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The rise of the Steath Cloud

One element of the debate was the rise of business initiated cloud computing, which the CIO may never hear about.  Something I'm calling the Stealth Cloud

Cloud Computing seems to have struck a chord in a way that ASP, OnDemand, SaaS and all the previous incarnations never have. Every analyst is blogging and tweeting about it, there are a slew of conferences, and a surprising number of books have already been published.

And there is now more than one sort of Cloud. There are Public Clouds and Private Clouds. I propose “Stealth Cloud” should be added to the lexicon.    As the name suggests is does its job – quietly, unseen, unnoticed.

Silver lining?

So business people are embracing the ideas of Cloud Computing. Why? Because they can see immediate value from the applications and services being offered.  And with technology becoming easier to develop there seems to be no limit to what is being provided in the Cloud, all packaged in a very compelling, fun user experience. 

Consumers are business people too

So when the individual is provided with these elegant services as a consumer it is inevitable that they bring them to work. With services such as on-line backup, project management, CRM, collaboration and social networking all available through a browser, is it any surprise business users are signing up and ignoring the staid and boring applications provided by the IT department.

Hence the rise of the Stealth Cloud.  Services being consumed by business users without the knowledge, permission or support of the CIO and the IT department.

The widening business IT divide

Too much has been talked about the Business IT divide. But unfortunately the Stealth Cloud has driven an even greater rift between business and IT.  It is exposing, as far as the business are concerned the lack of flexibility, agility and responsiveness of IT.  From IT’s perspective who can see the risks (operational, compliance and integration) of using some of these Cloud services, is simply underlines how cavalier and naïve the business users are.

Unfair rap

Corporate systems are costly to build and maintain. They are mission critical and need to support the entire operation.  So there is a good reason why the internal IT department cannot ‘knock-out’ application as fast as a nimble start-up.  The IT department is spending 80% of its time and effort ‘keeping the lights on’ and the remaining 20% on providing new solutions that are robust, scalable, secure and integrated into the core applications. How many of the ‘new’ Cloud providers are truly enterprise ready?
 

Confusion squared

BPM has multiple definitions, which was discussed in What Hat are You Wearing, and Cloud appears to mean anything which is accessed via the internet, unless it is Private Cloud and then it seems to be anything..... internet, intranet, WAN or even LAN. So let’s get some definitions sorted first. They may not be the definitions that everyone agrees on, but they will set the scope for the discussion here.

Definitions (do not skip this)

BPM – a business process management application which documents and executes a business process (eg Order to Cash, Idea to Product). By execute, I mean the process, which has both manual and automated activities, is accessed by an end user to get their job done. Examples of BPM applications (not necessarily Cloud) are Pegasystems Smart BPM , Global36 Process360, Software AG ARIS & Nimbus Control. So by Cloud App I mean an application and data that is not hosted by the client but by a 3^rd party and is accessed over the internet.

If you want to be a purist you would say that there is no local application installed on the client device apart from a browser, but that is not always practical for a range of reasons: access when no internet connectivity; access using mobile devices; data back-up.

A confusion that reigned at a recent event where I was on the Cloud panel was that people were talking about Processes in the Cloud in which they also included a 3^rd party delivering the processes on behalf of the client. An example would be Payroll or Call centre processes. I would describe as BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). Confusion cubed.

Potential?

So definitions set, what is the potential for BPM in the Cloud? Certainly the CIO in any organisation is looking at Cloud applications to be able to manage down cost, move CapEx spend to OpEx and potentially eliminate the hassle of running applications. But none of these decisions are made without taking a hard look at the risks and assessing the potential migration cost. Business leaders see Cloud Computing as a way of circumventing the IT logjam and getting ‘stuff done’. This is being done with or without the permission or even knowledge of the CIO. This is something I have coined the Stealth Cloud and am speaking about regularly at conferences such as the IT Directors Forum. So what are the risks?

The list of questions that need to be considered is long – in fact runs to 94 pages in my book Thinking of.. Buying a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions. (So not a fun read but critical!!!) And the questions aren’t all technical. Many of them are business and cultural. The technical questions can probably be answered more easily. So here are some of the question areas:

• Why are we considering Cloud Computing? These are questions around the benefits and opportunities that are achievable. What is motivating you?

• What do we need from the service? These are about your organization’s business and technical needs. Are there opportunity-led business benefits or is this simple cost reduction?

• What are the costs? Where are the internal costs of implementing Cloud Computing? What infrastructure upgrades, training costs, migration and licensing.

• What are the external barriers? There will be external limitations; legal, contractual, or physical that will need to be addressed. Some may be deal-breakers.

• Are we ready internally? What are all the activities that need to happen to fully exploit Cloud Computing? Is the organization in a position, emotionally, financially and technically, to implement Cloud Computing?

The future is already here

Some say that the future is already here, but it is unevenly distributed. By that we mean that if you look around you can find examples of any new innovation being used in anger, delivering business benefits, it’s just that not everyone is using it. A recent survey by Information Age highlighted the top 10 Cloud Computing systems. What is interesting is that they are currently all 100% hosted.

None of them has any locally installed software. Whilst this may be the best route for some systems, and is certainly the ideal answer for a consumer system, it is not necessarily best for an enterprise customer. They may require the local processing power of a PC for some analytical or reporting, but also the system needs to recognize when users are not connected and allow them to continue working, albeit with slightly reduced functionality.

But what of BPM in the Cloud

There are now a large number of vendors who have a Cloud based offering. Many of them pre-date the Cloud. Nimbus Control’s User Centric Process Management application has been available and used as a hosted offering for over 5 years. The service originally branded JumpStart as it was expected that it would be used for early stage pilots. But it became very rapidly obvious that clients wanted to use the service longer term for full production, or at least for several years until they had their own infrastructure in place.The roster of over 100 clients who have used the Nimbus Cloud is impressive;  Cognos, SAP, Nestle and Carphone Warehouse..... And many of these are still using it every day. For example Carphone Warehouse in the video below.

Other examples are more workflow or document centric BPM vendors who have launched Cloud offerings are are Pega, who are leaders in Gartner’s BPMS Magic Quadrant, and Vitria. Lombardi, recently bought by IBM has had a Cloud based modelling tool for a couple of years, but their BPMS engine is still on-premise, but with IBM’s support for Cloud it is only a matter of time. And if the Cloud is written about Salesforce.com is inevitably referenced. In the BPM context they have just acquired Informavores which is a workflow product which enables Salesforce.com transactions to be strung together which has been rebranded Visual Process Manager.

The final word?

BPM and Cloud has a place in the technical architecture of many companies, but only once the non-technical issues have been resolved. And you should look for benefits in terms of better joined up thinking across geographies and speed to deployment rather than straight technical cost savings.

1 Free upright Piano. Will need some reconditioning to return to good condition, but is marginally playable (and horribly out of tune) now.

Here's how it will work. You and as many of your strong friends that you can Tom Sawyer into this job will come by and move the piano off my second floor (1 set of straight stairs) into a vehicle of yours. I'm not lifting it, or providing a vehicle for it. I will help you gently guide it through my house so that I still have walls after you leave.


Now here's the part that I know will be hard for people to understand:

I'm not holding it for anyone without a $100 deposit for every week you want me to hold it. Not even if you ask really nicely.

The first person to show up and take it gets it. This piano was listed once before, and you wouldn't believe the number of homeless dying one-legged Mongolian orphans that just needed a piano to make life better. I heard some great sob stories (probably all true!) about why I should hold this piano for this person or that person. Well, I ended up holding it for the first caller, who never got it. Then I held it for someone else, and they never got it. Then everyone was gone, and I still had a piano.

"But wait!" you're saying. "Why should I put down a deposit on something that's free?" Well, if you want me to hold it, you can give me a $100 bill. I'll tape it to the piano. When you get the piano, you get the $100 with it! It's like getting paid $100 to take the piano! You won't find a better way to get your money back - *and* you get a free piano! If you forget, or get run over by a busload of orphans on their way to get a free harpsichord, I'm going to keep the $100. Want me to hold it 2 weeks? That's $200.

"But I don't trust you to keep my $100..." Well, I don't trust you to come back and get this oversized paperweight. I tried that before and it didn't work.

"But I don't have $100 and I really want the free piano!" OK, just come get it! It's really that simple.

"But I don't have $100 and I can't come by with a truck for two weeks..." No piano for you! Life sucks; get a helmet.

I don't really want the piano. It came with the house when I bought it. I play the flute, which I can carry in one hand. I've tried picking up the piano with 1 hand, and I can't quite get a good grip. Please, take my piano.

So, if you want it, show up and take it! Simple, huh?

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold water. After awhile, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result. Pretty soon, when any monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, turn off the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other monkeys attack him.

After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted. Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Again, replace a third original monkey with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four monkeys that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkeys, all the monkeys which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced.

Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs. Why not? Because that's the way it's always been around here.

And that's how company policy begins...

 

There are a number of people who come from the more traditional sales world who haven't yet grasped the power of social media.  You can tell them because they describe this as a waste of people's time, unnecessary distraction or not real work.


They say - why would I want to know if someone is getting on a plane or going to bed.  Agreed.  Neither do I.  Here is a great view on what to NOT tweet about. 

And they have a point.  Done in a random way it is very easy to become distracted by an interesting, but irrelevant tweet or blog. That leads you to another and another and suddenly the morning has gone.

However, the world of PR and marketing is being turned on its head by the power of the internet – i.e. social media.  The internet is working its way through industries, changing them forever; buying books (Amazon), selling your stuff (eBay), buying and listening to music (iTunes, Spotify).  Now newspapers are dying a death.


So the crux of Social Media can be summarised in 61 words (provided by David Meerman Scott  who had some help from Randy Kaipaniolo  

You can buy attention (advertising)
You can beg for attention from the media (PR)
You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales)

Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, a book or an ebook, a Facebook page.
Earning attention

At Nimbus we’ve known the power of the earning attention. 5 years ago we wrote a book called Common Approach, and have sold or given (mostly given) away 5,000 copies in the UK and 30,000 copies in China.   More than anything else, that has built an understanding of how to drive transformation changes in corporations. From there it is a small step to Nimbus’ powerful process mapping and management application – but Nimbus is NEVER mentioned in the book.

This is SO important if you are an innovative startup. This si discussed in my book Why Killer Products Don't Sell. You can get a free book summary from Killer-Products.com

I have a investment in a publisher called Smart Questions.  The publisher is based on a couple of simple principles:

-          If you give someone a book they can’t throw it away

-          If you are an expert, using the Smart Questions structure, you can write a book in 40 hours (yes really)

-          Print on Demand means a print run of just ONE book is less than £8 / $12

 
The concept has really struck a chord and companies are writing Smart Questions books and giving them way instead of marketing material. 

Spin-off benefit for the planet: The books are kept (and possible read) and then passed onto someone else, but marketing material is trashed almost immediately.

So now we need to add blogging and Twitter into the PR mix.    So does it work?  Yes, but you need to persevere.  Be patient.  Earn trust. Give value.   2 tweets, a follow and then direct email DOES NOT WORK.  Those of you who have sent me junk email, and I have unfollowed you, you now understand why.

So does twitter and blogging work?

Dave Stewart, Eurythmics talked about radiators/drains on a national UK Drivetime radio show a few days earlier.  They searched on Google and my blog popped up.  Voila.   The blog is here  updating original one.    My bit is at 18mins here – includes a couple of non-PC remarks (no surprise there).

So hopefully a Radio4 presenter from a more business-oriented programme will listen and say ’We need to interview him’.    If not, no matter - it made my mum proud.  However, I’ve been surprised how many people have emailed me to say they heard my slot – either through email or on Twitter.

Another angle. 

Doug Richard of Dragon’s Den fame told a story about the Entrepreneur’s Manifesto he had written.  His PR team did an amazing job and got him an interview with the Financial Times. The journalist was initially dismissive saying there was no story, and finally wrote a couple of lines buried in an article.  Doug tweeted about it and with all the retweets it reached over 500,000 people within a couple of days.

The final word

But don’t think that blogs and tweets have replaced all other PR.  It is an additional channel, but requires a different technique. So don’t dismiss what you don’t understand.

 
 

Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics was interviewed on BBC Radio2 Simon Mayo Drivetime show and talked about "Drains and radiators".

So Simon Mayo interviewed me to explore it in some more detail.

Oprah Winfrey, when once asked what she wished she'd learned earlier in life said "I wish I'd known how to distinguish radiators from drains". 

"Radiators" are people who give out warmth, kindness, love, honesty, positivity, energy, enthusiasm and all the good things which people need and respond to.

"Drains" are people who are negative, downbeat, suck the energy out of others and don't like themselves.
 
So life's too short to work with drains ............... unless of course you're Dynorod.

So how does this work in practice?

Sir Clive Woodward, coach of world cup winning England Rugby team in 2003 inherited a set of players.  For a number of matches he was selecting on their match playing abilities - on their rugby skills.  But a training camp with the Royal Marines made him change his mind about team selection.  The Marine's words were ringing in his ears "It's not about skills. It's about atitude and the effect on the team. One wrong team player can sap all the energy from the group."

The ultimate test is going into battle, ie the Royal Marines. You're in the helicopter with 8 of your team going into a firefight. Looking around those 8 individuals you need to be very clear that they are the right people - energisers, not energy sappers.

So with sport the results are  very visible. There is no place to hide.  Win or lose. 

So does this work in businesses?

Yes it is totally true but decisions that could and should have been made about staffing are fudged and avoided.  There appears to be less at stake. 

Or maybe you've never thought about your employees in these terms.At Nimbus we hadn't. Until we had Sir Clive speak at a Nimbus Inspiring Performance conference.  We talked about energisers and energy sappers. Suddenly it struck us why some teams were performing and others not.  We took immediate action and let some of the staff go. The energy in the whole company soared. It is now a critical part of how we evaluate new hires.

So what are you....  And if you are a drain can you change? 

Here are 3 steps

1. recognise if you are drain (or have drain-like moments)
2. try and catch yourself once a day about so say something drain-like, turn it around and look for the bright side
3. do this every day for 21 days and you will be staggered by the results

Any if you are drain you REALLY will be staggered.
 

The Golden Circle: Why, How, What?

