Must read “Halo 3 Meets Second Life” by Baseline!

Yesterday I wrote a blog about the ability to understand cultures using virtual worlds. Today I am reading an article about a “video game platform is being used to prepare soldiers for much more genteel aspects of modern warfare.” This article called “Halo 3 Meets Second Life” appeared in Baseline magazine. “The goal is to make soldiers better thinkers and communicators under stress.” Think about this applied to your sales force. Could you use the same techniques improve relations with customers? I joined Toastmasters to have a safe environment to practice public speaking. I know the advantage of failing in front of a supportive group instead of failing where the damage can’t be undone. The concept is based on learning by doing. Halo 3 Meets Second Life follows the same concept. You learn by doing in a virtual environment. Expect to see more of this in the future.

Does open innovation need reinventing?

Does open innovation need reinventing?

 

I have been participating in several open innovation formats lately. It has been a learning experience, so I thought I would share what I have observed. First, in the market place of ideas you still have to sell. In the sites that allow other participants to comment and rank your solutions and ideas you have the tyranny of the masses. You think you have the greatest invention since that mousetrap only to find that no one is willing to back it. Later you find ideas that do not seem that good to you getting wide community support. It can be very damaging to ones ego if you take it personally. Many of these sites are setup to find the TOP dog or BEST solution. They depend on motivating people, which leads the level of participation that will make them work. Unfortunately, when you have many participants there can still only be one WINNER. Even if there are several useable solutions or ideas there still is only one WINNER.

It is this focus on winning that gets to me. In many industries there are successful companies that are not number one. In sports not everyone is the star player on the team. With idea management we focus on the number one solution. I see people who are consistently coming up with sound solutions and ideas over time. Unfortunately, their solutions are seldom ranked as the best solution by the masses. They consistently come in on the top ten solutions. Most of the motivation in these systems is to be the WINNER or to be the BEST. Over time the motivation to participate diminishes for these also rans. Some would say that is how it should be. We only want the best. But in life few problems have only one solution. What a group may perceive as the best may not work out to be the best. Identifying individuals who can consistently produce sound solutions may be as important to an organization as finding the person who can hit the home run. When I look at results on the sites that do ranking I see a consistent pattern.

• First you have the person who hits the home run and was the winner by providing a particular solution or idea. Many times the home run hitter was a one shot wonder. They had a great solution but you never see them getting a high ranking again.
• You have the extremely rare case of the person who consistently hit them out of the park. The come up with winning solution after winning solution. Like I said, these are rare and seem to be limited to recognized experts in their given field.
• You have the also rans who have sound solutions for different challenges or problems. These people are always posting solutions and their solutions make the top ten but never seem to make number one.
• Finally, there are the solutions that are ranked at the bottom of the heap. This is where the really bad or game changing solutions reside.

 

I have addressed what I see as wasted talent with the also rans. Over time they get tired of being an also ran and are no longer motivated to participate. Unless a reward structure can be created to provide incentives to this group they are likely to leave. It is these also rans who are one area of wasted talent. Think about it, you have a group who is consistently coming up with workable solutions. Should not this groups opinions of solutions count for something? If nothing else you want to cultivate this group and build it to harvest their insight and opinions on the WINNERS. You then develop two sets of measures in your evaluations, the tyranny of the masses and the voice of the consistent solvers. By keeping the consistent solvers in the game you have created a valuable resource while still having the potential of one of these people finally hitting a home run some time in the future.

 

The other area of talent waste may be even more important. It can be found in the solutions that sank to the bottom of the heap. Many times truly game changing innovations are rejected out of hand when they are first presented. Yet these are the ideas and solutions that provide the disruptive innovations that change whole industries. These are the solutions that require examining sacred cows and going beyond our current technology and business theory. Most make it to the bottom because there are few game changing ideas that are AH-HA moments. Ideas that when you see them everyone understands how great they are and are voted to the top as a WINNER. Normally disruptive innovations defy the current best practices because they will define the new best practices. It takes a special type of individual to examine the bottom of the heap. You have to have the skills to see the egg of a great idea from the mass of just plan bad ideas. Many times the egg is an idea in the very early stages of development. With some effort the person who put it forward may be able to hatch it out and give you a bird. An idea that is developed enough to survive on its own by being truly understood and appreciated.

 Well that is all the time I have today. Let me know what you think of this by leaving a comment. I always appreciate feedback.

