Operating Principles – Taking The Positions Which Guide Strategy

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Russ Aebig
[caption id="attachment_1132" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Principles"]Principles[/caption]

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the genial Welfare…

– United States Constitution

The US Constitution takes a position on many fronts. These positions shaped the country and allowed for cascading decisions to take place. Taking positions in any leadership role is necessary. IT Organizations are no different.

IT Strategy ultimately will align the efforts of the IT Organization with that of the enterprise. Determining the operating principles of the organization will foundationally drive this alignment, and determine the initiatives which will be required as part of this alignment.

As an example in the area of Mobility, principles may be developed that sound like:
- We will support the iOS, Android, and Blackberry platforms
- Employees will provide their own smart phones from an approved list
- All mobile applications will be developed in-house, but maintained externally
- No corporate data will reside on the devices

Based on these defined principles, and the shape it provides to the IT organization, it is possible to build a series of initiatives which will help to realize these principles. It is also possible to see who needs to be involved, for what types of initiatives, and for how long.

It should be noted that these principles are specific, may be controversial, and can be rationally argued from the opposing point of view. What they are not is ambiguous, vague, or “motherhood and apple pie.”

When looking at your IT Organization, what are the principles that you operate with? Are they known and used as stakes in the ground to make decisions against and drive subsequent actions? My guess is that if your operating principles don’t cause a modicum of controversy, they are either too vague or not taking a stand. In either case they are not doing their job.

Once you know what position to take, the next step is to run this through the lens of “what does this mean to you – and what will be different?”  This critical step puts action in your strategy.  By defining  what will be different, you are also teeing up the actions you will take to realize this difference.  The actions may be a series of small steps or a few large ones, but the important aspect to this is that you will be in a different place organizationally than you were before you defined your principles.

Be bold. Be specific. Take a stand.  Take action.

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Goals – Making Your IT Strategy Real

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Russ Aebig
[caption id="attachment_1126" align="alignleft" width="280" caption="Goals"][/caption]

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal. Not to people or things. — Albert Einstein

All strategies need a target. More specifically, every strategic intent that you will execute against needs to have a clear understanding of what success looks like.

These goals need to be clear and unambiguous, specific and precise, time bound, and directly reflective of what success looks like for each strategic intent. For example, “reduce overall IT costs to 4.5% of revenues by the end of FY 2012″ or “increase on-line sales to 40% of total sales during the months of November and December this year”

Without this understanding of success there are significant risks which you will be taking on:
- There will be a perception of your strategy being seen as dreaming, or purely aspirational. There will be no grounding in the reality of the day to day activities.
- Inability to drive behaviors. People don’t respond to strategies which they cannot relate to in a meaningful way.
- Measure of progress against success. At any point in time you need to be able to determine if you are on the right track and how far away you are from the end zone – and how far you to go.
- Difficulty in crystalizing the initiatives which will allow you the meet your goals and thereby realizing your strategic intents

If your company is anything like the clients I typically work with, you will have more directions to push in and “must do” strategic intents to execute against than internal capabilities to succeed. Having these goals defined makes them tangible allowing for realism to be applied to process so that we can back off in one area to accelerate in another.

I encourage you to apply this simple test to your IT strategy.  Do you precisely know when you are successful?  If not, either your goals are not defined, or are not tight enough.   You invest a lot of time with not only developing your IT Strategy, but in directing the actions of your entire organization based on your strategy.  Your goals will ground and focus you.

Location:Mission Viejo,United States

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Strategic Intent – IT Strategy’s Business Alignment

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Russ Aebig

?Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention.  – Sharon Salzberg

Why. This is the simple question that is being asked and answered through this aspect of developing your IT Strategy. As questions go, this is a very powerful one as the process of answering this will focus your actions on the critical few must-do’s.

We all have limited resources at our disposal. We must be extremely diligent as to what we choose to do, and what we let go of. There is a virtually an unlimited number of activities we can be doing, some more important than others. Some would be done for yourself, some for others. In order to make a difference it is critical to know what you are going to focus on and why.

