Posts Tagged ‘Legacy Thinking’
Stop Funding the Obsolete
Gil Yehuda thinks we should question the value of having a company phone. He cites a story in Wired about a university that has scrapped its dorms’ computer labs in favor of giving each student an iPhone. They realized most students already had laptops. The computer labs had become redundant.
Hello, operator? Could you connect me with the 21st century?
When I was an IT consultant, I spent 50% of my time on the road. I barely used my desk phone. My laptop’s wifi was flaky. The VPN to the home office barely worked. Our clients couldn’t get in touch with me. The home office couldn’t keep up with me.
Out of frustration, I finally bought myself a Blackberry. Everyone was happier and I was more productive.
When phone networks were expensive to install and maintain, and computing power a scarce resource, it made sense for companies to provide these tools. Organizations can pool money and enforce standards.
But now that many knowledge workers have better tools available to them outside of the office than in it, it may be time to give up central planning and just let folks use the right tool for the job.
What tools does your organization provide? Why do they provide them? Are they business necessities, or another example of legacy thinking?
Information Management in the 21st Century
This post is from a keynote speech I gave to a room of Information Managers at a corporate function for Codice, a specialist IM Consulting Services company based in Brisbane, Australia. When I read it over, it seemed like a nice blog post — I decided I like the way I write speeches much better than the way I deliver them!
Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us this evening.
Now, I know the main reason we’re here is to have a drink and catch up with each other and gossip, and I’ll let you get back to that soon. But I just wanted to steal a little of your time to talk about three things that have been bugging me about information management in the 21st century.
When I was a boy, I wanted to be a teacher… or a fireman… and sometimes an astronaut… and a cowboy. Oh, and the guy who reads the news…
Nowadays, I have trouble explaining what it is I do to my kids.
In fact, I overheard my son talking to one of his friends about me the other day:
“My Dad is over there” he pointed. “He’s a computer nerd.”
And I guess that’s true, in some sense — I am. So, he’s right. But let’s face it, job titles aren’t what they used to be. (Nobody ever handed me a business card with “Cowboy” written on it.) And it’s getting harder to explain what we do to our kids.
As people who care about information management this curious fact should be very important to us:
The way people work is changing.
There are less and less menial jobs as a percentage of the global economy. More and more people are creating information for a living. They’re getting paid to think stuff. And enter it into some computer. And then to do stuff with the stuff they’ve thought up and stored. As a result, the amount of information is increasing.
Okay, so this is something that, in our field, we hear all the time — oh help, we’re sucking on the end of a firehose, information overload! Sales guys love to tell that story. So I’m not going to bore you with it again. But we should all be aware that this trend is occurring — if nothing else, it means a lot more work for us all to do.
The second thing is this:
The mediums that people are using have changed.
The young people who are joining the workforce today are steeped in information.
But the way they see and interact with that information is different — they’ve grown up with Facebook and Twitter and SMS. They think that email is lame. They think that paper is old-fashioned, and harmful to the environment. They are used to being able to reply to any piece of information they see. They share things much more freely, and thrive when given autonomy and freedom — two things that often aren’t exactly the hallmarks of many workplaces.
As Information Managers, we need to understand these mediums and these ways of thinking. We have to be able to manage, preserve, track and harness the content in these systems. They’re not going away.
This brings me to my other third thing:
What people expect from their systems has changed.
When I was at Elementary School, my school librarian was a lady called Mrs Gamble. She must have been about 85, and she was the sweetest thing. (As a fledgling nerd, she and I spent quite a bit of time together.) But there was one way to make her turn absolutely purple — put a book back on the wrong shelf. This heinous crime was punishable by a 10-minute lecture on the Dewey Decimal System, and the importance of proper filing of books so they could be accurately recalled by others.
“Do NOT!” She would shriek, “Ever put a book on the wrong SHELF!”
Thirty years later , Google came along and completely wrecked the world of information management. All of a sudden, in a wholly electronic world, the problem wasn’t that the book was on the wrong shelf. The problem was shelves. (Mrs Gamble would turn in her grave.) Google took a completely different approach to our established concepts of taxonomy, ontology and organization. Managing electronic information means that our old physical approaches could be re-thought. People have preconceived notions of of how information systems ought to behave, because they use them daily in their lives.
So:
- The way people work is changing.
- The mediums that people are using have changed.
- What people expect from information systems has changed.
Delivering Information Management solutions into this landscape is challenging. But the potential rewards and motivation are greater than ever.
And we would love to be able to help you, if we can.
Thanks : )
The Challenge of Idea 2
I heard an interesting story the other day about automotive companies. Apparently after the Model T went into production, Ford concentrated on selling cars to people who didn’t have cars. Now, as far as marketing strategies go, this seems like a really good one. After all, most people didn’t have cars. The production model meant that this kind of new-fangled transport was now available to all. And, despite some initial adoption barriers, it worked. Ford sold lots of cars. The problem came about when General Motors arrived, a bit later on.
Turns out GM couldn’t sell cars to people who didn’t have cars, because everyone already had one. So, they decided to sell the car as a ‘status symbol’ — to entrench the car as a reflection of its owner. Obviously, this too was a brilliant marketing strategy. It was at this point that GM began to surpass Ford as the number one car manufacturer. Ford, meanwhile, was still trying to figure out what to do with its profits — and still hunting for customers among people who didn’t have cars. “Look! No Horse!”
History repeats itself. Microsoft completely missed the Internet thing. They were firmly focused on the extremely profitable business they invented: selling consumer software. When they did finally engage with the Internet, they saw it as though it was consumer software. Even today, Microsoft are still talking about “Software + Services” — as though the Internet is some kind of Add-On pack to their consumer offerings. In a sense, they still seem to say, “Look! No more IBM mainframe!”
Companies seem to think that the way to beat the Idea 1 legacy thinking problem is to get crazy obsessed with finding Idea 2. Microsoft are trying to be, among other things, an advertising company. Google has gone from Internet search engine to enterprise software/hardware vendor, mobile phones and even virtual worlds. Both companies acquire startups regularly. I can’t help but be skeptical of these efforts. I think that there’s no doubt that they are possible avenues for success, but looming large over all of these is the legacy of Idea 1.
Success seems to be a fertile breeding ground for legacy thinking. In a way, it’s like we’re all striving to find a point where we don’t have to think any more. Or perhaps it’s just that every new idea has to be seen through the lens of the idea that proceeded it. People are innately more inclined to protect against loss than to seek out ways to gain. The advantage of Idea 1 is that it carried no risk of jeopardizing existing profits, unlike Idea 2 and all subsequent ideas.
Anyway, it’s an interesting paradox, but me musing on it isn’t getting this startup any closer to its Idea 1 release. Back to Vark!
