My Message to CEOs: Stop Reinventing the Wheel!
June 14, 2010
Thanks to Fox News for picking up our press release and telling people about my keynote speech at next week’s Semtech conference in San Francisco. This is your once-a-year opportunity to learn what’s going on in the semantic web. I encourage you to jump on an airplane next Monday and join us.
Books should only be catalogued once. Currently the public purse pays for having the same book catalogued over and over again.
–Jens Vigen, Head of the CERN Library
I was talking with a friend today about who my book is for and who would be interested in semantic strategy consulting. Or, even better – management consulting helping companies transform their cultures from a push mentality to a pull mentality.
I said my book really isn’t for CIOs or CTOs, because these people’s lives are extremely tactical. They react from one thing to another. Since they always have 1,000 things to do, their main goal is to get everyone to agree on what their priorities should be. Since they are always choosing what not to do, these people don’t have much time to plan for the future.
My book is really for three people, no matter how big a company is: the CEO, the chief strategist, and the chief marketing person. In some companies, that describes a single person. In others, there are several of each. The book is designed to be read by people at the top (and also venture capitalists – I’ll address them another time). It’s designed to get them out of the traps they have dug themselves into:
The back office is a drag on earnings. Most companies spend 80% of their IT budgets maintaining existing installed software. They’ve just managed to offshore most of their development and now they are trying to figure out how to use the cloud and SAAS. That’s it – IT budgets are maxed out, and all the maintaining and cloud-shifting isn’t going to save them from the data deluge that’s coming.
The front office is far too custom. Most companies think that what they do is very special. They couldn’t possibly have that much in common with what their competitors do. So they model their special processes and then bake those models into hard-coded software that petrifies the rules so they get better and better at doing what they did ten years ago. They have so much invested in business intelligence, sales, CRM, and marketing software that they can’t see the forest for the trees.
Their competitors are all doing the same thing. Everyone is spending way too much on software and chasing the last few percentages of efficiency from moldy old processes that died years ago. Instead, they could be collaborating to build a new information ecosystems that let them work together to solve customers’ problems in new ways that put them on a new playing field.
Look at any company. Very few people actually make decisions, and even those people spend very little time making decisions. One study of emergency room doctors found them spending 65% of their time just looking for information and only 15% of their time treating patients! This is as true for a bank as it is for an architecture firm. Most people spend most of their time looking for, moving, and managing information by hand. About 80% of what every company does is identical to what every other company in its industry does, and yet everyone insists on reinventing the wheel over and over and over!
Email is a perfect example – our tools recreate our old ways of shuffling paper, burying us in unstructured information that keeps piling up faster than we can shovel it. It’s not scaling very well, is it? There is a better way! My work on the personal data locker is a big part of the solution. In ten years, we’ll be on top of our messages because they won’t be in our in-box any more. We won’t have an in-box any more! We’ll have projects and facets and software that understands what we’re trying to accomplish and actually helps us, rather than just giving us an electronic pitchfork to hand-shovel our data with.
There’s a better way. If high-level strategic thinkers in companies would start reading and discussing the issues in my book, then we’d have fewer Steve Ballmers and more John Wilbankses.
