Directionally Correct

Why is it that, as we grow older, we are so reluctant to change it is not so much that new ideas are painful, for they are not.  It is that old ideas are seldom entirely false, but have truth, great truth in them.  The justification for conservatism is the desire to preserve the truths and standards of the past its dangers, of which we are seldom aware, is that in preserving those values, we may miss the infinitely greater riches that lie in the future.  – Dr. Dale E. Turner

In a prior post I discussed the inflection point that organizations go though.  In this post I would like to explore with you the IT side of the inflection point.

When companies are young, there is often abundant enthusiasm, and a scarcity of funds.  From an IT perspective your decision horizon is also not too far out.  You will typically have comparatively few users for the systems you have to build (or buy, or rent, or…).  The criteria that you have to work with will typically be very basic functionality, low volume, and little interaction between functions.  Given that the expectation that you will pull off minor miracles with two quarters and a dime, the best and easiest answer is to develop point solutions with minimal investment in the software platform.  If you have enough foresight to the types of applications required ahead of time you may even invest time in an application and system architecture.  Congratulate yourself if were able to pull this off in the typical start-up organization.  I would bet that in most cases the question the talented IT people ask is “what happens when our volume goes to x?”, the answer invariably comes back as “That will be a good problem to have.  We’ll worry about it then!”

If your business is fortunate, and wise investments are made to drive growth, you will pass an inflection point and be profitable.  Sales and marketing functions will have received the needed attention, front line operations and customer service will typically be addressed.   At the same time it will be necessary to decrease expenses through continuous improvement and refinements to the applications that were built in the early stages.  Unfortunately, IT typically will not receive the investment required to keep up with the other functions.  What IT investment is made will be of the “tweaking” variety.  Almost by definition you will have created not only a much greater number of people who will use the applications, but will have matured the business processes to the point where they may not resemble those for which the original applications were designed.  The point solutions may work, but they were intended and designed for a different world.

At some point, you will cross an IT inflection point.  This is the point that the systems created in the early days no longer function as expected in the new reality, with the current and project volumes, larger number of users, more complex processing logic, greater inter-system interaction.   This inflection point is not obvious.  Problems will occur more frequently.  Problems will be more impactful.  Problems will be more difficult to diagnose.  Problems will be multivariate in cause.  It is not easy to point to a single cause and find the silver bullet to put an end to your problems.   The off-hand comment of “That will be a good problem to have…” doesn’t feel like a good problem any more.  You may have outgrown your technology.  You may have move review and reposition all your applications to address the new world you are now in and the growth in your forecast.

This could be costly – to say the least.  The longer it takes to realize the situation you have found yourself in, the more expensive it will be.  That concept of profitability, as alluring as it is, may be short lasting.  Can you afford to take an emotional step back from profitability to go back in the red (maybe significantly so).  Looked at another way, can you afford not to?

Related Posts:

• Hey CIO, How Are Your Legal Skills?
• Physics of IT – What Have We Learned?
• Physics of IT – Force of Headwinds
• Physics of IT – Acceleration
• Physics of an IT Organization

I think you listen too much to the soldiers.  No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated  by the experience of life as that your should never trust experts.  If you believe the doctors nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.  They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.  – Lord Salisbury’s advice to an increasingly alarmist Viceroy in India (via Joshua-Michele Ross of Opposable Planets)

In a prior post I wrote about the value of sandpaper within an IT organization.  The challenging of ideas and building a better organization through people voicing their perspectives.  As this concept takes root the natural question is what is the implications to managing in this environment.

Let’s put Lord Salisbury’s quote in the context of an IT department.  If you have developed your culture where there is a healthy sandpaper to challenge ideas, there will be no shortage of voices to listen to.  Are they all equal in volume?  Are they all equal in critical thinking?  Are they all equal in importance?  The obvious answers are no, no, and no.

Every voice will be speaking from its personal perspective.  It may have a broad perspective, but will necessarily be biased.  Some voices will be headlining the positive, others the negative.  How much of either is played up or down will be a personal attribute of the individual voices.

