What Is The Product?

It is possible that till Drucker came up with his famous question in the early 90s: “The first question in raising productivity in knowledge and service work has to be: What is the task? What do we try to accomplish? Why do it at all?,  the technologists had a field day in defining what they saw and declaring it a valid answer to the product question. Post the double loop learning concept of Argyris  made famous by Senge in the mid 90s, even Drucker was not enough. The person and his thinking became part of the problem.

My last post was the Drucker and Senge in me. Now I am going to attempt a conventional answer, touching all the bases I must.

My Post 'Transforming the Enterprise-3' of February 6, 2011 defines the nature of Knowledge and the force it creates to reduce the Collective Ability. The next post 'Transforming the Enterprise-4' of February 7, 2011 states the theory of Feedback for overcoming the Knowing/Doing gap. The post 'Transforming the Enterprise-6' illustrates Feedback on the net. It has to be far richer in categorisation to be useful within the enterprise. Not shown here is the relationship between Feedback and innovation defined by Nonaka by way of the Knowledge spiral.

My post 'A Perspective of the possible Service' of September 14, 2011 explains how Feedback operates to create the Knowledge force. Alignment is a by-product. Its importance is explained at the Project site:

Mahindra Spark the Rise | Activating Moore's Law for the Rise by creating Intelligent Energy

The goal of my product then is creation of Feedback to drive the Knowledge Force. The force  overcomes the Knowing/Doing gap to drive success and operates the Knowledge Spiral to foster innovation.

As of today no means, mechanism, philosophy or system exists to achieve Feedback in the modern workplace. The Colonial administration had achieved it in the past with its paper systems.

The main components of my product to deliver Feedback are as follows: 

1. A single Knowledge process. All Knowledge flows on an event are composed of a finite number of repeatable Actions that drive its circulation for decision-making. Universal norms derived from evolution of teamwork assemble the repeatable Actions that progress circulation. The Actions possible on an event are anticipated given the history of Actions already assembled. 
2. Design of the flexible organization. Task forces, the basic work units of the enterprise, report to a specific Post within a Community at each level of a hierarchy. The concept aids flexibility of assignment and also offers a ready support group for Socialization. The structural flexibility is built in by enabling swift reallocation of the reporting hierarchy for the task forces. According to Nonaka (1996) the bureaucratic structure defined by the hierarchies efficiently accumulates and exploits new knowledge through Combination and Internalization, while the Task force is indispensable for creating new knowledge through Socialization and Externalization. He concluded that a dynamic synthesis of the two structures, termed by him as the hypertext organization, reaps benefits from both. The organization can be as flat as desired. 
3. Categorization of the Knowledge event. The Reasons why decision events arise in an enterprise are mostly known in advance. Additions may be captured on-line. These Reasons are distributed amongst the task forces. The distribution creates a framework that may be applied to the event for defining its owning task force and meta-data. The data aids conduct of the norms governing collective action. The unstructured part of the event may be a word file, a presentation, a work sheet, email, etc., or their combination. It is captured as a document in its environment. 
4. The conduct of the Process. The event is categorized and captured with the aid of the framework. The routing is decided by the Action selected from among those possible per the norms. The Actions circulate the event among dynamic team members selected from the organization structure per the logic of the Action. The circulation defined by the Action may either be in series to a single recipient or in parallel to multiple recipients. The recipients may be across boundaries. The User may record an opinion before executing the selections. All meta-data along with the expectation of the Action selected is recorded for organizing a dashboard to select a particular event for working. The process assembles the Knowledge of the Collective on the event in the Feedback format of Post-6 above. The process coordinates the ad-hoc team working on an event regardless of space, time, connectivity and chaos. This makes it over fifty times more appealing, powerful and relevant than email for business communication. Its implementation is non-disruptive.

Each of the components stated above solves a hitherto intractable problem. The Knowledge process alone changes the IT paradigm from a tool to energy. The concept of Intelligent Energy is explained in the referred project. I should be calling Intelligent Energy the product for it is the means for the produce – the transformation - but the problem is it cannot be seen and can be felt only by the initiated. The system assures its own adoption because it is the most painless way of working to circulate events, a daily necessity for the Knowledge worker. The system leverages this circulation and the intelligent categorisation for the flow and systematic capture of all Knowledge exchanged. The Knowledge exchange is represented in the Feedback format to generate the Knowledge force that creates alignment and drives the collective towards the vision.