Are We Ready for Enterprise 2.0
Wednesday: July 18, 2007 6:06 PM
Will Enterprise 2.0 do more harm than good? The obvious answer is no but management has a way of screwing things up. With the advancements in technology and a little elbow grease, we are now able to deliver executive dashboards with up to the minute information on sales, ordering, status, etc. In fact, we push and push to reduce the latency of the information just for this reason. We will spend millions of dollars to reinvent business process just so we can see an up to the second picture of where the business is. If that’s all the information is used for then that might be great. Unfortunately, our MBA educations won’t allow us to just observe, we must act. We alter investments, cut production, move inventory, and adjust priorities due to the daily fluctuations of a dashboard.
For example, take the stock price of a company. For most investors looking at the stock price is more of a conversation thing. We may look at the price on a daily basis but most of us won’t act. If we did, the transaction fees would kill any profit that we have in the portfolio. It’s the same thing in the business world. If we just used the dashboards as guides then we wouldn’t have so many problems with firefighting and over reacting.
In 1980, my father was teaching me to drive and one of the things he kept telling me was to stop over correcting. He told me the same thing when he took us out in the boat. For some reason, I was always the one with the paddle and he had the fishing pole. But again, don’t over correct, stay focused on a spot against bank and paddle toward that spot. Most business managers today could learn a few things about how to operate strategically from him. The question on the table is will Web 2.0 technologies make the short sighted process worse or better? Does the benefit of open communication and transparency outweigh the problems?
Think about how we run technology projects where we have to report status every day. Someone in leadership once decided that technology programs should be like manufacturing processes with as little variability as possible. The assumption is that if we apply Six Sigma methods to our technology community then we can have a predictable and stable environment. How many innovations are actually going to emerge from a predictable environment? We build process that requires 1,000 page manuals to describe and add mounds of process around even the simplest activities. And woe to the project manager that lets the status turn to yellow or red. The amount of overreaction this causes is borderline hilarious. Now imagine an executive taking time to read several employee blogs. One weblog, by a respected technology professional, wails on the project. She describes the trouble brewing and the difficulty of making the deadlines based upon the untested technology. Maybe she discusses the lack of appropriate testing time allocated to the project or poor usability of the interface? Will managers use Web 2.0 technologies as guides or just another reason apply their influence on people and activities that don’t really need them? The key to Web 2.0 is to use the tools appropriatlly and not use them to over compensate.
Will Enterprise 2.0 do more harm than good? The obvious answer is no but management has a way of screwing things up. With the advancements in technology and a little elbow grease, we are now able to deliver executive dashboards with up to the minute information on sales, ordering, status, etc. In fact, we push and push to reduce the latency of the information just for this reason. We will spend millions of dollars to reinvent business process just so we can see an up to the second picture of where the business is. If that’s all the information is used for then that might be great. Unfortunately, our MBA educations won’t allow us to just observe, we must act. We alter investments, cut production, move inventory, and adjust priorities due to the daily fluctuations of a dashboard.
For example, take the stock price of a company. For most investors looking at the stock price is more of a conversation thing. We may look at the price on a daily basis but most of us won’t act. If we did, the transaction fees would kill any profit that we have in the portfolio. It’s the same thing in the business world. If we just used the dashboards as guides then we wouldn’t have so many problems with firefighting and over reacting.
In 1980, my father was teaching me to drive and one of the things he kept telling me was to stop over correcting. He told me the same thing when he took us out in the boat. For some reason, I was always the one with the paddle and he had the fishing pole. But again, don’t over correct, stay focused on a spot against bank and paddle toward that spot. Most business managers today could learn a few things about how to operate strategically from him. The question on the table is will Web 2.0 technologies make the short sighted process worse or better? Does the benefit of open communication and transparency outweigh the problems?
Think about how we run technology projects where we have to report status every day. Someone in leadership once decided that technology programs should be like manufacturing processes with as little variability as possible. The assumption is that if we apply Six Sigma methods to our technology community then we can have a predictable and stable environment. How many innovations are actually going to emerge from a predictable environment? We build process that requires 1,000 page manuals to describe and add mounds of process around even the simplest activities. And woe to the project manager that lets the status turn to yellow or red. The amount of overreaction this causes is borderline hilarious. Now imagine an executive taking time to read several employee blogs. One weblog, by a respected technology professional, wails on the project. She describes the trouble brewing and the difficulty of making the deadlines based upon the untested technology. Maybe she discusses the lack of appropriate testing time allocated to the project or poor usability of the interface? Will managers use Web 2.0 technologies as guides or just another reason apply their influence on people and activities that don’t really need them? The key to Web 2.0 is to use the tools appropriatlly and not use them to over compensate.