We all woke up in the UK this morning to a shock result – no result. A hung parliament.

As a sidenote: Think how things have changed from the election 4 years ago.  Where did you go first to check on the result this time.... tv, radio, (free or politically aligned) newspaper, Twitter, web, Facebook.  And whose opinion on the impact did you trust most?

So I’ve seen a number of bloggers and journalists saying that  a hung parliament can be made to work because it is just like running a business – it requires collaboration and compromise.

Let’s examine this idea in more detail.  What makes a business work?

-    A leader with decision making power: Even if they are not making the correct decisions, at least they are making decisions which sets the strategy or direction for the company. Examples of companies in turmoil are those where the leader has left and the company is left rudderless and there is fighting for the leadership position

-    A shared goal or some direction:  In the absence of any clear strategic direction, it is to be successful enough so that employees can continue to earn a salary. To win work and make money. Very few people want to see the company they work for fail.

-    A level of transparency: People try and keep politics out of business because hidden agendas slow down any real action. Why are smaller companies more nimble, have less bureaucracy and more enjoyable to work in.  People spend less time ‘politicking’ / managing their career and more time focused on the job

I don’t see any of these traits in a hung parliament. In fact it is the complete opposite

Lets contrast this with Nimbus where I am Chairman and CEO.

At Nimbus we have an Exec Team who actually likes working together. We work together and play together. As Chairman and CEO I am not a dictator, but harness the energy and experience of the Exec Team to get an agreed direction. We genuinely work in a collaborative way.

We've been together long enough to know what each is thinking, we have a common goal (profitable growth), we are not afraid to speak our minds, we are not fearful of losing our jobs in a Boardroom coup. That is refreshing and fun.

Remember – Life is not a dress rehearsal. We get only one go at it. So do something you enjoy.

Net result.  The company is performing well.  The Exec Team enjoys working together. That feeds its way down the company. We have a happy, high performing company which people (clients, partners, employees) want to be around.

“Very pink and fluffy – give me some facts” some of you may be saying. 

-    We have very low attrition.  The last person who resigned from the company, came back 3 months later. The resignation before that was over 4 years ago – so way before the recession.

-    2 years ago we look at the market and were concerned about a slowdown so we cut costs and very regrettably made some staff redundant. It was very painful, but necessary. Now business is on the up we are hiring. The first of those made redundant has re-joined the company. That says a lot for the redundancy process; sympathetic, fair, integrity.

- we don't need to pay headhunters to find us staff.  We have brilliant people come to us who want to work for Nimbus - often taking a pay cut.

There is a lot of research that a Happy Company produces Better Returns and a recent book by FT Press called  What Happy Companies Know spells it out

Happy companies are winning companies. Well-adjusted, psychologically healthy companies collaborate better. They innovate more effectively. They change faster. They see reality with exceptional clarity, but they know how to address it positively.

Does that sound like working as a senior politician in a hung parliament? I think not.

 

We all want to succeed, but few people get the very special advice that L. Vaughan Spencer gives to his clients. Here he takes tea with the Economist

Do the math. Organizations are pyramids – albeit flatter nowadays. But there are more people at the bottom than the top. And those at the bottom are more likely to be younger than those at the top. And as companies are becoming leaner they are removing layers of middle management which means that there are proportionally even more Gen Y employees.

So why does this matter? They are becoming a far more important proportion of the workforce not just due to pure numbers, but for three other critical reasons.

Firstly, “technology is not technology if it was invented before you were born”.  So Gen Y were born after the internet, websites, Google, mobile phones and laptops were invented. They simply accept and expect them as part of their daily working lives. 

Secondly, they spend time in their private lives using cool, compelling and innovative websites, applications and devices. That sets an expectation about what they want to use at work. And they are often disappointed. So they use their own solutions which Cloud Computing now makes possible.

Finally, in a service-based industry they are touching the customer; setting the customer’s perception of the company’s culture and intent. In the insurance sector, they are taking on liabilities for the company which could last for years. In many industries they need to demonstrate they are following policies and procedures for regulatory and compliance reasons.

So there is a very strong need to ensure that Gen Y is engaged. But engaging Gen Y is far more difficult than previous generations. 

So what is your company doing about it?  Are they even trying to understand the needs, aspirations and desires of Gen Y?

What are your software vendors doing to produce applications with interfaces which appeal to Gen Y? Are they also offering an interface which appeals to other demographic groups?

At Nimbus it is something we are taking very seriously. It is critical that our business process management application, Nimbus Control, is adopted by everyone in the organisation because it delivers an organisation’s Online Operations Manual.

For compliance, business improvement, risk and governance reasons it is critical that every person in the organisation is able – and wants to – access the processes and related procedures, systems, policies forms and documents.  That is why we have developed a number of different user interfaces on the web and also one which has a "desktop music player" feel and another which runs on the iPhone and iPad. 

The Zune was never the iPod killer. Even now it is a faint pretender.  So can the Microsoft Courier out-do iPad? If you watch this video it seems a more compelling proposition than the "iPad is just a big iPhone" approach by Apple.

But there are some questions still.  

- Can the product actually LOOK and FEEL cool?  Not just black/chrome but "Apple-cool".  Remember the first Zunes were shit-brown. 

- Is the price compelling enough? SteveB was quoted as 

"You can't be high-priced," Ballmer told a group of analysts at Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting back in June 2009. "That doesn't get us to the high volume that we aspire to."

- How are Microsoft going to get apps available to run on it?Remember the iPad has all those iPhone apps ready to go.  The initial views is the device will run WinMobile7 and not Win7. 

Finally, when will it be available? 

This is an excerpt from my recent book, co authored with Mark McGregor called Thinking of... People-Centric Process Management? Ask the Smart Questions  published by Smart Questions

One way that we have found to consider the different perspectives is to use hats. We understand that each of the four groups has in most cases valuable inputs and concerns about any given process. At the same time we also find that it is important to differentiate between the differing views and perspectives.

Using the hat system described below in workshop situations has meant it is easier for people to appreciate other views, easier to build consensus and easier for people to identify risks and priorities. The following is a simplified take on what each hat represents and the key needs of each group represented by the hat color and style.

End Users

End users (or business users) are focused on delivering business results through processes. They understand that processes are how they work and deliver the products or services that provide value to our customers. These people also understand that good internal processes assist with staff training and ensure consistency. For some business users good processes also make it easier to move staff around or to expand operations, they use them to enable scalability. They are interested in ensuring that processes are logical, effective and accessible – in short they want processes that help them work the way they need to, they do not want to have to change the way they work to suit a new system.

These people understand the problems in the business and the frustrations of their customers. They are the source of a massive amount of knowledge.

On the down side they can also be blinkered at times into only seeing solutions from a very narrow angle, they can be the type of people that Henry Ford was thinking about when he said “If I had asked them they would have asked for a faster horse!”

These End Users we refer to as our Green Hats.

IT Department

The IT department wants to understand the business users’ view of the operation to ensure that the IT systems they build and maintain truly support the business users, at minimum cost. They want to ensure that there is integrity of information as it flows around the systems. Paradoxically although they suggest that they are very interested in process, they are in fact interested really in procedure because it is at this level the software applications operate. The reasons being that in order to build a system one has to know exactly how a decision is made and which path to go down when, there is no room for ambiguity?

Traditionally IT departments have not had a great track record in understanding the business or the real needs of customers, but happily this is now starting to change. Conversely though because of technology there are new and innovative ways of doing business that many of our Green Hats could never dream of. So ensuring we that we are getting great advice from the IT department is vital, to ignore them is highly risky in today’s world.

The IT Department is staffed with the White Hats.

IT Vendors

The IT system providers such as ERP, BPMS or Cloud vendors want to ensure that the configuration of their system is managed accurately and that it hangs together end-to-end i.e. passes System Testing and User Acceptance Testing.  In short, they are looking to ensure that it meets the user needs, but more importantly perhaps that they can get paid quickly. Of course they do also want to ensure that they have happy and referenceable customers.

Although they talk to solving business problems and so try to align themselves with the Green Hats, they frequently find themselves as having more in common with our White Hats.
In an ever changing landscape they find themselves having to increasingly act like chameleons, on one hand they know that the Green Hats control the budget for them, while on the other hand the White Hats control the ability for them to be installed.

Good clear processes will usually lead to clear requirements from customers, thus making it easier for this group to identify how well suited their application or platform might be to the client’s needs.

The danger with this group is that they have a tendency to always believe that their system does everything that everyone else does but better. This can make it hard for Green and White Hats to chose between Blue Hats.

The IT Vendors are Blue Hats.

Risk and Compliance

The Risk and Compliance Officers want to be able to demonstrate to auditors that end users are following a documented process, and that the correct risk control points have been identified and are effectively managed from a governance, ownership and auditing standpoint.  Unfortunately in an ever regulated and litigious society the needs put upon business by risk and compliance is getting ever greater. This burden seems to fly in the face of waste removal or Lean initiatives, but does not look like getting better in the near future. So the risk and compliance team have a vital part to play in identifying, managing and improving processes.

The prime interest then is that of auditability and provability, some suggest that in simple terms their role is to keep management and executives out of jail. Whilst this may seem glib or trite it may be nearer to the truth than some people realize.
As with the other groups, they will look at the problem from their own perspective. The risk of course being that the cost of being compliant far outweighs the commercial benefit of compliance, as ever it is a balancing act.

This is the Red Hat perspective.

 

The questionnaire is the form “Are you a sensitive lover” which are found in Mens magazines.  At the end you can add up your scores and based on the answer we’ve suggested some things to think about.

Try our simple quiz to find out if you are really ready for it by answering our multiple-choice questions and then totting up your score…

NEED - Do I need this… some typical signs?

Q1. Do we have one or more business transformation initiatives?
a. Yes, they are coordinated by a Programme Office with a shared business model
b. No, but there is one major initiative across the company
c. Yes, but we seem to have difficulty coordinating the results
d. I’ve no idea. Each department does their own thing

Q2: Are the following initiatives company – enterprise application implementation (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain), 6 Sigma, Business Process Reengineering, Sarbanes Oxley, M&A integration, outsourcing/shared services, launching new operations…..):
a. 1 or less
b. 2-4
c. More than 4
d. Probably all of them

Q3: We only get a percentage of the benefits stated in the business case.  This typically get:
a.  75-100%
b.  50-75%
c.  Less than 50%
d.  We don’t ever measure the benefits

DESIRE – Is there a strong enough desire to follow through?

Q4: Our positioning vs. the competition is best described:
a. We are setting the pace of change for others to follow
b. We are able respond to change and are able to stay competitive
c. We able respond to change but at a huge cost
d. We are unable to respond quickly enough

Q5: Our ability to stay alive requires us to transform the business:
a. No – we need some small course corrections
b. Yes – but it is limited to one business unit-
c. Yes – we recognize that changes are required
d. Yes – we require a radical overhaul of the business model

Q6:  The top team and managers recognize the benefits of moving to a process-focused approach
a. We have aligned our org chart to the cross-functional processes
b. We have process owners and a functional org chart
c. Work is organized in line with functional organization
d. Getting managers in different departments to talk would be a first

Q7: Which of these statements best reflects your attitude to compliance?
a. My company has to achieve the highest levels of compliance.
b. It’s a necessary evil.
c. It can sometimes get in the way of business.
d. I wonder who will get found out next?
OPPORTUNITY – Are there initiatives where this could be applied now?

Q8: I can see an initiative where we could apply these principles
a. We are already have a central source of information reused by all initiatives
b. We have a perfect initiative starting in the next month – the business case is being presented at the next Board meeting
c. I can see an opportunity in the next 3-6 months
d. I’d need the management team and project managers to read this book before I’d get them to adopt these ideas

Q9: We can mandate this approach on our external consultants
a. We mandate a process focused approach in all projects
b. We have a good relationship and the consultants are open to new ideas
c. We would need to convince the consultants of the benefits of this approach
d. We have fixed price contracts and they will fleece us if we try to change

Q10: How much is the business controlled by regulatory bodies
a. Very little - thankfully
b.  As we have a US parent we need to comply with Sarbanes Oxley
c. We need to comply with our industry regulations (is FSA for Financial Services, FDA for Pharmaceuticals)
d. You name it  - we’ve got it. It seems like we work for the compliance offices.

CAPABILITY – Do we have the technical infrastructure and the skills?

Q11: How well connected is the organization?
a. All our offices are connected by a single intranet and many of our staff have full access to servers and systems from home
b. All our offices are connected by a single intranet
c. We have separate intranets for each country
d.  We are thinking of outsourcing this area of IT

Q12: How long does it take to get a new software application installed?
a. With a business sponsor, less than 1 month.  That is the IT dept’s SLA
b. Less than a month on a test server, and less than 3 months into production
c. It varies a lot based IT’s priorities – you put it in the queue and wait
d. We’ve outsourced IT to XXX so it is now impossible

Q13: What experience is there of running process-focused projects?
a. We are currently running all projects using the principles in this book
b.  We have a project manager who has the skills and a small team of analysts
c. We have strong project skills, but would need coaching and support
d. This would be a first.  We would be dependent on external consultants

LEADERSHIP – Is there support at senior management to become process-focused?

Q14: Do you have a single strategy in place which aligns the top team?
a)    Yes. We couldn’t perform without it.
b)    Yes. We reached agreement on a strategy in the end.
c)    Yes. I think so.
d)    Yes. In fact we have several of them and we’ll probably have a new one next week).

Q15: How many of the top team would openly endorse the principles in the book?
a . Virtually all of them.  A couple of them could have written the book
b. Certainly the operational side – the finance guys have a numbers basis
c. Very few, but after they’ve read it they would be open to the approach
d. Forget it.  They are too busy fighting turf-wars

Q16: What chance is there of changing the organization structure around the end to end processes ?
a. We’re nearly there
b. We’d be more comfortable with a matrix organization reconciling functions with processes
c. We’ve a strong functional organization and we’d need to be convinced of the benefits
d. Didn’t you see my answer to Q15 .  No way.

Q17: If you were to receive an award for your desk, which one of these phrases would be engraved:
a. ‘The buck stops here’
b. ‘Executive of the year’
c. ‘It was like that when I found it’
d. ‘Gone for lunch – back in 2008”.

