IT
(and KM) professionals need to refocus on some simple, novel, inexpensive technology applications
that could dramatically enhance individual
employee effectiveness, instead of trying to achieve unattainable
organization-wide improvements with ever-shrinking budgets.
 The fallout over
HBR's May, 2003 article IT Doesn't Matter was
short-lived in the literature, but the continued disgruntlement of
business managers with the return on corporate IT investment continues,
and the recession for technology companies, and especially for IT
employees, is far from over.
Part of the reason for this, I think, is the lack of understanding by
business managers of what has been happening in the last few years in
IT, and what its potential new applications are. Business managers
still think of IT in traditional terms and traditional applications:
accounting, sales, and HR. This ignorance is mutual: Most people in IT
don't really understand the evolving needs, priorities, and worldview
of business managers either, or what keeps them awake at night. To make
matters worse, in most organizations neither group really understands
the needs of front-line employees. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy with
IT.
The 'problem' with IT is that it is bound, by tradition, job
description and resource availability, to continue to do three things
that perpetuate the 'IT Doesn't Matter' reputation:
- IT applications traditionally are designed to
provide information 'up and in' (i.e. to management and the back
office), rather than 'down and out' (to the people in the front lines
who actually do most of the work). For that reason, line employees
often feel that, because IT has never done anything for them, it probably can't do anything for them. It's
valueless to most of the people in the organization.
- IT applications continue to focus on solving yesterday's business problems: data
management, financial reports, regulatory compliance, automation of
'forms' that were of limited value in the first place. So now the real
'customers' of most IT applications aren't senior managers either, but
rather the accountants, the lawyers, the administrative staff, and
external regulators.
- IT departments continue to be burdened with the
management and maintenance of cumbersome and obsolete 'legacy' systems.
Both these systems and the new ones that replace them are frequently
designed by ill-informed committees and hopelessly over-engineered. So
much money and time goes into keeping these dinosaurs afloat, and
layering additional complexity onto them as new regulations and
policies are imposed, that there is no budget or energy left for novel
applications. In many organizations, there are compelling reasons to
abandon legacy systems entirely in favour of vastly simpler and more
economical zero-based relacement systems, but new systems seem to
inevitably add complexity and
functionality, and entrench everything that was in the old system
regardless of its value. The old over-built systems and the thinking
that causes their replacements to be even more unnecessarily complex,
are like anchors pulling IT down and suffocating new ideas and
investment.
At the same time IT is grappling with these intractable problems, a
relatively new discipline, Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged that
has gotten itself into trouble by raising expectations that it could do
three things (all of which were once expected of IT as well):
- Improve the efficiency of business processes
- Improve decision-making
- Improve 'organizational learning'
Few if any organizations have succeeded in doing any of these things in
any systematic or sustainable manner. Most organizations have realized
that the nature of most work that hasn't already been automated is
unique, and that there are no 'standard' business processes left. This
was the same reason that Business Process Re-engineering ultimately
failed. If every work activity is unique, every decision unique, every
learning requirement and learning situation unique, no 'system' is
going to make it otherwise, or better. These 'value propositions' for
KM are, at least at the organizational level, simply unachievable.
Some KM pioneers (many of whom I've worked with over the past two or
three years) are beginning to realize that the real opportunity for
both KM and IT in the 21st century requires a refocus of energy away
from organization-wide objectives entirely, and towards achieving the
objective that Peter Drucker described as the number one business
challenge in his book Management
Challenges for the 21st Century: Improving
the personal effectiveness of each individual front-line worker in
doing his or her unique and increasingly complex job.
Professor Jim McGee has articulated
this realization brilliantly in describing the challenges of KM:
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The
fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in
adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant
beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise
that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of
its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more
important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of "what's in
it for me?". It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem
into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the
deliverables of knowledge work most valuable--their uniqueness, their
variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective provokes
suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts a cycle
of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what once
were natural behaviors.
Suppose,
instead, that we turn our attention from the problems
of the organization to the problems of the individual knowledge worker.
What happens? What problems do we set out to solve and where might this
lead us?
Our
goal is to make it easier for a knowledge worker to create
and share unique results. Instead of specifying a standard output to be
created and the standardized steps to create that output, we need to
start with more modest goals. I've written about this before (see Is knowledge
work improvable?, Sharing
knowledge with yourself, and Knowledge
work as craft). In general terms, I advocate attacking friction,
noise, and other barriers to doing good knowledge work.
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These KM pioneers have had to completely re-think the function of
infrastructure in organizations, and abandon 'systematic'
organizational thinking to reach this realization. For several reasons,
they're not getting much traction:
- They're not especially trusted by either business
managers (who are as disappointed with KM's false promise as IT's) or
IT professionals (who often see KM as an intrusion on their turf);
- They have to champion some fairly bold new ideas at
a time when the interest of business managers in innovation has hardly
ever been lower, and when budgets for IT are being cut, not increased;
- Technology, and its economics and potential
applications, are changing at a dizzying rate, and keeping up is
difficult and a bit intimidating to non-techies (which most KM people
are).
