Category Archives: business

ESPN Beats RIAA in Learning to Dance

Posted by on October 10, 2012 No comments

This goes back to something I wrote in about years ago in this post titled; Learn to dance.

For a brief recap: I argued that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had dropped the ball when it came to the digitization and distribution of music. Worried about losing their cash cow, those little silver CD distribution mechanisms. The RIAA attempted to keep digital music (a.k.a. MP3s) locked up until they could design an end to end security and distribution mechanism.

I based my argument on one fact; that in business – we can’t stand still. We can’t wait for perfection, or what I called the long jump – hope all the stars line up and make the huge leap. Of course, this leap failed, Napster proved that. And fast forwarding ahead a few years, the RIAA has even lost leadership in its own industry as Apple’s iTunes is the dominant music distribution method.

In that case I argued that a long jump of attempting to reach perfection was a flawed strategy, that a preferable strategy, really the only strategy, is to take a small step, pause, pivot, step again, pause, review, and then step again. Sounds similar to a graceful waltz doesn’t it?

Let’s compare that RIAA post with a quote taken from the September 3 print issue of BusinessWeek titled; How ESPN Ate Sports. In that article, and writing about the advances in mobility that ESPN is pursuing, the author wrote;

“… in other words, ESPN has invested in creating content for platform before business exists to support it.”

And then later on in the same article;

“…we weren’t afraid of cannibalizing our television business if the fans liked it even though the ad serving technology just isn’t ready yet.

Reflect on that for a moment. Even though the ad serving technology just isn’t ready yet. Taking the small steps, pausing, and reflecting on the possibilities.

Small steps, pause, adapt. Just like a dance.

Image Credit Wikipedia

 

IT Doesn’t Matter: 2012

Posted by on October 2, 2012 No comments

Just about 10 years ago, Nicholas Carr wrote his seminal HBR article IT Doesn’t Matter, later followed up by the book that changed that phrase to a question: Does IT Matter?

And yes, as I’ve mentioned before, I have always agreed with Mr. Carr, and written that several times (here, here, and here).

To quote myself from one of those;

…if an assembly line is a table stakes commodity, the assembly line manufacturing process should have no differentiation on the quality or success of the automobile’s production in the market place. Product differentiation in the market place would have to be through other methods, such as marketing, design or other non assembly related methods.

Now here I am, reading The Long Conversation* about maximizing business value from IT and Enterprise Systems;

..the third effect is a new basis for competition in industries. As ES are becoming a common technology to every company in some industries (e.g. energy, automotive, and high-tech), the basis for competition in these industries may change dramatically.

To me?

They could have left out the ’may’ change dramatically. And it is not just those three industries either.

* The Long Conversation Maximizing Business Value fro Information Technology Investment

Oswaldo Lorenzo, Peter Kawalek, Gasto Gonzalez &  Boumediene Ramdani

2011 Palgrave-macmillan ISBN 978-0-230-29788-3

When Software Licensing Forces Your Decisions

Posted by on September 27, 2012 No comments

I’ve got a story here that leaves me a little bit frustrated.

First? A little background: We are currently in the process of replacing an ageing accounting system with a newer, more modern system. (Our current system is older than my son, and he is 17)

Like most enterprise tools, this new system has a multitude, and variety, of different user licensing options. Certain levels of license give full access to the tool, other levels of license allow a device to access it, and other levels of license just allow fringe access to particular pieces.

And as you may have guessed, the more access a particular individual requires to the tool, the more expensive that license is. And that is where my frustration comes in.

For every one of our processes and requirements, we have to determine whether the task can be done as economically as possible regarding those licenses. For example, if we allow a road warrior to input his expense claim; does that mean he needs the full-boat license that costs as much as a small car? Because if it does, the hell with it, we will have to change our processes and have that expense claim submitted some other way.

This tool is an accounting package- and as such? Yes, we pay the full boat license price for the accounting team and the people need to do the deep dive into the software. But having to review each and everything we are trying to do with an eye to seeing if it escalates the price of the license required is very frustrating.

