| IT (and KM) professionals need to refocus on some simple, novel, inexpensive technology applications that could dramatically enhance individual employee effectiveness, instead of trying to achieve unattainable organization-wide improvements with ever-shrinking budgets.
 The fallout over HBR’s May, 2003 article IT Doesn’t Matter was short-lived in the literature, but the continued disgruntlement of business managers with the return on corporate IT investment continues, and the recession for technology companies, and especially for IT employees, is far from over.
Part of the reason for this, I think, is the lack of understanding by business managers of what has been happening in the last few years in IT, and what its potential new applications are. Business managers still think of IT in traditional terms and traditional applications: accounting, sales, and HR. This ignorance is mutual: Most people in IT don’t really understand the evolving needs, priorities, and worldview of business managers either, or what keeps them awake at night. To make matters worse, in most organizations neither group really understands the needs of front-line employees. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy with IT. The ‘problem’ with IT is that it is bound, by tradition, job description and resource availability, to continue to do three things that perpetuate the ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’ reputation:
At the same time IT is grappling with these intractable problems, a relatively new discipline, Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged that has gotten itself into trouble by raising expectations that it could do three things (all of which were once expected of IT as well):
Few if any organizations have succeeded in doing any of these things in any systematic or sustainable manner. Most organizations have realized that the nature of most work that hasn’t already been automated is unique, and that there are no ’standard’ business processes left. This was the same reason that Business Process Re-engineering ultimately failed. If every work activity is unique, every decision unique, every learning requirement and learning situation unique, no ’system’ is going to make it otherwise, or better. These ‘value propositions’ for KM are, at least at the organizational level, simply unachievable. Some KM pioneers (many of whom I’ve worked with over the past two or three years) are beginning to realize that the real opportunity for both KM and IT in the 21st century requires a refocus of energy away from organization-wide objectives entirely, and towards achieving the objective that Peter Drucker described as the number one business challenge in his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century: Improving the personal effectiveness of each individual front-line worker in doing his or her unique and increasingly complex job. Professor Jim McGee has articulated this realization brilliantly in describing the challenges of KM:
These KM pioneers have had to completely re-think the function of infrastructure in organizations, and abandon ’systematic’ organizational thinking to reach this realization. For several reasons, they’re not getting much traction:
But there is a Holy Grail at the end of this thought process, one which could improve the careers and reputation of both IT and KM, if the two groups are prepared to work together, and with senior management and ‘front line’ leaders, to identify, articulate and design novel, inexpensive, and surprisingly simple new ‘TechKnowledgy’ applications that meet Drucker’s ‘Improve Individual Effectiveness’ challenge (the one in bold above). Here are four examples of such applications that could have enormous business impact:
There are undoubtedly many other such technologies that could be developed and implemented quickly, inexpensively and powerfully by IT and KM teams working together — these four are just examples off the top of my head. They apply to every type and size of organization, since they are personal — they help individuals work better, rather than trying to improve whole business units or organizations. How could further examples of such technologies be identified, and each tool properly spec’d out to meet employee needs? Here are some Management Consulting 101 techniques that could be used:
None of this is rocket science. It’s not being done today simply because IT is unaware of the need and distracted from the opportunity, senior management is unaware of the possibilities, and everyone is unaware of the problems of ‘real’ users on the front line. With the right team, and a dash of courage and vision, everyone could win: beleaguered IT and KM staff, disgruntled senior management, and frustrated front-line employees. |
September 30, 2003
WHAT GOOD IS IT?
September 29, 2003
HOW HARD IT IS TO BE DIFFERENT
 We are social animals. It is our nature to want to belong. It is Darwinian: We learn from each other and we survive by working in teams. We help each other out. Our community, our tribe, adopts us, accepts us, and teaches us what we need to know. Our very existence is in many ways indistinguishable from that of the groups we belong to. For most of humanity, life has enduring meaning only with others of our own kind.
