Clear
and Future Value
The
Value Spectrum enables professionals to chart their own futures and the progress
of the Information Age.
By
Thomas J. Buckholtz, Ph.D.
How
have people characterized their Information Age opportunities and
plight? Drowning in a tidal wave of e-mail and
information? Deafened
by a cacophony of data? Paralyzed
coping with a gridlock of disparate hardware and software? Blinded by the gleam of marketing claims?
Now
is the time to view the Information Age from 30,000 feet and chart
two down-to-earth forward-looking paths; a Roadmap for the Information
Age and your own course.
The
Information Age evolves through six electronic eras – Technician,
Clerk, Librarian, Analyst, Coach, and Executive – as defined by
the use of broadly applied electronic technologies.
The
Technician Era began in the 1840s with deployment of the telegraph,
and has continued with the spread of telephones, radio, television,
computers, and computer networks. This era focuses on infrastructure. Today’s centers of attention include increasing
the speed of computing, enhancing data transmission capacities,
and developing the Internet.
The
Clerk Era started in the 1890s with the electronic processing
of data recorded on punched cards. This era focuses on administering transactions.
Recent emphases include enterprise resources planning,
supply chain management, and electronic commerce.
The
Librarian Era commenced in the 1990s with the development of data
warehousing and the World Wide Web, and focuses on information.
Developing information from multiple transaction databases,
and creating Web search engines and other techniques to find and
filter information are the two centers of attention today.
The
Analyst, Coach, and Executive Eras have not yet begun. The Analyst Era will focus on creating
insight; the Coach era will emphasize improving the proficiency
of individuals, groups, and systems; and the Executive Era will
concentrate on generating outcomes, most notably making and implementing
decisions.
Today,
people benefit from mission-specific technologies in each of these
three areas. For example, an autopilot provides Executive
value to a human airplane pilot.
However, this Information Age Roadmap features generic
multiple-use technologies, not mission-specific systems.
The
Analyst Era will likely dawn soon.
Librarian Era information bases are being built.
Tools, such as “data mining,” spot trends in information. And, society is learning how to convert
information trends into Insight.
The
chat room provides a precursor to the Coach Era, which depends
on sharing and using insight. Today, people share people-generated insight.
In time, insight will be created and used electronically.
The Executive Era awaits general-purpose electronically
based techniques for converting insight and proficiency into outcomes
- decisions and implementations of decisions.
These
six eras of the Roadmap mirror the six elements that comprise
a Value Spectrum, which segments and explains the significance
of work. The Spectrum
pinpoints how any entity – a person, team, system, or combination
thereof – benefits from services performed on its behalf. The six Value elements, their focus, and
examples of how a beneficiary may view the corresponding services
follow:
-
Executive
– Outcomes – “Takes strategic action on my behalf.”
-
Coach
– Proficiency – “Improves my game plan and skills.”
-
Analyst
– Insight – “Creates useful recommendations.”
-
Librarian
– Information – “Provides me with useful information.”
-
Clerk
– Transactions – “Handles routine matters.”
-
Technician
– Infrastructure – “Keeps supporting systems running.”
While
the Roadmap predicts that electronic aspects of the Information
Age evolve bottom-up from Technician toward Executive, much human
behavior traverses the Value Spectrum top-down from Executive
toward Technician.
Consider
the choices for a project manager anticipating a key task in the
project. While planning to accomplish the task,
the manager searches for someone to whom to delegate the responsibilities
of setting goals for that task and achieving the outcomes inherent
in the goals. If
no person other than the manager has adequate time and skills
to provide such Executive value, the leader personally retains
the Executive function.
The leader seeks coaching to ensure adequate personal and
team proficiency to make and implement the decisions that define
the task and produce its outcomes.
Coaching enhances the leader’s success in selecting appropriate
team members, processes, and team-member roles.
If
the available Coach value appears inadequate for the leader’s
needs, the leader tries to obtain specific insight – Analyst value.
“Please provide me prioritized recommendations for the
task’s outcomes. Then,
I will choose one.” If
the team is unlikely to provide adequate Analyst value, the leader
digs deeper for Librarian value by asking for information with
which personally to develop the needed recommendations.
