Smart Companies, Smart Tools....
is about the inextricable relationship between business process and
business assets.
This concise, user-friendly guide provides insights into implementing
new processes and strategically using workflow and the internet
to provide faster delivery of products and services, while improving
quality, minimizing errors, and reducing costs. The author also introduces
the reader to a number of valuable management tools and strategies
such as the Perpetual Organization, the Business Operating
System, work roles, the System Schematic and Time-Based
Analysis, which have been adopted successfully by numerous Smart
Companies.
Global competition and the craze to transform business into an agile,
adaptive and constantly changing enterprise has put enormous pressure
on workers and managers to retink traditional management methods and
tools. Virtula organizations, free-agent workers, and unprecedented
downsizing have created an imperative for a new type of management,
based on new organizational models. Coupled with new technologies
toc apture and automate work processes, this has led to the evolution
of Smart Tools and the ultimate connected enterprise.
Smart Tools may well be the white collar equivalent of the industrial
revolution; transforming knowledge work through radically new methods
that are as important to the front office as industrial automation
was to the factory. But the principal difference is that unlike the
early days of factory automation, when workers were persecuted and
enslaved by their jobs, Smart Tools liberate employees.
There are legions of consultants and reengineering gurus who want
to convince you that process change requires the charisma of Theodore
Roosevelt, the will of Attilla the Hun, and the resources of the Sultan
of Brunei. Don't believe it. Process change is most often a matter
of applying the right tools to the right problems. These tools, what
I call Smart Tools, are being used in thousands of cases already.
Becoming a Smart Company means ferreting out the many ways in which
simple changes can amount to quantum improvements. Success stories
are not built on overnight turnarounds and catastrophic crisis. They
are built on a track record of success and buy-in from users, sponsors,
and technologists. That's the theme of this book. So before you get
out the artillery, bulldozers, and wrecking crew, stop and consider
the arguments and the examples highlighted in Smart Companies,
Smart Tools. It may save your company, your job, and your sanity.
Why have we let these opportunities go by? It's a long story that
began about 200 years ago when the attitude towards labor began to
shift from craftsmanship towards mass customization. Everything, including
people, became replaceable and reproducible. Companies have become
white collar gluttons, using an ever increasing labor pool as a spoiled
child might use a trust account; for meaningless and often trivial
purposes.
The trust fund has started to run dry. The labor pool can no longer
perform the trivial. It has to shift to the craftsmanship that so
clearly epitomizes skill and the creative application of knowledge.
In this new era, individuals and enterprises no longer have the luxury
of wasting the human resource. You will need to define value and apply
people to those tasks that are most worthy of them- apply technology
to what remains.
This book is not a prescription for the zealous pursuit of job elimination.
It is not a manifesto for short-sightedness. It is a basis
for vision and brave leadership into the next millennium.
Productivity increases must be supported by a healthy workforce.
During the 1900s the commensurate increase in both productivity and
the workforce has resulted in a higher standard of living for the
industrialized nations of the world. Ironically, we find unemployment
and underemployment subvert our ability to prosper from productivity.
Yet our work force is newly enabled, with new technologies and a
communications infrastructure able to re-apply the skills of knowledge
workers in ways which were entirely incomprehensible just a few decades
ago, in our enterprises and in home work settings or as free
agents.
In factories, workers used manual skills which were finite and could
be replaced by machines and automation. In the knowledge enterprise,
workers rely on intellectual capacity which is limitless and can be
expanded far beyond current capacity. This will require the use of
technology to remove the mundane and monotonous that impedes creative
innovation. These technologies are what I call Smart Tools.
What we need is an awareness and an acceptance of management's role
in using Smart Tools to apply human intellect and value in ways that
increase opportunity and innovation. We cannot manage costs alone,
without sending the global economy into a death spiral. We need brave
managers who are willing to take advantage of Smart Tools, not as
a means of exploiting workers and pacifying stockholders, but rather
as a vehicles for providing long term opportunities and prosperity
for both. Managers who are not simply responsive but strategic. Managers
who have the confidence in their ability to create new paradigms for
work and the value of the worker. Smart managers with Smart Tools
building Smart Companies.
As you read Smart Companies, Smart Tools, keep in mind the
common power of paradigms to change the world in dramatic and unpredictable
ways. We can form a basis for understanding the genesis of the change
but we can never fully estimate or predict the actual events that
will lead to it. Nor can we anticipate new paradigms before they come
into existence. That is the beauty of human progress and achievement.
In the process of attempting to understand change and the forces that
cause it, we are actually effecting the change and shaping it to meet
our perspective of the problems it will be addressing, while we also
plant the seeds of its eventual demise.
In today's global market, adaptive organizations are not those organizations
who empower their employees- but instead those that educate them.
Start thinking about how you can educate. And if you are reading this,
you have already started.
