Innovation often feels risky. Typically, it entails committing significant resources to something that may not bring about the needed outcome. This uncertainty often causes decision-makers to shy away from innovation.
But as the rules governing business performance continue to mutate, it may be reasonable to look at innovation from the opposite direction: Why are we committing significant resources to something—in this case, the status quo—that will certainly not deliver the needed outcome?
And there is no doubt that our present IT solutions cannot deliver needed outcomes. As Andy McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Digital Business, recently explained, “We have collaboration tools that are not social, and social tools that are not collaborative.”
Knowledge management repositories, for example, are collaborative (because they make content accessible to everyone)—but they’re not social (because all you do is check content in and out of the repository). Email, on the other hand, is very social (because it allows people to interact on an ad hoc basis)—but not collaborative at all (because email exchanges are not inherently visible to anyone else).
Without a way of working that is both collaborative and social, knowledge workers waste time and miss opportunities. IDC once estimated that that the typical Fortune 1000 company loses $2.5 billion per year just because knowledge workers spend so much time every day hunting down information. And an AIIM study found that knowledge workers spend 15-25% of their time unproductively because of the time it takes to find the information they need.
In other words, companies that don’t commit to the socialization of information are essentially committing to wasting time.
This is not spin or hype. It’s documented fact. And it’s supported by the first-hand experience of every knowledge worker in every organization around the world. Unless we’re in denial, we all know exactly what it’s like to have a task take much longer to complete than it should because we just couldn’t put our finger on the information we needed. And, at precisely those times, we all fantasize about how much more we could accomplish if we could eliminate those delays.
But we don’t have to fantasize. The technology exists today to radically change how we search for and share information. We can find the documents and data—and, sometimes even more critically, the people behind those documents and data—with a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks. And we can do it without having to sift through layer and layer of irrelevant search results.
To make the fantasy real, however, we have to innovate. We have to be willing to adopt new technologies—and we have to do so before everyone else already has. That’s what innovation means.
Of course, we can also decide to continue to waste time, just like our competitors are—because as long as they’re still doing it, it feels safe for us to keep doing it too.
But it’s not safe at all. Seemingly, successful companies are getting disrupted out of existence left and right as business becomes increasingly competitive and as customers become more disposed to shift their loyalty en masse as soon as someone else offers them a better experience and a better deal.
Perhaps then, we shouldn’t be so afraid of innovating when it comes to socializing information. Perhaps what we should be afraid of is not innovating.
collaboration, data repositories, information socialization, innovation, IT solutions, knowledge management
