Birthdays are time for celebration. Particularly if you are 9, 19 but maybe not 49.  100 years ago getting to 49 was a result in its own.  Now, apparently I’m reaching my peak as an entrepreneur. Yes really. Grey hair, experience and a dizzying array of contacts, and VCs are more likely to invest in you.

However, Silicon Valley stats do not bear that out, and an article by LifeTwo

The average age of these start-ups is 26.  

 
But the maturity of these young founders is that in many case they have have gone out and found ‘adult supervision’.  Google has Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg can be found regularly in with Marc Andreesen at the Creamery in Palo Alto.

Which gets me to my point – eventually.  The heart, the energy and the workforce of any company you build is going to be full of 20-30 year olds. Gen Y, iPod Gen or Digital Native.  People can’t agree on the term, but they do agree that they are wired differently.  The extensive research for Don Tapscott’s book GrownUp Digital has shown that they think, work act differently. Not worse. Not bad. But differently.

So the issue is at 49, how do I relate to them? How do I understand them? How do I run a company where they want to work and can thrive? And how can I learn from them.

Does the idea a company event with them fill you with horror?  There is age and the digital divide.

But let’s just look at their life vs. your. Your house plants are alive but you can’t smoke any of them. There is more food in your fridge than booze. You hear your favourite songs when you’re in the lift and, while you still like to see the dawn, you prefer to have had a decent night’s sleep first. Finally all they talk about is where they’re going next and all you want to do is go to bed.  

But – remember. They are the face and voice of the company. Particularly in serviced-based industries it is the lowest paid staff who touch the customers every day – in person, over the counter, on the phone and on email , Twitter and IM.
So what is the solution?

Attitude:  It is not new technology, it is life.  Don’t switch off mentally as well as physically.  Embrace new technology and change.  Hell, my mother at 87 sends me emails and texts. I marvel at my 7 year old’s grasp of technology without skipping a beat.

Connect: Use every opportunity to understand and talk to them. Yes it feels strange at first. Stilted possibly. Find areas of discussion starting with open questions, “What, When, How, Who, Why”. Small talk, meaningless at first, but they it will build into more significant conversations. Remember, they are just as keen to be recognised by senior people in the organisation.

Pupil: Put yourself in the position of a pupil, not teacher. Look for clues not give views. Be open and patient and start to learn how they view the world.

Project: Give yourself a reason to connect. For me it was designing the Nimbus Control for iPhone interface - putting myself in their shoes. It was exciting, scary, refreshing, frustrating and rewarding

I really need to take these ideas and write the book “Managing the iPod Generation – How can you manage them when they can’t hear you”.  So many (old) people have asked me for a copy when it is written.

Better get on writing that book before I’m too old and need to pee every 20 minutes.

ANON... But I completely subscribe to these sentiments. 

Combined with the ideas in Carl Honore's excellent book In Praise of Slow

A friend of mine opened his wife's underwear drawer and picked up a silk paper wrapped package:

'This, - he said - isn't any ordinary package.'

He unwrapped the box and stared at both the silk paper and the box.

'She got this the first time we went to New York , 8 or 9 years ago. She has never put it on , was saving it for a special occasion.

Well, I guess this is it.

He got near the bed and placed the gift box next to the other clothing he was taking to the funeral house, his wife had just died.

He turned to me and said:

'Never save something for a special occasion.

Every day in your life is a special occasion'

I still think those words changed my life.

Now I read more and clean less.

I sit on the porch without worrying about anything.

I spend more time with my family, and less at work.

I understood that life should be a source of experience to be lived up to, not survived through.

I no longer keep anything.

I use crystal glasses every day

I'll wear new clothes to go to the supermarket, if I feel like it.

The words 'Someday...' and ' One Day...' are fading away from my dictionary.

If it's worth seeing, listening or doing, I want to see, listen or do it now

I don't know what my friend's wife would have done if she knew she wouldn't be there the next morning, this nobody can tell.

I think she might have called her relatives and closest friends. She might call old friends to make peace over past quarrels.