 
Interpreting your score

Now simply add up your scores (with or without the help of your accountant, as necessary).
For every a) you score 10 points; every b) = 8 points; every c) = 5 points; every d) = 0 points.  How have you done? How ready are you for it?

Over 120 points:
Great – you’re red-hot. Give me a call because I’d love to profile your success story on our website and in the next book. 

80-120 points:
You’re nearly ready to take the plunge, but there are still a few things you need to sort out. At least you are aware of that some things need to change. Think through all of the issues raised in this book and, once you’ve done that, you can leap right in.

30-80 points:
Unless you get a lot more buy-in for the principles any initiative is likely to fail. It sounds like you need a bulk order of the book so you can distribute it more widely – or get the top team to attend one of our seminars.

0–30 points:
You’re clearly passionate about the process-focused approach or you wouldn’t have read this far, but you’re clearly in the wrong company.  Come and talk to us, because we know some companies that need you.  At the very least get out now before the excitement in you dies.
 

I've been re-reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  One section that fascinated me was the chapter on "Why People Love Tall Men".

A survey of thousands of people in the US showed that every extra inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary - and far more so if you are in the upper level of management.

BTW You don't get the same effect is you are short man who wears high heels.

A summary of the ideas are below from Gladwells website

This excerpt is from the part of "Blink" where I talk about the things that throw off our powers of rapid cognition. I've just been talking about a test--called the IAT--which measures your level of "unconscious prejudice." That's the kind of prejudice that you have that you aren't aware of, that affects the kinds of impressions and conclusions that you reach automatically, without thinking.

Or what if the person you are interviewing is tall? On a conscious level, I'm sure that all of us don't think that we treat tall people any differently from short people. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that height--particularly in men--does trigger a certain set of very positive, unconscious associations. I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list--the largest corporations in the United States--asking each company questions about its CEO. The heads of big companies are, as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias.

But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5'9" that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6'2" or taller.

Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6'2" or taller. The lack of women or minorities among the top executive ranks at least has a plausible explanation. For years, for a number of reasons having to do with discrimination and cultural patterns, there simply weren't a lot of women and minorities entering the management ranks of American corporations. So today, when boards of directors look for people with the necessary experience to be candidates for top positions, they can argue somewhat plausibly that there aren't a lot of women and minorities in the executive pipeline. But this is simply not true of short people.

It is possible to staff a company entirely with white males, but it is not possible to staff a company without short people: there simply aren't enough tall people to go around. Yet none of those short people ever seem to make it into the executive suite. Of the tens of millions of American men below 5'6", a grand total of ten--in my sample--have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American.

(The grand exception to all of these trends is American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who is both on the short side (5'9") and black. He must be a remarkable man to have overcome two Warren Harding Errors.)

Is this a deliberate prejudice? Of course not. No one ever says, dismissively, of a potential CEO candidate that 'he's too short.' This is quite clearly the kind of unconscious prejudice that the IAT picks up. Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense, in our minds, of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.

And this isn't confined to the corporate suite. Not long ago, researchers went back and analyzed the data from four large research studies, that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood, and calculated that when corrected for variables like age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary. That means that a person who is six feet tall, but who is otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five, will make on average $5,525 more per year. As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the study, points out: "If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage."

Have you ever wondered why so many mediocrities find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It's because when it comes to even the most important positions, we think that our selection decisions are a good deal more rational than they actually are. We see a tall person, and we swoon.

A great debate last night at CIONet with presentations on various aspects of Cloud Computing.  

Andrew Jordan of Complinet presented a compelling case for their migration from MSExchange to Gmail and some unexpected benefits. Here's a video which summarises his experiences

I presented ideas from my book on Thinking of ... Buying a Cloud Solution. The fact that business users "don't know what they don't know" and are buying Cloud Solutions and putting their business as risk (compliance, governance and security). The lucky CIOs invited to the event were given a complimentary copy of the book - thanks to CIONet

Lucy Mills from Nimbus presented their experiences of developing a raft of app using Salesforce.com and Force.com and the current implementation of FinancialForce.com

Then Paul Parsons of Server Labs talked about the mind-blowing amount of data (1PB one petabyte) that the European Space Agency Gaia project are planning to collect and process on Amazon EC2

The rise of the Steath Cloud

One element of the debate was the rise of business initiated cloud computing, which the CIO may never hear about.  Something I'm calling the Stealth Cloud

Cloud Computing seems to have struck a chord in a way that ASP, OnDemand, SaaS and all the previous incarnations never have. Every analyst is blogging and tweeting about it, there are a slew of conferences, and a surprising number of books have already been published.

And there is now more than one sort of Cloud. There are Public Clouds and Private Clouds. I propose “Stealth Cloud” should be added to the lexicon.    As the name suggests is does its job – quietly, unseen, unnoticed.

Silver lining?

So business people are embracing the ideas of Cloud Computing. Why? Because they can see immediate value from the applications and services being offered.  And with technology becoming easier to develop there seems to be no limit to what is being provided in the Cloud, all packaged in a very compelling, fun user experience. 

Consumers are business people too

So when the individual is provided with these elegant services as a consumer it is inevitable that they bring them to work. With services such as on-line backup, project management, CRM, collaboration and social networking all available through a browser, is it any surprise business users are signing up and ignoring the staid and boring applications provided by the IT department.

Hence the rise of the Stealth Cloud.  Services being consumed by business users without the knowledge, permission or support of the CIO and the IT department.

The widening business IT divide

Too much has been talked about the Business IT divide. But unfortunately the Stealth Cloud has driven an even greater rift between business and IT.  It is exposing, as far as the business are concerned the lack of flexibility, agility and responsiveness of IT.  From IT’s perspective who can see the risks (operational, compliance and integration) of using some of these Cloud services, is simply underlines how cavalier and naïve the business users are.

Unfair rap

Corporate systems are costly to build and maintain. They are mission critical and need to support the entire operation.  So there is a good reason why the internal IT department cannot ‘knock-out’ application as fast as a nimble start-up.  The IT department is spending 80% of its time and effort ‘keeping the lights on’ and the remaining 20% on providing new solutions that are robust, scalable, secure and integrated into the core applications. How many of the ‘new’ Cloud providers are truly enterprise ready?
 

Do you recognise any of thse discussions in your dealings with customer or vendors.  See how they make you squirm when applied to 'real life'.

P!nk takes 'performance' in rock concert terms to a different level

Even if you don't like P!ink worth watching 3:15 - 3:30 - exquisite timing 

Heard a lovely quote the other day:

Analysts are rather like eunuchs in a brothel.  They come to work each day and see it being done, they spend time talking to those who do it, they know all about the approaches and techniques, but no longer able to do it.

"There's a flip side to everything," the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.

The debate about the iPad, which sounds like an expensive tampon, about is it a PC minus the keyboard, USB ports etc etc or is really an iPhone which won't fit in your pocket...  is missing the point.

Yes Steve Jobs failed to make the launch visionary  and instead made it a tech fest for Apple afficiados. so yes, many will get bought regardless of the price/functionality.

But what the iPad should have done is started busineses thinking about where they could use a very visual, wifi connected, touch screen device to enable mobile workers to be more productive.

By that I mean BPM applications running on the iPad or equivalents such as Plastic Logic QUE and HP Slate.  Now when I say BPM I do not just mean automation / workflow / form filling applications.  Your local UPS guy has had one of those for ever with a grey LCD screen.

The awesome screen resolution of the iPod Touch / iPhone means that the entire operations manual for the company can be delivered so that workers can follow and understand the combination of manual and automated activities, plus links to the supporting documents, policies, forms, images and systems.

Let’s give an example, which one of our clients was describing to a journalist today.  He is Head of BPM for a global oil company.  His business is strongly regulated; Health and Safety and also SOX. 

He has staff on rigs or in refineries that are several miles square.  Operations staff are often out and about taking samples, checking on equipment and maintaining plant.

They have a wide range of responsibilities and often come across situations where they need guidance;

For example: A leaking pump that may require certain valves to be shut down. The operations manual could describe the sequence of activity supported by photographs, a link to the maintenance intranet page to report the fault, and the PDF with the pump schematic and the different maintenance fault codes.  The alternative would be make a note and then decipher the handwriting, possible soaking wet after a 10 min walk across the windswept Aberdeen site in northern Scotland.

Alternatively senior management are rarely at their desks, but need to make decisions, authorise actions and support staff.  Their iPod Touch  /  iPhone could be loaded with their process-related walkthroughs:

-    The budgeting cycle with guidance, hints and tips and links to the correct screens in the budgeting application

-    The HR review process with links to useful training videos which can be watched on the train into work prior to conducting the review meetings. Or equally valuable, guidance on interview best practice or the redundancy process.

-    How about processes which are disposable, relating to a specific event?  The step by step process for a 2 day conference or analyst/press roadshow, complete with links to the briefing documents, media clips or webpages at the relevant step. Or maybe the detailed step by step process for an M&A transaction.

So where does this information come from?  A centrally managed process repository. It consists of a governed process map made up of a hierarch y of thousands of diagrams.  Process related documentation; policies, work instructions, screenshots, links to systems, metrics, dashboards.

And also role-based end to end flows – guided walkthroughs – which we call Storyboards or Playbooks.
All this information can be accesses directly through the web or synchronised with a PC desktop player or onto a mobile device .
Is this the future.  Were we waiting for the iPad to make this possible?  Absolutely not.

Nimbus Control BPM software has been managing the enterprise process repositories for major blue-chip clients for over 10 years, and as a Cloud based app for 4years.

We’ve just launched Nimbus Control for the iPhone (and I assume for the iPad once we get our hands on one to test) to enable end users to get away from their desks and still be confident they are doing the right things the right way.

Sir Ken Robinson on why schools kill creativity

Sir Ken is speaking in London 9th March at the London Business Forum

Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+

A quick search on Google for BPM got exactly 15,900,000 hits.  There are a huge range of definitions or perspectives on what those three letters mean.  Business Process Management, Business Process Modeling (with 1 or 2 ‘L’s), Business Process Mapping. A couple of interesting finds were that BPM is the national time clock in China, and possibly more relevant, BPM-Focus is an energy drink sold exclusively in Ireland by Coca Cola.

Not wrong, just different

These different interpretations of BPM are not wrong – they are just different.  Clearly there is some miscommunication and ambiguity between people who genuinely mean the same thing. But there are very different interpretations based on the need or use of the ‘process model’.  Incidentally, the term process model means just as many different things to different people.

The risk is that when these individuals discuss processes and process models they naturally assume that the others in the conversation have exactly the same understanding. Everyone leaves the meeting thinking that they are in complete agreement, but then are horribly confused when they act differently.

Many people will recognise this from the HSBC Different Points of View advertising at airports;               

"The more you look at the world, the more you realise that people
     look at things from a different perspective”

4 Audiences - 4 hats

We have identified 4 different audiences that talk about process - but each means something different. And to make things simpler, or more graphic we have given them different coloured hats:

Green hats:

End users (or business users) want to use the process model for staff training and moment of need support when they are unsure how to conduct a task. The process model needs to include (or link to) detailed work instructions, forms, templates, systems and performance metrics.  In this respect the process model acts as a powerful knowledge management resource.  The process model is the starting point for all manner of business performance improvement initiatives.

Now that hat may be on ‘sideways’ as in service based organisations the average age of employees is under-30 – Gen Y or the iPod generation. These are the frontline staff  who touch the customers day in day out.


White Hats:

The IT department want to understand the business users’ view of the operation to ensure that the IT systems they build and maintain truly support the business users, at minimum cost. They want to ensure that there is integrity of information as it flows around the systems.
 
Blue Hats:
The IT system providers such as SAP, Oracle or Salesforce.com want to ensure that the configuration of their system is managed accurately and that it hangs together end-to-end i.e. passes System Testing and User Acceptance Testing.  In short, that it meets the users needs.

Red Hats:

The risk and compliance officers want to be able to demonstrate to auditors that end users are following a documented process, and that the correct risk control points have been identified and are effectively managed from a governance, ownership and auditing standpoint.

The Final Word

So what are the conclusions or takeaways from this?

•    There are 4 audiences – with different needs & perspectives
•    Each audience needs to respect and accommodate all 4 views
•    A 4 audiences need to collaborate and therefore need a common understanding of process and how they are modeled
•    That common model may need some compromises but has to be understood by all 4 audiences.  Therefore it has to use a language business (90% of the audience) will understand
•    Need for governance and cross linkage critical or the 4 audience will diverge

This argues for one multifaceted process model, which links to related systems and information which supports all 4 audiences.  If that’s correct, it confirms why there’s a B in BPM.

So the next time you think that you are in ‘violent agreement - step back, look up and take a look at the hat the other person is wearing.

The current weather problems are not a spike (1-2 days) but prolonged.   Therefore it has exposed companies who are not ‘process mature’ . 

But this problem applies to a number of business disruptions – power cuts, postal strikes, airline delays, data centre failure.   A quick spike and you can muddle through with staff heroics  - Heroics is the Process Maturity Curve (below).  But those heroics cannot be sustained for long. More mature organisations are at Defined or beyond in terms of maturity. 

When there is a problem they simply switch into a pre-defined ‘alternative working’ mode.   Example is Nimbus.  We switched to “staff can’t get in” mode;  support desk remote working, telephone rerouting, rules on use of VPN, etc etc.  We also have a “network connectivity / no power to office “ mode – an issue when you have a stately home in the middle of 2,000 acres of woods.

So – “What are your alternative modes of working and are they defined?  Can you switch to them without fuss, and then switch back without leaving data orphaned/lost?’   Shell called this scenario planning.  But it takes thought.  And sometimes doing is easier than thinking. 
 

Every year the Confident Club put out their thoughts on New Year's resolutions to a select group of their clients. As I whole heartedly agree with them, I thought I'd share them with you.

How to be the same old failure in the New Year
 
New Year's Eve... It's one minute to midnight... You're thinking one or all of the following:
 - Who can I kiss?

 - Who can I avoid kissing?

 - How much champagne is left?
 - What does "Should auld acquaintance be forgot for the sake of auld lang syne" actually mean?

Or

How come I never get invited to any parties? Just me and Jules Holland on TV again? I'm a sad loser? I must set some New Year's Resolutions.