As a small to medium business, it severely changes the language of the business case to add hundreds of thousands of dollars in license costs, simply to enable somebody to submit an expense claim or other minor piece of work.

The small to medium business take away

Enterprise class software can be expensive. And having to fight through these licensing battles makes it just more so.

Have you experienced this? Let me know!

 

BYOD, Consumer IT, Asia is Winning

Posted by on September 24, 2012 No comments

We can call it bring your own device, (BYOD) or the  consumerization of IT, (CoIT) and pundits can debate the semantic differences between the two.

The days of your employer providing you with its company supplied Blackberry, really, really, seem to be over. The iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy S, all of these devices are accessing our networks, are accessing e-mail, and in some cases there they are even replacing computers. And often, you won’t own them – your employees will.

Here’s the thing. When it comes to devices accessing your network, at the most  basic level, there are two primary risks involved. One risk is simply a technical risk. Technical risk is the technical issues which include security of the device and the data that may be on it.

Here is the second risk, let’s call this risk management risk. Management risk is not the security of the device, it is not the ability to remotely wipe the device if an employee leaves, it is not ensuring that corporate policies are maintained.

Management risks can be defined as a risk that can affect the company’s business, brand, or continuing operations.

For example, your star sales representative is using his or her personally owned iPhone for business. Okay, let’s assume the worst, that he or she has left your employ for a competitor. And as for your your largest client?

Well, they probably have his or her cellular number on speed dial, so who is your client going to reach when they call that cellular number? Hint it won’t be you!

And to me, this management risk is the far more serious risk than the technical risk.

And this is where Asia is winning!

Let me back up a moment, most of us have seen them, the “brains” or intelligence of these devices is located on the tiny little subscriber identity module, or ‘SIM’ card that we slide into the phone or tablet.

To me it seems obvious: Since this little card, which is basically just a microcomputer chip, is the key to the phone- why would it not be standard that a phone could be purchased that had two of these little SIM slots available? In other words,  I could bring my personal phone to work as a new employee, and then be handed a corporate SIM card that contains the corporate phone number. And when I leave? The employer takes back the corporate owned SIM card.

Problem solved! One, single phone. But two separate numbers, two separate security policies and arrangements.

And here’s the rub, I was talking with a senior executive with an Asian background who let me know that in many places in Asia, having two SIM cards in a phone is a common occurrence. It is already available. It is already there!

Why can’t we get that capability here?

As I mentioned, the technical risks involving data obtained or manipulated through phones and tablets is becoming more and more reduced, this ability to have two SIM cards in one phone would greatly reduce that management risk as well.

So here is a call to the Chief Information Officers at our large corporations, push our North American vendors to match what is already happening in Asia

ITIL – Without the ‘Word’

Posted by on September 18, 2012 2 comments

I’ve written about ITIL quite a bit on this blog, and in fact I am using ITI L in an IT service management form in this new role of mine, but here’s a little secret; I don’t think I’ve used the word more than a dozen times.

OK, OK, ITIL  is an anagram, for IT Infrastructure Library, not a word. (yes, I know!)

Here’s the thing, our organization already has a strong engineering and project management framework in various processes and disciplines. So let me ask you a question? Does it make sense for me to try to teach a new language, a new discipline or a new protocol, or just continue to use the words and language that we are already using?

Language, and words are powerful devices. And for us the language and the words already exist.

As a business we have a strong understanding of lessons learned, a strong understanding of risk reduction and mitigation, and we already have ISO 9000 certified processes.

Perhaps as we make our first steps away from the little baby steps that we are currently doing I may change my mind about the terminology, the words, the semantics, but for now?

ITIL is predicated on learning problems from incidents that occur, so what is the difference if I ask what lesson did we learn from that incident?

For me?

I’ll stick with the words, the terms, and the language that we, as a business, already know.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

When You Are the Expert, Speak Up!

Posted by on September 13, 2012 No comments

In the small farm community where I grew up, it was said that grizzled old farmers could predict the weather better than any professional forecast could. And as a family, we have all, (to smaller or larger extent) been boating enthusiasts, spending countless hours on the water in vessels of all sizes.