I'd like to think she would go out for Chinese, her favourite food.

It's these small things that I would regret not doing, if I knew my time had come.

Each day, each hour, each minute, is special.

Live for today, for tomorrow is promised to no-one.

Or to put in another way, in my words. 

Don't procrastinate. If you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

The packaging for the HTC Touch HD is beautiful.   The product inside the box is equally smooth, and it is clearly the state of the art Windows Mobile phone by HTC.

It is the same format and size as the iPhone, maybe even a little thinner.  Really crisp sharp screen, good battery life, a 3.5mm headphone socket and, at last, a loud enough ring tone to hear when it is in my pocket.

But the UI lets itself down in SO many ways.  It is as if the UI was designed by someone who had seen an iPhone or iPod Touch, but only at a distance and had never had a chance to use one in anger. Or maybe HTC’s lawyers said that every function could not mimic those on an iPhone.  Or simply the designer was just trying to be too clever.

Whatever – here are my top 3

Accidentally hitting keys along the bottom of the device – there are 4 touch sensitive keys that are very easily hit accidentally when you are holding the device one handed. They are make a call, home, back &  drop a call.  And they are not back-lit. And the bar is quite narrow. So you are listening to music or trying compose a txt and suddenly you brush over the key and you are making a call, and when you get back to what you are doing you have to start again.  Worse, is that you can’t switch them off.

Answering a phone call -  there is slider appears on screen when the phone rings. Slide it left to answer.  Why not just have a very large ‘Answer’ button. However there is a set of buttons on the bottom of the device which you can use, but they are relatively narrow so easy to miss - see above.

Listening to music – there are some fairly standard approaches for controlling which track and the volume. Large buttons so easy to hit. But – oh no. Not on the HTC. There is no volume control apart from the icon on the top bar which takes 2 clicks to get to the volume, or the buttons on side of the device. The on/pause and next/previous track are small buttons on the right hand side. And the track information is way too small.  So not a great music player.

So the player is designed to be a phone / music player / email device.  It falls short in 2 out of 3 in terms of software. Shame because the hardware rocks.

The adrenalin is gently subsiding after keynoting the Inspiring Performance 09 in front of 400 enterprise customers. It is interesting to look back on a key theme that was pervasive throughout the Nimbus and 10 + client presentations who included Balfour Beatty, Barclays Capital, Cisco, Marathon Oil, Nestle and the excellent Carphone Warehouse closing keynote.

The key message was “If you are documenting your business processes, and nobody reads them, why are you bothering?”  The audience are the 10,000 end users or "consumers" in your organisation.

At the conference we talked about the different audiences of process, in terms of what hat they are wearing.  White Hat: IT, Blue Hat: Systems Integration, Green Hat: line of business, Red Hat: compliance.

So if you focus on the audience.  Increasingly that audience is the end users or consumers of the content. 1,000’s or 10,000s of people who use them to understand how to do their job.   These are Green Hats ranging from seasoned professional in their 60’s down to the new starter in their teens – the iPod Generation.

Interestingly or scarily, for many businesses it is the iPod Generation who touch the customers and therefore communicate the company brand and promise.

So, if you were writing a book or white paper you would really think about the audience before you put pen to paper or keyboard.  But too often process projects start documenting processes and storing them in databases as the business management system without considering the ‘consumer’ of the information.  They fail the “So what?” test.

Richard Butterfield from Balfour Beatty talked about the attributes of the ‘business management system’ which is the collection of end to end business processes aimed at end users – Green Hats, and also Red Hats. Those attributes were  Simple (to understand), Elegant (and pretty to look at) , Integrated (so all supporting information linked) and Personalised (look & feel / content / access). 

How many business management systems can say yes to all those?  Delivering thought MS Sharepoint certainly helps with some of these aspects.  Nimbus launch of the Nimbus Control Desktop player which mimics iTunes and the Nimbus Control for iPhone application goes a long way to addressing all these points.
Carphone Warehouse presented the final keynote with a video shot in one of their stores with ‘real users’ – the guys who work in the Richmond store – explaining how they used the implementation of Nimbus Control called How2. The video will be posted on the Nimbus website early next week.

