Andrew McAfee at Harvard Business school poses an interesting question:

do 'managers' belong on the list of knowledge workers whose jobs are being transformed by information technology?

His question is prompted by a number of interesting examples of the use of IT in areas such as "fluid" building fabrication, sculpture, BMW car design and poker playing. He then goes on to describe, based on the experience of his course teaching, that most general managers do not believe that IT can help them in their roles as leaders, change agents and value generators because:

until fairly recently the profession of general management was actually not one of the ones deeply affected by technology. Prior to the mid 1990s the footprint of most corporate IT -- the sphere of direct influence for a piece of technology -- was the single function or task. This made for a happy marriage between technology and knowledge workers like engineers, scientists, and analysts because these workers stayed within a single function. But general managers, by definition, do not. They're responsible for orchestrating the work of multiple groups. So from their perspective, IT was actually delegable and low level.

This chimes well with some of the points we raise in our March 2005 BPM report (which will be updated next month). In it we highlight that much of IT discussion of business process is actually about the shadow that IT automation casts on real business processes. The real world of business processes is much more complicated than would appear to be case based on what IT can support. There are business processes which serve to differentiate the business and there are those that are a cost of doing business. There are business processes which support day-to-day operational activities (or single functions or tasks as Andrew refers to them); there are those that support management of those operational activities; and ultimately there are those that govern strategy.

IT has historically played a prominent role in support the non-differentiating, operational processes. That role is significantly diminished when it comes to differentiating, management and strategy processes because they are more ad-hoc and collaborative and nature and depend on harnessing and exploiting a wide variety of applications and structured and unstructured information assets.

Andrew believes that the emergence of ERP and the Internet has enabled a new class of business process automation which operates at the level of the organisation and so are more suited to management processes. He also believes that "Enterprise 2.0" technologies (which Angela discusses in the broader context of enterprise collaboration in her recent report), by virtue of their emergent characteristics, promise to do the same and concludes that he is:

comfortable adding 'general managers' to the list of knowledge workers who have very powerful digital tools at their disposal, and who need to learn how to use them well. Does this also seem right to you?

His historical analysis of business process automation certainly seems right to us and we believe that a range of new IT capabilities have the potential to shift IT's supporting role in the direction of differentiating management and strategy processes. However, it's not just about managers learning how to use them well. As we highlight in our BPM and collaboration reports (and more broadly in our analysis of IT-business alignment), these management competencies must also address a broad range of organisational, cultural and governance challenges if these innovations are to fully realise that potential.