How Does Change Occur?

Recently, we received an interesting email from our friend Jonathan Spira of Basex about the importance of providing access to all the different types of work a user does in a single (and familiar) environment.  Conversely, he notes the difficulty of getting people accustomed to working in one environment to move to another one.  Jonathan believes this means that collaboration takes place most successfully when it occurs in the same environment workers already use.

I agree that it is difficult to get people to change, but I note that when something truly appealing arrives in the marketplace, users may, in fact, volunteer to make the move. So the trick to introducing new technology may be understanding how much incremental value needs to be embodied in a new product to justify migration and how does a user define appealing.

With Jonathan Spira’s permission, I’m reprinting his thoughts, together with some dialogue we sent back and forth, as we discussed his idea.  Perhaps you’ll share your comments about this interesting subject with me and we’ll print them in a future issue.

All Informed KM Point-Of-View:
The One Rule Environment In Practice

Jonathan B. Spira, Chief Analyst, Basex

In Brief

Oftentimes the most useful and successful (in terms of implementation) technologies are those which are just part of the woodwork, unobtrusive and not necessarily discernible. Basex believes its One Environment Rule (OER), which describes the benefits of conflating a user's applications and information resources in one unified, cohesive area, portends the future for successful knowledge management and related technologies, including portals.

In Depth

The One Environment Rule (OER) is not merely a theoretical expression of an idea; it has its basis in the observations made by Basex over a period of years of successful and unsuccessful Lotus Notes implementations.  A strong pattern emerged: the implementations which were not successful treated Notes as a separate system to which the user went for a specific task, such as e-mail.  As a result of relatively infrequent use, users reported a lack of familiarity with more advanced Notes features, and an overall lack of satisfaction with Notes as a product.  In contrast, successful Notes implementations took full advantage of capabilities such as the Notes data store, workflow, replication, agents, doclinks and similar functionality. Companies whose users indicated they were very satisfied with Lotus Notes used Notes constantly throughout the workday.  Applications were designed,
in these organizations, to take advantage of Notes functionality and apply it to business problems.

This thinking has led to the approach which Basex takes to its own IT solutions.  Basex uses Lotus Notes and Domino (the server product in the Notes family) for far more than just e-mail; everything from project tracking to research takes place in Notes.  In some cases, the Notes solution is not best of breed, but the advantages of staying within one environment far outweigh far outweigh the disadvantages. For example, the document you are reading was written by A Basex analyst in Notes (Notes supports Microsoft Word as an activeX control in the Notes environment), to take full advantage of Notes' collaborative capabilities.

Basex analysts' laptops have full replicas of our proprietary InfoBasex research library; information gleamed from hundreds of thousands of documents can be searched without the need for an Internet connection, such as whilst on an airplane. Tasks are tracked - and meetings annotated - in other Notes databases.  And through publish and subscribe functionality, a portal-like interface greets the user, displaying business news plus newly added documents to the InfoBasex library.

Basex uses the OER to rank the efficacy of various technologies, including portals, and as a predictor of how well an implementation will go.  For example, a portal in almost full compliance with the OER would, in our view, have a greater chance of being successfully implemented in an enterprise because compliance indicates that the portal unites tremendous functionality under one "virtual roof" for the user, making information and people all accessible without having to navigate myriad interfaces and applications.

What You Need To Know

Does Basex' use of Notes make Notes a Pure Portal due to its compliance with the One Environment Rule?  Not at all.  However, the Notes environment used at Basex ranks high in compliance with the OER and is highly customized for its user base.  Although there are some limitations, the Basex implementation is an excellent example of the OER at work.  It is therefore an excellent template for understanding how technology impacts the user when developing new systems.

A more complete discussion of the OER and its implications in today's portal market will be published in 3 week's time in Basex’ report on the portal industry.  See www.basex.com for details.

Jonathan, I certainly recognize and agree with the underlying idea here.  But I have a question.
 
How do you recognize when a new idea comes along that is so compelling that it's time to change environments?  In your world view can that happen never?  At rare intervals (say 10-20 years) or could it happen every five years, say?  I guess I'm asking you what the trade off is between the cost of loss of familiarity and retraining versus the incremental value of the Big New Thing -- whatever that might be.   
Amy

Amy, Actually, I think you've hit on one of my favorite topics: the paradigm shift.  I rely on Thomas Kuhn for guidance with paradigm shifts by the way.

Simply put, the adherents of the old paradigm can never become the adherents of the new.  They have to die out.  A new paradigm can be adopted, but it comes from a somewhat different channel.

This is somewhat akin to the MIS manager retiring and a new manager sweeping clean with a new broom (is that the idiom?)

I am somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to the Big New Thing (or The Next Big Thing, as I wrote in my Internet World column).  My view: if something is hyped as TNBT, it undoubtedly won't become TNBT (in fact, the hype may be an automatic disqualification).

TNBT will come not from gluing two existing technologies together (I always think of the Tele-Compaq) but from an unforeseen corner. That's why true innovation is always a (pleasant) surprise.

Jonathan Spira, Basex 

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