The results in terms of ROI are staggering.

-    The time from thinking about building How2, through selecting Nimbus Control , documenting their store operations and then rolling out to 815 stores around the UK was 11 months. The fact that Nimbus host the software as service (SaaS) has certainly contributed to the speed in implementation.

-    Since implementation the performance of the worst performing stores have helved the gap between them and the best performing stores. Now How2 is not entirely responsible, but is has supported the drive to transform the operations.

The presentations of the conference will be available at the Inspiring Performance website.

A bizarre question, maybe, but ask yourself whether your executive management, managers and supervisors are using business information delivered through reports and scorecards to take the pulse of the organisation or to conduct a post mortem of last month’s performance?

Put another way, are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that they are using to make their decisions leading indicators or lagging indicators?

Lagging indicators vs leading indicators
 
Some examples of lagging and leading indicators:

leading: Software bugs reported to Support in Release x.x   
lagging: % of identified software bugs fixed in Release x.x

leading: Q2 revenue   
lagging: Contracts in negotiation for Q2

leading: Call centre calls completed within 2 minutes   
lagging: Customer cases currently open

leading: Product returns in November   
lagging: Customer complaints 3 month trend

Things can start to go wrong in a business well before the performance measure turns the traffic light on the scorecard red. Using metrics that measure past events is like driving whilst looking through the rear window. It’s easy not to see an opportunity or threat on the road ahead until you’re upon it.

So if leading indicators are clearly more valuable than lagging, why do many (most!) projects seem to deliver reports and scorecards full of lagging indicators?  There are probably 3 reasons:

1.    Lagging numbers are the easiest to find in the corporate databases and regular monthly reports
2.    They are the easiest to identify, especially if you do not have intimate insights into the operation of the business
3.    When IT are under pressure from the business to deliver “scorecards for the top team”, they are the quickest way to satisfy the demand.

So does is really matter?   Well – yes.

Firstly, delivering lagging indicators means that the business has a good idea of how well it has done, but little view of whether the direction / strategy is working. So not only is it wasting manager’s time looking at reports which are only showing a historical position – but more importantly it is squandering the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.  Remember- ‘if it’s difficult for you, it’s probably equally difficult for your competition.’

Secondly, the promise or ROI from the scorecarding project is not being realised.  Scorecards should not just be the latest management fad for senior management.  They should be a valuable tool to aid decision making in the hands of managers and supervisors – in fact anyone managing a team. 

So how do you working out what the leading indicators are?  Simple.  Understand the end to end process and the answers will leap out at you.  Provided you've process mapped them correctly - now there is the subject of another post..... don't get me started.

The final word - Agility

Think about driving alongside a pavement crowded with Christmas shoppers.  A pedestrian steps out and thanks to your lightning reactions and the ABS on the car, you swerve and manage to avoid hitting them. So agility is all about whether you are able to respond if something jumps out in front of you.  The measure is “did you hit them”.  You could have been just as ‘agile’, but required a far less violent reaction if you had been alert to the possibility and had had earlier warning of the pedestrian’s actions.

There is a strong parallel with corporations.  Many are striving to be so nimble that they can change direction in an instant, but are failing because a nimble 10,000 person organisation is an oxymoron. It is practically impossible, especially when you realize the increasing demands to comply with various pieces of legislation.  So a better approach is to be prepared for change (process) and have early warning (leading metrics).

I'm presenting on this topic at the Unicom Performance Management conference on 22nd September. 

As her latest CEO webinar closed and she looked around the room, Anne knew that she’d pushed her company forward again.

No matter how good the technology, at the end of the day it was about people – so she had insisted that every significant transformation project was launched properly. And for bigger projects like this one, that meant her hosting the launch and showing her commitment to continuous improvement.

Since she took over as CEO at Pharma Dynamics back in 2007, she had embedded continuous improvement into the company’s culture. The mechanics of change were almost automatic by now – managing change well had become business as usual.

