StrAIT Blogging

Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

I was thinking on some of the issues raised in Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat” and what it means to the consulting world and the midsize business world. If you haven’t read this book a link to a summary is provided here. His book is actually divided into two general parts. The first part contains his observations on a globalized economy, social factors, technology and the development of several third world countries. The second part contains his social/political recommendations for the future. I think the first part is very useful. The second part, not so much (big government and big taxes aren’t my cup of tea). This post is directed at U.S. located companies. For those of you not located in the U.S., the logic is much the same.

My concern is the management of intellectual property and projects amid the proliferation of sources of skilled service labor, such as consultants, managers, engineers and software developers. For example, your company may need to develop a new product. If your company is a midsize manufacturing company, it may not have sufficient resources to execute all aspects of converting a good business idea into a mature, profitable production facility. Your company will probably look outside to various sources, both familiar and new, for help and advice. If you apply the observations from “The World is Flat” to all the companies involved with your project, the result can be a complex, interdependent web of knowledge and judgment sources.

Certainly companies deal with that situation today. However, the complexity of such arrangements will grow in the future. Now is the time to plan for how to handle that dilemma. I don’t presume to offer a solution in this short blog post. I can only try to frame the questions and offer some ideas. At least, I hope to get you thinking about this topic.

I need to define the types of service labor and regions that will be relevant to this discussion. First, I categorize service labor into three basic groups, shown in the table below. The table also includes some of the major attributes of each category. The key differentiation between each category is the tightness of the bond between the company and each group. That is determined by the level of involvement in core business processes. The “coreness” of a business process is defined by how integral it is to the value proposition of the company. “Direct” labor will always be direct employees of the company. “Close” labor may not be employees of the company but they will probably seem to be employees to an outside observer. “Packaged” employees will obviously not be employees of the company although their contributions will be considered very valuable. Other categories could also be defined for various levels of closeness to the company but these three will be sufficient to make my point.

There is also a need to define the notion of proximity. Direct labor will mainly be located at one of the company’s locations or a location sanctioned by the company, such as an employee’s home office. Close service labor may be located at the same locations as Direct labor or their employer’s locations. Packaged labor will typically be remote to the company’s locations but available when needed. This type of labor can be located anywhere in the world. Typically they will be located in one of the areas on the global map above colored in red (Note that the color red does not have a political significance, only an ease of visibility significance).

There are also some other terms of significance. You will also need definitions for “outsourcing“, “insourcing“, “offshoring” and “onshoring“. To save time and words, those definitions are provided by their corresponding links. All of these terms apply to the location and accessibility of service labor resources. For example, it is entirely reasonable to talk about outsourcing a business process to a domestic (onshoring) contractor. That service may require “Packaged” service labor requiring a well defined scope of work and contract.

Projects, such as the types discussed above, can require a traditionally managed approach or use a lean, timeboxed approach. For example, if using the lean approach, a timeboxed part of a larger project could be outsourced to an offshore provider of Packaged engineering resources. The customer must then provide a home for all of the intellectual property being generated as the deliverables. A well defined policy and content management system are essential requirements. Fortunately, various tools are already available to fill these needs and more are on the way.

In summary, every company needs to be developing policies and tools for managing the intellectual property produced from multiple, smaller and networked service providers. These providers of skilled service labor can be located almost anywhere in the world. They may be close at hand or at arm’s length. I want to strongly encourage readers from midsized companies to not view this as a problem only for large, multinational corporations. If not now, it will also be your problem in the near future. In future posts, I’ll drill down into these broad ideas and suggest some specific actions. Hopefully, I’ve raised the awareness of those of you who haven’t been thinking about these ideas before now.

Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I attended a meeting of the Greater Houston Partnership’s Technology Cluster Council committee today. It was held at the local Cisco offices. As part of that meeting we got briefings on various Cisco technologies. The subject that really got my attention was the demonstration of Cisco’s TelePresence. Just to be clear, I have no commercial or personal relationship with Cisco or any Cisco employees and will not receive any compensation for what I say. My opinions are strictly my own.

The reason that the TelePresence demo got me excited is that 1) I hate business travel and 2) it could be a major benefit to midsize companies, my primary market. For me, the glamour wore off of business travel long, long ago. Business travel is very important for doing most business and a vital part of building relationships but it’s hugely inefficient. My view is that today people need to meet face to face to build relationships but most other work can be done remotely with the right technology. I want to emphasize that it usually takes several meetings and one-on-one time over an extended period to build good working relationships, so I accept the need for such travel. I’m just saying that today technology offers us a way to minimize the marginal trips. I have had briefings on other video conferencing systems in the past from LifeSize and others but on slightly older technology.

We were taken into a room arranged very much like the images below.

