Monthly Archives: August 2008

A Tale of Firefox, Resistance to Change and Personal Value Systems


It’s a familiar adage that if you are trying to persuade people to embrace or engage in some kind of change, you need to get to the heart of the “WIFM factors” – What’s in it for me? I’ve been helping clients understand, embrace and lead change initiatives for about 30 years.  This shows up in several ways:

  • Often the nature of my consulting work involves working with clients to create a business-IT strategy that must be sold to the organization.  Of course, collaborative approaches afforded by the Web 2.0 universe facilitate much more use of collaborative, appreciative inquiry, Future Search and similar whole systems approaches to change – pull versus push approaches, if you will.
  • Sometimes my work is about designing and helping clients to implement a new IT or shared service Operating Model.
  • Occasionally, I am teaching those in the role of “change sponsors” or “change agents” how to be more effective at leading or guiding organizational change.
  • And sometimes I’m asked to shed light on something gone awry, and usually to help get it back on track.

More and more frequently, I am personally on the receiving end of a change.  I learned many years ago that being trained and certified in a change management methodology does not immunize you from the stresses of change.  (About 15 years ago I went through many weeks of organizational change training when I was a partner at Ernst & Young and received the highest certification in their OCM methodology – a feat that involved rappelling down a sheer mountain in Jackson Hole, Wyoming – an activity that still has me occasionally waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat!)

My most recent personal change experience is trivial, but, I believe, quite telling.  I found myself in a discussion recently with several colleagues about web browsers in general, and Mozilla Firefox in particular.  I consider myself no laggard when it comes to technology adoption, but I’m no early adopter either.  I won’t lightly embark on a change unless I can:

  1. See a very compelling benefit to the change (in this case from MS Internet Explorer to Firefox)
  2. Understand and be comfortable with the risks of change (compared with the risks of not changing)
  3. Understand the path I’m going to take from current to changed state (in this case, learning a new browser, moving all my favorite links, etc.)

I’m pretty conservative with my work technologies.  Internet Explorer (IE) effectively came with my work laptop computer and seemed to work fine.  I particularly liked some of the new features such as tabbed browsing.  So, I asked my colleagues, who were all very enthusiastic about Firefox, why I should change to Firefox.  I heard a lot of “noise” – they were telling me about features that I either did not understand, could not visualize, or that simply did not turn me on.  I was sent a couple of links to evaluation sites.  I spent a few minutes on those, but again, could not see anything compelling that would lead me to undertake the risks of change.  After a few such conversations, I dropped the idea of switching, and continued with my good old IE.

A few days ago, I came across a comment about Firefox’s speed advantage over IE – now I was really interested!  In my personal value system as it relates to personal computing, I’m a speed freak!  I can’t explain why, but I crave fast response times.   I was one of the first to get AT&T’s U-verse broadband, and I’ve experimented with tricks such as Google Web Accelerator (which I’ve uninstalled due to too many conflicts with web sites such as delicious and YouTube).

So, when I learned that Firefox might be faster than IE, I took the plunge and installed Firefox.  This blog is typically not about software evaluation, so I won’t go there except to say that I’m absolutely delighted with Firefox and it is, indeed, noticeably faster than IE on my computer.  But the real point is a lesson in change management.  If my colleagues had known, or had flushed out my personal value system, and related the change in browser to my “need for speed” I would have jumped at the change – no hesitation.  Instead, they threw features at me, or benefits that I just did not relate to or was not interested in.

So, if you are trying to persuade people to change, one of the keys is the WIFM – and to help them understand what is in it for them, you need to understand their personal value systems – what are they looking for – what turns them on – then figure out how your proposed change gets to their value system.  It is said, “All politics is local.”  The analogy is that, “All change is personal!”

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Financial Forensics as a Clue to Dysfunctional IT


“To understand a crime, follow the money” is a familiar principle of detective work.  Over the years, I’ve found that principle to be extremely useful in the world of IT management.  In fact, my spin on it is, “If you want to understand dysfunctional IT behavior, follow the money!”

