Business@The Speed Of Thought

That was a great vision articulated by Bill Gates in 1999. But for thoughts to possess speed they must first flow. It is not sufficient that they are created. That would be like the archer shooting his quiver of arrows into the ether - delighting in the speed of the arrows but bidding goodbye to any target. Thoughts cannot flow on their own - they need a stream of knowledge. For the stream to exist there must be energy to initiate the flow. But Drucker has said : "In knowledge and service work, partnership with the responsible worker is the only way; nothing else will work at all.” This implies that thoughts can only move at the speed set by personnel. So Busineess@The Speed of Thought emerges just as a chimera and events since 1999 have proven it to be so.

I shall leave the reader with a thought: What if there were a language for the progress of interaction on an idea across the organization?

Knowledge Management vs. Knowledge Application

Recently I interacted with the Chief Editor of a well established journal. In one of her columns she had opined that raising revenues was a superior way to impact the bottom line. In this context she had opined that IT could help to better leverage the knowledge that employees have about the business:

‘I am not proposing large extensive Knowledge Management campaigns but simply improving the method by which information flows between the employees and management and how that data can be accumulated, analyzed and understood.’

I was taken aback when she denied me my breakthrough in application of knowledge to deliver results. After all had I not only improved on the method to conduct knowledge flows by organizing dialogue over discussion, but also created a source of intelligent energy to drive dialogue? It took some hard thinking to understand that perhaps Knowledge Management needed to be distinguished from Knowledge Application:

Knowledge Management: It creates the framework for shared thinking:

• Methods & Tools: The method encompasses recording of the key words that communicate meaning and progresses to define a structure for understanding or applying any explicit knowledge. The tools ease the conduct of the method and promote it. An important function of the method is to create a common language, so that when a reference is made everybody knows what is meant. Talking the same language assists the rapid exchange of information within or across projects.
• Cases: A collection of theoretical material or explicit knowledge that has been captured per the method and placed in a repository for swift access.
• Experience: Relates to previous engagement with the method and cases. It assists their interpretation, application and exploitation for better thinking, and may be passed on in a discussion in context at the discretion of the owner.

Personnel must self-organize and follow a discipline to take advantage of the methods, tools, cases and repositories of Knowledge Management. Experience is tacit knowledge and depends upon its owner’s volition to share it. Knowledge Management is known to be the mainstay of successful consulting. The paper Exploring Management Consulting Firms As Knowledge Systems (Werr, Stjernberg, 2003) details successful use of the concept.

Knowledge Application: It enables a group to achieve together what they cannot hope to achieve individually even if invested with the combined intelligence of the group. The context and possession of knowledge is best defined by the Knowledge Management method. Lack of a solution to the problems a team experiences in applying its knowledge for greater ability raise the gap between the possession of knowledge and its effective use on each event or the Knowing-Doing gap.

The Search For Magic

It is a relief when years into an odyssey one comes across an identity of views with a leading light. I quote here the view expressed by Tom Davenport in his blog on March 21, 2007:

"Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won't be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic."

Magical delivery demands an integrating process. Email is a tool for business exchange but a process for personal communication. Tools must be supported by skills, organization, discipline, culture, and energy for universal adoption and consistent delivery. This imposition on personnel by tools quickly dispels their claim to magic. A successful IT process organizes, anticipates and drives 24x7, and, as in case of email, can induce culture. IT alone cannot anticipate to drive knowledge processes since personnel themselves do not know the next step in advance.

The science I have established for driving the flow of knowledge is based on the evolution of teamwork. It creates a compelling natural language for the daily conduct of interactions personnel must engage in for performing their work. Like email for personal communication, it assures its own adoption for all business communication. Free flow of knowledge is a by-product.

