The Seamless Enterprise

I just read a great commentary by Cisco’s Mike Bergelson’s about how UC and Web 2.0 are merging.  I have always admired the high degree of awareness that Cisco employees have about collaboration technologies — and that all starts at the top.  Cisco Systems’ CEO John Chambers talks about collaboration more than any other Fortune 500 CEO that I know of.  He often cites Cisco’s “grueling” 45 day acquisition cycle of Scientific Atlanta versus their more-recent 8 day acquisition cycle of WebEx as a prime example of the kind of hyper-productivity that Bergelson refers to in his article.

But how many people see the future as well as Chambers and Bergelson?

As I talk to companies about technology futures, I often draw an analogy between the flow of electronic information and the flow of more tangible raw materials through a manufacturing business.  During the industrial revolution, companies took advantage of many new technologies to massively accelerate the push of raw materials through their plants.  The problem with that was that many failed to concurrently change enough of the underlying processes, resulting in even larger “work-in-process” inventories building up between the various stages of production.

For the first half of the 20th century, additional investments in automation created even more potential for excessive inventory.  It wasn’t until the late 20th century that most corporations started to get a better handle on their work-in-process inventory problems through the introduction of “just-in-time” manufacturing, which allowed materials to be pulled through the production process as opposed to pushed.

Over the past decade, I have witnessed a similar buildup of work-in-process due to technology advances – but now it is in the form of unopened, un-acted-upon and un-filed emails.  The dawn of the information era gave us myriad new tools to generate even more “memoranda” and send even more “carbon copies” through a now-electronic inter-departmental mail system.  Much like a century ago, we have merely been using the new technology to accelerate existing business communications processes without changing them at all.  Still to this day, every recipient of an email is expected to open an envelope, review its contents, decipher what action is required of them, and either dispose of the document or file it away for future reference.

I see collaboration technologies as the information technology equivalent of “just in time” manufacturing.  In the future, as opposed to employees pushing information to specific people via either email distributions or on specific web pages, employees will create information directly “in the cloud” with little concern for who needs to receive the information, where it should be stored or how it should be organized.  As information is pulled from the cloud or tagged by employees, collaboration technology will track the infinite number of relationships that start to emerge between information and people who require it.  All of this will make information so readily accessible, that older paradigms entirely dependent on pushing specific information to a specific audience will start to become obsolete.

In other words, collaboration is a just-in-time information paradigm, changing the process from push to pull.  As this happens, companies will start to track “work-in-process information” just as much as work-in-process inventories.  This paradigm shift will be hard to grasp initially because the hyper-productivity of collaboration is created by an invisible hand through a completely organic process – and it is almost impossible to understand it until you experience it firsthand.

For example, in the original Japanese JIT systems, “kanban” cards were used to signal when downstream manufacturing organizations needed more supply from upstream organizations – but with Web 2.0, while there is sometimes an overt pull mechanism (a query from the front lines for information), there is also a sixth-sense that people feel tugging at them to contribute knowledge, expertise and key learnings — even though they have no specific person that asked for that information.

I recall stories in the 1990’s about visionary CEOs who bought each of their senior executives a laptop to help them understand the Internet better.  I imagine it took differing amounts of time for each executive to have that “eureka” moment about how the Internet could create massive productivity gains somewhere in some part of their business.  So it will be with collaboration – and I agree with Bergelson that the required epiphany will be slow in coming for many large enterprises.  Not until innovating startups pave the way will large enterprises start to come on board.

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Tags: Add new tag, Cisco, collaboration, UC, WebEx

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.