Of course, this principle helps detectives to not only catch criminals, it helps to get the criminals punished.  Similarly, in the IT world, I’ve used the principle to both understand what is leading to dysfunctional IT behavior, and to help correct that behavior by fixing the money-related drivers.  Let me provide an example and the application of this principle.  The example is, of course, fictitious, though based on real life situations I have worked over many years of management consulting and research.

First, a caveat.  Clearly, not all human or organizational behavior is motivated by money.  However, I have found that collective organizational behavior is significantly shaped by money – by the sources of funds, valuation of returns, and measurement inherent in financial reporting.

Scenario

Higgins-Smithbottom is a global fashion designer and retailer.  The company culture values the creative geniuses who come up with the hallmark designs, and places great freedom and authority on the heads of business units.  In common with the industry, success is seen to be all about great design, brilliant merchandising and effective management of the brand – three disciplines that seem to have little to do with IT.  As such, IT is an “expense to be minimized,” a “necessary evil,” and something that the IT organization is expected to “take care of with minimal disruption to the business” so that business leaders are “free to design, merchandise and manage the fickle fashion business unencumbered by IT.”

The executives at Higgins-Smithbottom are vaguely aware of contemporary success stories such as Zara and Li & Fung, but don’t recognize the role that information and IT have in these companies success stories.

Financial Forensic Clues

  1. All IT capital and expense is managed out of an IT budget – the IT resource is essentially “free” to the business unit leaders.
  2. There is no enterprise-wide IT prioritization and allocation process.  Resources are essentially allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with the regulator on business demand being total supply – when all available supply is tied up, no other demand is accepted.
  3. Because IT is “free” there are no attempts to measure and track the return on IT investments.

Dysfunctional Behavior

The perspective on IT is that it costs too much and delivers too little.  Even though business heads do not “pay” for IT, they know that the bottom line is impacted by it – IT saps profits and eats into the executive bonuses.  As a result, business leaders try to minimize their involvement in IT, invest no time or energy trying to understand it, or figure out how it can improve the business.  Consequently, IT contributes relatively little to the business.  It responds as an “order taker” acting on low value requests from business silos, without an overall IT strategy or architecture.  Each response to a business order adds more complexity to the patchwork of IT systems.  More time and money is spent on inter-system interfaces than on business enablement.

When a meaningful business request surfaces for management information or business analytics, IT finds it virtually impossible to respond, due to the complex patchwork of systems and lack of data standardization.  Lack of adequate IT resourcing and responsiveness leads business units to hire their own IT resources – sometimes as consultants and contractors, other times as permanent staff.  These “shadow IT” groups exacerbate the complexity of the systems environment, and mask true IT spending levels.

IT eventually finds itself in a vicious cycle – low business demand maturity begets low IT supply maturity.  When IT does get engaged by the business for a new system, it fails to “push back” on the business demand to “automate the manual process as is – don’t make us change the process!”  IT does what it’s told, even if that means customizing the heck out of an off-the-shelf package.  The customization triples the implementation costs, and sends subsequent maintenance costs through the roof.

Lessons Learned

  1. When IT is “free,” it is not valued.  When someone else is footing the bill, there’s no sense of accountability from those who should be turning the investment into a valued return.
  2. Without enterprise-wide prioritization and allocation, IT optimization takes place at the business unit level, leading to sub-optimization at the enterprise level.
  3. Lack of enterprise-wide prioritization and allocation is typically accompanied by a lack of an overall IT strategy and road map.  This leads to islands of automation, and over time, the number of interfaces (and costs associated with building and maintaining those interfaces) increase exponentially.  After a few years, the vast majority of IT spend is related to interfaces – i.e., it’s all cost-added, without any value-added.
  4. When IT is sub-optimized for the enterprise, IT “vacuums” get created throughout the business, and nature’s abhorrence of vacuums leads them to be filled by “shadow IT” groups.  This adds to actual IT spend, even though the shadow spend is not visible in the IT budget – i.e., IT is costing you more than you think it is.
  5. Being “cheap” with IT usually ends up being very expensive!

