I was a little envious. HBR in the US is a fine publication, but there are too many sources of management advice for any particular channel to dominate the business dialogue. Maybe things have become too fragmented. If you want to get an idea out into the world today, you’ve got to publish an HBR article, write a few blog posts about it, get a few business magazines to write about it, be interviewed by Maria Bartiromo, do a YouTube video, and perhaps even Twitter about it. Maybe publish your own book, as Dave Balter argues on this site in a recent “conversation starter” (yet another medium?).

These are the heavy burdens on business authors, but they also fall on business readers. If you were an assiduous student of new business ideas, to where would you devote your scarce attention today? How would you choose among the thousands of management-oriented blogs? If everyone is publishing their own books, which publishers do you trust? It’s both the best and the worst of times for readers—there’s a vast amount of content, but it’s hard to know where to turn.

This content churn is perhaps responsible for the fact that nothing much seems to stand out among business ideas today. The business best-seller list, for example, is a little depressing. Good to Great is good, but is it that great? OK, The Tipping Point is a fun read, but does it really deserve to be on the list for 8 years? And don’t get me started on Who Moved My Cheese. The reading public for business books isn’t brain-dead; it’s just dazed and confused from the fragmentation of content sources. And I’m not sure how Humpty-Dumpty will ever be put back together again. Maybe I should develop a taste for pierogis and stay in Poland.

First, a little background. It is widely acknowledged that one of the problems that led to 9/11 and other intelligence failures is that our various intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA, ONI, BBC [just monitoring your alertness], etc.) did not share knowledge of terrorism threats with each other. As one response to this problem, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, and as another it created the Director of National Intelligence in 2005. Intellipedia was created in 2006 as a means of sharing information and knowledge across 16 intelligence agencies; some related blogs on a network called Intelink also serve this purpose.

Intellipedia is a good idea. However, it’s a bad idea to think that by itself it’s going to solve our information sharing problems. Fortunately the Office of the Director of National Intelligence hasn’t made that mistake. In their “U.S. Intelligence Community Information Sharing Strategy,” they note that, “Information sharing is a wide-ranging, multi-layered issue that spans governance, policy, technology, culture, and economic facets.” The document doesn’t even mention Intellipedia—and it shouldn’t, because it’s just one tool. The report focuses primarily on cultural and behavioral change—and it should, because that’s the hard part.

Garrett Hardin, perhaps the best-known ecologist in this world, has argued that ecology is based on the guiding principle, "We can never do merely one thing." If you want to encourage more information sharing in any organizational environment, you need to do a lot.

There are even some signs that Intellipedia is only somewhat successful as a single tool. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, some intelligence people who are working with Intellipedia said that only 10% of the eligible user population is actually using it, and that middle management isn’t comfortable with it. Of course, they probably need to get comfortable with tools like Intellipedia, but the mere existence of the tool isn’t going to make that happen.

If you haven’t already bounced to another site, I should say quickly that of course Nick is technically correct. This piece has his usual accuracy and perspicacity. The Internet is undeniably changing the way we read and think. Yes, you’ve shortened your attention span by reading this blog; you’re addicted to the literary cocaine that Google and the Web and email provide. If you’re younger than 25, you’ve probably already muttered “get over it” and moved along to Twitter.com.

But what, one might ask, is the point of pointing this out? Should a blue-ribbon commission be appointed to study ways we can halt the rotting of our brains? Should the Internet be banned in Boston? When George Bush finally leaves office and spends a lot of time on “the internets,” will he wish he had fought a war on online content rather than terrorism?

No. Nothing’s going to happen. Our neurons will continue to crave and be gratified by the stimulation they receive online. Once a new medium has been invented, we never go back to previous eras of literary languor. Despite many articles similar to Carr’s decrying the influence of television on the brain, we still watch, on average, 4 hours and 26 minutes a day of it.

The only possible way to take action, which Carr doesn’t even suggest, would be for individual readers to voluntarily change their own habits. Not much of this will happen either. For example, while Nick decries the fact that new emails appear on his screen while he’s consuming more substantial information fare, I’ll bet he hasn’t disabled that function (although it’s easy to do in most email clients). I know I haven’t.

All we can do is adapt. While Carr bemoans the fact that the first few pages of the print New York Times are made up of a news snippet index, it would be irrational for the Times editors to do otherwise. It would be irrational for Tolstoy to write War and Peace today. It would be irrational for The Atlantic not to put most of its content online. And it would be irrational of me not to make my next book shorter and snappier (let’s be candid; most books, including mine, shouldn’t be read word-for-word anyway). Informational nostalgia may have its partisans—and I sympathize with them—but they won’t prevail.

