Over the past couple of years,
I've read a lot of blogs, and a lot of books, from people who work in
Information Technology (IT) or in Knowledge Management (KM). At a KM
conference last year, I somewhat timidly suggested to the audience that
KM has become the organizational ghetto for the most creative minds in
business. I explained that almost everyone I knew in senior positions
in KM was brighter and more inventive than their peers, and had
self-selected or been hand-picked by management to lead their
organizations' KM programs for that reason. There was a belief in the
dot-com '90s that knowledge was the critical strategic asset of
business, and the gateway to innovation. KM was going to make a
difference, and allow people enamoured with creativity and change to
lead that change.
A decade later, most people left in KM are disillusioned. The culture
of big business has shifted sharply back right, and cost reduction, not
innovation, is Job One. There has not been much to show for all that
promise and creative ambition. But those in KM should not blame
themselves. They were unwittingly set up for disappointment. Executives
don't know what to do with creative thinkers, and putting them into KM
was, at least in hindsight, a perfect way to 'institutionalize' them,
keep them visible as innovation role models but marginalize them so
they don't actually do anything, or spend much of the company's money.
They are the corporation's lip service to diversity and creativity. The
problem is, unless they want a life as starving artists or starving
writers, they really have no place to go. They're trapped in this
creative ghetto.
When I said this to the KM crowd I expected a lot of push-back, but I
got a lot of nodding heads. I'd come to know many of them over the past
decade and I knew them to be an exceptional group: Far more
imaginative, more intelligent, more right-brained, more stimulated by
ideas, more idealistic than their organizational peers. But a lot of
them had also been misfits, non-conformists, constant questioners,
thorns in the side of their managers, who had wished they would just
shut up and do what they were told. KM provided a sanctuary for those
driven by ideas, but it was a sanctuary that was starved and
marginalized. It was a dead end. I've never met a Chief Knowledge
Officer who made it any further up the organizational ladder.
The people who work in KM report to a variety of different bosses --
some of them report directly to a CEO or VP, but most report to a
Director of IT, HR/Learning, Marketing or Sales. Those that report to
Sales Directors are the unhappiest, because their bosses belong to a
totally different culture, driven by short-term results. To many people
in Sales and Marketing, KM is synonymous with research, and KM people
are just overpaid librarians. Those KM people who report to HR,
Learning or Marketing Directors tend to have more sympathetic bosses,
but those bosses are going through an unprecedented crisis of their
own: The prevailing view in many organizations is that almost
everything in HR, Learning and Marketing can and should be outsourced,
and if the load can be lightened by outsourcing most of those KM people
as well, all the better.
Although the relationship between KM and IT was rocky from the start
(they compete for increasingly scarce resources), it has turned out to
be the healthiest, safest, and most logical and satisfying partnership
for KM people. For a start, IT has a budget, and so much tied up in
legacy systems that it's harder to outsource (and even when it's
outsourced, it's often insourced again a couple of years later when
outsourcing fails to deliver cost savings). IT also has a much greater
appreciation than most other departments for what people in KM do, and
for the value they provide. They're both parts of 'infrastructure',
those back-office guys who are perceived to be eating up the profits
that the real workers on the front lines produce.
But what I've come to realize is that one of the reasons for IT-KM
kinship is that IT people, too, live in an organizational ghetto. Like
people in KM, they are under-appreciated, starved for budget resources,
and complete cultural misfits in most companies. It was the IT people
in the 90's who, during their brief wave of popularity and scarcity,
smashed the 200-year-old business dress code, and as suits and neckties
are coming back, are most resistant to their return. If KM people are
the most creative in the company, IT people are the sharpest analytical
thinkers. They have a passion for their craft, and are the world's best
collaborators, but they rarely have the opportunity or the budget to do
more than a minuscule portion of what they know could be done, and
which could bring real value to the organization. To senior executives
(an echelon IT people rarely penetrate -- in most organizations IT is a
career dead-end and a revolving door), IT are the menial technical
people who make sure the clunky, horribly designed (by senior executive
committees), outmoded, centralized information systems spit out their
management reports. The revolutions in open source, desktop,
connectivity, collaboration and personal content management technology
that have been going on might as well be occurring in a parallel
universe as far as senior executives are concerned. The only pleasure
most IT people I know get from their jobs is working with wonderful,
sympathetic IT colleagues. And perhaps they also get cold comfort
knowing they're part of the minority in IT who aren't unemployed or
working at McDonalds or Wal-Mart since the dot-com bust. Most of them
tell me they do their best work outside the office, outside of working
hours, online collaborating and conversing with people who appreciate
what they can do.
