Your investment to improve tacit interactions

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=1767&L2=18&L3=30

If 70% of your workers interactions are what McKinsey calls Tacit, did you ask yourself what percentage of your IT investment goes to support those interactions?

Reengineering and automating processes has taken companies to achieve great productivity improvements. But if we are to live in an era where interactions are more tacit than, transformational or transactional, what is going to be the contribution of IT to improve productivity in this environement?

There are two key areas in IT that companies look at in order to support the new nature of their work:
- Make information accesible. Despite the organizational structure, try to avoid silos in information. Allow the information flow in all directions and break down barriers, hierarchies to become porous.
- Make people accesible. Adopt mechanisms to increase the means you can access people, inside or outside the boundaries of the organization in real time. Provide as many channels as possible in order to maximize the bandwidth of communciation.

As you can read in one of the McKinsey articles mentioned in previous posts, "Tacit interactions reduce the importance of structure and elevate the importance of people and collaboration"

In further posts I explore the details on how to do this and how SOA and Web 2.0 converge.