A simple little 'Year 2012' vision for today's Enterprises!

Last evening as the year 2011 was drawing to a close, I stood still witnessing the fireworks seamlessly blending into the vast ocean right in front of me. The artificially illuminated sky against the dark backdrop only added to the charm. In all of this perfection, I couldn't help but contemplate how great it would be if the components of today's enterprises i.e. people, process & technology, could be bound in an equally "seamless" manner.This is not to say that this binding in the current state isn't strong enough, it definitely is! Just that the adjective "seamless" doesn't quite fit in naturally as part of its description. 

Seam plays a critical role in deviation, be it on a cricket
ground or in the enterprise space

Let me pick up a simple analogy from the game of cricket to describe this better. In cricket, bowlers use the very prominent "seam" of the ball to get it swinging and behaving in a deceptive manner by utilizing air friction against it, thereby disrupting the ball's natural trajectory in the air. While this is a great weapon in the cricketing sense, we really do not want swinging and seaming organizations, do we? Instead organizations wish to be as independently stable as possible with no attached internal disruptive elements, so as to focus all their attention on tackling external disruptions (competition, economic hurdles and other ecosystem disturbances). For this to happen, its of paramount importance that we eliminate the "ever prominent seam" altogether. Question is what exactly is this organizational seam and how successful have we been so far in ensuring "seamlessness"?

Lets get back to the "people, process, technology" notion. Despite all the advances in enterprise technology, executing day to day processes in organizations is still a cumbersome act. Even simple non-core activities like expense reporting leave a lot to be desired on the efficiency front. The situation only gets worse when one thinks of the "unfriendly" information systems at the workplace put in place to execute these processes. How many of us care for those workplace desktops / systems / software and enjoy using them as much as we enjoy our iPods, iPads, iMacs or for that matter even the simple Blackberry RSS Apps? How many of us feel like admiring those dull and dead looking enterprise software screens as much as we admire the fluid Web 2.0  portals which are intuitive to the T? How many of us wish to be stuck on one seat, unable to move till the time we are done with our work?

Probably, the immediate counter-question would be, "Isn't this the way its supposed to be? Ain't workplaces and the constituent information systems supposed to promote a sense of seriousness?" That's the whole point! What could be a bigger anomaly for the human civilization than the fact that work and personal life are still considered two completely disjoint aspects of life? While all of us want life to be fun, most workplaces systems and processes are still..well "lifeless". 

You might again want to counter-attack by stating, "Why is this relevant in the first place?" Well, if companies can go through multiple design and functional iterations in order to come up with that perfect consumer product which ensures a flawless "user experience", why can't they do the same for their workforce who are the rightful "consumers of the workplace"? Remember the seamless ball analogy? We want seamless organizations, which as a matter of fact would come into shape only if employees: (1) Enjoy their work and workplace (2) Relish the ease with which they are able to make the most out of their efforts (3) Perform their work without procedural distraction so as to maximize focus on the core activities. All of this would immediately lead to increase in productivity, cost savings owing to process efficiencies with an eventual transition to the bottom line. What more, its a well known fact that a relaxed and focussed mind at work is more likely to increase the topline through aspects like innovation than otherwise. Traditional HR facts isn't it, and yet casually ignored!

If we were to dig deeper, we would realize that this is actually a much bigger problem. In the "People, Process & Technology" scheme of things, this points to the lack of inadequate integration of the "Technology" and "People" elements in the enterprise space and this is where the "seam" becomes evident. For long organizations have incorporated IT systems with a one dimensional mindset "execution of processes", ignoring everything else. However, given the rate at the which today's workers (read "workplace consumers") are increasingly getting habituated to consumer entities like smartphones and social media and wanting to bring them to the workplace (better known as "Consumerization of IT"), aspects like "user experience with workplace systems" can no longer be ignored. To add to it the millennial mindset of today's workforce would only lead to excessive frustration if not allowed to function in their own convenient way. 

