Confirmed speakers for the event are:

Drew Boyd

Drew Boyd is a recognized authority, thought leader, educator, and practitioner in the fields of innovation, persuasion, and social media. He is the Executive Director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program and Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati.

Ginny Walker

Virginia (Ginny) Walker is currently GE Aviation’s Chief Enterprise Architect, reporting to the CIO. She grew up in Michigan, obtained her undergraduate degree in Systems Analysis at Miami (OH) University, an MBA from Xavier (OH), and has worked 25 years for GE in Aviation, Corporate and Energy. She has held a diverse span of Information Technology roles…from application development, to data warehouse and data management, to strategic planning, outsourcing, data center management, and ERP implementations.

Jim Goetz

Jim is the Chief Information Officer at Convergys.  He is responsible for the planning, development, and delivery of the technology products and services for the Company globally, including external and internal clients. He reports to Jeff Fox, president and chief executive officer of Convergys.

Mike Cholak

Mike Cholak is the Vice President of Customer Intelligence Services at Convergys.  He leads a team dedicated to delivering a full suite of consulting services to the Company’s clients that help leverage customer intelligence and feedback to optimize long- term customer loyalty and profitability.

For more information:

iPhone4S

Like most of you, I recieve a lot of publications in my inbox each day.  This morning, an interview in Intelligent Utilitycaught my attention.  The interview, IT’s Workforce of the Future, is a very interesting observation by a CIO who has been in the workforce for less than 20 years.  In the interview the CIO, Branndon Kelley reminds us that in 1999 our workplace had better, faster technology than we had at home.  Today, for most, that simply isn’t the case.  We have a new workforce emerging that has been immersed in technology since birth and want to bring that to their new post-college positions.

Branndon issued a challenge for those of us “old timers” in IT.  Certainly our experience has taught us to be cautious and deliberate and to plan our project carefully.  These new techies, however, are more likely to jump in with both feet and more optimism.  Neither is certainly a perfect strategy but their is a lot to be learned from both.  Business is changing faster and faster every day.  When evaluating your projects here are some things you may want to consider:

1. Is there truly a compelling business reason why I couldn’t move my data to the Cloud?
2. How can I inspire my technical team to think more creatively and collaboratively?
3. Why does my staff need a permanent desk at my site? 
4. Can I find the best resources in my town/headquarters?  What if I was not limited by geography?
5. What tools do I need to get in place now so that I can enable my teams to push the boundaries of location, work hours, and technology?

Food for thought indeed.  How would you respond to the questions above?

 - Jodie

Another way to frame the discussion is, “Has someone already solved that problem?”  When the answer is yes, the existing solutions deserve a good look.  In my experience, a combination of both buy and build often turns out to be the right answer.

Let’s take the issue of getting more out of all that data that has been loaded into your company’s Microsoft SharePoint-based collaboration site.  Someone (probably many someones) has spent lots of time getting thousands of documents, contact lists, project plans, and other kinds of essential data into this amazingly versatile tool.  And if your portal has been well-designed, you probably find it an invaluable resource while you’re using your laptop or desktop at the office.

As soon as you try to get this information out using your mobile device, let’s say using your iPhone, it becomes a different story.  Even if you manage to navigate to the right place, the functional richness of the interface is not ideal when you move into the realm of finger touches and gestures .

So what to do?  Build a new, mobile version of your SharePoint site (probably a tough sell given the current economy)?  Or has someone already solved this problem?

As it turns out, the creators of SharePoint provided a shortcut to get to stored data directly.  This method uses web services – in human terms we might call it the “just give me the data, please ” service – to make the data available without the need to navigate through a web page.  It’s up to the application you’re using to determine how the data should look and be presented.

But until recently, not many people had solved the other part of the problem – taking the SharePoint web services and building an iPhone app to make it useable on a mobile device.

When he put two technologies together (buy + build), it increased the value of the data we already had, by making it more portable and our staff more productive.  Kudos to him for seeing the opportunity and going for it!

A growing number of developers have followed this lead to build iPhone apps that put all of your SharePoint data at your fingertips.  There are several choices now available in the Apple App Store, including (in alphabetical order):

• Attache: SharePoint Client (LUCRUM)
• iShare (Spyk Software)
• iSharePhone (Webstate)
• iSP-Browser (iSP Apps)
• Moshare (Moprise)
• SharePlus Office Mobile Client (SouthLabs)
• Sharetica (Celltica)

I’ll expand further on some of the topics touched on here in later posts, including more thoughts on the “build vs. buy” decision, the changing dynamics in data visualization, and how business intelligence solutions on mobile devices are impacting the way we work.