One Guru Disects the “Anatomy of a Wow” Customer Experience


My friend and colleague Frank Capek has just summarized his 25 years of learnings from his work on Customer Experience Design.  I think so much of Frank’s work, and believe this is so important, I thought I’d point you all to the post.

As a related aside, I’d like to share a couple of “wow” experiences I’ve had in the last week.  The first was delivered by Moen, the faucet company.  My kitchen faucet was getting a little hard to turn.  I went to the Moen web site and got my first small “wow.”  It is beautifully laid out.  I was quickly able to get a description of the problem, the recommended solution, and a real bonus – a nicely animated lesson in how to replace the cartridge in the faucet.  The site helped me find and order the right cartridge.  All well and good.  The replacement part arrived a few days later, and I was able to replace the part in about 20 minutes – a painless process thanks to the animation and clear directions that came with the part.

While I was replacing the cartridge I noticed that the lever was loose (the faucet is a single lever type, with an integrated spray attachment).  Anyway, replacing the part solved the “stickiness” in the handle, and all was well.  However, a couple of days later, I noticed that the lever was again loose.  I removed the Allen screw, applied a good dollop (an engineering term!) of Loctite thread compound.  A couple of days later, it was loose again.  I went back to the web site, but could not see any particular reference to the loose screw phenomenon, so I wrote a support request (again, easily done) describing the problem.  The next day, I got an email telling me that the parts I needed were being shipped to me post haste.

A couple of days later, a replacement Allen screw, plus several other parts associated with securing the lever, turned up in the mail – again with clear instructions.  No cost – no hassle.  Just exceptional customer service.  I replace the screw and related parts, and that solved the problem.  I was absolutely delighted about every aspect of my interaction with Moen.  In Frank’s words, I was ‘wowed!’

In the same week, I had read a review by the wonderful Walter Mossberg on Photo Books.  These are a fun way to assemble photos into a hard back or soft bound book.  He pointed out that Apple’s iPhoto had a gizmo built in, and that you could easily assemble a book (or calendar) and send it to Apple for processing and printing.  I’m already an enthusiastic iPhoto user, but had never tried the photo book feature.  So I did – quickly assembling a surprise book for my wife.  The process was easy and fun.  I ordered the book from Apple and was delighted when the finished product arrived through the mail about 10 days later.  Unfortunately, within minutes the pages separated from the hard back binding.  Bummer!

I got onto Apple’s web site, quickly found the place to register the problem – again, a beautifully designed site that made the whole process easy.  I got an immediate acknowledgment (nothing new there!) but a day later received a personal email from a support representative (named!) expressing deep regret that this had happened, and letting me know that a replacement would be shipped immediately.  The “wow” came 2 days later – while the original order was shipped by mail (my request, being a cheapskate) the replacement came by FedEx.  Once again, Apple proved it really is a class act.  of course, I’ve gone on to assemble and order several other items!

It’s experiences such as those delivered by Moen and Apple that go well above what we’ve come to expect – that differentiate them in the market place and keep us customers going back time and time again.  And, to one of Frank’s points, these were not “accidents.”  I know from years of experience, that Apple engineers the “wow” into virtually everything it does.  Similarly, as I’ve told friends about my Moen experience, they tell me of similar experiences they’ve had with the company – consistently exceptional customer experiences.

As an IT organization, how have you “designed” an exceptional customer experience?  How could you create more “wows” for your business partners and customers?  Check in on Frank’s blog to get some pointers on what it takes and how to achieve it.  It will be well worth your time!

Measuring the Business Value of IT – Where You Can Win By Simply Trying!


I was in a conversation with a CIO earlier this week on the topic of value realization measurement, and I realized I had never really posted on this crucial topic – shame on me!  I did come at measurement (somewhat obliquely) in a post last October on The Business Case as a Value Realization Tool, but I suspect some of the ideas got lost in that piece, so I’m going to tackle the issue more directly as a multi-part post.

The biggest single mistake I see with value realization measurement is that people get totally intimidated with the incredible complexity around the topic – so intimidated that they generally give up.  It’s as if the business-IT “system” (I use that term in a scientific or engineering sense) is a big black box.  We know how to (and generally do) measure the inputs to the black box – capital expense, operating costs, headcount, ratios such as IT spend as a percentage of revenues or IT spend per employee, but we are generally lost as to the outputs, or even worse, the outcomes. 

