How to Accelerate Business Performance with 2.0 Technologies

With the big US Enterprise 2.0 conference a week away, some more thoughts on accelerating business performance with the effective deployment of these modern technologies.

As previously discussed here, modern technology has greatly accelerated the rate at which we can create letters, documents, notes and voice communication, but these outdated workflow paradigms are inefficient and choking the arteries of businesses with terrabytes of hard to find information.

The resulting stress causes people to reach for local technology remedies which may relieve departmental congestion but ultimately does little to improve business performance holistically, and may even harm it in other areas.

When discussing broad performance improvement, a core human fitness attribute is aerobic efficiency; similarly no matter how complex a gasoline engine is, they are in essence just a giant air pump, and maximizing flow and throughput is key to improving power output.

If we see the modern business, with its many organs and components, as a human body then information flow is analogous to blood and oxygen supply. Our bodies are fundamentally hung off the framework of our skeleton, which could be compared to the overall structure of a company.

A huge challenge in many western companies is the obscure, unpublished org chart - it takes time and a good look at reporting structure through applications such as Microsoft Outlook to shine some light on your local hierarchy.

This lack of clear overarching structure can result in information confusion, duplication and internal competitive behaviors. Given the many organizational structure models different companies employ  - flat, matrix, lattice, team, network,  virtual and the hierarchical bureaucracy most people immediately associate with 'business' - the skeleton types analogy is very broad. We may be talking about huge mammals or tiny ones...

If you don't have a clear idea of the overall shape and structure of the business you are inside it is very hard for an individual to contribute and innovate outside your immediate surroundings, and if information isn't flowing through well organized veins we are starved of contextual information.

The concept of a form of 'sociocracy', where employees and participants participate in decision making by consent, has been fashionable in 2.0 technology circles. The reality is that career middle managers will protect their hierarchical position - or ideally improve on it - by quietly pouring weed killer on grass roots adoption of this type of thinking, even if it is validated by executive level sponsorship.

Despite this reality, this type of thinking is often a 'feel good' sales component when pitching enabling technologies. If you're inside a company you've probably been propositioned about the wonders of a modern 'social' address book with lots of user contributed information along with the wonders of wikis and forums for disseminating and updating centralized information.

Even the most wonderfully intuitive technology isn't going to improve the bottom line if you're attempting to graft it onto a culture which isn't going to change entrenched ways, and may be the result of a lowest common social denominator in terms of hierarchy. Some career employees are playing a long game, with longer memories, grudges and rivalries.

Grafting an organ into the human body is impossible without transplant drugs which prevent rejection: the concept of offering up technologies for workforce adoption generally doesn't end well, with shelf ware ranks added to and budgeting questions asked.

Returning to my human body analogy - we've seen a lot of departmental uptake of technologies, so there may be a sophisticated community within R&D and/or Engineering but not much information flow out of those collaboration silos. The analogy here is extremely well developed biceps but everything else is pretty puny - with the weak areas jealous of the strong ones and refusing to participate...

Any sports expert will tell you a well balanced holistic training approach is essential for success. Capitalism prides itself on a 'survival of the fittest' model mirroring natural selection, and the reality is that modern business primarily competes around efficiency and quality of staff as the differentiators.

Designing a coherent digital collaboration strategy akin to an efficient body or machine is essential to realize competitive advantage from modern technologies, which are now powerful enough to choke a business rather than help it in the wrong hands.

Remember the corny old 1.0 destination website cliche of the 'information superhighway'?  An efficient modern company needs to be plan information creation and flow like a national transport grid, allowing contextual information to flow freely between areas of the company.

Scale advances allow us to plan real time information systems that work at a global level while getting down to incredible levels of contextual personal detail, whether contributed or consumed - or both. Making this a reality is much more about facilitating performance improvement, making people see an environment has been created for them to work in where they can be more efficient and aware, and have more of that most precious commodity, time.

The underlying technology implementation should always be informed by and achieve business specific, clearly identified performance goals.

Read more on this in our Enterprise 2.0 White Paper, which the Sovos Group created for the Boston Conference.

* Image from Dorling Kindersley's excellent 'The Human Body Book' by Steve Parker