Collaboration leads to innovation, and as IT begins to runs itself as a business,
collaborating with its customers within the enterprise, it must act as
the organizing channel for the schemes of innovation that will
inevitably arise. First of course, IT has to learn how to converse with
its customers.
Businesses with the courage to do it are
letting their customers begin to point the way for their future
development. When companies begin to listen, they find that they don’t
know their customers very well, and they don’t know what’s best for the
customer either.
Surveys are a limited method of finding
out what people want, because respondents are notoriously inaccurate
about themselves. Even reviewing traditional patterns is unreliable:
we’re learning that treating users on the basis of their historical
patterns offers far less relevant options than by deducing the needs
from scratch in context.
“Well-documented research has shown that contextual
targeting (a shopper’s current context regardless of historical
interests) gets 62 percent of the recommendations right while
historical behavioral targeting gets it right only 18 percent of the
time.” – The Long Tail of E-Commerce
Users when asked actively want to offer
feedback and suggestions. There is a voluntarism in people that usually
goes untapped. This is a squandered resource in an age of tight margins.
“customers want to volunteer ideas to their vendors
to help drive better products and services: what some have called
cocreation of value
“Simply put, Deep Marketing engages with customers to
gather their insights and opinions, which, in turn, drive actionable
knowledge.” – ‘Deep Marketing’ Engages Customers
The new knowledge gained from the
conversation is the driver of innovation. The IT culture needs to be
prepared for what will happen when it engages with all the stakeholders
of the enterprise in extended conversations: mandates for change will
come back, and IT will have to respond to them in one way or another.
As IT talks with its customers, it will discover the power of crowdsourcing, which could be thought of simply as distributed computing with democracy added.
“The genius of open source (and, I would argue, the
burgeoning world of Web 2.0’s user-created content) is that it offers a
way for people to contribute who were previously shut out from
contributing their knowledge and expertise.” – Nick Carr KOs Another Straw Man
Crowdsourcing is important because of the
undeniable productivity and efficiency gains, but the “wisdom of the
crowds” is no good simply as a mob rule: there needs to be organizing
principles and actors at work in the superstructure.
But
as IT will discover by including its users in its development
brainstorming, priceless and uniquely irreplaceable nuggets can enter
into the mix, at no extra cost, from the stakeholders themselves. As
Charles Leadbetter says, “There may only be 1% of active contributors
in any given community, but think how that can multiply a company’s
productive resources.” More...
“There are two important angles to this. The first is
that the current connected world and web 2.0 technology allows the
masses of users to contribute content in ways that were never possible
before. The second is that often innovation doesn’t actually come from
big corporations, or serial entrepreneurs pitching their next big idea
to the VC community, but from the users and consumers themselves.
“Mountain bikes weren’t invented by some bicycle
manufacturer. Enthusiasts made a mashup from available bicycle
components, and the sport was around for years before the first
specialist manufacturer Marin started.” – Leadbeater on consumer innovation
The purpose of IT’s acting like a business
is really to find a more productive way of doing its job: companies
today are not satisfied that IT is paying for itself, or giving the
company the right tools it needs to survive, or at least not quickly
enough. And business experience shows that involving the customers is
simply a more productive way to innovate.
Along the way IT
has to keep a careful balance between the democracy of the crowd and
the integrity of the network and its development path. The object is to
capture unstructured information and give it structure, and to cultivate the tacit knowledge of the enterprise, and to render it explicit.
