the value of measurement

One of many differences between IT and the rest of the organization is effective measurement. IT either measures too little or too much, but most measurements gathered are internally focused. While it's good for the Help Desk Manager to know how long it takes before a call is answered, there is no need to share that data outside the department. IT needs to pay more attention to what's important to the business.

How do we do that? Measure in terms the business can understand. Paint a scenario, using vision and fear (the only drivers for change) to drive purpose. Use metrics to back up your story, not to tell your story.

Turn data into information via interpretation and analysis. But don't stop there. Turn that information into insight, using external data sources. Finally, turn that insight into knowledge, by distilling and communicating that message. Only then are measurements truly effective.

tonight we're gonna business plan like it's 1999

I met an entrepreneur this weekend at Superhappydevhouse who reminded me why we all loved Suck, back in the day. (Well, all of us except Marc Canter, anyway.)

I spent a couple hours listening to this man, whose company I will not disclose, talk about how great his company is. However, rather than speak in terms of the humanitarian element which Paul Holland of Foundation Capital claims is part of every successful startup, he was not able to enunciate what was special about his company. It was like watching a train wreck -- all he could talk about was about impressing VC's and how hard it is to obtain capital. Not surprisingly, he'd been told that he needed a stronger message. He interpreted this to mean -- not that he needed to develop a compelling vision for his product, or a story which explained why his product is useful and worthy of investment -- but that he needed to develop a better motto than the Stalinist quote on the home page. Pithy though it is, it says nothing about what business he's in, or what he has to offer a customer. And maybe a better name -- something cool.

So I listened to him brainstorming different Stalinist quotes with his business partner, including such lovelies as, "Death solves all problems - no man, no problem." Stalin really was a marketing genius. While they weren't putting this quotation to serious consideration, never did it occur to them that their message should be actually related to the value they hope to provide, and the customer need they hope to fill. Later, they got bored with that exercise, and moved on to finding a new name. Alex Russell had just done a presentation on the Dojo Toolkit, so they excitedly decided that they needed to name their product "Dojo." That way the CEO could call himself "Sensei" on his business card.

I wish I could say that these people were intoxicated, or just having fun, but unfortunately they were serious. Fortunately, the Dojo Toolkit doesn't need to worry about brand confusion, as there is no chance these folks are getting off the ground. What's needed is not personal ambition, but ambition for the company.

Jim Collins quotes David Packard on this topic:

“I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately—they make a contribution to society, a phrase that sounds trite but is fundamental.
… You can look around [in the general business world] and still see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to give a service—generally to do something that is of value.”

lingua franca

In a non-manufacturing company, the company is only as profitable as the effectiveness of IT, but CIO's have an abysmal time communicating what they actually do. The executive team is intimately knowledgable of what's going on in Sales and Finance, but IT can be a black hole. For such a huge cost center, that's not acceptable.

Ultimately, the CIO must get away from an operational mindset. Things like network and email should be high value, low cost, low visibility and effort. You're not in the IT business, you're in the retail business or the airline industry or consumer product goods, and that's where the bulk of your visibility should be. There should never be a business strategy and an IT strategy -- just one strategy -- one vision and direction for the company. IT needs to be at the table with the business, focusing efforts on reaching corporate objectives.

Within the corporation, it seems everyone speaks the same language, except for IT. In order to reach the other decision makers within the company, the CIO needs to get away from focusing on metrics which only matter to IT, and instead work on building specific strategic business recommendations. Data is only valuable when it is interpreted, compared against external sources, and a story created. What is the vision we are driving toward, or the terror we are working against? When Rebecca Blalock, the CIO of Southern Company, talked of getting 26 calls a second during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she stopped to analyze the best way to convey that number. The story she developed focused on the 55,000 employees which would have been required, had the company not instituted an advanced automated phone system. Same data, much more tangible story.

It's tempting to talk of a lingua franca, but even the CEO and CFO speak different languages, and have different priorities. You have to listen to the CEO for strategy, and then work numbers for the CFO. Ultimately, everything becomes maintenance, an operations issue, but there are things we can do to keep that from growing into a black hole.

When business justification is developed, as a business case or ROI model, that model is not often revisited. In many companies, once approval to begin an initiative is begun, that's the end of modeling. What a company should strive for is a state where the model is revisited throughout implementation, to ensure that the project will attain the desired goals. When the project is put into maintenance, the goals for the project need to be retained and periodically revisited. Are further projects minimizing the effectiveness of what's been developed? Are there additional investments which need to be made to preserve what's been achieved? Hardware and infrastructure upgrades should be tied to a corporate goal. If we are upgrading hardware to keep an old initiative up-to-date, this should trigger a review of these goals to see if they are still relevant to the corporation, given new market realities.

So simplify the language, create a business focus, and tie operational activities to corporate objectives. If this were simple, everyone would be doing it, instead of whining about how this is a common problem.

corporate blogging

The most amusing part of CIO Forum for me was a passing comment about blogs. The speaker asked the audience, almost entirely CIO's of old-line companies, if anyone in their companies was blogging about the corporation. I was the only person who raised a hand. I was in a room full of 50 CIO's of companies including Yahoo, Xerox and Iron Mountain. It was such a surprising display of obliviousness to the world we live in -- when companies think the most exciting technology is sensor nets, and don't know their people are openly talking about them.

Bob Forbes confided in me that he would be mortified to find that his employees were talking about him. More startling than the naivete of our corporate executives in not recognizing the pervasity of blogging was their reaction against it. Ultimately, companies need to understand that the press office no longer has the only megaphone. Companies who try to quash blogging by firing for blogging end up as blog targets. It's critical that companies instead understand the power in the hands of their employees, respect that, and treat their employees accordingly. Much the same way that compliance is the excuse companies have wanted to shore up their infrastructure, blogging should be recognized as the excuse for transparency, honesty and communication within the organization.

Stockdale Paradox

Like a lot of people, my only knowledge of Jim Stockdale was as the slightly eccentric running mate of Ross Perot in his ill-fated run for the presidency. I was blithely unaware of his eight-year stay in a POW camp in Vietnam. I can't ever pretend to comprehend the suffering he endured (I can barely even watch The Deer Hunter) and it feels trivializing to compare that experience to the business world.

However, hardly a week goes by that I don't end up relaying Jim Collins' discussion of the Stockdale Paradox.

Since so much of what I do involves changing not just the tactical activities of a company in building processes, but drilling into the very core of the company to change attitudes and do the impossible, I often end up working with discouraged, fatalistic employees who gave up trying to change things years ago, and doubt our ability to fix the broken. So this statement from the late Admiral really speaks to me:

“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Let's just not reflect on the fact that I'm comparing my career to being in a POW camp.

Nothing frustrates me more than people who have given up. People who put their own interests ahead of the company, or people who have different ideas of direction for the company can be dealt with in a logical, analytical fashion. But the disgruntled employee, tired of fighting battles he never wins, is unwilling to go through that pain again. He shuts down, and in shutting down, destroys his vision and the hopes of those around him.

This reflects passion displaced -- it takes emotional engagement and pride to care this much. I've talked to a lot of people who think that such a person is lost; that the company should cut the cord and let him go. While I have obvious concerns about the demotivated employee's affect on his coworkers, I think that few things would be more wasteful than losing that much passion. Nothing is so rewarding as seeing these people come back to life, once these problems which have been plaguing him for years suddenly begin to clear. He no longer doubts his own ability, and no longer strikes out in anger at those around him.

“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”