Showing posts with label Performance Results. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Performance Results. Show all posts

March 26, 2012

Lead With Technology, Not Trinkets

RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, continues to flounder, and many organizations are rightfully moving their mobility solutions to the ever more capable iPhone and Android platforms.

Changing the device has the potential to bring the latest technology to the organization, but the risk is that the device is viewed as a "toy" to hand out to the end-users, like doling out duckets to the impoverished in the Middle Ages.

With the latest smartphones and tablets running at 4G and loaded with camera, video, and more than half a million Apps, end-users are more than happy to receive their bounty whether or not it is immediately tied into the business processes of the organization. 

In some cases, when there is money to invest to new systems, strategic planning, sound governance, and robust security, the CIO may choose to focus on gadgets instead.  

Unfortunately, innovation in the organization is more than about gadgetry, but about how the organization can benefit from the integration of new hardware, software, and information to better carry out the mission. 

However, delivering solutions is hard, while buying devices can be as easy as just writing a check. 

If smartphones are treated trivially like gifts, rather than as a true game-changer for how people perform their jobs better, then CIOs have simply bought themselves some more time in the corner office, rather than driving transformative change. 

Bringing new devices to the organization has many benefits in it's own right, but the key is not to do it for it's own sake. 

New devices are wonderful, and we want them personally and professionally, but it is the CIO's job to ensure that IT investment dollars are spent on genuine IT solutions to mission and business requirements, and smartphones and tablets need to be integrated firmly into what we do, not just what we carry. 

(Source Photo: here with attribution to macattck)


Share/Save/Bookmark

February 9, 2010

Why The Customer Should Be The Center Of Our Professional World

It’s intuitive that organizations should manage oriented to serve their customers, because it’s the customers who keep them in business. Yet, in the name of “shareholder value,” many organizations continue to put short-term results at the forefront of their decision-making and this ends up damaging the long-term success of the organization to the detriment of its owners.

Harvard Business Review, January-February 2010, in an article called “The Age of Customer Capitalism” by Roger Martin states that “for three decades, executives have made maximizing shareholder value their top priority. But evidence suggest that shareholders actually do better when firms put the customer first.”

The author continues: “Peter Drucker had it right when he said the primary purpose of a business is to acquire and keep customers.”

Clearly, we serve our customers in the service of our mission. Our mission is why we exist as an organization. Our mission is to provide our customers with products and/or services that satisfy some intrinsic need.

The equation is simple:

Shareholder Returns = f (Customer Satisfaction)

Shareholder returns is a function of and positively correlated with customer satisfaction, as HBR notes. If we serve our customers well, the organization will thrive--and so will the owners—and if we do this poorly, the organization will die—and the owners will “lose their shirts”.

The problem with concentrating exclusively on stock price is that we then tend to focus on short-term returns versus long-term results, and the shareholder ends up worse off in the end.

“The harder a CEO is pushed to increase shareholder value, the more the CEO will be tempted to make moves that actually hurt the shareholders…short-term rewards encourage CEOs to manage short-term expectation rather than push for real progress.”

The article cites companies like Johnson & Johnson and P&G that “get it.” They put the customer first and their shareholders have been rewarded handsomely—“at least as high as, if not higher than, those of leading shareholder-focused companies.”

One good example of how J&J put customers first is when in the 1982 Tylenol poisonings, in which seven Chicago-area residents died, J&J recalled every capsule in the nation, “even though the government had not demanded it.”

Another good example in the article is Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. They recognized the importance of the customer versus the focus on the shareholder and already “in 1997, just after the firms IPO, the founders made a rule that any manager who talked about the share price at work had to buy a doughnut for every person in the company.” The last infraction by the COO had him delivering more than 800 doughnuts—the message was heard loud and clear.

These examples are in seemingly stark contrast to the recent handling by Toyota of its brake problems, in which there has been delayed recalls and the government is now investigating. As The New York Times (8 February 2010) reported: “The fact that Toyota knew about accelerator deficiencies as far back as December 2008 “raises serious questions about whether car manufacturers should be more forthcoming when they identify a problem, even before a recall,” said Robert Gifford, the executive director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, a nonprofit group that seeks to advise British legislators on air, rail and road safety issues.” Note: this is out of character for Toyota, which historically has been a car company known for its quality and safety.

As a long advocate for User-centric Enterprise Architecture, I applaud the organizations and the people that put the customer first—and by this, I mean not by words alone, but in deeds. It is easy to put the customer into our mission and vision statements, but it is another to manage our organization with a true service creed.

While the HBR article emphasizes short-term shareholder value as main culprit diverting us from a positive customer-focus, there are really numerous distractions to realizing the vision of a customer service organization. Some examples include: organizational politics that hinder our ability to accomplish our mission; functional silos that are self-serving instead of seeking the best for the enterprise; certain egocentric employees (a minority) that put personal gain or a lack of strain above a service ethos; and of course, greedy and corrupt individuals that seek to profit at the expense of the customer, perhaps even skimping on product quality and customer service, thereby even endangering health and safety.

