This week’s podcast featured an interview with Shane Harris of Washingtonian Magazine, who talked about a Palantir technology that enables government – and, in particular, the intelligence community – to mine vast amounts of data to find the proverbial needles in the haystack and cut time to critical answer from weeks to days or even hours.
But that’s not what struck me most. It was the fact that Palantir was able to gain traction with its software not by courting the senior leaders, but by equipping the frontline workers with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively. Eventually, their success captured the attention of supervisors and senior leaders…but it was the improved productivity of the people performing the day to day tasks that propelled organizations to adopt it agency-wide. I guess you might call it “trickle up technology.”
Listen to the interview for yourself (jump to 15:00 if you want to hear specifically about the trickle-up tech effect):
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Is this “trickle up tech” happening in your agency or department?
Are front line employees using technology that makes them more effective and, eventually, leads to a decision from the top to distribute the tech tools more broadly?