9. Ranked lists imply a comforting order to the universe. People like to believe that some people, teams, or companies are simply better than others. Never mind that it’s all about the criteria the rankers use, and the niggling detail that there may be no significant difference between ranks.

8. Lists can be worded tersely. They’re easy to write.

7. We’ve gotten conditioned to the context-free sentences (or even less) in lists, perhaps because of the popularity of bulleted lists in PowerPoint.

6. Lists are popular online because they are amenable to the “slide show” web format, which artificially runs up the page view count. In other words, they help to impress advertisers. Readers hate slide shows, but they seem to be proliferating nonetheless.

5. You can get away with silly statements in the middle of the list, because nobody’s reading closely at that point. For example, it’s clear to me that lists are to Internet content what Paris Hilton is to acting.

4. Lists are a good way to present jokes. Witness their popularity on Letterman since September 18, 1985 (“The Top Ten Things That Almost Rhyme With Peas" was the first ever).

3. Lists imply that you have exhausted the possibilities for items in them, although the predominance of the decimal system in our society means that you usually have to have ten items. Sometimes that means a need for artificial list fillers or repeats.

2. Lists seem to come in 10’s, so be wary of repetition.

1. Particularly when the numbers in the list are in decreasing order, there is an expectation that the number one item will be particularly momentous. Sadly, the last item rarely meets expectations.

I don’t doubt that these tools will have some impact on how governmental information and services are delivered. I also don’t have any doubt that they will not drive as much change as Don (and his co-author Anthony Williamson as quoted in a CIO Insight article ) apparently believe they will. Don said that “government 2.0” was the most important change for government in more than a century. Williamson (and Tapscott, to a slightly lesser degree) “foresees Web 2.0 technologies being employed to transform service delivery, make smarter policies, flatten silos and, most importantly, reinvigorate democracy.”

Of course, there may be a few hitches in this miraculous transformation. One caller who works in the U.S. federal government called in to Don today, saying something like, “I can’t even get a replacement for my six year old computer—how will the federal government be able to transform itself with wikis?” Don basically replied, “Sure, there will be some cultural obstacles, but this sort of change is inevitable.”

I don’t want to get into whether a few interesting technologies can transform the most hidebound of organizations, or even if these 2.0 tools somehow are more important than nuclear power and weapons, the internal combustion engine, and airplanes as tools that can transform government. No, my question is whether these exaggerations, which are typical of pronouncements emanating from the heights of gurudom, are helpful or not.

One could argue that they are helpful because they motivate us to strive for greater impact from new technologies or management approaches. Perhaps they help us keep our “eyes on the prize.” Without such optimism, maybe the pressures of everyday life would keep us from ever accomplishing anything. Maybe people are just looking for something new and different—what’s objectionable about that?

On the other hand, this sort of techno-utopian argument could be harmful. It might lead, for example, to disenchantment with the technology when it doesn’t lead to the promised result. Companies and organizations might end up spending more on the technologies than their utility warrants. If gurus were ever held accountable for their proclamations (and they hardly ever are), it might also lower the credibility of all management experts.

Of course, the proper role of the eternal optimist is not a new issue; it’s been discussed in literature since Candide wrote about Dr. Pangloss. But are there any new wrinkles? What do you think—should management and technology gurus moderate their expressed views, or is it the more utopian and visionary the better?

If it were up to me, the list of management gurus—and every other list—would be evenly balanced by gender, ethnicity, age, and so forth. We just went by the numbers, and the only possible bias might come from who we ran through the methodology in the first place. We ran everyone who was in the 2003 Top 100 list, and anybody else we could think of who might have a chance. That included Rosabeth Kanter, who was in the 2003 Top 20, Renee Mauborgne (co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy), Tammy Erickson (author of a number of recent articles and books on generational issues, and author of a HarvardBusiness.org blog), and organizational behavior professor Herminia Ibarra. Kanter is a bona fide management guru, but she’s been less active of late in publishing and speaking. Mauborgne is a rising star, but has also been less prolific recently. Erickson has been extremely productive in the last few years, but perhaps not for long enough to hit the big time list. Ibarra left Harvard to teach at INSEAD in Europe, which doesn’t help your ranking—see below.