I think there are 3 distinct aspects to the value realization measurement challenge:

  1. There is indeed enormous complexity involved if you allow it – the relationship between a given technology initiative and an associated business impact is often tenuous at best – especially when the technology impact is largely infrastructural in nature.  What, for example, is the value of upgrading a PC?  The answer, of course, depends on all sorts of things such as who is the user and what are they using the PC for?  How will they use the upgraded PC in ways they could not use the device it is replacing, and how will the new marginal uses lead to additional realized value?  Even if not infrastructural, there are often timing effects – the initiative may not yield its full value until some time into the future – perhaps years.  There are often effects from interdependencies – we might get a certain amount of increased sales performance through the implementation of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.  We might then get a significant multiplier through a new sales incentive program and another multiplier from using some sort of Web 2.0 capability to engage customers in the product design process.  Accurately allocating benefits across these initiatives might be tricky, to say the least!
  2. There are cultural issues that often get in the way.  With measurement comes accountability – real or implied!  If I’m a business executive that is sponsoring, say, a $150 million initiative and I’m in an environment where value realization is not measured, I am unlikely to stand up and say, “Hey, let’s measure the realized value of this initiative and see how it matches the business case!”  If I can get away without it being measured, that’s perfectly fine by me!
  3. The third aspect I see might be the most intimidating – IT people like to get to precision!  They want the answer.  This is insidious and prevents most organizations from even trying to measure value realization.  And that’s my key point – if you are not trying to measure value realization, you are likely to lose some potential value – what I refer to as value leakage. 

Let me explain why trying to measure value is so important for actually driving value realization.  I’ll go back to my black box analogy.  We know what goes in but not what comes out.  So I ask you, my business customer and partner, “What would you like to come out of the box if you had your wishes?”  Let’s stick with the CRM example, and assume my customer/partner is Fred, the VP Sales and Marketing.   Fred says, “I’d like to increase sales productivity.”   “By how much, by when, and how will you measure it?” I ask Fred.  “By 25%, by the end of next year, and we’d measure it by looking at the increase in sales volume per quarter per salesperson.”

“OK, Fred, now let me explain, the black box is not really a black box – it’s a system, with people, processes, policies, information, and so on.  What will the black box system need to do to increase sales productivity by 25%?”  “Well,” says Fred, “It will need to save the sales people time – increase their efficiency so more of their time is spent on selling rather than looking for information and other activities that get in the way.  And it will need to improve their close ratio – make them more effective at selling.”  “OK. Fred, let’s talk about exactly how the black box might achieve those goals.  Let’s drill down on how it might improve the sales close ratio to better understand the best possible ways we might be able to do this.  And how we will measure and track the ability for the system to improve the close ratio.”

You can imagine this conversation going to and fro.  Fred may have a rich understanding of these issues, and all I’m doing is mining that understanding and breaking the system’s outputs down into capabilities and outcomes.  On the other hand, Fred might have no idea how the CRM will contribute to performance, and in that case I’m really consulting to him, rather than mining what he knows – Fred and I are jointly figuring it out.  Either way, we might determine that effectiveness will be increased by giving the sales person capabilities that bring her a wealth of information about the customer (e.g., buying history, current market intelligence) so that she’s better able to target her sales efforts and more effective with the ones she targets because she knows so much more about them.  The outcomes might include a measure of customer knowledge as assessed by the sales manager by listening in on sales calls or through periodic customer surveys.  Another capability might be the opportunity to collaborate with other sales people on a specific sales issue – has anyone ever come across this competitor?  What do we know about them?  An outcome measure might include a measure of collaboration among sales people, perhaps tied to some sort of reward and recognition for such collaborative behavior.

