Gartner PCC Summit 2007 (part 2)

“Portal, Content and Collaboration Scenario 2007-2012" (by Andy Kite and Debra Logan) at PCC 2007 Summit

Beyond Productivity

Redefine your notions of what it means to be productive. Move beyond the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

20th Century Model: the law of diminishing returns
21th Century model: Innovation breeds innovation - infinitely. Marginal Innovation Curve.

Think about how IT really helps people do there work. How does IT contribute to business. It has to be more than making it better, faster, etc.

Trends
- changing expectations from the users and the business
- redefinition of core concepts
- new software delivery models (away from computer centers built on mainframes to on-demand services)
- consolidation of application functionality, vendors and market categories
- PCC (& IA) will become embedded and pervasive.

Debra wants to look back and give a brief history IT. Goes back to the cave men that via walls passed on information, to the monk in the 15^th century. 1950’s the mainframe, 1970’s SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, 1990’s the Internet, Yahoo, Amazon and Google. I miss the social media liftoff in 2000 and on.

Andy points to the fact that the increase in the amount of people in the world also changes what productivity is. There are simply more people to interact with and it’s more easy to interact with them than ever before. Simply driving down the time to place and transmit a purchase order, is not the way to go. Take a good look where you IT money goes to.

Most of the IT money goes to:
- hardware and facilities (32%)
- operations staff (18%)
- applications software (16%)
- telecom services (14%)
- infrastructure services (8%)
- Infrastructure IT services (5%)
- Non-operations staff (4%)
- Infrastructure software (3%)

How much of these dollars are really going into improving your business processes? What are you delivering to the people who think? Mostly people say “email”… So, think again where the budget is going. Yes, it’s an uphill battle…

Person-centered computing is disruption from the bottom. If you’re not doing it the user will do it themselves.

What are PCC drivers?
- IT part of the fabric of normal (nonwork) life (mix of work, personal, family and community life)
- multiple devices (more use of noncompany equipment on company networks)
- user frustration over nonintegration
- high-bandwidth connectivity
- automatic updates of Internet applications
- Advertising and other revenue sources

But there is also disruption from the top.
CIO’s say the number 1 change in the future is: “exploitation of information as a strategic asset” (milk the data) and “knowledge work productivity improvement”. Momentarily CIO’s focus on “technology systems” and “managing service providers who operate the technology systems”. Somewhere in the middle we find “managing business process change” and “business model innovation”. So, CIO’s see a shift towards corporate capability.

Redefinition of work and productivity
- systematic work
- information work
Two totally different worlds.

T doesn’t matter - I do(es) matter
Nicolas Carr said “IT doesn’t matter”. And is right. Gartner says Carr is wrong too: Information does and technology facilitates the use of information. And PCC crosses this chasm.

How? PCC helps translate technology to business and business to technology. “PCC (&IA) lend themselves to the business innovation approach.” It not about cutting costs, but about expanding business.

And when we look at the trends, Gartner see more investing in PCC.
But, there is too too much talking about RIO still. You need to look at this in another way. The business case is not only about RIO.

This summit focuses on:
- Portals (most have more than one of these, even though you intended to have one),
- Content Management (transactional data is mostly management, but what to do with the unstructured information),
- Collaboration technologies (such as email, instant messaging, web conferencing, team sharing, social software). (By the way Debra said: The lawyers and security people fear and shun social software. She promissed this issue will be addressed. There you go, Loek (a colleague of mine)!)
- Search. Everybody expects it to work, but nobody really spends money on it. “It should work like Google." Debra says, It’s not the silver bullet and will not solve all you productivity issues.

3 keys to success with PCC:
- assess and work within existing culture and engagement (“you need information architects for this”, Debra says. Well, I completely agree with that…)
- look for return beyond ROI
- understand that there will always be tension between control and collaboration, governance and freedom