In light of that incredible imperative — physical, social, emotional, intellectual, moral, rational, instinctive — to belong, it is amazing that we are different from each other at all. What reason is there to be different? Especially since, as ee cummings tells us, it’s so much easier to be the same?: to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting Similar arguments have been made, by Daniel Quinn and others, that a single human ‘taker’ culture with a remarkably, perhaps dangerously, homogeneous value and belief system began to squeeze out all other human cultures about thirty centuries ago, and is now virtually ubiquitous on Earth. Some recent scientific studies have suggested that evolution on Earth has largely ground to a halt, a consequence of the massive loss of biodiversity as our monolithic species and culture squeezes out all other life forms on the planet, as medical advances allow the weak-gened to proliferate as well as the strong, and as continued intermixing narrows the diversity of the human gene pool. We are in fact both ‘punier and smaller-brained‘ than our Cro-Magnon ancestors, for reasons not well known. Perhaps our culture and homogeneity have lowered the barriers to human survival, or perhaps our ancestors were just too strong and too smart for their own good. So with all of these forces working to make us more the same, what is it that drives us to be different? What is it that has made individuality, individual rights, personal freedoms, and diversity not only acceptable but admirable, desirable, even worth dying for? Why are Roddenberry’s Borg Collective the ultimate alien bad guys and not the model of human perfection? Despite all our chemical and social programming we are not all alike, and with the possible exception of American neocons (I’m being sarcastic) we don’t want everyone to be and think alike. Is this Darwinian as well? Is the need for incessant evolution, the constant trying out of minor (and sometimes major) differences in the makeup of species to see if the survival result is a little better, even more ingrained in humans, and in fact in all life, than the need to belong and conform? I think our reverence for individuality and ‘different-ness’ can be explained in a single Darwinian word: competition. We compete with other species, and with others of our own species, by using our competitive advantages. These competitive differences determine our success at choosing a mate and our role and rank in our community. If all ganders in a flock were identical, the process by which the geese selected their mates would be chaotic, and the process of determining the rank in the migration pattern would be anarchic. We celebrate our differences because they determine our life partners and our roles, what we do in our communities, and, as I’ve said before, what we do defines who we are. So all of life is a continuous tension between the imperative to belong, to conform, and the imperative to be different. Too far in one direction and we’re a nondescript drone, a non-breeder. Too far in the other and we’re a lone wolf, an outcast. Ultimately, however, we are not much different from each other. I believe humanity would be more resilient, smarter, and perhaps living a utopian existence if there were much more diversity of human cultures, values, beliefs and behaviours than there is in the brave new world of 21st century Earth. And that raises yet another question, one that is perhaps more important than the question of why we tolerate and even celebrate difference between individuals. And that question is: What can we do to encourage even more difference, more diversity, more distinctions that could re-jump-start the process of evolution and perhaps at the same time save us from pandemics like AIDS (which thrive on our homogeneity) by increasing our species’ genetic resilience? The book I’m now writing, or which more accurately is writing itself, is a future utopia with a much reduced human population and an absence of physical suffering and deprivation, achieved by simply re-channeling human energy and ingenuity from trying to sustain unlimited growth to trying to optimize well-being of all life on the planet at an eminently sustainable level. What is interesting is that this utopian world also produces rapidly increasing human diversity, as a byproduct of (i) a radically decentralized politic and economy, and (ii) the freeing up of time from the struggle to survive, allowing serendipitous, highly focused human activities towards new scientific and artistic goals that were previously unimaginable (or at least unimagined). When I was younger, I was a great believer in centralization. One world government, I was sure, would lead to global peace and prosperity and quick solutions to global problems. It seemed to me to be more efficient, to allow greater interchange of different cultures and hence to produce pragmatic, innovative solutions that would probably not occur to more parochial local authorities. The problem, as I’ve learned since, is that centralization just doesn’t work. What it accomplishes is to isolate decision-makers from both the source of the issues and problems their decisions are about, and the impact of those decisions. Any efficiency achieved by reducing functional duplication is more than offset by the cost of insensitive, undifferentiated and ill-informed decisions and actions that the isolated central authority takes. Despite examples to the contrary (the DMV and megalomanic condominium councils come to mind) I now believe that governance of communities, nations and corporations is best when it is as decentralized as humanly possible, where the people making the decisions are personally affected by them and face to face with others affected by them. My novel is leading me to believe that decentralized organizations are also likely to be more diverse, in fact astonishingly so. You’ve seen some of the isolated New Guinea tribes on National Geographic. You’ve seen the strange proclivities of inner city subcultures. Be prepared for some surprisingly unusual characters, events and innovations in The World That Could Be. This book is turning out to be a lot more fun than I’d expected, and an amazing mental exercise. (Artwork above: Hummingbird Muses by Saskatoon artist Jonathon Earl Bowser) |
September 28, 2003
BEST OF SALON BLOGS THIS WEEK
 Here are my personal favourite articles from the very talented writers of Salon Blogs in the past week. The topics are mostly political, and the authors of these posts are, for some reason, almost all female.
