I enjoyed Jim Stogdill’s recent post My Web Doesn’t Like Your Enterprise, at Least While it’s More Fun, about the various perceptions around the speed of Enterprise IT versus Web IT.  He writes

“Artur replied with this quote from one of his friends employed at a large enterprise: “What took us a weekend to do, has taken 18 months here.” That concise statement seems to sum up the view of the enterprise, and I’m not surprised. For nearly six years I’ve been swimming in the spirit-sapping molasses that is the Department of Defense IT Enterprise so I’m quite familiar with the sentiment.I often express it myself.”

Jim goes on to say that Enterprise IT is like this for good reason, a natural outgrowth of what is important to their business, their customers, and their shareholders, and that eventually the web too will be this boring, this predictable, and this unexciting.  Perhaps, but it there is another side to this discussion.

IT is the whipping boy because they are in an unfair position: the world is moving faster, business is moving faster, compliance is getting harder, budgets are shrinking, yet the kids in the Cloud can afford to make mistakes (think: Twitter downtime) with no one caring, and so IT consumers (employees) have unrealistic expectations (think: be as good as my stuff at home, dammit).

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My good friend Donald MacCormick sent me this little video outlining how he used Polestar to review the partners that attended our recent conference. I thought it worth sharing:

Access to information remains one of the biggest concerns to information workers. And we also here that information workers spend as much as 20% of their time trying to find information.

The cost of not responding to the avalanche of information can add up, yet not be immediately visible to CEOs and CFOs. In surveys of U.S. companies, we have found that information workers spend 14.5 hours per week reading and answering email, 13.3 hours creating documents, 9.6 hours searching for information, and 9.5 hours analyzing information. Expanding Digital Universe (IDC)

Search is often seen as the solution to reducing the amount of time spent searching for information. This may be true, but it presumes that the information worker would be able to access the information they need. If access is not available, the workers instead must rely on their network and spend their time working on finding out who has the information.

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Jason Kincaid wrote a nice piece on TechCrunch about the progress of OpenSocial (a standard interface for plugging your social application into a social network), with a rather attractive and impressive chart:

So what does this have to do with decision making? Not much, but it is such a pretty chart, so I thought I’d post it.

Actually, it is a bit relevant. We’ve talked about how the workplace is being transformed, and this is part of the reason… the increasing social aspects of applications. While OpenSocial is usually talked about in context of the popular consumer Social Networks (which gives them the ridiculous and oft-misleading numbers above), a growing number of enterprise applications are starting to utilize it, for a simple reason: it is not that hard, and it gives you wide reach.

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I’m a big fan of Zipcar, as those around me know.  I just reserved one for tomorrow, and since I waited so long, I had to choose a pickup waiting at a local McDonalds, instead of my usual Prius down the street.  But I didn’t mind since it took me only about 25 seconds to find it, book it, and have a car ready for me tomorrow at 5:30 AM.

As I did this I was thinking about speed.  Satisfying the speed of business is not about perfection  — it is about things being good enough, provided they are fast enough.

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The report’s authors state that good decision-making needs:

1. High-quality data
2. Access to advanced systems and training
3. Sound judgment
4. Trust
5. Flexibility

My colleague Timo also blogged on this some time ago - here.

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I work at a large company.  My nature is to move quickly, which often feels impossible.  In the past few weeks, a lot of the impossibility has involved not knowing the right people.

A lot of smart people think about this, for example the labcoats behind Organization Network Analysis.  Looking at how people work together in a network can often yield surprising insights into whether the organization can move fast or slowly.

A lot of the rest of us do this everyday without thinking about it, with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and the rest, leveraging each other to speed ourselves up (I didn’t list MySpace, since that slows people down).

But it comes down to one thing… the degree to which you can communicate effectively, quickly, and trustfully with the people you need to get things done.  If you couldn’t conceivably get agreement with someone over IM then you don’t have the right relationship with them to decide things in business time.  The last guy I hired I negotiated purely over SMS while I was on the tarmac, otherwise I would have lost him.

Fast Fast Fast Fast requires People People People People.

What are the elements of a decision, what is the basic structure that every decision can encompass.

Access to information

Most decisions will require some information, especially if we want to make an informed decision. Information comes in many forms of course. Ideally we have direct access to all the information to make our decision immediately. In reality we will likely have access to some, have to hunt for some, and have to rely on experience or guesswork when we cannot expend the time to collect or discover the gaps.

And of course, before we worry about the quality of that information, we have to be able to get to it. This remains the biggest blockage for user - actually getting access to information. Most information workers - 60% in recent survey by the economist - continue to lack access to the information they need to complete their tasks:

Source: “Enterprise Knowledge Workers: Understanding Risks and Opportunities” - available here 

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How often have you heard someone say “We need to be making fact-based decisions” as apposed to “Gut-feel based decisions”

Timo Elliott a colleague of mine has this to say:

It’s one of our core beliefs that decisions made on data are better, of course Scott Adams has a slightly alternate take on that…

Before we can really start to assess whether facts assist us in making decisions, we need to be able to achieve a few other things. The very first thing is we need to find the facts. And given that Butler Group state:

“a number of surveys have concluded that an information-based worker is spending between one and 20 hours each week searching for information”

It appears were spending a lot of time collecting information. Anything we can do to reduce the time spent looking for information and increase the time spent looking at information would seem to be important to getting better decisions faster.

And that is the project I have been working on for a while - BUSINESSSOBJECTS POLESTAR. How to get from “I have a question” to “Here is some useful data” as fast as possible - and to make that accessible and usable by anyone.

“Polestar combines the simplicity of search with the power of BI to offer an iTunes-like interface that will appeal to a currently under-served segment of BI users.” - Cindi Howson, Founder BI Scorecard

So before posting some content. I thought first to welcome everyone to this sight.  A little about myself.

My name is Adam Binnie

I am a Vice President of Product Management at Business Objects an SAP Company. My profile is available at:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/adambinnie

My focus is on how we can continue to apply technology to the very human problem of making decisions. Specifically how to make better decisions faster - to improve the decision velocity so we can all go faster in the right direction.