Part 1 of 2
A famous experiment from the late 1800s represents an excellent example of the weaknesses of human perception. The “boiling frog” theory says that if you put a frog in a pot full of cold water and slowly heat it on a stove, the frog, if unmolested, will remain in the water until it boils to death. On the other hand, if you take the same frog and drop it into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out.
This story captures how human perception molds itself to gradual change. Events that affect our lives slowly and quietly often bring change without us being conscious of it. For example, when we look at a 10-year-old picture of a person we see daily, we often are stunned by the contrast. Two tectonic processes affect modern businesses, but few people examine them from an impact, risk and opportunity standpoint.
The first of these is the process of change itself. We have been taught since we were children that we live in a world of unprecedented progress. But have you stepped back and internalized the rate of that change and how much it has accelerated during your life or your business career? The fact is, in most modern societies the rate of progress and change is quietly, gradually, persistently increasing.
The second process affecting modern business is the transformation of how information is recorded and archived. We are in the midst of a multi-decade evolution in business information, which has always represented one of the soft assets for most businesses. Your customer list, your engineering documentation, your business strategy and your financial reports are examples of information assets businesses have used for the last several hundred years. But two vectors of information management have been changing for the last 30 years.
In 1977, almost all information assets of modern businesses were delivered in hardcopy print format. General ledgers were actually books. Customer Relations Management (CRM) was maintained in a notebook your sales representatives carried around. And your engineering drawings were literally drawings on vellum. In addition, information was costly to acquire and difficult to extract. Research was commissioned on a case-by-case basis and data was extracted manually by sharp-eyed analysts. Needless to say, we have come a long way from that world in 30 years.
Business information is now so ubiquitous, so efficient and accessible that the concept of an Information-Driven organization is being formed. In fact, I believe in 20 years, your business will have to demonstrate the characteristics of an information-driven organization or it will be unable to compete anywhere but in the most reclusive markets.
The characteristics of an information-driven organization are:
- All parameters of critical organization processes are instrumented and recorded
- All employees in the organization have job support tools that readily supply them with information they need to perform at the highest level of productivity
- Long-term trending and exogenous factors are captured to support operational data
- Key decision-makers in the organization have up-to-the-minute decision support tools fed from this worldwide data
In this information-driven organization, you and your workforce are supported by efficiently culled and precisely accurate information — whether you are running a university, a factory, a customer service center or a government agency. Though the standard of efficiency has risen around the globe, businesses that demonstrate leadership by embracing these models will reap the lion’s share of the benefits of this highly competitive vision.
Fortunately, this accelerating rate of change and the prevalence of organization information hold both opportunity and risk for business leaders. Read about these risks and what you can do about them in ProCurve’s Adaptive Networks vision, or wait for next month’s edition of Network Pro News.
Part 2: "The power and challenge of being information-driven"
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