Information and it's value chain

One of the topics I'm researching is the principles of the value chain and their impact to information inside enterprises. Somehow, every company today is like a big media conglomerate: they live for the content they create and use; they base their decisions on it; they invest massive amounts of money to improving it. Better said, in the technology to unbury it, to present it and to store it.

However, very little thinking is applied to the way information is created and used inside enterprises. I'm playing with this idea of the value chain of information compared to the industrial era concept of the physical value chain. Lean management techniques applied to the physical world have produced enormous improvements in corporate performance. Is there anything similar to be achieved in the world of information supply chain?

Calculating, reasoning and perceiving, and their impact in Enterprise 2.0

During one of my workout sessions this weekend I discovered myself remembering a great book I read years ago when I started researching about the impact of Artificial Intelligence and Text Mining. The book is Robot, Mere machine to transcendent mind by Hans Moravec. Not because I was thinking about his visionary theories and predictions about intelligent robots, but because something that I've been thinking about since I read the book: "For machines, calculating is much easier than reasoning, and reasoning much easier than perceiving and acting". I know it sounds philosophical. But the reason this quote resonates again in my mind is because more and more I'm asking myself one question: what is the difference that technology plays in business functions that require pure calculation and those that require reasoning and perceiving? In other words, why technology has been successful in automating transactional interactions, but is only in it's infancy in relation to tacit interactions? This is the most important area of innovation in the era of Web 2.0 applies to the enterprise (the Enterprise 2.0)

Sounds to me that one of the biggest challenges that the business and technology worlds are facing today is the optimization of interactions where humans need to interact with other humans or use large volumes of information for decision making. Knowing how those processes operate and how to optimize them is, in my view, the most important business challenge of our time. I think this is the most important element to be considered in the Enterprise 2.0 world. Of course this has a lot to do with technology (SaaS, SOA, ) but I agree with Andrew McAfee that Enterprise 2.0 should be consider a term broader than only it's software underlying properties.

The reason why this is relevant and related to Moravec's quote and it's connotations for me is the following: what we're seeing in Enterprise 2.0 is a new way of approaching the complex issue of optimizing collective behavior; and the novelty it brings is a combination of IT and social aspects that so far, provides the best results. This way, web 2.0 applied to the enterprise, is helping achieve better results when an organized group of people in an enterprise, need to obtain an understanding of any given topic that spans beyond their own individual knowledge. This can only be achieved when wikis, blogs, tagging and other web 2.0 capabilities, combine the individual pieces of knowledge that they all have to produce a bigger, more comprehensive and better organized piece of knowledge that everyone can benefit from. Think for example on how a large corporation keeps track of all interactions with a business partner or a customer. There is no single individual that has the whole picture; but everyone benefits from a broader picture if it could be obtained. This is one of the reasons, in my view, why customer service is so difficult to optimize, but in the Enterprise 2.0 world it has the most promising of all attempts. (I'll post a blog entry about this topic soon)

This is reasoning and perceiving. And in this areas, for the time being, humans are proving to be more effective than machines. We will see if Moravec's predictions were true.

Passion and You- Time Magazine person of the year

I just read the Time magazine "person of the year" online article. Very timely because builds on one of the topics of my previous entrance: Passion. Time hits the nail on its head when talking about the Web 2.0 growth and the social participation on the web these days they come back to passion. It is truth. Why is the consumer part of the web 2.0 that is exploding, and not the enterprise one (at least yet)? I think it has a lot to do with the fact that when you right your blog, or participate in second life or post your family video you do it for fun, you follow some kind of passion, you're not obliged to do it. How many of us do that at work? How many of us proactively participate, suggest, contribute in our working life? mmmm

That makes me think and revisit the past and I realize that for every person I've hired lately, I've always looked for individuals that are passionate about what they do. You can learn other things, but the level of dedication, interest and excelence that normally comes with passionate individuals, that's impossible to replicate.

Be passionate my friend!

Happiness and Economics

Christmas and Year End give us some days for reflection. Most people tend to do a year balance and plans for next year: have I achieved by goals, am I prepared for next year? No surprise this is the time of the year when more people start new collections, join health club and other futile, short term initiatives than soon dilute in the day to day activity.

However, thinking about happiness is a good exercise, one that can be done these days or at any other moment though. Reading the article from Economist Happiness and Economics one thinks in the traditional but difficult terms of being vs having, or experiences vs commodities as the article puts it. Just by coincidence I'm reading the book "Success built to last" which touches some of the same deep aspects of success and happiness. And there's one quote that captures well the basic idea behind it: "you can never get enough of what you don't really need to make you happy".

As usual, the concept of happiness is frequently perceived as a relative one: Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. Somehow I see this as a natural tool to protect ourselves. Passion, they say, is needed to excel at your job and enjoy it. And normally there is a defence angle to this: "you've got to love what you're doing or you can be sure there will be someone else who will".

In reality, how many people truly enjoy and are passionate about what they do, and how many are simply trading time for salary? In other words is work not just a way to pay the rent?. The lasting reference here continues to be the flow: "the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile"

I tend to think that this topic is elusive because there's no universal answer: some individuals will be just fine with a mediocre satisfaction level at work because the level of demand is tolerable. For some others though, exigent jobs are not a problem as long as they provide the internal or external level of applause and satisfaction they are aiming at. Also, I find that many times it is dependent on your position in the economic ladder: why is it easier to focus on what you really want, once economic independence is achieved? Why is it so hard to find the joy in your job being a waiter at a fast food restaurant?