The eWorld Radar

CIO Screw up Log

Some might say that this is the unofficial name for the help desk ticketing system. And to some extent they are right.

But screw up is an unkind phrase for a failure. But failure is a key element in self development. As mentioned in an earlier post, failure is crucial, mistakes are unacceptable.

I encourage CIOs to keep a log of anything that takes place during the day that doesn’t conclude in a positive manner. These might include:

• The mis-launch of a new IT service.
• The strained meeting with the CFO.
• The heated exchange with the key supplier.
• The new innovation budget allocated to the CMO, which includes a substantial allocation for technology spend (that is not under the CIO’s control).

All of these came about because of something the CIO didn’t do correctly. So rather than go on to make the same mistakes day after day, they need to be logged. Assigning severity scores to the log entries will provide the information needed to prioritise the CIO’s personal development.

If the CIO is unwilling to do this, then HR might take on this responsibility. The log can then be used as either a development tool or exhibit A in the firing process.

Ade McCormack

Performance – Perceived Emotional Cost

Most sales people know that the value they deliver is proportional to the perceived benefits. In most cases a bigger price has a value dampening effect. But most importantly, the greater the perceived emotional cost the less associated value the customer will perceive.

To be a successful worker in the industrial economy, you need to be compliant / low maintenance from a management perspective.

However in the digital economy, creativity trumps compliancy.

So it is expected that workers will be a management nightmare. This in turn means that the perceived benefits associated with you must shoot through the roof to offset this.

Mastery of your skills will of course help, but brand management is more important.

Ade McCormack

CIO – A different carrot

What would happen if CIO compensation packages were based on business-relevant information output rather than size of technology estate / user community?

It is likely that CIOs would:

• Push as much technology out of the door / into the Cloud as possible.
• Engage with users as if their career depended on it.
• Help the organisation streamline processes.
• Become acutely aware of what the business leaders were focused on

It strikes me that many of the issues organisations face in relation to their IT leadership could easily be resolved by simply changing the carrot.

Ade McCormack

Empower your ‘bad-job’ workers

In a hyper competitive market, where customers look at the price tag before they look at the offering, it makes sense to keep your labour bill as low as possible.  And so where you cannot ‘automate out’ the labour you simply minimise the investment in those workers that take up the so called ’bad jobs’.

Well according to the Harvard Business Review this approach to worker investment is flawed.

Zeynep Ton, visiting assistant professor in operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management suggests that retailers can break the low-price low worker investment link by adopting the following practices:

• Reduce the catalogue of items sold. This reduces complexity both operationally and in what workers need to get to grips with.
• Rather than flexing the workforce in line with demand, cross train workers so that they can be reposted as required. Thus there are less clueless temp workers damaging the brand.
• Apply lean principles to eliminating waste so that worker productivity is maximised.
• Empower employees to make real-time decisions, which translates into better customer service.

As mentioned in previous posts, most organisations are in a ‘race to the bottom’. The winners will be those that can flourish when they get there. And they will be unlikely to achieve this unless they place great emphasis on their staff, new technologies and information management.

Ade McCormack

Trends – Social Entrepreneurship

The pointlessness of conspicuous consumption coupled with a sense of wanting the planet to be a slightly better place because one existed is leading to a large scale review of the pursuit of a career based on solely financial goals.

Typically this has led to private sector workers migrating to public or voluntary sector jobs.

However over the last century we have seen a growth in those in the entrepreneurial class opting to focus on social rather than financial goals. Florence Nightingale  being an early example.

The 2008 recession triggered an interest in social capitalism, which in essence suggests that better social policies lead to better economic output. Social entrepreneurship is not so much about fixing society to create better economic outcomes, but to fix business so as to create better social outcomes.

The web and in particular social media has provided a platform that is causing social entrepreneurship to flourish.  For example the ability to connect those with money to those that need the money at the volumes needed to help the intermediary cover their costs (and make enough money to grow their model) could only happen with a web-based model.

Keep in mind we are not talking about a facility that enables venture capitalists to lend to pre-IPO start ups. We are talking about allowing the average Joe in any Western economy to micro-finance the business of a start up in say rural Africa.

What is interesting here is that the model can be so effective that the economic goals whilst largely secondary can increasingly be almost primary without compromising the social output.

New technology and in particular Search engine optimisation and PPC allows the most impoverished of social entrepreneurs to enjoy the economics associated with a global business.

Social enterprise may seem like a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of margins. But that is where many ‘big ticket’ players today are heading because of the pressure of competing in a global market.

Smart entrepreneurs today may realise it is wise to ‘start at the bottom’. Those in emerging economies will have no other choice. But that constraint could well lead to a discipline that enables the emerging economy entrepreneurs to out compete their resource-rich western rivals.

So social entrepreneurism becomes less of a ‘conscience balm’ and more of a necessity for those looking to ‘stay in play’ in the global marketplace.