Different Strings‘ Kriselda is doing wonderful, thorough research on the potentially dynamite story that someone (possibly Karl Rove) deliberately blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame as revenge for her husband’s revelation that the Niger arms-to-Iraq story in Bush’s SOTU address was bogus and the Administration knew it. Part One is here, Part Two is here. Rob Salkowitz at Emphasis Added is also all over this story, and elaborates on Kriselda’s report here. Stay tuned, this could be huge. Fiona at Spirited Digressions has a remarkable rant entitled A World of Lies. She’s trying to understand the minds of working-class Republicans. She asks some very important questions, and suggests some hopeful answers. Vivion at Iraq Democracy Watch has been analyzing the attempted privatization of the Iraq economy and its impact on the industry that is Iraq’s major employer — no, it’s not oil, it’s agriculture. She explains the complete unreasonableness of a headlong rush to end agricultural subsidies and open up agriculture to large-scale foreign-owned operations. Part One is here, Part Two is here. More to come. Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages poignantly summarizes John Pilger’s Breaking the Silence program on ITV in the UK, about the chaos and devastation wracking Afghanistan, the West’s betrayal of that country and the rest of the Middle East, and the lies of Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice. Rayne describes A Random Saturday, and One of Those Days, each with some very sharp and moving observations about life. And World O’Crap presents a hilarious deconstruction of Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Condi Rice. And congratulations to two Salon bloggers for well-deserved success: Julie at Julie/Julia has a book deal based on her blogged ‘project’ of cooking Julia Child recipes, and Claire at Life in LA has been listed by the Sydney Morning Herald as one of the world’s best blogs. For other excellent posts from Salon and elsewhere in the blogosphere check out the new edition of Virtual Occoquan tomorrow (Monday). |
September 26, 2003
ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE: THE BUSH LEGACY
 Sometimes, an article is so well written that it’s pointless to try to summarize it. This week’s lead in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town is one such article. Writer Elizabeth Kolbert succinctly captures the extent, the cynicism, and the atrocity of George Bush’s war on the environment in six short paragraphs. Read it here before it disappears into the PPV archives, buy a subscription, and/or read it below._____________________________________________________________ Each year, the Detroit Edison plant in Monroe, Michigan, burns roughly eight million tons of coal. That is enough to generate electricity for three million homes and also to make the plant one of the nationís most extravagant polluters. In 2001, the last year for which complete data are available, Monroeís smokestacks emitted, among other things: more than a hundred thousand tons of sulfur dioxide (the principal pollutant in acid rain), nearly forty-six thousand tons of nitrous oxide (the chief ingredient of smog), and seventeen and a half million tons of carbon dioxide (the major culprit in global warming). Widely accepted statistical models project that the plant will cause some three hundred premature deaths annually, from ailments like lung disease and stroke. All of which makes President Bushís visit to Monroe last week to tout his latest air-quality initiatives either horribly ill-advised or, if you prefer, perversely appropriate. Even in the catalogue of depredations that is the Bush Administrationís environmental recordóa list that includes the decision to reclassify various forms of mining waste as ìfillî so that it can be dumped in valleys and streams; the attempt to open up millions of acres of public lands (including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) for oil exploration; and the so-called Healthy Forests initiative, whose major beneficiary is the logging industryóthe Presidentís assault on the Clean Air Act stands out. When Congress approved the act, back in 1970, its goal was explicitly to prevent plants like Detroit Edisonís from being built. Because of the difficultyóthe expense, reallyóof retrofitting existing plants, Congress granted them an exemption but some years later stipulated that if changes were made that went beyond ìroutine maintenanceî the plants would have to be equipped with up-to-date pollution controls. In resisting this requirement, known as ìnew source review,î or N.S.R., plant