My example here is trivial (as clearly is my knowledge of the CRM space!) but hopefully you get the point.  We’ve taken a big investment (CRM deployment) with a nebulous goal – increase sales productivity – and drilled down to determine the capabilities that the CRM needs to provide, the outcomes those capabilities need to deliver, and the metrics we will use to track those outcomes.  Typically, in the process of doing this, we have significantly increased our understanding of the solution, probably identified additional aspects of the solution that might have been overlooked, dramatically increased Fred’s buy-in and commitment to the solution, and have identified some success metrics that we can track. By doing so, we are in a better position to learn and improve our business case processes and value realization strategies.

And this is why I say in the post’s title that “you can win by simply trying.”  Rather than assume that value realization tracking is so hard I won’t bother, I’ve worked with my key customer/partner to tease out some key measures.  They won’t all be right – that’s fine, they are a starting point we can refine with experience.  They won’t be precise, or perhaps even accurate – again, that’s OK.  Something is better than nothing, and there was probably enormous benefit in taking Fred through the analytical process.  Simply doing that will likely increase value realization.  Alternatively, it may have revealed that the benefits were just not there, or too nebulous for the CRM program to go ahead without further analysis and perhaps some benchmarking.

As Lord Kelvin famously said, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

Speedbumps on the Information Superhighway?


I try not to exploit my role as a blogger to promote products or businesses (unless there’s an exceptional customer experience or innovation I really believe is worthy of note).  Nor do I use it to vent frustrations about bad customer experiences (except in rare cases.)  I can’t fully explain my internal compass and guidelines for these principles, or even justify myself – when I promote or chastise, I do so because it feels right and appropriate at the time.  (As it happens, I think a great site for addressing product and vendor issues is at Get Satisfaction.)

With the caveats out of the way, I’ve recently been “upping the ante” on myself in terms of better organizing my online experience.  For example, as my bookmarks have expanded over the years, the way I originally had them organized no longer reflects how I actually need to use bookmarking.  Also, there’s just so much stuff to keep track of, so I decided to get into social bookmarking.  I had dabbled in the past, but determined that I needed to get beyond dabbling into some more serious usage.

Based on colleagues recommendations I tried Delicious - the new version.  Delicious is a rich and powerful tool.  I like the fact that I can use it in its simplest form (personal tagging and bookmarking) and grow into the more valuable social bookmarking dimension as I gain comfort with it.   Like most powerful tools, there’s a learning curve, and therefore I won’t feel the real value until I’m “past the hump” in terms of learning (my own personal ‘speed bump’).

But I’m increasingly finding some Web 2.0 tools have really rough edges – strange user interfaces, erratic performance, and little meaningful guidance on how to get the best from them.  Now admittedly, I have a low threshold of pain in terms of learning.  If I can’t get a sufficient hang of a tool, and some level of instant gratification in 10 to 15 minutes, I tend to give up.  Sometimes the issue turns out to be unfortunate interactions between tools.  I’ve had a couple of such instances with Google Web Accelerator conflicting somehow with other web sites.  I was getting very erratic behavior with YouTube until I disabled Google Web Accelerator.  I believe I just found a similar incompatibility between Google Web Accelerator and Delicious.  The manifestation of this was both amusing and annoying.  I would frequently get the message:

Hmmm… you have been blocked…  Sorry, you’ve been temporarily blocked for accessing Delicious too rapidly. This could be the result of using a buggy, misconfigured, or malicious program. It could also be accidental on our part. Please hold off for a few minutes and try again later, in a gentler fashion. 

For a first class (and free!) product, this message from Delicious confounded me!  The implication that it’s my fault that I got an error message – I’m accessing the service “too rapidly”!  I should return later “in a gentler fashion”!  I tried typing slower, and hitting the keys with a little less vigor, but I still got the error message.  Fortunately, I discovered the Google Web Accelerator glitch, but someone else in a similar situation might have given up, or lived with this annoying glitch forever.

Again, this is not about Delicious, or even Google Web Accelerator.  Weird interactions aside, these are great products that work well (mostly) and have value.  I raved recently about MindMeister.  The more I use, the more I love it (as does my team as we now use this as a team support tool.)  But I’ve also wasted time and effort with some total rubbish!  I get the idea of beta versions and having users debug products, but some of the tools out there really are not ready for prime time.  One I tried recently (at a colleague’s suggestion) had no real guidance as to how to use it, a help system from the 1960′s, and when I gave up and tried to delete the things I put on it, gave me no way to do so.  I then decided to delete my account, and again there was no way to do so.  A search of the support pages showed me that this was a much requested feature they would work on some day.  In the meantime, “tell support you want out, and they will cancel the service within 24 hours”!  That’s not what Web 2.0 is all about!

