Myths and Misconceptions of Technology

A recent survey from consultants Logica and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) reveals that about one in three projects to improve business processes fails. The expenses of businesses have run at a hefty $10bn.

The findings also show that winners tend to be more ambitious in their planning and to run cross-regional and cross-departmental projects as opposed to their less successful counterparts. They also show a more proactive approach towards possible problems and involve customers and partners in their planning.

The survey was conducted among 380 managers from nine European countries.

As we all know, most of the household concepts in IT are very much talked about and very little understood and the marketing hacks seize the opportunity to promise everything to everybody and the big players are poaching for innovation among specialized vendors, mostly in a rush to fill their game pockets faster than the competition before actually asserting the benefits of the acquisition for themselves or their customers.

In today’s enterprise there is a lot of messy data, duplicate or plain wrong information scattered around in ERPs, custom applications and user-generated spreadsheets across all departments. The resulting silo effect is worsened by quick changes across the board and even timely and accurate information soon becomes a rare luxury item. Worse still, most BI tools are far from intelligent in the sense of smart like this article (in German) of revised profit expectations of ERP (and BI) vendor SAP illustrates.

What is the problem?

The problem of most current BI tools is that they are limited to aggregate data in a warehouse-like manner without being able to show proper connections and run current analytics because of limited metrics. The result is usually incomplete information that is delivered too late and therefore provides no reliable input for real-time decision-making.

BI: Downward Bound

Here is some news about the most recent step in Google’s bid to diversify its business model. Apart from the casual snubs in the article, CMS Watch also provides the following excerpt from their in-depth report:

Even Google’s marketing won’t go so far as to call their implementation “enterprise-class security,” instead favoring to highlight single sign-on (which the Appliance supports quite well). Document-level security is handled late-binding - the result sets are filtered for hits a searcher is allowed to see, which requires the system to fire off separate requests for each hit to see if it may be displayed. This has only one advantage - the authorization will be up-to-date to the second - but, certainly in Google’s implementation, several drawbacks.

More insights can also be found in this knowledgeable comment.

I am peculiar about the things I like and I know I am peculiar in some other ways, too, but I might talk about that at another time. The former peculiarity has it that I keep things as long as I can and then run constantly into trouble replacing them appropriately. Hence I fear the day when my thirty-year old road bike (which is now the merger of three bikes) will finally quit its services. But this is also not what I want to talk about today.

Brand loyalty is not for the meek

What I want to talk about was the recent loss of my 25-year old sunglasses and the ordeal and redemption that followed. Okay, so here is what happened: On a turbulent trail ride I managed to hold on to a bucking horse by sheer luck rather than any riding skills and in the process the glasses came off which I was not aware of at the time because I had other things on my mind, of course. Home we go and the damage becomes apparent. A search attempt the other day in the thick underweed proved futile. When I turned to the Internet to look for a replacement I knew I was in trouble. Although these were branded icon glasses and there were umpteen similar glasses available it seemed that the specific combination of frame, lenses and temples was not. What to do? I thought, I might ask an expert and go to an optician in the nearest mall. I entered the shop hoping they could at least give me advice on what to do. Before seeing any staff my eyes fell on a shelf full of xy glasses and soon I found one I liked, even if it was not quite the one I had lost. Up came an apprentice and I thought I was done soon. So I told him I would like to buy what I had found, only that I wanted different temples. He turned around without a word and headed to some of the senior staff at the opposite end of the shop. After a while he came back. “There is no such thing!” Nothing else. It sounded like a verdict. So I walked away with low spirits and as I passed another optician I decided only faintheartedly to try my luck again. The same procedure there: I found the shelf but I didn’t have time to look around much before a young lady came up to ask me what I wanted. As she received the answer “sunglasses” she asked me what I needed them for, leisure or sports or whatever, I couldn’t believe what I heard. Obviously she had good training and was really making an effort to get me what I could really use. But as my mind was set on that particular model I just told her the story of my loss and that I wanted an exact replacement. Again, I could barely believe what happened: She asked me to sit down at a table in a kind of department with two chairs and a little later she came back with the complete xy catalog. Then she explained to me that temples a came only with model b, instead of model c, which combination was the one I’ve had. But no problem, she said, they could order both models and change the temples, just as easy as that!

To cut it short right here: I found my glasses again, canceled the order (no problem, of course!) and lived on happily ever thereafter as I need no longer theorize about quality of service, customer experience and loyalty and such stuff for weirdos only.

What exactly is Web 2.0? Is it the interactive Internet with user-generated content? Is it a never-ending source of priceless personal data promising so immense profits that it has become the battleground of the likes of Google, Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch? Is it the final undermining and democratization of the information monopolies? Is it the next giant bubble to burst?

We all know that Web 2.0 was just a random tag and lacks a proper definition and if it had a valid one any marketing hack would still promise you to deliver just the Web 2.0 you want even if it were far off the shot. And as Peter Fingar has pointed out there is a lot of similar and even more fatuous tagging going on. And while it is obvious that blogs and Wikis are fancy tools they do indeed create an information overload and have therefore little value for business.

But witty as Fingar’s remarks are, the offered solutions seem to be like jumping a bandwagon that has gained substantial momentum. What people really need is not ever more refined processes but more control over how they organize their work. They need no control from IT, they just need advice.

So Web 2.0 is surely not a remedy to all problems businesses face in organizing collaborative work and it is not the continuation of KM with proper tools. It is, however, a fascinating experiment and if someone can make money out of it, why not. But please leave the tagging to those specialized platforms.

peter fingar