CIO Mag - Decision Evolution

A couple of different riffs on this article by Davenport.

• A lot easier said than done - it's still kind of difficult to design systems that truly are "intelligent", capable of making "decisions". There is still a lot of art, insight, etc. that is captured by the way the solution is architected / designed - and it's that gray area of "knowledge engineering" that you need to capitalize on. Work on elegant, sustainable, flexible, and cheap ways of encoding solutions.
• He talks about the changing work environment, and how different types of knowledge workers are being displaced. Don't think about simple value-added; think rather about complex value-added, and differentiate yourself along those lines. Don't merely be good at translating and computing stuff that can be done by anybody - be the one to tackle the tougher problems (the ones that are tougher to automate <g>).
• He's talking more about subject matter expertise, I'm talking more about methodology expertise. Of course, this also requires a high degree of self-marketing. Most people are very comfortable slotting people into a single specific type of expertise - craftsman, artist ... and even computer programmer. Some "old world" corporate cultures (I'm giving away my preference here) are not comfortable dealing eith the generalist.
• I often sense a difference in the way large corporations deal with concepts like this, vs. smaller corporations (think Fortune 500 vs. SMBs). Most big trade rags, MBA classes, op ed pieces speak from a large corporate bias - my opinion, yes, but I've seen small, medium, and large businesses. My point, however, is that for SMBs on down, there is still much opportunity for IT, especially as the radical new technolgies contnue to get chearper to implement. This, of course, matches up against that pressure of shrinking budgets ...