The Problem with Big Companies
Is embodied by the culture which produces this:
It’s not that IT is unaware of these new tools and methodologies. The networking folks in attendance at Interop certainly are well aware of Web 2.0/E2.0 and the collaborative powers the technologies have to offer. The biggest challenge is attaching hard-dollar business value to the solutions.
As Tom Marcin, director of global telecommunications at DuPont, put it at one panel discussion:
“We’re now being asked to build social networks and self-forming networks to solve business problems. We’re expected to transform businesses. But guess what, we’re expected to reduce costs. Collaboration tools are of value to us. But we can’t sell a project on migrating 60,000 employees, based upon the soft benefits associated with it. I need to show demonstrable savings directly linked to the solution we put in. One month of data on a pilot would not cut it.”
JP would love this. Classic case of institutional coveryourass-itis, aka M.A.I.D. - mutually assured innovation destruction.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:21 pm
In my experience IT leadership also likes to spend resources on keeping the grass roots from innovating. Truly amazing to watch.
-JD
June 5th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
This is the same reason why the Useability team was discarded at our ex-employer Sean - and also why I found it so hard to get team and management traction on using and supporting wiki and wiki-like applications.
June 5th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
oops - sent post too soon. I think you also had to push quite hard to get the IM app upraded no? And in each case the resistance was the management line that the apps did not have a prove objective cost-benefit. Of course, part of the problem was the overhang of paying for old, legacy, poorly specified projects, and the ongoing costs of supporting and gluing together the non Web2 application universe.
The cost of using and supporting a the MS Exchange landscape on its own should have persuaded people that there must be anohther way.
Finally I think the biggest problem was in explaining what these apps were for. I would be met with blank looks by both IT (JP a notable exception) and management with my stock answer : “to communicate and converse”.
I don’t have really good messages on this one, I am merely a bewildered observer of the MAID phenomena. It just might be that within the corporate firewall life will only change long after everyone else does.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
As discussed here:
http://waratah.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/datanews-vendors-as-ecns-are-they-the-right-providers/
and by Holky here:
http://mostly.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/no-more-innovation/
This has huge relevaqnce in the emerging duopoly (Bloomberg and Thomson-Reuters) that is Fixed Income e-Trading!
June 26th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
I don’t think there has never been such a fertile ground for innovation around the edges in the financial services industry. The big guys can’t do it, and to be fair are so profitable these days that they don’t really even care. Little tiny mammals and big bad dinosaurs: interesting ecosystem to say the least. To your point Darren, I think Carlota Perez hit the nail on the head when she highlighted that socio-institutional changes (ie what is perceived as ‘common sense’ or ‘conventional’) takes much longer (usually c. 20 years) to arrive after any significant change in the technological-economic paradigm. This is often the cause of great opportunity (and at the same time great stress) in the economy as the previous ‘common sense’ resists adaptation to the new technological paradigm. In other words, you are right - inside the (big) corporate firewall change is only possible at the speed of general cultural change and so measured in decades, whereas technological change is measured in years (or even months.) If you subscribe to Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating (Technology) Returns, it will be interesting to see if the accelerating pace of technological change completely breaks the ability of culture and institutions to ‘catch up’ over the cycle.