This latest project, to improve the way that the company’s manufacturing units in East Asia integrated with new a component supplier in Hungary, was typical. From the original idea through to her own authorisation, she had tracked its progress through the company’s Lifecycle change environment.

Likely most projects these days, it wasn’t going to deliver a dramatic ROI - maybe it would make the supply chain just one or two percent more efficient in this case – but it was yet another in a continual and relentless stream of business improvement projects.

The ability of Pharma Dynamics to generate projects like this, and execute them well, was what competitors envied and analysts valued.

It hadn’t always been this straightforward. Like most major corporations, Pharma Dynamics had spent the 90’s going through dramatic interventions to re-engineer the business and implement ever bigger software packages. There was a lot of smoke and noise, and things changed - but when the last consultant’s BMW pulled away it wasn’t necessarily obvious that different was better, or that the pain had been worth the cost.

Lurching companies forward through Big Bangs went out of style – it came to be seen as a shallow easy option next to positively transforming people, processes and culture. Improving any company’s game now was organic - about incremental change, and everyone being involved. Workforce engagement had become recognised as critical in managing change well.

Anne had sensed this change in her previous role as CIO at Pharma Dynamics, and it was a pivotal moment in her career. Like most of her executive colleagues, Anne had experimented with Six Sigma and other process improvement methods. They’d delivered but not convincingly – the initial energy behind each project was often dissipated early on, and it wasn’t clear that costs weren’t simply being shunted around the business rather than truly taken out. And frequently the enthusiasm for change, and people’s involvement, was limited to a small band pressing on against the odds. Anne knew from the ‘change fatigue’ she’d seen on her improvement projects that continuous change demanded new thinking.

Coming at it from the data end, the CFO had initiated projects using dashboards and scorecards to drive performance improvement. But their value was fundamentally constrained because the metrics were disconnected from the business processes: the traffic light was blinking red – but the causes and the potential remedies were not usually obvious.

Human capital development was moving up the Board’s agenda. The definition of leadership was being re-focussed on workforce engagement and motivation as a critical capability in a world where outsourcing was becoming ubiquitous.

The pressure for active compliance had also driven her to search for enabling technologies that could create a new environment. “Keep me out of jail!” had become the mantra of every CEO.

When she took the Lifecycle concept to the Board, they loved it. Leveraging the capabilities of the emerging PPM (process and performance management) software applications, it promised an organisation better integrated and more agile. Lifecycle would deliver an environment where performance improvement and compliance would go hand-in-hand – all threaded together around the end-to-end processes that ultimately delivered value to Pharma Dynamics customers.

Appointed CEO to deliver it, implementing Lifecycle hadn’t been easy. There was initial resistance to yet more change - but as she travelled around the company selling people on Lifecycle, she noticed the climate changing. People felt increasingly empowered by being more involved, and while tough business decisions had still to be made, and could blow things off course, the correction was quicker. Lifecycle had helped create a business that embraced change.

“Ready to go with the award?”- her PA burst into Anne’s thoughts.

“Sure” she said. One of the things she’d cemented into the Lifecycle culture was rewards. It was time to recognise the contribution made by the manager in Brazil who had kicked off this latest project. He had no line responsibility for the East Asia manufacturing units – but, like everyone in Pharma Dynamics, Lifecycle had given him visibility of their processes. By applying lessons from his supply chain work in South America, he had spotted the potential for improvement and posted the original idea on Lifecycle, which had sparked off this latest successful project. That’s how best practices usually now spread across the company - collaboratively and from the grass-roots.

As she turned to the plasma wallscreen for the videocall, Anne wondered whether some awards didn’t merit a personal visit from the CEO – to Rio, for instance…

Contributed by Mike Gammage (mike.gammage@nimbuspartners.com)

A true story from South Africa. 

Connectivity is not good within the country, although data links from outside are receiving investment.

So a corporation with sites 50 miles apart needs to send about 3-4 GB of data between them once per day. Cost prohibits a dedicated line between the offices, so the internet is an obvious answer. Remarkably this is taking 6 hours due to the poor bandwith across the internet.

