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.