Some blog commenters suggested less mainstream female candidates—Oprah Winfrey, for example—but unless I’m mistaken, she doesn’t write on management topics, and that’s one of the criteria for listing. The distinguished organizational expert Edith Penrose was suggested, but she’s no longer among the living—another criterion. Someone suggested Charlene Li, co-author of a recent book on social media and of another Harvard Business Online blog Fine, but she’s just getting started, and I would guess she needs to keep producing this sort of thing for another decade or so before making the list. Some have just criticized the ranking criteria (including a couple of men who didn’t make the top twenty); to that I say two things. One, I didn’t create them; Judge Richard Posner did for a list of political or “public” intellectuals . Two, it’s true that any set of criteria is somewhat arbitrary—so you are welcome to propose others—but this is the most rigorous and reasonable set I’ve seen.

The reasons why particular women may not have made the list begin to suggest a set of rules for making it. Women—or any other interest group you may prefer—need only follow them assiduously to become a Top 20 Guru. Here’s the list:

Keep at it for a long time. Most of those gurus at or near the top of the list have been writing about management issues for a couple of decades or so. Howard Gardner, who is #5 in the new list, is a relative newbie to management, but he’s been writing and speaking about multiple intelligences for many moons.

Write a huge best-seller. The newcomers to the list, Malcolm Gladwell and Tom Friedman, have written enormous best-sellers. If I knew how to do that I would have already done so, but perhaps you can figure it out.

Find a regular outlet for your writing. Again, Friedman has his New York Times column, and Gladwell has his New Yorker pieces. Jeff Pfeffer wrote for Business 2.0. Phil Kotler writes marketing textbooks. Economist Hal Varian was #10 in 2003; he stopped writing his NYT column, and now he’s out of the top twenty.

Don’t be a second author. If you co-author, make sure your name is first. Second authors get screwed in both media mentions and citations. This may have been a problem for Renee Mauborgne—she was the second author to jump into the blue ocean.

Move to the United States. Geert Hofstede—whose presence on the list surprised me despite his great work on organizational cultures—is the only European on the Top 20 list, and there are no Asians.

Write about broad, sweeping topics. The top-ranked gurus tend to write about business and management in a very broad—almost intergalactic—fashion. If you restrict yourself to topics like the workforce (as does Tammy Erickson) or information and technology (as do I), you are likely to find yourself down the list a bit.

Can women pull this off? I don’t see why not. It’s not rocket science—and for that matter there are plenty of female rocket scientists. Maybe in 2012 or so we’ll do another list, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you.

Management gurus can be enormously influential in all kinds of organizations. Keynes said that “practical men…are usually slaves to some defunct economist;” today’s equivalent influencer is a management thinker. It’s easy to lampoon new management ideas as faddish and facile, but they often revitalize organizations and their employees. The best management ideas—e.g., Jim Collins’ work in Good to Great—are based on solid evidence and avoid simplistic answers. They can be influential for years, as Collins’ ideas have been. Collins moved up in the list since our 2003 ranking in the book "What’s the Big Idea," but he didn’t make this year’s Top 20.

Why isn’t he higher if his ideas are so good? Unfortunately, the list is not a ranking of the quality of the ideas. A high-ranking management guru has to be a good promoter as well as a good researcher and sound thinker. Collins—like Michael Porter, who was at the top of the 2003 list but fell a bit (to #14) in the new list—doesn’t do a lot of conference speeches, doesn’t have much of a web presence, and doesn’t write much in the popular press. If you want your ideas to be really influential, you’ve got to be out hawking them all the time.

So who did well? Gary Hamel (see his HBS Online page) is at the top, and I attribute that to his nimbleness at taking up the important ideas of the day and producing significant articles and books on them. Bill Gates remains high (#3)—not necessarily because of his great management ideas, but because of Microsoft, his wealth, and his foundation. Tom Friedman (#2), Malcolm Gladwell (#4), and Howard Gardner (#5) zoomed up from nowhere to hit the top 5 this year.

Interestingly, none of these latter three people are traditional management experts. Friedman and Gladwell are primarily journalists, and Gardner is an educational psychologist. Why have these interlopers prospered to such a degree? I chalk it up to two factors: the increased desire to master people issues in business—we’ve finally realized they’re always the most difficult to address—and the ever-decreasing attention span of businesspeople. Many of them want few academic details and an entertaining story, which these journalists know how to provide. I don’t always agree with the quality of Gladwell’s evidence, but I am certainly impressed by his writing ability. Some of Friedman’s ideas seem quite obvious to me, but he knows how to put together a sentence. That didn’t matter much in the old days of management gurudom, but it seems much more important now.