-Eric

This snapshot shows the new home page for the Cleveland Museum of Art, featuring personalized content, exhibitions information, and highlighted objects from the collection.

It’s a treat when we have the opportunity to publicly showcase work from our portfolio.  This week, we invite you to view the results of our most recent assignment with the Cleveland Museum of Art and their new website.  

 This event marks the successful completion of a two year effort to set a new standard for how museums engage with their visitors.  The engagement has followed the LUCRUM iStream methodology – starting with our high-value Stakeholder Alignment Session, though a process of analysis, collaboration, transformation, and now launch – to result in this groundbreaking experience.  The website was developed in partnership with the museum staff and award-winning Pentagram Design, based in New York.  

One of the most compelling features of the new website is enhanced access to the museum’s encyclopedic collection of over 40,000 objects - many of these iconic works of art are now accessible online, as well as woven into the pages of the site.  The objects become part of the fabric of the experience.  Large images and a wide range of search options make it easy to wander for hours in the online collection – I encourage you to give it a try!  

The redesigned collections browser offers visual access to over 40,000 objects in the Museum's collection.

You’ll not find a single security guard with arms crossed, daring you to approach for a close-up look.  Interaction is encouraged, and you are invited to add comments to their favorite objects or tag them with key words so that they are easier for others to find.  

The new site also paves the way for more in the way of multimedia features, to provide diverse perspectives on individual works of art and offer behind-the-scenes views of areas within the museum that are not accessible to the general public.    

In planning the experience, the design and development teams examined the best online practices of retail and consumer product brands.  Social media is heavily integrated into each page of the new site as well, with an option to share content with various online services or add events to a personal calendar. Links are also supplied to the museum’s own Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts.  

The simplicity of the navigation was also a key to improving the overall experience for site users. Everything on the site is as close to the homepage as possible, which eliminates the kind of multiple clicks and top-down hierarchical navigation found on a lot of websites.   An expanded calendar provides day-by-day views of all activities at the museum, with direct links to more information about the events or to the online box office.

LUCRUM engineered the site using a number of advanced technologies and design innovations.  And while the end experience is highly visual and is delivered in an engaging, interactive way, the some of the real marvels are “under the hood.”  Think about it – the key to the site’s richness is in the data that it makes available, and the way in which you can engage with that data to find “hidden meaning” and value that was not immeditately obvious.

Sound familiar?  The same data strategies and fundamental approaches we use in our business intelligence assignments apply here too.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking more about how we applied these principles and how they lead to successful technology projects.  In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy the website, and let us know what you think!   

-Eric

I’ve been working in IT since 1993.  In that time, I’ve become the Excel champion.  Excel is cheap (relatively), installed nearly everywhere, and most everyone knows how to use it.  IT rejects Excel…because it’s cheap and easy.  We technicians like things to be complicated.  It makes us feel smart when we can deploy an app that most people would never understand.  But year after year, I find that the cheap, simple Excel spreadsheet is the one thing that can always get you a “thank you” and “you’ve made my job so easy” response from a customer.

With today’s install, I was able to get my smart guys to even look at Excel as something complex.  Using a stored procedure in MS SQL 2005 and the data connection in MS Excel, we were able to create an Excel Macro that allows a user to click on a menu item and execute that stored procedure using parameters in the Excel spreadsheet.

After creating the connection, the next step was to establish parameters/prompts in the spreadsheet.

Now that the parameters were established, the user could bring back the data into a table in Excel to view the results.  We chose to hide that tab and instead allow the users to manipulate with a simple but elegant Pivot Table (this did require some macro work).

THERE!  DONE!

Now, with some additional time, we could clean up the macro, create some error handling and actually move the running of the stored proc to the macro…with…some…additional…time. The solution is clean and simple and the user is happy.  For prototyping and user solutions that are going to just a few people, sometimes easier and faster is better.

- Jodie

Think about the conversations on Facebook.  Your friend from out of town posts the question, “I need ideas for a 9 year old birthday party in the Cincy area”.  Within minutes, the suggestion start rolling in:

Everyone that is your “friend” can comment on the question.  Responses are real time.  If the friend had sent an email, it would bounce through the servers and firewalls.  Some would lose the mail message into their junk items, some would not respond, some would think to do it later (and then not do it).  With Facebook, the question shows up in my “Most Recent” list.  It’s there if I want to respond now or later.  Responding is easy.  All can see one another’s responses (unlike email where I may not be on a reply list).  You are engaged in the conversation because it is easy and allows for debate.

