Learning and Technology

If the “world is increasingly flat”, why should anyone in IT care about the mountains and the valleys? January 15, 2008

If the “world is increasingly flat”, why should anyone care about the mountains and the valleys? If globalization is slowly but surely leveling the field of ideas, passions and business models, why should information technology help mangers identify and appreciate differences in culture, motivations and action? Will these differences in managerial behavior soon be a thing of the past, or potential reservoirs of talent and innovation that can be analyzed to help organizations grow their markets? Let’s quickly review our premises concerning globalization, how today’s business software influences and often distorts our vision, and what kinds of IT might bring the picture into better focus in the near future.

In the World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman provides abundant proof, anecdotes and stories to support the idea that of the increasing circulation of ideas, services and labor across the borders of both organizations and markets. This global village that Thomas Friedman sees so clearly differs profoundly with the village I’ve chosen to live in nestled high up in the French Alps. Writing from my desk, the mountains and the valleys of the Belledone offer welcome relief from the monotonous routines of big city life. People choose to live in villages like mine because they see things a little bit differently than those living in Europe’s metropoles; they play the game of business a little differently. If business applications fail to capture the values and passions that define why we come to work, what lessons are managers minimizing or leaving out of the picture altogether?

In an interconnected economy, information technology plays a fundamental role in shaping how we see our organization, our business and our markets. Business applications help us capture, aggregate and structure “proof” of client demands, organizational capacities, and the efficiency and/or effectiveness of our efforts to produce sustainable revenue streams. Business applications commonly do this by helping managers structure organizational data into scorecards (boxes) and/or processes (activities and tasks) and that help them focus on what’s essential in pushing their businesses forward. Whatever doesn’t fit into the picture is either flagged as a bottleneck or worse discarded as unworthy of managerial attention. Although managers must continually filter and structure information given the monumental sums of data at their disposal each day, are business applications helping them focus on the right information? Is IT largely responsible for the impression that our world is flat, when anyone looking at a sunset can see abundant proof of importance of the mountains and the valleys?

In there is little doubt that managers can neither hide from nor ignore the winds globalization, there is little doubt that local context, culture and vision continues to influence the actual patterns of business practice. One reason appears to be experience with “real” clients and customers, for managers judge the value of the information they receive against their impressions of current and past realities of trying to get work done. A second justification can be found in how different business communities use information: whereas in certain businesses information is often taken at face value, in other cultures information is believed to be essentially a political instrument, and in others still more often than not largely divorced from business behavior. A third explanation could be analyzed in understanding how rules and regulations impact corporate behavior: whereas many cultures feel that managers must play by the rules, others accept the reality of a “grey” economy, where in others legislation offers only a vague guideline for organizational behavior. Faced with the rugged contours of reality of business, it is of little wonder that managers have widely varying opinions of the facts and figures provided by today’s business applications.

Implicit in our concepts of “modern” markets is an assumption that local cultures are slowly but surely giving way to one global lifestyle. Current business applications, based on notions of best practice, projects and processes, and the objectivity of information, reinforce the view that the business world is indeed “flat.” Corporate culture, which colors the mountains and the valleys of business practice, are largely ignored in today’s approaches to enterprise applications. Corporate culture has proved difficult to define but easy to see: it’s composed of a coherent set of beliefs and values that define how managers perceive themselves and the organization around them. Although corporate culture isn’t easily captured in a database nor specified as part of an operating procedure, it conditions how IT is appropriated and used to do business on a daily basis. Proof of these unwritten rules of engagement are relegated to the anecdotes and stories told in corporate hallways and restaurants, human attempts to give meaning to the naked facts and figures of corporate reporting and scorecards. Why aren’t current business applications capturing these realities of business?

Several challenges need to be resolved before such applications can help managers appreciate the importance of mountains and valleys in shaping local markets. How can business applications best be designed to capture information outside of projects and processes, i.e. the large parts of each workday in which managers are firefighting, relationship building and just simply muddling through? How can enterprise applications best represent “non-structured” data, i.e. data on feelings, values, and experience that is difficult to put into spreadsheets and databases? How can taxonomies, processes and procedures accommodate differences in opinion, experience and vision from one manager to another? How can interfaces be designed to draw managers’ attention to dissonance, data that doesn’t quite fit into the tables, not as a source of error, but as a potential reservoir for improving an organization’s products, services and ideas? If the industry can rise to meet these challenges, they will develop better visions of the depth and breadth of potential ideas, passions and business models that will continue to shape markets in the foreseeable future.