Alignment
Observing Communications
I attended a dinner this week which had an interesting presentation. It was the monthly dinner meeting of the Society for Information Management here in Houston. The presentation revolved around the usefulness of IT leadership surveying their customers and doing some amount of statistical analysis on the results to understand customer satisfaction levels. I agree with the speaker that this is very useful and can provide IT leadership with insight on the perceptions of their customers.
The idea of IT leadership maintaining a clear understanding of their customer base is a big deal to me. However, statistics can’t do it all. During my tour of duty in IT leadership, I spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to understand how our customers saw us and our value to them. In my case, I spent more time talking with them directly than doing surveys (a luxury of a mid-size manufacturing company). What I concluded is that many problems are just communications and perception problems. I’m sure you’ve heard that before but it’s really true. In the world of IT operations it really boils down to vocabularies. In many cases, the business customer doesn’t have the IT vocabulary to articulate their problems to the IT support staff trying to help them. Conversely, the IT support staff often doesn’t have the business vocabulary to articulate their thoughts to the business customer. Communications suffer and customer satisfaction can go in the tank.
The customer shouldn’t be required to have an IT vocabulary (although it sure helps a lot). One solution to this dilemma is that the IT support group either needs each IT support person to have both vocabularies (very rare) or have a few “Translators” on staff to translate business speak to IT speak, as shown in the diagram on the right. The effect is that your IT support staff only needs sufficient business vocabulary to communicate with the Translator and the Translator only needs sufficient IT vocabulary to communicate with your IT staff. I would articulate this with a bridge metaphor, like to one implied by the diagram on the right. The simple idea was that half a bridge doesn’t get the job done.
When I added the staff to actually deliver on this idea, the results were dramatic. In larger IT organizations, such staff additions are becoming the norm but in mid-size companies resources are much leaner. Adding semi-technical staff to those IT organizations is a much bigger deal. I suggest to those of you in such organizations is that it’s worth the effort and will pay huge dividends. The idea of complementary skills is addressed in an earlier post called Alignment to the Core. It highlights that there are different frames of mind or paradigms that need to be bridged. The basic idea is that there is the paradigm where it tools (IT hardware and software) is the primary focus and there is the paradigm where the application of the tools (business uses, workflow, etc.) is the focus. As with the bridge metaphor these overlapping paradigms must communicate with each other as well.
As you can tell, I am a big fan of overlapping, complementary skills inventory in IT organizations. It’s the best way to align the IT function with the business requirements and people. I hope I have increased your interest as well.
Thanks for stopping by. Until next time…
Herding Consultants 2.0
What kind of title is “Herding Consultants 2.0″? I suppose for search engine optimization reasons I should have used “aligning” instead of “herding” but at some point the whole alignment theme can get boring. I’ll stick with “herding” this time. Having been on both sides of the consulting table leads to some firm convictions about what that means in an era of highly available sources of judgment and advice. In the “old” days (before the late 1990′s) consultants found consultants based on their business offerings, sales campaigns and contacts. A relationship was built based on repeated personal contact. The competitive differentiator was the consultant’s previous work and their skills inventory. That ultimately led to a “resume bake off” when consultants competed for your business. That model is still viable to a large extent.
A new model has appeared over the last few years based on Internet based tools and virtual presence. Blogs have grown rapidly and any consultant worth his salt has one (me included). We use some tool to subscribe to the blogs that interest us, such as our email clients, browsers or any number of other tools. My preference is a tool called BlogBridge. That keeps the blog posts out of my inbox which reduces clutter and makes them easy to scan. The end result is that I now have subscribed to many blogs. I did that because there are many topics about which I want to stay current or have an interest. That creates a need to assign levels of credibility to each blog. BlogBridge makes the assignment of a ranking very easy. It’s the deciding on a rank that’s hard.
My current technique is to look over my “herd” of consultant blogs to spot trends. Once I do that I decide if I’m in agreement with the consensus. If not, I research the topic more to validate my opinions. I’m not trying to be a technical expert but I am trying to understand the topic well enough that I can offer my own options and judgment in a way that adds value for my target clients (C-level executives in mid-market manufacturing or manufacturing related service businesses who are trying to make decisions on the use and deployment of technology tools). I will then vet my opinions with a few people whose opinion I trust and who have differing backgrounds.
This just reinforces the point I have made before. It’s the personal relationships that matter most. It also reinforces the idea that there is just a huge amount of opinions and “experts” out there. Another way of “herding” all of the consultants you rely on for advice is to let the large consulting companies do it for you. For example, both Gartner and Forrester have become active bloggers. You can also just sign up with either of them and get even more information. Essentially, by relying on their blogs you are letting them do the vetting for you. There are other, smaller consulting groups like ebizQ and TechRepublic, which offer similar capabilities. I watch some consultants from each of these.
In summary, my point is that we need techniques to vet the web-based consultants we have all come to rely on. We each need to decide how much effort to apply to that vetting exercise and how to leverage our own personal networks. I have my approach and I recommend that you develop one that works for you.
Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…
Google Wave beta, the BITA view
I would like to welcome everyone back and hope your holidays were great. Consider this one those early January real world wake up calls reminding you that the holidays are over and it’s time to hit it again. It’s OK to have a heavy sigh of resignation now; I’ll wait until you’re finished… OK, now that you’re fully reengaged, I’ll move on.
A few weeks ago I became part of the Google Wave beta program. For those of you that don’t know what Google Wave is, I’ll summarize. It’s Google’s spin on what real-time threaded message collaboration should look like. For those of you who want a more robust description, I’ll provide a link here. For those of you who are more visual there is a YouTube video below.
