It looks like the Department of Homeland Security is starting to implement some of the ideas that I expressed in a previous blog entry.
This is a good sign. When you tell front-line screeners that a certain set of people should not be allowed to board a plane, you are also in effect telling them that everyone else should be allowed to board the plane. That is, the unspoken assumption is that all the important and necessary thinking has already been done by someone else. The screener’s job is therefore just to use whatever information has already been spoon-fed to them.
On the other hand, if you empower screeners with tools that allow them to search and evaluate information themselves, you make it clear that they are actually supposed to think. This license to think and decide is what puts them in a position to add value to the process—instead of merely behaving robotically.
Of course, it’s easy for those of us in the private sector to criticize the way certain government agencies operate—especially when someone commits some particularly outrageous gaffe.
But we make the same kinds of mistakes in our own organizations every day. We make customers unhappy, we miss sales opportunities, and we spend wastefully because we drastically limit the information available to the people on the front lines of our businesses.
In fact, the whole notion of “business intelligence”—which is, ironically, a public-sector concept appropriated by the private sector—continues to be overly associated with the executive suite and the back office. IT department often (mistakenly) think that if they give managers and strategic planners access to the most cleverly sliced and diced structured data, they are providing their business with all the “intelligence” it needs to perform better.
The Department of Homeland Security, however, offers an object lesson in the fact that this is not the case. Yes, high-end back-office BI is a very valuable form of “intelligence.” But it is far from the whole ballgame. Every organization needs intelligence on the front line, too.
And you don’t develop front-line intelligence by just pushing some selected structured data out to it. You have to empower people on the front line to think, evaluate and decide. Ultimately, that means giving them the ability to search, navigate and analyze information assets across the organization.
The empowerment of front-line staff is not a radical new idea. It is what spawned the PC revolution in the first place, and it is at the heart of every quality assurance strategy. What is new is the idea that there might be an effective way to empower front-line staff with better access to the full wealth of an organization’s structured and unstructured information assets.
This idea is a powerful one, and it’s only going to become more powerful as organizations create more and more information that gets utilized less and less. That’s why everybody should be thinking about IO now—whether they’re trying to prevent terrorists from boarding airplanes or trying to prevent good customers from taking their business to a competitor.
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