Useful to Whom?
Progress deserves a closer look when the benefits and the costs arrive at different addresses.
From the user’s side of the screen, the improvement is easy to appreciate: fewer steps, faster answers, less time spent searching. From the other side, the picture can look very different.
Someone produces the information, maintains the service, and pays to keep it available. When a new tool changes how that work reaches people, it also changes the exchange that sustains it.
This is where leaders need to look beyond convenience. An innovation can serve the customer well while leaving a supplier, publisher, or community with a harder business to run. It can also open opportunities that were previously out of reach.
Our cover story this week examines that uneven exchange. The useful question is what your organization needs to protect, what it wants to make easier, and what it expects in return.
Those decisions deserve to be made deliberately. Left unattended, they will still be made—by someone else.