If
the information proves inadequate, the leader asks for transactions
data and attempts to synthesize information.
If the transactions prove inadequate, the leader requests
an increase in Technician value – for example, an Infrastructure
upgrade to data gathering systems and technologies.
Higher
value behavior generates risks to the extent weaknesses lower
in the Spectrum undermine it.
For example, successful proficiency-enhancing coaching
depends on appropriate recommendations and other insight.
Recommendations produce risk to the extent weakness exists
in the underlying information on which they are based.
And, information suffers to the extent underlying transactions
data has flaws.
Thus,
the Information Age’s now one-and-a-half-centuries old bottom-up
evolution through the electronic eras represents a-walk-before-run
scenario. While some people claim the Information
Age is burgeoning rapidly, others can legitimately point to evolutionary
slowness. Currently,
the Information Age scenario still requires much “low on the Value
Spectrum” experimentation and work.
Many people would relish today reliable Coach and Analyst
general-purpose systems.
But society still works to resolve important infrastructure,
transactions, and information issues such as, respectively, capabilities
for systems to communicate with each other, the consistency and
accuracy of data, and the trustworthiness of supposed knowledge.
Value
Spectrum Opportunities
The
Value Spectrum addresses some of the workplace’s, and life’s,
key opportunities:
-
“Am
I doing the most appropriate work?”
-
“What
support and learning should I seek to succeed with my work?”
-
“How
can I best market my work?”
Specifically,
the Value Spectrum describes how services performed by one entity
add value for a beneficiary regarding a specific goal or activity
the beneficiary endeavors to accomplish.
Either entity, the provider or the beneficiary, can be
a person, group, product, service, system, or combination.
Sometimes, the provider and beneficiary are the same entity.
For
example, you personally invest in the stock market and thereby
run a one- or few-person business.
Examples of the six types of value you need to run your
business include:
-
Outcomes
– Decisions to buy and sell stocks.
-
Proficiency
– Coaching provided by investment advisors.
-
Insight
– Analyses from newsletters for investors.
-
Information
– News about world events.
-
Transactions
– Processing buy and sell orders.
-
Infrastructure
– Telecommunications and computing systems.
Your
decision to buy a stock constitutes Executive value for the business. Your buy and sell decisions, along with
your expenditures securing the other five supporting types of
value, determine the financial success of the business.
To the extent you are not an impulse trader, you value
Coach, Analyst, and other services that enhance your effectiveness
at making buy and sell decisions.
Like the project manager described earlier, you may prefer
to rely on apt Coach and Analyst services, rather than perform
your own Librarian research and develop your own conclusions.
The
Value Spectrum points out some key features of the personal investment
marketplace. For example, many people do not have time
or other resources adequate to secure services sufficient to support
picking stocks. Like
the project manager confronting that key task, these people have
the option of delegating the Executive function, in this case
by investing through a mutual fund.
The
Spectrum also points out a disparity that, along with the Internet,
created the opportunity for online discount brokerages.
Traditionally, investors who make their own decisions rely
on brokers for Coach, Analyst, Librarian, and Clerk services. Such investors typically crave coaching
and insight, but pay only for Clerk-value execution of buy and
sell orders. Traditionally, brokerages bundle the cost
of the higher Value services into transactions fees. Discount brokers to provide Clerk services
priced as Clerk-only services.
As
a provider of services, your tests for “doing the right work”
include:
-
External perspective: “Do
the beneficiaries of my work find it situated sufficiently high
on their Value Spectra?”
-
Internal perspective: “From
my point of view, are my intended Outcomes sufficiently supported
throughout my work’s Value Spectrum that no inappropriate weaknesses
jeopardize my achieving them?”
To
the extent you anticipate inappropriate weaknesses, you discover
potential opportunities to take advantage of additional resources
or training. You enhance the marketing of your own
work and capabilities to the extent you legitimately position
those accomplishments and talents high on the Value Spectrum in
other people’s perspectives.
Measurements
and Gauges
While
composed of six distinctly named Value Elements, the Value Spectrum
is continuous. For example, a sophisticated Clerk provides
low-level Librarian services for finding and filtering Information.