Those life experiences have left us all with a fairly good “weather eye”. Not as good as those grizzled farmers perhaps, but a quick view of sky and cloud formations can tell members of our family if nasty weather is on the horizon.

In one sense, the following story has some humour, however it also has risk and can illustrate the point I state in the title. (and I can think of at least a couple of situations where I should have followed that advice myself)

A family member was in a small boat on bigger water (meaning a relatively large body of water) with five others who were not familiar with being on ‘water’ or familiar with boating. After a leisurely few hours travel, they had travelled about 20 kilometres (about 12 miles) and docked at a waterside town for sight seeing and lunch.

This family member then noticed that the horizon was beginning to darken. He started to suggest that they start to head back towards home. The rest of the people were enjoying shopping and sight seeing and put off the recommendation.

A few minutes later he noticed the darkening cloud had become a cumulo nimbus wall of cloud that appeared to be soaring several thousand feet up. You can imagine him saying: “Umm folks, we should get moving….” Again the response: “just a minute, this shop looks nice…”

Minutes later that wall of cloud had soared higher – he estimates 18 thousand feet or higher. I can imagine his voice getting a little more strident in warning: “umm people, there will be a storm!!!”

Finally he does get the five into the boat and heads full throttle back that 20 Km towards home. He estimates that they were about three quarters of the way back, when the first drops of rain overtook them. Then the rain turned into a deluge that was dropping stinging marble sized drops of water. Passengers huddled under the bow trying to avoid the stinging, pelting streams of water.Then the wind hit, instantly driving spray and green water over the bulwarks, leaving the bilge bump to fight the load and soaking everything. And finally – as home was in site and trying to get into the slip – the lightning hit.

If you are familiar with the water, then you can imagine the challenge of docking a boat when there is only one person that can handle the boat or a line, when high winds, deluging rain and flashes of lightning rent the sky.

Our lesson?

In our business we can talk about inclusion, we can talk about building consensus. But sometimes, when you are the expert, and risk shows its ugly head – you need to yell your expertise to the sky. Yell it passionately!

As a note, my family member in retrospect thought that when he realized the risk was getting larger, he probably should have argued that they just stay in that waterside town until the storm blew over.

Either option would have worked, in hind-sight.

 

Real SMB IT: VoIP

Posted by on July 13, 2012 No comments

Voice over Internet Protocol – Most commonly shortened to VoIP. As a small to medium enterprise, are you using Voice over IP? Or have you had frustrating issues and trouble with a VoIP system?

Voice over IP is simply digitizing telecommunications data and allowing us to communicate using the same Internet technologies that permit us to visit web sites or send email.

While there are many benefits to using VoIP, there is also one large caveat.

That caveat is that VoIP requires a more stable and reliable Internet network connection than simple email does to operate properly.

To give an example, if you access a web page, you may not even notice if there is a small delay as a picture or small piece content shows up a little bit slower than other pieces of the site. In fact, the Internet communications ‘Language’ or ‘Protocols’ assumed that there would be delays or missing information and are designed to correct them automatically.

While a web browser may not care if a small piece of data is delayed. Well, VoIP cares very much about those delays. These little delays have interesting names such as jitter and latency – but they all mean something is slowing down!

Each delay caused by jitter or latency may be small, but cumulatively those delays can effectively destroy a VoIP communications call. This is simply because our spoken words do not take well to delays. (Have you ever tried listening to a radio station that is just beyond the range of your radio receiver?)

And here is when it can be tough identifying issues with VoIP, what makes it more difficult is that these delays we are talking about are not just delays in your own office, but delays in every device that exists between the telephone we hold in our hands, to the recipient of the phone call.

One of our teams experienced this problem first hand. VoIP performance from their hosted provider was very poor. The VoIP system was a constant source of frustration. Fortunately, their VoIP provider had the ability to supply us with some monitoring data that identified this issue for us.

If you look at the picture below, each of the small green blocks you see shows shows network delays, each small bump of green would cause an issue with a VoIP call, and the locations where the green blocks look like hills would have left the VoIP system pretty much unusable. (click on the image to enlarge it)

Here is the key piece though, if you look at the ‘Last 30 Hours’ frame in the picture – you will see that these delays continue to occur in the middle of the night when no staff members were in the office! This frame demonstrates that it is not only the devices we can control – but devices outside of our direct control that can affect successful implementation of a VoIP system.

