Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms

Hiring the Right / Wrong IT People to Achieve Alignment

Dr. George E. Strouse had a great article recently on CIO.com entitled "Are You Hiring the Wrong IT Staff to Achieve Your Alignment Goals?"  Strouse contends that the major cause of business and IT mis-alignment is that IT is not hiring the right kind of people.   He states "The right people need strong backgrounds in both business and technology. Most IT hiring managers place too much emphasis on strong technology backgrounds."  Although I cannot comment on whether or not this is the major reason for the misalignment I wholeheartedly agree with his comment on the needed background nonetheless.

The most popular post I've made (accounting for about 20+% of site visits) is one that contains what I thought was a good business analyst job description.  While this job description does contains some technical requirements as you might expect it also contains skills that are not often found in traditionally trained IT folks.  These are the types of skills that are needed for an business analyst to understand business.

Dr. Strouse contends that the reason business can not get the right people is that we are asking for people with a Computer Science degree rather than an Information Systems degree.  As a professor of information systems at York College in Pennsylvania he is eminently qualified to layout the distinction and makes a strong case.  Now before anyone with a Computer Science degree gets upset please read his article carefully.  As he points out there is a need for both types of degrees but each is better suited for different functions.

Agile Programming - A Poor Choice of Words?

Agile Programming is a popular programming methodology.  But it's not alone. There are other methodologies such as the Rational Unified Process, Spiral, and the traditional Waterfall methodology in common use.  Each has it advantages and disadvantages and each is named in a way that describes the process.  However with Agile its very name can tend to cause confusion.  "Agile" gets confused with "agile".  Wait a minute.  Other than the capitalization aren't they the same things?  Well not exactly.  Agile with capitals does mean something different than lower case agile and that's where the confusion comes in.

Agile (upper-case) programming in overly simple terms is a method of developing programs using closely knit teams to quickly produce releasable code in short time frames.  Based on the Agile manifesto principles it has some certain processes.  Wikipedia provides a good overview and a simple Google search will provide a mass of references. 

agile (lower-case "a") programming simply denotes being flexible in our design and adjusting as we go.

The term Agile was no doubt derived from its lower-case counterparts and that's where the difficulty comes in.  When we speak of Agile others often hear agile.  And after all who wouldn't want some flexibility in programming?  So very often you quickly get buy-in to employ this methodology when you use this term.  That is until the realization sinks in that what your user thinks they bought is not what you thought you were selling. 

Should We Make Customers Pay For The Convenience of Doing Business With Us Over The Internet?

Yesterday, I took the family down to Minute Maid park to watch the Houston Astros play the Milwaukee Brewers.  It was a  great day.  The weather was beautiful, I got to spend some quality time with my family and enjoyed a great ball game.  The Astros won!  My daughter's favorite player, #9 Hunter Spence, hit a 2-run walk-off homer in the 12th the win it 8 to 6.  Oh Baby!

Like a lot of other things I buy, I bought the tickets over the Internet.  Buying over the Internet is nice.  I could buy them when I wanted, not just when the box office was open.  It was easy and fast and I could print my own tickets.  Without question buying tickets over the Internet was very convenient.

At the same time it is a good thing for the Astros too.  Making it easer for customers to do business with you is always a good way to promote increased sales.  It also reduces costs.  When customers print their own own tickets the Astros' printing expense is reduced.  Likewise the staffing costs for the will call and tickets sales windows are reduced.  The more people that buy over the Internet the lower the Astros' costs.

So although this would seem like the classic win-win situation there is one little catch.

Keeping Data Accurate

This weekend I got a new windshield on my car.  A few weeks ago a rock chipped the windshield and propagated and 18 inch crack within a few minutes so I arranged for a windshield repair company to come to my house to replace it.  Things were going along pretty smoothly at first.  They removed the old windshield, took off the various registration and safety inspection stickers and prepped the car for the new windshield.  Everything was going well until it came time to put in the new windshield.  That's when they found out that the windshield they brought wasn't the right one for my car.

The repairmen called their office and verified that all of the ordering information was correct.  The problem turned out to be that the database of auto glass parts that they subscribed to had the wrong information.  They finally were able to figure out the right part number, brought it out to the house and installed it.  All turned out well except that it cost them an extra 2 hours of delay.  As they were about to leave one of them commented that they recalled that they ran into this same problem the last time they worked on my model of car.  It turns out they had to work with an inaccurate database that didn't have a good means for them to update or correct when errors were found.  In this case an inaccurate database became a customer service issue.

