Computer says “What?”
The collision of two powerful forces could stifle business innovation in the 21st century: new fangled computers and old fashioned bosses. That is the fear expressed by Andrew McAfee, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://andrewmcafee.org/ ). While new technology gives companies the potential to create a collaborative, networked business – a model that some have labelled Enterprise 2.0 – most bosses, McAfee insists, aren’t interested: “They say let’s not have a networked enterprise, let’s have a row-and-column enterprise, let’s have a grid enterprise, where people are sitting at their work stations everyday, with their heads down, getting work done every day, all day, not really forming communities and having voices, but just cranking out work.”
The best way to innovate using this technology, McAfee says, is to focus on the questions that computers can’t answer very well. Simple questions that are easy to ask but hard to answer. Questions like: “What do our customers really want?” That isn’t going to be answered by a load of people with their heads down hammering away at their keyboards.
