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| Home - Industry Article - June 08 Issue |
Finding the Balance Between User Creativity and System Controls |
By Tim Tisdale, CTO & Co-Founder, ThoughtBridge
It’s the age-old question. How much freedom do you
give users when it comes to IT systems? In the past, this
question was not an issue discussed during IT meetings. Most
systems were mainframe- based and transaction-oriented. Changes
made were planned well ahead of time with many controls and
checks in place. I can remember when PCs were a novelty and
networks were based on protocols other than TCP/IP. The Internet
has changed the approach on how we think about systems forever.
Every day, I see business leaders’ priorities shifting from
thinking about IT as an unfortunate cost they have to incur, to
instead, a strategy for winning the race against competition.
The ability to process information, find the answer and make an
important move before your competitor is at the top of the mind
in every strategy meeting. However, one of the big areas that I see
missing in a lot of planning and strategy sessions is unlocking
the wealth of information in their most important asset – their
people. On numerous occasions, I have heard comments from IT
staff about their lack of confidence in the ability for
end-users to manage information. Comments such as, “Our systems
would be flawless if we didn't have users to deal with” or
comments about, “What a disaster it would be to enable users to
have this right or that feature enabled.” Yes, it's true, that
in the past, even if they could figure it out, enabling users to
make a change to a mainframe application or one of the numerous
structured ERP systems that we've spent millions on, probably,
would have been a disaster. Today is a different time.
Life is fast, business is fast and decisions have to be fast.
There are numerous new technologies being employed and used by
users today, most as a result of the Internet. Remember when
everyone thought that you had to have a master Navigation menu
for finding information on a web-based platform or that you had
to be an HTML developer to publish information on the Internet?
Excite, Yahoo, Wikipedia and other technologies changed our
culture and our way of thinking about that.
One thing I have always wondered about is why don't we see more
of these innovations cross into corporate systems? Years after
these innovations have happened, business leaders of medium to
large corporations are just now exploring these technologies,
but still with hesitation. I can say that I haven't seen that
problem with small companies. Why is that? Is it because the
bigger we get, the more controls we put in place? What if a
large corporation implemented innovations as quickly as a small
company? What technology would support an environment where
employees could use technology to create new innovations and
form it to the way they do business? In my opinion, one of the
greatest additions to corporate systems that can be game
changing is the latest round of collaboration platforms
available to corporations right now. One platform in particular
that has gained mass appeal is Microsoft's SharePoint platform.
I have followed this platform over the years and recently have
witnessed how dramatic the impact is when this technology is
adopted and embraced as a strategy. More importantly, placing
the emphasis on the adoption and empowerment of the technology
by end-users as a strategy.
For the first time, business users have a set of web-based tools
to create their own ‘mini-systems’ that can live in between the
more expensive ‘structured systems.’ These mini-systems are
built by the person who knows the most about their business –
themselves. New efficiencies happen when a user configures the
tool to match ‘the way that they do business’ while still being
maintained on a safe and secure central server. The platform is
basically a large collection of ‘information gathering’ and
‘information sharing’ tools layered with workflow, search,
personalization and numerous other capabilities that I don't
want to list here.
My whole point of this article is, what happens when we don’t
trust these users and allow them to work with these new
technologies? What if we don't embrace the new wave of corporate
social networking by thinking that users will lose productivity
with these new advances? I feel that the time has come to
rethink the way we approach business systems. One of my favorite
analogies is that if you build a brick wall next to a tree, the
tree doesn’t stop growing; its branches will just grow in the
opposite direction. The way people share information is a lot
like that. As business leaders, we can either continue to build
walls or tear them down and enable users to innovate. Empowering
people has always been the best resource for innovation. Will
you embrace it first or will your competitor?
Tim Tisdale is CTO and Co-Founder of ThoughtBridge, an
innovative business-improvement and application-consulting firm
that bridges the gap between business and technology by helping
clients visualize, organize and manage corporate information by
leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).
He has over 18 years of technology leadership and business
experience gained through his representation of various
successful corporations throughout the state of Georgia. As the
think-tank behind ThoughtBridge, Tim is responsible for the
vision and strategy around the technologies and solutions the
firm specializes in. He has created service divisions and
Internet companies, led corporate IT divisions and served as a
CTO for a billion-dollar corporation. During the .com
revolution, Tim invented and executed a click to brick ecommerce
strategy for a national corporation that is still in use and
profitable today. For article feedback, contact Tim at
ttisdale@thoughtbc.com
 
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