The Rainmaker

This blog is linked to an interview Knowledge@Wharton conducted with Ray Ozzie, the person who harnessed IT to create the collective. The canvas covered was vast but the talk on clouds did stand out. It is what everybody is talking of these days. It got me wondering when all the cloud seeding will result in rain? The business landscape urgently needs fertility to grow innovation, judgments, and cooperation to cope with the rapidly changing times. But what is growing are more tools, more choices and perhaps a more liberated workforce. Counter arguments abound. Managers have to work harder to stand still. The old knowledge work paradigm of dependence upon administrators to self-organize and share their knowledge has only grown stronger. And, taking Ray Ozzie on his word, the industry has its hands full:

"In each solution within our business, the people who are running those businesses should look at their customers and say, "Given these new tools at my customers' disposal, how should we reshape this?" And I think that is potentially disruptive innovation in a positive way."

The thought is: Must this be the question that decides our future? Must the industry be run by the tools it has created? Amounts to the tail wagging the dog. Why must the customer be conceived of as an individual operating tools. Can IT now not progress to organize the collective? Actually get administrators to engage in collective thinking. Do something to overcome the self-interest that prevents them from sharing knowledge for the good of the organization they serve. Unburden them from the honorous task of organizing themselves for more effective working. In other words, develop the courage to change the centuries old knowledge work paradigm that now appears to be holding mankind back. If IT could get administrators to engage in free flow of knowledge in context - that would be rain. Fertility would follow.

The Daily Wish Of Leaders And Managers

O Lord, if people could listen and respond, I shall be happy to follow.

This has been the substance of the refrain ever since Taylor succeeded with his scientific management in the early 20th century and ran into heavy weather with his championing of top down power. The refrain has become markedly stronger with the coming of age of the knowledge worker though nobody denies that top down power is essential.

Communities attest that people are quite happy to listen and respond when there is:

• An effortless system for concerned people to progress a consensus
• Easy access to past exchange for sense making
• Swift focus per selected parameters
• Easy response to follow up and anxiety
• Contemplation at convenience, viz., work anytime/anywhere/offline
• Management of chaos.
  

This is far more demanding than collaboration - what IT offers today - and demands a compelling means for organizing, driving and channneling interactions, viz., constructive team working or purposeful collaboration. The science of collaboration, proven on a prototype scale, makes this possible.

The Power Of The Collective

The Maginot Line (Per Wikipedia): The fortification system, built at huge expense of time, money and material resources, utterly failed to contain the Germans in World War II. The term is sometimes used today to describe any comically ineffective protection.

Collective ability, in command of all enterprise resources including technology, is the civilian equivalent of the coordinated and disciplined might of the Germans in WW-II. The similarity ends with the effect of coordinated power. It has to be induced to ward off adverse politics and cannot be established by the command control culture that drives the army. Personnel must enjoy autonomy of thought and control over their actions without sinking into chaos.

The compelling way of working fosters the collective by anticipating the permissible actions and driving their execution. Dependence upon discipline is eliminated. Reliable and intelligent application of security ensures access is confined to selected personnel. In addition, space, time, continuity, mobility, focus, direction, anxiety, etc., are all easily satisfied by the automatic organization of data, information and knowledge to assure adoption. The leadership acquires powerful means to create and influence the collective mind in the virtual space, and is spared the frustration of reasoning with inaccessible and distributed minds.

Survey results at Calgon Carbon (~1999) establish the power of collective ability: For every 10 percent increase in trust and teamwork, the company can achieve a 20 percent to 30 percent increase in financial results within two years.

The only protection against collective intelligence is another collective intelligence focused on the pursuit of success.

Top Down Or Bottom Up?

Prima facie, Enterprise 2.0 and Presence software require a supportive culture. Their adoption is therefore top-down dependent. However, their potential to sustain adoption makes them bottom-up friendly. In contrast, the Science induces its own culture. Hence, once it is introduced by the management, its spread is bottom-up.

The question has overtones. It also addresses the Jeffersonian belief that no human being is fit to wield power over others. This has proved itself often enough in the corporate and world stage yet the reality is that organization performance depends on top-down management power. Drucker sought to liberate employees with Management By Objectives, which still underpins most management practices. It enables subordinates to work with autonomy and "self-control" rather than as pawns manipulated from above.

