A Better Way to Do Things on the Fly
40% of business is ad hoc. That is according to a 2004 report from McKinsey, entitled Making a Market in Knowledge
McKinsey calls doing things on the fly “Tacit business interactions”. Dion Hinchcliffe has a great article detailing the implications of the McKinsey called Leveraging Web 2.0 for business growth. Dion created this graph to clearly show how important these tactic business interactions are:
When CTOs and CIOs consider Enterprise 2.0 / Web Office / Office 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis, they need to consider these tools in the context of these tacit interaction.
Today, when business people work on the fly, they use email, instant messages, MS Word and Excel. The work flows that result have significant quality, risk management and control issues. Specifically, today’s ad hoc processes lack clear audit trails, access control, and often any kind of security through encryption.
In addition, today’s processes are not leverageable. If you cut & paste to build this month’s report, you are going to have to cut and paste to build next months report. If you stuck this month’s report in a shared drive, how can an auditor find it, how can your colleagues find it, and how does anyone know how you built it, or how they could replicate it should you get run over by the proverbial bus?
Enterprise 2.0 Provides a Safer Alternative.
If companies want to build more secure, more structured and more efficient ad hoc information analysis and distribution processes, then those companies should consider using blogs, wikis and Office 2.0 tools as a replacement for today’s emails, IMs and shared drives littered with word and Excel.
Buying Enterprise 2.0 Means Making the Right Comparison
When a large company starts using blogs or wikis, they are inevitably going to apply the technology to these 40% of business processes that are built on the fly.
When compared with a massive customized system, such as a customized trade management tool, blogs and wikis do not look that interesting.
However, when compared with today’s tools, such as email, word and excel, blogs and wikis quickly demonstrate why they are better tools.
this article is dated but was ahead of its time in thinking about the potential of a web 2.0 business model. the workflow ideas are top line but still not in use by so many companies even 3 years after this was written.