It is necessary to differentiate the message from the agenda.   Sometimes the message is a façade designed for a purpose other than the message itself.  The payload in this case is more in the driving a reaction or behavior than in the message itself.  It is necessary to understand how the messages support /amplify or negate / mute each other.  Confusion arises when the messages are contradictory.  A clearer understanding occurs when there are congruences.

Where is the insipid common sense as Lord Salisbury describes in the quotation above?  In many ways this comes from knowing the people behind the voices.   It will become second nature to hear what is not said, as well as what is said.  The level of hierarchical authority will play less importance than the domain authority.  The valuable insight will be distinguished from the less meaningful banter.

No magic bullets here.  Many alerts and alarms.  As you shape your organization, and transform it to it next phase there will be many voices with many messages.  Where you place the filters and microphones will be important.  Get it right and you will be well on your way to understanding more of your world.  Get it wrong and you will quickly feel your decent.

Related Posts:

• Attraction of Identity
• IT Farming
• Sandpaper
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Sociology Skills?
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Legal Skills?

A man’s work is his dilemma his job is his bondage, but it also gives him his fair share of his identity and keeps him from being a bystander in someone else’s world.  – Melvin Maddocks

As an organization, who are you? What is your internal and external story? If you cannot crisply define yourself in a few words you likely have a problem on your hands.

The market shapes corporate brands and heavily influenced by the company upon whom the brand is bestowed.  Companies spend a great deal of money on branding, shaping market perception in the way the company wishes to be defined. The reason is clear, there is too much at stake to let the customers and potential customers independently set their market positioning.

Pulling in the focus, what is the identity of your IT department?  Does it convey a promise which is translated into a brand?  IT organizations typically are not oriented around branding and when pushed to think about it realize they have many disparate, confused, and mixed  identities, each shaped by recent events with their customers. From a brand perspective, there will be no clear message which the IT customers can positively associate with.

For companies at lower maturity levels (see Vaughan Merlyn’s great series of posts on IT Maturity levels)  the primary time IT interacts with their customers is when IT applications fail – roughly equivalent to the heroic people who work in lost luggage at the airport. Carrying the analogy a little further, each person who may lose their luggage typically have their own private lost luggage department.  This drives a confused IT organization identity as the group operates in a reactive way to many IT customers.  As the IT customers will unknowingly control the IT activity, the IT message is lost.  By being primarily reactive, the IT organization is not able to proactively define themselves, their identity, their promise, and their brand.  This is a situation which is all too common – all too unfortunate – and all to unacceptable.

Let’s look at a different scenario. An IT department which has a proactively defined its internal sub-identities (system maintenance, help desk, research and development, software engineering, etc).  Each of these groups not only have well established sub-identities but also internally and externally known set of accountabilities and responsibilities within the groups.  This hypothetical organization would also have well understood interactions and dependencies between the groups.  What this drives from an external perspective is a higher order of identity.  Rather than a personal identity, the organization will develop its own identity.  An identity, which when developed with a move to a proactive culture, will form a promise of control and (ironically) greater responsiveness to the right things than in a overtly reactive culture.

From an IT customer perspective, there is an attractiveness to this.  Knowing how the IT organization operates, what areas of the organization are directly related to each IT customer and how they should work with the IT organization will attract energy from the customer base.  IT will in turn be able to feed on this energy producing a positive feedback loop to the relationship.

Internally there is a great attractiveness to defining your identity.  When there are clear boundaries established there is comfort in knowing what is within each individuals scope of control and what is not.  Knowing where to build and grow specific expertise in your sub-identity is culturally focusing. Knowing what your story is and how to tell it empowering.

The journey to building the identity is adventurous.  In many ways the organizational identity can be shaped directly by the IT organization.  The interesting part come from how the IT customers shape the identity based on how the promise from IT is defined and delivered.  There is an attractiveness to this as the IT organization will be better able to place a value to their identity and brand.

My challenge to you is simple.  Define who you are.  Build and live your promise.  Change your brand.

Related Posts:

• Voices and Messages
• IT Farming
• Types of Meetings – It Depends on Your Perspective
• Sandpaper
• My Relationship With Apple

The difference between what the most and least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.  – Albert Einstein

Ask anyone (astrophysicists excluded) what the universe is made of and they will point to the mountains, oceans, plants, buildings, and people around us. They would be correct – to a point. The reality is that these known and tangible items account for four percent (4%) of the universe. Ninety six percent (96%) is unknown – called Dark Matter. What we know is vastly over-shadowed by what we don’t know. Given how much we don’t know, it is quite likely that we will learn that we likely don’t know the 4% that well either.

Ask your business side partners what IT consists of and the answer you will most often hear is their ERP or CRM system. Poke on this a little and you will find that they are really only talking about a small set of functions within these systems that are frequently used. Like the astrophysics example above they are correct – to a point.

The Dark Matter of IT is rarely spoken of, and examples would include:

• End user applications.  More often than not, this is Dark Matter for everyone until regulatory compliance presses the point and spreadsheets and Access databases find their way into the world of the known.
• Applications outside of the domain of any individual, and interfaces between the applications.  Water cooler conversation will have the effect of extending the knowledge of other systems and applications, but the interfaces between the portfolio of applications will generally always stay Dark Matter.
• Architecture, Middleware, Data Models, and Databases. While the term Oracle will generally be well-recognized, the implementation of a data model in a database, in the context of a system and application architecture will largely stay IT Dark Matter.
• Server Farms, Communications Gear. While people conceptually know their applications live on servers, typically only a small handful of people know the number of servers a typical company maintains.  Hint – the number is bigger than you think.

Recognizing that IT Dark Matter exits is the first step in the understanding why there are challenges in communicating between IT and business.   The same can be said about many of the disciplines which make up the corporate world.  Finance, Marketing, Legal, HR all have their Dark Matter, this isn’t territory exclusive to IT.

All too often when cross functional teams are assembled the Dark Matter is not recognized appropriately with the result of participants taking hits of their favorite headache medicine.  Bringing this around full circle, let’s remember that some of the world’s most brilliant minds have concluded that 96% of the universe is unknown.  Let’s appreciate those that understand their respective Dark Matter, regardless of the discipline they represent, and work with patience to collectively explore the Dark Matter of each others disciplines.

Until then, I think the corner store has a sale on Extra Strength Tylenol.

Related Posts:

• Top 10 Posts of 2009
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Legal Skills?
• Hey CIO, How Are Your HR/OD Skills?
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Financial Skills?
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Marketing Skills?

Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny. — Charles Reade

It is easy to say that something is broke, a business relationship is fractured beyond repair, or we will never be able to do something because we’ve tried it before and failed. It is equally easy to say (but rarely said) that a process works exceptionally smoothly, the value delivered by IT exceeds expectations, or that IT operations have performed so well that there have been no un-scheduled production outages in over a year.

One interesting aspect to explore here is not the comments or absence of them, but how the situations being commented on came to be. While many times these comments can refer to specific events, more often than not, when you dig beneath the surface, you will find that the reaction is to a systemic condition, the seeds (either crop or weeds) of which were planted long ago.

A farmer knows specifically what crop he is farming and why (soil conditions, prior crop rotation, market demand, available workers, required equipment, projected weather patterns, etc.). They also are fully aware that between the time they decide what crop to sow and the time they sell it at the end of the season, many events can conspire to derail these plans. Pests, frost, drought, flood can all prevent the harvest from coming to fruition. Even if all comes off to perfection on the farm bumper crops in foreign lands can severely limit the market price of the crop and turn a great season into one of much less value.  Along these lines, while it is wonderfully quaint to set up your farm on a few acres as a hobby, if you want to farm several sections of land you will need different equipment and ways of working. The hand tools need replacement with industrial strength seeders and combines.

It all starts with a plan. Knowing which seeds to plant in what soil at what time. Carefully nurturing the crop through the events along the way which serve to eat away at its value. If all comes off as per plan the crop will offer its reward. It clearly doesn’t happen by accident.

In IT, seeds are continually being planted. Some will be the crop we intend to harvest, others are weeds which serve to steal valuable water and nutrients from our crop. As IT leaders you are in control of planting and shepherding of these seeds into a viable and valuable crop.

