It’s all in the timing

One of the scariest things about the whole “Web 2.0” thing for IT and IS management is that it seems to break the long-held problem-solution paradigm that’s served the industry so indifferently for the past 50 years.

As we’ve begun our roll-out of Google Docs, core in our thinking has been a team- and user-centred approach which starts with the principal that if there are problems to be solved or (much more importantly) new possibilities to be explored in our business, it’s IT’s role to give our people the tools, skills and confidence to just on and solve them themselves. This is where we do see a difference between the digital natives, immigrants and (quite frankly) refuseniks. The latter category just don’t engage, like dinosaurs awaiting a meteorite. But the middle expect IT to just do everything for them, because that’s what they are used to.

We’ve been using bits of Soft Systems Methodology to help our deployment, but more than anything it’s turning into a pure coaching and development exercise, where the only “IT” part is the account administration involved in enabling the functionality on a user’s account.

The discomfort to traditional IT management thinking here is deep (but also to much business improvement project-governance). The reality is that, from the outset, we have no idea what changes Google Docs is going to have on the business. We’ve got some best practices building up, some basic dos and don’ts (mostly focusing around managing Intellectual Property of our clients sensibly). But other than that we are keeping a watch over what is going on, selling the successes and sharing the failures, and believing that overall it will make our business more collaborative, more global, more creative and more innovative.

It’s sometimes tempting to think that the technological revolution that we are going through is like nothing that has gone before. Whilst the specific technology might be new, similar (if not bigger) revolutions have existed. Tom Standage’s excellent book about the telegraph “The Victorian Internet” tells one such tale. (Standage facilitated a couple of the sessions at Atmosphere, which reminded me of this).

I was chatting with my dad at the weekend. He’s in his 60s, but a digital native. In his twenties he was setting up communications networks (of a sort) at the BBC, and then when he switched career and became an organisational psychologist he was instrumental in establishing the UK’s first computer-moderated distance learning course at Birkbeck in the 1980s.

I was talking about some of the uncertainties that we are facing now that the problem-solution model is failing. He told of the unpredictable yet significant impact that clocks had on the industrial revolution.
Whilst the steam engine undoubtedly powered much of the beginning of the industrialisation of the 19th century, cheaper clocks measured it. Clocks had been hugely expensive, bespoke creations. When they became mass produced, they became able to not just tell the time, but measure time. Ford couldn’t have perfected line-production without knowing how long things took.

Likewise for tools today that help us to collaborate. What form that collaboration will take will be up to those using it. If a cheaper clock had been introduced by a traditional IT department, though, Henry Ford would have probably been told to stop trying to use it for unintended use-cases, as it was only there to tell the time, not to measure intervals…