In his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Thomas L. Friedman summarizes economic historian Paul A. David’s 1989 essay, “Computer and Dynamo: the Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too-Distant Mirror.” Summarizing David’s thoughts on the lag between new technology introduction and its impact, Friedman writes:
He [David] noted that while the light bulb was invented in 1879, it took several decades for electrification to kick in and have a big economic and productivity impact. Why? Because it was not enough just to install electric motors and scrap the old technology – steam engines. The whole way of doing manufacturing had to be reconfigured. In the case of electricity, David pointed out, the key breakthrough was in how buildings, and assembly lines, were designed and managed. Factories in the steam age tended to be heavy, costly multistory buildings designed to brace the weighty belts and other big transmission devices needed to drive steam-powered systems. Once small, powerful electric motors were introduced, everyone hoped for a quick productivity boost. It took time, though. To get all the savings, you needed to redesign enough buildings with small electric motors powering machines of all sizes. Only when there was a critical mass of experienced factory architects and electrical engineers and managers, who understood the complementarities among the production line, did electrification really deliver the productivity breakthrough in manufacturing, David wrote.
Similar to electrification, enterprise software adoption exploded at the end of the Twentieth Century. However, the full potential and productivity boost to organizations took time to realize. Organizations had to change how they did business in order to take advantage of the new efficiencies. Enterprise 1.0 solutions enabled the standardization of business processes on a local level. Unfortunately, these solutions perpetuated inefficient organizational silos. They were hardcoded to meet the objectives of a silo. By solving a narrow business need, Enterprise 1.0 solutions created multiple others. For the efficiencies of enterprise solutions to be exponential, an organizational shift was required – a flattening of the organization. Flattening occurs by destroying silos. When you destroy silos, solutions built to accommodate the narrow scope of the silo must die, too.
The economic downturn, now in our rearview mirror, provided the impetus for the flattening to occur. The reader of this blog is the security, governance, risk and compliance professional. A multi-disciplinary group of professionals with specialties in Corporate Security, Ethics & Compliance, General Counsel, Human Resources, IT Security, Safety and Security Operations. Flattening an organization requires collaboration that eliminates inefficiency. Enterprise 1.0 solutions are inefficient because they hinder collaboration.
Enterprise 2.0 solutions arrived because companies (such as my own) recognized the opportunity to provide solutions that allow for collaboration and convergence. By leveraging Enterprise 2.0 solutions, the disciplines mentioned above can now manage their shared processes on a single configurable platform. From the security, governance, risk and compliance perspective, managers that recognize that a case is a case is a case, regardless of discipline, remain relevant. Certainly, data collection fields, workflow and business intelligence may vary between disciplines. Yet, an Enterprise 2.0 solution is built on a platform with the required components to empower business users. Rather than managing a solution business users leverage a solution to unleash the efficiencies of collaboration and realize the benefits of convergence. Whether you call it a
Case Collaboration Platform,
Incident Reporting Software or Investigation Management System, an imperative for case management software in the flattened organization is configurability which enables scalability. With Enterprise 2.0, the full potential of enterprise software is being realized in the security, governance, risk and compliance realm. As security and GRC professionals, we can either be the “experienced factory architects and electrical engineers and managers” who can deliver the productivity breakthroughs required of flattening organizations or become irrelevant.