Dancing around the IT Flower
Samuel Driessen over at infoarch asks an interesting question about the IT Flower framework.
Does this framework also acknowledge these mixed work processes and environments? Yes, if I’m not mistaken. These mixed environments would be in the “leaves” “ad hoc apps” and, especially, “process tools to add knowledge work”. Examples of the “ad hoc apps” are mentioned.
Samuel is correct. Transactional workers sometimes do knowledge work. Knowledge workers sometimes do transactional work. And people often have to slip between following highly structured processes for some parts of their job, such as getting approval for a large expense, and totally unstructured processes, such as discussing strategy with colleagues.
Interestingly, people often have to go through all four of these combinations of types of work and how work gets done during a single business project. Hiring someone often involves all four. Today, most companies don’t use ad hoc applications to help with parts of the process. Many companies also do not use tools to help add structure to the tacit parts of the process. Instead they use manual effort, MS Office and lots of nagging follow-up emails.
Samuel also hit the nail on the head when he said “The key for the tools vendors will be to allow users to switch easily between tools that support the different types of work. This will truly help workers “get work done”!”
[…] Dancing around the IT Flower […]
I have a question: how the IT Project Managers Professionals — like me — are included into the IT Flower? Could you talk about this?
Thanks a lot.
Hi Nelson,
Your question gives me a great idea for a post. Thank you. Project management is trying to impose structure on tacit work or knowledge work.
There are some Enterprise 1.0 tools to help with this, such as MS Project. There are also Enterprise 2.0 tools such as 37 signals Basecamp.
I do need to point out that there is a difference between the ad hoc nature of project management design and the more structured nature of actually getting a project done, complete with its deadlines, etc.
Hope this helps,
Rod
Thanks for your comment on my blog and this post, Rod!
I gave the IT Flower some more thought. I was wondering if you were going to elaborate on “structured process + knowledge work”(page 26 of whitepaper)? Are there tools that fit this cluster? Or is there a combination of tools that fit it? The closest that comes to my mind would be something like MOSS 2007 (with workflow tooling). (But that’s kind of boring…)
And I was wondering if “IT” Flower is the correct name for your framework. Isn’t it more a work(place) framework on which you can map IT tools/markets?
I left some more comments on my blog.
[…] I can for example make a case for loosely coupled and ad hoc processes that fit fellow Irregular Rod Boothby’s IT Flower model for adding value into processes like PLM but in the real world that has yet to be seen […]
[…] like this short visualization, I agree with Rod and think that this is also a helpful starting point for (IT-related) Social Software discussions, […]