While most people are essentially good and seek to do the right thing, the organization must put in place controls to ensure that our focus is never distracted or diminished from our customers. These controls include everything from establishing values, policies, processes, requirements management, product development, training, testing, measurement and reporting, and best practices implementation in order to ensure our finest delivery to the customers, always.


Share/Save/Bookmark

October 6, 2009

Measurement is Essential to Results

Mission execution and performance results are the highest goals of enterprise architecture.

In the book Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani, he describes how performance measurement in his administration as mayor of NYC resulted in tremendous improvements, such as drastic decreases in crime. He states: “Every time we’d add a performance indicator, we’d see a similar pattern of improvement.”

How did Giuliani use performance measures? The centerpiece of the effort to reduce crime was a process called Compstat in which crime statistics were collected and analyzed daily, and then at meetings these stats were used to “hold each borough command’s feet to the fire.”

What improvements did Giuliani get from instituting performance measurements? Major felonies fell 12.3%, murder fell 17.9%, and robbery 15.5% from just 1993-1994. “New York’s [crime] rate reduction was three to six times the national average…far surpassed that of any other American city. And we not only brought down the crime rate, we kept it down.”

How important was performance measurement to Giuliani? Giuliani states, “even after eight years, I remain electrified by how effective those Compstat meetings could be. It became the crown jewel of my administration’s push for accountability—yet it had been resisted by many who did not want their performance to be measured.”

From an architecture perspective, performance measurement is critical—you cannot manage what you don’t measure!

Performance measurement is really at the heart of enterprise architecture—identifying where you are today (i.e. your baseline), setting your goals where you want to be in the future (i.e. your targets), and establishing a plan to get your organization from here to there through business process improvement, reengineering, and technology enablement.

In the end, genuine leadership means we direct people, process, and technology towards achieving measureable results. Fear of measurement just won't make the grade!


Share/Save/Bookmark

January 4, 2009

The Need for Control and Enterprise Architecture

Human beings have many needs and these have been well documented by prominent psychologists like Abraham Maslow.

At the most basic level, people have physiological needs for food, water, shelter, and so on. Then “higher-level” needs come into play including those for safety, socializing, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization.

The second order need for safety incorporates the human desire for feeling a certain degree of control over one’s life and that there is, from the macro perspective, elements of predictability, order, and consistency in the world.

Those of us who believe in G-d generally attribute “real” control over our lives and world events to being in the hands of our creator and sustainer. Nevertheless, we see ourselves having an important role to play in doing our part—it is here that we strive for control over our lives in choosing a path and working hard at it. A lack of any semblance of control over our lives makes us feel like sheer puppets without the ability to affect things positively or negatively. We are lost in inaction and frustration that whatever we do is for naught. So the feeling of being able to influence or impact the course of our lives is critical for us as human beings to feel productive and a meaningful part of the universe that we live in.

How does this impact technology?

Mike Elgan has an interesting article in Computerworld, 2 January 2009, called “Why Products Fail,” in which he postulates that technology “makers don’t understand what users want most: control.”

Of course, technical performance is always important, but users also have a fundamental need to feel in control of the technology they are using. The technology is a tool for humans and should be an extension of our capabilities, rather than something like in the movie Terminator that runs rogue and out of the control of the human beings who made them.

When do users feel that the technology is out of their control?

Well aside from getting the blue screen of death, when they are left waiting for the computer to do something (especially the case when they don’t know how long it will be) and when the user interface is complicated, not intuitive, and they cannot find or easily understand how to do what they want to do.

Elgan says that there are a number of elements that need to be built into technology to help user feel in control.

Consistetency—“predictability…users know what will happen when they do something…it’s a feeling of mastery of control.”

Usability—“give the user control, let them make their own mistakes, then undo the damage if they mess something up” as opposed to the “Microsoft route—burying and hiding controls and features, which protects newbies from their own mistakes, but frustrates the hell out of experienced users.”

Simplicity—“insist on top-to-bottom, inside-and-outside simplicity,” rather than “the company that hides features, buries controls, and groups features into categories to create the appearance of few options, with actually reducing options.”

Performance/Stability—“everyone hates slows PCs. It’s not the waiting. It’s the fact that the PC has wrenched control from the user during the time that the hourglass is displayed.”

Elgan goes on to say that vendors’ product tests “tend to focus on enabling user to ‘accomplish goals…but how the user feels during the process is more important than anything else.”

As a huge proponent of user-centricity, I agree that people have an inherent need to feel they are in some sort of control in their lives, with the technology they use, and over the direction that things are going in (i.e. enterprise architecture).

However, I would disagree that how the user feels is more important than how well we accomplish goals; mission needs and the ability of the user to execute on these must come first and foremost!

In performing our mission, users must be able to do their jobs, using technology, effectively and efficiently. So really, it’s a balance between meeting mission requirements and considering how users feel in the process.

Technology is amazing. It helps us do things better, faster, and cheaper that we could ever do by ourselves. But we must never forget that technology is an extension of ourselves and as such must always be under our control and direction in the service of a larger goal.


Share/Save/Bookmark

December 31, 2008

Comments from OMB's Chief Architect: Kshemendra Paul

Recently, Kshemendra Paul, Chief Enterprise Architect, at the President's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) made the following critical comments to me about business cases and pilots and incorporating these in the Systems Development Life Cycle:

"I was online and came across your site -
http://usercentricea.blogspot.com/2007/08/system-development-life-cycle-and.html.

I had two comments I wanted to share. First, I would recommend you highlight a business case step, a formal decision to move out of select/conceptual planning and into control. While this is implied, it is such a crucial step and we don't do it well - meaning that we don't force programs to work through all of the kinks in terms of putting forward a real business case (tied to strong performance architecture).

Also, this is a step that is inevitably cross boundary - either on the mission side and for sure on the funding side.

Second, I'd like to see more emphasis on smaller scale rollout or piloting. The goal of which is to prove the original business case in a limited setting. Nothing goes as planned, so another objective is to have real world data to refine the over all plan."

I completely agree with Kshemendra on the need to develop business cases and do them well for all new initiatives.

Organizations, all too often, in their zeal to get out new technologies, either skip this step altogether or do it as a "paper" (i.e. compliance) exercise. Symbolic, but wholly without intent to do due diligence and thus, without any genuine value.

Therefore, whenever we plan for new IT, we must ensure strategic business alignment, return on investment, and risk mitigation by developing and properly vetting business cases through the Enterprise Architecture and Investment Review Boards.

It's great to want to move quickly, get ahead of the pack, and gain competitive advantage by deploying new technologies quickly, but we risk doing more harm than good, by acting rashly and without adequately thinking through and documenting the proposed investment, and vetting it with the breadth and depth of organizational leadership and subject matter experts.

Secondly, as to Kshemendra's point on doing pilots to prove out the business case. This is an important part of proofing new ideas and technologies, before fully committing and investing. It's a critical element in protecting the enterprise from errant IT investments in unproven technologies, immature business plans, and the lack of ability to execute.

Pilots should be incorporated along with concept of operations, proof of concepts, and prototypes in rolling out new IT. (See my blog http://usercentricea.blogspot.com/2007/08/conops-proof-of-concepts-prototypes.html)

With both business cases and pilots for new IT projects, it's a clear case of "look before you leap." This is good business and good IT!

Share/Save/Bookmark

May 26, 2008

Managing Human Capital and Enterprise Architecture

Human capital is one of the perspectives of enterprise architecture that I have been advocating for the Federal Enterprise Architecture to adopt.

ComputerWorld, 19 May 2008, has a good article on “How to Manage Brilliant People,” which can be applied to all everyone—brilliant or not.

Here are some of the best dos and don’ts (in my own words for the most part) and my two cents on them:

  1. Manage results, not process—Identify the results you’re looking for, but don’t prescribe to others how they need do it. This is micromanagement plain and simple. I don’t like to be micro-managed and I don’t think others do either. Treat people like adults and give them the freedom to do their jobs (assuming they haven’t abused that freedom and trust in the past).
  2. Vet ideas, then make a decision—Communicate with your staff openly and creatively. Everyone on the team has good ideas and can contribute to analyzing problems and working out viable solutions. Not everyone will agree on the solution, so after a reasonable discussion and analysis, it time for the manager to make a decision. Analysis paralysis is detrimental to you, your team, and your program. Better to make a timely decision and then course correct as new facts become available, then to wait and wait and wait. Time is a critical success factor for most important decisions. The marketplace waits for no one.
  3. Be a good mentor, and learn from everyone—We all have something to teach others and to learn from others, because we all have strengths and weaknesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re the boss or the subordinate. For the boss, it takes a degree of humility and open mindedness to “be bested” and more than that to actually learn from it.
  4. Admit what you don’t know, not just what you do know—Generally, we all are more than in a hurry to mouth off what we know and show off what we can do. But how many of us are quick to admit what we don’t know? It takes a degree of maturity to say that I don’t know, but I’ll find out and get back to you, and not “feel insecure and threatened.”
  5. Raise the bar, and stretch your staff—Just like when setting organizational goals, you want them to be achievable, yet ambitious, so too with setting personal and team goals, they should be challenging, but doable. That way you keep productivity high and morale high and people know they are growing (not stagnant).

At a manager in the IT world, I have learned that technically, pretty much we can do anything (given the time and resources); however, the trick to good management is not the technical stuff, but rather the people stuff. People can be more complicated than landing a man on the moon that’s why we need solid leaders, plenty of management training, compassion and empathy for people, and the institutionalization of human capital as part of our everyday EA planning.

Some early things that I would suggest in developing a human capital perspective in architecture would be:

  1. Identifying best practices and benchmarking leadership and management performance against them;
  2. Establishing a framework for professional development and training in these areas;
  3. Identifying key knowledge, skill, and ability areas for the organization;
  4. Inventorying employees against #3;
  5. Identifying gaps;
  6. Creating alignment between function and talent; and
  7. Developing performance plan templates so that everyone understands their roles, goals, and the rewards available to them for high performance.

Of course, there is much more that can be done, and this is only a beginning. This is something that I am very interested in and about which I would welcome any comments and feedback.


Share/Save/Bookmark