Anyone can set-up a computer, and if you can set up one, you can set up two. Almost anyone can plug those two computers into a hub or switch and get them to talk to each other. If you can do that, then replacing the hub or switch with a broadband router isn’t much harder, and then you have an Internet connected network.
What is hard is making large networks with diverse server or client-server applications work well. This is a significant job for the basic IT staff and all it means is keeping things running – things running is a far cry from things running well.
At some point in the growth of an organization its computer network becomes an Enterprise Information System. There isn’t a specific, formal metric for predicting when this will happen, and anyone who tries to tell you there is, is probably trying to get your money. It just happens. One day you realize that without your computers, the applications that run on them, the network that connects them, the website, and your Internet connection you are UNABLE TO DO BUSINESS.
Unfortunately, that probably also means that your Enterprise Information System is crap – “crap” being a technical term implying variously; brittleness, incompatibility, expense, proprietary, not extensible, vulnerable, and/or old. It also means that your organization has bad habits that amplify the condition of your EIS.
What was perfectly good as “the computers” or “the network” is almost universally insufficient as an EIS. This is because and Enterprise Information System is expected to DO MORE than just be a bunch of computers sharing printers and an Internet connection. It has to add value to the enterprise. It has to be a force multiplier in one of the factors that determine whether or not your organization wins or loses in the marketplace. If, on that day when you discover that with out your digital assets or connectivity you can’t do business, you also discover that despite your dependence upon them they collectively DO LITTLE by themselves to make sure you win the next account, grant, award, or whatever is important to you, then you have an EIS that is an anchor, not a sail. (For those of you saying we aren’t in the business of winning, you need to look again – its a win if you save a life, stop a crime, cure the patient, or release the mind – these “social” goals aren’t exempt.)
Notice I didn’t say motor, I said sail. Whatever the motor of your organization is, it isn’t your EIS. You have a motor somewhere else, and the EIS is either helping of hurting it, there really isn’t any in-between. Information is always there, and if your system ‘catches the wind’ you get moved forward. If it doesn’t, then it is providing resistance and making your motor work harder.
So what is it that the EIS does and why is it important that it be the antithesis of all those descriptive adjectives cited earlier?
What it is: the Enterprise Information System is the combined analog and digital methods and tools used to acquire, store, and re-use data, information, and knowledge required by the organization to achieve marketplace success, satisfy regulations, and assure the continuance of the organization.
It is important because: Enterprise Information Systems, when properly developed and integrated into the organization, provide force multipliers with regards to rapidity, cost, resource allocation and employment, and attrition by providing structured, reproducible methods to achieve best results, making available resources in compressed time and space, and capturing activity, results, and resolutions for the better use of self-knowledge and institutional memory.In plain speech, the EIS helps you win, covers your ass, and protects against disaster by focusing your spent money on delivering product cheaper, faster, and better than your competition. It does this by making you know you, and transforming that guy who is irreplaceable into a set of tools and methods that, while they aren’t any less irreplaceable, are less likely to win the lotto, get hit by a bus, or move to Costa Rica to ‘find himself’.
I haven’t said much about computers, and there is a reason. Inside the EIS, there are more than computers and wires. The EIS also governs your paper and your people system. The computers, network equipment, phones, and printers are all consumable components inside this big ASSET, the value of which is more than just the collection of silicon chips and wires.
That means the EIS isn’t something that ‘just IT’ has to worry about. If you are the CEO, you can’t leave it to ‘the kid’ and go golfing. If you are a board member, you can’t say it isn’t ‘vital to shareholder value’. If you are the computer guy, it is no longer the ‘toy’ you get paid to ‘play’ with. If you are a user of the system, you don’t get to make it up as you go along.
Once again in plain speech, the EIS is the catalog and measurement of EVERY ACTION by EVERY EMPLOYEE. No one ‘doesn’t use the system’.
At this point you are saying, “No one has the time to do this. We have to make/sell/fix widgets/solutions/problems/people and nothing is more important than that”. Very true. Knowing how and sharing what you know are two very different things. If you can honestly say no one in your organization has bits of esoteric knowledge that you must have to stay the course you are on right now, good for you. Let’s ratchet it up another notch – do you, right now, know something that only you know that is vital to the advance of the organization? In my experience, most employees have between six and ten discrete bits of knowledge that are vital to the organization. Also in my experience, most organizations have one person who “keeps things running” – how many things do you thing that person knows exclusively?
If you still think you don’t have any loose knowledge, you can stop reading. Either you are an uber-executive or so totally out of touch that you won’t see the end until it has passed you by. If you are still here, the rest of this comes in three parts, clustered around three kinds of relationships: people to people relationships; people to machine relationships; and machine to machine relationships. Each of these parts will address some of the challenges to building a functional EIS lurking in each relationship. This means that the first section will be more political and the last section will be more technical. It also means this discussion will be somewhat high-level and big-picture in that it will tend to be philosophical, conceptual, and architectural. Where suitable detailed information about specific technical tasks is lacking, it will deliver that information, but this is not a how-to manual. This is a design guide and a handbook, not a field manual. There are plenty of in-depth guides to the various mechanisms, what we are attempting to be is an integration guide – how, where, and when you should put them together, along with a heavy dose of why you should.
(Unstated in this listing of relationships is the relationship with self; self-knowledge of the individual, which shouldn’t be ignored, but isn’t part of the EIS, per se, but can be considered prerequisite for the proper use of any EIS.)