operators have over the years tried to define as ìroutine maintenanceî projects that were essentially rebuilding efforts. (In one spectacular example, the Tennessee Valley Authority labelled as ìroutine maintenanceî a project that required constructing an entire miniature monorail system.) Then, last New Yearís Eve, the Bush Administration proposed new rules that broadened the definition of ìroutine maintenanceî to allow operators to make, in effect, any changes they want to their plants without installing new pollution controls. These rules were finalized just before Labor Day weekend, and, not coincidentally, before Governor Mike Leavitt, of Utah, the Presidentís nominee to be the next E.P.A. administrator, was forced to take a position on them. (At an E.P.A. hearing in Salt Lake City this past spring, Utahís air-quality director labelled the Administrationís plans for N.S.R. ìa disastrous approach to managing air quality,î ìa step backward,î and a ìtrain wreck.î) According to environmentalists, the new N.S.R. regulations would let the Monroe plant emit about forty thousand additional tons of sulfur dioxide a year. Critics argue that the new rules represent yet another payback from the Administration to a friendly industryóthe Times called them a ìgiveaway to Mr. Bushís corporate allies.î Certainly the paper trail is suggestive. In March, 2001, an official of the Southern Company, the owner of twenty-three coal-fired power plants, a defendant in several lawsuits that the Clinton Administration brought under the Clean Air Act, and a major Republican donor, wrote to Vice-President Cheneyís energy task force urging ìreformî of the N.S.R. regulations. Precisely such a ìreformî effort was recommended in the task forceís final report, and the changes made to the regulations last month can be considered its fruits. (The Southern Company memo was made public thanks to prolonged litigation by the Natural Resources Defense Council.) What the new N.S.R. rules finally reflect, though, even beyond undue corporate influence, is the Bush Administrationís casual relationship to cause and effect. You can say that your three-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar tax cut is aimed at the middle class, but when the top two-tenths of a per cent of the population stands to gain more than the bottom seventy per cent itís not the middle class thatís going to benefit. Similarly, you can claim that tax cuts pay for themselves, but, four hundred and eighty billion dollarsí worth of red ink later, there is, it would seem, something off about the calculation. And you can argue that dismantling pollution laws will produce cleaner air, but the fish in acidified lakes know (if thatís the right word) different. The companion piece to the new N.S.R. regulations is a package of bills that the President callsóin the Orwellian spirit of Healthy Forestsóhis Clear Skies initiative. The Administration likes to assert that the initiative, if approved, would reduce power-plant emissions by seventy per cent by the year 2018. In fact, the initiative weakens several laws that are already on the books, and that would reduce the same pollutants by a greater amount in a shorter period of time. Last week, by way of defending the new N.S.R. regulations, Bush invoked the progress that has been made since the Clean Air Act was passed. ìOur economy has grown one hundred and sixty-four per cent in three decades,î he said. ìThatís pretty good growth. And yet, according to a report that the E.P.A. is releasing today, air pollution from six major pollutants is down by forty-eight per cent during that period of time.î Citing the success of the Clean Air Act in order to justify gutting it makes, on the face of it, no sense whatsoever; if thereís any lesson here, itís that tough pollution standards work, and that they are perfectly consistent with a robust economy. But the weakness of the Presidentís arguments only makes the broader message of his trip to Monroe that much plainer: nothing is going to stand in the way of the Administrationís environmental ‘program’, least of all logic. ó Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker, September 29, 2003) |
September 25, 2003
WHEN THE BOSS IS A BULLY
 One of the submissions in the latest Virtual Occoquan was an article by a non-blogger, D.G. Johnston, on dealing with bosses who bully their staff. This is an important and rarely-discussed topic and Johnston deals with it very powerfully, and suggests some solutions. Johnston argues that abusive behaviour at work is really no different from abusive behaviour in the home, and we all know how soul-destroying that can be..
