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Loading ...Shooting consultants in a barrel
Everybody makes lawyer jokes, but I don’t know of anyone who makes consulting jokes.
More common is the approach taken by this month’s issue of GQ magazine, which features a story (unavailable online) about outside experts graced with a photo of large-domed, bug-eyed monsters out of a 1940s horror movie. It is a story about “the most terrifying corporate plague imaginable,” featuring evildoers who “will suck the lifeblood out of your organization and leave nothing but corpes in their wake.”
The author, a former consultant himself, is careful to distinguish between the good consultants and the bad. “I’m not talking about the various genuinely useful outsiders we’d come in and help us do, like, actual work – creating specific new products hat might wind up being used by real live consumers,” he writes, referring to them as vendors. He means the real strategic pointy-heads. “Management spends the equivalent of an entire department’s paycheque to fund outside experts who replicate information that’s readily available from internal sources . . . know that they are not there to make your job better. They aren’t there to make anything better.”
There was something at once familiar and vaguely weary about the entire piece, as though it could have been written 10 years ago, and offered little more than the rub that those who find themselves forced out of a gig could also take up consulting. Such jobs are the business equivalent of movie criticism – something everyone thinks they could do, and perhaps even enjoy.
Consultants have become so easy to hate that it’s getting more difficult to recognize the value they bring to the table. This includes a fresh, outsider’s perspective on what are sometimes long-standing problems in an entrenched culture; a knowledge of industry best practices, technologies or techniques that can propel a range of stalled corporate objectives; and, an ability to focus squarely on strategic thinking without overly disrupting those charged with day-to-day operations. At their best, engaging a consultant should be like a CEO or department head turning to an experienced colleague or friend and asking, “How do other people do this? How did you do it?”
IT departments are increasingly being looked at much like consulting organizations, which means they are saddled with all the negative connotations associated with them. They are brought in to projects or to help align processes late in the game, with insufficient knowledge of the players and their histories. They are not always acting like the “vendors” of the GQ article, providing a quick-fix custom application but often fine-tuning or making better use of existing equipment or software to deal with problems. They possess specialist knowledge available to no one else in the organization, yet compared with real consultants they are limited in their ability to make recommendations beyond what happens to the corporate network. And unlike real consultants, they are still dealing with all those day-to-day operations.
I think GQ is right in that consultants often spend their days on safari, unearthing the tribal knowledge that shouldn’t be hard to find in the average company. But all enterprises could improve the way they can communicate. There are a lot of tools to do this, and even a few that the IT department could set up and manage for the organization’s benefit. But there has to be a commitment across the employee base to use those tools and really share what they know. That’s the real challenge. Which means it may be time to call in the consultants.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The verdict on Privacy Commish Stoddart’s appeal to lawyers
Roe vs. Wade would never have become Roe vs. Wade if it was simply known as R. vs. W.
In a speech to Canadian Bar Association, federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart suggested that the traditional “open court” principle of disclosing information about those involved with the courts should be reconsidered. She also hinted that using an individuals’ initials may be sufficient to educate the public about legal decisions and keep the system accountable to Canadians.
“In law school, we all learned cases by individuals’ names,” said Stoddart, according to a transcript of the speech. “When these cases were accessible only in specialized legal texts, or search engines accessible to legal professionals only, or copies could be picked up by making a trip to the basement records room of a court or tribunal, the concept of practical obscurity always operated in favour of privacy protection and the need-to-know principle.”
Later, the Globe and Mail r eported a press conference in which Stoddart said search engines “distort” the open court rule, implying that all of us will be stuck with a digital paper trail that may be impossible to hide from employers or business associates.
“They will go to social network sites; see what they can find about your past,” she said. “Something may come up there that is irrelevant and doesn’t really need to be known by the world at large. Perhaps something about a family member … That really wasn’t the original purpose.”
Courts do not operate to serve the law, however, but to serve people. And obscuring the identities of those who appear before them does not necessarily serve the need-to-know principle. Who we are determines what we do, and what we do determines when and why we get involved in tribunals or in other cases involving a judge. That doesn’t mean every health-care case and human rights case deserves a front page headline, but not all of those cases would receive much attention anyway.
As for social networking sites, the onus there is on the user to manage their personal settings if they don’t want employers to find anything unsavoury. Whether legal or court-related information winds up in the wrong hands will also depend in part on the evolution of the semantic Web, as well as the semantic capabilities that are integrated into information-retrieval applications developed and deployed by corporate enterprises. Would it also be too naïve to suggest that companies outside the legal profession apply some reasonable judgement as they search for information? Perhaps if Stoddart is right and the need to know principle is fading, we need to apply a need to protect principle.
Stoddart is legitimately trying to maximize the protection available to people whose information can be channelled across the Internet, and for that she is to be applauded. At the same time, we have to determine whether individual privacy necessarily means public anonymity, and whether availability online automatically means unnecessary exposure.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...What I learned about business process optimization at Woodbine
It sounded like a great IT industry name, but I just couldn’t put my money down on “Redeploy,” one of horses competing at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto last week. Instead, I kept looking for one that might be called “Virtual Machine.”
