The Long View

Technology as enabler

Once again, with feeling...

I've expressed the opinion several times in blog entries (and will say to anyone who gives me the slightest sliver of opportunity to riff on this) that technology is only as effective as the processes that it supports. I've said many times that I'd rather be running a company with outstanding processes and mediocre technology than a company with state-of-the-art technology and dysfunctional processes.

I started reading a book that's long been on my "must-read" list, and  - bang - in almost the opening pages is the empirical evidence for this observation.

In Good to Great by Jim Collins (and you really have to read it to get a sense of the depth of the five-year research that went into this book) he recounts a number of things that one might expect to have played a part in a company's transition from a good company to a great company, but in fact did not. One of these things was technology.

Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great. We did find technology to accelerate transformations, but we learned that technology cannot cause a transformation; it can never be a fundamental prime mover in a shift from good to great.

So, if you want to be where the action is, to effect change, or to try to achieve greatness in a company, it is definitely NOT in the IT department, writing code, maintaining networks or configuring servers, no matter how cutting-edge the technology. You have to be led and directed by someone who can formulate the goals and objectives the technology serves.

Lost Knowledge

I argued frequently with one of my former business partners about the utility of Wikis in a business environment. He felt that the entire concept was too difficult for the average employee to grasp, and too foreign for the average company management to embrace. I, on the other hand am convinced that with a well-designed Wiki system, and adequate training and mentoring on its application and use, companies have the potential to use Wikis to achieve significant competitive advantages.

All wiki software packages have improved greatly over time, whether an open-source project or a commercial product. This improvement along with the increased awareness of wikis by the business community is allowing them to see more mainstream application.

One of the problem areas that wikis can admirably address is described eloquently in a recent entry in Tom Foydel's blog. He describes the all-too-common situation in which Management is clueless about how things really work in the trenches within their own companies. Unfortunately, with many front-line staff  knowing only their piece of the process, they are in the position of the blind men and the elephant - the can't see the whole picture well enough to make improvements beyond their cubicle.

Having all processes completely documented would be a solution. However, using the usual techniques - static word processing documents created through email collaboration - such documentation would be extremely costly to create and difficult to maintain as the processes evolve.

Wikis are tailor-made to allow employees to contribute to the documentation of processes, and the on-going maintenance of that documentation. What results is a knowledge base that is a valuable reference for new employees, transferees, management and line staff. The value of this reference can itself provide an incentive to use and maintain the information that it contains.

The really good news is that wikis can be implemented relatively quickly and at a very modest cost. I can't think of another software implementation that has the potential to yield as great an ROI as a wiki.

It always looks so easy, doesn't it?

I find part of me wishing that Ross Perot had won the '92 election, just so he could find out how difficult it is to govern. I'm very skeptical of these business people that go into public life, thinking that they're going to show these politicians how things are done in the business world, and that they're going to "clean things up". What a joke.

Similarly, the link above will connect you to a story about the reverse situation. David Stockman, the former politician who came to prominence during the Reagan years thought he could sweep into the business world ready to apply his conservative ideas, and be as successful there as he was in Washington. Well, it didn't turn out that way. The company's Board of Directors asked him without preamble or qualification to leave his post as Chairman and CEO of an auto parts supplier..Now.

It seems that politicians are the biggest targets for this kind of "I could do it better" thinking, particularly from the business community. I fail to understand why business people think that everything will turn out just fine if every institution - schools, government, churches - were run like businesses. It's not as if the landscape weren't littered with the carcasses of failed businesses as far as the eye can see. But it's nice to know - as Mr. Stockman has so ably demonstrated - that politicians can give as good as they get, and fail just as miserably.

It's amusing to observe that we can still sit on the outside and think that someone else's job looks so simple, so easy, and imagine that we can do the job so much better. Most jobs I've taken always turned out to be more complex and more difficult than the job description made them seem. Still, maybe this self-delusion is a good thing. Otherwise, no one would ever try to take on the tough jobs, and we'd never get any "new blood" in politics or business or any other human endeavor.