The Last New Year's Article on "Top Trends;" Or, Why KM is So Hard

Have no fear that "Adam Smith, Esq." is going to morph into a boot-licking, reverential conduit for re-distributing the year-end natterings of those ink-stained scribes from the MSM and the high-profile consultancies hoping to goose their annual bonus by producing yet another "ten trends..." or such-like:  The predictions tend to the bullet-proof, in that they flunk the fundamental tenet of vector analysis, which is that to fully specify the characteristics of a vector one must define it in all four dimensions (the fourth being time, or with objects in motion, speed).  "X is going to increase/decrease/start/stop," but omitted is where, when, or how fast.

(And lest you think I harbor a secret intellectual temptation to indulge in potentially-entertaining year-end prognostication myself, take a look at David Maister's comment to an earlier post: 

"With no disrespect to any law or consulting firm named here, I am deeply skeptical about all this. In the past, when asked to talk about the "Trends in the Profession" I used to use a 10-year-old slide which referred to no specific profession or country. Everyone fell for it - they all agreed that, yes these are the trends we will have to face.")

Nevertheless, sometimes consensus surveys are used to extrapolate trends, and they have value if only for the snapshot they provide of the common wisdom at a point in time.

Consider, then, CIO Insight's year-end survey of nearly 6,000 CIO's and CTO's (64%) and other top executives (36%), which generated no fewer than thirty "trends." 

A prefatory note:  The results of some of the non-trend-generating questions are intrinsicially interesting.   Two of the more hopeful:  #1:  "Our research also indicates that companies are giving more employees access to business intelligence tools, in hopes they apply the insights those systems generate."  Knowledge is power; distribute power lest it corrupt.   And #2:  78% of companies plan to increase profits through growth, not cost reduction. Gordon Bethune, the legendary former turn-around CEO of Continental Airlines, like to make the latter point with his pizza analogy: "The biggest cost component of a pizza is the cheese; if you're serious about cutting costs, eliminate the cheese."  

Off, then, to the trends.  And don't worry; I've narrowed their thirty down to four of note to us:

• Trend 7: The Hunger for Analysis and Intelligence Will Keep Growing:  By this, they mean "Business Intelligence," and specifically what I've called the second generation of "BI:"  "Already, mid-level managers and planning staff use BI tools at 61 percent of companies. [...] This widening use of ever more powerful analytical tools has enormous potential for the future. But the extent to which that potential is met will depend on how well the BI system connects to strategy and user needs."
• Trend 22: IT Architecture Becomes Critical to Business Strategy:  "What once appeared arcane will become more and more central. As high-growth companies have figured out, IT architecture and infrastructure have never been so closely tied to corporate strategy as they are today. It doesn't matter whether CIOs are trying to achieve faster growth, better business processes, lower costs or global expansion."  In other words, the basic "hygiene" of your information systems has to be rock-solid.  (1) Secure, reliable data (2) shared across all your offices and employees (3) on a common platform.
• Trend 24: Data Integration Is the Technology Pressure Point:  "Data quality will go from nice-to-have to need-to-have. Flexibility and openness remain nothing but talk, while standardization and virtualization remain useless, unless companies can reliably integrate their systems and ensure the quality of their data."  It's not just your corporate clients struggling with Sarbanes-Oxley that have to get their "data" squeaky-clean; it's your own firm as well.  Don't your clients have every right to expect you can and do handle your own data with the utmost scrupulousness?
• Trend 27: Knowledge Management Regains Respect:  Isn't this the perennial whipping boy, the classic example of the "evergreen" prediction?  (My favorite is, "Brazil will lead the way the next decade," which we've been hearing since before Sputnik.)  But listen to what CIO Insight has to say at some length about KM (emphasis supplied):

  "CIOs haven't given up on its promise. Knowledge management has long suffered a bad rap as a sexy technology that falls short on delivering business value. But for two years in a row, KM has ranked a respectable 7th on our list of critical technologies. (Twenty-one technologies were ranked on this list in 2005.) This is happening in part because many of the technologies that fall under the aegis of KM have come into their own: collaboration tools, corporate portals, content management and business intelligence.
  
  "These technologies aren't mere repositories for knowledge, as earlier KM systems tended to be. They route knowledge to the people who need it, or embed what the company has learned into a process. As companies find these knowledge-managing technologies helpful, they'll look for new, effective ways to manage corporate know-how and put it to work."

I would be the last person to tell you that KM is easy, and I'm both unsurprised and essentially unperturbed that it's taking us so long to get it right.  We are, after all, dealing in some cases with "knowledge" that is so contextual and nuanced as to be almost ineffable.  And it's not just those at the peak of the empyrean professions:   Consider the story in today's WSJ of the technology columnist trying to make polite conversation with a FedEx guy in a high-rise office elevator.  WSJ Guy:  "So, is it quicker to work top to bottom or bottom to top?"  FedEx Guy (dead serious):  "It depends on the time of day."

Put that in a database!