I was there with my company, which had rented out a tent as part of an employee social event. There was a group of tables set up just outside the tent, which sat right on the edge of the track where all the action took place. Inside the tent was the food, a booth to make our bets, and a handful of monitors that gave us updates on race times and the latest odds. On each table was a collection of racing forms, which offered even more background about the individual horses and their past performance. As a mix of paper and electronic steps, Woodbine’s races seem like they’re crying out for business process optimization, but an afternoon there convinced me they’re probably best to leave it alone.
In any other kind of organization, you could see plenty of opportunity for increased digitization of the betting process, for example. People tended to flip through the racing forms, scan the monitors, make up their minds, line up to place their bets and occasionally change their minds while they were up there. Sometimes people at the front of the line took so long that those at the end didn’t have a chance to place their bets. Then, when the races were over, there was a mad dash as people flocked back to the monitors to see the full results, including not only the winner but who “placed” and “showed.”
With the right mix of hardware and software, a lot of these cumbersome and unnecessary steps could be eliminated. The monitors could be placed outdoors, just near where we stood to watch. Better yet would be handhelds distributed to the audience where they could see updates and place bets in real-time, without ever having to leave their place (this would require e-payments, but that wouldn’t be hard to do). The racing forms seem almost entirely redundant – the type of thing best served up on a Web page that could be accessed through the handheld, and hyper-linked to the day’s roster of competing horses.
And yet . . . I looked around at my coworkers. The reason this whole thing was fun (and it really was) came down to the level of interactivity and collaboration the process encouraged. They were talking as they looked through those racing forms, and the paper format got them to make their decision more slowly than they might have by clicking through a series of pages, like search results. They kept the conversation up while they stood in line, and they were really buzzing by the time they were rushing to see who won what, and how much.
Woodbine’s desired outcome of this process, of course, is to maximize the amounts the audience bets on each race. Automation would allow for greater throughput (and no doubt does in off-track or online wagering) but the social networking that took place last week far outweighed what you could replicate on Facebook or similar Web sites. The process as it stands today creates a community which is assisted by IT but is not necessarily driven by it. The people are the horses that pull the processes along, like a cart filled with IT equipment. You have to be careful which one you put in front of the other.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Olympics 2008 and the ethics of using IT
The whole question of “Does IT matter” sent shivers down the spines of corporate CIOs, but in athletics there’s a tendency to downplay the role of technology. This segment from Voice of America offers an interesting look at how much of an advantage IT can bring to the individual competitor or team, and to what extent it creates an uneven playing field.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Seven other IT terms that shouldn’t be trademarked
I don’t think too many people are surprised that the U.S. Patent Office shot down Dell’s attempts to trademark the term “cloud computing” this week. What surprised me is that no one has tried this tack before, particularly using cloud computing’s antecedents such as grid computing, utility computing and so on.
What Dell would have done with its trademark is hard to determine, given that strict enforcement would have dulled the currency of the term among other vendors and users. Since it’s hard to imagine Dell offering a cloud computing service, the best I can come up with is the branding of its infrastructure products as “made for cloud computing,” or something of that ilk.
This is not, however, the only concept or buzzword in the industry that should be free from such shackles. Consider some of the following:
Service oriented architecture: Most people in the IT industry are by now familiar with the idea of loosely coupled applications that transform the way processes are carried out in the enterprise, but there’s still some debate as to what a “real” SOA is. Some companies have offered variations on this theme, such as SAP’s Enterprise Service Architecture, which has only added to the confusion.
Electronic Health Record: Maybe it’s everything about a patient’s history of care and treatment. Maybe it’s more site-specific (in which case electronic patient record might be used instead). It could be basic patient demographics. Possibly (if you’re in the States) it’s a compilation of a patients’ bills. Whatever it is, it’s not ready to be copyrighted.
Virtual Machine: With the mad rush to consolidate server infrastructure, it’s a wonder no one has tried to make a claim for the term we use to talk about those non-physical instances of compute machinery. Note to VMware, Microsoft and Citrix: don’t even think about it.
Smart phone: Some Mac loyalists would probably argue that Apple’s iPhone is the only device worthy of this description, but for the most part we’re still using it to talk about the potential of portable communication devices, not something to which any one vendor could lay claim.
Web 2.0: Should be avoided just for its likely brief shelf life. To do otherwise would be about as wise as trademarking “dot com,” which Sun (“We put the dot in dot-com”) came dangerously close to doing circa 1999.
Software as a service: Would anyone even want it? Salesforce.com might seem to deserve it based on its success with the model, but it still has a better ring to it than application service provider (ASP), which is now largely forgotten.
E-discovery: A piece of jargon that will only gain traction as new regulations come into force over the next year or so, and there are plenty of firms that would be all too quick to pay more attention to a supplier that had cornered the market on the phrase. Enterprise legal departments might even appreciate its value as a piece of intellectual property, but that’s beside the point.
