Your posting reminds me of a “behind the scenes” tour of a major gambling casino that I had the pleasure of taking (…don’t ask why…that is a whole different posting). The executive giving the tour explained that at one time they considered automating the job of the pit bosses by creating an RFID-based system that tracked all the card, dice, chip and even drink movements on the gambling table. By the way..I learned that the pit bosses are the ones walking around the casino tracking and managing the floor. The casino did a pilot program and tried the computerized system out. In the end, they found that it couldn’t compare to the accuracy and speed of the pit bosses.

Why not??? Thinking like a geek…I was pondering the details. Was it a problem with the RFID chips, maybe the data transfer…maybe the issue was with the analytics tools? I must have had a pretty quizzical look on my face, because my guide said… “Let me show you.”

We walked over to one of the pit bosses. He was a 50+ year old man in a dark suit leaning against a podium, tapping his pen and generally looking bored off to space. My guide said, “Hi Fred, can you tell us what’s going on?” The pit boss proceeded to instantly rattle off how long each person had been sitting in his area, how much they had bet, how much they lost and won and what they were drinking. Based on his immediate and on-going tracking of the floor he and the management could make immediate decisions about deploying resources, serving more drinks, calling security or upgrading a high value gambler.

Every once and a while the pit boss would write down a few pieces of data that that were then later input into a data repository for trend analysis etc.

I give this organization a lot of credit because they realized that in fact there was a trade-off benefit of not automating and mechanizing everything. They realized that there was a whole generation (in fact multiple generations) of people, who had honed the internal gut skills to rapidly analyze incoming data, processes it and do something with it. AND also provide a level of customer service that was unmatched.

Finding that balance is essential. Just automating, warehousing, consolidating, outsourcing, clouding…or pick another buzz word……without an understand of why and understanding the cost and benefit, is just missing the point. There maybe a wealth of opportunity in the experience, the gut and the skills of people within your business that you might be unwittingly missing.

So one strategy is to bet on capabilities not products. This is, I suspect, what the folks at Google do, more or less consciously. Some days someone at Google wakes up and thinks: wouldn’t it be cool if….. and something like Wave, Maps or Earth is born. When they start investing in it, they don’t know exactly how it will work or even what features it will have. But they tend to create extensible and flexible capabilities that can be used in lots of different ways, and then let the community of developers find out what they’re for. So in many ways Google doesn’t care which future emerges, their technology will still be relevant.

A classic product development process based on detailed market forecasts and intelligence can pay off big time if you’re right, but tends to be fragile if the future doesn’t turn out the way you expect. Although it’s heresy to say so, as a Gartner analyst I am often worried when people ask me for detailed market forecasts, because it can sometimes indicate someone with too narrow a view of the future.

Nick