Loading ...Musing on "deregulation" of knowledge
I was reading this article What created this Monster? which attempts to find the root of current collapse in financial markets, and it occurred to me that perhaps there are some similarities between the results of deregulation of financial markets and “democratization” of information.
According to the authors, NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and JULIE CRESWELL, the lack of definition for all these complex financial instruments, which flooded global capital markets during the last few years, made them devoid of value. Since market participants cannot easily assign value to an instrument, the market seized and no transaction can take place.
The enthusiasts of Enterprise 2.0 concept seem to propose wholesale replacement of some corporate applications with wiki and other social networking software technologies in effort to “liberate” business information from evil claws of IT organizations. Without debating role, constrains and value of IT organizations in modern enterprise or endless stream of “revolutionary” technologies promising incredible leaps in productivity, I would like to focus on the value of boundaries to management of content.
Personally I have difficulties in coming up with definitions of me as an individual or describing my emotional states, because these are very difficult to express fully without a healthy doze of ambiguity, and check boxes of pre-defined office forms irritate me. In a corporate environment lack of clear and complete definition for key data can bring a legal or financial collapse as we are witnessing today in capital markets. In fact taking as much ambiguity out of corporate data as possible converts in into valuable information for supporting management decision. A good example for demonstrating my point is “tanking” of company’s shares after not meeting market’s expectations because it’s revenue forecast was too ambiguous for management to interpret. Flood of “mob wisdom” pouring into wiki without clear definition of roles, responsibilities, deliverables, etc. does not turn it into a project management tool to ensure quality and budget control.
The challenge is to functionally integrate emerging technologies with a goal of enhancing communication between people, who make up the enterprise and the market, in a context which keeps these communications from becoming a meaningless “noise”. Let’s learn a lesson from a great project of the past called the Babel Tower.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.