Here is a teaser from the article for those that missed it, with a link to the full article. Please read it — it may open your eyes to why many employees dread the start of every working day, and the impact this can have on their, and their families’ whole lives. If you have comments, post them below or e-mail me and I’ll make sure they get to the author.
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September 24, 2003
AND THE WORLD CHARGES AHEAD, BLITHELY IGNORANT
 Two bad new stories on the environment yesterday, one of which only appeared in the Canadian media, the other only in the American media, so the irony of the two stories appearing the same day was lost on everyone.
In the first story, scientists report that the Ward Hunt ice shelf, the largest and most Northerly in Canada, has broken apart for the first time in thousands of years. Researchers, who are writing a detailed report on the implications of the collapse, warn that it is is a sign “the climate in the area is changing too quickly”. The collapse drained a large freshwater lake and, along with it, cold-tolerant freshwater marine communities scientists had been studying to understand how life survived the ice ages. Climate change had already been blamed for the collapse of the ice shelves in the Western Antarctic. Only 2.5% of Earth’s water is fresh (non-saline) and 70% of that is in the Arctic and Antarctic. |
In the second story, the Republican Party is September 23, 2003
BROWNFIELD DEVELOPMENT VS. URBAN SPRAWL
 Brownfield Development is the restoration of abandoned, underutilized and often polluted land. It’s a messy business. Some of the land contains large, sprawling, poorly maintained and gutted buildings. Often the costs of dismantling the existing structures outweigh the cost of building in new, suburban ‘greenfield’ locations. Many brownfield sites are abandoned because it would cost more to clean them up than they would command in the market, so they’re just written off and left vacant. Many are polluted, with the underlying soil contaminated by industrial development from another era, hugely expensive to remediate. Often, the sites are owned by numbered companies that are bankrupt or wound up, and subject to liens for back taxes and other unpaid debts that a new owner would have to deal with.
The paradox is that, while these centrally located sites sit neglected and unused, urban sprawl consumes more and more agricultural land, parkland and green space, and brings with it traffic congestion, highway construction and pollution as cars navigate long distances past these very brownfield sites to the centres of commerce. A recent study of Toronto’s brownfield sites concluded that by redeveloping them properly, Toronto could add a million people and the businesses and stores to employ and serve them, without the need to touch any of the Oak Ridges Moraine lands and the adjacent greenbelt around the city for at least a generation. And one councillor says that 40% of Buffalo’s downtown area is brownfields. Ironically, a new New York State law designed to force cleanup of brownfields will actually have the opposite effect in upstate New York, since in those areas, unlike The Big Apple, the cost of cleanup exceeds the price of the raw, clean land. The answer, which would require more courage and coordination from more levels of politicians than can reasonably be expected, would be to combine such mandatory cleanup laws with a moratorium on new development in adjacent suburbs until all brownfield sites have been reclaimed. We’ll have to wait for a Green Government before that will happen. |
September 22, 2003
IS ‘BRINGING THE TROOPS HOME NOW’ AN OPTION?