Being a business partner and earning your “seat at the table” means to be relentlessly adding value to the corporate mission. Your corporate mission and vision should be common knowledge and used as an anchor point. Through your on-going relationship with peer executives, strategic workshops, and executive mandates it should be possible to identify the strategic intents of the organization. This occasionally will be a “business strategy”, but more than likely will a thoroughly vetted understanding of where the enterprise wants and needs to go, as well as what the “critical few” strategic intents are which must be done. These are the foundational elements that both focus your attention and answer the why of those selected items.

Examples of strategic intents to align to would sound like “reduce operating expenses by 20%,” “re-frame our position with channel partners to increase our value-add,” “leverage our current talent base for our future growth.”  These all have direct analogs for IT.  They also can each spawn a series of initiatives which directly add value make tangible progress towards your corporate strategy.

When you align your must-do initiatives with business intents (strategy or direction) the first realization is that you now have a North Star for driving your IT organization. The next realization is that the funding mechanism for your organization becomes very clear. Finally, you will also realize that your agenda had been filled with items that add limited value to the corporate vision and draining your capacity to make meaningful change.

Identifying and aligning to these corporate strategies (or strategic intents) in developing your IT Strategy will make or break your success as a leader. Not doing so will spread you so thin that that meaningful change will remain a distant possibility.

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Elements of IT Strategy

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Russ Aebig
T Strategy

Perception is strong and sight weak.  In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and take a distanced view of close things.
– Miyamoto Musashi

Type “IT Strategy” into Google and the search engine will return over 140 million entries.  There is no single way to draft an IT Strategy (or what IT Strategy means). It is safe to say that there are many methods, structures, processes, and outcomes from any of the millions of links Google will serve up, some in common, some good, some not so much.

I believe IT Strategy needs to look both externally (serving your customers), and internally (being able to provide a high degree of value to your customers in a repeatable and sustainable manner).    As a quick snapshot, here is my short list of elements critical to an IT Strategy.

External Focus…

  • Business focused. This is first and foremost tied directly to the corporate mission, vision, and strategic intents of the enterprise (or geography, line of business, etc that the IT organization is supporting).  While seemingly “motherhood and apple pie”, it is surprising how many IT Strategies do not lead with this concept.  In part, this may be due to the frustration IT “strategists” often experience when they cannot find any business partners able to articulate the business strategy.
  • Relevant.  Strategy which is not tied to timely and cornerstone enterprise issues is not relevant to your organization, your business partners, or the enterprise.  It may be “cool” and transformational in nature, but if it doesn’t directly connect with the business it isn’t relevant and pursuing it is a drain on resources.
  • Specific, Measurable, and Actionable Goals. Words don’t make a difference - actions do. Each aspect of the IT Strategy needs to be based in goals which are specific, measurable, and actionable.   For example, “reduce operating expenditures by 15% within 2 years,” or “increase on-line sales by 25% by the end of 2013.”   Setting goals lets locate the end zone.  Making them specific and measurable makes them real.  Actionable goals drive and unify behaviors.

Internal focus…

  • Identify capability gaps. Knowing what you can and cannot accomplish is critical to being able to be a serious partner with the business.  Similarly, it is critical to really understand what your business partners / customers expect of you.  In many companies I find a significant discontinuity between the business expectations of IT, and IT’s belief in what is expected of them.  Harmonizing these two expectations needs to find its way into the IT strategy.
  • Sustainable. While it is challenging to build an organization which can pull together to achieve short-term success, it is far more challenging to build an organization which is sustainable over the long haul.  People wear out, and after a short period people fall back to their core values.  Organizations which can serve their customer over the long haul understand this and work to align itself around common values which will serve as the much-needed ballast through the various stresses the IT Organization will need to endure.

Survivable…

  • Easily communicated. In order for any strategy to gain traction within an organization it is essential that it be concisely communicated to people at all levels of the organization.  Ideally the entire strategic plan can be presented in a single page – “Strategy on a Page (SOAP).”   If you can do this you will be able to generate support and attract followers to your vision.  If you cannot, the strategy will most likely languish and the degree of movement will be minimal.

Does your IT Strategy have these elements in place?  Over the next few posts, I will explore some of these areas in more detail.

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The Art of Problem Solving

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Russ Aebig
[caption id="attachment_1096" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Think - Different"][/caption]

Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense.  Thinking makes the man.  – Amos Bronson Alcott

How do you solve problems?  Big problems,  small problems, routine problems, complex problems.  I’m sure that each of these categories has its own means of problem solving.  The answer is that while there are many frameworks which have been developed which attempt to get to sought after answers in a methodical manner, the reality is there is less hard science behind this than we would hope.  Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato were philosophizing about this long, long ago.  Debates brought out valid points in different approaches, but no consensus.

Thinking about problems in different ways is healthy.  While many books have been written about how to go about this thinking, the good news is that there is not only no shortage of these books, but no end of these types books coming anytime soon.  I highly encourage everyone to explore some of these books to determine what resonates with you, what helps you the most, and what applies to the different types of problems you typically deal with.

I’ve always found that thinking about thinking leads to numerous “Sparks!” of ideas.   An example of this is a book (and iPhone App) called Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.  It is amazingly simple.  You tap the screen and it presents a few words.  “How would you have done it?”, “What is the reality of the situation?”, “Into the impossible”, “Always first steps”, “Emphasize differences”.   Maybe a verbal ink blot test, but being introspective and applying simple triggers to problems swirling around your subconscious always generates sparks.  It is these random sparks that lead to addressing problems which you are dealing with at some level.

While the above is an example of generating sparks and thereby change your thought pattern, there are many ways to generate new ways of thinking.   As leaders and managers of people, how are you encouraging those who follow you to think through problems.  Teaching people the fundamentals of performing tasks, will only get you better task do-ers.  If you want to really make dramatic strides, I encourage you as leaders to facilitate new ways of thinking, as opposed to training people to be better cogs in your machinery.  To paraphrase, “to get different than you’ve got, you have think different than you’ve ever thought.”

Being a leader means thinking and providing a vision of the future.  The problems which will arise in the future will require people who can address them.  Growing people who can solve these problems requires thought, effort, and investment.  It will not happen by accident.

Image if you had developed a small army of people who would place you two years ahead of your competition in terms of the end products of the way they think, and think differently.  This is not the exclusive domain of the research and development group.  Everyone can get in on this game.   Imagine the return on that investment.

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It’s a Cause Not a Job

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Russ Aebig

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.  Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good. — Vaclav Havel

I’ve been fortunate to have worked with many companies, in many industries.  It is always interesting to me to see how cultures across these companies differ, and how much they are the same.

There is a group of companies, largely clustered around similar industry sectors, which have a similar culture.   A culture which drives everything the business does and oozes from all those who choose to work within it.  These firms include disease management organizations, hospitals, therapeutic firms, medical research, medication delivery firms, etc. Clearly separate from the healthcare insurance, big pharmacy, medical device manufacturing, these firms stand apart.

A common thread which runs through all these organizations is that everyone, not just the medical directors, doctors, nurses and clinical research specialists, have a strong focus beyond their immediate task.  It may be because people resonate with their own frailties and mortalities, but more than in any other industry the business analysts, managers, database administrators, programmers, system operators, and everyone else look well beyond the desktops.

People who work for these types of organizations know that their work is bigger than them – it is all about the people they serve.  Patients.  People who need care.  People who need people.

Having spent a good deal of time with these types of firms, it is clear that the people working in these firms have a higher sense of purpose, and one which we should all aspire to.

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Measuring IT Success by Business Outcomes

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Russ Aebig
[caption id="attachment_1091" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Success"][/caption]

Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.  – Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe

How do you as an IT Leader measure success.  Once upon a time a common measure was Mean Time between Failures (MTBF).  I distinctly remember these figures being proudly displayed by IT executives and senior management.  Bar charts and line charts reflected the degree of success an organization had in keeping the heart beating regularly and predictably.

This was a different time. A time reflective of the technological challenges and complexities that were embodied in computers.  Reflective of the high degree of skill required to keep the technological heart beating.  A time when working with computers was akin to weaving magic among your peers.  A time when the best minds in the business thought the world as a whole would need no more than a handful of computers.

