Benefitting from Portal and Web 2.0 Technologies

We have to have clear and common-sense answers to following set of questions: (I am sure you would have come across these from Goldratt's "Necessary but not sufficient" business novel)

1. What is the power of the technology?
   
2. What is the limitation that the technology helps in diminishing?
   
3. What are the business rules that organizations have formed to function 'with the limitation'?
   
4. What are the new business rules that need to be formed so that the power of the technology can be directly applied to diminish the limitation?
   
5. How to cause the change from old ways of doing things to new ways of doing things?
   

The technology vendors focus on selling the 'Power' of the technology but the business users need to look at the same from the context of how this power helps them achieve their Goal of 'making more money now as well as in future'

The examples of MRP and ERP given by Goldratt could help us in thinking through.

	Question	MRP	ERP	Portal / Web2.0
	What is the power of the technology?	Completing dependent calculations in a jiffy	Store and retrieve enormous amount of data quickly	Display and organize data and information on demand Power to individual to have a say
	What is the limitation that the technology helps in diminishing?	Inability to create and modify the shop-floor production schedule as frequently as possible as manually preparing the schedule was very laborious	Inability to guide managers and workers to take 'local decisions' based on a global picture.	Individuals have to depend on their own limited visibility of the system, selective memory clouded by prejudices and limited experience to arrive at the view on health of the overall system, role played by different players and the next best action for the self interest and interest of the overall system.
	What are the business rules that organizations have formed to function 'with the limitation'?	Create the schedule on a monthly basis.	Create common-sense business rules for local optima. E.g. optimum batch size, inventory re-order levels, evaluate the machine and shop-floor worker by utilization / efficiency, product costing as a basis for deciding a sale etc, in short Cost Accounting based measures	Promote specialization in job roles; give weightage to 'marquee qualification', 'experience' and 'eloquent references' for deciding on awarding posts of importance in the organization. Promote hierarchical organization with power to decide, reward and punish concentrated in the hands of few. Promote competition amongst organizations even when they are part of the same value chain.
	What are the new business rules that need to be formed so that the power of the technology can be directly applied to diminish the limitation?	Create the schedule on a daily or bi-weekly basis.	Throughput accounting and basing local decisions on the primary criteria of impact on the system throughput	One thing is very clear; this will lead to SIMPLE ORGANISATIONs. To my mind it will be on the lines of Toyota Productions System for information processing especially from the Goals and Long Term Philosophy point of view.
	How to cause the change from old ways of doing things to new ways of doing things?	Point out the ridiculousness of not utilizing the power.	Educating everyone concerned on systems thinking with effect-cause-effect mode, changing the measurement system, creating incentives which promote increasing throughput rather than reducing cost.	Organisations will not on their own change to the new ways of doing things. It will be through a process of survival of the fittest that the organizations who adopt this will survive in the long run while the others who sit on the fence or adopt this half heartedly will be forced to close down as we are witnessing in the Automotive Crisis in the US

Technology support for building SIMPLE organisational tools

If the organisational leadership has the will, the technology available today can be molded into solutions that would help the frontline staff to act with agility in an environment of information overload and quick decision making requirements.

Simplicity is the new Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better and Faster – Bill Jensen (Simplicity)

An important guiding principle for organizations and people – Whoever is faster at changing rules will win more often.

It is possible when organization empowers its people to do less of what doesn’t matter and more of what does or in other words Working Smarter in a World of Infinite Choices. This means we have to start changing two habits that create work complexity and confusion:

1. We need to use time differently by changing how we organize and share what we know – how we create meaning and make sense of things.

2. We need to work backwards from what people need to work smarter. Most everyone is a lot smarter than we are letting them be.

The technological solutions provided by Portals, Enterprise Content Management, Groupware, Business Process Management in conjunction with User Experience Management (UXM) practice promise to provide a platform for building SIMPLE, user friendly and empowering solutions.

The above combination of practices are the ones which can play very important role in helping organizations to become SIMPLE. Following is a high level elaboration of this assertion:

1. Faster at changing rules more often – Business Processes enabled with state of the art BPM (Business Process Management) and BRE (Business Rules Engine) tools can empower the users to define, visualise, simulate, monitor and control business processes without overdependence on detailed coding skills.

2. Do less of what doesn’t matter and more of what matters – Workplace and Portals personalized to the role of the person removing all the clutter of information and choices. BPM and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) managing the complexities arising out of investment in different legacy applications

3. How we organize and share what we know – Taxonomy of the knowledge and content, collaboration tools

4. How we create meaning and sense of things – Enterprise Search, Information Access and Discovery tools which index and present the structured and unstructured information from across the information silos ON DEMAND.

5. Work backwards from what people need – Usability and User Experience Management (UXM) practices for designing the interfaces to ease off the presssure on the users

We have the ingredients for the solution but each organization will have unique challenges. Hence, how these components come together to meet the needs would have to be designed imaginatively and creatively.