Does IT really matter? Is that the right question?

Does IT really matter?

 

There has been a lot of debate over the importance of IT. Does it really matter? I think the real question should be, is the underlying business process being supported key to your organization. This leads to the second important question, who is responsible for this process. I have been in IT for a couple of decades now. In that time I have seen many manual processes automated. Many times these processes were turned into black blocks when they were automated. The users understanding of what was going on started and ended at the screen and keyboard. It was the IT wizard or programmer who really knew what was going on behind the curtain. The business rules were all contained in the programming logic.

This system worked well in those early days of IT. Then software companies started offering packages that could perform different business processes. Companies started buying solutions and depended on the software companies to have experts who would maintain these new black boxes. For example, I use Microsoft Word’s grammar checker. I depend on someone at Microsoft to understand English grammar and to keep up to date on proper use of grammar. When an organization buys a package it is doing the same thing. The organization needs to be able to depend on the software company who produces the package to have the subject matter experts who can truly understand the business processed the package is automating.

Now some companies see an advantage in buying a package and customizing it or creating their own software. They create it and put it in production and everything goes well once the bugs are gone and it is up and running. This is the point where they fail to understand that someone must be responsible for understanding what is going on inside the black box. Business is seldom a static environment. Change should be expected and the ability to handle change is required. This applies to the processes that are taking place inside the IT black boxes also. Someone has to be able to understand the processes taking place in the customized or custom programming logic. Unfortunately many in management do not seem to understand this. I have heard many times that “ you do not need to be able to do the employees job you need to be able to manage them”. These same managers take this approach to their IT assets. So long as they can find someone who can hack code in the language they were written in then they think they are managing these resources.

Well the managers who do not need to know the jobs of their employees has to depend on their employees knowing their jobs. Many times when they bring in someone new, training is on the job. Experienced employees who know how things are done being are given the responsibility of transferring knowledge to these new employees so they can perform their jobs. When tasks are automated this transfer of knowledge has to take place by someone truly understanding what is going on inside the black box or code. Unfortunately, for many organizations a high level of understanding was created in the creation of the asset. It tended to reside in documentation and people who worked on the project to create it. This asset then may be turned over to a support staff who may or may not have been involved in its’ creation. Over time changes take place and documentation tends to become outdated or no longer reflects the current system. People in the support staff come and go with knowledge being transferred based on many factors. Support costs money and developing a deep understanding of the processes one supports requires time. Since most of the support issues and minor updated will not require a deep understanding it is easy to believe that a adequate level of resources has been devoted to supporting this automated process. When in reality the process is under supported and the organization is really just depending on no major issues developing in the business processes being supported. The organization may be assuming risks it is not even aware of.

How do companies get into this state? In many organizations IT is seen as an expense. Since it is an expense the focus in on keeping expenses down and cost savings. This can lead to a focus on tangible Rio’s. I can buy X package for twenty thousand or I can buy Z package for five thousand and customize it for another five thousand. The tangible ROI on the Z package looks better so that the solution selected. Unfortunately what was not considered is that the company who supports X package can support your key business process with little customization. If they are a “Sound Company”, they will have employees who are subject matter experts on the processes the software is supporting. By buying their package you are depending on knowledge transfer through their employees. You depend on company X to maintain this deep level of understanding within their organization. They can afford to do this because they are in reality supporting this business process for many companies. This makes it profitable to maintain subject matter experts who have deep understanding of their packages and the business processes their packages are supporting. Purchasing package Z and customizing it means that someone in the organization will need to become the knowledge expert on the customized system.

As the company who produce Z makes upgrades this level of knowledge will be key to the continued functioning of the customized package.

 

The same thing can also happen with custom software developed in-house. I have spent the last decade of my life maintaining legacy systems. I have had contact with many IT people who are doing the same. There is a tendency in the business world today to keep IT costs down. One of the main costs that business focuses on is maintenance of legacy IT assets. It is now not uncommon for targets to be set for the amount of the IT budget that should be devoted to maintaining legacy systems. The theory generally is that resources not spent on supporting existing systems can be put into projects that will provide new ROI’s. These projects are then prioritized and managed under the eye of executive staff. Since these projects are now high profile they are also the avenues to advancement inside many organizations. If I work on a high profile project I can shine in the eyes of management and be on their minds when they are thinking about filling an opening they may have in the near future. While the guy who is making them money supporting their legacy systems never shows up on upper managements radar unless there is a problem impacting the business. This situation is not right or wrong; it is just how things are. It also explains why IT workers become outdated in their skills. The company needs legacy systems supported in order to keep making money. If an employee obtains new skills and move away from supporting legacy systems then the organization will have to find another resource to support the legacy system. It is many times easier to just bring in new employees with skills required for a new project then to train existing staff and have to replace them. This pattern is sometimes broken is when the legacy systems themselves are replaced. In which case there are sometimes efforts made to retrain IT workers on the new systems.

