After reading “Eight business technology trends to watch” in the most recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, I have to believe that either we have an uncanny ability to predict the technology market (which I like to think we do) or McKinsey analysts really do love Wikinomics (in which case, feel free to send along a cut of consulting revenues). Three of McKinsey’s top eight business technology trends certainly do echo chapters from the Wikinomics book. Consider the following:

1. Distributing cocreation. “The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries.”
2. Using consumers as innovators. “Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers.”
3. Tapping into a world of talent. “As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence.”

While this is old hat for Wikinomics readers, number seven on the list is something close to my heart and something that we don’t talk about much, but probably should: management metrics (or in McKinsey’s words, “putting more science into management”).

In my previous job, I used to write a lot about service level agreements (SLAs) and decision-making tools for IT managers. As part of this work, I often talked about using metrics to improve IT service management through various stages of maturity. The stages of maturity that we used for the IT service management model are probably fairly transferable to all levels of management. Generalized to be relevant to non-IT sectors, they would be as follows:

• Unmanaged: You pretty much have no clue and manage without any data inputs at all. The extent of your insight into how things are going is, “the lights are on.”
• Reactive: You are pretty much fighting fires and allocating resources without any pre-determined priority. Whatever your boss is yelling at you about the most inevitably gets done at the expense of everything else.
• Predictive: Automated metric gathering is in place to give you a basic view of operations. Resources are allocated in a predictable manner based on solid data that tells you at a high level what is important and what isn’t. You are now managing with the help of Spidey Sense.
• Proactive: This is a consolidated “single-pane-of-glass” view of operations. You understand what metrics are key and contribute to value creation. Patterns emerge that allow decision-makers to pre-empt problems.
• Optimized: Value-driven reporting provides cost vs. risk tradeoffs that help you make the best decisions. There is complete transparency into the metrics program.

I think it would be interesting to get back into looking at how technology can help managers reach the “optimized” stage. If anyone has any new ideas on this, or comes across any interesting examples of how Wikinomics and performance management are intersecting, please send them along.

And for those of you that want to start thinking about the top trends for 2009, I think Don’s new book should be coming out sometime this year ; )