I am very intrigued by a concept of Enterprise information flow based on knowledge workers’ conversations as opposed to “snap shots” of data, stored and based in contemporary databases.
“So we’re going to see some things change in the enterprise. Conversation is going to be captured and archived and retrieved and enhanced and allowed to flow. We’re going to use blogs and wikis and twitter and IM and audio and video, we may even have tiny pockets of e-mail and fax and (dare I mention it) telex. Every conversational action will hit an enterprise ping server, populate search engines, aggregators, data miners and online media and even text scrapers.”
“Musing about enterprise information and flow” J.P. Rangaswami
This appears to be an attempt to deal with the perennial adoption problem – people like to communicate using unformalized data supported by conversations, chat, email and wiki technologies, while Enterprise software applications need normalized data to process into meaningful information in order to support business processes. The root of this problem can be exemplified by the desire to gain great value of 360-degree visibility of Customer at a minimum of user keystrokes, which in my opinion is not a technological issue, but a change management one. It requires substantial intellectual effort to transform contextual data of tribal knowledge into Enterprise grade information, and even more so, if we consider a model of extended Enterprise, as it is proposed:
“We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. We are calling this VRM, Vendor Relationship Management. The project is being launched within the Harvard’s Berkman Center. The core concept is that the individual should be able to manage their relationships with their vendors and suppliers, based on the idea that they actually know more about specific preferences, updated data, etc. And, further, that most CRM systems oversimplify customer data in order to segment, and to effectively manage the info; ultimately they are just a sales system, not a relationship system.”
Doc Searls
“The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. – Maya Angelou (-1928)
Perhaps a better question to ask would be “How can we “mine” conversations to support a Business Process? – There is a lot to learn.
In the words of Robert Heinlein – “I am only an egg”.
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi wrote about The End of Analytic Science:
Chemistry that shrugs at pollution is foolishness, Economics that discounts politics and sociology is just as ignorant as are politics and sociology that discount economics.
I would like to apply this way of thinking to the business of IT – software implementation without development of best practices and adoption management strategy is a waste of resources.
As a consultant, I often witnessed IT executives taking a role of enablers rather than game changers, shying away from leading organizational transformation to the position of junior partner in the process. Some of the reasons for such attitude are career path and professional background of individuals involved, and subsequently their perception of risk/reward probabilities. I would suggest that primary skill of most CIO is an operational risk management, not organizational transformation management.
Many years ago I have lost a lot of my political capital as a CIO because of massive hardware failure caused loss of email services for over 24 hours. Nobody was interested in details, reasons, and excuses. Since then I did not become any better in hardware or networking operations, but I did learn to demand building multiple redundancies and periodic fail over testing for all critical services. And most importantly, management processes to control that my demands are actually acted on.
So why do we think that it is sufficient to deliver projects on time and within the budgets? Why are we often not treated as an equal partner by the business community? Because true partners do not stop half the way, and take more risk. They act as principals, not as agents.
Charlie Rose touched on a very raw nerve in his interview with Andrew McAfee
Charlie is not a time-waster; his first questions were around the big issue of IT’s impact on competition. And he immediately hit on an apparent paradox: how can universally available technology contribute to competitive differentiation? Doesn’t something have to be scarce in order for it to be competitively valuable?
Andrew has provided a reasonably good answer to this question in the context of Enterprise Software, but I have been struggling with it in a somewhat larger scope – what makes companies different? Michael Hammer of Business Process Re-Engineering fame, not to be confused with Mickey Spillane character, believed that business processes defined the uniqueness of an enterprise. I cannot point to an actual reference expressing this idea this way, but that was how I understood it.
I am a very big fan and a student of Michael Hammer, but it is very hard for me to accept that it is a set of business processes around product design and marketing, that differentiate Apple from Dell or Creative Labs. All three are in the business of consumer electronics, among other things, and manufacture products of similar functionality, but that is where the similarities end. I would love to have an opportunity to study the processes of these very different companies to come to a well documented and definite conclusion, but before that happens I would like to suggest that perhaps the respective leadership of these companies have much more defining influence on their uniqueness. In fact the effective business processes landscape is the reflection of effective leadership.
A blog about experiences, curiosity and the never-ending search for ways to do better things better