User Experience & Worker preferences
need to be the focal point of Enterprise IT

This leads us to the all important question, "what is the secret sauce for setting up a seamless organization given the current scenario?" Well, there is no secret sauce, its all out in the open, "Adoption of the consumerism mindset for the workplace by smart integration of disruptive consumer driven concepts like mobility, social computing and cloud within the enterprise space". So is this the vision I had set forth to present for 2012? No way! Given the current organizational and technology maturity levels, getting close to even reasonable utilization of the power of these concepts could take no less than a couple of years. My vision for 2012 is a tiny but very powerful component of this larger picture: "Unrelenting focus on 'user experience' and 'worker preferences' when designing the enterprise information systems". In short, organizations need to allot much more priority to the "people" element when planning future information systems. If they make this a norm, the following years could see a lot more progress on the maturity front of new age Enterprise IT as well as much quicker rise of the CIO department from being a mere cost center to an innovation churning machine.

Here's the good part! The benefits of this specific focus go way beyond just making work an enjoyably productive activity, tangible examples of which have been presented to some extent in the recent posts with the more detailed representations tagged for the forthcoming ones. So, keep on watching this space for more! Here's wishing you all a PHENOMENAL 2012 and needless to say, prospective "seamless" organizations.

What's so disruptive about new age Enterprise IT?

With the enterprise IT space going through a major transformation owing to the emergence of concepts like Mobility, Social Media & Cloud, every passing day leads to the emergence of a new jargon meant to describe the changing paradigm and its constituent elements. Terms like ‘Consumerization of IT’, ‘Enterprise 2.0’, ‘Web 3.0’ are now common place. While each of these new terminologies has a strong exploration base, their casual flaunting ends up demeaning their real sense every now and then.

One term which probably leads the chart these days is ‘disruptive technology’. If we were to actually go back to the origin of this term, it takes us back to the year 1995 when a Harvard Professor by the name of Clayton Christensen first used it to describe a ‘new technology which had the potential to successfully displace an existing one’. In those days, it was applicable to something like a CD drive replacing a floppy drive. True to its inherent meaning, the displacement indeed happened. Over the years, the same turned true for the iPod like music player, digital camera and USB to name a few. The trend continues but the horizon has broadened beyond just the technology to the impact this has on the entire ecosystem (read business &society)

Probably Christensen saw hints of this happening in the future in a big way and replaced the term ‘disruptive technology’ with ‘disruptive innovation’ in his book “The Innovator’s solution” (sequel to the popular “The Innovator’s Dilemma”). However as it turns out, there’s a huge gray area between the two terms. While ‘disruptive technology’ is quite restrictive and specific in nature, ‘disruptive innovation’ expands the scope in a humongous manner taking it beyond the ecosystem itself. Fortunately in the current enterprise context, the first word in each of the two terms overpowers the second one in all possible ways and thus for the sake of simplicity, I wish to use the term ‘disruption’ and its adjective form ‘disruptive’ in this post to steer clear of the ambiguity.

Why emerging enterprise IT scenario is ‘not’ disruptive in the ‘traditional sense’!

Off-late there has been a lot of debate around the premise on which emerging enterprise solutions based on mobility, cloud & social are being labeled ‘disruptive’.  Analysts, thought leaders and consultants have tried to come up with their own versions but the picture remains blurred. By the way, is it really important to find the right premise around the usage of the term ‘disruptive’ in this context? Absolutely! What if someone replaced ‘marketing’ with ‘selling’ or for that matter what if we used ‘supply chain management’ to describe ‘operations management’? That’s how critical the word ‘disruptive’ is for technology! Incorrect usage could severely restrict the thought process which eventually leads to the creation of enterprise solutions based on these new concepts. So here are my two cents on the grounds of disruption in new age Enterprise IT. This is my personal non-biased view of the paradigm based on my professional experience as well as personal usage (more on this in another post) of these technologies, so please feel free to agree/disagree/vilify/promote the thought.

To begin with, let’s go back to Christensen’s first definition of ‘disruptive technology’ which describes a technology as disruptive if it ‘displaces’ an existent technology. As it turns out, this definition is still the industry benchmark for grading a new discovery/invention and is most commonly used to describe the combo of mobility, social & cloud Here’s why this is out-rightly inappropriate.