In summary, Voice over IP systems can be a fantastic business tool, however care must be taken to ensure that the network connectivity supporting the system is as stable as possible.

Jitter and Latency

Order Taker or Solution Maker

Posted by on July 4, 2012 2 comments

A good read by by Eric Brown titled; Are you building an “order taker” or “solution maker” environment?. Now, Eric writes for IT Professionals, however for any executive or general manager in the small to medium business space, I urge you to read it as well. (And I would like to add one more thing to Mr. Brown’s post!)

The IT teams in most SME’s are Order Takers. They may not know it, and they may not really think about it, but orders come from executives or committees that provide marching orders for some new server or tool. IT just chips in and gets it done. (usually quite well too)

We can consider a spectrum, with Order Taker one one side – and primarily being in a reactive posture, then moving to the Solution Maker on the other side of the spectrum which we can be consider as being in a proactive posture. But allow me to be quite blunt, moving an IT team from Order Taker to Solution Maker is not a linear event.

Moving to the Solution Maker side of the spectrum requires organizational maturity levels that are orders of magnitude higher, perhaps even logarithmically higher than the organizational maturity required at the Order Taker side of the spectrum.

And I would argue that the first step for moving across that spectrum is for IT to have a true plan, and then be able to provide feedback and options when these Order Taker initiatives arise. Without a formal plan, you never will get beyond the Order Taker side of the spectrum.

Let me ask you a few questions, the last time you decided to purchase a large ‘IT system’ such as Service Management, Financial Management, that good ‘ole boy ‘ERP’ system, or any larger technology tool, did you….

1) Have someone draft a requirements plan?

2) Have all business units add their ‘must have’ bits and pieces that they are adamant they need?

3) Then nod sagely when a vendor describes the mysteries of a ‘gap analysis’ and listen to them solemnly state that they certainly can do all of that for you?

Oh yes, one last little question; Did your IT Team ever give you a bit of feedback (positive or negative), push back, or any other method of raising caution signs?

Here is an example that you, dear Sir or Madam have probably done yourself……

You decided to renovate one of the rooms of your home, came up with an idea or two, added in a rough budget limit…..

Ahhhh! then the real shopping begins, and upgrade after upgrade leaves that initial budget and plan  blowing in the wind….

Yes! that project that started as ‘reface the cabinetry and replace the sink’ ended up with granite counter tops, tile flooring, new cabinetry and the latest high end appliances…..

Providing feedback and even some argument that you are deviating from plan may not be critical with kitchen appliances, but it can be costly in IT.

The first improvement in your IT level of organizational maturity?

Is to get your IT team clearly articulating that those business unit ‘wish lists’ are going to cost money – lots of money, specifically if they are wandering off of your plan. As one example, when one Vice President was advised that a tiny part of one wishlist alone was six figure dollar amounts to implement:  “No damned way I’m spending that …” was the response.

Moving across the spectrum from order taker to solution maker is hard work, but to start, you need a plan, and you need your IT Teams to able to demonstrate when, and even argue, if you are beginning to deviate from that plan.

On Stories

Posted by on May 31, 2012 No comments

First? I have to let you know that this post was written the old fashioned way; using pen and paper!

It was also written at 36 thousand feet with 1413 miles of 1780 left in flight number one of a five day, 5 city (plus 9 flights) road trip. For all of you uber travellers, yes I have a laptop with with me, but in the cheek by jowl, fully loaded cattle class confines of an Embraer 190, well, it means I really, really don’t want to try digging it out of the 18 cramped inches of foot space.

Just before I left for this whirlwind trip, the image you see below was re-circulating around the interwebs. (it seems to circle around every year or so – which is another story…)

You can click the image to see it full size, if you don’t want to; it pokes fun at our business technology and IT. (justifiably so) You wanted a tire swing on rope on that huge tree in the yard, the picture then pokes fun at what the analysts, architects and the like translate that simple swing into.

