Wiki That!

Are we just a workforce of sheep?

I guess I needed something to piss me off enough to get me back in the writing saddle. 

This blog post by Dan Woods (Forbes.com) did it for me.…

“In 2005, McKinsey & Co. made a big splash with the concept of tacit interactions, processes that can't be automated in a step-by-step manner. Examples include negotiating a deal, managing staff, writing a blog, providing great customer service and selling a product.

Tacit interactions are carried out by knowledge workers who assemble information from a variety of sources and perform tasks that may be done differently each time. Tacit interactions involve improvisation, taking action and moving forward based on what you find out.”

The article goes on to highlight several approaches and products that deal with these “tacit interactions”.

Tacit Interactions?!? 

Are you kidding me? 

Don't they mean "work"? 

Did we really need a study from McKinsey (not to mention more goofy consultant-speak that nobody understands) to realize that as ERP has matured, the cycle time required to process transactions would shrink? And wouldn’t it just make common sense that what is left is the activity that occurs “between the transactions” and would end up representing a greater percentage of the whole than was the case pre-ERP? 

Yes, people working “between the transactions” would be those “tacit interactions”, the phrase these geniuses coined so that no one would understand the obvious and would feel compelled to call in a McKinsey-like organization to explain it to them.

Here’s a thought - tell employees who work together and depend on each other that, now that they’ve shrunken ‘transaction processing’ time, it is time to shrink the cycle time of what happens between the transactions by half. Make the company's future (and their continued employment) dependent on succeeding. Then tell them that there are some web 2.0 tools out there they can use if it will help - they’ll figure out the rest without chugging some Consultant's Koolaid.

It kills me how lame company management has become these days and how willing these companies are to buy the smoke and mirrors that the McKinseys of the world are selling instead of simply giving some clear goals to be achieved by employees, some incentive to succeed, some reasonable consequences if not successful, and a few simple tools to make the job easier.

We’ve become a culture of sheep.

Note – I actually posted most of this as a comment on another site that was referencing the Woods post. I was just so frustrated when I first read it that I commented on that site before thinking 'hey, wait a minute… I have a blog. Maybe I should start writing there again'.  And so I will.

The Margin is in the Mystery

That title is a well-known saying in the consulting world. It refers to the understanding that most business challenges have solutions implemented for which none of the parties involved (client, technology provider, and/or service provider) really know why it will work but there is this desire to believe it will work. Service providers rely on this blind faith to justify their fees and margins. Of course, this isn't true of all such providers, but it is prevalent enough to taint all of them.

Many business leaders, politicians, religious leaders, and other professionals have a large stake based on this kind of perception. Their value is a function of dealing with the unknown for their constituents who have an implicit faith that these providers know what the are doing and talking about. If there is anything that threatens that value stake for those providers, they will typically take a stand against it whether they really believe it (or even understand it) or not.

Clarity, simplicity, and truth are anathma to folks like this.

Wikis provide a forum for both public and private discourse that potentially cuts to the chase, eliminates falsehoods, and provides a clear path to whatever destination a particular group's reason for being is. Now, that assumes of course that the group actually wants a clear, simple path to some legitimate purpose, goal, or destination and isn't promoting their own self-serving agenda (yeah, I know, what group doesn't do that?). Institutional leadership sees this as a threat.

What prompted me to write this actually has nothing to do with wikis. The controversy over the fictional 'Da Vinci Code' movie has gotten my attention. There are religious leaders who acknowledge they will see it and don't take it too seriously. I am struck, however, by the anger exhibited by many other religious leaders who are calling for boycotts and picketing various venues.

I wonder how adamant they really are or are they just taking the opportunity to shine the light on themselves, shore up the beliefs of their flocks, and maintain the 'mystery'?

Look at litigation reform, campaign reform, tax reform, immigration reform, SEC reforms and consider the value stakes the various parties have on both sides of any issue. More often than not they are more concerned about their personal loss of value than they are for the benefits their constituents might receive.

The Web 2.0 phenomenon (well the hype is more of a phenomenon right now than the actual application and use) could be thought of as a reform. Unfortunately, it is being usurped by the major tech players because business leaders, reluctant to lose their 'mystery' by unleashing open discourse in the enterprise, have not embraced the relatively inexpensive approach to adoption and will, instead, end up having it shoved down their throats by their 'trusted' tech vendors and implementation service providers.

Brilliant.

More KM and 'Big Firm' insight

Found this at KnowledgeBoard.com - it basically touches on topics I mentioned in BOTH the previous 2 posts (more compelling and eloquent than my post, BTW). They don't mention it directly, but wikis are implied (I think).

Lots of other complementary topics to what I'm writing about so .... you'll find KnowledgeBoard.com at my 'People With Good Info' list.

What's gonna happen to 'Big Firm'?

I spent a lot of time working in consulting firms – both the well-known ‘Big Firm’ variety and the boutique flavor. The common denominator was that the really successful ones were those that rode whatever technology wave or management ‘mandate du jour’ that was in vogue at the time. These firms could latch on to large system implementations or web enabling initiatives, implant armies of their billable minions, and suck revenue out of clients for years.

The consulting firms were very dependent on their relationships with the tech companies that developed the technology. The tech vendor firms typically had their own armies of developers paid in large part through lucrative maintenance contracts. Today’s tech giants are scrambling to establish their strategic positions in the coming Web 2.0 world, but where do the traditional ‘implementation and facilitation’ firms fit in?

I’ve not heard much about this arena lately and, in the face of Web 2.0 (not entirely defined yet, but basically that next phase of the internet that is driven by all the collaborative and engaging technologies coming to market of late), I wonder how these traditional consulting models are dealing with the impending reality of Open Source, static Sarbanes-Oxley projects, and market reluctance to implement big-dollar technologies.

Open Source has got to be a huge threat to 'Big Firm'. Essentially, open source is characterized masses of developers developing snippets of code (voluntarily!) that is reusable by anyone who can plug it in somewhere – and it’s free (much of it anyway) - awfully tough for the ‘Big Firm’ business model to get a foothold with that kind of model. Not to mention, open source developers are generally fiercely independent and old economy business models are anathema to them.

The enterprise and social collaboration market for Web 2.0 is huge. If not in total dollars, it is certainly several times larger than the ERP/CRM market was in terms of numbers of people who can utilize Web 2.0 technologies. Yet, I don’t see how traditional consulting firms will be able to differentiate themselves in that market. Wikis are almost universally open source technology, easily implemented, and magnitudes more viral and adoptable than traditional enterprise technologies.

Maybe I’ve just out of that loop for too long to know what’s going on, but I have to believe that the 'Big Firm' is nervous.