 There’s increasing attention — and pressure on liberal and moderate presidential candidates to state their position — on how best to extricate ourselves from the expensive and unnecessary war in Iraq. There seem to be two schools of thought:
There is no question in my mind that both alternatives will be bloody, and embarrassing to the US. Although I would agree with this Salon editor (who favours the second approach) that Iraq is no Vietnam, I disagree strongly that long-term foreign military presence has any hope whatsoever of leading to a peaceful and democratic future for Iraq. in fact, Iraq resembles more closely the balkanized Yugoslavia after the death of Tito and the rise of Milosevic. Here’s my ugly, pessimistic scenario for each of the two alternatives above. Remember, as you read this, that we have George Bush and the neocons for getting us into this awful mess in the first place: Fast Exit: If we immediately turn over political control to the Iraqi council led by the dreadful and unpopular Chalabi, and, following the Chiraq proposal, introduce UN peacekeepers, service organizations and trainers to try to restore law and order to the country:
Slow Exit: If we continue to believe that somehow under prolonged foreign occupation the people of Iraq are going to magically bypass the bloody lessons every other country has been through before it achieved free and democratic laws and institutions:
The lesson here is simple. There is no easy route to self-determination, rule of law, freedom and democracy and it cannot be imposed militarily by an outside force. All we can do is set a good example, offer the assistance of the UN to help keep the peace once it is established, and hope the bloodshed is short and minimal. It will of course be embarrassing to withdraw from a country we hoped to save from the anguish of this struggle for identity and democracy, and watch it degenerate into further bloodshed, as it was in Yugoslavia. And with the removal of Saddam Hussein the transition may be shorter, and freedom and democracy may come sooner than it would have otherwise. But the alternative of a long-term military occupation of a country that does not want us, is much bloodier, much costlier, and will merely prolong the inevitable. |
September 21, 2003
END OF SUMMER
 We made our annual trek to the Niagara Wine Festival yesterday, and got back too late to blog. Been out campaigning today for the Ontario Greens. It’s almost as if summer caught up at last — it was a lovely clear warm weekend, and the Friday downpour that was the remnants of Isabel left everything green and bright.
and Niagara photographers Colin & Pat (colin@niagara.com) whose photos of Greece make me long to visit. Back to regular rants tomorrow. |
The wine tour was a hoot — a bunch of us hired a schoolbus to take us around, so we didn’t have to ration our tastings, and we ate out on the patio of one of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s finest restaurants until the stars came out, and then sang songs on the bus all the way home. On the way we picked up some decent wines and discovered some new local artists — cast marble sculpturers Robert and Barbara Abram of Trenton ON (
September 19, 2003
SWEET DIFFERENCE
 One of the curious differences between Americans and Canadians is how they sate their sweet tooth. Although the big manufacturers are the same in both countries, their top products are quite different. In alphabetical order, here are the top 10 lists:
In case you’re confused, Canadian Smarties are very similar to M&Ms, and nothing like the chalky sweet rolled candy called Smarties in the US. And a Canadian Crispy Crunch is nothing like an American Crunch bar, which is made by Nestle. Snickers is number one in the US, Oh Henry is number one in Canada. There are a lot more differences as well. Canadians love Hershey’s Glossettes (chocolate covered peanuts and raisins), Nestle Mackintosh toffee, and Maynard’s wine gums (alcohol free). And one of their favourite rich desserts is called Nanaimo Bar. And they call the products in blue above chocolate bars not candy bars (even when they have no chocolate). Why the differences? It seems to have more to do with what you grow up with than anything else: Agriculture Canada says the Canadian top ten above has hardly changed in the last sixty years. Neither list has a nutritional advantage, or significantly different mix of ingredients. But it’s tough on travellers and ex-pats with a sweet tooth. We’re ordered to bring wine gums and other Canadian favourites when we visit friends who have moved to the US. And when you collapse in your foreign hotel room and open the bar fridge, the chocolate (sorry, candy) bars inside just aren’t quite right. |
