I've been reading some of the more recent postings in James Taylor's Decision Management blog here on ebizQ, and I find his insights refreshingly business- and human-focused and to the point. You might find them so as well.
So while thinking about how decisions affect processes and vice versa, I came across yet another interesting new techno-thingie...ok, ok, potentially valuable IT-based business tool at IBM Corp.'s Lotusphere event in Orlando this week. It's called "Many Eyes."
Many Eyes has its own Web site, where you can go and check it out, something I recommend strongly. You can also read IBM's news release about it, but nothing beats seeing and test-driving this fascinating tool. In brief, it lets anyone select, visualize, comment upon, share, and invite other comments upon information. Almost any information.
Sounds simple, and it is. But it's also extraordinary. You can, for example, comment upon another's visualization by revisualizing the same data, or selecting different subsets, and both you and others can compare not only the comments and visualizations, but the differences in the underlying data.
Okay, the idea doesn't leap off the screen as mere words, I know. But read the release, then go check out the site. Trust me, once you get what it's doing, you will quickly start to smile at the potential. If that doesn't do it, check out some of the visualizations already created and shared by others. (One of my favorites: "Bubble Chart of Breakdown of sex and specialty of guests on The Colbert Report" [sic], by Anonymous.)
Then, once you've been amused, consider the implications for business processes. If Many Eyes technologies could be brought to bear on information gathered about the tools and information people actually use at work, couldn't that help make processes more human-centric? If processes could be crafted and deployed, and their results visualized and collaboratively analyzed, couldn't that make process refinement more effective? (For that matter, couldn't it even help improve support processes and policies if applied to information about IT infrastructure failures and responses to them, too?)
Let's go one step beyond, if not further. What about capturing and tracking the frequency by which participants create, share, and comment upon visualizations by type? A dynamic version of such a list could help out a lot when looking for people with particular areas of expertise as potential project team members, couldn't it? (This is just a business-focused variation of the basic services provided by Web sites such as Yahoo! Answers.)
They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. What, then, is the ability to turn complex, interrelated sets of information about human behavior at work into easily shared fodder for collaborative analysis and discussion worth to enterprise agility and responsiveness? (Whew!)
Many Eyes isn't yet available as a licensed, inside-the-firewall product. But I'm sure IBM is working on that, and/or a securely "private" version of today's publicly available version. But it's not too early to check it out, and to start thinking (dreaming?) about how the underlying concepts can be applied to management of business and human processes at your enterprise. I think the accessible, easy-to-use combination of visualization and collaboration could have significant effects on lots of business processes, and on their management. What do you think?
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