We have come a long way since then.  Success is now measured in a wide variety of ways.  Metrics abound on virtually every imaginable aspect of the IT organization.  MTBF is still a measure, but it is ne drop among a sea of measures.  This in large part is due to the wide variety of uses we have found for our computers.  The mysterious mainframes of the past that lived proudly behind glass walls in climate sensitive environments are now augmented with single and multi-purpose servers, workstations and desktops, laptops, and handhelds.  The form factor is shrinking and becoming more diverse.  This explosion of computing power and computing devices is allowing us to explore new ways to take advantage of the computing power.  Measuring success in this world has been in some ways tied to trying to keep up with technology advances, workforce skill sets, using Moore’s Law to your advantage, and demonstrating you were able to get the right things done at an increasingly lower price point.

Looking forward, we have to “helicopter up” in our thinking.  We need to get to the true partnership with the business customers whom we service.  Our measures of success need to reflect orders shipped, customer loyalty, channel efficiency.  The assurance of the technology being as available and predictable as the dial tone on your phone is a given, table stakes as it were.  The success of IT is the success of the business and vice versa.

Just as you cannot separate the business strategy from the IT strategy (it’s collectively corporate strategy), you should not be separating the measures of success.  In a world where we are swimming in data and ways to measure it, getting back to the basics of why we are in business is both grounding and reflective of the highly desired partnership between business and IT.  Some may say that this is simply a way for IT to avoid being measured.  I disagree.  This is a way for IT to be consistently measured in all areas they affect – and in a manner reflecting their partnership with business.

As a Chief Medical Officer friend of mine once told me, “All that matters are the outcomes, everything else is just CYA”.

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Spark!, Now What?

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Russ Aebig
[caption id="attachment_1084" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Sharing Your Idea"][/caption]

If you don’t have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.  – A.M. Rosenthal

Spark!  You have a great idea.  Now what do you do?

While that can be a personal question, it really does depend on the individual.  Everyone will do different things with their ideas.  Some people are very introverted and will keep their ideas and thoughts to themselves at all costs.   On the other extreme, some people will share their ideas, personal information, credit scores, and social security information with anyone within earshot.

If you are paid for your ideas, then it is a different story.   While it is often prudent for your good ideas to find and make friends with other good ideas, building a more comprehensive good idea, you frequently do not have that luxury.  Your ideas often have to mature quickly.  More importantly, your ideas often need to be shared with others under a deadline, and in a manner that will drive behaviors.  No small task.

The best way I have found to do this is to understand the needs of the audience you are sharing your ideas with, and how your idea meets these needs.  From your perspective, you want to be clear about what behaviors you want to drive by sharing your idea.  This often manifests itself in the form of selling.  It doesn’t have to be selling a product or service.  Selling of an idea or concept is equally important, possibly more so.

Table stakes for having your idea accepted is to have your idea received with complete clarity.  While the science behind how this happens is beyond the scope of this blog, Brain Rules is an excellent book providing this information in layman’s terms.

In my world, presenting ideas comes down to a few simple concepts.

1.  People remember stories (see Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath).  Stories have natural sections beginning, middle, end.   Stories in a corporate setting have scripts.  These scripts are made of points (ideas, concepts, findings, observations, etc) which build upon and feed off of one another.  Memorable stories have scripts which tie into the emotion of the audience and resonate with them at a level beyond logic and intellect.

2.   People relate to concepts visually, far better than words or numbers.  Visual depiction of the point you are trying to make will hit the mark in a way that a table of numbers never can.  A decade ago this would have meant a nice pie chart.  Today this may mean a picture of someone working in a rice patty with a message of “our profits funded her village’s food supply.”   I’m a big fan of Nancy Duarte are her work in this area (see her book slide:ology to generate your own Spark!’s).

3. The combination of telling scripted stories of key points that you want to make and telling this story through graphics / images is a powerful combination.

What have you found works for you?

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Spark!

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Russ Aebig
[caption id="attachment_1077" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="What Will Happen After the Spark?"][/caption]

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.  – Alfred Bernhard Nobel

Spark.