I believe that Google sees it as the next generation of email. I think that is naïve at best. The current version of Wave tries to be all things to all people and is just too much for most people outside of a dedicated team collaboration scenario. For example, writing notes on paper preceded email by millennia. Yet it persists both in the form of paper notes as well as electronic text messages. I do think that Wave will offer some great opportunities for those of us in the business-IT alignment, or BITA, space. One of the core requirements for IT doing a better job of supporting their company’s core business processes is improved communication between IT and their customers. Any tool that makes that communication more effective is a good thing.
The best way to explain my point is through a simple example. An example wave is shown below. Since I am the only member of this hypothetical team I must ask for your understanding by imagining a larger group.
What you see is a threaded discussion much like you would see in Lotus Notes, Microsoft Groove or any one of several other discussion board tools. In this case, the wave is a new manufacturing requirement proposal document that IT needs to prepare. The initial entry for this thread is the general statement of what needs to be done. Subsequent statements hold the initial text for each of the three sections. The collaborators for each section can then begin to edit that text with supporting discussions as to why they made their changes to it.
The strength of Wave is the ability to see modifications as they are made and to engage in an instant messaging discussion as the process takes place (phone calls can work too but that isn’t very Web 2.0). You could be seeing text and discussions appearing in all three groups simultaneously in real-time by different people. It would be a little like having a real-time control room where you are watching a manufacturing activity taking place before your eyes. Such activity can become unmanageable very quickly without some ground rules, especially if the manufacturing group is included as collaborators. This doesn’t consider that the whole Wave platform is open source and can be extended to include all kinds of cloud-based tools.
To me it’s clear that for work of any complexity it makes sense to embed Wave into another application which will manage the workflow and constrain the flexibility of the Wave tool to something that is manageable for real world use. The good news is that such applications can be built fairly quickly or adapted from other existing applications.
I’m sure that Wave will evolve fairly quickly into something very useful for real business use. Then it just becomes a question of a company’s comfort level with using cloud-based tools for sensitive work. I hope you found this post useful. I can now say that I’m fully reengaged after my holidays. My heavy sigh follows…
Cloud Alignment – Part I
This is the first of a series of posts on cloud computing. This is a hot topic in the technology world yet it is also the source of much confusion. Before I start talking about cloud computing, I should provide you with my practical definition. My perspective is that of someone responsible for both IT and business operations within a larger “midsize” company. I don’t care about technology for technology’s sake but only for what it can do for my business. Given all of that my definition is:
“Cloud computing refers to beneficial software functionality delivered as services via the Internet. Those services reduce the demands on the company’s IT infrastructure, other than the capacity of the connection to the Internet.”
Its only value is to give me access to capabilities I didn’t have before for a price I can afford and/or to lower the costs of services already provided to my customers. The Wikipedia definition is provided here. There is much more material there but I believe it’s consistent with my definition above.
I also separate the cloud into two parts. There is that part of the cloud that provides my connection to a hosted application. It is composed of various routers, gateways and backbones but it basically my highway to the application. I’ll refer to that generically as the “pipe”. The other part is the hosting environment itself. It contains the application and data storage. I’ll refer to that environment generically as the “host”. This distinction will be important throughout the subsequent parts of this series.
My current plan for the series is:
Part I – Introduction and definitions (this part)
Part II – Cloud performance
Part III – Cloud security
Part IV – Cloud privacy (legal issues)
Part V – Conclusion
There is no shortage of material on cloud computing on the Internet and it’s not hard to find. Try not to get caught up in the hype. It’s easy to do. Remember, cloud computing in some form and by some name will be important to all of us in the future. It will be part of your business and IT strategic plan in the not too distant future. Stay tuned for more…
What is BITA Triage?
The purpose of this post is to try to articulate the reasons behind creating our new BITA Triage offering. It isn’t intended as an overt pitch for us but as an observation of the marketplace in general. First, we need to define the terms. Triage is a term used in the medical field to refer to the initial sorting out of patients based on need and available resources. A more complete definition can be found here. Next is BITA which stands for Business IT
Alignment. It struck me some time ago that many references to the notion of BITA had become somewhat negative about the concept, claiming it was ineffective or out of date. I disagree with that idea so I investigated where it came from.
To be clear, while I did a lot of reading of various materials, like Blog posts, articles and some books, I do not claim that my approach followed a rigorous methodology as used in statistically valid research projects. I do believe that my research was extensive enough to provide useful insight based on both anecdotal data and personal experience. After all, I intended to use it to make an informed business decision and investment. Some of the notable insight I gained was:
- Most opinions were based on comparing the formal theory of BITA frameworks to real life applications of those frameworks.
- The need of the author to attract readership by being somewhat controversial.
- Some authors are very passionate on the subject and are somewhat rigid in their definition of success.
- Several authors ignored or undervalued soft skills like relationships and communication.
From these observations and others I concluded that:
- Many perceived alignment problems stemmed from poor communications between key players in organizations.
- Our current offering, the SLR methodology, was too focused on quantitative analysis, like spreadsheets and simulations.
What was needed was an initial qualitative body of work which would quickly sort and prioritize the client’s needs and then rank them is some logical manner. From this I realized that the need I was describing was a form of Voice of the Customer (VOC) survey and analysis. A more complete definition is provided here. Essentially, the customers were the business process execution staff in a client’s organization. The product was the body of services offered by the IT organization which enables those business processes. From this it was obvious that the best approach would come from the quality and marketing worlds. The most appropriate tools are established practices like a VOC survey and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) analysis. Those would be combined with some methodology to assess the communication styles and coach the client’s key players on how to improve their communications effectiveness. The result was the BITA Triage offering. It is described here.
As I proof read this post I’m struck with the simplicity of the description of our approach contrasted with all the work to produce a competent offering. I think it was worth the effort and adds a valuable new dimension to our offerings. Only time will tell.
Thanks for your time and stay tuned for more…