So they have trained up some carrier pigeons carring encrypted memory sticks. The first few flights have take 3-4 hours, so presumably the pigeon stopped for lunch, but with a little training they able to do it in a couple of hours.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Force.com is making Salesforce.com sticky. Sure the Salesforce.com CRM app is easy to use and can be accessed anywhere you have a browser and access to the internet (which is not many places on the road in the UK). But the churn levels were pretty high. Easy to start using it, but equally easy to stop. Why? Poor implementation. As I have discussed before.  But Salesforce.com has found the magic sauce that makes it sticky.

Force.com?

Force.com is a very powerful end user development environment allowing someone with no knowledge of databases, HTML or coding to build a scalable, web-based form-filling application. This could be completely standalone, or extending the current Salesforce.com CRM objects (Account, Contact, Opportunity, Case etc).

So why sticky?

The moment you start extending the CRM using Force.com or even developing completely standalone apps then you are hooked.  You are a client for life. Take those spreadsheets that get emailed around and very quickly and easily turn them into an application using Force.com app. Voila – you have a multi-user, secure, scalable, web-based backed-up application.

But companies are going further and rewriting whole applications such as Asset Management, Staff Expenses, or Bug Tracking . Why? Several reasons. The existing applications are out of date and too expensive or impossible to modify, are creaking and becoming unstable, or are unsupported by the vendor.

Nimbus - 100% Force.com

At Nimbus we have gone one stage further. The goal is every application the company needs to operate is on the Force.com platform. So we have implemented Salesforce.com and have used Force.com to develop all HR (Payroll, Personnel, Expense, Training, Vacation & Sickness), Asset Management (Hosting infrastructure, Servers, PC, Laptops, PDA & and Mobiles), Business Excellence (Change Projects, Audits), R&D (Development projects, Enhancement Requests, Issues & Bug Tracking) 

Every application and spreadsheet has been ruthlessly analyzed from a process perspective and replaced by Force.com. The last area is to replace Sage Accounting with Coda2Go.

The benefits are a single integrated system. Most CIOs in our Fortune1000 clients would kills to have a single integrated application set to run their business. The ability to up drive data integrity is huge and it eliminates messy, error prone and expensive integrations between disparate applications.

Fine. But so what?

The really interesting part is that all of the above at Nimbus has been achieved by a very small team lead by the Head of Business Excellence who has no technical programming skills. She is a skilled business analyst with a great understanding of the operation of Nimbus. She has taken a process-focused view of the business, using Nimbus own product suite – Nimbus Control - before developing any of the extensions to Salesforce.com or creating new modules using Force.com. But she has achieved everything Nimbus needs without resorting to the Apex, the proprietary Force.com programming language.

Nimbus is by no means an isolated example. There are thousands of companies following the same path in every industry from SMEs up to major multi-nationals like Dell, Cisco and Japan Post.

CIO’s dream or nightmare?

This has some huge implications for the CIO.

-    Companies are now moving back to custom development rather than relying on using packaged apps – driven or dragged by the business users
-    A methodology for custom development is not well understood inside companies - certainly not the end user organisation
-    The  tools for custom development , like Nimbus Control, are not in place and their value is not understood
-    It is the end user doing the development, not internal IT
-    These apps are taking corporate data outside the company firewall, completely under the radar and without the knowledge of the CIO and internal IT.

Time for an amnesty

The CIO needs to accept that this is the new world and cannot be stopped or controlled using the normal levers – budget, access to equipment or availability of skilled resource. This is happening. The question is where, how much and what is the risk?

One approach is an amnesty to get all the business users to ‘come clean’ and declare what they are doing, and where. Then at least the CIO can develop and inclusive strategy which will reduce the business, technical and financial risks of the systems that have been built.

Cue book plug. I’ve just finished a book which I’ve co-authored called Thinking of... Buying a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions which has collated all the questions an organisation should be answering before embarking on implementing a Cloud on solution.  On Amazon.com  and reviews / summary at www.Smart-Questions.com