Intelligence Among Us

This is an update to the compelling Shift Happens video.  Everyone I show it to is both awed and overwhelmed about the potential implications. 

I see this as not only our reality but a huge opportunity.  More to follow but take a look at the video.  I’m interested in your thoughts.

I find once a few key people get the Enterprise 2.0 bug and read all the content on the web about changing demographics, retaining new and younger talent they lose clarity on where a more immediate impact can be had.  I have been guilty of this myself and want to share some thoughts on the subject.

First of all, I am a huge proponent of bringing Web 2.0 behind the firewall.  I think it has a trememdous amount of potential to democratize an organization and give people a way to have a voice and contribute to a unified effort.  Blogs, wikis, tags, folksonomies etc. are all great ideas and definitely have their place.  But attempting to implement them without first understanding the language of your organization is a mistake.

Firstly a discussion of structured vs unstructured data is in order.  I like this excerpt:

“We all know that structured data is boring and useless; while unstructured data is sexy and chock full of value. Well, only up to a point, Lord Copper. Genuinely unstructured data can be a real nuisance – imagine extracting the return address from an unstructured letter, without letterhead and any of the formatting usually applied to letters. A letter may be thought of as unstructured data, but most business letters are, in fact, highly-structured.”

I consider structured data to be information that can be easily described, has a defined container to store it and is easily searchable.  The problem is that the vast majority of business interactions take place in an unstructured environment: email, IM, RSS etc.

I saw an excellent example somewhere where someone used the example of New York City.   In a structured scenario New York could be described with a latitude and longitude, a type of City, possibly a parent State and Country attribute etc.  In an unstructured scenario New York could be referring to the city or state, the Yankees, Rangers, Jets, New York Stock Exchange etc.  Gleaning the context and intent from unstructured data is much more difficult.

I’m going to analogize in the context of MOSS 2007 but the same principles apply regardless of the technology platform.  I’ll use the example of an HR department who finds out the IT has implemented SharePoint (I’ll discuss why this is a mistake in a later post) and believes that this is the silver bullet for getting people to collaborate and share documents with each other.  The HR lead sits with IT and runs through a vague set of requirements which ends up with a few document libraries in SharePoint that grow over time to become complex enough that internal customers find it too tedious and over time revert to the previous ways of doing things.

Unfortunately the question that is usually asked is, “What content would you like to share?”.   The questions that should be asked are:

1. Who are your target audience(s)?
2. What business processes support the interactions with those audiences?
3. What is the language of HR?  In other words – what is a policy, an employment standard, leave of absence , vacation etc. 

This then leads to going through the process of identifying metadata for each type of content.  It also will allow for the idendification of standard templates and workflows.  Having this data well-thought through is the foundation of an effective enterprise search strategy.

So, instead of a customer meadering aimlessly through a semi-structured repository they are able to interact and search based on the language of the business. Without going through this process you will exacerbate the problems you currently have with your enterprise data.  In fact, if the adoption rate of the portal is near expectations it will accelerate the mayhem.  

There is a growing suite of vendors that have offerings on the market for integrating unstructured data into your business intelligence and analytics landscape.  I submit again, that if you can’t manage structured data and your business intelligence capabilities are limited you will be striking a Faustian bargain by attempting to engage a partner or implement a solution that focuses on unstructured data.

IT must have a seat at the strategic decision making table.  In order to earn that seat IT must make an ongoing business to understand your organization’s core business.  Too many IT departments never gain the required business knowledge , see themselves as nothing more than a “service” department and begin to focus on providing services that they shouldn’t.

IT needs to get out of the role of constant firefighting and become much more focused on strategic issues that will be impacting the organization going forward.  In order to do that IT needs to have rock solid infrastructure in place.  In my view, that means outsourcing any service that does not directly impact key business processes of your organization.

Email??  Why not look at hosted email services?  Do your IT people need to be experts in managing email infrastructure or do they need to be experts in helping make your business more competitive, lean and agile?  All businesses rely on email which in my view makes an even more compelling case to leaving to the experts.  Every minute one of your people spends managing email servers/issues is time they are not spending on your business.

Data Storage??  Why not look at the cloud?  This one is still a relatively new area but Amazon has recently announced their Elastic Block Store which is essentially limitless data storage which can be added to on the fly for a fraction of what it would cost to manage that infrastructure internally.  Does having people on staff that understand SAN architecture and all the associated peripheral knowledge make sense?  Possibly, but we need to be thinking outside the box.  Your competitors are.  Actually this is not even outside the box anymore.  This just makes sense.

Portals? SharePoint?  Why in the world an organization would want to manage all the infrastructure and complexity of an installation of something like a SharePoint farm is beyone me – unless you are a SharePoint hosting company I suppose.  I speak from painful personal experience here.  There are options out there.

I think of it this way.  If I was launching a greendfield manufacturing facility my IT team would have to make a damn compelling case for each server they want to have on site.   Being at the fore of the coming IT revolution means being able to focus on your business and leaving all the other stuff to the experts.  Be an expert on your business.

My mom sent me this video and as a dad of two girls, one who is the age of this girl, it really hits home about how important parents are:

This touched my soul: