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Learning to Manage in the World of the
Unexpected
Paper By Martyn Daniels
Published as Chapter 3
Information in Action: Putting
Knowledge to Work in the Publishing Industry
1999,
©VISTA
Computer Services
ISBN 0952556685
3.
Learning to Manage in the World of the
Unexpected
"In an economy where the only certainty is
uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting
competitive advantage is knowledge"
Ikujiro Nonaka
1
When we set out on a journey, we have many
decisions to make:
•
Which route should we take?
•
What conditions will we face?
•
How long will it take?
•
Do we know of any delays, road works, and
hazards?
•
Have we sufficient gas to make the journey?
We know how to drive and how to minimize
the risk of accidents. We understand the
automobile's dashboard and the many messages
it conveys. But even with all this
preparation, information and experience, we
know we have to expect the unexpected.
When on our journey we are faced with a new
road sign, an oncoming car flashing its
headlights at us, or a warning light on our
dashboard, we recognize the potential risk
associated with the message and take
appropriate action. We collate all the
information available to us at the time,
relate this to our experience and knowledge,
and decide what we should do.
Our business journeys towards our strategic
and tactical goals are no different, just more
complex. We are all in different vehicles with
different capabilities, moving at different
speeds, often going in different directions.
We all want to avoid tailbacks, getting lost,
accident, break down – and running out of gas!
However, we often find ourselves confronted
with the unexpected; then we have to draw on
our personal and organizational skills and
knowledge to manoeuvre around the obstacle and
continue our journey.
Unfortunately, the information signals we
receive – from both inside and outside the
organization – are obscure and ambiguous.
Often the information is out of date, which
means that our responses, instead of being
proactive, can only be reactive. In many
instances, the person who is best equipped
with the experience and knowledge to deal with
a particular issue is not the one who receives
the relevant information.
Before we start to look for a response to
these issues, we must reflect on the
contribution that technology has already made
in capturing and exploiting information,
experience and knowledge and, as a result,
providing competitive advantage to the
companies that have used it effectively.
3.1 Yesterday's Journeys
Automating the process and accumulating the
transactional data
"So far computer users still use the new
technology only to do faster what they have
always done before, crunch conventional
numbers"
2
We have all in the past experienced some
degree of success in reducing the cost of
doing business. We have automated data entry,
reduced accounting and clerical resources and
significantly reduced the cost of processing
transactions. We have also enabled our
organizations to grow, handling greater
volumes of data more effectively. It is
difficult if not impossible to imagine the
same levels of growth being achieved using the
old paper- and people-intensive business
systems.
However, in automating our business
processes, we implemented little change; the
processes remained essentially the same as
they were before they were automated. In many
instances, innovative “best practice”
solutions to particular problems were neither
widely identified nor widely adopted. As a
result, these frequently remained proprietary
to an organization or an industry sector.
Taking the view that the individual
organization always knew best, "packaged"
system solutions were customized to support
proprietary practices and processes and as a
result became unsupportable by the vendor.
These "batch based" business system
solutions were all too often inward looking
and focused not on the supply or value chains
but on internal organizational processes.
Competitive advantage was seen as flowing from
reduction in the business's cost base, even if
this reduction was made at the expense of
others in the chain. Investment in technology
was high – and any competitive advantage
gained proved unsustainable.
Businesses created "data islands" that did
little to provide the organization with the
information it required for making its
tactical – let alone its strategic –
decisions. These "islands" of data were often
hard to locate within the organization. It was
cumbersome to extract useable information from
them and it required specialists to provide or
amend the simplest of reports. In many cases,
the data was incorrect, inconsistent or out of
date.
Organizations made many of their decisions
entirely "blind of the facts". Despite the
investment in technology, they remained
totally reliant on the internal,
unsystematized expertise and knowledge on
which they had always depended.
"In the absence of learning, companies and
individuals, simply repeat old practices.
Change remains cosmetic and improvements are
either fortuitous or short lived"
3
Providing power to the desktop but not
the organization
The PC and local network revolution brought
a realignment of focus from the organization
and the back office to the user. This change,
together with previously unimaginable local
computing power and software capability,
broadened the computing franchise beyond the
IT specialists.
We now found ourselves wielding new tools
that could download the data, manipulate it
and report on it more effectively and
efficiently than ever before. However, we
often found a significant gap between those
who could and those who just thought they
could. Newly empowered users often spent hours
designing (and over-engineering) spreadsheets
and other analysis tools.
The data was certainly turned into
information – of a sort. However, in this “new
frontier” environment, it was still doubtful
that the right information reached the right
people at the right time.
The more that data was collated and
analyzed, the more information we wanted. Our
thirst could not be quenched. All too often we
failed to stop and think – we just had to
analyze everything. Every finance department
had its own spreadsheet "magician". The
autonomous became even more autonomous. We had
deployed "island technology" that spawned
"island information" and the information
created even more information in this
seemingly lawless maze.
The myriad "information islands" that now
dominate the publishing front office often
inhibit easy access to comprehensive
information covering the complete life-cycle
of a title. However, we need to recognize that
the information alone is effectively valueless
unless we can also find ways of capturing and
exploiting the organizational knowledge that
gives it context.
In this era, competitive advantage was
still seen as residing in the ability to
analyze a business's performance in detail, to
seek out inefficiency and to apply corrective
action. However, it turned out that monitoring
the organization was hard: all too often,
conflicts occurred when two departments
presented two (or more!) different
perspectives using precisely the same
information.
Investment in technology remained high,
technical effort across the organization rose
sharply and any competitive advantage again
proved unsustainable. Organizations became
increasingly "sceptical about the facts" and
were still totally reliant on –and exposed to
– that internal decision making expertise and
knowledge they had always used.
Information is not static and lives all
around us
"Most organizations have habits and
structures that keep them at arm's length from
the rest of the world"
4
In the second paper in this series,
"Profiting From Tomorrow's Customers",
5 we highlighted many of the issues
surrounding the publishing supply chain and
the growing shift from a product-oriented
business to a customer-driven one. We
highlighted the often-adversarial
relationships that existed then and that
(perhaps to a lesser extent) still exist
today.
Sharing of data, let alone information,
with trading partners is only now starting to
take place across the industry. Publishing
still lags a long way behind other industries
in the area of EDI (electronic data
interchange). Such sharing of information as
does exist in the book industry would be
regarded as unacceptably meagre in many other
trading communities today.
However, movement is perceptible. The
industry has started to confront the massive
gaps in information that have existed between
trading partners across the publishing supply
chain.
• In the subscription sector, it is
recognized that the vast majority of claims –
and the resultant costs – are a direct result
of there being little or no sharing of
publication schedules.
• In the book sector, over 65% of calls to
publisher's customer service departments are
inquiries on price, availability and the
status of an order.
Organizations are beginning to realize that
significant efficiency can be gained by the
adoption of "open information trading" with
their supply chain partners.
EDI will address a considerable proportion
of the transactional information exchanges but
will not address real time requests for
information. Innovative services, such as
PubEasy.com,
6 Ingram I,
6 Oasis
6 and others,
are starting to redefine information access,
presentation and exchange. Other industry
services such as BookTrack
6 and BookScan 5
are now collating and analyzing cross-industry
information.
In the third and fourth papers in this
series,
7 we highlighted many of the
issues relating to the publishing value chain
and the information and technology needs of
the core "value adding" front office
activities within publishing. Integrating
information from the myriad of "information
islands" that dominate the front office is
often a daunting task. What is more, bridging
the cultural divide between publishing back
and front office is not as important as
bridging the information divide between these
two areas of the business.
Significant competitive advantage can flow
from sharing data and information both within
the organization and in trading partnerships.
However, realizing the benefits from this
activity requires vision, commitment and
co-operation between "information traders".
Data standards are also essential, not just
between the different trading partners but
also within the organization!
However, merely throwing information "over
the wall" without the insight and knowledge
that gives it meaning does not create the
"win-win" environment that is essential for
future success.
"There is no future for hermetically sealed
closed systems in the networked economy."
8
Yesterday's journeys brought us greater
efficiency and started to unlock the
information available from inside and outside
the organization. In doing so, they served to
highlight the exposure of the organization to
inadequate management of its information and
knowledge resources.
3.2 The dynamic landscape we now live in
3.2.1 Convergence, convergence, convergence
Not only does everyone now have internal
systems and information sources, we have many
external ones as well. We are all continually
bombarded with email and have increasingly
high mountains of it to climb every day. We
still have the telephone; thanks to mobile
telephony, we can no longer escape from its
call. If we do escape briefly, we have a
string of voice mails, all crying out for our
attention. We still have the constant arrival
of faxes and even traditional "snail mail”
seems never to decline in volume.
We are, as individuals, becoming
increasingly "open all hours", to do business
with anyone, from anywhere and at anytime. We
are continuously "plugged in" to the
information and communication network.
"I meet refuges coming out of Kosovo with
the few possessions they could carry. I was
amazed to see them carrying their cellular
phones with them"
9
Will it get worse? “Certainly” is the only
possible answer. Potentially at least, we are
now recipients of more information in one day
than Jane Austen or Mark Twain would have
received in a decade. Telecommunication and
information services will continue to merge
and develop. Anytime, anywhere access to
information (and others’ access to us) will
become inescapable. At the same time, the
quality and utility of that access will
improve. We will find the "office in our
hands" a reality.
Most of us can remember life without
laptops, mobile phones, personal organizers;
our new employees will never have known life
without them. The new workforce will expect,
indeed demand, much greater and more
sophisticated use of technology.
King Canute failed to hold back the tide.
The question today is not how we can contain
this new tidal wave of intrusion, but how we
can manage and exploit it to our advantage. We
will need automatic filters on what we receive
and when we receive it – and we will need to
personalize these to reflect our individual
needs. In a world of convergence, we will need
to find new ways of establishing lines of
demarcation between our social and working
lives.
Publishing and the media are at the very
heart of this technology convergence. The
formats and channels in which content is
delivered (with its supportive contextual
information) are rapidly evolving.
The speed at which this convergence is
happening is frightening, even to a
professional technologist. We are constantly
being bombarded with new and innovative
technology and prototype applications. If we
thought that the choice in the beginning
between Betamax and VHS was a close call, then
we are in for some tough decisions.
Broadcasting and telecommunications
technologies are converging, along with the
infrastructure and tools that we use to access
them; at the same time, their carrying
capacity is increasing exponentially.
What this all means for the future is
uncertain. Who will dominate this marketplace
and what their offer will be remains unclear.
What is certain is that out of today's myriad
of options will emerge a winner, just as in
the past we had IBM (mainframes), DEC
(midrange), Intel (PC chips), Microsoft (PC
Windows), Oracle (relational databases) and
SAP (ERP software). What may be worth noting
is that no dominant technology position has
ever proved to be defendable against the next
wave – at least, not yet.
3.2.2 Drowning in the sea of data
"Mistakes get repeated, but smart decisions
do not. Most important, the old ways of
thinking are never discussed, so they are
still in place to spawn new mishaps"
10
As with telecommunications, we are
increasingly being bombarded with
“information”. Some of it is still only
“data”; some has been collated and analyzed
and can now claim to be “information”.
Nevertheless it is clear that we all spend far
too much time and effort reading the wrong
news.
We have office systems which create their
own information flows, some structured and
some not. How many emails and attached reports
are circulated to us just “for your
information”? We now have the all too simple
capability to fire off at random "just in
case" information. Are we expecting some sort
of response, a reaction – or are we merely
covering our backs? Irrespective of our
expectations, the recipient has to make some
decision about it. To make that decision, at
least part of what we send has to be read by
all those to whom we send it.
We also have external feeds, both in the
form of transactional and operational
information and access to external market
information. These feeds are sometimes
"pushed" at us in the form of an online
newsletter or alerts; alternatively we have to
go and pull the information in the form of
online "self service".
We are increasingly information and
communication slaves, all conscious that
non-participation in the information chain
(both creating and digesting) is a not an
option; exclusion from the chain could have a
terminal effect if not on our business then at
least on our careers.
Ask yourself these questions:
•
How much of my day is now spent dealing with
"noise"?
•
What percentage of all the information I
receive actually makes a difference?
•
What information don't I get that would really
make a difference?
" Who depends on me for information? And on
whom do I depend? Everyone should be
constantly thinking through what information
he or she needs to do the job and to make a
contribution"
11
Management by exception must be the goal –
with automated profiling and filtering of
information an essential means of reaching
that goal.
However, we often forget that communication
is a two way process. What information do we
send to others today that instead of enriching
their contribution potentially dilutes it?
There is little point in giving trading
partners advanced supply chain information,
such as demand forecasts, if they are unable
to use it effectively, or choose to ignore it,
or, worse, actively use the information as a
weapon against us.
We need to learn the art of navigating a
safe passage through this sea of data and to
ensure that in doing so we do not
inadvertently sink those on whom we also
depend.
3.2.3 The e-business environment
"With electronic business not only
commercial transactions but whole businesses
will go online"
12
The migration from e-commerce to e-business
is so significant and difficult to achieve
that many companies will miss the boat and
perish as a result. The move from the physical
world to the virtual world is not just about
digital product; it is about doing business,
irrespective of whether the product itself is
physical, virtual or multi-format.
Early adopters may be seen to be operating
at a commercial disadvantage, apparently
spending money for little or no tangible
return. They are however learning the new
rules, establishing their brands and gaining
knowledge about customers and the market that
will be essential to their survival.
3.2.4 The net redefines the customer
"Electronic commerce gets over hyped today.
There's nothing dramatic about the fact that
an order that used to come on paper now comes
on the Internet. What's profound is when
buyers and sellers who never would have been
matched before are being matched"
13
We speak today about ERP (Enterprise
Resource Planning) and “Enterprise Systems”
but these are already being overtaken by CRM
(Customer Relationship Management) and
“Customer Systems”. Vendors are realizing that
information about their customers sales are
not enough and that they need to understand
their buying patterns and preferences.
Categorizing customers by this analysis can be
far more productive than by sales and
territory alone.
The traditional vendor driven publishing
model is fast becoming extinct. Power has
already shifted firmly to the intermediary but
is moving at an increasing speed to the
consumer. Those who ignore this – and the
rising role of the Infomediaries – may well
find themselves not driving the development of
their products and the market but firmly being
driven by others down the supply chain.14
"Customers don't have to buy the books -
the mere fact that they looked for information
about such books can be recorded and marketed
to others"
15
The customer is king in the world of "MyNet"
"There's no such thing as a personal
computer in the future. There are only
available appliances. You'll use your smart
card or smart ring or some sort of proximity
device, the device knows who you are, what
you're authorized to access - and you type in
your password to get whatever service you paid
for"
16
Utility of access works two ways and comes
with a heavy price. Consumers can be accessed
and targeted just as easily as they can access
and target vendors and information. Consumers
are besieged, telemarketers phoning at home at
all hours, direct marketers stuffing the
mailbox with junk mail, relationship marketers
demanding more information. "Spam" junk email
now constitutes 10% of all worldwide email.
Yesterday the consumer was happy to give
their personal information and often had the
option to refuse its reuse or sale to third
parties. Today we only have to view our PC
files to see the profusion of "cookies" that
are being deposited in them. Customers
understand that their information and feedback
has real value and is no longer an
afterthought. It has the potential to become
"the tail that wags the dog".
• A 1996 DIRECT survey found 83% of those
surveyed said there should be a law requiring
an opt-in procedure for names to be included
on direct mail lists
• A 1998 survey of more than 10,000 World
Wide web users by Graphic, Visualization &
Usability (GVU) found that 72% of Internet
users believed there should be new laws to
protect privacy on the Internet and that 82%
of users objected to the sale of personal
information.
• A 1998 Business Week poll found that 53%
of respondents said government should pass
laws now for how personal information can be
captured and used online, a figure 3 times
higher than the number of consumers who
supported the idea that the government should
let trade groups develop voluntary privacy
standards.17
Another aspect of this new environment is
the development of Intelligent Agent
technology. We are all familiar with the
search services available on the Internet.
Without the search engines, we would not be
capable of finding the haystack, let alone the
needle. These agents collect information and
allow us to search against it. However they
perform simple "word match" searches (however
sophisticated these may be) and are "dumb" as
to the relevance of what they find to any
particular individual.
A new breed of tools are taking this one
stage further and are starting to search more
intelligently against specific requirements
and on a narrower range of directly relevant
sites. Comparison shoppers, for example, are
powerful aids to the user who is searching for
the "best buy" – and can kill traffic to sites
that are not in their search path. If
customers see value in their service, then
there is much to be lost in blocking their
entry. However, who is then the real service
provider to the customer?
Infomediaries18 are
now using agent technologies both to profile
users and to enable users to profile
themselves. This profiling then enables the
user to be automatically alerted to any new
information or services that match their
profile. This technology has the potential to
make a really significant impact on everything
we do, both in our commercial and in our
social lives.
Imagine for example a bookstore that
currently generates insufficient trade to
warrant a call from a sales representative.
The bookstore’s buyer inevitably goes to a
wholesaler today. With more sophisticated
tools, publishers could profile these
accounts, not just by their sales history
(which only says what they bought), but
against their own description of what they
want, when they want it, and those many other
factors that together create an “intelligent
profile” of their business.
This would then present the opportunity,
for example, to "push" appropriate marketing
and promotional materials to them at the
appropriate time. Potentially a "win–win"
solution – and one that could address a
significant proportion of today’s supply chain
issues.
3.3 Learning to swim in the sea of data
"A Corporation's success today lies more in
its intellectual and systems capabilities than
in its physical assets"
19
How do we prepare for the unexpected and
arm ourselves react more quickly – or to
pre-empt the surprise? We need to focus on what
we need to know in order to perform our
individual tasks and to remove unnecessary
data that is currently cluttering our vision.
The schematic in Figure 1generically
depicts the different information roles within
any organization. The framework is defined by
the type of actions required from a member of
staff, from routine everyday tasks to
exceptional ones and from those that are often
heavily systematized to those that require
substantial intellectual "knowledge" input.
Figure 1
Clerical Support activities require routine
and systematized information flows that feed
regular inputs, that can be processed and
output to the next activity in the chain. The
information is transactional and needs to be
minimized to facilitate efficiency. This area
of activity is where the paper chain (and
resultant paper mountains) need urgently to
migrate online and where integration and
portable technologies such as hand held
terminals, radio frequency, and mobile
telephony can bring significant efficiency.
The overall objective is to "feed the
conveyor-belt" and ensure that operations are
kept moving.
Users need workflow tools that provide "to
do lists", automated routing, process
management and full integration of their
information and communication systems and
services. They also require full online
enquiry and entry capabilities and minimal
paper reporting.
The service objective is: "check it in
and check it out".
Process Management activities differ from
the clerical ones in that these are focused
not on the performance of tasks but on the
performance of process. Process managers
require access to the same transactional
information used in the clerical process but
their usage of the data and their application
requirements are very different. They often
require access to associated information from
a number of sources to enable them to manage
risk and change in the day to day activities
associated with the process.
Users here still require workflow tools but
in this case to alert them to process
exceptions, performance bottlenecks and future
resource requirements. They also need basic
analysis and standard online reporting against
targets, thresholds and trends.
In today's flat organizational structures,
a program manager may be involved in the
management of a process or processes not just
within a single functional area but right
across the whole business. This involves the
management of cross-functional teams and
appropriate allocation of resources. The
resource information associated with these
dynamics is similar to that found in the
traditional project management toolkit; this
adds a further dimension to the information
requirement.
The service objective is: "keep today on
schedule".
"Strong businesses and economies draw on
deep reservoirs of know-how and expertise"
20
Business Analysis activities tend to be
associated not so much with process, but with
monitoring and analyzing overall business
activities and performance. This analysis may
be prompted by a variance to that expected or
by a search to discover the parameters that
effect an operation or process. All involve
deep "data mining" of the information.
"Data mining" describes the functionality
required to drill down through a huge volume
of data, tapping off into specific rich
“seams” as necessary. This involves not
viewing information in a single dimension but
in multiple dimensions.
Analysis is often performed "offline",
often using a Data Warehouse, in which both
operational information and information from
many other sources has been aggregated. This
approach protects live operational data from
the performance demands of the analysis
techniques while at the same time providing
analysts with both the performance they
require and the wider business picture. The
tools used vary considerably from the PC
spreadsheet to very sophisticated modelling and
forecasting tools. It is important that the
results of any analysis can be presented in a
graphical and accessible format using industry
standard tools.
The service objective is to enable the
analyst to: "turn over the stones and look for
the issues".
Enterprise Decision Support is focused at
managing the key performance indicators (KPIs)
within the business. The activity is focused
not on “fixing what isn't broke”, but
identifying what is broke and fixing it, or
even more importantly on identifying what
could be breaking and taking actions to
prevent the fracture. There is also an
often-unrecognized need to understand where
and why performance is exceeded. The role is
proactive as well as reactive and users need
to be able to pose sophisticated "what if"
questions against information at a high level.
.
This area of activity is at the senior
executive level and again needs to accommodate
external as well as internal information
sources. However, unlike the "search and
discovery" role of the analyst, executives
need an active feed that alerts them to where
they need to look more closely at information.
This type of approach can be referred to as
"traffic lighting". They do not need to know
when the lights are green but only when they
are on amber or red. When on amber they also
need to understand if they are about to turn
green – or red.
The service object is to: "identify which
key performance indicators need attention".
"The management of knowledge involves
essentially the creation of behaviours that
allow people to transform information into
business results"
21
All too often we seek a single solution or
toolkit that covers all these disparate needs
for information; we end up by servicing only
lowest common denominator needs.
Alternatively, we develop lots of different
information islands and become incapable of a
complete and consistent understanding of the
business.
3.4 A technology architecture for the
millennium publishing business
Few new technologies suddenly appear and
get instantly deployed. They need to mature.
They develop from what is initially announced,
start to be adapted to meet a specific need,
then when viable they start to be widely
adopted. Finally, they go full circle and
spawn new technology.
This should not be seen to imply that we
believe that all announcements end up being
adopted or even that all adaptations progress.
There are many good ideas and good
technologies that never made it.
However, if we look at publishing, we can
see a number of examples of this virtuous
circle of development. Today the e-book is a
classic example that may be somewhere around
the initial adaptation stage. Radio frequency
tagging is another example where the
technology has been adapted to address the
issue of bookstore shrinkage, but where its
adoption is now waiting for the price of the
technology to drop sufficiently. Wide spread
adoption may eventually depend on the
potential use of RF in managing returns.
In last year's white paper in this series,6
we first introduced a schematic architecture
for systems to support publishing. Having
reviewed and qualified this basic
architecture, it has now been further refined
and developed to become a driving vision of
how we see the future being serviced. This
vision should not be seen as “finished”, it is
continuing to develop. What we envisaged some
six months ago is being enhanced as we
continue to adapt and adopt it.
The unique architecture is focused on
delivering front and back office solutions for
publishers that are full integrated with
e-business applications. These business
solutions are able to access the corporate
databases that underpin the business and
provide a common user presentation for the
information.
The business processes that are required to
support publishing activities and projects are
controlled by use of work flow and data flow
technology and a powerful reporting tool. The
architecture also includes a powerful decision
support and analysis tool to provide intuitive
access and presentation of all the business
information within the organization.
The schematic in Figure 2 depicts this
architecture
Figure 2 
The Databases are built on the core
publishing foundations of Content, Context and
Commerce.
•
Content consists of the books, chapters,
journals, issues, pictures, and fragments of
information in all its many formats.
•
Context is the product and bibliographic
information that describes the content and
enables you and your customers to find it and
establish its value.
•
Commerce is the final dimension, the business
information that relates to pricing, sales,
inventory, customers and royalties systems.
The process management and control layer
focuses on the need to manage and control the
business across its operational activities and
also various product and project life cycles.
•
Work Flow technology enables the various
activities within a process to be integrated
and for them to be controlled from start to
finish.
•
Data Flow technology enables the flow of
content and its associated context, to be
managed and controlled from receipt of
manuscript to delivery of finished product.
Business Transaction Processing provides a framework
that is focused at supporting any publisher’s
specific requirements across the total life
cycle of a product, from conception to final
royalty payment. Different activities within a
publisher will require different aspects of
the functionality and will need individual
combinations of the back and front office
applications as well as e-business solutions.
This layer incorporates not only the front
office applications that are shown
but also back office applications (customer
service, ordering and fulfillment,
distribution and warehousing, finance and
administration, royalties and inventory
management). Also in this layer are the
e-business applications that open all of the
company’s applications to communication with
the outside world. This recognizes that the
successful operation of a publishing company
implies the management a “virtual
organization” with many out-sourced
operations.
Information Management focuses on using
database and knowledge technologies to
enable all information to be accessed and
analyzed both at summary and detail levels.
The User Presentation layer recognizes the
need for consistency and integration of data
and its presentation through a standard user
interface. Today, the user interface is a
Windows Client for internal use and a Web
Browser externally. We need to satisfy both
and recognize that they will shortly converge,
with the browser becoming the dominant
presentation technology for the next
millennium.
In order to understand the significant
changes that an information and knowledge
driven environment will have, it is necessary
to develop these latter layers further.
3.4.1 Information Management
We regard the application and database
layers as being the primary information feeds
into the business. Figure 4 shows the three
primary feeds.
Figure 3
The traditional approach is to view the
corporate analysis and reporting layer simply
in the context of the corporate data
warehouse. The warehouse is a storage
aggregation of all the corporate information
within a structured relational database
environment. However, this perspective often
limits the vision and development to focus
only on operational needs and creates a narrow
perspective on the overall organizational
needs.
As we have already discussed, we can no
longer afford to ignore perspectives provided
by external information; there is also a need
to deliver a wide range of types of
information in a consistent user interface,
not just commercial information but also
contextual information, and even completely
unstructured information.
The architecture also acknowledges the
critical relationship between information and
one of the key knowledge-adding inputs –
process. The requirement to manage, control,
monitor the business processes and product
development is achieved through the sub layers
and tools provided by Workflow and Dataflow.
Given the different information roles and
needs we discussed earlier, we can now extend
this critical aspect of the architecture even
further as depicted in Figure 4.
Figure 4
3.4.2 Preparing for "MyNet"
It is not possible to ensure that your
customers in the future will not elect to bar
you from their world. The technology is
rapidly becoming available for them to profile
what they want, when they want it and how they
want it. Full self-service is becoming a
reality; e-business is not something you
should be thinking about, it is something you
must be doing now. Those who enter the fray
late will have to spend heavily on the skills
and knowledge to enable them simply to stay in
the game; if they fail to make the migration
to customer relationship management they will
surely perish in the world of the infomediary
and permissions marketing.
Figure 5 depicts how the new permission
layers will need to be accommodated.
Figure 5
We can now further develop the vision to
recognize this new and evolving environment.
This vision is shown in Figure 10, which we
believe sets the agenda for tomorrow's
solutions, incorporating the extended
information needs and knowledge input.
