On my way to work I often end up on the phone with an old friend. I keep threatening to podcast the conversations because they’re often pretty insightful, even if I do say so myself. To make up for it, they’re sometimes just drivel.

But back to the insight.

Today we came to a great conclusion:

Information isn’t power. It’s fuel.

To put it another way, information doesn’t do great things, it enables great things. In order to get the great things out of it, you have to act on it, which means it must have some value to drive action. It must be actionable.

But many folks have this backward. They think the action part is mostly supposed to be about gathering the information, and that once gathered it will somehow produce benefit by its mere existence.

Are you doing this? Are you collecting status reports from your people, filing them away, distributing them to people all in the hopes that by some sort of motive osmosis power will be extracted from them? It may be that those reports contain a lot of information, but it’s not actionable information because it’s not needed.

The best way to differentiate real buyers from tire kickers was to ask about the details of their need. When do they need the product? When do they want it delivered? Why do they need it? If there’s detail in the answers, then you have a real buyer. If not, then you have a tire kicker. They may be interested in buying someday but they don’t have the real need yet. It’s the same with information. If you need it, you know what you need because you have questions to be answered.

If information is fuel, strategy is the engine.

If you have lots of information lying around and don’t know what to do with it, it’s probably a symptom that you lack a focused need. Strategy is what guides the business and ultimately creates that need. Strategy is executed through tactics, which require planning, which in turn requires information.

Symptoms of the lack of strategy:

1. You’re drowning in reports and other information, but you can’t seem to get value out of it. The need isn’t there, so the information isn’t actionable, and no action is taken from it.
2. Major decisions are made (not thought about, not discussed, but actually made) as a reaction to outside forces. A customer demands new technology, cancels an order, or switches to a competitor and someone snaps and a decision gets made. The world is fluid and reacting to it is often a large part of business, but it shouldn’t drive the business.
3. Discussions about “What business are we really in, and where are we headed?” and similar subjects erupt unexpectedly during meetings, and delay activity. The key here is that they delay whatever was about to take place. If there’s no delay, then the eruptions are more likely caused by a lack of communication on the strategy rather than the lack of strategy itself.

Do you have an engine to burn your fuel?

Have you read the 2006 State of the Industry report from NAPL? In the chapter on client relationships, they report on some responses the survey participants gave on how contact with clients is changing. The first was that client contact was becoming:

“More electronic, less face-to-face, less personal.�?

Sounds true enough, and probably true for every industry. But the response right after it is what made me chuckle:

“Need to see clients more often to counter effects of electronic communication.�?

More often than what? More often than when communication was less electronic, more face to face and more personal? “…counter effects…?�? Is electronic communication poisonous?

I think this response is indicative of a very real problem in business today – the technology gap. There are still a lot of folks out there who see the Internet and associated technologies as alien and evil. They’re fighting them.

In the past no one was expected to understand computers or the Internet. Neither existed, or at best only experts were involved. In the past 20 years both have gone mainstream, and I think everyone would agree that 20 years from now everyone will be as well-versed in using both as using a telephone or driving car. It’s neither the past nor the future that’s the problem. It’s the present, and the shift from a workforce that’s not techno-savvy to one that is of concern.

As each company’s workforce ages the non-savvy folks will retire and be replaced by folks who are savvier. Yes, I know there are plenty of older folks who are very savvy – my 75 year-old father is one of them – but as a generality older folks tend to be less adept with technology. The problem is that in any given industry, some companies will make this transition faster than others. We all invest in technology because of the tremendous competitive advantage it provides, and the technological literacy of the workforce is probably the strongest aspect of this phenomenon.

Put another way, companies with technologically literate workforces will have a competitive advantage over those who don’t.

We all know that. But what I don’t think most people are considering is that technological literacy as a competitive advantage is itself changing. It used to be that literacy meant that Bob or Jane could perform the work related tasks they needed to without having to bother IT. That is, the work that the company had established as standard operating procedure. Anything beyond that, like creating a new report or template or database was IT’s job. However, as we all know, being successful means improving at an ever increasing rate and that means moving the source of innovation and improvement closer and closer to people who will benefit. That means people have to invent for themselves. We may expect our IT departments to being doing this innovation, but increasingly they are tasked with reducing costs and keeping users under control – which kills innovation at both ends.

It also means being at home with email, instant messaging, and other forms of modern communication. Millions of teenagers form personal (in some cases very personal) relationships using little more than text messaging on cell phones, so it’s not impossible.

Being functionally competent with computers is a whole different story than being comfortable enough to innovate new ways of using them. Yet most training programs are aimed at getting users to follow specific procedures to do specific tasks – add a network printer, or create a spreadsheet for example. They aren’t focused on general knowledge to enable users to find and create their own solutions or absorb the exploding array of new stuff on the web.

Computer literacy is also usually seen as a lower-level skill. How many upper management people do you know who pride themselves on being able to query a database or write their own macros?

In order to solve these problems companies need to do several things. They need to move more responsibility to the employee for IT tasks, to drive increased competence at that level. They need to change their culture to include technological innovation in one’s work among the things to be rewarded. They need to work as hard to educate people on technology as they do on more business oriented subjects.

All other things being equal, those companies who close the technology gap faster are going to have greater success than those who don’t. What will your company do?

While I was at the SCIP conference I was able to meet several folks from Strategy Software, who make several products I use. We talked about their products and their features, and we also ended up talking about creating a user’s group.

There were a few of us “power users” there, and everyone seemed to think it was a good idea. It was one of those discussions where everyone’s nodding, but no one is talking about what they’re going to do, so I volunteered to put it together.

So on the way home in the airport I found a spot with free wi-fi and set to work. One of the things I really love about the internet is how quickly things can be done. In less than an hour I had found software (PHPBB) and had uploaded it to my web servers, defined the forums, thought up a name (poorly chosen and later changed), written posts, and emailed the others about it.

That was Friday, and Saturday I registered a domain, cleaned up the site, set up security on the Strategy Software forums (they’re for licensees only) and wrote more posts. Since then the domain as changed to www.speakstrategy.com. The folks from Strategy Software have been participating, and now we have 48 articles and 10 users.

But that’s not enough!

So, please come and have a look when you can!

www.speakstrategy.com is a place where CI professionals and others involved in research or information security can network and discuss issues that are important to them, as well as their experience with Strategy Software products. It’s still in it’s infancy, so now’s the time to get in on the ground floor!