•  Are mobile phones and tablets in any which way replacing laptops and desktops? – In some cases yes but no way in entirety. There is still a long way to go before we could create power-packed presentations and do hardcore excel based number crunching without a keyboard and mouse and this is just a first level example. Instead, iPads and iPhones extend involvement with a business process by taking it to ways and means not feasible with a laptop/desktop.
•      Is Social Media displacing physical social environment in a business setting? – No way! We would still need to conduct meetings in a physical environment and have face to face interactions with our colleagues and partners to do business in an effective manner. We would still need a salesperson to sell products and services. Instead, similar to mobility, social media extends the scope of interaction with a social touch, beyond conventional hours and irrespective of geographical co-ordinates. More importantly it tries to nullify the conventional 6 degrees of separation.
•       Is the Cloud replacing physical infrastructure and ensuring ‘no dependency’ on devices for every possible scenario? – Again, absolutely not and I will leave the reasoning to you.

In short, none of the new age concepts are entirely displacing what we already have in place. Instead they are extending the scope of existent processes to add never-before imagined flexibility, agility, leanness and speed. This invalidates the very definition of ‘disruptive technology’. Of course there are a few cases where something like mobile devices are replacing paper-based processes but that’s just a segment of a business process, not the entire value chain.

What exactly is disruptive about the emerging enterprise IT scenario?

Here’s the real deal. While the traditional sense of disruption does not work in the scenario being explored here, the disruption actually goes way beyond the norm and transforms the entire ecosystem itself and that is HUGE. It is this disruption which is shaking up things and forcing companies to look at IT from a completely different viewpoint. Here’s how.

Enterprise IT has always been viewed as a dull and boring box where technologies in the form of applications are used just because they have to be used to execute certain business processes. It doesn’t matter whether the user likes what (s)he is using, it’s a mandate. Most of the IT that an employee is exposed to at the workplace is of no use the moment (s)he steps out of the office premises and this stands true both for the hardware and the software. In short, the world created by Enterprise IT within an office complex is completely different from what a worker experiences in his personal space or at home.

However, this as we see it has now started moving to the past. Here’s the brand new picture. A worker is  no more a worker, (s)he is a now a ‘rightful consumer’ (yes even at the workplace). Just the way a business keeps its consumers’ needs, preferences and requirements in mind before conceptualizing a product/service, companies would now need to keep the consumer’s (worker) interests at the forefront before rolling out their working environment in the form of Enterprise IT. 

So why this sudden paradigm shift? Well, there probably could not be a better analogy to this than the “boiling point” syndrome. Till very recently corporations could afford to operate in a silo, delinked from their workforce’s preferences, however these preferences were slowly heating up. The mass availability and adoption of mobile phones and social media by the same workforce meant that the temperature suddenly started rising. However, something that is now speeding up things and proving to be a catalyst of sorts is the “millennial mindset”. The Gen Y workers are much more upfront in expressing their opinions and getting things done their own way and this tendency is now starting to show up in a big way. They wish to work on their personally preferred devices (BYOD phenomena), don’t think twice before utilizing social media for reaching out to people for work related issues (just an example) and wish to be a super-flexible knowledge nodes who wish to execute work irrespective of their geographical co-ordinates and movement.

Owing to all of this, for the first time in the history of Enterprise IT, consumer behavior and user experience is starting to override all traditional parameters, a ‘disruption’ which is too huge for an organization’s comfort. So is this a deadly friction in the making? Well, here’s the encouraging news. The other end of the spectrum i.e. the all important CIO is actually viewing this shift of paradigm as an opportunity to make the organization more efficient, agile and effective. Concepts like enterprise mobility, cloud and social media can enable organizations to improve productivity, eliminate inefficiencies, cut down costs & wastage, enhance customer engagement and dare I say, innovate! Ponder over the previous statement once again!!

However, coming back to the aspect of disruption, while the first look paints a rosy picture, the implementation aspect i.e. getting the whole setup in working order, is a major challenge. It requires a strong understanding of aspects like consumerism, behavioral science leading to experiential marketing, none of which is ideally a CIOs core competency. However, given that globalization was never at a higher magnitude than now, organizations are reaching out to the apt entities to help them wade through the maze and discover the treasure trove.

No matter where all of this leads to, Enterprise IT would no longer be the same again and rightly so. For the first time ever, the ‘human element’ could occupy the top slot when an organization thinks about how it’s using technology, a disruption strong enough to reach irrecoverable limits.