Monthly Archives: March 2008

Surfing and IT Innovation


surfing.jpg

Thanks to a colleague for pointing me to a remarkable post by John Hagel entitled Innovating on the Edge of Big Waves.   Hagel explores the evolution of ‘big wave’ surfing – both from a perspective of the technology innovations (e.g., fibreglass, foam core, changeable stabilizing fins) and techniques (e.g., tow-in surfing, insights borrowed from wind surfing, skateboarding).  He then examines the lessons that can be applied by business executives.  For those of us that don’t have first hand experience with big wave surfing, the history and achievements of this sport are very interesting.  More importantly, the analogy to, and lessons for business executives are very insightful.

I think these lessons are especially intriguing for IT executives, and both match and expand upon some of the issues we’ve explored here, and in our Reaching Level 3 mutli-company research.   With acknowledgments to Hagel, here are some of the lessons I see for IT executives.

  1. Find the ‘edge’ that pushes performance boundaries.  Most IT organizations have become bogged down managing the ‘core’ IT systems and capabilities.  This core, managing and running the firm’s infrastructure and foundation systems consumes much of the IT budget and most of the IT management bandwidth – and yet it delivers relatively little in the way of new business value.  You can’t take your eye off the ‘core’ but you have to find ways to be watching, stimulating and working with the ‘edge’ – this is where the big opportunities lurk.  Somewhere in your ecosystem – in your business units, customers, suppliers, and so on, there are ‘edge’ needs and ideas being surfaced and explored.  Are you ‘catching these waves’?
  2. The ones who achieve the breakthroughs are ‘risk takers.’  While you typically can’t take risks with your ‘core’ systems, you have to with your ‘edge’ opportunities.  And yet, you have grown a culture of “prevent bad change.”  While not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you now need to foster a culture of “create good change.”  I’ve mentioned before that onerous, rigorous Net Present Value-based business cases are good at screening out low value IT opportunities, but if you are not careful with them, they will also screen out potentially high value, but risky opportunities.  Rather than the onerous business case (or at least as a supplement to it) you need to develop competencies and capabilities in business experimentation, analytics and rapid, iterative development.
  3. Appropriate insights from adjacent disciplines.  Are you tracking adjacent disciplines?  Do you know how the disciplines of marketing, and especially advertising are evolving in the Web 2.0 world, and how this impacts IT opportunities?  Do you understand the state of the art in ‘design thinking’, or ‘customer experience design’ or ‘IT enabled innovation’?  What other adjacent disciplines might be applicable sources of insight in your ecosystem?
  4. Bring users and developers closer together.  We’ve discussed this whole idea of business-IT ‘confluence’ before – I truly believe it’s the ‘big idea’ behind business-IT maturity and Reaching Level 3.  It’s also the essence of ‘agile development’, ‘extreme programming’, ‘rapid interactive prototyping’ and many of the development methodology improvements and innovations of the last 10 years or so.
  5. Foster and understand ‘loose practice networks’ of edge practitioners.  This follows the Appreciative Inquiry school of organizational development.  Or as science fiction writer William Gibson said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.”  In other words, somewhere in your ecosystem, someone has tried/is trying something innovative – can you find it, and make it more common practice?
About these ads

Clues from Google for IT Circa 2017


google.jpg

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ, March 18, 2008, Business Technology page) published an interesting article, “Pleasing Google’s Tech-Savvy Staff.”  WSJ interviewed Google’s impressive CIO Douglas Merrill on “How do you run the IT department at a company whose employees are considered among the world’s most tech-savvy?”

I liked the piece for a couple of reasons.  First, I find that anything Google does is at the very least interesting, often highly innovative, and sometimes, for me personally, extremely useful and generally well-implemented.  Yes, I know there are exceptions, and that’s ok – that’s the price of being an innovator.

Second, the article gave an interesting glimpse into IT circa 2017 for traditional companies and the role of IT.  By traditional companies in this context, I mean those whose business is not IT.  In response to a question by Vaughini Vara (I get her name is misspelled even more than mine!) about the structure of Google’s IT organization, Douglas said, “We are a decentralized technology organization, in that almost everyone at Google is some type of technologist.”  Think about your company 9 years from now – to what degree will everyone be some type of technologist?  To what degree should they be?  As you ponder these questions, don’t forget the demographics – many of your boomers will be spending time on the proverbial golf course, and an important part of your worforce will be the netgen – who grew with technology, instant messaging, social networking, online gaming, and so on.

Third, I liked the article because at its heart it addressed the topic for one of my company’s new multi-company research projects, “Redefining Employee Computing.”  This is about the emerging trend of moving away from a highly controlled and locked-down approach to what used to be known as “end-user computing” to a more open and self-service model – another important dimension of Business-IT Maturity and of IT circa 2017.

Finally, I’m a fan of Douglas Merrill ever since seeing his (very long – be warned, but fascinating) YouTube video on innovation at Google:

Retiring Retirement – A Path to Business-IT Maturity


retirementlane.jpg

I’m increasingly invited to retirement celebrations for former and current consulting clients and friends.  They are quite distressing events.  First, the retiree is typically putting on a brave face, boasting about all the golf and fishing they will enjoy.  But often beneath the surface bluster is a deep-seated fear.  Sometimes they ask me if my firm might have a role for them, or if I know any organizations that could leverage their experience - in spite of the talk of daily golf, they don’t want to leave the IT industry – especially now, when things seem to be getting more exciting than ever.

These are folks in their early 60′s who have been incented to “take the package.”  There is an irony as their bosses and peers are often equally fearful – of losing access to all the knowledge about to walk out of the door.  “Bill ‘s the only one that really understands the manufacturing business and its systems – I don’t know how we’re going to manage without him!”  “Why don’t you create some form of alternate work arrangement for Bill?” I ask, “Perhaps part time?”  “That would be great, but our company just does not do that kind of thing.”

I’ve become sensitized to this issue ever since my company BSG Alliance completeted its landmark research on demographics, culminating in a McKinsey Award-winning HBR article, and my colleague Tammy Erickson’s superb book Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation.  This really exposed me to the issues, and to the very pragmatic, win-win solutions that enlightened firms are now offering.   It occurs to me that IT organizations are often shortchanging themselves.  They are often striving to increase Business-IT Maturity, while allowing their more “mature” talent to walk out of the door!  Admittedly, there are some old timers that are stuck in the old paradigm – don’t know about things like SOA, SaaS, Enterprise 2.0, and so on, and don’t care to.  But there are many that have kept up, AND bring the deep knowledge and expertise about their business and systems environment that only comes with 15 or 20 years “in the hot seat.”

There are many emerging HR and Talent Management practices that are win-win, and yet which many organizations don’t take advantage of.   I put my company’s research to the test a couple of years ago, as I approached 60, and they willingly allowed me to move to a 4-day week schedule.  In a consulting and research job, with its grueling travel schedule, the day off makes a huge difference.I get the benefit of more family and private time, plus staying with the company and the industry that I love – it’s been a real win-win!  I’m also more productive – the things I now say “no” to, are probably things I should not have been doing anyway, but now I have an excuse!

I encourage you to check-in on the website http://www.retire-retirement.com/.  Look at the white papers and thought pieces available, buy the book, and join the discussions.  Perhaps you can be part of changing the practices at your company, and securing for yourself a more reasonable and mutually beneficial trajectory into retirement.

Stage-Gate Development – An Example of a Level 2 Sticking Point


I posted from time-to-time on what I’ve called “sticking points” – how things that you had to do (e.g., practices, processes) to get from Level 1 Business-IT Maturity to Level 2 could trap you in Level 2 if you did not modify them, or in some cases, dispense with them entirely!  It’s not that they are bad practices – quite the contrary – they are essential to maturing beyond Level 1.  But the discontinuities between Level 1 and 2, and between Level 2 and 3 are such that some of the practices will not take you all the way from Level 1 to Level 3.

Anyway, Idris Mootee on one of my favorite blogs, Innovation Playground wrote this post on The Problem With Stage-Gate Process With Experience Innovation.  Although he’s writing about innovation more broadly than for the role of IT, I think the post applies beautifully to the IT world, and is a great example of a sticking point trap.

I’ve seen many cases where a rigorous and well-intended stage-gate process was introduced in a low maturity organization, and helped them increase maturity through a more-disciplined approach to development.  But as they tried to inject a more innovative spin to their discovery and development efforts, were stymied by the stage-gate process.

Please read Idris’s excellent post for a great perspective on why that happens.  Then consider, “Are our development processes ‘innovation friendly’.  Do they allow for the kind of program, rather than project approach, and for experimentation rather than ‘avoid risk at any cost’ mentality?”

Business-IT Maturity and Smaller Businesses


 lemonade.jpg

Someone sent me an email about my blog and the small business in which she works.  She wrote, “Level 2 sounds like my workplace.  It drives me insane that we have no in-house IT person. I feel that any business over a certain size should have at the very least a part-time in house IT person.  I think it is very difficult for a smaller, less ambitious business to ever reach a ‘level 3′ collaborative mindset without IT support.  Businesses like that don’t have the resources or the ambition to get truly quality IT support, so I think the relationship with support becomes a lesser (and costlier) version of in-house support.  I know the mindset at my workplace is that we are only paying when we have a problem, but not only do we often have problems, we are also only troubleshooting, never innovating, so we’re not only paying too much to maintain the status quo, we’re also failing to exploit a lot of growth and quality.  Drives me crazy!”

There is a lot of wisdom in her comments – most certainly for smaller businesses, but also for large companies with ‘small thinking’ about IT.  The notion of outsourcing selections of IT services is absolutely fine – perhaps even essential to reaching high Business-IT Maturity (a good topic for a future post, methinks!)  But, I strongly believe there are some aspects of IT that cannot be outsourced without giving away the farm.  There are IT services that are purely “keep the trains running and the lights on” kinds of things – back-up and recovery, preventive maintenance, bug fixes, updating computers and networks, and so forth.  These are services that can be fairly easily outsourced.  There are other services that are about finding and fulfilling opportunities to use IT for business value – solving business problems, if you will.  The “fulfilling” aspects of these services are relatively easily outsourced, but not so the “finding” aspects.  For this to work well you need either or both of:

  1. Business-savvy IT professionals working closely enough with the business to really understand the business problems (or the business customer’s problems!) and the opportunities for IT to solve them.
  2. IT-savvy business professionals working closely enough with the IT folks (whether in-house or outsourced) to really understand the business problems (or the business customer’s problems!) and the opportunities for IT to solve them.

Small (or small-minded) business can rarely afford path #1 above, so they have to go down path #2.  The conundrum is, how did they get to be IT-savvy?  Ultimately, this is a function of business leadership.  In today’s information- and technology-intensive world, I don’t think you have a right to be a business leader without both being IT-savvy yourself, and being determined that the other business leaders also become IT-savvy.  The one thing you can never outsource is your responsibility to your stakeholders (your customers, employees, owners) to understand and fully leverage information and IT for advantage.

My emailer’s message is telling – by under-investing in IT, they are in a vicious cycle.  IT does not work properly, therefore IT is an evil to avoid, therefore we should spend less on it.  As I like to say (though not an original quote!) – businesses get the IT they deserve!

So, What Comes After Level 3 Business-IT Maturity?


I had a question from a colleague recently that I’d like to address in this post.  She asked, “I’m going to ask a possibly ‘dumb’ question, but since I believe that there are no dumb questions I’m asking it anyway…  Since level 3 is constantly evolving i.e., today’s Level 3 will be tomorrow’s Level 2 etc., isn’t it always going to be a moving target?  If I was a company at Level 3 Business-IT Maturity, where IT and business act as one in strategy, planning and execution, and so on,  won’t you eventually fall to Level 2 if you don’t keep changing? How do leading edge companies do that?”

As she noted, there are no dumb questions, and this is actually a very smart question.  First, a reminder.  We recently updated the 3-level Business-IT Maturity Model to more clearly show that it is really made up of 3 separate ‘S’ shape, or ‘learning’ curves.

new-bus-it-no-detail.jpg

The significance here is the discontinuities that occur between levels.  To simplify, Level 1 was about learning to leverage (business demand) and manage (IT supply) the universe of mainframe computing.  The big discontinuity that threw everyone was the entry of the Personal Computer, and the seismic shift to client-server computing.  So, Level 2 was the same as Level 1, but for client-server computing.  The seismic shift today is ultimately caused by the Internet as a computing platform, with all its consequences, including Service Oriented Architecture, Software (and Hardware) as a Service, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and so on.  Level 3, then, is about learning to leverage (business demand) and manage (IT supply) the universe of Internet computing. 

The fact that this is a discontinuity gives us choices about how, when and why we jump from the Level 2 curve to the Level 3 curve.  Some are jumping early, and for everything (e.g., Google, Amazon.com).  Some are jumping early for some things (e.g., ING Direct, but not ING), and most are not jumping at all at this time.

Back to my colleague’s question.  The way we are using the Business-IT Maturity Model, from the perspective of today, high Level 3 means we have mastered the new computing paradigm, both from a business demand and IT supply perspective.  There will have been such a confluence between what we today know as “business” and as “IT” that these things will be inextricably interwoven.  Some will say we are already at this point, but I beg to differ.  These things are deeply interdependent, but still most organizations have IT specialists (internal or external) who are responsible for “doing” most IT development and support work.  On the other hand, most “business” people are ‘users’ of IT but not ‘producers.’  I believe that by 2017, the focus of this blog, that situation will have changed dramatically, and most organizations will be well into the Level 3 space.  As she noted in her question, they will have to work at staying at at high Level 3 – entropy, anarchy and other forces are always working to undo the good work of management.

Note, the ‘S’ curves become asymptotic to the horizontal – but never become horizontal, so I could answer my colleague by saying, “There is no ‘after Level 3′ – just a long, slow, journey through it.”  Or, I could say, “There will be some other seismic shift, as yet unanticipated (at least by me!) and we will transition through another discontinuity.”

