Reassessing “efficiency”

I guess my major thrust in ECM consulting engagements has been around separating valued information from noise. Maybe we need to do that in a broader fashion also?

I think the next generation of information professionals should be getting back to the basics of true efficiency:

• Identifying repeatable processes and functions that are at the core of our business

• Reducing exceptions as much as possible

• Provide the right platforms to enable high quality work

And taking the kind of tangential leap that only a blog entry can allow – I think we need to be considering BPR 2.0 – smarter re-engineering, drawing from the best of the past and hopefully learning from the sheer disasters that did occur during the last BPR revolution, mistakes made from assumptions such as:

• Overestimating the value and capability of technology solutions

• Underestimating the value of human intelligence and process knowledge

• Recognizing the limitations of the consultants in understanding how businesses tick

One thing that will be of value in this next generation I think will be an honest reassessment of the role and purpose of so called ‘productivity tools’. Has giving everyone Microsoft Office a Cell Phone and a Blackberry really made things more efficient?

At the same time we need to teach people how to communicate effectively – potentially by mirroring successful communicators (thoughtful, deliberate and happy to ignore trivia).

We probably need to get away from the anally retentive IT mentality we currently embrace of storing everything, and bring some discipline back into information management. For unless we do so we will continue to stumble from one expensive and under-performing deployment to the next. For let’s be honest, many of today’s expensive new technology deployments are being undertaken to fix the mistakes of the last expensive technology deployment.

Nitin Sawhney’s ‘Street Guru’ said…”I think there is going to be a backlash against technology…….”. If not a true backlash, there is cynicism at many levels, and it’s got to be time for a rethink. The industry is obsessed with Web 2.0, and to many it is all about Mashups and Ajax, but I think if it is to have any real impact, it needs to be about much more fundamental issues.

Slaves to technology

Those who know me well know that I take my music (particularly Electronica/Dance) very seriously. My iPod is playing a bunch of recent downloads and top amongst them are some albums by Nitin Sawhney. One of the tracks (on his Prophesy Album) that I have listened to many times is 'Street Guru'. It’s a track that samples heavily from a conversation with a US city Cab Driver, the driver muses on the fact that people have become slaves to time and technology…

“Development has pushed us away from other people”

“A lot of times people are mad because they want immediate access, immediate information, but sometimes you just gotta wait and let things happen”

“People get in the cab & I say it will take 5 minutes and they say “it should only take 3”….nobody is going to put on your tombstone, I got here in 5 minutes instead of 7..”

“Technology has made us slaves to time”

These are thoughts that clearly resonate with me, possibly from a different context and perspective but resonating nonetheless. The world of document/content management and workflow (you knew there was a connection coming up!) was constructed solely for the purpose of automating manual tasks and delivering and moving information at ever faster speeds. All with the intension of increasing efficiency, but efficiency isn’t simply about doing things faster…

ECM technologies are (I believe) essential in any enterprise to save them from drowning in a sea of irrelevant information. The mass of information facing people in their working life is real, and has reached a critical status – yet as I often pointed out, most of the information (documents) are irrelevant and wasteful.

Indeed it sometimes seems as if we spend our lives responding to irrelevancies, we keep busy, but don’t achieve all that much.

At the time of originally writing this post (long hand in my B&W A4 hardback notebook) I am sitting next to a man on an aeroplane who keeps sneakily responding to emails on his Blackberry mid flight to Seattle. I myself at Chicago airport earlier this morning opened my email account to see 10 emails relating to the same topic, a simple phone call to one person would have done the trick, but instead I have 10 emails with 5 people copied on each. And here is the rub, everyone wants immediate action, yet they don’t tend to see the major contradiction between these 50 emails (which would go onto to spurn yet others) that had brought closure to nothing.

Everyone wants immediate responses, to issues that may in their totality be important but are not particularly urgent. In our haste to respond, we fire off ill thought out responses that trigger yet more interactions…..”technology has made us slaves to time”