the most part, we’re fine with delegating straightforward decisions to machines. But now there’s a widening area in which we’re not so sure how much decision-making power we really want to share with our software applications. For example, farmers used to decide when to water their crops. Now, exquisitely complex systems of machinery, software, mobile devices, and sensors – including cameras mounted on airborne drones and orbiting satellites – decide when it’s necessary to turn on the spigot.
The real question facing us is whether we want to use our increasingly sophisticated decision-making technology not just to grow better grapes and keep our shopping malls cool in the summer, but to improve the performance of our companies and organizations.
The question that executives should be asking is not about technology. For the most part, the technology you need to make better decisions is already available. The question executives need to ask is this: How do we transform our organizations into data-driven cultures?
The Digital Revolution Has Rewritten the Rules
It’s not exactly fresh news that digital information technologies have changed everything, but it’s worth repeating: Digital information technologies have changed everything.
On many levels, we all understand that we’re living through a revolution, but the reality has not fully set in. In the communications industry, for example, most of us pay lip service to “new media,” but few of us are genuinely comfortable operating within the digital environment, which now surrounds and envelops us so completely.
Some of my best friends still pine for “the good old days” when most of our business was done at lunches or over the phone. I also experience a twinge of nostalgia and fondness for the past. It’s only natural. In the past, everything was easier, simpler, and slower. Or at least, it seems that way.
What we had then, that we don’t have now, is a routine. There is no well-worn path or standard operating procedure – yet. For decades, we relied on a comparatively narrow set of reflexive responses to whatever challenges came our way. Table 1.1 is a gross simplification, but it will remind you of how we typically dealt with problems before everyone had a computer, a smartphone, and a Facebook account.
Table 1.1 Typical Responses of Functional Silos Operating within Traditional Organizations
Collaborating, Crowdsourcing, and Co-Creating
Modern digital technologies don’t merely help us manage larger amounts of information more quickly – they enable us to interact with the information we handle. We are no longer passive customers of information – we sample it, we modify it, and we share the results of our improvised tinkering across the social networks that we help to create. Today, everyone is a publisher.
In the past, developing and distributing content required significant upfront investments of capital. You needed lots of money to buy printing presses and television transmitters. And you needed even more money to hire people with the skills, talent, and experience necessary to create content that you could distribute profitably to a large audience. Publishing and broadcasting companies were run like factories – products were manufactured from component materials and then distributed through various channels to customers.
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