Now let us consider that last thought. Here are the top ten most popular New Year's Resolutions:

1.    Get a life. A recent poll shows that 97% of people lead lives of quiet desperation. Then die. And are quite pleased.

2.    Get fit. Regular exercise has been associated with more health benefits than anything else known to man. That's why we hate it.

3.    Lose weight. 55% of adults are overweight. 45% of adults point and laugh at the other 55%.

4.    Quit smoking. On average, smokers try about four times before they quit for good. By which time, because of their massive mood swings, they have no friends left and so start smoking again through intense loneliness.

5.    Enjoy life more. 90% vow to make this the year to appreciate life itself. And wear flowers in their hair.

6.    Quit drinking. For many this really gets in the way of resolution five.

7.    Get out of debt. 11 people out of 10 believe money will solve their problems. They also struggle with fractions.

8.    Make money. See above.

9.    Save money. Ditto.

10.  Get organised. Just where is that important tax return? Is it under paper mountain one, two or twelve? Can't someone invent a kind of metal detector thing but for important documents?
 

And here are the top ten reasons why people fail to keep their New Year Resolutions. It's important you don't read, or understand any of them, if you want to keep that wonderful feeling of underachievement you get from falling at the first hurdle, year after sorry year.

1.    Limiting beliefs. Beliefs control all of your behaviours. If you don't change these nothing will change. For example, if you believe money is the root of all evil, it is.

2.    No strong reason why. Most people get started with the when* or the how but what matters most is the why. Membership of health and fitness clubs quadruple in January. Most people stop going by March. Because the only reason why they had was something they resolved to do on a whim at 11.59pm on December 31st.

3.    Not knowing your values.We need to move in line with the things that are most important to us. If the reason you are doing something isn't important to you, if it doesn't align with your values, it will be hard to stay motivated.

4.    No vision. What will success look, sound and feel like say a year from now? Most sabotage their New Year's Resolutions by not creating a crystal clear picture of their future success and playing it back over and over again inside their head.

5.    No clearly defined goal. If your goal is wishy washy so will be your results. Which is best: "I want to lose lots of blubber" or "I will be my ideal weight of 12st by 1st August by losing 3oz a day"?

6.    Not involving others. There is no successful person on the planet who has achieved anything on their own. Life is a team game.

7.    Not taking personal responsibility. "People are as happy as they make up their minds to be" so spoke Abraham Lincoln. I know it's hard to believe but you got yourself into this mess and until you take personal responsibility to get out of it you will be forever stuck in the mire blaming everyone but yourself for your misfortune.

8.    Not taking massive action. "After all is said and done more is said than done." Need I say more.

9.    No measurement of results. Feedback is the breakfast of champions- whatever that means. If you don't regularly monitor and measure your progress, get quality feedback and develop flexibility on the journey towards your goal you will never reach it.

10.  Not taking time to celebrate the little wins along the way. If you don't break your goal down into bite sized chunks and give yourself a little pat on the back every time you enjoy progress, no matter how small, you will feel overwhelmed and under motivated.

* By the way, New Year is a crap time to decide to change your life for the better. The one and only reason you have for doing it then is that it's a tradition. (First started by the Babylonians who celebrated New Year's Day over four thousand years ago, although their celebration was in March rather than in January, coinciding with the spring planting of crops. The Babylonians still quit going to the gym in droves in April.)

The Confident Club  www.theconfidentclub.com

Social Networking is everywhere.  A recent blog posting listed the top 50 sites where you need to make sure that your business is listed.  That is a full time job on top of all the other PR and analyst relations you need to do.

A quote from the MD of one business says it all

"There are 50 (obviously much more than that) sites that you need to have a presence on in order to "pull off" your social media strategy. I dont know about you, but I dont have time to sit on a computer all day and manage my real-time social/business profile. I mean it's getting kind of nuts, wouldn't you agree? There must be a simpler way. Today I need to go to LinkedIn to talk to folks like you. Go to YouTube to upload a video. Go to Facebook to add a picture. Forget MySpace, that's a joke. And Twitter baffles me. 140 character messages to people I dont know? Dont get it. And the kicker is, none of these sites are exclusive for my industry. I think that is what bugs me the most. I want one site, dedicated to my industry where I can do everything I need to do and where every one else is also hanging out thinking the same thing. Load pictures, write a blog, add my company, upload a video, chat, etc. And it's all connected."

So for all those of you who are confused - it is only going to get worse before it gets better.  Eventually the top products will win out and the rest will be noise.  But to see where it has all come from, here is a look back at 2009 in terms of Social Networking.

2009 in Social Media from Rob Cottingham on Vimeo. (credit where its due)

Walking along the edge of harbour on a very bright, crisp cold Sunday with our 2 children aged 8 and 10 we noticed one of the houses had very prominent solar panels. So the discussion got onto saving the planet, the recent Summit in Copenhagen and how businesses consume natural resources; electricity, cars to get people to work and airtravel.

Pretty serious stuff for a Sunday morning. And then the discussion got onto Nimbus.  "So Daddy, if we are all meant to be saving the planet, what does your company do to help?" My initial reaction was "Well. not much..."

But, it got me thinking. We now use web-ex  more and fly less than we ever did. I gladly gave back my BA Silver Card in exchange for a Blue card (Note to BA - couldn't that be spun into a clever PR angle by renaming it a Green Card. They certainly could do with the positive spin). The knock on effect of reduced expenses is a welcome by-product, plus less wear and tear on our staff.

Our HQ is in a large stately home in the middleof 2,000 acres of woods.  Last year they installed a huge wood chipping and burning facility to heat the buildings. And wood is not something they are short of.

Many of our staff work from home reducing the cars on the road and again making them more effective. My commute the office is over an hour, but that is because I choose to mountain bike through the hills to work - the long way which includes a couple of climbs with stunning views over Chichester Harbour.  The direct route takes  just 15 mins.  But when I get to work I need to fight for the showers as a large number of staff have taken advantage of subsidised bicycles on the Government Ride2Work scheme.

But a larger point is that Nimbus Control is being used by major corporations to help them reduce waste and improve their efficiencies. That probably has a greatest effect.

So, satisifed with that, the kids turned their thoughts to lunch at the sailing club, and whether ice cream was on offer. Now we were back on a siubject where I could be clear on the answer - "Maybe. We'll see"

Just walked in to the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall with 3 colleagues. Unfortunately their expresso machine is not working so no Café Latte, Café Cappucino or Hot chocolates.  Not the best start to the day. So to add some humour to the situation, I suggested we get a couple of coffees from the Café Nero or Pret a Manager next door. I was politely and firmly told that I could not bring anything in from outside.

Rules are rules.

But not according to an article on the IOD website title An awkward customer in the section Business Information and Advice > Marketing & Sales >  "If what the customer wants is actually reasonable, you will have gained a valuable insight into your marketplace. Small businesses don't typically have customer satisfaction surveys because they can't afford it. Customer complaints are a great source of information for improving your service."

So a bad situation got worse due to the attitude of the staff.

So how could this have been resolved? In order of outstanding customer service….

-    They could have offered to have got the coffees for us from Café Nero, charged us and put them in IOD cups
-    Less customer-centric, but still acceptable, we could have got the coffees ourselves from Café Nero, and they put it in IOD cups
-    We go somewhere else…   Where?

Obviously Café Nero which has friendly staff with a sense of humour, working expresso machines, cheaper cofee and free wifi.   So what exactly was the IOD membership for?

Public clouds could take decades to mature, says Gartner. Organisations should focus on private clouds in the meantime
Organisations are more likely to spend their money on investments in private clouds in the next few years despite the many benefits of public cloud infrastructures, according to analyst firm Gartner.

In a research note published today, distinguished analyst Tom Bittman argued that private cloud services would provide a stepping stone to public services, with the latter maybe taking decades to mature enough for enterprise use.

In a report by Phil Muncaster of www.V3.co.uk he discusses the findings.

But I’d like to question the assessment claim by Gartner. Decades is a long time in technology. 10 years ago a mobile phone was brick, a USB with 256K was pretty cool and the internet was pretty flaky.  10 years from now, what can we expect.  Already the most of the technology in Microsoft’s envisioning video is available – although not commercially in the market.

Plastic Logic, a client of Nimbus is launching an A4 reader as thin as paper next month.

Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google all have offerings that have massive investments behind them and they are not aimed at just the SME or consumer.  They are architected and priced so that ISVs or enterprises can run their applications in the Cloud - reliably and securely - and I am sure that their business models do not assume 10-20 years to break even.

So maybe the reference is to the maturity of enterprise clients willingness to use public Clouds.  The revenue growth of Salesforce.com in the enterprise sector and a just one of many article in the computer press  "Chief information officers are more comfortable with the idea of cloud computing than they were six months ago" ComputerWeekly suggests that enterprises will take less than decades to adopt public clouds.

So maybe the jury is out - or Gartner are predicting in 'internet-years' where a decade is the same as one earth-year.


 

At a time when it seems every Apple product launch turns to gold (literally) and Steve Jobs has just been crowed CEO of the decade by Fortune, suddenly a few of the analysts are breaking ranks and starting to question Apple's untouchable status.

George F. Colony’s from Forrester’s article titled “What We Shouldn't Learn From Steve Jobs” asks whether Steve is exceptional and rather than try to become Steve clones we should question where his role model shouldn’t be followed. His article starts

”I don't know about you, but I am developing a major inferiority complex as I contemplate the achievements of Steve Jobs. In a decade that has been punishing and humbling for most CEOs, Steve has conjured victory after victory from the whole cloth of his vision, imagination, and singular focus on excellence. I am in complete agreement with Fortune Magazine's assessment that he is the "CEO of the Decade." -- I was already taking note back in 2004.

When confronted with a problem, a new favorite question of CEOs is: "What would Steve do?"

Don't get me wrong -- there will be many useful lessons from the Steve Jobs/Apple repertoire -- I expect a few great books will take on the task of revealing them. So I'll leave that to others.

But let's ask another question -- what shouldn't we learn from Steve Jobs?”

The areas he lists are
 - His lessons don't work in business to business environments.
-  His approach wouldn't work for complex products.
 -  Apple's fear-based management style wouldn't fit in people-intensive businesses.
 -  Steve is not just any CEO

 -  Apple is in a highly-specialized industry.

By the storm of comments in response to his article he has certainly challenged people’s comfortable thinking. But the article is worth reading and calm your initial (positive or negative) reaction and think more deeply about the questions.

The Rebecca Wettman at Nucleus Research (famous for the Siebel slap a few Xmas’s ago - see below) has asked “Is it time to short Apple (APPL) stock?” Her thoughts are below

“Maybe not just yet, but Apple is in danger of losing its superstar status. Legions adopted Macs when Vista was the future, but that was two years ago and Windows 7 delivers Microsoft redemption. The minimalist designed MacBooks are growing as tired as Ikea paper lamps and are, quite frankly, ridiculously overpriced compared to the latest wave of netbooks. Apple steadfastly ignores the business community, so no help with computer sales there. Sure, the iPods will sell, but adding a camera doesn’t make it worth an upgrade and users are starting to find other places to download music for iTunes. The iPhone 3GS launch delivered 1000 times more hype than substance while Google’s Android is likely to provide better synching in the cloud for our growingly connected and device-independent world. And lets not forget the treatment of iPhone developers who are subjected to a draconian approval process for their shiny new applications. That secretive process is nothing less than a sad commentary from the company that brought us that famous 1984 ad. So we’re starting to see the current Mac ads in a new light: That PC guy in a suit has a job while the Mac kid still lives at home with his parents.”

So how valid are her comments?  Apple is the past master at obsoleting its own products, a passion for detail in design and most importantly making products appear price-insensitive - that is to consumers. 

Take the watch you are wearing. You can get a reliable digital watch for less than $5, so why spend 10 or 100 times more? 

Some of the Apple products have reached “jewellery-status”.
But the challenges come when you start to attack the business market, where the CIO or procurement team care more about price/feature than sexy looks. Which is why the Apple products get the main reception into the corporation as prized personal possessions.

So one question being asked is “Is the iPhone ready for the enterprise?”  In a recent blog my view is the question is wrong. The question is “Is the enterprise ready for the iPhone?” And you could ask the same question of the MacBook.

Siebel gets a slap: Nucleus Research interviewed the Siebel cases studies on their ROI. Their summary, which got Rebecca crossed off Tom Siebel’s Xmas card list was

“Because the average Siebel deployment costs a company more than $18,000 per user per year, achieving a positive ROI means carefully assessing benefits and managing deployment costs. Sixty-one percent of customers interviewed do not believe they achieved a positive ROI from Siebel.”

Oprah Winfrey, when once asked what she wished she'd learned earlier in life said "I wish I'd known how to distinguish radiators from drains". 

She explained that "radiators" are people who give out warmth, kindness, love, honesty, positivity, energy, enthusiasm and all the good things which people need and respond to.

"Drains" are people who are negative, downbeat, suck the energy out of others and don't like themselves.
 
Life's to short to work with drains, ............... unless of course you're Dynorod.

The current market economy has forced into harsh relief those business that are valuable and have sound fundamentals and those that are weak. Or to put it another way, as Warren Buffett so eloquently did “When the tide goes out it is easy to see who is swimming naked”.

But even if your product has value, your customers love you and your business model works, you still need to cut costs and drive up efficiencies. This may be a fundamental shift to your strategy from loss-making growth to month on month profit, or it might mean fine tuning by examining every process to reduce waste. Or a combination of both.  Either way, a good understanding of the businesses operation processes is critical.  This is explored in my blog, The Wheels Haven’t Come off  http://is.gd/582T4

Reducing waste is deeply unsettling for employees. At best is means reduced budgets and asking them to cut travel expenses. At worst is means redundancies.  Both of these requires line managers to be better communicators and be more empathetic with their teams. They need to lead from the front.

Just when we should be better man-managers I see examples of poor man management bordering on cowardly. Here are just a few. Every one fails the “Would I like to be treated this way” test.

The redundancy process

The redundancy process is not clearly documented and hence it is not applied fairly, done with respect and dignity. The proper consultation period is given lip service, hence individuals who should be kept are laid off – and this damages the company. Those who are laid off and feel they have been treated badly or unfairly are walking adverts actively damaging the company’s reputation. This will really become apparent when they try to hire again.  This is a simple process to document and make sure every line manager has access to it.

