InformationWeek

January 15, 2001

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It's the Vision Thing

By Lou Bertin

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t was invented by demons for the torture of imbeciles." That pithy thought was offered by one Dr. Henry van Dyke in 1921 about the art form that is jazz. About the art form that is information capture, dissemination and utilization, I happily (and, based on recent reader mail, accurately) cast myself in the role of imbecile when I say that the business of tracking what business is doing with IT has never been more torturous.

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of who or what can take credit for IT's invention, I can tell you that the multiple--and sometimes conflicting--roles that IT is playing in the global economy give life to the notion that achieving simplicity is a devilishly complex process.

InformationWeek's superb "Innovation 100" package is all the evidence one needs to see that the seemingly oxymoronic notion of complex simplicity indeed is the rule rather than the exception for organizations not merely content to survive in these odd economic times.

Consider that all of the organizations cited on the Innovation 100 list had a single, well-defined, ages-old goal for their IT investments: making customers happy and keeping them so. That's it. Nothing special about that, right?

Well, from the lucky perch where I sit--one where I get to learn from hundreds of InformationWeek's readers and friends on a monthly basis--I can tell you that the view of what's going on out there in the "real" economy (as opposed to the theoretical models we're inundated with from our friends at the Fed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, et alia) is many things, but simple it ain't.

The business of making IT part of the very fabric of enterprise is, of itself, fiendishly complex. Coping with the constant change in the variety of tools at one's disposal, the concurrent shifts in customer demands, and competitive considerations increases the complexity by an order of magnitude.

Yet the best of the best re-jigger their tool sets, take care of we masses on a near one-on-one basis, and maintain the jump on the competition. And above all, they do so in such a way that, from the perspective of an outsider looking in occasionally to do business, simplicity is the order of the day.

Small wonder, then, that one is made to feel so imbecilic when poking around trying to understand how organizations of all sizes manage to achieve all that they do in technological and marketplace environments that are close to the textbook definition of chaotic.

What's the common element among the organizations thriving in this time where mastering complexity is the single and simplest of goals? In a word: vision. The vision I specifically write of here is not ocular but, rather, the sort of vision that enables individuals to see a series of building blocks (think technologies). It's the sort of vision that enables individuals to understand how those building blocks can be used to construct imaginative, efficient, productive structures. And that brings into play the fact that fulfilling any vision demands change.

Is change simple? Oftener than not, change is a complex, three-dimensional process. Is change painless? Never. Is change welcome? There's the million-dollar question. Change might not be welcome, but it surely needs to be encouraged, at best, and tolerated, at worst, during this time, in this economy, and in this competitive environment

Why do organizations need to look at every new thing that comes down the line? Because even if said organization isn't looking, it can be assumed with absolute certainly that someone else looking.

Simply put, the issue of coping with and capitalizing on change isn't a question of what tools an organization has at its disposal. Unmistakably, it is an issue of how that organization decides to use those tools--modest or extravagant--that are at its disposal, along with a constant re-evaluation of what the organization does, why it does what it does, and how it does what it does.

This brings us back to that troublesome and eternal "vision thing." I think Mr. Einstein got it right when he said that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Mr. Disney got it equally right when he referred to his employees as "imagineers."

Here's to the dreamers and the visionaries, even from one they regularly cause to feel imbecilic.

Lou Bertin is a contributor to InformationWeek Online and is a principal at Bertin & Co., an organization he founded in 1999. He formerly was managing editor/industry at InformationWeek, a founding editor at Computer Reseller News, and a senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard in Washington, D.C., where he led government relations efforts on behalf of a variety of technology companies and consortia. He also was a vice-president at Burson-Marsteller in New York. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is a commentator on CMP Media's TechWeb multimedia online service. He can be reached at lou.bertin@gte.net.


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