If Facebook were smart they would take some of the same concepts in their free version and create a Business Edition.  This edition would be installed within my firewall and rely on Active Directory for the users.  New employees would be set up as they would be in email.  The “friend” concept would be abolished as we are all colleagues that need to communicate with one another and all employees would be in my list.  I no longer need a separate IM client, as that feature is already built in.  Email is also built in…do I need corporate email?  (FB mail does not allow for attachments, only links…).  Additionally, my HR or event planners could post events and recieve RSVPs.  The calendaring isn’t great in FB – perhaps that’s an enhancement???  To me, having a conversation with my colleagues just became considerably easier.  Imagine the IT department:

Wow…wouldn’t that be great!!  What features would you add to the business edition of Facebook?

- Jodie

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Recently I came across a quote by the legendary Chicago Sun-Times journalist Sydney Harris who observed, “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same, but get better.” Nothing like a little paradox to reboot the brain and inspire a new look at the same landscape.

We want things to stay the same – only get better. Ain’t that the truth? There’s a lot of comfort in things remaining the same. We know what to expect, we can predict our reactions, nothing is going to catch us off guard and cause us pain or make us look bad.

We gain a sense of security in things remaining the same, especially over a long period of time. It’s like a baseball hitter who spends hours hitting off a pitching machine. The speed and location of the ball are predictable, so eventually, no matter how fast the pitch comes in, the hitter can whack it. He starts feeling good about himself. Then he gets into a game where the pitcher is changing speeds and location, and suddenly those hard line drives turn into soft pop-ups and groundouts. Without the predictability of the machine, hitting becomes a much tougher job.

Change by definition upsets the status quo. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s not. If it makes things better, then we love it. But because we only know the outcome after the change occurs, we hate the prospect of it, mostly because we’re afraid of losing what we already have. That’s human nature.

While I was in the process of wrapping my brain around this concept I was given a copy of a recent article by Geoffrey Moore from the Harvard Business Review.¹ The article has proved very helpful in understanding the power of this paradox – stay the same only better.

The always-insightful Moore pointed out that there are three terms or time horizons we work in. Normally we deal in the short-term horizon and the long-term horizon. But according to Moore, there is also the overlooked, often borrowed from and always-misunderstood middle-term horizon, which ironically is the only place where innovative ideas can gain traction.

Eureka! Paradox solved – or at least given clarity.

We are very comfortable in the short term, getting instant gratification for our immediate needs – be it food (hence the proliferation of quick-service restaurants), receiving a thumbs-up for doing a good job, making a quick sale, or achieving our quarterly quota, etc. Hitting a short-term objective is satisfying, although getting there can be difficult. Still, the shorter the term we’re dealing with, the fewer chances there are for the rules, the environment or the assumptions we’re working under to change. As Harris points out, we would prefer it if it were a bit easier.

We are comfortable in long-term thinking about the future, designing new products and services, opening new geographic markets and starting new businesses because we apparently enjoy a degree of accountability that is, shall we say, more fluid at the edges. The future is ripe with possibility, riches and romance; or as they say in baseball – all teams look good in spring training.

The other comfort with the long term is that if changes do sneak up on us, we will have time to react to them. Changes that face a long-term outcome aren’t nearly as traumatic, giving us the opportunity to try different things, regain our equilibrium and return to a state of nonchange before we reach the day of reckoning. Things may have changed in truth, but they don’t feel like they did as much because we have time to assimilate the changes.

“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same, but get better.”

What Moore gets right in his essay and that the Harris quote misses is that innovation is not actually a dilemma. A dilemma is a choice between two painful alternatives. Moore demonstrates that there is a third alternative, a middle horizon or a middle term, that incorporates the best of the other two. He says that in order to implement change, we need to create a space in this middle horizon that is free from the pain and rewards of the short-term horizon and also free from the open-ended “explore all options” thinking of the long-term horizon.
 
What’s needed, then, in order to implement innovation and alignment in the middle horizon, is a little wiggle room. I realize the term “wiggle room” isn’t listed in the glossary of the latest MBA textbooks – but it works for me. Wiggle room means there is flexibility in the business expectations of ROI and market share for new product and service innovations, making the prospect of change a less fearsome one; but it also means there are needed restraints that sharpen the focus. There is less of a tendency to push off concerns about the consequences of your actions on “future you” when the future is not as far off. Flexibility with restraint is the ideal environment to nurture innovation.

One of the ways to create an innovative middle horizon is to build both flexibility and structure into an IT organization through the use of managed services. On the flexibility front, managed services give companies two critical advantages – flexibility of capital resources and flexibility of human resources.