At Nimbus we restructured our hosting team as over 70% of new clients want Nimbus Control, our BPM solution, hosted by us, and more and more want it hosted long term. This involved redundancies. The feedback on the process was staggering. “I’ve been made redundant, and seen colleagues made redundant on a several occasions over a 20 year career in IT. This was the best experience I’ve ever had. Thank you”

Redundancy not review

Companies are using redundancy to ‘cut out the dead wood’. A job that should have been done through fair and consistent reviews enabling the individual to correct their behaviours, or have training scheduled to help them up their game. Instead they are made redundant. This is not only unfair but it also squanders potential talent that should have been trained and coached. And often unrecognised stars in the organisation end up as collateral damage when wide-sweeping redundancies are announced.  Regular reviews would have recognised their value to the organisation and saved them.

 “I can treat my staff like shit – where else can they go?” 

The current market conditions are being used to cut staff salaries with the undertone of “well at least you have a job”. In many cases salary cuts are being made at junior levels but not the more senior ones which drives up resentment and hits morale. This will only be seen when the job market becomes easier and staff vote with the feet. I was staggered when I overheard one MD at a dinner say, “I can treat my staff like shit – where else can they go?”  The best ones can and will go. Nimbus is still hiring and we are getting the pick of the crop.

Clawing back commissions

At one major software company they have the typical hockey stick in sales – i.e. they all occur in the final quarter. But they pay their sales and support teams quarterly commissions on the anticipation of them hitting their annual target  because they have hit them  every year for the last 5 years. Except for this year.   So in the employee’s contract that commission can be clawed back.  Bearing in mind some of the commissions to be clawed back were 30% of an individual’s salary.

Instead of the Managing Director, Sales Director or Line Manager communicating the problem and explaining how the commissions were going to be clawed back, Finance sent out an email to each individual saying “Pay us a cheque for the full amount”. 

Training budgets unnecessary luxury

With costs being cut it is easy to see training budgets as an easy target. Again the “they’re lucky to have a job mentality kicks in”. Training is a small part of an employee’s annual cost but disproportionally important to maintaining their enthusiasm, skills and motivation.

What internally run training can you offer?  If the CEO is a brilliant speaker, then can't he running atraining course or coach one to one? Can you identify good podcasts or blogs and make them available to staff.

If you think education is expensive you should try ignorance.

No career planning, but at least you have a job

Every employee wants to grow and improve – or more importantly they want to see their salary grow. It is very easy in the current environment to lapse into the mode of ‘they are luck y to have a job  when every one else is losing theirs”. But not every company has gone into hibernation, paralysis or administration.  Good companies are looking for ways to innovate, grow and position themselves for the recovery.  That means a happy, motivated workforce which in turn means future prospects.

So maybe there are limited opportunities for promotion, but sideways skills-enhancing moves have the same effect. It builds skills in the organisation and keeps people fresh.  Even better if you can change the structure of the role so it is not a like for like swap.

“Can’t you stay with friends?”

Expenses comes under closer scrutiny, which is healthy. Perhaps a conference call could replace an expensive flight – saving money and employee stress.  But often undue pressure is a put on staff to rough it.  Stay with friends. Stay over weekends to make long-haul flights cheaper. 

All these are great ideas but how do you soften it.  Stay with friends – BUT take a bottle of wine and charge it to expenses.  Stay over the weekend, BUT charge the weekend hotel and a hire car to the company and make the most of the time away.

The future bright

If the current economy were a short blip with then a return to the market conditions we’ve seen of the last 5 years then some of the examples, whist not acceptable, are understandable.  But the clever money is predicting that the economy has had a ‘reset’ and we will have to operate with the current economic conditions for several years. Therefore these examples of poor management are actively damaging companies.
This means that some may not survive.  Which is good, because many do not deserve to.
 

Biggest issue with Cloud is that business users are using it to get results and bypass the CIO.  This has 2 MAJOR issues for the CIO

- It is driving an even larger wedge between business and IT because Cloud apps give "immediate gratification" showing HOW SLOW internal IT are.  See blog http://is.gd/57D3T

- Business users don't know what they don't know, so are buying from Cloud vendors is a compliance/risk nightmare waiting to explode in CIOs face. Books like "Thinking of Buying a Cloud Solution - Ask the Smart Questions" help. http://is.gd/57FFZ - Which is why I wrote it  8-)

Time for reality TVwhere CIO becomes business-savvy and trusted advisor to the business? This is a major challenge as the business has grown to despise the CIO for siding with IT and failing to deliver for years.

It probably requires a radical makeover, including the CIO reporting the COO and not having IT staff report to him/her.

They need a different philosophy, if only to emphasis the change.  They need to see themselves as business but with an understanding of what IT can do, not as IT with a knowledge of the business.

Having said that there are some role models out there.  They are radical, evangelical and a little edgy.  People like Jeremy Vincent from Jaguar Land Rover.

It only takes a minute to read this...

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke...totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE

Thank God for the sense to remember the '3' steps, STR . Read and Learn!

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

S *Ask the individual to SMILE.
T *Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (C oherently) i.e. It is sunny out today
R *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call emergency number immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

New Sign of a Stroke  ---  Stick out Your Tongue

NOTE: Another 'sign' of a stroke is this: Ask the person to 'stick' out his tongue.. If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other, that is also an indication of a stroke.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.

In an excellent blog by Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD he laments the lack of progress in improving business processes.  In fact his example of a typical project, which has changed little since the 1990's goes likes this:

    * Someone senior decides that a process needs to be improved.
    * A group of specialists (process analysts, business analysts, whatever) conducts an analysis exercise. Cue much walking around with clipboards, making notes.
    * Time passes.
    * Workshops and interviews are organised where processes are mapped out on large sheets of brown paper.
    * A team writes a large requirements document.
    * Time passes.
    * The organisation starts to procure one or more packaged applications and/or carry out some custom software integration work.
    * Time passes.
    * More time passes.
    * At some point, a date arrives. The project is declared finished.
 

Sadly his view of BPM/BPR/BPI is absolutely true in 80-90% of organisations, and in 100% of organisations that have engaged one of the Big4 consulting organisations.

There are glimmers of hope as we are now seeing major organisations (Nestle, HSBC, Chevron, Unilever, CarphoneWarehouse (video) taking a different approach and getting the results they deserve. 

So what is different:
 - mapping in live workshops = speed and end user engagement
 - mapping with end user as intended audience (not IT) = useable content & end user engagement
 - content (processes & supporting info) available to every employee via web or mobile device = making end users 20%+ more efficient
 - an application (rather than a tool) to capture, deploy, and manage the changes to the content   ['application' as it is used long term, tool is only used on a project] = governed content
- the content has multiple uses  - training, performance measurement, compliance, business improvement = reduced cost of compliance

Question - what is this application called.  It is NOT a BPA tool. BPA tools are used by Enterprise Architects  to deliver the 1990's approach described above.  A BPMS is about automating the processes.

The collective term for this breed of application is still emerging.  But there are already vendors out there delivering staggering results  - BusinessGenetics, ProcessMaster and Nimbus Control to name 3.

These are ?????  Business Optimization Management Suite (BOMS) ??? applications.  

What is most disappointing is that if the effort of documenting processes in Visio was used instead to document using a BOMS there would be NO EXTRA EFFORT and a FAR GREATER RETURN.

So once we understand what it is called, more people can ask for it.  So for now lets just agree to call it BOMS??

 

The ongoing debate is “Is the iPhone ready for the enterprise”, but this is rapidly becoming irrelevant and the wrong question. The iPhone is infiltrating organisations hidden in senior executives pockets much to the dismay of CIO’s. But the iPhone has the potential to be a powerful ally when deploying enterprise applications, where lack of adoption of applications by business users is the real enemy.

So the question should be “Is the enterprise ready for the iPhone?”

Most of the talk is about the core use for the iPhone – as a phone and email device. So the topics of security are discussed at length in the blogosphere. As are the other discussions about the iPhone support for MS Exchange and sychronisation. It is clearly getting better – except for Tasks.  What happed to that? Perhaps once you get an iPhone you are either too cool to understand tasks and deadlines or so senior that you have delegated everything 

For those not in this luxurious position read Stanley Bing's excellent Being retired at work blog

But the debate that is starting, and a recent post at CIO.com although they are arguing for the Smartphone rather than just the iPhone and the topic of my keynote at iCE09  in Amsterdam is how the iPhone and iPod Touch is becoming an enterprise platform.

As an enterprise platform it is the perfect device for the CIO to engage the business users – getting closer to them. Closing that ever widening business-IT divide.  A divide that Cloud Computing is making even wider as I discussed in a recent blog Why Force.com is the CIOs nightmare 

A book I’m currently writing with John Appleby of Bluefin Solutions  is Thinking of… Developing an iPhone app for the enterprise? Ask the Smart Questions, published by Smart Questions.  What is interesting is the number and range of questions that need to be answered BEFORE you start writing code. 

So what are the challenges (over and above those simply using it as a phone and email device)?  BTW I’m only going to be able to scratch the surface.  Obviously we will going into a lot more detail in the book.

Ownership & device

The first debate is what device and who owns it. Notice earlier I said iPhone AND iPod Touch. The iPod Touch is essentially the iPhone without the phone and a few other bits and pieces. As it has wifi and no ongoing cost it maybe is a cheaper better platform if the person who will be using it does not need a company phone.

If the iPhone is owned by the employee you have some interesting challenges which I’ll discuss in distribution.

What app

At the moment there are relatively few iPhone Apps that are design for the enterprise. There are lots that are aimed at business people  - let’s call them standalone productivity apps.  But a true iPhone enterprise app is where the iPhone as an integral part of an enterprise application. So the apps supports all or part of an enterprise process such as R2R (Recruit2Retire), O2C (Order2Cash), or I2P (Idea2Product). Good examples are the recently launched Salesforce.com Mobile app.

Buy vs build

Are you implementing an app built by a 3rd party or building your own?

Buy - Buying and distributing a 3rd party app

If it is a buy what due diligence have you done on the supplier? How good is their coding, security, scalability and encryption? Will they be in business next year?

If it is a 3rd party how are you going to get it onto the device as it will probably need to be downloaded from the iTunes store by the owner of the device and paid for.  Even if is only 99c how is the person going to be reimbursed.  Or is the IT department going to register every iPhone user and download the apps for them.  That sounds like a McJob.

Build - architecture, development & release cycles

You also need consider the future functionality of the Apple iPhone OS roadmap (or what is visible of it) when you architect your app. What other apps in the iPhone are you going to integrate with? What about your core external systems.
Certainly when Nimbus started to develop its Nimbus Control for iPhone application there was as much work to do to our core enterprise app (developing the web services) to let it to talk to the iPhone, as the work to create the iPhone app itself.

But that ties you into the core app release cycles. How do you disconnect yourself so that you can iterate your iPhone app more rapidly as the true requirements emerge? That requires a clear view of the roadmap for the iPhone app so that you can build in the hooks into the core app.

iPhone vs Smartphone

I’ve focused on the iPhone because in many ways it is easier to develop for than other Smartphones. At least it has a single OS, a single screen size, one app running on the device at a time, and a single mechanism to download/sync apps (iTunes store).
 

The Americans are all off celebrating Thanksgiving. Giving presents. Fighting through airports at any cost to get back to their loved ones in time for this special day. In many ways it is more important that Christmas.

But despite the close relationship between the US and UK, started in the Thatcher/Reagan era we we really don't understand what it is about.

So I thought I'd let Eddie Izzard explain.  Izzard is best known in the UK as an off the wall transvestite comic and appearing in the odd film. The US will know him as an actor in the The Riches ina very traditional role as a straight husband.  My doesn't money change people!!

So in his alter ego he is explaining what Thanksgiving is all about.

I'm currently researching a book aimed at every corporation that hires people.  Those people joining the work force are the iPod generation, or Generation Y (or Generation V – virtual) as they are sometimes called. 

They are one or two generations away from those hiring and managing them.  But hasn’t this always been the case?  So what is so different?  Every parent claims that they don’t understand their teenage children, and even less so when they leave school or college.

Technology is what is different.  The technology that is now ubiquitous has created a completely disruptive change in these people’s working and leisure life.  Lets looks some of the disruptive examples that are less than 5 years old:

-    Everyone has a mobile phone from the age of 10.  Advances in processing power, battery life, screen resolution, available applications and low cost talk plans have made it possible to use it as the universal communicator  (voice, email, Instant Messaging), a media center (music, video stored or streamed), a games machine, and a micro-computer running applications .

-    Internet access is available in most homes so consumers have become accustomed to a very rich internet experience (Web 2.0). This has set an expectation for business applications.

-    Social networking sites and MMP (massively multiple player) computer games have changed the way they interact, communicate and play with their peers. Their confidence and trust of the internet and the way they evaluate others they meet on internet is very different from the traditional face to face meeting. They bare their souls, quirks, passions and fetishes on social networking sites, which they would never reveal them in a job interview.

-    Internet search (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live), Wikipedia and plethora of website, blogs, podcasts and video sharing sites means that information is a couple of clicks away: “how to do something”, “where to go”, “cheapest place to buy”.  It has also changed the way that they learn.

-    Every one of them seems to have little white earphones permanently inserted in their ears. Even when they are working, when they need to concentrate, if they are on the phone or out in a group of friends.
But there are other changes which mean this work force is very different from their parents when they joined the world of work.
-    The entrepreneurial opportunities due to technology and highly visible role models mean that they could already have tasted commercial success well before they leave school.

-    They have a variety of working modes available.  Full time employed with a number of different and very distinct careers over their working lifetime. A part-time portfolio lifestyle combining periods of travel, vocational activities or further education. Setting up and running a business – either with an aim to fund their lifestyle or make it big and get rich. This has profound implications for employers in terms of managing staff turnover and continuing training.

But companies will need to hire, motivate, manage and fire these new breed. The iPod generation. The book will give some insights and some practical actions from hiring through to firing.
 

I recently attended an improv comedy workshop with John Cremer, who has just been awarded Speaker of the Decade by the Academy for Chief Executives. John is founder of  The Maydays, an improv troupe based in Brighton.