It's a fact of life that errors will find their way into our databases.  There are things we can do to minimize this but it difficult to entirely eliminate errors.  So this begs the question - "What do we do about the errors?"

Photos on Flickr

I've been using photos from Flickr with my postings for some time now.  A lot of people have been nice enough to post their photos there and have allowed me to use them through Creative Commons licensing.  So I thought it would be appropriate to start posting some of my photos to share with others.  Take a look if you're interested.

The Digital Divide: Promise versus Delivery

The "digital divide", the gap between those with access to information technology and those without, gets a lot of play in the press and with politicians.  It is always expressed as a problem that must be addressed.  You typically hear of it in socio-economic terms: 

• by the country's development level
• by age
• by economic status
• by race
• by gender
• by all of the above.

It really is an important issue worthy of thoughtful discussion - but I'm not going to discuss this in this post.  At least not this form of "digital divide" anyway.

We in corporate IT may be a little smug about the digital divide because for the most part we don't have to deal with it.  Generally, the groups we serve are all on the same level of access to technology so we don't have to worry about the divide.  There is however a digital divide that we do need to worry about.  In geo-political terms it is not nearly as important as the issues above but it is a local issue for all of us.  It is the digital divide between what technology promises (the potential of technology) and what it delivers (or how we use it).  This divide between promise and delivery expresses itself in two ways.

Zappos: Integrating Systems and Business Processes

When you run across a company the truly integrates their systems with their business processes it can be an amazing experience.  Dealing with these companies borders on fun because they take the effort to make it easy and have anticipated your needs.  Zappos, an online retailer of shoes and other accessories, is one such company.  Or more appropriately as they describe themselves: "We are a service company that happens to sell ________.

• shoes
• and handbags
• and clothing
• and eyewear
• and watches
• and accessories
• (and eventually anything and everything)"

Since I'm a customer of Zappos I'm surprised that I hadn't written about this before.  Fortunately, Seth Godin's recent post, "Zappos wants you to return those shoes" reminded me so now is a good time to talk about them.

Zappos' service is all encompassing in how it is set up.  It includes: policy, processes, customer perspective, vision, attitude and systems.  Customer service for them isn't just putting a "Contact us" or "Customer Service" link on their web site.  Pete Blackshaw explain this in more detail in "Word-of-Mouth Marketing 101, à la Zappos.com"

Don't believe me?  Then check out these examples:

When Robots Attack

James Taylor over at the smart (enough) systems blog posted an interesting article last week.  It was one of those that if it wasn't so serious it would be funny.  His post iRobot - Elite CRM, stupid returns system details his experiences of buying 3 systems from iRobot and wanting to return 1 of them.   As crazy as it sounds the only way he could do this was to return all 3 and then re-purchase the 2 he wanted.  As Taylor points out this is a poor way of doing business in so many ways.

Taylor notes that iRobot received a 2008 destinationCRM award for their automated customer service system.  However after his experience with trying to return a product Taylor notes " am sure the automated system for which they received an award is wonderful - I have not had to use it yet - but clearly they could do with making their return system a little smarter."  It does make you question how much thought they really put into the design of their system or if they tried to get any customer input into the system.

This example points out the need for 2 essential elements in good application development - the end user perspective and adaptability.  End user perspective can be obtained in a number of ways.  It can be based on the developers knowledge of how the system is used, input from the sales team,or directly from the end-user themselves.  How you get this input all depends upon the particular situation.

So why is all this important?

Eight Business Technology TrendsTo Watch

I recently ran across an article at the McKinsey Quarterly that caught my attention.  The McKinsey Quarterly is a business journal published by McKinsey & Company, a large international strategic business consulting firm.  The McKinsey Quarterly publishes both free (with registration articles) and "premium" (for a fee) articles.  The article that caught my attention is a free article published in December, 2007, entitled "Eight business technology trends to watch" by James Manyika, Roger Roberts and Kara Sprague.  These McKinsey consultants have identified some trends that we as IT leaders need to be thinking about.  It's a very thought provoking article.  The trends they identify are:

Managing relationships

1. Distributing cocreation - the Internet offers new ways for people and teams to collaborate in developing new products and services
2. Using consumers as innovators - "crowdsourcing" allows our customers to also be contributors
3. Tapping into a world of talent - it's a big world out there and in the virtual world one with out borders
4. Extracting more value from interactions - technology can help us focus our efforts into more value- added areas and transfer transactional activities to more cost effective solutions

Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation - technology has tremendous potential for automating repetitive tasks
6. Unbundling production from delivery - we can use technology to make our fixed assets into reusable components

Leveraging information in new ways

7. Putting more science into management - we now have the ability for data-based decisions more than we've ever had
8. Making businesses from information - "knowledge is power" that can help our business succeed and develop new markets

I'm a few months behind many other reviews of this article so I won't do a detailed review.  For that you may want to take a look at some of the reviews I've listed below.  Instead I'll make a different observation.

Unintended Consequences of Overlooking the Obvious with Technology

A week ago Saturday (March 8) we moved our clocks one hour ahead for daylight savings time (DST)  to give us more daylight in the evening.  The next day I checked into a DoubleTree hotel to attend a conference.  Upon entering my room I noticed that the alarm clock was one hour behind.  My first reaction was that they missed a great customer service opportunity.  Since the housekeeping staff is in the room everyday why not simply have them adjust the alarm clocks for daylight savings?  That should be simple enough, shouldn't it?  Well maybe not.

Since I wanted to use the alarm clock I figured it would be easier to set the time correctly myself.  Upon looking at the clock I noticed 2 things.  First the clock was 53 minutes behind and not 60 as I assumed resulting from the DST change.  Second, and this is the most shocking, there is no way to adjust the time.  That's right you can not change the time.  Some of the features include:

• Four pre-set buttons for local radio stations designated by a graphic of the music type

• Connection cable for use with guest’s personal MP3 player, portable CD player, laptop and other entertainment devices

• Built-in stereo speakers for radio or connected devices

• Large LCD screen with dimmer that adjusts to high, medium or low

• Automatic daily alarm time reset, preventing an alarm set by a previous guest from repeating

I picked up the radio and looked on the top and looked on the bottom and looked all around but couldn't find anything that would let me change the time.  My curiosity got the best of me so I called the front desk and the conversation went something like this:

Me: I must be a complete idiot but the time on the clock is wrong and I cannot figure out how to set it, can you tell me how to set the time.

Front Desk: We'll have to send up someone from engineering to do that.  You have to have a screwdriver and open up the clock to adjust the time.

Me: Am I hearing you correctly?  It takes someone from engineering to set the time on a clock?

Front Desk:  I'm afraid so.  Would you like me to send someone up?

Me: No thanks.  I'll just use the alarm feature on my BlackBerry.

I wish I would have had more time.  It would have been interesting to see if the time setting really can be corrected.  While preparing this post I did a little research and things get even more interesting.

CIOs and the Marketing of IT

Last Monday's post started out, "Marketing guru, Mary Schmidt, . . ." which was a similar start to the previous Monday's post, "Marketing guru, Seth Godin . . ."  At first blush it may seem strange to be referencing marketing experts in an IT blog but I believe IT can benefit greatly from applying some common marketing concepts.  For purposes of this discussion I mean true marketing, not to be confused with advertising or sales.  While I also believe advertising and sales can be important for IT, they are different from marketing so I'll defer discussions on those until later posts.

Marketing is at its heart a strategic approach to how you decide what your product is, what the target market is, its pricing and delivery.  The classical way of looking at it is the 4P's of marketing (also try a Google search for many more references):

1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion

Product for IT are the various services we deliver whether it is infrastructure services such as voice and data; productivity tools such as word processing; and business system whether ERP or individual systems.

Price in our case is what our user community is willing to pay for these services.

Place is our distribution method, how we deliver these services.   This is where you see client-server, SOA (service-oriented architecture), web technologies, etc. come to play.

Promotion is about how we make our users aware of our services and how we convince them to adopt new technologies.  This is often the one IT has the most difficulty with and I'll talk more about this in future posts.

Oops

I'd like to thank Daintree Peters for his comment in my last post and for pointing out that my blog did not appear properly in the Firefox browser.  Apparently the typo in my coding did not affect Internet Explorer but did affect Firefox. I try to make your reading experience enjoyable and I'm sure it wasn't for those that use Firefox.  I have corrected this error.  My apologies for making things inconvenient.

Again thank you Daintree for pointing this out and giving me the opportunity to correct it.

Mike

"oops..funny socks i have!" photo by PrASanGaM