But there is a Holy Grail at the end of this thought process, one which
could improve the careers and reputation of both IT and KM, if the two groups are prepared to work
together, and with senior management and 'front line' leaders,
to identify, articulate and design novel, inexpensive, and surprisingly
simple new 'TechKnowledgy' applications that meet Drucker's 'Improve
Individual Effectiveness' challenge (the one in bold above).
Here are four examples of such applications that could have enormous business impact:
- Locating and
Connecting to People with Expertise: What most people most need to
know, quickly and accurately, to be more effective in doing their jobs,
is (a) 'who knows what about x', both
inside and outside the organization, (b) what is the best way to
contact those experts, and (c) where to 'browse' examples and evidence
of their expertise. This is what Social
Networking Enablement and Social Software offers. And the
absolutely critical quality of this technology is that it can be
completely personalizable, and can work exactly as
each individual wants it to work.
- Reducing the Need
for Travel: Because of
the clumsiness, unreliability and complexity of today's
videoconferencing technologies, individuals waste hours of time, expend
a lot of unnecessary physical and psychological energy, and needlessly
spend many nights away from home and family, to travel to events where
physical presence is not required. There is an even greater loss, due
to the inability of many people to attend and participate in learning
events and conferences because they can't afford the cost or time to
travel to these events, or because of the physical capacity limits of
the event space. We need new, intuitive, portable, entirely personally controlled
video and 'virtual presence' webcam-type technologies (with
capabilities such as backchanneling)
to eliminate this waste and dramatically extend individual human
capacity.
- Enabling
Multi-Tasking: Most
people spend most of their work time waiting for things (like bloated
Microsoft software), in unproductive activities (most meetings) and
otherwise constrained by the physical and technical limitations of
their work environment. As a result, their brain and work effectiveness
is unnecessarily reduced by their worktools, many of which, ironically,
were designed to 'improve productivity'. New technologies are needed
that allow individuals to fill in this 'idle' time by multi-tasking,
simply, comfortably, and effectively. IM and e-mail allow multi-tasking
during meetings, an enormous boon to work efficiency, and a simple
example of such technologies.
- Automating the
Purchase and Sale of Commodities: An enormous amount of time is
spent arranging, approving, documenting and processing very elementary
business transactions that are needed to provide individual employees
with the resources and tools they need to do their jobs. This also
entails costly delays in getting these resources to the people who need
them, and generates a huge amount of needless paperwork. What is needed
are technologies that pre-authorize individual employees to make
purchases from approved suppliers, automatically charge the expense to
the appropriate accounts, and enable quick Amazon-style personal
delivery to the employee wherever he or she may be. This would put
every individual employee on an even footing with sole proprietors,
which, in many respects, most employees effectively operate as anyways.
Zero delay, zero paperwork, and tapped into new internet technologies
that are designed precisely to handle sale of commodities to
individuals in a cost-effective manner.
There are undoubtedly many other such technologies that could be
developed and implemented quickly, inexpensively and powerfully by IT
and KM teams working together -- these four are just examples off the
top of my head. They apply to every
type and size of organization, since they are personal -- they help individuals work better, rather
than trying to improve whole business units or organizations.
How could further examples of such technologies be identified, and each
tool properly spec'd out to meet employee needs? Here are some
Management Consulting 101 techniques that could be used:
- Bring together IT, KM, senior management, and a
cross section of front-line employees for a facilitated
information exchange session. Have senior management describe
the major organizational challenges and priorities. Have IT talk about
some of the new frontiers and developments in IT, like Weblogs and
Social Software, and explain how the new economics of IT allow rapid
prototyping and inexpensive development of novel applications. Have the
front-line employees describe the impediments they face trying to do
their jobs, and what they need to do their jobs more effectively. Allow
the KM and IT teams to proffer some 'what if' scenarios.
- Have the KM team develop a future state vision
that articulates, from the perspective of several individual employees,
how new developments in IT could be applied to improve personal
performance and effectiveness, and as a result solve some of the
identified challenges and priorities of senior management. Get buy-in
from senior management (on the desirability of this vision), from IT
(on the achievability of this vision), and from the front-line focus
group (on whether the vision is realistic and will, if it works as
advertised, significantly improve effectiveness.
- Bring the three teams together again for a design and
co-development session to bring the vision to fruition. Get the
technologies approximately right, not perfect, and into the field as
quickly as possible so they can be piloted, evaluated and refined
rapidly and inexpensively.
None of this is rocket science. It's not being done today simply
because IT is unaware of the need and distracted from the opportunity,
senior management is unaware of the possibilities, and everyone is
unaware of the problems of 'real' users on the front line. With the
right team, and a dash of courage and vision, everyone could win:
beleaguered IT and KM staff, disgruntled senior management, and
frustrated front-line employees.
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