We also talked about social media as collaborative tools. The companies who seemed to be having the most success with them were using them either as purely social tools or infrastructural devices. At one professional services firm, for example, they’d implemented an internal Facebook, but the primary goal was to help people make friends at work. As I have argued in another post , this isn’t a bad idea at all. A defense contractor said they had used a Facebook-style application to develop an expertise directory. Fine with me, as long as you populate it with as much information as possible from transaction systems. This feels like infrastructure to me, and it’s hard to object to. Both such uses of these social tools aren’t “focused collaboration” as I’ve defined it above, and they don’t have hard-core business objectives. But they might do some good as long as employees don’t get obsessed with them.

So there are your two options: focused collaboration with clear business objectives, or collaborative tools for social or infrastructural purposes. Where organizations get in trouble is when they venture into the muddled middle between these two options. They throw out some collaborative tools—either new-style social media like wikis and social networks, or old-style tools like Notes or Sharepoint or ERoom—and say, “go forth and be collaborative.” They don’t insist on a collaborative objective or business benefit, but they still somehow expect business value. They seem to assume that just because a technology is available, it will lead to collaboration, and that the collaboration will yield an ROI. I’ve seen countless instances where this hasn’t worked, and very few where it has.

Perhaps the underlying issue is that collaboration for business purposes is real work. It needs to be managed like any other project or process. Having a technology to facilitate the collaboration makes it easier, but it’s still work. Social networks for social purposes, on the other hand, are fun. Infrastructural collaborative tools are only a little bit of fun (if everybody puts in a lot of juicy details about their kids, your hobbies, your pets, etc.), but they are intended to make organizational life more efficient. It’s when we don’t have a clear understanding of what’s work, and what’s fun, that we get into trouble.

I was alerted to this issue by Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell, who posted a comment on my blog. He suggested that people don’t actually use prediction markets enough for them to be successful, so I checked out his perspective. I think he’s onto something.

I praised Google’s culture and its fit with prediction markets, but even they may have a problem with participation. Bo Cowgill, Google’s prediction markets evangelist, and a couple of academic economists have written a paper describing two-and-a-half years of prediction market activity at Google. It’s well done and worth a read. But one line jumped out at me: the authors say that 6,425 employees had a prediction market account, but only 1,463 placed at least one trade. In the McKinsey roundtable summary Cowgill notes that new Google recruits have ensured a continuing stream of users, but he isn’t sure about participation levels in a lower-growth environment.

I have heard rumors about low participation at the Hollywood Stock Exchange as well. The Exchange claims to have 1.4 million registered traders, but I have heard there is a lot of attrition. You’d have to be a pretty avid movie buff to trade at the site on a regular basis.

It wouldn’t be surprising if participation levels over time were low for prediction markets. Companies can’t really pay you in anything but trinkets, or it becomes online gambling. In this upstanding country that’s illegal. Further, as Mark Turrell pointed out to me, any prediction market works by continual trading based on new information. The participants in prediction markets would have to be pretty highly motivated to keep going back to the site and placing new bets. In any case, as the McKinsey roundtable participants suggest, if you want to run one of these things, you’ve got to devote a lot of attention to marketing them to employees.

How about it—have you tried a prediction market in your company? Did anybody show up?

Rae-Dupree's New York Times article is titled, goofily, “Let Computers Compute: It’s the Age of the Right Brain,” and goes on to assert:

Why bother [to build up our right brains]? Because much of the left-brain-centric work that the Information Age workers of America once did — computer programming, financial accounting, routing calls — is now done more cheaply in Asia or more efficiently by computers. If it can be outsourced or automated, it probably has been. Now the master of fine arts, or MFA, Mr. Pink says, “is the new MBA.”

Rae-Dupree’s article has one virtue, which is that it traces the “recht uber links” idea back to its origins. However, it’s both wrong and misleading. There are the obvious facts, for example, that computers don’t compute unless humans program them to do so, and that routing calls have been done by machine for several decades now. I suspect that MFA employment levels and starting salaries, compared to those for MBAs, would be another fact that Pink would like to ignore.

But this column and Pink’s book would not be very helpful even if they were factually accurate. First, they presume that Asians are only good at left-brain work, which is demonstrably incorrect. Just as India, for example, has a proud tradition of mathematical sophistication, it’s also rich in literary, artistic, and cinematic traditions. There are world-class Indian (Mira Nair) and Chinese (Wong Kar-Wai) directors.

