Mob mentality good for business

Is your workplace an adhocracy? And if it is, should you be worried?

According to online collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia, in the jargon of management theory an adhocracy is an organisation in which everyone has the authority to make decisions and take actions affecting its future.

Wikipedia reminds us that Future Shock author Alvin Toffler predicted that adhocracies were on the rise. He went as far as to suggest that they would replace bureaucracies in the near future.

Wikipedia is itself an example of an adhocracy - any Wikipedia user can contribute to the website's definition of a term.

If adhocracies can breed collaboration in cyberspace, can they also generate positive results for business?

At least one global IT company, BEA, believes they can.

Speaking at a company briefing for journalists and analysts in Sydney last week, BEA senior director for product marketing, Jay Simons, said harnessing "the wisdom of the crowd" was potentially a huge productivity booster for businesses.

It comes back, Simons said, to the age-old issue of workers finding themselves overloaded with information, a problem which stymies business innovation and progress.

"This is a problem that has been rampant nearly since the dawn of technology for most of us," he said.

"It breeds a lot of inefficiencies people aren't always clear what tool to use to publish a certain fact or piece of evidence that they need to contribute back into the enterprise knowledge base."

And while sharing information may be difficult, at the same time staff are usually eager to be involved in improving knowledge flow.

"People contribute to wikis (online collaboration tools) and open source software projects simply for the joy of working with other people and contributing to a shared project or a shared idea," Simons said.

The problem has been that organisations typically limit the publishing of information in company intranets to a select group of employees who are usually chosen for their expertise in using publishing software rather than their grasp on the information they have to share.

BEA has released, and continues to develop, software tools designed to make online publishing and sharing of information easier and more effective.

The market for this type of application is huge among large corporate customers, and BEA is not alone in tapping into it.

A senior executive of database giant Oracle told the Herald last year that in the information retrieval area, the company's biggest competitor was the filing cabinet.

Executives are hungry for simple ways to store and extract information in ways that don't involve rooms full of paper.

One of BEA's newer collaborative information management tools is called Graffiti. It's a sort of company-wide Google-type applications that uses previous search results within the organisation to guess what document someone is searching for.

"When I search for a document in my enterprise, maybe the most relevant result is the document people tag the most with my search [term] or the document," Simons explained.

"[Or it could be that] the document that's most relevant happens to be authored by the person who reads the most documents about that search or contributes the most documents about that topic."

Refining the effectiveness of software that can intelligently sift through an organisation's gigabytes of information is a task that will continue to keep IT developers busy for years to come.

The payback for developing an efficient system, however, can be significant.

Simons talked about the experiences of Halliburton, a global petroleum and energy services company involved in multi-million dollar projects including building off-shore oil drilling platforms.

Halliburton analysed its "days sales outstanding" financials and discovered that clients were taking an average of 29 to 30 days to settle accounts.

"On a $200 million collection, every day is potentially millions of dollars for them," Simons said.

The reason for the delay in payment was often that the client would request information on the status of a project before writing a cheque.

"It would require account teams, sometimes up to 50 people in Halliburton, to scurry around the business to the different systems that housed the information that the customer was requesting, and compile it all together to satisfy what the customer needed to process payment," Simons said.

By improving its information management systems, Halliburton was able to cut the average days sales outstanding figure back to 21 days, resulting in significant savings.

The filing cabinet may remain an office feature for some time yet, but if the IT boffins have their way it will eventually become a thing of the past.