The Law of Unintended Consequences
If you asked me what kind of business I was founding in the 1970s, I would have answered, "a mainframe reporting software company." But as Information Builders grew I realized we weren't just in the reporting business. We were in the information delivery business. That perspective has allowed us to
thrive to this day, despite many changes in the business landscape and a continually evolving technical infrastructure.
I think software companies succeed through their ability to generalize the value of what they offer. To prosper over the long term, they can't merely create products for a specific platform or a specific architecture, or even a specific technical need. They must learn to solve certain kinds of
business problems, and to become adept at perceiving the unanticipated needs of customers.
Today's computers still collect, manage, store and distribute information. They are great at performing complex calculations, monitoring and controlling processes, and helping us communicate with each other – whether through a wireless Blackberry or IBM's latest iSeries server. The user base has
grown exponentially during that period. When Information Builders was founded there were maybe a million people in the world who were tied into a computerized information system. During the era of the mini-computer in the 1980s, the user base jumped tenfold, to about ten million people. When PCs hit the market and
the personal computing revolution took hold, the user base quickly jumped by a similar magnitude, to more than 100 million people. Today, with the advent of the Internet and the spread of low-cost computing devices, we are fast approaching 1 billion users.
Today, Information Builders' thrust is operational business intelligence, which entails extending actionable business information to many different types of employees throughout the enterprise, as well as to external partners and customers. The scale of these systems is becoming larger as companies
adopt the Internet more and more.
I have observed an interesting phenomenon as organizations widely distribute information to people. I call this the "law of unintended consequences." It is obvious to assume that if people get all of the information they need to do their jobs, they will do their jobs better. However, the ways in which "better"
occurs is where the "law" seems to operate.
I remember one scenario recently in which a company tied thousands of field repair reps into a system that revealed information about the service calls each of them was handling. This business intelligence system computed difficulty factors, duration factors, and other metrics to determine individual productivity.
What was the unintended consequence? Once all of the workers were able to compare their own productivity with their fellow workers' productivity, some reps complained that the metrics did not accurately account for time spent traveling to and from remote sites. It became clear that the scheduling system was
defective. Fixing the scheduling system yielded immense improvements that no one could have foreseen when the BI system was installed.
What does the future hold? In the years ahead we will be putting intelligence in places we never anticipated. Computing is bursting out of the IT world and into our everyday lives. The decreasing cost of producing integrated circuits in tandem with ever-greater miniaturization is enabling applications that once
belonged solely in the realm of science fiction. As computers get smaller, smarter and more ubiquitous and permeate every aspect of our lives, I think we are in for many more tales of unintended consequences. I collect these tales, so if you have one I would be pleased if you shared it with me.
Regards,
Gerald D. Cohen
 
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