By Greg Gutkowski – The benefits of the digital revolution rest upon the trinity of data collection, education, and multichannel communication.
Data
The proliferation of sensors and other ways of collecting data (reflecting almost everything we do) is only as good as the ability to collect it in an organized way. The collection processes need to be consistent, repeatable, and auditable. The result of collection needs to lead to a repository of high quality, granular data that could be the basis for meaningful real time and historical analysis.
Today, we do a better job collecting data than deciding on what needs to be collected and how to keep it straight. So, we collect and store a lot of irrelevant ‘noise’ in the form of incomplete and outdated data. However, let’s assume that we can successfully solve this problem.
Education
The next bottleneck in leveraging all this collected data is to know what to do with it. We are doubling the amount of data collected every year. Nevertheless, neither human knowledge nor human IQ is doubling every year. We cannot do much about the increase in the average human IQ. As far as knowledge is concerned, though, the only way to increase it is via education.
Here, technology comes to the rescue in the form of relatively inexpensive online training that can be deployed on a massive scale based on the need-to-know. The technology to spread knowledge is not expensive and already quite mature. However, the issue is what we should teach and who decides who needs to know what and when. This issue will be omnipresent as long as humans are around.
One way or another, the value of the ‘knowledge gatekeepers’, or teachers who decide on curriculum content, will only increase. One day in the future, the market may decide to pay the top knowledge gatekeepers at par with top managers. After all, the top responsibility of CEOs is strategy and its implementation. To formulate and execute any strategy requires knowledge gained from personal experience, including that of the knowledge gatekeepers.
Communication
In my years of experience consulting with various businesses of all types and sizes, the single largest bottleneck to leveraging knowledge and increasing productivity is our traditional communication model based on verbal conversations and fragmented writing. Traditional communication is heavily fragmented. As such, it is frequently ineffective, inefficient, error prone, untimely, irrelevant, incorrect, incomplete, single-threaded, and untraceable. This leads to delays, rework, mistakes, errors, and flawed decision making. Given the known limitations of human memory and cognition, this is not surprising. We hire armies of clerical folks to do nothing but address these issues by hand.
Nevertheless, technology could be of great help here. Imagine all business communication being recorded, searchable, and auditable in real time. The technology to achieve that already exists. Our collective knowledge about it and willingness to use it may not be here yet, though.
Today, with voice-to-text technologies and the capture of all written communication in text messages and emails, one can imagine a repository of all business communications that is searchable in real time. However, the best repository is not enough without the ability to communicate on a need-to-know basis to any group of people at any given time. The technology to do that already exists, with prime examples being Slack and Microsoft Teams. It allows users to collect all communication and to define what to communicate to whom, when, and under what conditions. It already has a full audit trail of all interactions among all parties, all in real time.
Such tools increase transparency and accountability, so their adoption will be met with the natural resistance of people to avoid scrutiny. Nevertheless, given competitive business environments, we may not have a choice. Just ask truck drivers who are being tracked by GPS and electronic logs of miles driven—all in real time.
In summary…
This digital trinity of data, education, and communication will lead to increased productivity and, thus, an increase in our collective wealth. But do not expect this to happen overnight, just because communication and data collection technologies are already available. Full deployment will require widespread knowledge and broad acceptance of these technologies, supplemented with education on how to use it.
This reminds me of the days before we had word processors, on-demand printing, and the Internet. The mechanics of writing and publishing was a chore and took a large percentage of time and cost to put a book together. The publisher was a significant roadblock for many writers. It took us about 20 years to successfully eliminate the mechanics and drudgery of the process by leveraging word processors, automatic printing, and distribution via Amazon or social media or blogs. So, now the best writers win on the merits of their writing and not on their success in surmounting mechanical and bureaucratic obstacles to publishing. Now imagine a similar phenomenon applied to business which, after all is just based on data collection, education, and communication.