The net result for organizations is that there tends to be a lack of knowledge transfer when new technology enters the door in the form of a new IT projects. It is the rare organization that sees the value in cross training experienced IT employees into new technology. It is even rarer to see an organization develop a system of business knowledge transfer that allows a continual cycling of IT workers while maintaining depth of knowledge in the KEY business processes IT is supporting. Such a system requires truly understanding black boxes within IT and managing knowledge transfer as part of the organizations HR effort.

 

So does IT really matter? I think the question should be do your business processes matter. If so then you have to ask yourself who and how are these business processes, buried inside software, being managed and by whom. If they are truly critical to the functioning of you organization you really should be able to answer this. For they are either being managed by you, or you have placed their management in package suppliers hands, or you are assuming unknown risks because they are not really being managed.

As I watch my fellow baby boomer begin retiring it is an issue that will have important implications for many businesses.

Are you a competent follower?

It has been a while since I have had time to post anything. I have been doing some research into best practises. So I though I would share with you something I have observed over a couple of decades.

 

The first best practices were linked to perceived cause and effect. Holy men developed rituals for harvest based on the positions of the stars and sun. The positions were consistent with times of year that were ideal for planting the first crops. Other practices such as a rain dance also developed based on a perceived cause and effect relationship.

These best practices both real and perceived gained critical mass as they spread from one group of humans to another. In time they became generally accepted as sacred cows that were fact and could not be challenged. To challenge them was to challenge the holy men and the very Gods themselves.

Well, it’s 2008 and things really have not chanced much. In the world of business we have best practices. These are generally practices that are linked to a real or perceived cause and effect. It is a hypothesis to state that such and such is the best practice. This is because there are always a number of variables that are linked to one of several choices being “The best practice”. Unfortunately, this is forgotten and best practices evolve into “sacred cows”. They are not longer a hypothesis that must constantly prove itself. They are unalterable truths that must not be challenged.

When it comes to best practices there should be no sacred cows in business, there is “what is working” and “what isn’t working” at any given point in time. To forget this is to invite extinction. Change is a constant and businesses must adapt to changes in their environment if they wish to continue in business. The best practices a business is using must prove themselves by proving the best solutions every day. The day they no longer prove the best solution then other practices should be considered as candidates for best practice.

There will always be industry leader breaking new ground. Some will be establish while others will be start-ups. These leaders will put in place business practices that will give them an advantage over what is the current best practice today. When this event happens a point will be reached where the competent followers will recognize that a game-changing event has happened and they must adapt to this change. Failure to understand this need many times comes from best practices that have become sacred cows. Competent followers have no sacred cows. They are filling to face reality and abandon what is not working for what is working.

Since most companies will never be the industry leader in all areas of their business, the ability to become a competent follower is critical. This means that there can be no sacred cows when it comes to best practices. Each best practice must be able to standup to examination. Management must be willing to look beyond what they currently are comfortable with and be willing to adapt when faces with facts that current best practice may no longer be working. The problem is many companies become successful by doing things a certain way. When that way not longer works they are not willing to change. If we just stick with this best practice it will work out.

The other side of being a competent follower knows when a best practice is based on cause and effect or perceived cause and effect. Is the best practice really responsible for the results that people are claiming it is responsible for? Sometimes best practices take on a cult following. The right people get behind an idea and the idea reaches critical mass and spreads like wild fire. If you have been in business for any length of time then you have seen these fades come and go. Well a competent follower is willing to treat a best practice as just a hypothesis that is only valid until someone disproves it. They are willing to view it in the context of their unique business. If it is tested and fails they do not blame the test or question the results, they are willing to question the hypothesis itself. If it does not work for their situation then they are willing to accept that and look for alternatives.

So is you company a competent follower? The answer may determine if you are around in a decade or so.