I guess the punchline is – caveat emptor.  While there are some wonderful (and free!) tools out there that really do help with productivity and making you “smarter”, there’s many that just don’t cut it!

IT Maturity Sanity Check – How Do You Stack Up?


I’ve recently been working with a company where business-IT maturity is significantly lower than I typically see in my clients.  It’s a strange and sobering feeling – like stepping back about 20 years!  I don’t wish to embarrass anyone, so I’d best not say too much about the industry or the circumstances that led this company to have such low maturity, or that led them to be suddenly interested in cranking up the volume in their IT capabilities.  Suffice it to say that business conditions have recently changed, and are expected to continue changing over the foreseeable future, and this led them to hire a new, seasoned CIO.

Let me describe some of the characteristics of low business-IT maturity we see at this company.

  • All “formal” IT spending is in the IT budget.  To the business, IT is a “free” resource – there is no business accountability for project spend or business return on IT-related investments.  This is a recipe that dooms IT to be viewed as a necessary overhead, and to mask the business value of investments in IT-enabled business change.
  • There is a significant “non-formal” – i.e., shadow IT spend that is outside the IT budget.  Shadow IT typically occurs as a natural response to a void the IT organization has created – the business needs certain IT services or capabilities it is not getting from the “formal” IT structure, so it creates its own IT capabilities.  This may be OK, but it masks true IT spend, and typically impedes cost and leverage plays such as shared IT infrastructure, common tools and methods, and standardization.
  • The business “places orders” on IT, and IT “takes orders” from the business.  As such, little, if any, process re-engineering is done, and given the highly siloed nature of the business (a common symptom of low business maturity), each silo wants to handle a process (such as order processing) in its own unique, idiosyncratic way.  This ultimately drives up IT costs and drives down value.
  • As a result of the above, application packages are customized to a ridiculous degree – staying current with application package releases is impossible and support costs escalate.
  • There is no consistent company-wide IT prioritization or portfolio management mechanism.  Demand volume always exceeds supply capacity.  To protect against this, the IT organization has grown its own silos that mirror the business silos.  Each IT silo has its own dedicated resources as a means to ensure that they can respond, at least at some level, to business demand.  The net result is that there’s always a significant amount of low value IT work to keep people busy, while potentially high value business opportunities lay fallow for want of IT supply capacity.
  • There are no consistent project or program management methods, and nobody with a role of Information Architect, let alone Enterprise or Ecosystem Architect.  Contemporary practices such as SOA, or even simple middleware are a distant dream to those in IT that understand their potential.
  • The IT staff is of reasonably high quality.  Many have been with the company a long time, so they really don’t know any different.  Some are more recent hires, though all from within the industry – and this is an industry I’d describe as one of the last bastions of what I’d call “IT blindness.”  The industry, by and large, has yet to recognize the potential of information and technology to completely reshape it, the way Wal-Mart’s supply chain and logistics leap in the 1990′s, or American Airlines foray into yield management in the mid 1980′s took their respective industries by storm, literally toppling some of their largest competitors and changing the discount retail and airline reservations businesses for ever more.

I’ll post another time about what this company might do to correct its sins of the past, and start gaining business advantage from IT, but challenge the reader to ask of your own company:

  1. What is your level of busienss-IT maturity?
  2. Are there any areas of IT blindness your company has?
  3. Is all IT spending happening in those places that have the greatest leverage?
  4. What are you doing to wring more value and competitive advantage from IT?

The Myth of Information Overload


We increasingly hear complaints about the stresses and strains of “information overload.”  I have to admit, I’m somewhat skeptical of this term and the phenomena associated with it.

