The Only Sustainable Edge
Nice interview with John Seely Brown and John Hagel about their new book, The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization.
I like the way Hagel differentiates between process and practice related work. He talks about surfacing and managing exceptions -- those practices that require the use of experience and expertise and not just process defined rules. This adds a new dimension and requirement to knowledge management activities.
"In the past couple of decades, the primary focus of IT investment certainly by large enterprises has been to automate and standardize the core operating processes of the business. The net result is, if you look at where the headcount of the enterprise is focused, it is on handling exceptions that get thrown out by the automated processes, and that can't be handled by the rules or procedures that have been specified. The real opportunity for technology now is to help people to address the exceptions -- it's typically more than one person, and it involves finding the right people, bringing them together quickly, giving them the tools necessary to address the exception, and then, probably most importantly, to create a record of the exception-handling so that you can see patterns emerge of where these exceptions are occurring over time. That's a huge opportunity for technology. We see the emergence of an array of social software tools to address this challenge of exception handling."
Permalink | Monday, June 27, 2005
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