Graham Chastney

Another day when articles come together.

Jeffrey Philips has an interesting article on decision making.

Church of the Customer has an interesting article on organisations that treat remote operations as ‘dumb terminals’.

Both of these articles focus on the current organisational cultures and constructs that make the process of decision making very difficult.

Jeffrey highlights four areas which compound the problems, four areas that I have seen in many organisations:

• Who has to be involved in the decision?
• How will we justify the decision?
• Does the decision align with corporate and strategic objectives?
• What happens if things don’t go so well?

Anyone who has worked in a large organisation will know that the answer to each of those questions has its own peculiar difficulties.

In many matrix organisations it seems that the answer to the ‘who’ question is ‘everyone’. Everyone wants a finger in the pie, everyone wants to contribute (and take away) and no-one is in a position to decide. It is this first problem that makes all other problems insurmountable.

The Church of the Customer article highlights decision making as an issue too. In their case the issue is about autonomy at the right level. Again ‘who has to be involved in the decision?’.

As organisations become more ‘virtual’ I can only see this issue getting worse. It’s bad enough when the question of who needs to be involved includes a broad spectrum of your own organisation; when you extend this out to another organisation then it just gets worse.

The best place I have ever worked is within a small office where we had a small team that was almost totally autonomous and was well focussed on a small set of priorities. We made decision quickly and we galloped our way through our priorities. Organisations need to realise this and focus on building those small-well focussed-autonomous teams if they don’t want to become a talking-shop which never makes any decisions.

Perhaps virtual organisations will be the answer to the problem eventually. Many people will be much happier when they don’t have to make any decisions themselves and give someone else the problem .

Creating Passionate Users has an interesting article today on the success of communication techniques.

When trying to communicate to a crowd it looks like the best you can get is about 30%, and that’s if you put something in their hands and communicate via written or video media.

This rings true with my own experience. I have been involved in a number of large projects that have implemented some new technology something (email, desktop, etc.). In each case the implementation has gone slower then the project managers expected and in every case the project managers have complained that the end user has not done what they were asked to do.

If a project requires the end user to do something – the best you should expect is that 30% of them will do it. If you start with that number you will build a project that will at least be realistic about the effort that is going to need to be expended overcoming this limitation. If you expect that only 30% will do what you want them to do then you will realise how important it is to have a project that requires the end user to do nothing whatsoever; any dependency on the end user will just slow you down.

A lot of comment on Microsoft’s intention to buy Softricity (Steve Richards, Brian Madden, others)

My own viewpoint can be summarised like this:

• Technology: Great
• User Experience: Great
• Licensing: Problem

Both Steve and Brian touch on the licensing issue. The benchmark that everyone in the market works to when it comes to licensing is Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft are doing everyone else falls into line with. The Microsoft licensing engine is dominated by licensing that is installation based. In other words, you pay for every installation.

In order to accommodate the ‘terminal server’ type applications the pay-per-installation scenario has been fudged a bit to state that a license is required for each device capable of running the application on the terminal server.

Application virtualisation only becomes truly valuable where the licensing terms are flexible and fluid allowing a pay-per-use type model.

The pressure is on to make this change, but until Microsoft makes a dramatic change no-one else will see the need to. Moving to a pay-per-use model would require a huge shift for Microsoft and significantly impact the revenue from enterprise licensing and from Office; both of them things that they will be unwilling to tinker with too much.

Without a shift in licensing mechanisms application virtualisation is stick.

Tags: Microsoft, Softricity, Licensing

Michael Platt has picked up on some research done by Gartner stating that IT must start demonstrating value – not just cost reduction.

CIOs need to establish a track record of creating value faster than reducing IT costs by 2009. CIOs are now expected to provide high-quality, secure and cost-effective services. CIOs must deliver a record of high performance to establish their position and contribution in the organization. To do this, CIOs will need to create business value faster than the market and technology can reduce IT and business costs.

I’m just adding my voice to the chorus here. The primary role of IT needs to be the delivery of VALUE and not just the reduction of cost of the existing.

We’ll see whether reports from people like Gartner have the same effect they did when they made created a huge hullabaloo about TCO some years back. A hullabaloo I have to say has enabled IT organisations to reduce cost and also to massively reduce the value. High value and high cost has been replaced in most organisations with lower cost and lower value.

The cost centred thinking may have been appropriate in the last economic cycle. As the cycle turns another corner it’s no longer appropriate, it’s time to think value. Value thinking will require a huge metamorphosis for most IT organisation and many won’t be given the opportunity. What I see happening is that businesses will focus parts of their organisation on innovation. It will be the innovation function that drives expenditure on IT. The innovation expenditure will be focussed directly on creating innovation and on supporting the innovations that they develop, this will normally result in some IT expenditure but probably not by the IT function. The IT organisation will get given the technology that supports the innovation only when it is no longer innovation and requires a run-and-maintain, cost-centred approach.

Engineering organisation have worked this way for years; the IT organisation rarely supports the IT for the engineering part of the organisation. The the engineering function fund and normally support the technology themselves because they need to be closely intimate to the value it delivers, because value it the primary driver and not cost. Having the IT function supporting the engineering function normally has the effect of slowing down the engineering, the same would be true for the innovation function.

If the IT function only looks after run-and-maintain why bother having an IT function. Most organisation let someone else run-and-maintain their buildings, why should the run-and-maintain of IT be different.

Tags: Gartner,TVO,TCO

There are a number of reoccuring themes on this blog, it’s not deliberate it’s just what I’m interested in. One of them is the workplace of the future and that depends upon work culture more than technology.

Slow leadership points to a quiz on the subject of organisation civility:

 “How civilised is your organisation? Can it pass the Slow Leadership test for a working environment beneficial to the people who inhabit it? Now you have a chance to find out.”

I did the score for the organisation I work in, but I’m not willing to share the results .

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

John W. Gardner 

From my perspective the organisations that are going to succeed, particularly in the West World, are going to be those organisation that focus on creativity and innovation. Creativity and innovation requires civility in an organisation.