The corporation exists on its
network, and through the disciplines of knowledge management is
striving hard to bring all of its value chain onto the network For an
example of one formerly disconnected piece joining the stream, see The Rewards of Automating Data Management on the Shop Floor,
which says that “firms that measure operations and then relate the
figures to finance perform best.” This is an ongoing enterprise task
made more complex by its global outsourcing and third-party
relationships.
The network is the value chain, and as the
enterprise brings its operations onto the network, fully connected with
its knowledge management system, the value and utility of those
operations increase. The network effect operates upon the operation. Exposing the data to the human workers, and the converse, is what enriches the network.
One of the most impressive trends visible in the world of CRM,
and enterprise knowledge management, and one that should cause no
surprise, is the growing force of people-driven innovation,
commensurate with the growing spread of the tools given to people to
collaborate.
We often speak of the liberating aspect of software,
by which we mean that when you provide ordinary people with a lot of
new functions, they create new and better ways of doing things that you
might not have conceived yourself. In the macrocosm, we architect for
maximum possibilities; in the microcosm, people fill in the blanks, and
then some.
That “then some” is the feedback from the
markets and the consumers that show the margin between what you design
for and what people want next, now that you’ve shown them what’s
possible. In the evolution of the network and its software agents,
ultimately the shape of the whole is drawn by the innocent consumers of
its services, and only partially by its architects. And only as the
architects draw blueprints for liberation – always with potential chaos
at the edges, and rock-solid standards at the core – does the
marketplace of usefulness endorse their developments.
All
of this is to say that the future is uncertain for every company
currently at work in the worlds relating to software. Today’s giants
may be gone in a decade, and today’s apparent has-beens can reinvent
themselves to become almost unrecognizable, in a new glory, tomorrow.
With all this in mind, it becomes instructive to take a look at
Microsoft, as it rolls along its development path, working
energetically to survive and prosper in the new software age
The
attention-getting glamor of the Web has forcibly demonstrated to
business strategists everywhere the truth of that prophetic Sun
Microsystems pronouncement, the network is the operating system. Microsoft used to own the operating system, but the Web seems too big
for any one entity to own. So can Microsoft even be a player?
Well,
the spoiler is, we think the answer is “yes”, and plenty of other
people think so too, although there’s the other school of thought that
says, Microsoft is Dead.For some detail about this, however, you’ll have to tune in tomorrow,
to catch Part Two of our assertion that Microsoft is very much alive.
