For those interested in grown up business intelligence, Andy Hayler has a terrific blog on the topic. I first met Andy when he ran Kalista, a specialised data warehouse company. He is super smart. The other day Andy pointed to an Information Week discussion about information overload. That in turn was based upon an Accenture report (sorry, no link available) which talks about the consequences of accessing the right information. According to Information Week:
IT managers say information-overload affects their jobs in a number of ways. Forty-two percent complain they are bombarded by too much information; 44% complain other departments in their companies are not forthcoming with data; 39% say they can’t figure out which information is current; 38% say they need to weed out duplicate information; and 21% say they don’t understand the value of the information they do receive.
What a mess? It’s an issue to which I can relate because try as I might, much of the information I really want is still hard to find. And that’s coming from someone who spends all day searching for stories. Andy’s incisive commentary argues:
The issue is not only that technologies are insufficiently intuitive. In my experience there are a number of factors that come into play:
- no culture of sharing information
- inconsistent data definitions
- poor data quality
- inability to locate appropriate data sources
- insufficient understanding of how to use BI tools effectively.The one that interests me is ‘no culture’ because I believe the technology issues go away. But that’s for another day. Andy says:
If you set out to produce a useful new report in some area and succeed in doing so, what incentive is there for you to make this easily shared around the company, and to help others find it? In most companies this would be pure altruism, and so people just keep the information on their hard disk, and indeed may gain kudos from the “information is power” syndrome. Overcoming such cultural barriers is hard, and few companies succeed.
This worries me. I find it hard to believe that in the current world we occupy, that such Soviet style thinking persists to such an extent. It simply doesn’t make sense. I know as a profession we tend to believe that what we ‘know’ has an intrinsic value. Well, yes, in an academic sense, but knowledge is of no value unless it has context. Like the conversation I had with Julie Le of Zoobug where we talked about the value of certain services. My understanding of the area only takes on value when it is shared. As I explained to Julie, I can and do give a way a lot of information and I find it pays off.
It's the altruism bit that caught my attention here. Del.icio.us gets around the "altruism problem" by making selfish actions -- tagging sites for easy future retrieval -- a public good. It's not unlike captialism:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
How then can we using blogging and Web 2.0 technologies to provide an individual benefit that will in turn lead a social/business benefit? The first quoted paragraph from Business Week gives a clue: do save employee's time; don't introduce new tasks; make everything fast (1 second turn arounds would be ideal); put simplicity in the interface; put complexity in the code; replace multiple tasks with a single one.
Once that's done, there's little need to talk about making "cultural change", as it will make itself.