• The people performing and managing the work is one type of seed that leaders will sow.  As these are the people who execute, they collectively will carry you to distant heights  or sink a departments credibility. These are important seeds to sow.
• Every decision which will be a seed which takes on a life of its own – good decisions and bad decisions alike. Short term decisions have a shorter life than their long-term siblings, but collectively the methods and mechanisms of making decisions will be far-reaching. For good or bad, these seeds will take root.
• Culture and environment are also seeds which are sown. The tone at the top will be followed while corporate culture is adhered to. The actions and reactions of the leaders are watched and followed by others. Communication and management styles are cultural aspects which are commonly followed once the culture is set.  These can be seeds or weeds and have a great deal of influence.
• The processes for identifying, initiating, managing, implementing and operating initiatives are seeds which will determine how much work can be taken on.  Like the farming example which referenced a hobby farm on a few acres using hand tools, if the intent is to scale beyond the hobby stage, processes  need to be set up to scale to the size of the operation. The ad hoc, “ask Mary to just add a few fields to this screen while she is working on that defect” will act as weeds stealing the energy from crop.

As an IT leader you will have a crop at the end of the growing season. Will it be the crop you intended, or something very different?  It all starts with the seeds. What seeds are you sowing?

Related Posts:

• Voices and Messages
• Attraction of Identity
• Sandpaper
• Physics of IT – The Forces You Bring With You
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Sociology Skills?

None of us is smarter than all of us. — Ken Majer

I love watching “The West Wing.” Politics aside, it is a great demonstration of how the highest levels of organizations communicate information and make decisions. In one episode,  the administration offered a bright, enthusiastic, and highly critical member of the opposing party a senior level job inside the administration.   Shocked, she asked why she would be asked to work for those of which she had been so critical. The answer was simple, the President needs to have smart people to argue with.

IT organizations are no different.  There are a variety of people, processes, technologies, stakeholders, and customers in play. Communicating and decision-making in environments such as these is difficult at best. Successful organizations have figured out how to effectively do this.

The greatest success factor here is what I call a “sandpaper culture”. This is best described as an environment where the primary way of conducting business is to present ideas and have them challenged, potentially by all, regardless of title or rank. Facts rule. There is no bad idea and no bad challenge to that idea.

The reason this works so well is simple. The inter-related nature of the “big stuff” in IT organizations demands multiple perspectives to make effective decisions. Add in the intricacies and nuanced inter-dependencies of the “little stuff” and it can be argued that it is a necessity to work within a model where strong communication with a free flow of opinion and insight is necessary to be the primary method of operation.

Sandpaper serves two purposes. First, like coarse sandpaper, it shapes ideas quickly. The “have you considered…”, “it will have a huge impact on…”, and “Joe in xxxx is already doing something similar…” types of friction are necessary to position the ideas and concepts for validation.  The second purpose, like fine-grained sandpaper is to polish, remove the burrs and refine the idea. “we need to synchronize project dates with…”, “we need to free up Mary…”, and “the vendor will need to weigh in with…” will also need friction to work through these considerations.

Like in the fable which no one wished to bring the news of the emperor having no clothes, group think, intimidation of title, fear of confrontation, fear of being seen as having a bad idea, and “yes men” are all barriers to success. These eliminate the greatest asset an organization has – diversity of insight. As a friend of mine often says, “None of us is smarter than all of us.”

Be like sandpaper.

Related Posts:

• IT Farming
• Voices and Messages
• Attraction of Identity
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Sociology Skills?
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Legal Skills?

The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
-Alben W. Barkley

Based on a highly un-scientific review of Directionally Correct page views, retweets, email commentary, and personal bias, I present, in no particular order, the Top 10 posts of 2009.