Ade McCormack

Talent – Just-in-time learning

The day of the multi-day residential learning experience has come to an end from a mainstream education perspective. The market increasingly has a role to play in this as does the worker.

The market is putting pressure on costs so anything that involves accommodation and travel will be unattractive. Also the opportunity cost of being away from the desk makes many managers reluctant to release their staff for extended periods of time.

Also the speed at which the market moves can often make classroom learning, particularly where it is knowledge-based, appear like an annual inoculation when what the learners really need is daily vitamins.

It would also appear that Generation-Ys much prefer their education bite-sized. The digital economy, with its real-time pace and volatile movement is forcing the rest of us to fall into line with this approach.

There are a couple of significant points that come to mind:

• The future of universities is in question.
• The school model is looking increasingly outmoded.

Isn’t it best to be taught how to learn at school? Should there ever be a business-critical need to know the outcome of Henry the Eighth’s six marriages the learner has the skills to find that out?

The convergence of social media, mobile and the Cloud looks set to shake up how we nurture our talent.

Tech – Buzzwords: High Performance Computing

This is a term that was originally associated with mainframe computers around the time of the arrival of the PC. Before that mainframes could be considered high, medium and low performance as they were the sole computing option.

Today HPC is more associated with clusters of servers that work together to act as one virtual super computer. And even in later years this has gone on to become known as grid computing.

HPC is significant because it can be used to study events that would otherwise be expensive to conduct in the real world (crashing a plane) or predicting the outcome of complex systems (the weather, stock prices).

Again it’s not a new concept, but hasn’t yet entered mainstream IT jargon.

As the price of technology drops and the need to model volatility increases, the demand for HPC will increase. Increasingly this will become the domain of Cloud service providers.

Tech Sector Review - January 2012

RIM – Heins Uncertainty Principle

Blackberry maker RIM has a new man at the helm. Physicist Thorsten Heins is the new CEO. Despite RIM’s share price dropping over 70% in 12 months, he is advocating a turnaround rather than sticking the organisation in the Large Hadron Collider and selling off the resultant pieces. In particular he believes that RIM’s private data network is a key differentiator and so will remain in place. 

Apple – MVP

Apple revisited the top of the leader board when after announcing its record quarterly results it briefly become the most valuable company in the world again. It would appear that the CEO transition from the iconic Steve Jobs to Tim Cook has been a complete success.

Twitter – Censorship strategy

Twitter plans to grow its membership from 100 million to a billion and that means entering markets where the governmental leaders can get a little tetchy about less than respectful tweets. Anticipating this Twitter has loosened its censorship policy so that it will if requested make ‘offensive’ tweets invisible to citizens of the offended nation. It would be great if the censorship could extend to ‘social marketing’ experts who seem to make up a significant percentage of Twitter’s existing community.  

Kodak – Unfortunate development

Kodak became another example of an industrial economy giant failing to adjust to the digital economy when it recently filed for bankruptcy. The innovation-loaded slogan ‘you press the button, we do the rest’ suggests that Kodak played at the leading edge. However that slogan was coined in 1888 and whilst Kodak continued to keep one eye on the digital landscape it wasn’t enough (eyes) to gauge the speed at which the market was moving.

IBM – 12 atom bit

IBM researchers decided rather than follow the traditional path of making the next version of memory storage a little smaller than the current version they would rush to the end game. Having discovered that it is not possible to represent either one or a zero on just one atom (quantum effects) they just kept adding atoms until they were able to predictably store literally one bit of information. This is still very much in the lab and a very cold one at that (1 degree above absolute zero).

Sap – Bullish

German enterprise applications vendor SAP is confident that it is on target to hit 20 billion euro in revenues by 2015. 2011 saw its best year ever with fourth quarter revenues up 11 per cent year on year. Its $3.4bn acquisition of SuccessFactors gives it a boost in the Cloud space as well as in the HR software market. Oracle and Microsoft will likely be unnerved by the enterprise giant regaining its mojo.

Cisco – Leaves the living room

Cisco’s relatively recent review of its strategic direction led to its commitment to focus on the enterprise space. It subsequently dumped its half a billion dollar Flip investment, which on reflection looked sadly on course to obsolete itself anyway. The most recent withdrawal from the consumer space is the demise of the Umi Telepresence home videoconference offering. Cisco does teleconferencing like no other, but its consumer offering was expensive. Like the Flip it was another device delivered into a world where device consolidation is the name of the game.

WalMart – Scan and scram

Be afraid. Retail giant Walmart is now in the mobile shopping applications business through its acquisition of Small Society for an undisclosed sum. It is looking to boost its web offering with a view to taking on Amazon, which has in recent years been eating its lunch. Another problem Walmart is looking to address is where shoppers visit their store and use their smartphones to capture the barcode information of products they are interested in and then source a better deal online.