Enabling Technologies

Peter Drucker drew a great analogy between the printing press and computers¹. He said that for the first fifty years after the printing press was invented in 1455, it was used to produce content that had already been written—most of it religious or from Greece and Rome. Afterward, there was an explosion of new content. Luther published the Bible in German. Machiavelli wrote The Prince. This new technology began to change the world. By spreading new ideas to a broader audience than ever before, the printing press helped create the Renaissance.

If you think about the first fifty years after the invention of the computer, they followed a similar pattern. And now, we may be at the beginning of our own renaissance with respect to the way we use computers.  The Internet and web technologies are creating a shift in our economy and our world that will be as dramatic as the introduction of the printing press.

Dashboards are a real-world manifestation of this shift—one that you can exploit today.  You can move beyond using your information systems just to store and access data.  With dashboards (and the technologies behind them), you can link disparate data sources, drill down to uncover the story behind the numbers, as well as learn and see connections that were never obvious before.  Until recently, most of these dashboard systems were custom-built for companies like WalMart.  As dashboards move into the mainstream, they are helping to speed business model innovation—enabling companies to outsource any and all “non-core” activities.  If you can still have the full information you need to manage a process, it will matter less and less whether you own the process.

One thing to keep in mind, however, as we all work more and more closely with this approach to management information, is that as powerful and informative as these dashboards are, we should be mindful to look through the windshield as well.

¹ The Drucker thoughts are from Beyond the Information Revolution, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2002)

-Mary Adams    2006