As noted above, the evolution of the Information Age’s
electronic eras has reached this point. By helping a client assess the trustworthiness
of information for use in a particular context, a sophisticated
Librarian provides low-level Analyst services. The extent Analyst-Value recommendations
contain game plans for implementing recommendations, a beneficiary
of those recommendations receives Coach value.
Each
Value Element has two associated words.
For example, the third element has Analyst and Insight.
The first word is, strictly speaking, used as an adjective
– Analyst Value. The
second word, in this instance Insight, is a noun.
Coincidentally, society uses the six first words as nouns
for job titles or work descriptions.
Exploiting this coincidence proves useful in some circumstances,
but inappropriate in others.
Every
job carries responsibilities for outcomes.
A person who records routine data and has a job title of
Clerk has responsibility for the quality of recording that data
and maybe even for the quality of the data itself.
Within the context of those duties, recording data is an
Executive function and requires appropriate Coach-through-Technician
support.
The
Roadmap highlights the progress up the Value Spectrum of the use
of generic, widely applicable technologies, such as the information
resources of the World Wide Web. Society can gauge progress within each
electronic era. Table
1 suggests measures for Technician, Clerk, and Librarian Era progress.
Extensively
discussed gauges lag Information Age advancement.
Table 1 refers to the two most discussed “Laws” – Moore’s
and Metcalfe’s. The
former tracks over many years and predicts the increasing density
of components on microcomputer chips and, as a corollary, the
increasing speed of microprocessors. The latter asserts that the value of a
telephone or computer network scales proportionately to the square
of the number of entities connected.
Industry
watchers track other indicators, such as the highest storage density
for data on disks and the maximal standardized transactions processed
per second for “online transaction processing systems.”
Opportunities exist for more gauges and for broader media
coverage and public discussion of progress.
Indeed, the Age is named for information, not technology.
While
the bottom half of the Value Spectrum emphasizes tangibles, the
top half features creativity. Measurements for the former tend to be
concrete and, when financial, cost-oriented. Gauges for the latter emphasize competitive
advantage and net value.
Such differences lead some people to call for new methods
for estimating corporate value.
Using the
Roadmap to Shape Decisions
You
can use the Roadmap to anticipate and shape future Information
Age developments. For example, to provide Insight toward
an information technology “make or buy” decision, combine estimates
of your enterprise’s needs for timely enhanced competitive advantage
with estimates for relevant Roadmap progress.
If you require technology before generic systems will fulfill
your needs, consider developing a mission-specific system or having
one built for you. Alternatively, if the development of generic
systems has proceeded adequately, you will probably want to buy
“off the shelf.”
The
Roadmap provides technology developers, professional services
companies, and other suppliers with vital pointers to opportunities
to develop new products and services. Suppliers should also consider the extent
to which customers will buy “bleeding edge,” leading edge, or
mainstream products and services.
The Value Spectrum provides important insight into
the future of work and services.
-
Work. Can
you predict the evolution of work?
Clerk work is being mechanized.
While after more than a century of electronic automation
much manual transactions processing remains, today automation
increasingly obsoletes human Clerk work in significant segments
of society. In those sectors, the new competence threshold
becomes Analyst creativity backed by Librarian knowledge and
abilities to find additional information.
-
Services. Can
you identify the emerging markets for services? Look toward the upper four Value Elements.
Minimizing time-to-market and focusing on core competencies
compel enterprises to outsource traditional functions.
These enterprises pay others to provide Executive value
services for those functions. The same emphases cause leaders to seek
coaching and analyses from outside service providers. Pride in self-sufficiency yields to the
effectiveness of hiring trustworthy Coach and Analyst services. The move to Analyst and higher-value work
produces needs for Librarian services, especially information
that is comprehensive, concise, timely, and trustworthy.
-
Staff Functions. Which
staff functions have staying power? Many chief financial officers and senior
attorneys provide trusted Coach services to CEOs. Even in an era in which enterprises crave
competitive advantage through people and technology, many senior
human resources officials and chief information officers have
yet to capture opportunities to provide Coach and Analyst services
to business unit leaders and, thereby, earn true roles on corporate
leadership teams. Sub-Analyst staff functions that fail
to seize their opportunities risk the prospects of outsourcing
or fading further into the background.