I thought improv would be a great way of extending my presentation skills.  But I was surprised that I got a lot more out of it than just some new techniques.

So improv.  There is 1 principle and 3 rules for actors when they are on stage doing improv:

Principle: You don’t need to be funny, clever or witty and therefore you can’t “get it wrong”

Rule 1 - Listen: you can’t be preparing what you are going to say when the other actor is speaking because you won’t be listening to what you need to react to.

Rule 2 – Always say Yes: always be open and positive to what ever had been suggested.  Worlds like ‘But’ and ‘However’ are banned as they suck the energy out

Rule 3 – Commit: even if you don’t know what you are going to say or think your response is not going to be very good, deliver the lines it with passion and energy, you will get some surprising results

So how powerful are these 3 rules if we applied them to life or business?

Listen: How many times in a conversation are we simply waiting to make our point whilst the other person is speaking. We are not listening. We don’t hear their point of view and genuinely think about it. We are preparing our defence or attack. We never really hear.

Yes: Sir Clive Woodward put it well.  He identified that in his England team there were ‘energy sappers’. He deselected them and built a winning team of ‘energy givers’.  These are people who love to say Yes and get stuck in. And don't we all just love working with people like that? Which leads to my last point.

Commit: Life is not a dress rehearsal. Do what you do with passion and energy or don’t do it at all. No successful entrepreneur, business man, parent or teacher has done it by sitting in the shadows.

Improv workshop
The workshop was 8 people with a wild mix of backgrounds; business, actors, students. Before the course I asked what I needed to prepare and John was polite enough not to say "Nothing - it's impov - doh!!"

The day was fun, engaging, scary, enlightening and stressful all at the same time. But when John said “It is nearly 4pm we need to wrap it up” my immediate reaction was “No, we can’t stop now”.

What next
So I haven’t. John is keen to understand how to really make improv relevant to business and I'm very excited that he has asked me to join a small focus group to develop the “improv for business proposition”. 

John has written an excellent book on improv. And now there is even talk of him and Neil Mullarkey, one of the founders of the Comedy Store Players, writing a Smart Questions book Thinking of.. Using improv for business? Ask the Smart Questions.

So if you want to 'enrich your (business or real) life' think about improv. No preparation required.

A recent survey on bad language at work makes interesting reading. What is interesting is the idea of a politically correct joke.  A joke is often making fun about stereotypes...

So the findings of the survey are:
 
A seismic shift in the acceptability of jokes and slang within the UK workplace has taken place over the last decade, according to a survey of more than 270 company directors by the spoken communications consultancy, The Aziz Corporation.
 
•    Company directors are ten times more likely to find politically correct jokes acceptable in the office than they did ten years ago,  when nearly 40% believed jokes were unacceptable at all times.
 
•    In 1999 only 1% of respondents found politically correct jokes acceptable in internal office meetings, today the figure has increased to nearly 70%.
 
Another shift has taken place in the differentiation between offensive and inoffensive jokes.   In the earlier survey 64% of directors thought politically incorrect jokes were acceptable in informal conversations with colleagues, if funny. Today the proportion has dropped to 47%.
 
•    Mild swear words in internal meetings were deemed unacceptable by all respondents ten years ago. Today 50% have no problem with this with nearly 20% even accepting strong swearing in the office.
 
•    Increasingly slang has become accepted with 64% of directors finding this appropriate even in internal meetings.
 
Khalid Aziz, Chairman of The Aziz Corporation commented:  “British business has been stereotyped for its formality but this survey demonstrates a dramatic change. “
 
“I suspect this process has accelerated during the recession when people are desperate for anything that will raise their spirits.  Britain has a long standing tradition of gallows humour and that may also be a factor; what's the difference between a banker and pigeon?  A pigeon can still make a deposit on a Porsche!"
 
 
 

The lights dim, the audience quietens in response - and you step towards the rostrum.  It was an extraordinary honour for an amateur conductor, Philip Glass – a ‘mere’ business CEO - to be invited to do a cameo with the Vienna Philharmonic.

It was a simple piece of course, an early Mozart piano concerto, featuring a young Chinese pianist. But snow at O’Hare had cancelled two days of flights – so there had been no time for any rehearsals at all.  Gulp - you lift the white baton to gather the orchestra. It was now or never.  Hell, this was more nerve-wracking than any investor presentation.

But, really, what could go wrong?  You knew the piece intimately, and had even conducted it before.  And the Vienna Philharmonic Phil were among the world’s finest musicians. So relax and enjoy.

It was the second bar when you realised something was awry. The orchestra was going faster than you’d ever imagined. It came crashing into your head that they were using the revised October 1782 score, while you had the original September 17812 score  in front of you.  Never mind – maybe you could still get through this.
The orchestra built raggedly towards the entry of the soloist, their eyes looking at you in increasing bewilderment, wondering why your arms were off-beat. 

You turned to introduce the pianist.  She played from memory of course.  It was half a bar later that you realised that she was performing Mozart’s later revision of this work – his January 1783 score, which was much the same, except for the revised timpani line.

The music careered along, jumping and spluttering like a car with water in the tank.  Maybe it was OK  for an amateur – you might just make it to the end.

But not much can survive when the timpanist is confused. The cacophany grew. Only true grit could save the day. You waved and pummelled the air, and pulled them through into the final bar - and silence.

First one clap, then another, then spreading around the hall – until finally tumultous applause.  You bowed, amazed, and left the podium.

In the wings, you overheard a radio presenter gushing into his microphone: ‘…a stunning new interpretation of Mozart in the style of Philip Glass …’

A miraculous survival – again.! But as you headed back for a final bow – and definitely no encore – your thoughts turned inexplicably to work. 

How well are your teams performing? Is it that talented heroics are required because everyone has a slightly different or no view of the playbook? How much more profitable could your company be if their skills were harnessed and directed?

Didn’t you just put that HowTo project on the backburner? Wasn’t it aimed at getting consistent processes and documents delivered real-time to all staff.Maybe you should pay attention to that programme to deliver a real-time and authoritative ‘intelligent operations manual’ to every one of your people. Hey, you might even get the Europeans onto the same page, at last.
 

Inspired Thinking by Mike.Gammage (at) Nimbuspartners.com

Up on stage, mouth goes dry, mind goes blank, everybody is looking at you, you struggle through your Powerpoint slides, heart beating wildly. You sit down vowing never to do it again.

But worse than that, it has reflected badly on you and yor company and disturbed the sleep of 100’s of innocent people. But conference after conference the same mistakes are made.

A little known statistic is that 42% of the population are more scared of death than speaking in public. 

But for business people being able to present well is a core skill, right up there with managing people. If you can’t present then you will never be promoted as quickly, you will not make the salary you aspire to, you won’t enjoy the success you deserve.
Sadly as professional speaker I attend a huge number of conferences and witness poor (or worse) presentations.

Presentations that, based on the material, could have been engaging and entertaining.  Instead they were embarrassingly boring.

Maybe you’ve watched in awe as a presenter commands the stage, works the audience, and finishes to a rousing finale. Is it nurture or nature?  Is it a learnt skill or is that person ‘just a natural’.

For all those of you hiding your fears behind the excuse “It’s nature”, I’m afraid you are very very wrong.  It is a skill you can, and should learn.

How do you get better?  3 simple steps
-    Understand the principles
-    Practice and stretch yourself
-    Learn from the feedback

Understand the principles: sounds obvious.  “You stand up and communicate some information using Powerpoint.” 

How wrong can you be?   This is where most if not everybody gets it wrong. Your job is to engage the audience. That means you want them to “Think. Feel. Do,” in that order.  So how do you get the audience intrigued? Make them sit up and want to hear the end?

Practice and stretch yourself: find some safe environments to practice - the local school or college is always after outside speakers, your local sports club or Toastmasters Club. But try something different each time.

Learn from the feedback: ask someone you trust in the audience for candid feedback. Use that feedback to learn and improve not to force you back to reading Powerpoint slides.

For some more ideas on presenting listed to a quick interview on the Top 10 ways to improve your presentations here
 

In a blog later this month I'll explain why Powerpoint is like my 10 yr old daughter's attempts at make-up

In a recent article in Computer Weekly by Tony Collins 

Defra defends Accenture over “flawed” £350m IT system (excerpts below) there are clear examples why a process based approach to capture requirements are the ONLY way to make sure that the system you develop will meet the business need

Defra is a Government agency, and UK Government hits the headlines regularly with failed IT systems.  This is another painful, no pitiful example, or taxpayers money being flushed away.

But it could be so much simpler. Use a rigorous process mamangement tool to map the requirements as a series of end to end processes, attach supporting information and then give that to Accenture to build a system.

For more information read how ING Bank used this approach successful  or read Common Approach, Uncommon Results. Read the summary. If you like it I'll send yo a copy of the book.

So if it is so much better approach, why didn't Accenture recommend they work this way? Simple.  Do what the client wants  in the way that they want it and even if iit goes wrong they will pay you and defend you......

Read the article and weep.

Defra defends Accenture over “flawed” £350m IT system

Top civil servants have defended Accenture after it helped to deliver a "fundamentally flawed" £350m IT system to pay EU subsidies to farmers.

Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), told MPs yesterday: "The people responsible for the fact that the IT system was not as good as it should have been were the people who commissioned it as much as Accenture."

The defence of Accenture came when the House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee (PAC) met to question Ghosh and Tony Cooper, chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency, on the Single Payment Scheme.

Labour MP Alan Williams asked Ghosh and Cooper whether Accenture should pay compensation for a disastrous system that pays subsidies to farmers under the Single Payment Scheme.
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Cooper said that officials had so poorly specified the system that it had no facility for changing the entitlements for each farmer.

Statements are sent to farmers each year which set out the amounts they are entitled to. The rates in 2009 are higher than 2008 entitlements.

Cooper said that something "pretty fundamental was missing from the original specification".

He added: "When the system was delivered out of the change programme in 2005/6 it did not include the functionality to be able to change entitlement or to transfer entitlements, and that is a fundamental aspect of the scheme. We therefore had to invest to retrofit that functionality into the system."

Ghosh, who as head of Defra has overall responsibility for the Rural Payments Agency, said that one main problem with the IT was that Accenture delivered what it was asked to deliver. "What they [Accenture] were asked to deliver was the wrong thing."

full article
 

Great entrepreneurs do not necessarily make great leaders of corporations.  Most entrepreneurs start companies expecting their baby to grow and be a significant force.  I certainly did when we lanched Nimbus 12 years ago.

But as Nimbus has grown can the leadership team make the necessary transitions from start-up to an established business?  I believe so, partially because several of us in the leadership have come from working in large corporations and understnad what it is like, but most importantly we understand and expect it a transition.

That said there are leaders in large companies who are just BAD.  Here are some of the traits. After scrutinizing 360-degree feedback data on over 11,000 leaders and evaluating the 10% considered the least effective, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found the 10 most common leadership shortcomings.

In a recent Management Issues article  here Max McKeowan gives examples of comnpanies constantly innovating or reinventing its products.

Toyota says that everyone's job is to "Improve 1000 things by 1% continuously".  Apple works to make sure that its own products obsolete its current range rather than be obsoleted by its competitors. So this is product innovation.

So why is there not the same focus on process innovation? The approach of constantly striving to improve the way people do things. To be fanatical about driving our non-value added activities. But this needs to be done in a controlled, managed and governed manner or a company will fall foul of regulatory compliance.

At Nimbus (www.nimbuscontrol.com) this is our driving passion. Our software is the ‘operations manual’ helps companies in every industry constantly improve.

The results are staggering. Carphone Warehouse can see an additional £55m of revenue from the 800+ UK stores purely by getting standardised, consistent information to staff on all the core activities in a store.  Watch the video

Lockheed Martin improved its win rate from 30% to 100% when bidding for big systems implementation projects.

Why? Because most projects use MS Powerpoint or Visio and whilst you can visualise some improvements, you can make them stick. “Sustainable improvement” is the goal.

This is discussed in my book Common Approach, Uncommon Results.  Read the book summary at www.ideas-warehouse.com  and if you like it I’ll send you a free copy.

Following on from my blog - "Force.com - CIOs dream or nightmare' Silicon.com has started talking about 'citizen developers' in a recent article (which is below) and here.

This echoes the other articles I've written about the challenges the CIOs. So the challenge for the CIOs is can they make a shift in the minds of the business users from 'The man who loves to say no'  (the anti-Del Monte man) to the coach, trusted advisor and mentor to the business.

No there is an idea for a TV program - "CIO Makeover".

By Natasha Lomas

We've had the 'citizen journalist', blogging from war zones or capturing breaking news on their cameraphone. Now step forward the 'citizen developer' - an individual set to play an increasingly important role in creating business apps, according to analyst house Gartner.

BT & Salesforce ran an event this week to help educate CIOs on the Cloud at the BT Tower, in London.  So a few informative series of sessions in the morning.  Lots of discussions about the Cloud.

Based on the lively Q&A there is a great deal of fear, doubt and uncertainty. (Can't see the video.  click here )

But the Clouds cleared as we travelled at 7.5 m/s up in the lift to the restaurant at the top of the tower and we were greated by stunning views over London.

Sounds like the start of a bad Christmas cracker joke.  Talking of Christmas, I’ve already had the first ‘Festive discount’ email from a supplier.  I thought there was an unwritten rule that we had to get through Halloween and Fireworks night before they started promoting Christmas.

Cloud Computing seems to have struck a chord a way that ASP, OnDemand, SaaS and all the previous incarnations never have. Every analyst is blogging and tweeting about it, there are multiple conferences, there are books that have been written   - in fact I’ve co-authored 2 Thinking of.. books on the Cloud. One aimed at buyers and the other for software vendors looking to migrate.

But what is interesting is that it has reached the mainstream press – hence the joke.  It is no longer something that IT folks talk about in terms that baffle the rest of society. Now most business people have heard of ‘the Cloud’ even if they don’t understand it, and more critically the implications.

So business people are embracing the ideas of Cloud Computing. Why? Because they can see immediate value from the applications and services being offered.  But there are ‘unknown unknowns’  There are corporate, security and reputation risks that they don’t even know that the consider. That is the role of the CIO to coach, mentor and support the business as they look at the Cloud.

