"Knowledge is Power." And one of the most common assumptions in our industry, indeed one of the building blocks of the industry, is taking this to the next level and assuming that if we give employees access to more information, then we are empowering them to be more productive.

But does this idea hold water? That’s a question that our associate, Tom Nolle, Founder and President of CIMI Corporation, recently asked in a publication, “Information Empowerment: Fact or Fantasy?”

As Tom states in the publication, “Workers, armed with the best information money can buy, become productivity machines, generating a payback that justifies a lot of hardware and software investment.

“In the past, we’ve looked at the role of empowerment in justifying things like SOA, and we’ve introduced the notion of ‘jobspace’ as a means of understanding just what empowerment means in a logical sense. What we propose to do this month is look at the statistical framework of the workforce to get a notion of what workers might really be ‘empowerable’ and thus learn how much money might be on the table.”

Tom then examines a number of potential pitfalls and incorrect assumptions that can come about unless one is extremely careful in the implementation. As a result, he comes to the conclusion that, “The ‘pro’ argument here is based on the fact that SOA orchestration and process management could literally remake the way that productivity enhancement is achieved. In the past, IT has sought to improve productivity by creating an IT context for work that we’d call an ‘application.’ SOA eliminates the notion of an application in a classical sense, substituting a set of services that can be orchestrated into individual ‘views’ or ‘jobspaces’ and also onto processes.

“One could well argue that this is a truly revolutionary change, and we’d so argue and be happy to do it. Unfortunately, just as beauty is reputedly in the eye of the beholder, so ‘orchestrability’ is in the eye of the CIO or business planner. The media has uniformly failed to portray the real import of SOA, the buyers are largely under-educated, and so the question is whether the potential revolution of SOA will fail because all the revolutionaries decided to nap under a tree instead.

“Inertia is a heavy burden (how do you like that for picturesque allusion?). The mass IT market takes time to move, and it may well be that there won’t be enough time to move it within the framework of the IT cycle that is now moving forward. If that’s the case, we’ll drive productivity up but fail to achieve a higher peak, a better ratio of labor spending to IT support spending, than we have in the past.”

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.