Second and more critically, they make the false assumption that good jobs require only one half of the brain. In truth, the jobs that will make American (and Indian and Chinese) individuals and organizations successful are those that draw on both sides of the brain. More and more jobs in the U.S. and other leading economies will require some understanding of mathematical and computational concepts.

Even traditionally right-brain roles will benefit from logical and mathematical sophistication. The actor Will Smith, for example, calls himself a “student of universal patterns,” and studies the box office results after every weekend, looking for patterns of success. When he first came to Hollywood, he and his agent classified successful movies, and concluded that films incorporating “special effects with creatures” were particularly successful. Obviously not only his right brain was at work when he decided to do Men in Black. Given his track record of choosing films that reliably deliver $120 million or more, Smith seems to care as much about prediction as plot and performance.

Similarly, traditionally left-brain jobs need creativity and intuition. The best statisticians and quantitative analysts are intuitive and creative. What is a hypothesis other than an intuition about what’s going on in the data? And if they can’t explain their results to decision-makers in metaphorical, easy-to-understand terms, they’re not going to be very influential.

English and film majors should not avoid math courses, and math geeks need to learn how to intuit and express themselves with words. Emphasizing only one half of the brain is both individual career suicide, and a sure route to economic decline for a society. We’ve got a great name for those who use only one side of their brains: half-wit.

Which part of your brain are you using?

Business process reengineering was the most commonly-used management tool in the CIO Insight list, and in the top ten for Bain. I don’t quite get this one, since the companies I work with are not doing business process reengineering they way I understand it. The respondents must be using a very broad definition of business process management (although they presumably don’t include Six Sigma and TQM, which were other tools explicitly listed further down in popularity).

The process-oriented tools weren’t the only persistent ones in both lists. Benchmarking, balanced scorecards, core competency analysis, and scenario planning were also pretty popular in both surveys. I suspect that if the CIO Insight folks had asked about more of the tools that Bain had surveyed for, they would have had even more old chestnut tools in common.

This persistence could be viewed as either negative or positive. The negative view (which Allan Alter primarily takes) is that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the same old ideas keep coming up. The positive view, which I will advocate here, is that these tools did not turn out to be fads at all, contrary to the oft-stated criticism of management trends. They have become embedded into day-to-day business practice, and successful companies need to keep doing them all the time.

How can you succeed without, for example, constantly improving how you do your work with some form of process management? Benchmarking is undeniably helpful if you want to have the best possible processes, customer service, etc. It’s generally useful to have an idea of what your core competencies or capabilities are when you’re deliberating on strategy. These are no-brainers.

Some of these ideas have become so commonly-held that they don’t seem like new management ideas at all—but they were at one time. So I say more power to the management thinkers and the companies who adopted their ideas—it shows success, not stagnation.

The only downside I see is that companies adopt too many of these ideas to do any of them particularly well. In the Bain survey, the average company was making use of 15.3 management tools. I don’t know what the right number is, but that’s too many. GE—particularly in Jack Welch’s heyday when management ideas were heartily embraced—believed that 5 or 6 management tools was the right number. They religiously held back on adding to the total, and if they did add one, they tried to drop another. They realized that management attention was the limiting factor to the successful implementation of these ideas, and there is only so much of that to go around.

Yes, I agree that there are aspects of E2.0 that overlap the ambitions of KM of the past. But traditional KM was always a fool's errand, with some out-of-touch centralized group laboring in abstentia to scrape intelligence from the stale artifacts of existing documentation and struggling to achieve some level of relevance (some would say personalization) through the laborious maintenance of out-of-date profiles in a disembodied relational database (whew!). There could be nothing more different from traditional KM than applying Web 2.0 technologies and emerging social behaviors to the goal of more effective and efficient knowledge sharing within the enterprise. What could be more different from a centralized and sanitized (and little used) KM database than the free flow user-generated content, the value of which is judged by the actual user community itself? This is certainly not the same wine in a different bottle--it is a new and refreshing varietal!

