Comments on: WHAT GOOD IS IT?

By: David Jones

David Jones — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 23:10:47 +0000

Well I think IT is fully into IT and fully out of it. The recent discovery of “content” is, to me, one the the big jokes of the century. Just what do the IT professionals imagine those pipes and storage vats were for anyway?

By: Rob Salkowitz

Rob Salkowitz — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 19:12:56 +0000

Right now, one of the concrete needs driving the market for collaboration and knowledge management solutions is exception handling within structured workflow – e.g., the ability of a call-center drone to initiate an IM session with someone in product development while they have a troublesome customer on the line, or to do something ad-hoc that their form-driven business environment does not permit. Effective teaming for knowledge workers is important, but it’s a smaller slice of the market, and harder to quantify, than line-of-business tasks. Fortunately, what we’re seeing is that collaboration is moving from specialty apps and stand-alone products to infrastructure: platform (MS) and middleware (IBM). I think in the short run, more large companies will get improved collaboration capabilities as a bi-product of business process automation improvements, rather than vice versa.

By: Kevin Laurence

Kevin Laurence — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 07:38:29 +0000

This is an interesting post, but I'm afraid the statement "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" is simply not true.There are plenty of standard processes awaiting automation. Britain's National Health Service (the largest organisation in Europe) provides just one good example. It's top three IT priorities are:1) The elimination/reduction of paperwork.2) The implementation of electronic patient records.3) The implementation of electronic appointment-setting (between doctors and patients) on-line.What is not standard about those tasks? For the NHS and its millions of customers, they absolutely common, everyday activites. And the NHS is not alone; neither France nor Canada have electronic patient records as yet.Telecom companies, as well as many utilities, have enormous room for improvement on billing. See http://www.kevinlaurence.net/weblog/000014.html for an amusing example.I'm afraid that most organisations are not nearly as advanced as you think!

By: Euan

Euan — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 05:17:39 +0000

Great stuff!

By: Rayne

Rayne — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:54:29 +0000

Easiest way to make the case for IT’s value? Have another blackout, sustain it for a week or so and tell people to try to stay in business without IT. Heh.