A foundational organizing principle, for IT!?

No, seriously, I actually mean it. We’ve all heard the consulting world stumping about corporate vision mission and values being necessary for business success. And what company that completes these exercises doesn’t have something that says they value people (employees, customers, both)? Especially here in the USA, where most industry pundits talk about supporting knowledge workers as being a holy grail for management.

So given that you value employees, their talents and creativity and want to support their knowledge work, what is your foundational principle for Information technology? I wager that most of you do not have one. Actually, more to the point, you do, but instead of formulating it yourself, it was delivered to you by your hardware/software vendors.

Image: Suat Eman

How did this happen? I believe it is because we look at work in terms of problems and solutions separate from the people who create/need them. Get the tool and we fix the problem, we can manipulate the document (information) and that is what knowledge workers do. After all isn’t work the manipulation of things across time? Perhaps; but bees do that too, and their society hasn’t really changed much in a few thousand years. Human society has and the rate of change is logarithmic.

And, oddly enough, one thing we share with bees, is that we get work done, by interacting on an individual to individual (and individual to group) basis.  The problem is we still view those interactions as manipulating things. Person A transmits words to person B. This view is thing centric, not people centric. And that thing, in terms of your IT infrastructure is the document, not what it is supposed to enable your people to do, or why it exists. I bet you still think of your computing infrastructure as analogous to a file cabinet, and workflow means moving a document along a timeline of tasks that manipulate it. Chew up the pollen and spit it in a cell and it turns to honey. Yay.

Let’s take a different view. Let’s put people and their concerns at the center of everything, as your value statement says. Start there and we can ask why does the document exist, what actions does it enable, what relationships, entities, and products can we create? Bill Welty, CEO of Action Technologies, Inc., wrote an article in the October 2005 edition of Business Integration Journal, entitled BPM in the Real World: How Person-to-Person Interactions Support the Knowledge Worker. According to Welty knowledge workers comprised 52% of the workforce in 2004, versus a bit more than 10% in 1904.

“It’s too bad most workflow software packages weren’t designed with knowledge workers in mind. Instead, they were created using a command and control methodology in which managers simply assign tasks and check to see that work is completed. This approach works perfectly if you’re trying to run a factory or a typing pool. But these products are totally inadequate for organizations that rely on knowledge workers.”

OK, so what is the difference? People centric models more accurately reflect what people do when creativity and development are required. They allow for negotiation, building agreement, managing commitments, and building trust. Task based systems do not engender collaboration nor coordination. Yes you can collaborate on a document in SharePoint by capturing versions. But the negotiation, and commitments are not accounted for in SharePoint, and they are virtually invisible unless you save every email as a file related to that document. Heck you can only assign a document to a category if a category is a folder to put the document in.

That’s why I like IBM’s Lotus Notes & Domino approach. Ed Brill, Director, Messaging and Collaboration, IBM Lotus Software, writes in his blog:

“In IBM's world, the person and their work results are the center of the universe. Right click on a mail message in Notes 8.x, and the first menu choice is the human who authored the mail -- and ways to enhance your interaction with that human. Sure, Lotus Connections can store file attachments, but the fundamental unit of measure there is a person -- with their activities and interests.” “We didn't simply say we want to take a word processor/spreadsheet/presentation tool to the web -- we examined how we could make the act of using these tools more productive for the humans on either end. We are focusing on the future of collaboration based on social analytics and a move away from the inbox, towards a much-more productive world of relevant content and information.”

With this approach, IBM has committed to providing these solutions in a manner which do not dictate platform. If people are the main concern, then why force them to use one server operating system? Why force them to migrate to new hardware or operating systems with every new release? Why force them to wait three years for new feature releases?

So I ask again, what is your foundational principle for IT?