That's fun, and intellectually rewarding, but, let's face it, it
doesn't really accomplish much. Although IT people can create wonderful
software, quickly, effectively, to accomplish almost any information
processing need, it's all really just a hobby. It rarely makes the
world a better place. Most of the world isn't online at all, and most
of the people online are still struggling with simple things like
e-mail. And I don't think that's going to change in another generation:
As I've said before, unless a technology is dead easy to use, it will
never catch on, will never become mainstream, will never be more than a
passing fad. All the social software tools, blogs, and cleverly coded
programs that have been and are being developed are just a recreational
drug for us, a tiny minority of the population bored with the inanity
of our 9-5 jobs. It's largely a hobby destined to be no more
significant in historical terms than ham radio, CBing, or scrapbooking.
The best that can be hoped is that all this software will ultimately be
built into very simple, ubiquitous tools that will allow people to
network better, find people and communicate with them more easily, and
learn faster and more easily.
Stack those modest benefits up against the crises facing our world
today: Poverty, violence and war, disease, inequality, crime, famine,
overpopulation, pollution, waste, cruelty to children and to animals,
addiction, mental illness, corporatism, lack of access to and poor
quality of health care and education, fraud, political corruption,
stress, oil shortages, water shortages, spousal abuse, consumerism,
tyranny, ignorance, hate-mongering, social disintegration, abuse of
power. There may well be answers to many of these problems, but they're
not going to come from IT tools developed and used by a small minority
separated from the rest of the planet by a vast and growing digital
divide. In fact, no one is
looking for solutions to these problems. The few people that care about
these problems are busy treating their symptoms, mostly as volunteers,
and have neither the time nor the resources to address the underlying
causes.
Here's my point: For restless and dissatisfied IT people, unlike their
KM counterparts, there is an alternative, a career path that could
really make a difference: Science-Based Enterprises.
Your bright, disciplined analytical minds are desperately needed to
develop practical new technologies that can solve the global problems
of our world. But instead the majority of you are marginalized in IT,
one of the few branches of science and technology that really can't
help solve these problems. And paradoxically this is happening at
precisely the time when there is more knowledge about science and
technology, more power of individual and collaborative enterprise to
introduce new technologies at a modest cost than ever before.
Notice I said Science-Based Enterprises,
not going to work for a science or technology company or a government
or university research facility. Unemployment among science and
engineering graduates is, while lower than that in IT or the population
as a whole, still quite high. The Bush Administration does not believe
in science. They have reduced government spending for scientific and
technical research as a percentage of GDP to its lowest level in
decades. And both government and private industry have reduced
no-strings-attached support for universities, so universities can't
afford to pay for more scientists or research either. And the private
sector is only interested in profitable, commercial development,
leeching off university research and content to produce 'me-too'
copycat products. Go to work for a pharma company and instead of
helping find a cure for AIDS you're more likely to be put to work
developing a stronger version of Viagra.
If you're really interested in making a difference through scientific
and technological development, you're going to have to become an
entrepreneur. That's not as risky as it sounds: Just follow the advice
I've laid out in Natural Enterprise, starting with identifying an unmet need. But I mean a fundamental human need, not a commercial need. We really don't need any more stuff. If the list three paragraphs back doesn't give you enough ideas, I can give you more.
The next step is to do some research, some homework into what really
underlies these basic human problems, and talk to potential customers
(that would be all of us)
about root causes and possible solutions. Talk to other scientists and
technologists (and us creative types in KM) about solutions, about
what's possible. Ask us what we'd be willing to pay for the solution
you have in mind. If it solves the problem, we'll find some way to pay
for it. Do all of this before you spend one penny setting up your
enterprise. The next step involves making sure you or your partners
have the scientific and technical skills to develop the solution. Some
of you may have to (or want to) go back to university to get what you
need, but I bet you'll find you learn what you need a lot more
effectively in the process of simply researching the problem. You know,
"most of what I needed to know to cure AIDS I learned in kindergarten".
Don't be intimidated by the mystique of higher education, or the
complexity of big-business processes -- they're there for a reason, but
it has nothing to do with the requirements of innovation or
entrepreneurship. The knowledge to do almost anything technical is out
there -- you only need to know enough to know where to look, and with
your web savvy and your background in IT, that should be easy.
Now, at last, with the knowledge of the solution, and the assurance
from 'customers' that there's a market for it, you're ready to set up
your Science-Based Enterprise. If you've done it right, you'll probably
have people lined up ready to invest. Don't give up control when you
take their money.
Why haven't I taken my own advice? I'm one of those creative KM guys.
I'm hopeless with the details, destined to come up with tons of good
ideas (most of which won't work, but a few of which will) and watch the
money and fame go to those who have the patience for, and know how to
go about, the details of implementation.
I'm not saying this is easy. Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. But
if just a select few of the millions of under-employed IT professionals
in the world found the courage to end-run the politicians only looking
at the next election, the bureaucrats only looking at their job
security, and the corporations only looking at their bottom line, and
put their remarkable minds to analyzing and solving some of the world's
neglected and critical problems through real science,
the world would be a better place. And amazingly grateful. And you
probably wouldn't be restless and bored in your job anymore.
For more information on the figure at top, please see my Prescription for Business Innovation., section 1
|
3:03:06 PM 
|
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