We connected with a person at one of the Cisco offices in California. He then proceeded to run through the features of the system. What I noticed was the attention to details. As the person in California moved from one end of his table to the other, his voice tracked out of the corresponding speaker in our room so that his voice and image drew your eyes to the same place. The resolution was very high quality. We didn’t get into depth on the technical specifications but you can research that topic at the link provided above. If found that keeping the screens at table level made me feel more like the remote site was local. They said that they would have a real-time translation capability very soon (I got permission to say that!) which will be huge. You will be able to have a meeting with an international trading partner and be able to hear your native language and/or see subtitles in your native language. I hope the system will be able to produce a printed transcript of the meeting minutes but that didn’t come up and I forgot to ask.

My imagination got fired up when they mentioned using Wacom tablets with the system. I immediately thought of the model shown below.

I am a manufacturing engineer, IT guy (i.e., geek) and commercial photographer (alas, only part time). I am a very visual person. I visualized a group of people collaborating over a drawing or photograph. Now imagine one of these tablets in front of every chair in the conference room (I’m being creative, not practical). One person has control of the document being discussed. Others can annotate the location of their comments (like drawing a circle around an area of the document) so the editor can make changes. The image is displayed on a screen devoted to presentation materials like the projected white area which appears below the center of the table in the smaller conference room (bad idea) or the overhead screen shown in the larger conference room (good idea). When I asked about this the response is that it’s on their radar (my words) but it is a very hard problem. From that I’m assuming that they are sensitive about that being a good idea but made no commitments about where or if it is on their product roadmap. That’s a fair response since it is a very hard problem.

Now on to my next fantasy. This is a very expensive system. Well beyond the budgets of many midsize companies and all small companies. Let’s imagine Cisco seeding most major cites with conference centers containing several of these meeting rooms. Those conference centers take reservations from the public for video conferences. These systems are complex to build but we were told they are designed to be easy to manage, so the IT support resources should be minimal. To extend beyond the initial locations Cisco sets up a franchise-like operation which allows business partners to build additional centers in each area. Eventually, each urban hub has a collection of these conference centers. At that point, we may have to drive across town but that’s way better than driving to airports, flights, rental cars, hotels, etc.

If any Cisco people read this I hope some of my enthusiasm finds its way into product roadmaps and partner channel management plans. In any event, I appreciated the demo. If anyone has a similar fantasy please post a comment. That’s all for now.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

When I think about the various IT Service Management, or ITSM, frameworks (a collection of best practices) I am concerned that they are very heavy on a contractual mindset and very light on a relationship mindset. I am not saying that we don’t need service level agreements or any form of commitment from IT to their customers. I am saying that if a contract is all you have for a relationship with a customer that relationship is destined to become adversarial very quickly. I am saying that IT must have an informed consultant relationship with all of their customers. To do that a number of things must happen.

What are the roles?

The diagram above summarizes the major components of a successful collaborative relationship between IT and its customer base. First, we must be clear on our definitions. Customers are simply those people who consume IT services delivered over some IT infrastructure. IT simply refers to that group responsible for providing for the IT needs of their customers. The business domain skills pool is a little less simple. It is a group of domain experts, either dedicated to such a pool or contributors to that pool virtually. These people are also IT customers themselves. Of course, the IT group is also their own customer. The diagram shows each group overlapping with the others. That is intended to reflect the close working relationships which require sharing some common vocabulary and concepts.

Cross training

I believe this to be core to success. In order for communication and collaboration to happen, everyone involved must share at least some core vocabulary. There is always a challenge to get hard core IT folks to learn business topics, whether it’s manufacturing, service, or consulting skills. It’s also always a challenge to get hard core business folks to understand enough IT vocabulary to have informed conversations about new topics like cloud computing, virtualization or security. Neither of these groups needs to be experts in the other’s field. They just need to be able to have intelligent, informed conversations and collaborate.

Those customers not involved in the domain expert pool also need some education but at a much higher, more general level. They primary obligation is to be able to clearly articulate their needs to IT support staff. The domain experts also need a high level understanding of Web 2.0. They will also need to have a general understanding of Web 3.0 as it occurs.

BPI consulting

This brings us to the discussion about the basic behavior of IT staff as they collaborate with their customers. Those “front line” IT folks must earn the trust and respect of their customers. They must be good partners and team members as the business works to improve their business processes (BPI), using IT tools to their best advantage in a way that makes business sense. I have always liked the analogy of an artist. It is the responsibility of IT to understand a broad range of IT tools (the palette) but also how they can be applied to solve business problems (painting on a canvas). Not all IT people need to be able to do this but a few must have that level of understanding.

Conclusion

The preceding discussion is above and beyond the formal notions of IT operations required by the ITSM frameworks. My point is about relationships, not just contracts. We need IT to make and keep their performance commitments to their customers and to employ best practices where ever it makes sense. However, we should extend our vision of IT’s responsibilities beyond formal contractual and procedural constraints. At the end of the day, success ultimately comes through relationships between people.

Thanks to being here. Stay tuned…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites