(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10)
Loading ...10 changes Steve Ballmer should make at Microsoft
When I appeared on CBC Newsworld last week to talk about Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft, they asked me whether I thought the company can survive without him. I tried not to roll my eyes.
“I realize there’s a temptation to identify with the founder of a company,” I said, “but he’s put a good succession plan in place. Ford Motor Co. managed to survive without Henry Ford, and I think Microsoft will survive without Bill Gates.”
I barely mentioned Steve Ballmer, because I wasn’t sure how well he would be recognized by a mainstream audience. Although he’s a familiar face within corporate IT departments, I’d argue he’s still not a household name. Here are a few of the things he needs to do next, whether he ever becomes one or not.
1. Make user education a corporate mission. We all know there are more features in Word, Excel and Windows itself that customers simply do not understand. As a result, they spend too much time and energy working around problems Microsoft’s products already solve. Ballmer should invest some marketing dollars in a “Did You Know That Windows Can . . .” campaign that highlights the work Microsoft’s developers have done.
2. Don’t leave the technical vision to Ray Ozzie. The former Groove Networks leader is capable of great insight into technology trends and writing extremely long staff memos, but it should be Ballmer who most clearly articulates the kind of computing environments Microsoft wants to help customers build in the next decade. The last thing he should want is to be seen as merely the sales guy. As Steve Jobs proves, you don’t have to write code to offer some inspiring thoughts on the management of information. Even Gates left too much of the heavy lifting to his subordinates during keynotes. Ballmer should try to change that.
3. Open yourself up as a case study. It can’t be easy running one of the world’s largest companies, so Ballmer should be able to provide CIOs and IT managers a unique perspective on how Microsoft uses technology to align itself with business objectives. He should talk about Microsoft walks the walk.
4. Don’t bash the competition. Microsoft is still dominant in nearly every market, so it makes no sense for Ballmer to bash Google, Apple or other rivals as he has in the past. Microsoft should be more focused on improving its products and growing its business, not swatting at what, in a market share sense, are still flies. There’s no need for the Scott McNealy approach here.
5. Start an open source project. Microsoft has stuck to the same business model for years, but what if its dream team of developers actually reached out to independent ISVs and offered them the same kind of ability to tweak future products as Mozilla does with Firefox, or the way Linux evolves? The company doesn’t even need to release the result as a commercial product (call it “Office Sandbox,” for example) but it would help the company start the kind of positive grassroots following it needs. The whole “shared source” strategy has only gone so far. And although it has released thousands of documentation around Windows and Office already, it needs to communicate something about the difference that’s made to the industry.
6. Engineer a smooth transition to Windows 7. After the Vista debacle (and by extension the XP fiasco), it’s hard to imagine things getting much worse, but demonstrate a willingness to let customers upgrade at their own pace. If companies like SAP are able to offer feature packages to customers rather than demand an ERP overall, Microsoft should be able to do the same thing with its operating system.
7. Partner where it counts. Microsoft’s agreement with Novell was supposed to usher in a new era of interoperability. That may have happened for Suse Linux customers (although there’s not a lot of proof yet), but what about more popular distributions like Red Hat? They’ve held out so far, but Ballmer should be working hard to change their minds.
8. Iron out your acquisition approach. Too much attention has been focused on the buyout of Yahoo and not enough on what Microsoft is doing with the firms it actually managed to purchase. This includes Fast Search and Transfer. We should be seeing the beginnings of a new enterprise search strategy from Microsoft by now. Where is it?
9. Get friendly with the social networking crowd. So what if Microsoft invested in Facebook? Microsoft should be developing for Facebook, just like all the other ISVs that want some exposure to an often technically savvy audience. Imagine if Microsoft created something that make social networking easier, safer or easier to integrate with its applications. That would change a lot of people’s perceptions about its laggard approach to the Internet.
10. Don’t give up on spam. Bill Gates predicted the world would be free of the unsolicited e-mail scourge by 2006. Microsoft had the talent to deliver, and still has. Ballmer would make a considerable mark at Microsoft, and within the IT industry in general, if he could marshal he resources to make good on his predecessor’s promise.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Bill Gates’ last day (revisited)
This clip was widely shown earlier this year at Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ speech at the Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas, but I think with this being his official final bow it’s appropriate to revisit it. If you want more up-to-date footage than this, check out CBC Newsworld today around 2:30 EST where I’ll be discussing the big guy’s legacy and the company he leaves behind.
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...LinkedIn guilt: The new social networking disease
“LinkedIn,” the CIO said. “That thing drives me nuts.”
I was in a meeting today with one of our editorial advisory boards when the above statement was made. These are not really public discussions, so I won’t mention names, but suffice it to say this is a really likeable guy who’s running a major technology operation for a well-known Canadian company. We were talking about the whole social networking thing, and whether he was really a part of it.
“I get these invites (to LinkedIn) from someone I worked with more than 10 years ago,” he went on. “I barely remember their name. And then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you worked at . . .” Suffice it to say he probably didn’t accept the invitation.
Another senior manager I know recently told me LinkedIn has become less of a way to keep in touch than an ongoing chore. “I constantly have CIOs and people like that asking me to ‘recommend’ them,” she said, referring to a feature on the site that allows you to become an online (and alarmingly permanent) reference of sorts. “They all want to get consulting jobs, so I’m spending all my time trying to think of these nice things to say.”
First came Facebook fatigue. Now we have LinkedIn guilt.
The whole thing reminds me of an episode from season two of The Office (U.S. version) where narcissistic boss Michael Scott eventually wearies of the toady who keeps trying to make his way into Scott’s good graces. By the time the episode ends, he offers a reflection to the camera: “I don’t like people who suck up to me just because I might be able to help them in their career,” he muses. “I want people to suck up to me because they like me.”
Maybe IT industry folk are more likely to lay on the LinkedIn guilt because they have a hard time being liked by their coworkers in the first place. If they’ve been so inundated with other projects that they couldn’t reset someone’s password or had to install an employee monitoring tool, it might be that much harder to get that LinkedIn recommendation. Or maybe, given their reputation for poor soft skills, technology professionals prefer to hide behind LinkedIn rather than asking in-person for a reference or recommendation.
Much as Wikipedia had to experience some growing pains around accuracy, LinkedIn’s recommendations feature will probably face skepticism over its sincerity. Not that I would ever hire or not hire someone based solely on their LinkedIn profile, but as a way of measuring those intangible qualities of a job candidate (especially one whose skills and role you only partially understand), nothing beats the power of peer testimonials.
Perhaps IT managers and consultants using LinkedIn should approach their profile the same way they would scale a physical network: slowly, based on what’s appropriate, and never without considering the drain it might put on other resources. In this case, those resources include the time and patience of those whose loyalty you might really need one day. Now who’s feeling the guilt?
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Google shouldn’t corner the market as an agent of organization
We all know what Google does. So why don’t more users understand what IT departments are supposed to do?
If nothing else, the search engine firm managed to corner the market on a great mission statement. Rather than describe itself as a business that helps people find what they’re looking for online, Google has said it wants to “organize the world’s information.” There are probably a lot of other companies that wish they’d thought of that one, because it touches on so many areas of data, content and process management.
In a recent article on Harvard Business Publishing’s Discussion Leader Web site, Umair Haque uses Google’s mission statement as the jumping-off point for a more thoughtful exploration of business purpose. He forms this as “A Manifesto For The Next Industrial Revolution,” and suggests that growth is contained the inherent DNA of any organization. How that growth is channelled, though, is another matter.
“What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges,” Haque writes. “Here’s what it looks like. Organize the world’s hunger. Organize the world’s energy. Organize the world’s thirst. Organize the world’s health. Organize the world’s freedom. Organize the world’s finance. Organize the world’s education.”
Haque stresses that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list but the beginning of a discussion among business leaders. “If you’re a corporate boardroom, and you’re not refocusing and restructuring to meet these new challenges – here’s the bottom line: the next industrial revolution has your name written all over it,” he says.
IT departments are only one component of a business, of course, but they are routinely characterized as (theoretically) a key enabler of growth. Therefore, technology becomes the tool by which a company would attempt one of Haque’s worldwide efforts at organization. The problem is that many firms, even if they had this kind of ambition, tend to identify it only as they evolve. Then turn to their CIOs and IT managers to figure out the means to make it happen from a resource and in some cases process/workflow perspective. If IT isn’t really prepared to enable the organizing, the company is bound to fail.
Maybe the real first step is for technology professionals to determine their own personal mission statement, based on the model in Haque’s manifesto. Though this could vary by industry, a common one based on the role should be possible. If Google is all about organizing the world’s information, for example, perhaps IT managers should think of themselves as responsible (at least collectively) or organizing the world’s knowledge. Too highfalutin? Maybe, but not if you’re an IT manager who really wants to get closer to the business, to understand it and drive it forward.
Take the opposite approach: There a lot of people for whom “management” is a four-letter word, something difficult to really define unless you’re doing it really badly. But people understand the difference between something that’s organized and disorganized. What if IT managers thought of themselves as IT organizers? It might sound a little too tactical and less strategic. But organization requires strategy, and helping people get quicker access to knowledge is a worthy goal of any individual or company. Technology professionals might want to consider it for a manifesto of their own.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Licence renewal: How to be a better, bolder IT manager
For me to preach the concept of social skills to an IT manager is absurd, because I can barely muster them in my personal life. I never talk to strangers unless it’s in a professional capacity. I don’t even look them in the eye. I could never do what Anne Fauteux is asking people to do.
The Toronto-based artist has set up a makeshift office in a gallery called Mercer Union, where she has set up what looks like a clothesline from which pieces of paper are strung. Each of these pieces of paper are “licences” to do the kinds of things you would not normally do, such as say what you think even at the risk of offending someone, or embracing someone on the street. Once you’ve made your choice, participants are asked to make their bold move over a three-day period, and then share their experience on the artist’s blog. This kind of detracts from the second word of “Licentious Anonymous,” which is the name of the project, but never mind. Even without the social networking angle, this exercise strikes me as a perfect fit for technology professionals.
In some ways’ Fauteux’s concept reminds me of a management retreat I went on some years ago, where we discussed innovation and decision-making with the president of our company. We were encouraged to take big risks, even if they didn’t work out. Like a lot of large companies, we were guilty of being slow to move on things, and he told us we should “act first and ask permission later.” And if we failed? That was okay, he insisted. “Fail, fail, fail!” he exhorted. Unfortunately that’s not how things actually worked at that company. When you failed, your future was far from certain.
IT managers are often charged with the same ambiguous commandment, but are equally unsupported. Instead of confidently making strategic use of technology to improve a business, they are either passive-aggressively pushed back or have doors closed to them. Even more than their counterparts in marketing, sales or finance, they are constantly asking permission, for approval or for executive sponsorship.
Imagine if someone were to hand a licence to an IT manager which said, “This entitles the bearer to replace something obsolete even if it’s more expensive in the first year of operation.” Or what about a Licence to Tell Senior Management They Don’t Know What They’re Talking About? I’m sure a lot of IT managers would love a Licence To Ignore Users Who Consistently Lose Their Passwords. Best of all might be a Licence To Delegate A Project To The Person Who Should Really Be Doing It.
There are probably many other, better examples, but the point is this: We constantly focus on what keeps IT departments up at night, as though anxiety is what drives accomplishment in the management of technology. I think a lot of enterprise IT would run much better if, security issues aside, we didn’t have to be so afraid.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...When an after-hours BlackBerry leads to overtime demands
If IT managers could get paid overtime whenever they’d had to check their BlackBerry outside of office hours, a lot of them would be rich by now.
A story is making the rounds about how ABC News was trying to put a clause in their writer’s contracts that they would not be compensated for checking e-mail on a company-issued device after 5:00 p.m. The employee’s union lashed out, saying that it’s trying to avoid a 24/7 workplace for its members and that mobile computing shouldn’t “shackle” people to their jobs. Technology professionals everywhere probably got a good laugh from that one. Reportedly, things have since been resolved, although the details weren’t made public, and we don’t know if either side was really satisfied. For at least three days, though, some writers at ABC News had their BlackBerry devices taken away. Not a good sign.
Although it may sound like an isolated incident, the story indicates a looming problem for organizations that are using technology to improve productivity. The long-promised anytime/anywhere access of mobile computers quickly translates into work always/wherever, and as such it could have a big bearing on how some applications and tools are adopted by users. If workers feel technology is keeping them on a short leash, life won’t get any easier for the IT departments who are helping to keep the leash properly fastened.
In the case of ABC News, the BlackBerries were company property, but it’s not hard to imagine similar conflicts arising over the equipment purchased and used by individual employees. If they want access to the network, for example, overtime may become the hidden cost of connectivity. Already there are bosses who expect employees to be reachable via cell phone at all hours. What happens when more of those cell phones integrate PC-like functionality that would give them the ability to access work-related data and applications?
This speaks to a detail in the ABC News story that probably went unnoticed in the hysteria over the always-contentious issue of overtime. The writer’s guild said checking e-mail was one thing. It was when that e-mail led to scripts being written or guests scheduled for the show. This is when the issue gets thornier. Should knowledge workers be paid overtime merely for awareness of information, or only for awareness that leads to immediate action?
These aren’t IT issues, of course. They are HR issues, but HR isn’t always in the room when senior management authorities access to information to workers in the field, or when the successful deployment of a Web-based tool is marred by the poor morale of sleepless employees. For actual technology professionals, the probability of overtime should be worked into the contract or the bonus structure, as is already done in many organizations. But the overall goal in most enterprise companies is to reduce the amount of IT department overtime by engineering a better application and hardware infrastructure. It’s everyone else’s overtime that, if the infrastructure scales well, is bound to keep going up.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Meanwhile, back in Nortel’s data centre . . .
This was another sad moment in Nortel’s history, with its former senior managers, including one-time CEO Frank Dunn, charged by the RCMP for alleged accounting fraud. The company itself is not on trial here, which is easy to forget amid all the coverage.
It’s also difficult for Nortel in that these alleged crimes happened a couple of years ago, and its current management is trying desparately to move on. This clip is a good example of that. In an interview, the CIO of Nortel’s Asia operation, Eric Lauzon, takes us behind the scenes to discuss the way he and his team are trying to improve the way it runs its own IT infrastructure….
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Some retail sales guys know how to treat an IT user
There’s nothing wrong with working at Future Shop, but I think Ben has more potential than that.
My wife and I finally managed to choose a laptop that will hopefully get us through the next couple of years. As I may have mentioned, this wasn’t easy for us. We knew what we wanted – something bigger than 13 inches, something light, something with a decent graphics card and something that wouldn’t cost us more than $1,500. It should have been easier than it was.
Based on the selection we had, we were looking at a 17-inch HP machine worth $1,117 with I think 3GB of RAM, an Nvidia graphics card and a bunch of other stuff. There was also a 15-inch model with a similar amount of memory but a lesser graphics card. Then there was a Toshiba which had better memory and graphics but a slower AMD processor (at least I think; it’s all a blur now). We couldn’t make up our minds. Which is where Ben came in.
He didn’t crack a smile, but in his own way Ben managed to muster enough soft skills to help us think strategically about our option. Based on what we told him, he explained that the graphics and memory in the other units wouldn’t help if we were running Adobe Premier on the smaller machines. “It’s not like it won’t perform, but it won’t be a pleasant experience,” he warned. We weren’t completely sure we needed Premier, but both of us are potentially going to be working with videos, so it was a case of future-proofing, much in the way that a business wants to be sure its IT can handle all the various projects that are going to depend on it.
As we continued to dither (the smaller machines were only $800, after all), he pointed us to yet another alternative, which had a better processor and the same memory and graphics capability in the same price range. It was an LG machine, and although we considered it, the screen was only 14 inches.
Now, I know that there must have been a part of Ben that was thinking we were crazy for choosing a laptop based on only an inch of screen real estate, but the truth is we may not need Premier, and that was the only program we could see that would be enhanced by the higher-end, larger laptop. He never let on though, even to give that annoying “O-kay” that implies, “You’re making a big mistake, but if that’s what you want to do, there’s nothing I can do about it.” He simply talked to us about how quickly his team would get the laptop set up for us and when we could pick it up.
This was a sales guy, but I didn’t see a trace of bias, even a bias based on his own preferences as a user. He talked to us like a knowledgeable friend (or maybe a coworker; it wasn’t a touchy-feely vibe). He listened very carefully to every one of our questions. Once the decision was made, he was all about making it happen.
There are IT departments all over the place that could learn from such a low-pressure, cooperative approach. In fact, I’d recommend any CIO out there scouting for talent to talk to Ben. Right after he finishes getting my new Toshiba laptop ready.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The IT performance metrics that don’t exist (yet)
Of all the ways we try to measure IT’s return on investment, “progress” seems a little too broad. And yet most of the other measures we use – improved productivity, operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness – are all signs of a company’s progress, if not progress on a world level. Everyone always assumes that such progress is a good thing, and often hope that countries can collectively progress on a global scale. Everyone, that is, except Edgar Morin.
A French philosopher whose work touches on both politics and economics, Morin has become known in his home country for highly controversial views on capitalism and consumption, which have nonetheless attracted the attention of president Nicholas Sarkozy. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Morin put things very succinctly:
“We are hypnotised by economic growth. But we should consider both economic growth and contraction together: what must grow, what must contract and what must remain stationary,” Morin said, citing technology as one of the forces that demand greater analysis. “Technological and economic development has brought capitalism and individualism. But if you take the effects of individualism, for example, it gives a lot of autonomy and responsibility to a person, but is also accompanied by a degradation of an essential social solidarity, of the family, the village, the district, or the workplace.”
Even philosophers, therefore, are starting to recognize that if you use your BlackBerry too much, you may end up ignoring your kids. But I was more interested in his first statement. If you take what Morin is saying about national or international economic growth, the engine of that growth is in part made up of IT. But probably the biggest quandries facing IT managers is not only how they will build up their infrastructure but precisely “what must contract and what must remain stationary.”
In some cases, what must contract is determined by the budget an IT manager has to work with, as does that which remains stationary. In the grand scheme of things, however, senior management typically charges the IT department to empower users with more data, more access to compute resources, additional tools for collaboration and communication. Only in the interests of security or the bottom line do those things contract or remain stationary.
Growth requires investment – not only of money but time and talent. And you don’t get the investment unless you can measure the results. But Morin is suspicious of efforts to explain everything away by numbers alone.
“Even if you have better measurements you will still not be able to quantify happiness,” he told FT. “All efforts to quantify love, for example, by creating a new measure – called the Cupidon, say – will never work. How can a young man in love with a woman say I feel a thousand Cupidon? It’s not possible.”
It’s easy for business, you might argue. You can use sales, or expenses, or customer churn. Not always, though. If customer (or employee) satisfaction wasn’t so hard to measure, we wouldn’t still be using survey tools. Emerging areas of interest, such as corporate social responsibility and business reputation, may be even harder to evaluate.
Morin offers no easy answers, but thinks it’s up to the public intellectuals to come up with them. “We live in a world of specialists, who have precise knowledge in distinct fields. But because of their limited knowledge they can never confront the fundamental and global problems that are really shaking society.” Can’t they? Specialized knowledge shouldn’t mean you operate with blinders on. Even if IT managers can’t come up with all the solutions, surely they can offer some of the components.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...There’s nothing ’stoopid’ about Nicholas Carr
Nicholas Carr is not so much the IT industry Cassandra as its declinologue. With “IT Doesn’t Matter,” he argued that technology offers businesses no strategic advantage. With his most recent book, The Big Switch, he insists that cloud computing makes the traditional data centre redundant. Now, with “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he takes things one step further, wondering aloud if our dependence on the Internet will one day make the human brain unnecessary, too.
The article was published in The Atlantic Monthly, which might not be the most mainstream publication, but compared with the Harvard Business Review, where Carr got his start, it’s practically People magazine. It’s a fitting stage for his thesis, which is that extensive use of online media and search engines is slowly changing our ability to concentrate and think deeply. You know the feeling: instead of immersing yourself in a good book you’re itching to check e-mail. To Carr, it’s an early warning sign of what may come.
“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self,” he writes. “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”
The long-term cognitive effects of extensive Internet use are impossible to predict, and apart from a vision of artificially intelligent search engines hard-wired to our brains, Carr barely tries. He merely makes a point – and perhaps his most important one – that in our haste to move to the next Web page we may be losing our ability to contemplate. Without that kind of sustained mental activity, we will have a more difficult time dealing with the ambiguities that make life interesting. And although he doesn’t spell it out, it could make idea generation that much more difficult. No wonder Intel, Apple and other vendors are now asking employees to devote some time to thinking away from their PC screens.
Contrast Carr’s piece with a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called In the Air, which tries to help us understand why the big innovations often happen simultaneously among different people. He follows the efforts of a former Microsoft exec who sets up a group brainstorming network, and the value that comes from dedicating resources to such activities. His conclusion: that “insight could be orchestrated,” but primarily among scientists, not artists.
“You can’t pool the talents of a dozen Salieris and get Mozart’s Requiem. You can’t put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse’s ‘La Danse,’” he writes. “Our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong. Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Alexander Graham Bell owned the telephone only because his patent application landed on the examiner’s desk a few hours before Gray’s. The first kind of creation was sui generis; the second could be re-created in a warehouse outside Seattle.”
If the Internet erodes our attention spans, however, it may not matter whether we are scientists or artists. It will become harder to have those eureka moments that are critical to major discoveries and accomplishments. Of course, the rub here is that both Carr’s and Gladwell’s articles are obviously the result of deep contemplation, and run thousands of words longer than most of what’s read online. So far, we are winning the war on distraction.
Carr has said the role of the IT manager will eventually fade away, but for the moment, at least, they are the ones setting up the systems we use for managing information and, indirectly, the collected knowledge of employees. Just like users, they are bombarded with data and decisions to make, and one of those decisions may be whether to provide technology that makes workers not only more productive but develops their capacity to ruminate and reason. “The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure,” Carr says. That of the IT manager cannot afford to be.
