I attended the AIIM expo today to hear the keynote speech by Microsoft's Jeff Teper, with demo by Arpan Shah. Teper's talk, "From Business Intelligence to Blogs and Workflow to Wikis: Accelerating Both Empowerment and Governance in a Rapidly Expanding World of Information," discussed the difference between companies that are execution-oriented and those that are innovation-oriented.
The execution-oriented companies are concerned with governance, control, and regulating their internal content. The innovation-oriented companies are concerned with collaboration and empowerment of their users. The two types appear to have different strategic and infrastructure needs, but in reality, all companies need to combine the right amount of both. Execution-oriented companies need to innovate in order to survive in the marketplace, and innovation-oriented companies need some standardization of their work process and product so that they don't end up with duplicative effort and chaos.
Teper showed how Microsoft designed SharePoint (MOSS 2007) with both sides in mind. It has what Teper called the Governance Accelerators:
- Consistent site & information architecture
- Information management policy
- Rights management
- Auditing
And it has the Empowerment Accelerators:
- Employee self-service
- Role delegation
- Intuitive User Interface
- Pervasive Collaboration
Which way does your company tend - toward execution or innovation? Is one of these words part of your mission statement? Have you experienced situations where you needed to enable your organization to work in a different direction than you usually do? I'd love to hear stories or examples from the real world, now that I'm looking at things through execution-vs.-innovation-tinted glasses...
