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Company news, plus our musings on Enterprise 2.0, organizational culture, knowledge workers, and information management
When preparing our video for the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad, Dean and I found we had a problem.
The problem is that, let’s face it, the world of Enterprise Software is pretty boring. So trying to create an exciting marketing video is a big challenge.
If you look at existing enterprise software marketing, it’s all about “ROI” this and “increased productivity” that.
For instance, Microsoft explains its primary enterprise offering, SharePoint, like so:
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
Messages like these might be important to a CIO, but are not at all interesting to most people. How will this software tame that overflowing inbox, help you transcend a difficult process, or avoid an annoying colleague? “Strategic focus” and “investment in the future” is great for the boss, but how’s that going to help you, right now, clear away all the bothersome tasks that prevent you from getting things done?
As far as software goes, the CIO is the most important person in the whole organization. After all, they hold the checkbook. The guys doing the work don’t have the checkbook. Why would you want to pitch to them?
Empowering the people
As consultants, Dean and I struggled valiantly to attain the nirvana of “User Adoption” (cue angelic chorus). We worked hard to integrate tons of tools that were the product of the CIO’s checkbook. And then we worked even harder to explain to everyone that wasn’t a CIO why they should use the Frankenstien’s monster we’d created. It was impossible.
That’s what we tried to fix with Infovark. We want the actual users of our software to be its major beneficiaries. We want people to enjoy using it. And truth be told, we don’t even care what the CIO thinks of it.
Sure, at first we crafted some of that mealy-mouthed enterprise software marketing gobbledygook:
Infovark is an ad-hoc, peer based collaborative social network, designed to harness the existing tacit efforts of your knowledge workers, facilitate effective information transfer, and minimize duplication of effort, improving productivity.
The problem was that, while Infovark actually does that stuff, that’s not why we built it. It isn’t about the money, or the processes. We built it for you. So you could get on with your work, and not have to worry about feeding the machine, or attending another training course on how to effectively and responsibly manage corporate information using some weird new system.
Enterprises are made of people, and Infovark is a tool for people, so the video we came up with in the end was this one. We hope you like it, and thanks so much to everyone who voted for us — we were humbled by your support!
Also, a big thanks to our awesome voice talent, Ben Holland from Spotland Productions. We highly recommend them!
This week’s podcast of This American Life opens with a story of a policeman who arrives at the scene of a traffic accident to discover that the driver was a chimpanzee, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, who had freaked out in a thunderstorm, thrown his handler to the back of the van, and taken the wheel, only to crash into a streetlight.
As the cop arrives in the pouring rain, with the chimp hooting and screaming and the handler reeking of rum, he thinks to himself, “Now What? They never covered this back at the Academy…”
The point of the story (if one can be extracted from such a surreal turn of events) is that sometimes strange and unexpected things happen, and you will have to deal with it somehow. At some point, you have to operate with no map, no process, and often no idea of what to do next. You will have to use your best judgment.
This story got me thinking about the way people work. About business as usual. About information management systems, and business processes, and taxonomies. And the reason is… those things are all made by monkeys.
Nah, just kidding. The reason is that all of these things are maps — they’re operational guidelines for how to correctly perform tasks at work.
People are good at following processes. We’re naturally creatures of habit. There’s a comfort to be found in knowing just how to handle each event as it occurs. Although we possess the most complex brain on the planet, we’re really pretty lazy, and if possible, we will try to avoid using it. (We’ll just do what we did last time. After all, that worked out okay, right?) Harnessing this notion of “standard operation procedure” has proved spectacularly successful, particularly in manufacturing and construction.
“Bob, your job is to tighten these 4 bolts here as the car goes past, okay?
Either taking advantage of this success, or just doing what we did last time, we decided that perhaps the whole world of work could be automated. That we could encapsulate a bank or an insurance company as a giant binder full of operational practices that could be consulted at any time. A kind of information production line, just like the way we built cars.
But unlike the production line, the inputs into a knowledge system are much less predictable.
Manufacturing and construction are constrained by physical limits. There are well-defined boundaries. When things go wrong, it’s obvious — at least to a trained eye. Knowledge work is different. It’s creative, abstract, and often deals with situations outside the ideal and outside the norm. It’s about handling exceptions, not following recipes.
It’s these exceptions that have been the undoing of our attempt to automate knowledge work along the lines of Taylorism and Scientific Management.
And curiously, it’s the successful handling of these exceptions that defines the success of an enterprise. Thomas Watson Sr famously said “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate”.
He wasn’t talking about process mistakes — like forgetting to tighten the fourth bolt — he was talking about those awkward times that you find yourself with No Map.
Rules are for fools — and the guidance of the wise. And when we’re making decisions for our organization, be it building a process, buying information systems, or implementing a taxonomy, we need to take this as our golden rule.
Thanks to everyone who voted for us in the first round of the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad - Infovark has made the “Sweet Sixteen” of finalists!
The next round is a series of 1 minute videos, so Dean and I are trying to figure out the best way we can show how Infovark can help you in 60 seconds.
So, watch this space – we’ll be posting our video as soon as we can get it together!
(And then we’ll no doubt be nagging you to vote for that too… )
Launch Pad 2009 at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston attracted lots of interest. Nearly 30 companies have signed up to pitch their new products. Infovark is one of them.
If you’d like to see us on stage, vote for us!
Last year we attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference as a stealth startup, mainly to get a feel for the event. We’re going to attend this year, but this time we won’t be a stealth company.
That’s right. It’s been a long, hard slog, but we think we’re finally ready. We’re going to release our public Infovark beta. We can hardly believe it.
We want to get our product on to the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad.
If you’re curious about Infovark, please vote for us!