Part 2 of "Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate, Decide: How IT Achieves Strategic Leadership," our article in Cutter IT Journal, November '08
Part 1 is here.
Communication: From Technology to Services
How quickly people get used to new ways of communicating! With Web 2.0, for the first time in the information revolution, the consumer market is ahead of the enterprise market. People now expect services inside organizations comparable to those they use outside. Indeed, IT often finds itself fending off rogue installations that the “tech people” have yet to consider, instant messaging (IM) being a prime example. When IT departments have delayed approving IM, enthusiastic users have found their own workarounds — even if it means logging into Facebook or Gchat to use this valuable utility.
Many IT organizations have moved to seeing their larger role as providing “information management,” a service-oriented model. In this operating view, technologies lie below the visible surface, constantly changing, sometimes used in multiple services, while the support focus is on what the “customer” wants and needs.
A comprehensive view of IM sees customer needs at four distinct scales within an enterprise: individual people, teams, communities, and organizations. All are customers for different aspects of IT’s full menu of services. These multiscale services comprise IT’s essential contribution to collaboration, coordination, and decision making across the whole organizational network.
In a recent project with the US Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS), we helped develop a picture (see Figure 1) of existing or embryonic services available to the Army, grouping those services by the populations they serve.2 Many of these capabilities reach — or are projected to reach — across many boundaries to the Army’s partners in the larger complex world of current joint military organizations. This complex set of relationships is often abbreviated as JIIM, which stands for Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational engagements.
Figure 1 shows the array of technologies available in some form in many enterprises. What’s important here is the notion of IT customers at every scale. Traditional knowledge management (KM) is directed at the organizational level, as are learning services. Other services are directed to and served by individuals, such as FAQ and information-request services, joined by newer social-profile, expertise-location, and blog services. Discussion forums support cross-cutting communities of practice, while subsets develop domain expertise and programs that use workflow services. Finally, the now hot area of virtual team support includes the key technologies of synchronous conferencing (audio, video, Web) and asynchronous capabilities (repository, team room).
New communication capabilities enable new collaboration capabilities. Industrial Era technologies — bracketed by 15th-century printing and 20th-century broadcast television — predominantly enhanced one-way communication. These served efficient hierarchies and specialized bureaucracies. In the Information Era, interactive, anytime, anywhere technologies have emerged, been adopted, and are now forcing organizational restructuring. New forms of organization are emerging in the public and private sectors, most along network lines. IT can bring a natural network mindset to the senior table as companies repeatedly consider reorganizations large and small to meet the demands of change.
Figure 1