Innovation by its nature requires a large investment in human resources in particular. In most cases, it helps to have many minds brainstorming a variety of concepts from different points of view to nurture innovation. It also takes a fair amount of freedom from the restraints of day-to-day work in order to envision what does not already exist or is not already a part of the corporate culture. Yet it is difficult to achieve that free-thinking mindset when your best resources are bogged down in the day-to-day tasks involved in keeping the current business operating. Offloading the mundane tasks onto a managed services provider frees your experts to think in an innovative way. Reducing current cost and avoiding future costs also enables new products and services to attain more realistic maturity cycles.

Managed services address the structure part of the equation by making the costs of ideas real. In a typical organization, the cost of the day-to-day running of IT tends to be loosely defined, coming out of a central budget that can be applied conveniently. When working with a managed services provider costs are much more tightly controlled, with greater accountability across the board. Knowing this level of detail helps place a practical focus onto innovation, assuring that it is being driven by the needs of the business, not just innovation for its own sake.
In the end, business survival is about bringing innovation to market. Managed services are an often-overlooked yet critical tool in a CIOs portfolio for creating that little bit of wiggle room in the mid-term horizon for new products and services to find their potential. They can help take some of the fear and pain out of change by redefining roles in order to encourage it. While the individuals may not learn to love change unequivocally, they may at least learn to embrace it as a necessary step on the road to success. And that’s definitely movement in the right direction.

Reference:

1. Geoffrey Moore. “To Succeed in the Long Term, Focus on the Middle Term.” Harvard Business Review. July/August 2007.

– JB

– Jodie

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For centuries, the encyclopedia was viewed as the single most reliable reference source for just about everything. Encyclopedia articles were written, edited, vetted and edited some more, until finally an article appeared that was as close to absolute truth as humans could make it. 

Then came the Internet, and shortly thereafter sites such as Wikipedia. Now, instead of content on a given topic being determined by the elite few, anyone can contribute their thoughts, ideas and points of view. How egalitarian. The other side to it is all of this collaboration has created what comedian Stephen Colbert refers to as “the reality we can all agree on.”

That may be bad for pure academic research. Not to mention students trying to write their term papers with as little effort as possible. But it could be the way of the world for IT executives in the future. Forty-four percent of those surveyed by CIO Insight in November 2007 agreed that technologies that “gather and present the wisdom of crowds” will be among the most important technological developments in 2012 to 2017.¹ So perhaps the “wiki way” will not be so bad for the business world.

For years, when organizations would outsource applications or services, they pretty much had to take whatever the supplier offered. And just as with the politics Colbert skewers on a regular basis, sometimes the choice wasn’t that you wanted option A so much as you really didn’t like option B, and wouldn’t use it/vote for it in a million years.

The wiki mentality has the chance to change that. Rather than settling for a hard set of capabilities based on the knowledge and abilities of the supplier’s internal development team, taking a wiki-like approach means using a much larger set of brains to create an application or service that is more flexible than in the past. This flexibility gives it the ability to satisfy a much larger set of demands, and to do it without waiting for the next major revision.

Take infrastructure management services, for example. A decade ago outsourcing the management of the data infrastructure at all was considered heretical. It was an organization’s strategic advantage, and thus not to be trusted to outsiders. Today, we’ve come to realize that the data (and our ability to analyze it) is the strategic advantage. The infrastructure is merely the vessel that holds it. It’s just like the difference between gold bars and a vault. One has intrinsic value, and the other is merely there to contain and protect that value.

Because of that, organizations are finding less and less reason to keep (and manage) the infrastructure inside their own walls. Perhaps the one thing holding them back is finding an infrastructure management partner that will do things the way they want them done.

With a wiki-style approach, that will change. The suppliers will become used to taking and incorporating customer input not only to satisfy the needs of a particular customer, but also to benefit their entire customer base. In other words, the ideas/improvements that Company A wants to implement are seen by other customers, and together the customer base helps drive the way the infrastructure is managed. The business model then becomes the reality the customers can all agree on.

This wiki mentality is also being used in areas such as product development. Open source software is doubtless the best-known example. Open source applications are constantly being improved upon by the people who use them; more importantly, as users develop improvements they are morally and contractually obligated to share their innovations with all other users. It doesn’t take long before one person’s great idea becomes the reality all users can agree on.

This idea is now being expanded into other product areas. Communities are springing up to help organizations tap into a much wider range of brain power than they’ve had access to in the past. Here’s how they work:

Suppose Company A has an idea for a product or service, but isn’t quite sure how to make it work. They can go to a community site and look for individuals or other organizations that may have the expertise they need, or they can post a notice of their needs on the community site. Company A and interested members of the community can then brainstorm the concept, divide up the work and ultimately share in the rewards.

