Once upon a time, I was a financial analyst at a wear-a-suit-to-work kind of firm. Towards the end of my tenure, I got into an argument with my boss' boss. He said our region's IT budget had run out, so we'd have to wait until the following quarter to replace one of our managing directors' defunct printer. In the meantime, he'd have to print to the network printer waaaaay across the hall. I pointed out that our lunch tab exceeded the cost of a temporary inkjet printer, and I threatened to charge one to my corporate card and expense it as lunch. He said when I'm older, I'll understand that in a corporate environment, it's important to follow procedures.
I'm older now, but it seems procedure-following is no longer in vogue. I'm going to the Office 2.0 conference next week, and I thought I'd do some homework by subscribing to all of the presenters' and panelists' blogs (there must be at least 50!). I've just read two posts that the uberboss would surely have frowned upon. Paul McNamara, CEO of Coghead, writes that his upcoming web app development tool will be the antidote of bureaucracy because adoption will happen thusly:
1. A critical need develops at the grass roots level that is not fully understood at the executive level.
2. Individual contributors and first line managers independently discover a practical solution, enabled by new technology, that can solve the problem quickly.
3. The nature of the solution is such that an individual contributor or first line manager can autonomously make the decision to adopt the new technology.4. The solution is generally compatible with existing methods.
And Rod Boothby, author of Innovative Creators, offers the "taxi-fare secret", which is to avoid the CTO, CIO and business group leader and sell Enterprise 2.0 solutions to individual corporate citizens.
If you charge $9/user per month and make each end user pay their own way, then each person has to get the company to cover just $9 in expenses. $9 is cab fare. Taxi cab fare doesn't require approval. Or... $9 might be just cheap enough for people to be willing to cover it themselves. Maybe they'll call it a telecommunications expense.
This is awesome and empowering and so totally cool. I wish I had the uberboss' email address. I'd tell him I'm learning that in a corporate environment, it's important to follow solutions.
Comments