The
Value Spectrum also provides key insight into human resources opportunities.
-
Team Building. Does
your team have adequate skills throughout the Spectrum? When you determine an inadequacy, you
pinpoint a need to add or train people.
-
Hiring. Will
your hiring criteria meet your true needs? People tend to write job descriptions
that emphasize Clerk-Value skills, such as programming in a
specific language. Perhaps
your project and enterprise actually need Analyst skills now
and Coach skills soon. Analyst skills can promote the development
of more capable, flexible software with less programming effort.
Interpersonal Coach skills may be needed now to ensure
adequate teamwork; soon to ensure the software is marketed,
sold, and used effectively; and later to ensure the enterprise
sustains its growth.
-
Learning. How
can you create great learning opportunities? The Value Spectrum provides a method for
pinpointing needs for people and teams to learn. Ask your clients, boss, peers, and subordinates
to what extent you need to be more successful in taking strategic
action on their behalf, improving their game plans and skills,
creating useful recommendations, and so forth.
Ask yourself the same questions.
Also, consider the situations to which and people to
whom you want to contribute in the future.
Use your newfound insight create or select learning opportunities
that meet your immediate or future mission-specific needs.
-
Succession planning. Whom
will a project manager suggest as her successor when she transfers
to another assignment in the middle of the project? Her recommended candidate pool will likely
include those project participants who have provided Executive
value for her project leadership role.
If that pool proves inadequate, Coach-value and perhaps
analyst-Value contributors will be added.
Similarly, effective organizational succession planning
identifies and develops Executive- and Coach-skilled people.
-
Career development. How
can you best position yourself for advancement? Enhance, demonstrate, and market your
high-value skills with respect to the roles you want to have. Also, take into account two pieces of
wisdom: Premature or overly broad marketing may threaten some
of your colleagues. A
weakness in lower-value skills may prove to be a hindrance.
Moving
Forward – You and the Information Age
You
have the following six choices for using this article.
-
Recycle
the paper or avoid downloading the electronic version – Technician
Value.
-
File
the paper or bookmark the online link – Clerk Value.
-
Review
the article occasionally – Librarian Value.
-
Determine
how you can apply the article – Analyst Value.
-
Deploy
techniques from the article to help yourself and your colleagues
– Coach Value.
-
Achieve,
thereby, something you find worthwhile – Executive Value.
The
closer to Executive Value you choose, the more opportunities you
will have to thrive – throughout your endeavors and in the Information
Age.
______
Thomas
J. Buckholtz Ph.D. is executive vice president for xxxx Corp.,
a venture fund and business accelerator based in Silicon Valley. Buckholtz provides business and executive
coaching to xxxx startups
and other enterprises. He
authored the book Information
Proficiency: Your Key to the Information Age.
Reach him at 408/xxx-xxxx
(tom_b@cinnovations.com).
_____
Table 1:
Monitoring Progress of the First Three Eras
The
following aspects and measurements typify the ones society can
use to monitor the progress of each of the first three electronic
eras of the Information Age.
As appropriate, you can chart over time the progress aggregated
worldwide, amassed by a single enterprise, or determined by the
single most advanced system yet produced.
Technician
Era
-
Communication
– bandwidth
-
Sharing –
nodes per network (“Metcalfe’s Law”)
-
Computing
– operations per time (for single microprocessors, a derivative
of “Moore’s Law”)
-
Storage –
total data; bits per volume, area, or volume-time
-
Reliability
– typical time between failures
-
Transaction
Rate – completions per time
-
Transactions
– total records, records per database
-
Intrinsic
Data Qualities – completeness, timeliness, accuracy, consistency,
degree of detail
-
Extrinsic
Data Qualities – convenience, knowledge of sources, security
-
Collecting
Information – amount of information
-
Finding and
Filtering Information – useful pointers conveyed
-
Intrinsic
Information Qualities – completeness, timeliness, accuracy,
consistency, degree of detail
-
Extrinsic
Information Qualities – convenience, knowledge of sources, security
-
Interpreting
Information (in the contexts in which is was created and previous
used) – value generated
-
Estimating
the Trustworthiness of Information (in the context in which
it will be used) – value generated
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