I am not a technologist.  There, that’s out, for anyone who may still be labouring under the misapprehension that I understand anything about information technology even remotely, other than conceptually what it does and how it gets done..  However, I do spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of technology and its use on human sociology and anthropology in the work and business arenas..

That’s why when this Whit Andrews (Gartner’s lead analyst on search) quote on the FASTForward Enterprise 2.0 blog caught my eye, I immediately began thinking about what this means for knowledge workers and organizations still working on understanding what E2.0 means to them and for them.

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“End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

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It can be argued, and successfully (I think) that notwithstanding much work at integration there’s a lot of siloed and compartmentalized information systems in use out there … and you can even be forgiven for assuming or thinking that information technology designed to do what a given business process needs done is natural.  However, it remains problematic for many organizations today that accessing information is mightily influenced by the architecture of specialized applications, and those specialized applications have often been designed for siloed or functionally separated business processes and organizations

The "forcing of architecture on access strategy" has (both unconsciously and at times consciously, I think) come about due to 1) a general replication-of-reporting-relationships-on-the-org chart as the formal route or map for the information flows supported by the architecture, and 2) insufficient attention to the patterns of information flow actually used in the process of putting information and knowledge to work.

Silo-busting and improved cross-functional communications have long been two of the primary objectives of many organizations in their quests for greater effectiveness and efficiency, or their "search for excellence" as they work on going "from good to great".  And more often than not they still are.

However, with the advent of the "user revolution" that Web 2.0 continues to promise and enable, real and substantive change can be seen on the horizon.  I have said before, and continue to believe, that the use of social software with minimal policy restrictions beyond "don’t be stupid" would go a long way towards silo-busting and opening up cross-functional flows of information, support accelerated and deeper learning and increase the opportunities for innovation that bubble up from committed and engaged people working together on purpose.

End users in a Web 2.0 environment now have a wide choice of tools for sharing and shaping what they know and what they learn, and it’s highly probable that they (as a generality) do not want one or a few applications imposed by the organization "forcing their hand" so to speak.  They want to use the tools they find easy, or that work nicely with their cognitive, communications and collaboration styles, and they want to be able to change when something better comes along.  And increasingly they don’t "understand" why what they want to use won’t work with the systems in place.

 "End-users … do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable" ….

Welcome to another episode of the "mass customization of work".

Remember all the systems training courses to which you used to send all sorts of workers ?  As JP Rangaswami has been known to state, "Tomorrow’s workers have been using online applications, platforms, widgets and services for a while now, and so they’ll be all trained up when they report to work".

 It’s the organizations for which they will work that have to be trained now

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