So do CIOs need a ‘make over’?  Certainly in the eyes of most of the business.

But unfortunately the Cloud has driven an even greater rift between business and IT.  It is being used to show how smaller nimbler suppliers are delivering far faster than the internal IT department. But there is a good reason.  The IT department is spending 80% of its time and effort ‘keeping the lights on’ and the remaining 20% on providing new solution that are robust, scalable, secure and integrated into the core applications. How many of the ‘new’ Cloud providers are truly enterprise ready?

Which is we wrote Thinking of.. Buying a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions. It has many, if not most, of the questions that you should be asking of yourself and your Cloud supplier.

A man goes into a shop and says “I’d like to buy a Cloud Computer”  So rather than buying a Cloud Computer, maybe he needs a copy of our book?  What a great idea for a Christmas present for CIOs for all their business managers.

Having sat on a panel session at BPM Europe on "BPM & Cloud" even the panelists found the discussion decidedly cloudy.  The issue was both BPM and Cloud are poorly defined so together it was difficult. 

The key issue was BPM & Cloud could be

 - BPM tools offered in the Cloud or

  - BPM operation in the Cloud.

Still not clearer.  So lets understand the options:

First you can define your business operation in terms of process descriptions / maps with links to supporting information (systems, forms, documents, metrics).Good practice whatever you intend to do with the Cloud.

Lets call this the Intelligent Operations Manual (IOM), and this can be provided to end users real time in a system.  You also have the underlying execution systems (BPMS, ERP, CRM).

This short (3 min) Carphone Warehouse video of what an Intelligent Operations Manual looks like to an end user and example of BPM in the Cloud.   Nimbus hosts the process system and that is all.

Then have several choices

-    You can give it all to someone else…  people, process system (IOM), execution systems, responsibility  = BPO   eg EDS, Accenture using

-    You can get someone else to run the process system (IOM), execution systems but keep the people and ownership = BPM applications in the Cloud  eg Nimbus, Appian, Lombardi, Salesforce.com

-    You keep it all

What you can’t do is give it all to someone else before you have defined your business operation.

Clearer?

David Rowan wrote a great article called Crowdsourcing back in 2006.  It very astutely identified a trend where individuals will happily work for pennies or even for free - all made possible by the internet and central exchanges.

An example is stock photography. In the old world, if your magazine or corporate brochure needed a few images a conventional picture library would charge you £100 for each pic. Suddenly, that has all changed. iStockphoto has cut the price to as low as 60p. The secret? The over 25,000 amateur photographers who between them have uploaded 4m royalty-free pics to the site. The photographers earn a few pennies, the customer gets a bargain. And in the middle, iStockphoto makes a margin.

But that is an example of financial gain. 

How about this - the 24 hour book. The authors are going to write a book on Saturday drawing on ideas from people like you and me  - and the book is printed on the following Monday.

But in the world of 100% altrusim there is Wikipedia. Who maintains Wikipedia. We all do. Why? Because we care about the content. 

So why do we all care so little about our corporate information?  The DNA of the business.  Its business processes, procedures and work instructions.  We even get paid to maintain it - and we still don't do it.

3 Simple reasons !!! 

- They are BORING (but a necessary evil),

- Poorly presented - unintelligeble flow charts which are not described in the context of an individuals role

- Difficult find hidden on some dusty corner of the intranet.

Here's a video of an alternative approach..and in action at Carphone Warehouse

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

I read a lot about going green these days.  In fact it is pretty difficult to miss it.  Oil companies changing themselves to energy companies. Car companies pushing more and more efficient cars, electric cars, hybrid cars. Even Sky keeps telling me to switch my TV off rather than leave it on standby. 

The Government not wanting to be outdone is spending millions printing and distributing booklets telling people how to save the planet. Surely NOT printing and distributing them would help save trees and transport costs?

But all of this is effort is a small rounding error compared with the waste of resources caused by our local council who leave the street lighting in our small town on all night. The whole town is lit up like a Christmas tree, and from midnight when the pubs empty to 6am no-one benefits. In fact we have had to put thicker curtains in all the bedrooms to ensure we and the children get a decent night’s sleep.

So where do bananas come in?   Have you ever seen a single banana in a bunch which is larger or riper than the rest? No.  Nature is telling us something here.  All the bananas ripen at the same speed.  So they are all kept consistent. Energy is expended equally across all the bananas to grow and ripen them.

So surely our Local Council should be thinking and applying its green approach across ALL the departments equally. IT working on server virtualization and lower energy PCs. Facilities on low wattage bulbs and reducing need for air conditioning. Street lighting working out how to switch off some or all of the street lights.

So they are wasting the planet’s resources, wasting our local tax – but at least I have enough light to write this blog at 4:30am
 

Interestingly the true cost of poor process is not in doing the process badly.  Clearly there is some cost. But often it is the knock-on effect of that poor process has on other areas of the company, downstream of the problem which is the real cost multiplier.

But this is rarely calculated. If you have poorly documented and followed processes, you won’t even be able to identify the potential costs downstream – let alone measure them. (Note processes must be documented AND followed to be valuable) So, like the iceberg, you only see a small part of the problem. Assuming an iceberg is a problem is looking at an iceberg from the Titanic’s rather than the penguin’s perspective.

So to illustrate my point, I received a letter a few days ago from HM Revenue & Customs, the UK equivalent of the IRS. A largish organisation with some 100,000 employees dotted all over the UK.

The letter explained in 7 very wordy paragraphs:
-    During my online Tax Return on their website I had checked the  box “Do you want any over/under payment of tax adjusted via my tax code”.  I had said ‘Yes’.
-    As I had replied after 1 December, that check box should not have been available.  But it was.
-    As I had checked the box, could I access their website and to establish the phone number of my local tax office.
-    Could I call the tax office to confirm that I wanted any over/under tax adjusted.  BUT WASN’T THAT WHY I CHECKED THE BOX IN THE FIRST PLACE?

So, with a heavy heart anticipating a long wait in a call centre queue for a non-valued added call, followed their instructions:
-    I hit their website and needed to enter some tax information to be able to find the local tax office phone number – rather than just list the offices by county or city.
-    I phoned the tax office and followed the automated menu system and reached a human being, who was in a call centre in Scotland. 
-    The operator was polite but asked me to redial the number and select a menu option which was not the obvious one, to get to the local office.
-    I phoned the number again and was eventually connected to my local tax office
-    Again a polite operator took me through slightly more security questions than my bank or credit card company ever does
-    I was asked that confirm that I wanted any over/under tax adjusted.
-    She said that she would make a note of my request and send it through to the right person.
-    Finally, I mentioned this waste of everyone’s time to the operator who was equally exasperated and embarrassed about HMRC

So how much of that wild goose chase was Value Added for me or HMRC?  Answer NONE

How much made be or the operators feel good about HMRC and the use of tax payers money? Answer NONE

So one small process error (not testing the application correctly has spawned:
-    A badly letter written, proofed, printed and sent to 10,000+ of people
-    A spike in hits on website to get phone details
-    Calls to call centres and local offices
-    Back office process to log and action my confirmation

What were the alternatives?   In order of effort spent by me and by HMRC:

-    Have a robust test process on the original web-based application
      Effort – 1 hour
-    Accept the error and do nothing, but possibly fix a system calculation internally
      Effort – 4 hours
-    If so some reason they need additional confirmation, create an additional page on the HMRC website and reference the link in the letter and I can go to it
     Effort – 8 hours (website), 4 hours (letter), £15,000 (print and post x 10,000 letters), 1,666 hours (process  the results assuming 10 mins per entry)
-    If creating a new webpage is too difficult, create a new website with a form filling app
     Effort – 16 hours (website), 4 hours (letter), £15,000 (print and post x 10,000 letters), 1,666 hours (process  the results assuming 10 mins per entry)
-    If they really want me to phone, then set up a dedicated phone number with an automated system like credit card companies have for validating new cards
    Effort – 24 hours (phone number system), 4 hours (letter), £15,000 (print and post x 10,000 letters), 1,666 hours (process  the results assuming 10 mins per entry)

-    If they REALLY want to drive me to phone a local office, then create a letter with the phone number I need to call in the letter and the correct options to select from the menu system eliminating effort on my part
    Effort – 24 hours (phone number), 4 hours (letter), £15,000 (print and post x 10,000 letters), 833 hours (answering calls to call centre), 1,666 hours (process  the results assuming 10 mins per entry)

- What they actually made me do
    Effort – 4 hours (letter), £15,000 (print and post x 10,000 letters), 1666 hours (answering twice as many calls to call centre), 1,666 hours (process  the results assuming 10 mins per entry)

Assuming a salary of £10,000 and 200 days worked per year the loaded cost is £55 per day.

So the original process cost of £6.88  vs the option HMRC selected which is £37,935

How many little process issues cause internal problems and then have a convoluted, wasteful and ill thought-through processes to correct them.

And the people best placed to identify the problems and recommend the best solutions are those at the sharp end, on the shop floor, at the grass roots. You know.  The ones are the lowest paid people in the company.

UPDATE:  We believe that the number of letters sent out is closer to 1.5 million.  That makes the cost to the taxpayer £5,690,250

As an "RIP" to Humphrey Lyttleton, here are some of his best jokes/double entendres about his radio show's (fictional) scorer, Samantha:

"Samantha's going out now for an ice cream with her new Italian gentleman friend. She says she's looking forward to licking the nuts off a large Neapolitan."

"She's popped out to visit an old gentleman friend of hers who's a notorious curmudgeon. However, she finds that if she butters him up properly she can sometimes get him to splash out."

"In her spare time, Samantha likes nothing more than to peruse old record shops. She particularly enjoys a rewarding poke in the country section."

And some more..

There was OpEx (operational expenditure) which was perfect for funding your consulting and Cloud Computing services.  This was great as it is far easy to get than CapEx (capital expenditure).

Sadly, OpEx and CapEx have come under the axe. Budgets are being slashed based on the uncertainty of the future. 'Cut harder and deeper than you feel is necessary' is the mantra, "so you do it just once".

But thrive rather than just survive should be the thinking.  In a recession there are always going to be winners. Question is, are you going to be one of them? 

That depends on how you support your clients, manage costs ( yeah, yeah, yawn 8-O ), but also how you invest (now it gets interesting...)

But how can you invest with budgets being cut away from underneath you.  That's where a new budget category is emerging.  StratEx.   Strategic Expenditure. So no matter what else happens, these budgets are protected because they are ring-fenced for strategic investments. There are the projects which will secure your continued existence, and your dominance in the post-recessionary world.

As my Chairman told me recently - "Ian, you need to have a short term plan to deliver your long term vision".  trite but true.

So what are your StratEx projects?

If you are selling to corporates, how do you get your project into their StratEx bugdets?  How do you make yourself urgent and important?

Most people feel they need to attend business networking events, but are scared, hang onto the wall, talk to a few inappropriate people and come away horribly disappointed. 

Here are 12 pointers to help you improve radically:

1. Know why your there.  Is it for the social side, to develop sales or to raise your profile.  Then ask the question "Can I achieve that here?"

2. Set low expectations – aim to get NO MORE THAN 2 business cards or useful / relevant contacts

3. Treat every interaction as a "Conversation of Possibilities". Go with an open mind, not  a targeted sales pitch.

4. Check seating plan – Sod’s Law of Networking. If there a dinner, you are likely to be sitting next to the person you spend time talking to prior to the dinner, wasting an opportunity.

5. Leave residual energy  - give more than you take.  good Karma as @guykawasaki would say

6. Be interested in them, ask open questions

7. Badge on right lapel - so when you shake hands that is where their eyes go

8. Getting rid of someone; Introduce to someone else, or say “I need to move on”

9. If know nobody in the room; Take your time and look around, look at groups for opening, join but don’t stop the conversation, introduce your self ina FEW SHORT WORDS - make an impression

10. If you want them to take your card, ask for theirs

11. Take a pen to write notes on the back of their card

12. Follow-up .. do what you said you would.  SO FEW PEOPLE DO.  This one simple act wil make you stand out.

Enjoy the experience, don't focus on the results.  Finally - you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the princes.

There are so many business networks currently being set up, if you only count the face to face ones.  Considerably more if you count on-line; custom web-site drven, social-networking powered, and online groups-based ones.

So thinking about the face to face events, what is the most effective approach.  So before you answer that question you need to consider the motivation behind the delegate (which may not be the same as the organiser's reasons).

Why?

1. Is it to meet likeminded people?  This could be for social reasons - they don't have a job anymore (retired or redundant).

2. For business development? They want to find new clients, partners, or a new job.

3. For help. They have a problem which they want to share and get collective answers.

So there area a variety of formats which are floating around.  I've been to virtually every combination. Some work well, others tank badly.   The grratest variable is the number and quality / compatibility of the people attending.  Think successful party or dinner party.  The best ones are where the groups is selected based on th others attending. 

A previous blog drew parallels with Singles Dating Parties

What are the different formats?

1. Lunch/dinner, tables of 6-8, no agenda, no structure. 

2. Lunch/dinner, tables of 6-8 with chairman and a formal discussion topic

3. Lunch/dinner, tables of 6-8 with chairman and a specific problem each person wants to have solved

4. Lunch/dinner, table of up to 30 with after-dinner speaker

5. Stand around, up to 200 with after-dinner speaker

6. Stand around, up to 200 with no speaker

What works best for you?

Next up: working a room.

The buzz word for 2008 was Cloud Computing.  It is seen as a way of cutting costs in a recession. But there is far more to it that simply switching off your internal systems and cutting over to the new Cloud Computing servic.

Sadly the Cloud Computing service providers make it sound oh so simple.  And it is form their end.  You are just another client.  at your end you have a new systems implementation project.

So, before you start, what are the questions you should be asking yourself? 

Talking to Nick Daniels, the MD of DanielsReeve, who has run recruitment agencies through 2 previous recessionary periods (1990's and 2000 dot come crash), he remarked on how similar the Recruitment Cycle was.

There is little to suspect the principles will be the different. However there are a couple of marked differences. 

So firstly the sequence of the 4 step cycle and then the 3 ways this is different from before.