The operational question then becomes: Do the 2.0 avatars enable autonomy and self-control? They could if they were to foster communities of practice but they securely belong to the paradigm that ‘IT is a tool’, viz., they cannot assure a practice within the community. The tools have the potential to nurture ‘freedom’ but the fact is they do not.

The science delivers an architecture that is bottom up in adoption as well as in its creation of communities of practice. Yet, it respects the importance of management power by creating a reliable mechanism to spread the influence of leadership.

The Return Of The Fizzle

Perhaps the common factor behind the fizzling out of ERP, Dotcom 1 and Knowledge Management was the failure of the industry to converge with knowledge work. I say this on good authority:

Conclusion of five ERP case studies (Scott Elliff A, Organizing for Excellence: Five Case Studies, Supply Chain Management Review, Winter 1998): Even the best-conceived process initiatives will fall well short of potential without aggressive organization of people.

Tom Davenport, pioneer of Knowledge Management (July , 2003): “We’ve been experimenting with IT support for knowledge work for several decades now. When will we figure out what works?”

The conventional wisdom today is that the flow of knowledge cannot be organized and driven by IT. Hence, whatever advance takes place loses steam because personnel must consistently spare their energies and observe discipline to either respond to it or adopt it. This dependence upon a support culture applies to use of Web 2.0 within the enterprise and has led to the inevitable:
Review of a recent Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young report: While venture capitalists invested $455 million in Web 2.0 companies in the first three quarters of 2006, not a single Web 2.0 startup went public during the year. Perhaps more worrisome, just four Web 2.0 companies were acquired - can they make money?

It is possible that convergence of IT with teamwork is the missing element for catalysing a coming together of ERP, KM, SaaS, SOA, Dotcom 1&2, etc., to satisfy the huge unsatisfied demand for raising collective ability. Today only hype connects them.

The Case Against “Presence”

In May 2005, when the pieces of the present Collaboration market were falling into place, Jonathan Spira, CEO of Basex Knowledge Consultants, published in the Basex Newsletter a letter he had written to the editor of Business Week . Its theme sentence was provocative:
“Two of the world's largest software companies just don't get what collaboration and knowledge sharing is and their products reflect a lack of understanding of the needs of knowledge and information workers and how they work.”

Few were willing to define standards for collaboration back then though “community of practice”, viz., free flow of knowledge among a group driven by common interests, and its value for raising "collective ability" were established concepts. Collaboration was so difficult to achieve in practice that any form of collaboration was welcome. To a great extent this applies even today.

Recently Passerini of P&G was quoted as saying: "For collaboration tools to help, they must be completely embedded in the work processes”. This is an echo of Davenport (Nov., 1999): “.. knowledge management has to be “baked into” the job. It’s got to be part of the fabric of the work to import knowledge when it’s needed and export it to the rest of the organization when it’s created or acquired”. Knowledge Management fell short of creating a community because it became focused on methods for knowledge sharing. Similarly, collaboration today is being understood as a product of tools. The goal of collective ability is over-shadowed.

The Live Communication Server (LCS) of Microsoft integrates with various applications so co-workers can collaborate from a spreadsheet, a document or line-of-business system, such as CRM. It also integrates with videoconferencing, Web conferencing, phone systems, e-mail, calendar, directory programs and public IM systems to create a presence-enabled work environment. This is expected to have a major impact on the way the enterprise collaborates, communicates and operates. Likewise, Lotus has assembled all the social networking capabilities it thinks are useful under a single umbrella.

Provision of tools is a far cry from organizing people and driving their individual effort towards a collective goal. A horde of strong men could have replicated the strength of Hercules but directing the strength to channel a river for cleaning out the Augean stables demanded the binding and driving force of organization and purpose that only Hercules could manage. Similarly, harnessing IT to sweep away the problems of collective ability requires a clear understanding of the force sought to be released so that its thrust may be organized and suitably channeled in the desired direction.

Collaboration quality must be defined not in terms of half way marks like knowledge sharing or a tool attribute like 'presence', but in terms of assurance of a coherent community where people share, listen, learn and evolve, in the words of Mary Parker Follett (~1926), ‘composite ideas'.