Our businesses are relentlessly becoming more complex. We are engaging with an expanding network of contractors and partners to get our work done. We are utilizing more diverse channels to reach more customers. We are operating in more countries and in more languages, while we wrestle with more regulations and market variables.
In one sense, this complexity is a dangerous enemy. Complexity can increase the probability that some process somewhere will break or that somebody will do something wrong. Orders get screwed up. Customers get ticked off. Revenue goes out the window.
Complexity, however, complexity can also be a powerful ally. After all, everybody’s business is getting more complex—including our competitors’. So if we become innately better at handling complexity than those competitors, complexity will actually create a substantial competitive advantage for us.
If, on the other hand, we fail to make our companies more complexity-friendly, just the opposite occurs. Every new relationship, new channel, new product and new market makes it harder for our people to pinpoint information and expertise they need, when they need it. It takes longer and longer for knowledge inputs to make their way across our companies’ increasingly labyrinthine nervous systems—rendering us slower to sense and react to customer needs and market opportunities.
The imperative is therefore obvious. Either we proactively take steps now to make our companies more complexity-friendly, or we eventually become complexity’s victim.
Effective socialization, collaboration and search are particularly powerful solutions for handling organizational complexity. With socialization, it doesn’t matter if the information you need is in your personal documents folder or in the brain of an overseas partner. You’re going to be able to find it quickly and easily. Socialization therefore neutralizes complexity—rendering it powerless to prevent us from knowing what we need to know, when we need to know it.
This understanding of the relationship between socialization and complexity recasts the decision to embrace technologies such as Vivisimo’s Velocity Platform. Sure, no one wants to spend time and money on a technology solution without having some sense of the concrete ROI they’re going to achieve. But the stakes of the game are more than just improving sales staff productivity or reducing call-resolution times in the contact center—as worthwhile as those objectives may be. The ability to rapidly and effortlessly socialize information across and beyond the enterprise fundamentally transforms a company from one for which complexity is an enemy to one for which complexity is a competitive advantage.
Which one do you want your company to be?
collaboration, competitive advantage, complexity, information organization, information socialization, information technology, ROI, search, Velocity
