Bloglines - Innovation is a Human Ability

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The FASTForward Blog

Innovation is a Human Ability By Paula Thornton on Enterprise 2.0 Recent posts have spoken of challenges to Enterprise 2.0. The dissenters seem to  mistakenly assume that Enterprise 2.0 is a technology play. This reflects a common mind-set, um, among technologists — they forget about the people and process portions of the solution triad. Certainly there are technological components, but they are simply enablers. Optimizing the potential rests with the people and process dimensions. Even one of my respected colleagues seems to miss this point when he suggests that "it is vital for intranets to innovate". Just as Jared Spool correctly argues that interfaces cannot intuit, intranets cannot innovate. Innovation is a human ability, not a technical one. Technologies can be deemed 'innovative', but do not innovate. Enterprise 2.0 provides necessariy but insufficient means by which to facilitate the potential of individuals to innovate. The potential can easily surpass Knowledge Management initiatives, which were doomed by edict as a misnomer. There is no value in managing knowledge, an intert collection of bytes. The value is in facilitating human potential. Leveraged correctly, this is an opportunity to identify and crush limitations/barriers to human potential. When considering the process dimension, focus on the original premises of BPR (to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for automating it) and challenge defined process and methods seeking for focused simplicity. The goal is to mechanize the work, not the worker. But to recognize that the greatest value humans contribute is in managing varability. Automate the fixed dimensions and facilitate for variability. Critical to such efforts is a fundamental premise: innovation is fueled by design thinking. If Enterprise 2.0 is left to the practices of IT, it will fail. Where many IT floors are often more culturally diverse than the rest of the organization, they often lack true intellectual diversity. That's not to say that the staff do not have diverse intellectual potential, but that typically such potential is restrained by methods and operating cultures. I have found truly creative technology people who 'change their identify' when they go to work, as a survival tactic. I suggest that it is not Enterprise 2.0 that is threatened by this renaissance, it is the survival of the current IT model that is in question. Comments