One of the advantages of this community-based approach is that it removes many of the old limitations of business, such as geography and budget. Organizations are free to seek out talent wherever it happens to live and can review solutions from several providers – while only paying for the one they ultimately accept. The end result is the sum of the knowledge of all who contribute to it, which is certain to be greater than the knowledge of any single individual or organization.

Therein lays the opportunity. Rather than relying solely on our own knowledge and experience the way the old encyclopedia-makers did, the wiki approach allows organizations to leverage a much broader range of knowledge and experiences than they could ever afford to develop internally. Sure, some of that “knowledge” might elicit a smirk from Stephen Colbert. But it won’t take long before the cream rises to the top, as it always does. And at that point, the business reality truly will be one we can all agree on.

Reference:

1. CIO Insight. “The Technologies of Tomorrow.” CIOInsight.com, December 12, 2007.

-  JB

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Psychologist Philip Zimbardo once said, “Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so than we recognize or acknowledge.” That certainly appears to be true when we look at how we work with people who provide services to us in our personal lives versus those who do it in the business world. In our personal lives, we tend to hire specialists. We look for people who have an expertise in a particular area, and count on them to do that one thing. You wouldn’t ask the company that takes care of your lawn to provide daycare services for your children. You don’t ask the plumber to build custom kitchen cabinets. You wouldn’t think to ask the person who fixes your car to tailor your suit or clean your house. Yet, in the business world we always seem to want to take the “holistic” route, i.e., find that one supplier who can do everything for us. We’re hoping that a company will come in, get to know our business, and then start solving problems and/or removing burdens for us.

At first, bringing in that big company works because they’re hired to perform a specific task or function. When we initially hire an outside supplier, we carefully vet several contenders until we finally select the one we believe has the greatest expertise in whatever it is we need done.

Once the supplier is on board and solving the problem we hired it to solve, either we start asking the team to do other things for us, or the team starts looking for other things to do for us to expand their “web of influence.” Or both. It doesn’t take long before we’ve strayed far from their core area of expertise and are now settling for less than optimum solutions – often merely for the sake of convenience. Proximity, or already being on the approved vendor list, becomes one of those “situational variables” Zimbardo mentioned. And that’s just not right.

In today’s business world with all its complexities and nuances, specialization in operational tasks is really the better way to go. Every operation requires so much specific knowledge that it’s impossible for any one person or even one organization to possess it. While taking a holistic approach may sound good in theory, in practice it tends to lead more to frustration and disappointment than success. When that happens, the business almost always suffers – and often a very good supplier for certain things winds up getting judged more for what it can’t do very well than what it can.

The other negative that comes out of trying to adopt a holistic approach in an era that requires specialization is that organizations become fatigued trying to get more out of a supplier than that supplier is capable of providing. The result is the enterprise gives up on demanding excellence and instead ultimately settles for mediocrity.

Hiring specialized suppliers of operational tasks and services avoids putting organizations in a state of “supplier fatigue.” The specialists tend to yield a higher level of performance across the board, because their knowledge is an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around. Specialized suppliers have the time, interest and resources to become experts in their specific area, and as long as they stay within that area they can provide a higher level of continuous service. Bringing in as many of them as is needed tends to raise the organization’s expectations the way a rising tide raises all boats. It sets a standard of excellence across the entire organization. And if the need arises to find a different supplier due to performance issues, that one segment can be excised without affecting the entire operation.

It’s really about portfolio management. Think of it this way: It is without doubt easier to manage a single stock than a diverse portfolio. But it’s also a lot riskier. In addition, a single stock only answers part of a savvy investor’s needs. It can be aggressive, conservative, poised for growth, capable of protecting gains, etc. – but it can’t be all of them. Smart investors select the best stocks to accomplish all of their investing goals. That’s what smart organizations do, too – select their suppliers based on specialties and required outcomes, then manage that portfolio scrupulously.

A holistic approach to outsourced services may seem solid on the surface, but when you dig deeper you’ll see it’s really laden with holes. Creating a tightly managed network of specialty suppliers assures you get the best each has to offer rather than having to settle for both good and bad.

Don’t get psyched out. Avoid allowing situational variables to dictate your behavior. Instead, use the same approach to hiring business suppliers as you do with suppliers in your personal life. You’ll find your results greatly surpass your expectations.

– JB

I was running a few searches today and found some material from our own John Bostick that didn’t make it here to TheFutureValueOfBusiness.com.  I thought I would share it with you today.  The Information System Security website that it’s posted on allows no comments, so feel free to share your thoughts here!

- Jodie