• Blood Type of a Consultant (here). Consultants and contractors are not the same. They play different roles and serve different purposes within the IT ecosystem. This post presents a view of what makes a good consultant, their blood type if you will.  It was surprising to me that this post received as much interest from consultants.  Many of which recognized that a chord had been struck which resonated within them.
• Whom Do I Hire, Consultant or Contractor (here). Many times a company is faced with looking outside to deal with internal issues.  The big question is whether to hire a consultant or a contractor.  Knowing why it is appropriate to select a consultant or contractor will make a difference in the outcome.  As a follow-on the “Blood Type” series this post puts the difference into a pragmatic context of a common decision.
• Anatomy of a Decision (here). Decisions are foundational to business. This post takes a step back and looks at decisions as a web of inter-related events, the sequencing behind the web, and the structure of a decision taken within the appropriate context.  It also allows the reader to explore the decisions they are facing and position them within the context presented, facilitating a different way of looking at decisions in general, and the specific decisions each reader is dealing with.
• Demonstrable Leadership (here). This post looks at leadership in its essence. Getting far away from the theory of leadership, this review gets to the heart of the matter, the actions which demonstrate leadership, and those which place leaders in positions which serve as barriers to their ability to lead.  Commentary from the readers related to this post seemed to tie it to the timeliness of the post in the context of the political climate, and the changing of the presidency of the United States.
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Financial Skills (here)? The “Hey CIO” series examines the vast set of skills which a CIO needs to have to be successful.  This post looks at the required financial skills.  CIOs and consultants to CIOs responded that this is a greatly understated but required skill for the role, echoing the statement that “in many ways, their job depends on it.”
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Marketing Skills (here)? Another part of the “Hey CIO series”, this post looks at the marketing skills which the CIO must have.  Far from marketing being a “bad word” in IT shops, it looks at the lessons which the marketing world can bring to the IT organization.  Getting the message out, positioning the organization, and enabling understanding are often foreign to IT organizations, and their leaders, yet skills which their job depend on.
• Physics of IT – Mass of People (here). The “Physics of IT” series compares an IT organization to Newtonian Physics.  Admittedly distant topics, these two areas are brought together with this series.  One of the most popular of the “Physics of IT” series this post looks at a way to assess the mass of an IT organization, specifically using the number of people as the measuring stick.
• Physics of IT – the Forces You Bring With You (here). This post, also part of the “Physics of IT” series, looks at Force.  While the series looks at difference types of forces within an IT organization, this particular post refers to the forces which a leader brings to the organization.  Leaders are never empty-handed and the forces they bring with them are real.
• Personal Effort vs. Corporate Effort (here). An interesting statistic related to personal and corporate effort is examined in this post.  While at first thought it appear that this could not possibly be a true statistic, upon deeper examination, it is clear that this astonishing statistic is not only possible, but probable.
• Organizing for Success (here). Taking a “work-centric” view, this post describes a four step process to organize your group in manner which increases the chances they will be successful. Different from traditional management oriented alignment, this process has proven to yield successful results in many different situations.

So there you have it. An unscientific review of the top posts of 2009.  Enjoy.  There will be more where these came from.

Related Posts:

• How Healthy is Your IT Ecosystem?
• Anatomy of a Decision
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Financial Skills?
• Hey CIO, How Are Your Marketing Skills?
• The Inflection Point

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

As part of a series, I am looking at my relationship with Microsoft, Google, and Apple brands and how they have become part of my work life.

I now use Google for a few services on a day-to-day basis, surprisingly not their search engine. I use Google Apps often and with our firm moving our IT infrastructure to Google Apps it will soon be woven into the fabric of all we do.

Would it be possible to go a work day without Google? At this point I would have to say that it would be possible by having all Google based email routed to another account. Would it be possible to go without Google on a long-term basis? I believe it can certainly be done. The Google Apps I use all have synonyms with vendors like Zoho which would give equivalent services. The search engine could be replaced with a Microsoft, Yahoo, or niche equivalent.

Is a move away from Google desirable. Definitely not. At least not for me. There is something comforting in the fact that these applications are while not great, good enough for most things I do. I trust that they will keep getting better over time (Google has a good track record with me in this area). Perhaps it is that Google has done a great job of setting my expectations at a level which they can meet. After all, “they’re still in beta”. I also like the financial and service / reliability model associated with using Google (despite recent outages).

While I’m sure that some day I will be forced to move away from Google, or another next best thing will come along, for now Google seems to have me.

