StrAIT Blogging

Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

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…

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…

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.

 

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…

Let’s start by being very clear. For any business everything must ultimately align to the success of that business, period. That being said we can now focus on how all of the various pieces that make up that business must align with each other. At a high level, it is obvious that all business activities must support each other for the business to be successful. However, what I have observed over the years is that alignment is easy to get lost in the multitude of daily pressing details that we must deal with. This thought was best captured in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In this book there is one diagram that has stuck with me over the years because it is direct and simple. It is shown in Figure 1.

 

 

  

  

 

 

  

  

Figure 1 Covey’s time management matrix
 

For more information on Covey’s teachings look here. In this diagram we see Quadrant I as the place where most of us spend much of our time. Quadrant II is where we need to spend most of our time. We need to manage our time such that we can spend more of it thinking about planning, relationships and collaboration. Spending our time here is where alignment happens. We won’t spend any time on Quadrants III and IV. We are wasting our time there.
So what else do we need to consider when aligning our business operations? I argue that we must first understand that all things technology can best be represented as a circle bisected into two parts. One part includes the tools; the hardware and software that enable our business to function. The other part includes how those tools are used to deliver real benefits to our business. Each of those parts is dominated by very different states of mind. Historically, IT has focused on tools and the business users focus on their application. There is overlap for each group as shown in Figure 2.

  

  

 

  

 

  

  

 

Figure 2   All things technology and interest groups

The overlap between the interests of those two groups is important. The end user group must understand the tools well enough to know what can actually be accomplished in a reasonable period of time and the IT group must understand the needs of the user group well enough to deliver useful tools. Orchestrating the communication between these two interest groups is an ongoing activity between end customers of the tools and those people who must deliver those tools to the marketplace. It is a painful and inefficient process constrained by the financial interests and negotiating positions of each group. It’s beneficial to each group to make this process more effective.
We must also consider the methodologies that are needed for the alignment of business improvement work. For this we will focus on two of the most representative methodologies for their respective interest groups. For the tool provider group we will use RUP, or Rational Unified Process, as the most used (in its multiple variations) and for the end user community the BPM-based methodologies. The overlap diagram is shown in Figure 3.

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

  

Figure 3   All things technology and improvement methodology overlap
 

The key difference here is that BPM is about addressing what business processes are needed and the functionality of the tools each business needs. On the other hand, RUP is focused on the effectiveness of software development. Delivering business process improvements will consist of new capabilities delivered by some combination of revising the current tools used by the business, buying new software and writing new software. Neither BPM nor RUP alone is suitable for doing that, so managing the overlap between those two families of methodologies is crucial.
 

Finally, there is the overlap between those groups responsible for the day-to-day operation of the tools and those responsible for their daily application. That overlap is shown in Figure 4.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

Figure 4 All things technology and daily operations
 

The group responsible for the delivery of those technology tools to the business, either internal IT or external, hosted providers is represented by the ITIL, or IT Infrastructure Library, framework. The group responsible for the daily use of those tools is represented by the various continuous improvement frameworks, such as Six Sigma. Each of these groups needs some framework around which to manage daily operation and incremental improvements. Again, managing the overlap of these two interest groups and their frameworks is extremely important.

In each of the cases above, managing the overlap of the various interest groups is a matter of ongoing communication. That communication must happen within an oversight group composed of representatives of each of the interest groups with shared vocabulary and skills inventory. None of the groups need to be experts in the other’s fields but they must commit to understanding the basic needs and issues. This can be a challenge in most organizations but it is vital if the business wants to improve.

Alignment is important and complex. It requires a commitment from a business’s leadership to insure ongoing communications between the core groups within the company. It requires a commitment to include vendors, external service providers and other external stake holders in that collaboration in a meaningful way. So how do you do that? The options are growing every day. There are portal frameworks, like SharePoint and WebSphere. There are peer-to-peer tools, like Groove and Notes. There are Web 2.0 tools, like Huddle and Zoho. The list goes on. Regardless of what tools you use, the ongoing collaboration between the consumers of technology tools and the providers of those tools, both in improvement activities and ongoing daily operations is vital.

Thanks for your attention. Stay tuned…