First, this is not a new issue.  To the contrary, I suspect that since the earliest days of civilization, people have complained about information overload.  I can imagine the Town Crier (this was a person in the 1800′s employed by a town to proclaim announcements in the streets) approaching, bell ringing in hand, yelling, “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.  Let it be known that…” and the town’s citizens grumbling, “Oh no!  That’s the third crier I’ve heard today – is there no limit to the amount of news we are expected to listen to?”

There’s something about the term “information overload” that puts the cart before the horse.  It’s like “horseless carriage” rather than “automobile” – if you pick the wrong label, you might misunderstand the problem, and thus come up with the wrong solution (or at least, come up with a solution that generates all sorts of undesirable, unintended consequences!)  If you think of the problem as information overload you might look for a solution that cuts back on the information, and that would be a crime!

I don’t personally suffer from information overload.  I feel eternally fortunate that I have access to so much information – that I am washed in so many messages for so much of my day and evening.  But, what I do feel is a strong need to:

  1. Be better at finding potentially valuable information.  I’m finding an ever increasing array of new tools  – often Web 2.0 tools such as social bookmarking, RSS readers, tag and search, and content management – that really are helping me find useful information I might not otherwise come across.
  2. Have much better tools to sort and filter the information available.  Again, tools such as tag/search, social bookmarking, and RSS readers are a great help in sorting and filtering.
  3. Have much better ways to make sense of all the information.  There is always room for improvement here, but I find the better I can leverage technology to help with 1. and 2. above, the easier it is to make sense of the information I’m exposed to.  And even then, Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, social networks, and easy-to-use collaboration tools (e.g., mind mapping, project management) are helping enormously.

I think some of the so-called “information overload” is actually a “channels” problem – we often use the wrong channels for a given purpose.  Email, of course, is the most prone to abuse.  Part of this is a lack of accepted, shared protocols that would bring some sense and order to the email chaos.  Part of this is the old “hammer” problem – when all you have is a hammer, everything is treated as if it were a nail.  Clearly, tools such as Instant Messaging, collaboration hubs, and a better balance between “push” and “pull” communication methods can take the sting out of email.   At nGenera, my email traffic is down significantly since we began using a collaboration hub.

A more insidious problem that I believe is often masked under the “information overload” banner is poor work management practices.  In many IT organizations I see situations where layers of middle management have been eliminated over the last few years, but work processes have not been improved.  This is exacerbated by IT organizations often being the worst kind of “cobblers children” in that they are all but un-automated.  As a result, we see IT managers who spend much of their day sending and responding to email messages that are actually part of a dreadfully inefficient work-flow.  So, you have broken work-flow processes automated by email – a recipe for low productivity, low quality, and managers who don’t have the time to think, read, or learn. 

Let’s call a spade a spade – this is not “information overload” – it is poor management (at all levels) that has fostered poor processes and has created a vicious cycle leading to yet more emails, and ever-shrinking time to “sharpen the saw”, as the old adage goes.

I’ve Looked At Clouds from Both Sides Now…


I’ve had some interesting conversations with CIO’s and CTO’s about Cloud Computing lately.  These are exciting times.  I’m reminded of the earliest days of the personal computer.  PC’s were quietly finding their way into the enterprise computing scene, though you would not have known that by talking to CIOs.  They were mostly in denial, even as executive offices just down the corridor from the CIO’s office were beginning to become home to a variety of rogue PC’s – machines such as Apple II’s and Radio Shack TRS 80′s.

Fast forward 25 years or so.  Now the press is full of predictions and prognostications about Cloud Computing, several key players are investing heavily in this space (pun intended) but many CIO’s and CTO’s either just don’t believe it, see it as warmed over service  bureau computing from the 60′s and 70′s, or believe it’s the greatest threat to enterprise computing sanity since computer viruses first appeared.

I loved this post in ZDNet by Dion Hinchcliffe.   As usual, Dion is insightful, convincing and manages to come up with a clear graphic that helps us understand this emerging phenomenon.   I often have to remind myself about the theme of this blog – what IT organizations will look like in 2017.  That’s why I like Dion’s post so much.  I am absolutely convinced that by 2017, Cloud Computing will be the norm for all but the extreme laggards.