Taking a step back and looking at my relationship with Google I would categorize it as familial. While they didn’t start here, they have become the one that provides me a safe place to work, with not best in class but good enough apps, and charge me friends and family rates.

I am curious about your thoughts in this area as I know I am not the only on thinking along these lines.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots.  So far,the Universe is winning.  – Rich Cook

My hardware configuration in my work life probably doesn’t stray too far from typical. I use the big three (Microsoft, Google, and Apple) as part of my repertoire with each vendor playing a role in how I carry out my day. While tempted to experiment by depriving myself from products of each of these vendors for a day, I’ve realized that these vendors have embedded themselves in my life in a way which they cannot be extracted – at least not without significant planning.

If I was to go without Microsoft for a day would mean finding an alternative for using my Vista based laptop. For the most part I could carry out this by using my wife’s Mac outfitted with OS X and moving the relevent files off the laptop to the home network storage.  Outlook/Exchange could be replaced with Google Mail in a heartbeat.

Leaving Microsoft Office for a day would be more challenging as the wide variety of people I interact with use Microsoft applications and share files from these applications many times each day.  To meet the spirit of the test the application would have to seamlessly import Microsoft office file formats and use them in a native format, and be able to send them in a format which can be read by other’s applications (specifically Microsoft applications).  The OS X version of Excel, Powerpoint, and Word applications are still authored by Microsoft so this wouldn’t be an option, however (although I haven’t tried this) iWork may fill this fill in quite nicely.  For my purposes, the Google version of the Office apps are not yet practical replacements (however are wonderful from a collaborative stand point). While I haven’t given Open Office or Zoho a serious look, it may be a possible alternative.

Given a week for transition, it may be possible to go without Microsoft. OSX is a practical operating system alternative, and there are several alternatives tot he Office applications.

I don’t know if this would be desirable to do so, but it may be quite possible to go without Microsoft technology in my work life.  Vista has left a very bitter taste with me, and I don’t know that I want to move to Windows7 as I feel they cheated me once with Vista.  I feel OSX could win my business. I have to agree with the critics that Microsoft applications are over-featured. They are however the standard and the inter-connected world we live in works smoother if everyone uses the same tools.  All in all, this is an experiment I would like to explore.

I am curious about your thoughts on this.  I know I am not the only one with the wheels turning upstairs in this area.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come up to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear.  But son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you are standing there, you are going to end up with an earful of cider.  – Damon Runyon

I’ve arrived late to the Apple party. For the most part the zealots who were near hysteria in their love for their Mac, iPod, or other Apple device in my mind were exhibiting borderline cult like behaviors. For 20+ years the Apple brand never made its way into my work (or personal) life.

A couple of years ago I purchased an iPhone 3G. This purchase was primarily as a telephone as the phone I was using at the time was well past it’s useful life and was frequently failing. Since this acquisition, I’ve been a regular at the App Store and regularly use 10-15 iPhone business apps.

In looking at my relationship with Apple, I would have to say it is fundamentally emotional.  As brands go, this is a great foundation to build a relationship upon.

A day without Apple would be difficult, but possible. While I frequently use my iPhone as a phone, I find myself using the iPhone Apps dozens of times a day, at all hours of the day. Going without these would be similar to an addict going through withdrawals.

Going without Apple on a long-term basis does not seem within the realm of possibility. As I curse at my Vista based computer on a daily basis, I can certainly see an OS X based computer being the replacement.  I don’t know that Windows 7 is not a top-notch operating system, but more that the exceptionally positive experience I’ve had with my one Apple product makes me wanting additional products that will give me the same positive experience.

From a brand perspective, the relationship is ideal from Apple’s perspective in that this largely emotional tie will allow them to charge a premium for their products.  The relationship is great from my perspective as well, as the relationship (while based on a sample size of one) has me trusting that all products they produce will offer a similar experience.  I may be disappointed at some point, and if so the form of relationship will change.

In short, the Apple brand promise a lot, and exceeded expectations. If I’ve joined a cult, so be it.

Related Posts:

• Attraction of Identity
• Memories