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@BRINT Out of Box Thinking Featured in Datamation
Pittsburgh, PA, February 15, 1997 -- Many of you would be familiar with the thought-provoking critique and analyses of cutting-edge business and information technology issues that form the regular fare of our Out-of-box Thinking column. In this column, your host critiques the latest industry issues and events that are of strategic relevance to managers and decision-makers of contemporary knowledge intensive organizations.Recently, the Out-of-box Thinking column critically analyzed the Datamation, December 1996, cover story entitled 'Intranets Rescue Reengineering.' Our key argument was against the suggestion of the author's primary assertion that the grass-roots orientation of intranets provides them with an "inherent capacity" to share information easily and cheaply.
A letter based on this analyses was published in the Datamation of February, 1997. The printed version of the letter is reproduced below. The detailed analyses of the story featured in Out-of-box Thinking column is available in the Out-of-box Thinking: Archive. The online version of February, 1997, Letters section is available at http://www.datamation.com/PlugIn/issues/1997/feb/02in100.html.
The following letter was published in the Letters section of the Datamation of February 1997.
Nothing Inherent in Intranets "Intranets rescue reengineering" in the December 1996 issue [p. 38] made interesting reading. However, there are some fundamental arguments against its primary assertion that the grass-roots orientation of intranets provides them with an "inherent capacity" to share information easily and cheaply.
Industry case studies of organizational implementation of intranets suggest that this new technology is encountering the organizational problems posed by organizational control and work culture issues [that plague BPR implementations]. Such case studies documented in the industry trade journals clearly suggest that although intranets provide the potential for a grass-roots initiative, the real materialization of such an initiative is dependent on the culture and control issues embedded in the organization's work environment.
The key question is whether intranets, because of some inherent capacity, facilitate bottom-up and/or top-down information sharing better than existing technologies such as groupware, CASE tools, etc.
Yogesh Malhotra, Editor & Publisher
A Business Researcher's Interests
www.yogeshmalhotra.com