Manchester City soccer club is proposing to buy a Kaka, a soccer player, from AC Milan for €100m transfer fee plus a €15m per year salary.

So how did they construct the business case to justify the purchase?

We at Nimbus are ‘relaxed, yet professional’.  That what our staff tell us. That’s what our clients tell us. That’s the exact wording in our company values statement . In the office, from the CEO down we wear jeans, polo shirts and sneakers. Or whatever people want to wear. But when we go to the client we wear what the client wears – suit and tie at Nestle, smart shirt and chinos at Microsoft. 

So our culture has driven our dress code. In fact our dress code has relaxed over the last 10 years. But we have a strong company culture. In a recent staff survey it was identified as one of the reasons people enjoy working for Nimbus.  It is one of the things that people will fight to protect. So it is one our 3 key priorities as we grow around the world – “Maintain our company culture”.

In our case our culture has driven our dress code.

But is the reverse true?

Does a suit and tie dress code breed a stuffy, over-important culture or a very professional attitude.  By contrast is a t-shirt and jeans dress code, or even no dress code, symptomatic of a chaotic and slovenly business?

I remember when I was IT Director at a major UK Government Department we had very large teams who were under-performing and came to work looking a mess.  But those same people would put on a smart shirt and tailored trousers as it was the entry requirement for the local nightclub.  So we imposed that as the minimum dress code. 

Did it change the culture?  Slightly.

My view:

- Culture sets the dress code.

- Senior role models demonstrate both the culture and dress code.

- Dress code reinforces the culture, particularly for those new to the organisation.

 - get it established (in writing and minds of senior people) early in the company's growth.

What’s your experience?

There are a few things in life that you should not do, because once you've done them, you can't go back.  For me they are:

- Go out with a model (detailes withheld)

- Drive expensive sports cars (www.p1international.com)

- Drink fine wine (various)

- Listen to awesome hifi (www.redwineaudio.com  www.ultimateears.com)

Just added a 5th.   Drink Nespresso coffee. (www.nespresso.com)

This image sums it all up.  Living the Beautiful  Life - ad for Belvedere Vodka

What have I missed?

Paul McGee, the SUMO guy, sent a great email out last week about Making Excuses.  Sadly he doesn't blog, so here it is.

How many times do excuses replace action.  Why not give up 'making excuses' for Lent?

Click on the title for the full email.

So is 2009 going to be the year of BPM?   We think so, for a couple of reasons.


1.       The current problems in the banking sector have highlighted a woeful lack of controls.  Clearer definition of process will make the control points more transparent and allow management to understand and manage the risks better.

2.       If companies are looking to make people redundant then the first question is “Which ones”. Without any clear picture of the operational processes it is difficult to make fair and effective decisions.

3.       Operational efficiency is the way to grow the bottom line. Growth of the economy and increasing demand will not bail companies out, as it has over the last 4-5 years. As this recession looks like it will last some time a quick fix is not good enough.  “Sustainable improvement” is what companies are looking for.

So the question is where to focus? 

Here are Steve Mc Dermott's "take" on New Year's Resolutions, 

New Year's Eve... It's one minute to midnight... You're thinking one or all of the following:

Who can I kiss? Who can I avoid kissing? How much champagne is left? What does "Should auld acquaintance be forgot for the sake of auld lang syne" actually mean?

Or

How come I never get invited to any parties? Just me and Jules Holland on TV again? I'm a sad loser? I must set some New Year's Resolutions.

Now let us consider that last thought.

In my lifetime music has evolved many times, but it has still not reached its final end point.  But the end is in sight. One of the key barriers, DRM, is being removed by most music providers. The second is the available disk space or memory on players and computers.

Intrigued . read on

 
Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.

At the moment VCs and Business Angels are sitting on their hands for 3 crucial reasons:

1.  What is the rush?   VCs still earn their management fees even when they are not investing.  So it is better to wait and let the market settle before committing.  'Settle' may be 3-6 months.

2. Our portfolio may need further investment.  Understandable.  Thier current investments may get into trouble and need cash.  Double whammy.  Investment means taking more equity.  In trouble means low valuation so more equity for less.

3. In a downturn it is easier to spot winners.  So if everyone else is tanking it is easier to see those rising stars.  So that de-risks investments and they can still benefit from depressed valuations.

With this as a backdrop - Bootstrapping looks like it is going to be the only way to fund a start-up.  In the main article are some thoughts on bootstrapping.

So boostrapping it is...  read on - click on the blog title

Managing geeks / nerds / software engineers is never going to be easy. But if you have a top team then it is going to be doubly challenging.

Principle 1: the MOST expensive engineer is no more than 2x more expensive than the least and can be 10-50 more productive.  So get THE VERY BEST.

Principle 2: if you've paid top dollar, then do everything you can to keep them. 

The attached article was written in 2000 by Cal Evans, and is as true today as it was when it was written.  Probably more so with the current economic squeeze.

Click on the blog title to read the article

Everyone's been to a few "business networking" events. With talk of mixing business with pleasure made me consider the real similarities between networking ewvents and singles dating clubs.

read on... click on blog title

This is not an argument for or against an ID card for the UK citizen.  Life is too short to enter that debate.  But the letter below to the Passport Agency raises some interesting issues about - so "Who are you".

With so many social networking sites that I can join, what is my identity?  I can create a different persona on every site.  Maybe I'm getting old, but this is some form of 'managed schizophrenia' or 'mulitple personalities disorder'. How do you keep track of them all, and what is your motivation? 

Gartner talks about Generation-V, or the virtual generation.  This is probably analysts over-analysing and creating new terminology for their own gratification.

The infamous presentation by Dick Hardt of Sxip gives a perspective of the problem of defining who you are - online and offline.

But start by reading the letter from a British Citizen to the UK Passport agency - click in the blog title

It started as a spoof article in Jobs & Money in the Guardian, and has been emailed around the world with people believing it to be true.  Why? 

Because, for those of you who know the UK Goverment, it could have been.  UK Government, contrary to popular misconception is staffed with some highly intelligent, eloquent and witty people. They have to deal with the general public day in and day out - who on the whole are not highly intelligent, eloquent or witty.

So read and enjoy... believing that it could be true. Background on the letter

 read the letter   - click on title

One essential ingredient that is sometimes overlooked in the early stage of a company's life is sales. Everyone gets jazzed up about raising money, building a product, launching a website then, lo-and-behold, a few months or even a year rolls by and you wonder why the customer service team always goes home early. Rest assured, if you don't have sales, you won't have to worry about any other problems for long.Good sales are a critical ingredient in growing any company. If you think of sales people as the human fertilizer that helps to grow revenues, you won't be far wrong.

But what sort of sales person do you need?  Bearing in mind there are 4 sales cultures - yes:  4.   For more information read the Why Killer Products Don't Sell Book Summary ( or simply buy the book)

read more... click on the title

 I was lucky to have spent some time last week with the Director of Engineering and Production of an oil company. An American who has had 40 years working in every corner of the planet managing the major construction projects – mostly oil platforms, but he has also built a railway and a couple of bridges.

read  more...  click on title

It is not the first, not the last…. But this heart-warming story of £390 million needlessly thrown away on a case management computer system for the UK courts identifies in important change in attitude by the Government.

Big scary monsters, out of control

Government projects are big, high risk and high profile – and have a high price tag. Over the last 10-15 years the Government has tried various ways of controlling cost and mitigating risk – by engaging the big System Integrators with proven expertise, by PFI (Private Finance Initiative) where the system is not paid for upfront, but charges are based on some usage metric, and more recently by employing a high profile CIO to drive a hard-bargain throughout the bidding process.

read more... click on the title

 Companies need to make managing change a COMPETENCE, not just have experienced a lot of change.

Many companies say that they "experience a great deal of change", or even "are experienced at change".
 

But to really drive continuous improvement in a fast moving world, companies need to make change management a Competence.  Something that they recognise as a skill that can be taught, honed and developed. Particularly in the next 2 years because it is going to be a very turbulent ride.

So your business card says Quality Manager or Head of Quality. But if you (or your team ) are the owners of the Quality Manual and ensures that you get your ISO9000 certificate on the wall each year, then you are an “unnecessary overhead”. It’s not that you are not working hard. I’m sure you are, but you are not contributing to the long term success of the company.

read more... click title

A lot, actually.  Consider this: top golf equipment makers introduce new technology every year. Keen golfers the world over upgrade every two to three years.  Yet has the average handicap of these players fallen? No.  Where’s the ROI?

In this thought provoking article published by AMR Research, Tony Friscia explores the similar achievements of businesses upgrading to the latest versions of Enterprise Software, and why they too are often failing to achieve significant ROI.  And the root cause?  Failure to address underlying business process issues.

Visiting our Chinese subsidiary is always interesting.  The taxi ride from the new Beijing airport was like a film car chase – weaving from lane to lane – and using the hard shoulder when necessary…. and we weren’t even in a hurry - I dread to think what the journey will be like if I say I’m late.  However, it does support the statistics put out by the airlines that say flying is safer than driving.

Watching the bicycles and cars fight for dominance on the roads in downtown Beijing with little concern for personal safety always fascinates.  Every bicycle is old battered and ridden by all ages – so with such a large market where are the new bicycles?  When it suddenly rains it develops another perspective with some people managing to cycle and hold umbrellas, some put on plastic rain capes or dustbin bags, and others simply accept that the rain will stop and they will eventually dry in the 30 degree heat.

The business is equally diverse ranging from the street seller with suitcase of pirated software and DVDs to the corporations with 100,000s of employees.  But my attention is on the corporations – some state owned and desperate to apply western business principles and systems – others privately owned who already look like their western counterparts.

All the companies are looking to the west for the latest business thinking on improving productivity and competing on a global scale. Which is why we have a flourishing business here. 

4 years after we launched a subsidiary we ar emaking progress.  we now have the references to be crible.  The next few years should be fascinating / amazing (hugely financially rewarding??)

I was in a major Waterstones store in London in the business section seeing if I could see my latest book Why Killer Products Don't Sell. You may say author ego, but I'd like to justify it as "checking up on my publisher, Wiley"

The book is about how to sell innovative products and services into corporates - B2B.

Finally found the floor where there are business books - bearing in mind is it's HUUUGE store. There had to be 30 meters of shelving with business books. Everything from Accounting for Dummies through to Macolm Galdwells excellent new book Outliers which looks at what makes people successful.

What was interesting, was there were only 50cm of shelving for books on selling.  5 metres of shelving for books on marketing.

So do people not buy books on selling?  In which case Dominc and I have wasted our time writing Why Killer.  So if they don't read them, how do they gain the skills?

As sales is probably the most critical skill to get a job, to get the order, to get a lifelong (or short term) partner - how come it is not taught in schoolds, University or Business schools?   Are we expected to just absorb it - or are 'sales simply born'. 

Some interesting perspectives from Bob Apollo from Revenue Insights who has been tracking the principles of the Chasm for a number of year, having spent some with Geoffrey Moore just after he published “Crossing the Chasm”


"It’s clear that you can’t wave a magic wand and cross the chasm overnight (or at all).  One of the things I’ve observed is that start-ups reach the chasm faster now than it used to be when Moore wrote the book (fewer early adopters).  Pragmatic buyers rule!"


Reaching the Chasm quicker is an issue as the start-up doesn’t have the referenceable clients, resources or cash to be able to engage with the Early Majority.  The Early Adopter will pay for professional services. The Early Majority will not.  The Early Majority will tie you up for months in a procurement because their job is to minimize risk and pick the right solution.  The early Majority want to get going NOW because they want to get the benefits for the company.


It is there are fewer Early Adopters, as Bob suggests, or is it that the internet has made companies globally visible far mor quickly.  And that is not necessarily good.  At time you want to keep your head down, below the radar in a client and build some revenue, some friends and supporters and also  a track record to protect you when the Early Majority in IT get to hear of you.

In the last week I've taken two flights. The two journeys were similar distances (Amsterdam and Brussels).  The planes’ were the same size. My luggage was the same. The only difference was the airline and hence the attitude of the staff. 

One made money, the other lost £250 and my respect.

 
As a great many businesses are now service based B2C (eg insurance, IT, retail, automotive) often the lowest paid staff deal exclusively with the customers.  Or even worse a 3rd party call center does.

I have realised one thing, you can have the best and latest equipment, the nicest showroom, and even the best stock, but if your staff are so stupid, they don't have an understanding of your underlying business and 'intent' you deserve to die in this recession.


What rules do you have in your business that are stupid, hack off customers and push them into the hands of your competition?

Facebook started as the hangout for the iPod Generation.  Stanley Bing wrote a very funny article for Fortune called I'm sorry, I'm not linking to you.  He makes some good ponits.  But that was back in April 08 - nearly half a decade in web-years (slightly less than dog-years).

So, as we are not the iPod generation there is a real risk we are the digital equivalent of your middle-aged Uncle gatecrashing your student parties, hanging around and trying to chat up your mates. 

Being cool is just like being powerful or a lady.  If you have to tell people you are... then you are not.

So is Facebook morphing, or it is we are just mourning our student years?  Someone please tell me because I'm not sure whether to accept the invitation from Juli, Jaz, Myles and Rebecca.  And if I do, I certainly don't know how to fill out my profile.

In the world of txt / IM / email TLAs have a place.  Type less. Say more.

But, what seems to the biggest barrier to entry into a new company or new industry is the terminology often hiding behind the TLA (three letter acronym).  People talk using TLAs almost to show how clever they are rather then to make the conversations shorter and more succinct.

So I launched acronymcentral.com   It has no business plan, no revenue, no exit - so must be worth$1.7bn even in this market.

What is MORE interesting is with current technology it took less than 2 hours to build the website, build the back end database with user login and permissions, buying domain name and redirecting it to the website.   That is Business 2.0 for you.

All that is needed now is a revenue model.  But with a domain name costing £9.99 and the hosting free, the ROI (sorry!!! - Return On Investment) could be quite quick.

So excited.  I finished the manuscript in May, and it has taken a while to get it through the Capstone / Wiley publishing machine.  Still it looks nice.. 

Go to www.killer-products.com to download the book summary and tell me what you think.  Or better still order a copy from amazon.

Next book will be self-published.  Faster, less hassle and more profitable.  Watch this space for the title.....