Start with a story!

In our business technology – there are bundles of binders, reams of paper, and untold numbers of words compiled into documents we call requirements, or standard operations procedures. (and that is only two examples)

And I cannot even begin to number the cases I have seen where the minutia of these documents led to confusion, frustration and failure as different interpretations of the same minutia from the same meeting expand and balloon into paralysing chaos……

It does not need to be this way.

Step number one: What is the story? Not a long, drawn out spiel, but a story! in the below image that simple story would be: “I want a good ‘ole fashioned tire swing on that there Oak in the yard…”

A simple story of why. A simple story of the end result. When teams are stuck arguing about the minutia in the thousand pages of requirements, the story can bring bring reality back into view.

Do I walk up to my CEO and ask him to tell me a story? Sure you may chuckle – but I don’t usually do that. (Although I have in some cases)

But I can ask questions;

“In a perfect world where what you want will appear tomorrow, what would that look like….”

“What is the ultimate business goal you see after this initiative….”

Many of us have heard the terms looking through different lenses, or re-framing the the conversation. I can tell you that nothing helps change those lenses or re-frame that conversation as quickly as a story. To give an example, I was talking with the president of a SME a while ago that was lamenting the trouble he was having considering ‘ERP’ (Enterprise Resource Planning) software to help him grow his business to the next level. After just a minute or so of casual talk about his ‘story’, I personally don’t think ‘ERP’ software will do him any good. He fixes and repairs (services) incredibly complex machinery. To re-frame the conversation; in my opinion, what he should be looking at is a good service management application that can track parts inventory, serial numbers, etc. Not a generic ERP system.

As management expert and author Tom Peters has written, a story is more ‘engaging’ and that includes;

“..a question that as readily applies to a revised business process”

I have to agree with that…..

Swing

‘Free’ Can be a Good Idea

Posted by on May 28, 2012 1 comment

Living in the ‘snow belt’ temperate climate of Canada, there is a spring ritual I have to perform. While this ritual does not require the chanting and ritual sacrifice required during early historic turns of the equinox, it still takes a little magic and a few potions, with each potion balanced ‘just so….’

That is to say, each spring I have to reverse the work I did last fall, namely getting our swimming pool back into operation after its winter hibernation of thick coverings and the disembowelment of all parts which are then tucked safely away from the frigid winter elements.

(living in a heavily forested area just adds to the joi-de vivre of this ritual, yes the picture below sums it up with more eloquence than I can)

After a long winters hibernation, our northern swimming pools want to be pampered with just the right amount and the right balance of the ingredients that magically turn water stained green or black into that familiar swimming pool blue.

The thick winter coverings are removed? Check..

The previously disembowelled parts are restored to their rightful place? Check..

The first doses of the spring potions have been added? Check..

After the initial ritual of opening of the pool, the little test strips you buy usually do perfectly well in advising you of the pools state -

Ahhh, but the opening ceremony usually needs a little more tender loving care than those quick test strips can provide.

So for this part of the ritual I fill a small bottle with water from the pool and go to my local pool supply store. In this case, I showed up about 15 minutes before they opened, and like devotees queueing for the latest device from Apple (AAPL) , there was already a line up of others performing the same ritual that I was.

The reason we were lined up like iPhone fans waiting for the latest gadget? This pool supply store has a computer test system that performs for the pool opening ritual the same thing we see in all the crime shows on TV, a few squirts of water into various tubes and and the computer screen lights up with not only the required potion, but the amounts (down to two decimal places – which was 4.06 Kilograms of Alkalinity boosting potions in my case)

Which segues into my topic

With this line of people performing this spring ritual?

The price I paid for them to tell me which potions I needed?

Zero, nada, zilch, nothing…….

In my admittedly completely unscientific visual survey, I saw one or two people take away the information from the computer and just leave the store. But the rest of us?

Yes, buckets, cannisters, bottles or tubs of the potions needed to get our pools to a sparkling blue.

You can call it a ‘loss leader’ if you like. But the amount of product I saw going through the check-out line just says good business to me.

Your thoughts?

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