Web Services Journal :: Enabling the High Performance Corporation
by Jonathan Sapir, president of InfoPower, developers of SnapXT
...To quote Peter Drucker: "The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker."
Unfortunately, to date, our efforts to improve the productivity of this increasingly important segment of the organization have been less than spectacular. As is pointed out in a recent study by the Center for High Performance and its parent company Hudson Highland Group ("Unlock Corporate Performance: America's Knowledge Workers Provide The Key" download pdf) a "performance crisis" has hit Corporate America, hindering its ability to shake off the effects of the sluggish economy and return to sustainable growth.
...In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell searches for catalysts that precipitate a "tipping point" - that moment in time when the boiling point is reached. This concept holds that small changes will have little or no effect on a system until a critical mass is reached. Then one final small change "tips" the system and a large effect is observed.
One example of this phenomenon is the establishment of e-mail as a primary means of doing business. Although personal computers in business had been around in various forms since the early 1980s, they were not seen as primary means of communication. In order for that to change, several factors had to occur: PC prices had to come down low enough to place them on every desktop; users had to become more comfortable with their use to incorporate them into their daily routines; network technology had to improve to the point where internal connections extended throughout the organization; a public network (the Internet) had to be established to allow external point-to-point communication; and easy-to-use e-mail software had to be created. The tipping point came when e-mail software was on enough desktops to drive further adoption. Suddenly, if you didn't have e-mail you were out of touch, and unable to conduct business the way the rest of the world was conducting it.
Today, technology has become so ingrained in the daily life of business users that their requests for automated solutions far outstrip IT's ability to deliver them all. One of the consequences of this is that many users have resorted to creating their own solutions using desktop tools (for example, creating macros in spreadsheets to perform repetitive calculations). The problem with this is that these systems are isolated from the rest of the organization, and the tools used to build them are often ill-suited to the task at hand. But we are moving toward a tipping point, and the change will be swift and sudden. Key drivers toward this point are Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). These new concepts will enable solutions developed by and for a single business user to be easily extended to others in the organization. All that is needed to reach the tipping point is the right tool built on these concepts - a personal service builder (PSB).
...So what exactly is a PSB? One way to think of it is as a development environment that lets business users create simple applications with techniques such as mind mapping instead of writing code - or depending on IT to write the code. Those business users know their jobs very well. They know what they need to do it better. But unless they've taken programming courses, they've lacked the knowledge of how to translate their ideas into something practical. Now, business users simply need to understand the logic - A follows B follows C - and then map it out with the PSB. The rest happens behind the scenes...
K-Collector