Figure 6
3.5 Beware – technology at work
Remember all those dreams we only partially
realized: the paperless office, teleworking,
the virtual organization? All too often we
were presented with the prototype but tactical
priorities dictated our direction and we
adopted a "wait and see" approach.
Today the pace of technology change is
quickening and it is no longer an option to
join the marathon at mile 21.
“Business must compete by exploiting
capabilities which its competitors cannot
easily match or imitate. These distinctive
capabilities are not raw materials, land or
access to cheap labour. They must be knowledge,
skills and creativity…That is why we will only
compete successfully in future if we create an
economy that is genuinely knowledge driven.”
23
Learning to learn continually is our
hardest task. This is not restricted to the
organization itself, or to relationships with
trading partners and customers, or to new
channels to market, or to evolving product
formats, or to business processes, or to
organizational structure. It encompasses all
of these and more. It is about learning to
adapt, adopt and advance technology. It about
learning to share information within a new
"open" commercial environment. It is about
reducing the organization's current exposure
to risk from the failure effectively to manage
knowledge and information assets. It is about
tapping into and exploiting all the
information and knowledge available to provide
a secure future for the organization and the
individual within it.
"We can know more than we can tell"
24
Notes and references:
1. Ikujiro Nonaka, "The Knowledge Creating
Company", Harvard Business Review Nov - Dec
1991
2. Peter F Drucker, "The
Coming of the New
Organization", Harvard Business Review, Jan -
Feb 1988
3. David A Garvin, "Building a learning
organization", Harvard Business Review, July -
Aug 1993
4. S Davis, C Meyer, "Blur: the speed of
change in the connected economy" ,Addison
Wesley 1998
5. M Bide and M Shatzkin (Eds)
"Profiting From Tomorrow's Customers" the
second report in the Publishing in the 21st
Century research series, London and New York:
VISTA Computer Services (1996)
6. PubEasy.com, E-business Internet trading
service developed by VISTA Computer Services
Ingram I , a self service Internet service
developed by the Ingram Book Company OASIS
BookTrack, a retail sales analysis and
reporting service developed for the UK market
by J Whitaker Information Services BookScan, a
retail sales analysis and reporting service
developed for the US market by BookScan Inc.
7. M Bide and M Shatzkin (Eds)
"From N to X - The publishing value chain" the
third report in the Publishing in the 21st
Century research series, London and New York:
VISTA Computer Services (1997)
M
Bide and M Shatzkin (Eds)"Supporting
Creativity: Bringing Technology to Front
Office Operations" the forth report in the
Publishing in the 21st Century research
series, London and New York: VISTA Computer
Services (1998)
8. K Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy:
Twelve dependable principles for thriving in a
turbulent world" Wired, Sept 1997
9. Richard Gere, CNN May, 1999
10. Art Kliener and George Roth, "How to
make experience your companies best teacher"
Harvard Business Review Sept -Oct 1997
11. Peter F Drucker, "The
Coming of the New
Organization", Harvard Business Review, Jan -
Feb 1988
12. Gigabyte - an annual review of the
Information Technology Sector, Granville
Equity Research, 1999
13. Bill Gates , Microsoft 1999
14. See further chapter 11
in this report
15. John Hagel III, Marc Singer, "Net
Worth", Harvard Business School Press, 1999
16. Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems, 1999
17. John Hagel III and
Singer M "Net Worth" Harvard Business School
Press (1999)
18. See further chapter 11
in this report
19. "Our Competitive Future" UK Government
Department of Trade and Industry White Paper,
1998
20. A Braganza and Dr K Breu, "Management
Focus" Cranfield School of Management, winter
1998
21. Ibid
22. M Bide and M Shatzkin
(Eds)"Supporting
Creativity: Bringing Technology to Front
Office Operations" the forth report in the
Publishing in the 21st Century research
series, London and New York: VISTA Computer
Services (1998)
23. J B Quinn, P Anderson, S
Finkelstein "Managing Professional Intellect"
Harvard Business Review March - April 1996
24. Michael Polanyi quoted
in "Gigabyte" (see above n12)
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