What I actually said was, “Level 3 does change over time – when everyone has reached Level 3, the model will no longer be valuable.  As an analogy, once you are an adult and stop growing, you tend not to obsess the way kids do about how many inches you’ve grown over a year.  The Business-IT Maturity Model will have outlived its usefulness, I will be retired and living on a Caribbean Island, and some other blogger will be all in a lather about some new maturity model!”  See, it was not a dumb question after all!

Goodby, Shadow IT – Hello, Shadow IT


shadow_opportunity_big.jpg

In our multi-company research WebEx call earlier this week a participant reflected on the changing attitudes to “Shadow IT” – that term IT professionals give to non-IT professionals when they ‘step into their IT professional turf’ and do stuff that should have been ‘better left to the professionals.’

The Shadow IT phenomenon is a great example of what I’ve referred to in the past as ‘sticking points’ – things you need to do to drive Business-IT Maturity from Level 1 to 2, but that if you keep doing, will stick you at Level 2 – in fact, you almost literally have to ‘undo’ them to get to Level 3.  Let me explain.

At lower Business-IT Maturity Levels, Shadow IT is by and large, bad news.  First, it’s typically a business response to a need that the IT organization is not fulfilling – i.e., it’s symptomatic of a problem.  Second, because it is typically IT activity that happens ‘in the shadows’, it often does not have the integrity or recoverability characteristics that a ‘professionally built’ solution would have (at least, in theory!)  Third, given this, after a time, the ‘one-off’ solution created by Shadow IT evolves into a mission critical system, and gets handed to the IT organization with a plea for, “Can you please sort this out and maintain it from now on?”  This sometimes creates a problem because the solution was developed by a non-supported or non-standard technology.

So, typically in late level 1, the CIO goes Stalinist and demands that all IT budget and resources be centralized under his or her control.  This allows rationalization and consolidation, and generally helps elevate maturity into the Level 2 space.  In parallel with this, the architecture group gets empowered, principles and standards are declared, technology roadmaps produced, and IT architectures created.  Welcome to Level 2.

The paradox, however, is that to get to Level 3, the power of ‘end user computing’, for want of a better term, is critical.  That’s where most of the business knowledge lies, where the business problems are felt most intimately, and where most of the ‘arms and legs’ are.  And, given that Level 2 created all that fine IT and Enterprise Architecture with supporting infrastructure, it is now possible to safely unleash the Shadow IT monster!  Rather than see Shadow IT as an evil to be tempered, it must now be seen as a force to be harnessed and directed.

You can see the challenge – in a relatively short period, perhaps 18 months or 2 years, something that was treated as a pariah must now be cherished and nurtured.  This creates a kind of mental whiplash that most people can’t easily absorb.  But I believe that you have to manage through this see-saw to get to Level 3 and the business value that is unleashed at Level 3.  Recognizing this phenomenon, and being able to dialog about it is half way to solving it.

Reaching Level 3: The Mindset Factor


mindset.jpg

I’ve posted before on the role of ambition as a key factor in driving business-IT maturity.  I want to move beyond that and pick up the theme of mindset.  This is a topic I covered in today’s teleconference as part of our multi-client research project into business-IT maturity.

According to Wikipedia, Mindset refers to the set of assumptions or methods held by groups of people which is so established that it creates a powerful incentive with these people to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices or tools.  i.e., it defines a mental ‘rut’ we all get stuck in.  Below are a few slides from today’s research WebEx meeting that examine the nature of business, IT and collective mindsets that tend to predominate Level 2 versus Level 3 business-IT maturity levels.  (This is hopefully useful to you – in the interests of full disclosure, this is also a test for me in that it’s the first time I’ve embedded a PowerPoint presentation into my blog – a trivial act for most of the blogosphere, but a breakthrough activity for me!)  Enjoy!

You Know You’ve Reached Level 3 When…


 pic3.jpg

Back in mid-December, I posted “You Know You’ve Reached Level 3 When…“   As the BSG Alliance multi-company research project that has been examining Reaching Level 3 Business-IT Maturity shifts gears from its research to its reporting phase, I want to revisit that headline.  Here are some ‘one-liners’ that are being discussed in today’s WebEx session for the participating companies:

You know you’ve reached Level 3 Business-IT Maturity when…

  • There is no separate IT Governance structure – it is converged with Business Governance
  • There is no separate IT Portfolio – it is integrated into the Business Portfolio
  • There is no separate IT Strategy – it is integrated into the Business Strategy
  • There is no separate IT Architecture – it is a component of the Enterprise Architecture
  • There are no separate IT Relationship Managers – Relationship Management is a widespread and diverse Role

How do those statements feel to you?  Are you already there with any of them?  All of them?  If you reached those conditions, how would things be different around IT decision making and value extraction?