Good article. I would also say that IT isn't the biggest problem of the automakers, but I agree about ESSP and Enterprise 2.0

Good article. I would also say that IT isn't the biggest problem of the automakers, but I agree about ESSP and Enterprise 2.0

Success is not a product of the availability of the ‘right’ information (how to overcome biases?) but concerted action on reliable knowledge of patterns of behavior and an honestly shared understanding of reality. This is the only reliable means for protection from mistakes due to the common failure to see beyond assumptions and generalizations.

The decision makers in the auto industry need to go beyond the obvious in their fast paced competitive world for defining problems, solutions and strategy. They are not the first to have suffered for want of reliable means to grasp reality and apply knowledge. Ford had a taste of it when they disregarded the feedback from their own force on why their SUVs were turning turtle. Kodak experienced it when the hubris of being the best caused them to lose sight of the competition. Intel paid heavily for believing a remote error unearthed by an academic could be safely denied.

I agree with the evaluation that free flow of knowledge has the power to emerge the reality. Emergence is an attribute of free flow. However, ESSPs do not have the power to assure the feedback needed to provide this free flow of knowledge. Free flow requires total coordination irrespective of chaos, the assurance of constructive feedback, and categorization to organize content, place it in context and deliver it persuasively with reference to accumulated experience. It needs to be addressed to people engaged with the issue and requires a drive to follow up on action or response and progress the flow. This coordination, feedback, organization and drive requires time and energy that personnel are simply too busy or pre-occupied to provide. Like Fred Johanson has opined, it will take a near impossible culture in an impractical time frame for personnel to achieve this free flow. IT is of no help today because it cannot anticipate the unpredictable flow of Knowledge work to deliver categorization and coordination. ESSPs submit to the prevailing conventional wisdom that personnel must self-organize.

In conclusion I would like to point to AndrewÂ’s blog of March 25, 2007. There he uses Tom DavenportÂ’s gift with words to warn against techno utopianism: “…Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – wonÂ’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic.” I would say it is time to get the philosophy right. The need is convergence of technology with free flow and I believe it is possible.

Why you take the IT job and not the HR or strategic ? Why you seems to reduce the entreprise 2.0 to this IT approach.

You mess all the sociological approach, how to keep faith, motivation for all the staff in this time of crisis ?

I’m a litlle disapointed by your answer to this challenge

I doubt if social networking could really substitute for a good ERP system. Collaborative payroll is probably still a long way off; even with “digital natives” controlling the company. When I hear that term I get this “Lord of the Flies” sort of image.

No, I don’t believe there will be salvation for the Big Three; but, if there was, it would be rooted in more traditional, “competition from startups” motivating them to further refine their structure, trim waste, lower prices and control greed.

With all the difficulty that the Detroit 3 are in, one area where they are often ahead of the pack is in their IT usage.

Ralph Szygenda of GM is the poster child of global IT sourcing.

Chrysler’s IT team did a gun point divorce from Daimlers IT systems at a rate no one thought possible.

The automakers have utilized technology to slash the idea to car concept by massive amounts.

Technology allows an engineer in Detroit, and one in California to review the same CAD files.

GM can tell in seconds when **one** of some 80,000 devices experiences a glitch.

Of the many failings they have, their IT teams have put in their share of improvements.

Regards,

Elliot Ross

(isn’t it interesting that comments are usually not prefaced with some form of salutation? but I digress…)

I feel that maybe this post should’ve been called “Twitter saves the Big 3″ or something to that effect While I always enjoy your thoughts, I think I am (almost) completely over the social media hype. We’ve had discussion forums forever and all the major “new” technologies are at the core not very different, if at all – people post messages. You can call it blogs, tweets, comments, whatever, it’s essentially all the same: people type in text that is associated with an online persona and widely viewable. Woopdeedoo. What seems to me implied in your whole fanatasy rescue plan here is that people by and large don’t have a problem with and actually want to leave electronic messages. And that’s where I think you are indeed living in a fantasy land. Forget about time – which is a great point – but people over a certain age, I would argue, just aren’t down with “socializing” by sitting in front of a computer screen and hacking away at the keyboard. The new generation of people I think will be a lot more comfortable with this, but until they grow up en masse and enter the workforce any e2.0 (god what a stupid name) platform will just fail – which brings actually brings us back to the time issue: maybe in 10, 20 years this could be a lot more successful, but now, I’d bet against it. So if you actually got to be head of IT and proposed to save the automakers by a social networking platform… not even sure what to say because that already sounds so ridiculous.

Social networking may be successful with geeks who _like_ spending all their time ruining their eyes staring at a big lightbulb, but I think the average joe walking down the street – or working at an auto company – would rather minimize their time sitting at the comp and would consider the idea of “socializing” online utterly nonsensical.

The real million dollar question I think is how could computer systems capture human knowledge without the knowledge possessor having to interface _directly_ with that system? Also, how can we reduce the time spend staring at a screen?

And finally, how social is it to sit silently in front of a screen typing in words??? Does that not increase our sense of separateness and otherness from everyone else, thereby strengthening the egoic illusion? But again, I digress.

Let me apologize in advance if I came across as insulting or offensive, this is surely not my intent… I’m just really can’t hear about these “social” utilities saving the day any longer.

- Jaded knowledge worker

Lots of good points to your list, let me add some quickly, I’ll try to do a blog post for a more complete comment:

(I’ve posted a simple framework to support those comments here as a single slide)

- An integrated suite of ESSPs does not exist, at least not a good one.

- I would take advantage of the various cloud options available to switch hosting and drastically reduce costs. Along with this, “outsource” things like email by using Gmail for the enterprise or similar offering. Basically, looking at cutting costs on the infra layer without cutting features or even by adding new ones.

- Would also look at the office suites like Zoho to cut licenses cost.

- Open source: same commitment here, lots of potential cost savings without reducing the capabilities.

- For in-house applications, I would leverage RIA technologies like Air, in order to efficiently build applications which have a good UI, as well as an on- and off-line version.

- I would also focus more on the outside ecosystem of the company: your list is mostly inwardly focused, but lots of potential lies at the edge of the company.

Of course, an ESSPs suite would be at the core, exactly as you exposed it, however I would use the cost savings produced on the other fronts to get buy-in to be ambitious on the ESSP front.