The sound of an idea coming to life.  Once born, it will seek out other ideas and inspire people to build on it, growing into and morphing into many other shapes and sizes.

The casual insight that someone mentions in the elevator to a colleague is overheard by a fellow passenger who connects the idea with something they read about in an industry journal.   A new idea is formed, still embryonic but having more substance, solving a problem that he has been experienced.  He posts his new idea on a blog and emails two of his colleagues.  The blog post is read by many people, all with different perspectives and circles of people they spend time with.

A research scientist finds in interesting and applies it to a theory she has been working on.  A consultant connects the idea with other ideas that are particularly sticky at one of her clients and puts together an innovative solution.  A screenwriter sees the post and it sparks another idea which ends up in a scene of sitcom.   A concerned parent reads the post and inextricably connects this with the worries they have with one of their kids, putting their mind at ease and changing their way of thinking.

Over time the ideas will grow.  The director of the sitcom remembers the scene and incorporates it into a movie which he directs a couple of years later, the actors in the movie talk about it over drinks at a reunion the following summer.   The research scientist finds that her theory is invalid, but that the spark has led to other sparks that lead to more research and furthering of the body of knowledge.   The consultant finds that the opportunity he thought existed didn’t have a market outside his specific client, but for that client it solved a couple hundred thousand dollar problem.

This is one of the major benefits of social media and the technologies that facilitate the spreading of ideas.  While difficult to quantify, difficult to place an ROI against, difficult to incorporate in a controlled sense inside corporations, there is no denying that ideas carry with them value.  Even incomplete unformed ideas have value.  Their value exponentially increases as they are shared.  They cannot be managed in the classic sense, and in many ways only thrive when put into circulation with as broad an audience as possible.  Not all ideas will take flight – only a few will.  Some will have negative consequences – but not many.

As organizations share more and develop a culture of sharing, the greater the reward of what they receive in terms of what has been shared with them. This is a different mindset from that of controlling of all knowledge within the corporate walls, but a challenge worth taking.  It is also the challenge of those people who champion such ideas inside corporations.

Spark.    Where will your next idea go?

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Next Level Thinking

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Russ Aebig
[caption id="attachment_1073" align="alignleft" width="223" caption="Next Level Thinking"][/caption]

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.   -A. A. Milne

Changing your way of thinking is not easy. Culture, habit, and time pressures conspire to keep the things as they are.  Getting to the next level, regardless of what level that may be, requires this very change however.

I was fortunate to stumble upon an article titled “The sexual life of ideas: flirtation, promiscuity, procreation, and seminal creativity but no virgin births“.  The insight presented by Ross Dawson is simple. Ideas do not survive alone. They need to socialize with other ideas and mingle. When other similar ideas are encountered they create new ideas, sharing traits of their parents.

Environment. When trying to get to the next level of thinking within your organization perhaps the most important fundamental element to put in place is an environment which will encourage ideas to brought forward. Ideas which are not shared have no chance to grow – the acorn cannot become the oak.

The Right People. The next element to establish is the blend of people.  Diversity of thought and diversity of concept are necessary.  Deep thinkers and broad thinkers need to intermingle.  Internal people with comprehensive knowledge of the culture and environment need to explore with external people having extensive knowledge of leading edge thinking. This is a great place to leverage your ecosystem.

The Seed.  Some people like to start with a vision of the desired end state.  I prefer to start with a seed of an idea.  This may be an end-state.  It may be a directional statement.   It may be simply a concept.  From this seed the ideas will feed each other until a complete picture is formed (or the amount of time alloted is exhausted). In my experience, this seed can form might oaks quite quickly given the right environment and people.

Technology.   In recent years social / collaborative technologies have moved closer to having mainstream status. While not a silver bullet unto themselves, used properly and placed in the right environment they can both accelerate progress of both depth and breadth of thinking. One of the reasons for this is that the mechanics of these tools typically do not get in the way of the thought process.

It is worth noting that these elements are all necessary to get to next level thinking. They should be considered necessary but not sufficient. Above all else you need a desire to change, an understanding of why you want to change, and a dedication to follow through on the commitment to change.

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