I don’t think many companies are going to follow Dell’s lead, and those that do might opt for terms other than these. My point is that to improve our use of technology for business purposes we need to be able to discuss issues freely. And that means taking an open source approach to language.
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(2 votes, average: 9.5 out of 10) Loading ...Olympic Games are not an IT-driven enterprise as we know it
Whenever the Olympic Games rears its head it’s the IT vendors who act like they deserve a gold medal.
Whether it’s Bell, Cisco, or longtime Olympic systems integrator Atos Origin, anyone who’s responsible for the behind-the-scenes technical work for the competition is quick to tout their association with the Games, and no wonder. Even if it’s not spelled out, there’s an easy mental association between the inspiring running, jumping or swimming performed by athletes and the network gymnastics performed by the underlying IT infrastructure. Whether the Olympics face the kind of challenges experienced by a regular enterprise is another matter.
Like most businesses, the Olympics are centered around a core competency: measuring and comparing the performance of human beings engaged in competitive physical activities. Although it’s the host city that may eat up most of the cost (and, if they’re lucky, enjoy the benefits of increased tourism), the real point of the Games is to relay information about who won, who lost, and by how much. Real-time data is seldom as real-time as it will be in Bejing this year.
You can break that down into some core functions and processes, almost all of which are supported by IT: timing and scoring, scheduling, and the broadcasting of information to the media and to various Olympics Web properties. In some ways, it’s not that different from tracking the sales of a company’s products, marketing information about those products, organizing employees and tracking the activities of customers, partners and suppliers.
The major differences are around scope and scale. Scope in the sense that the Games are an enterprise with a fairly short life span. Building (and especially configuring) the IT infrastructure typically takes years of planning and an army of experts, but the mission of the Games is fulfilled (one way or another) within less time than the average company’s sales quarter.
From a scale perspective, it might be worth looking at plans for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, where lead partner Bell Canada is already at work on setting up a network with 15,000 IP-based ports connecting more than 10,000 IP phones, and 5,000 two-way radios. Expectations are for 5,200 laptops, 560 servers and 1,000 printers. The budget? About $343 million, which is probably a tad more than the average Canadian enterprise.
What the Olympic Games don’t do is evolve. If they are to be considered enterprises, they are closed down and rebuilt from scratch each time, often with different partners and players. In this they are more like point projects of the Olympic Committee than a living, breathing corporation faced with peaks and valleys of business demand. When the Games are underway, that’s the peak.
Best to think of the Olympics, either in Bejing or anywhere else, as the industry’s ultimate benchmark test. They may provide useful case studies of technology in action but in ones that push far greater extremes than the reality faced by everyday firms. For them, running IT well enough to get the job done day in, day out is more of a marathon than a sprint. That’s where the Olympian effort really comes in.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...You’re either satisfied with your IT job or you’re not
Whenever we publish the results of IT World Canada’s annual salary survey (buy the full report here), everyone automatically looks at the big numbers and compares how they rank with their peers. That’s the whole point of this project. But beyond the coverage we’ve already provided, there were a couple of other points around job satisfaction that I think should be highlighted and further explored.
First, the good news: Overall, 87 per cent of all technology professionals said they would recommend IT as a career choice. Think about that for a minute. Despite all the budget constraints, the outsourcing, the user griping, the unrealistic deadlines and the manipulative vendors, a lot of people would encourage others to follow in their footsteps. That’s a ringing endorsement of this industry, and a healthy sign that IT presents the kind of variety, challenges and (yes) compensation that provides personal fulfillment.
But when you look a little deeper, the picture becomes a bit murky. For example, 60 per cent of those we spoke to said they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their job. Fourteen percent said they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. But there was another entire quarter of respondents, 25 per cent, who said they were “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” with their jobs in IT.
You could blame this on the question, of course. What does it really mean to be neither/nor? In fact, it means a lot. It means you’re not sure how to gauge your overall job satisfaction, and that depending on your circumstances, outlook and options, the pendulum could swing either way.
Looked at another way, it’s possible to interpret that 25 per cent as being unable to make up their mind because their job is changing so much. They might have been hired on for their technology expertise but are now being thrown business-related responsibilities for which they are unprepared. Or they are in training mode, trying to adjust to a new reality and simply need more time to make up their mind about how satisfying it is.
Having that many people sitting on the fence is not healthy for the long-term retention prospects of the enterprises that employ them. Making them more satisfied could come down to pay – the average salary this year was nearly $78 – but it will also be about how well companies can define what the role of IT departments will be. If they properly understand what their responsibilities are, and if their efforts are recognized appropriately, they might at least say they’re satisfied. But even to have more IT people dissatisfied or very dissatisfied would be better, because the root causes would likely be easier to identify.
Can you really say it’s a good idea to go into IT when you’re not sure how you actually feel about it yourself? It doesn’t really seem to make a lot of sense. Unless . . . maybe 87 per cent say information technology is a good career choice because, their personal satisfaction notwithstanding, they still see possibilities in it. Buried within all the statistics around what ends up on an IT manager’s paycheque, perhaps we have stumbled on a measurement of hope.
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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.