This view that E2.0 unleashes the power of the masses while rejecting silly previous arrangements is, of course, revolutionary in tone. Cocheu’s utopian vision is shared by many writers on that topic. As a liberal but not a radical in most aspects of life, I have rarely been an advocate of revolution in any sphere. I usually think that too many babies are thrown out with the old guard’s bathwater. It’s never very popular to defend any aspect of the Ancient Regime, but I have become cynical about utopias—particularly those that will supposedly be brought on by information technology. I recently read a piece called “The Management Myth” in The Atlantic Monthly by Mathew Stewart that captured many of my reservations:

Why does every new management theorist seem to want to outdo Chairman Mao in calling for perpetual havoc on the old order? Very simply, because all economic organizations involve at least some degree of power, and power always pisses people off. That is the human condition. At the end of the day, it isn’t a new world order that the management theorists are after; it’s the sensation of the revolutionary moment. They long for that exhilarating instant when they’re fighting the good fight and imagining a future utopia. What happens after the revolution—civil war and Stalinism being good bets—could not be of less concern.

Certainly any form of “2.0” movement would require a distribution of power. I have no objections to other groups coming into power, but if I held any power I would not be ready to hand it over because of some new software becoming available. I suspect many senior executives will feel the same way. Most would probably like to get the best ideas of their employees, but they like their own ideas even better.

“Ask him something interesting,” someone yelled. “Let us ask questions,” another pleaded.

Lacy asked what they wanted her to do, and a helpful audience member yelled, “Look on Twitter.” Lacy referred to the crowd’s reaction as “mob rule”--only a moderate exaggeration—and later Twittered, “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” I suspect it will be a while before Lacy attempts another interview at SXSW.

This idea that you should Twitter about the speaker or interviewer while they are speaking at a conference is an interesting and increasingly popular one. I certainly wouldn’t advocate trying to stop it, but I would encourage potential and actual critical Twitterers to think carefully about where this all goes. You may not like intermediaries between yourself and people like Zuckerberg, but even (presumably) socially oriented folks like him may like a little bit more control than an open dialogue with a crowd would involve.

Just about every speaker or interlocutor antagonizes someone (or if they don’t their ideas aren’t very provocative). If the leading thinkers of the world feel that they will be attacked on the back channel, they may not want to play. The highly secure ones may find it interesting or even helpful to hear what the audience is really thinking, but I know a goodly number of guru types who are not very secure at all.

When I was at Accenture, the leadership team of the firm began a series of videoconferences for all employees. Somebody decided that a back channel discussion forum—which would allow anonymous postings—would be a good idea. A couple of video sessions were offered with this back channel. Not surprisingly, some anonymous postings were not entirely complimentary. The back channel disappeared quickly.

I am guessing that there are some institutions of higher education (perhaps even my own) where students are back-channel Twittering about their professors during class. Be careful! There is probably no faster way to shutting down the wireless signal in classrooms.

We have to balance the idea of unfettered self-expression with civility. If we’re not civil, it will probably lead to less free speech, not more.

No, actually, they don’t. We have lost much of the connection between the supply of information and the demand for it in decision-making. Despite the fact that companies often justify IT projects on the basis of better decisions, there is seldom a direct tie between the information a particular system produces and the decisions that are supposed to be based on it. When my former Accenture colleague Jeanne Harris and I surveyed companies in 2002, and again in 2006, about their enterprise systems, “better decision-making” was the objective most frequently mentioned as the reason for implementing the systems. Of course, that’s an easy response to give, since virtually no company measures the quality of decisions. Yet in interviews with some of the companies, we found not a single effort to actually connect enterprise information with decisions.

How have supply and demand become disconnected? Let me count the ways. One is that many systems implemented at the enterprise level are initially focused on transactions, not decisions. Human resource management systems, for example, Instead of helping managers decide how many employees a business needs, are primarily used to issue payroll checks and keep track of vacation balances. A second reason is that managers don’t often know all the information and knowledge that is available to help make a decision. Managers also aren’t typically held accountable for how they make their decisions; at best they are only assessed on the result. So we have no means of knowing what information they actually used to make a decision.

How can we re-establish a connection between information systems and decisions? Unfortunately, that’s not a question I am frequently asked. If I were, I’d have a few possible answers. One approach would be to start an inventory of key decisions. For each one, a company could note who’s responsible for making it, how often it gets made, and what information and knowledge are necessary to make it well. A second approach would be to precede any effort to build business intelligence solutions—the type of IT that is most closely related to decision-making—with identification of the key decisions that would be made on the data and analysis. A third would be to begin assessing managers not only on the outcomes of their decisions, but on the processes they employed.

I have faith that access to information and knowledge can yield better decisions. On occasion they already do. However, I do not have faith that our trillion-dollar investment in corporate information systems is yielding better decisions on a regular basis. If your organization spends money on IT, that should worry you.