Solving Tomorrow’s Problems

In the I.T. world, we’re all about customer service. Our goal is to solve problems quickly. Wade through those helpdesk tickets. Get people back on track and productive again.

Sometimes we lose sight of the real goal – avoiding the situations that cause the problems in the first place.

The Toyota Production System, teaches getting to the source of a problem by asking “Why?” five times. The thought is, that by following this chain of logic (how did we ever get to this point?) backwards, one can identify the source of the problem and remedy it.

For too long, some I.T. departments have been the “whipping boy” of their organizations – bearing the brunt of crappy Microsoft applications, victims of their own programming shortcomings and slaves to short term infrastructure decisions.

Truth is, for the most part, I.T. departments are playing defense. They act like the little boy who plugged the dyke with his fingers.

I think that realization hit some of my guys yesterday as we discussed a framework for administering reporting security. It became evident that in the course of quickly trying to
appease the security needs of individuals, we were undermining our ability to manage security “as a whole”.

We were unnecessarily complicating our daily processes to serve the needs of a few.

And so, we tried a different tact.

Let’s play offense.

Why don’t we educate our management team on how we manage security and why it makes sense to do it that way. Let’s involve our customers up front, in a decision making effort to develop a framework in which we can balance the need for information security with the level of effort to administer it.

Some I.T. folks undermine their own effectiveness by not even trying to engage their customers. “They’ll never go for that!” or “There’s always an exception to the rule.” And so the status quo perpetuates the “cycle of doom”.

I have the benefit of perspective. I don’t have Helpdesk tickets assigned to me. I’m not neck deep solving time critical problems. So it’s incumbent upon me to lead the charge with our user community to shed some light on how we do things and why and to invite them to participate in future policy and infrastructure framework decisions.

I call it solving tomorrow’s problems.

If we spend one meeting per week talking and thinking strategically, we’ll have a very successful department.

Meeting Deja Vu

I participated in a meeting this past week.

I exited the meeting with a feeling that we hadn’t accomplished much. Certainly the challenges were laid out and a couple of suggestions were raised. Some attendees decided that additional information was required.

What was missing?

For starters, we made the cardinal sin of declaring the meeting over before we assigned specific “to dos” and deadlines. There were no specific action plans to advance a solution.

Afterwards, I mentioned this to a colleague who had also attended. His response surprised me.

“I’ve worked here for ten years and have attended that meeting at least ten times before”.

Very telling.

Has this ever happened to you? Ask yourself the following questions.

1. Are you taking comfort in activity vs. accomplishments? i.e. If we’re meeting, we’re doing something about it. Even if we aren’t.

2. Are you executing well? Setting tasks, assigning responsibilities, establishing deadlines?

3. Is the meeting topic important, but not urgent? Perhaps the topic is important enough to draw ten people into a meeting, but doesn’t make it to our individual top three tasks once we return to our desks.

4. Who is in charge? Who owns the initiative? We assembled a group of independent people (each responsible for a different product line or sales channel) but we weren’t working within a common strategic plan under the guidance of a VP of Sales.

If you answered Yes to any of the above questions, you’re suffering from Meeting Deja Vu.

Now that you recognize the disease, how are you going to treat it? Here’s a suggestion.

CSI: Your Company

The unreadable image above is a snapshot of the Computing Scene Investigation we undertook at one company. Company and site names (which appeared down the left hand side of the spreadsheet) have been removed to protect the innocent.

We actually printed out the spreadsheet on a very large scale color plotter and it covered an entire wall of my office.

What you’re looking at is an Application Map. The sites (were) listed down the left side and all the business processes are listed across the top of the spreadsheet. Each cell within the spreadsheet identified the application that supported each business process at a specific site.

Different applications are identified by different colors. The “application color legend” appears at the bottom of the chart.

At first glance, it looks as if someone threw confetti at a wall. And this version shows the application landscape AFTER a substantial ERP implementation (the light blue color).

Think about this for a second.. 34 different applications requiring, maintenance, support, training, interoperability, data mining, security, backup and recovery planning over a mix of centralized and distributed computing platforms.

Now let me give you one more piece of information. Each plant performed essentially the same function.

If you were to do some psychological forensics by staring at this diagram for a while, what would you determine?

1. Clearly, each site’s I.T. solutions were historically chosen and managed locally.
2. The variety of applications – even within the same function might lead you to believe that the sites didn’t talk to one another.
3. You might expect that business processes, system security and segregation of duties would be varied and difficult to enforce, both within a site and across the enterprise.
4. Reporting to Head office would be done with a myriad of different reports, which would need to be collated and re-summarized at the Corporate offices.
5. The reporting processes would be cumbersome, slow and likely not entirely accurate (apples to apples).
6. The entire infrastructure would be expensive to maintain and slow to change.
7. No shared services.
8. The company would not likely be positioned to compete in the 21st Century.
9. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance would be a challenge.
10. Autonomy and site performance trumps overall corporate performance.
11. Very little information (customer, vendor, business processes) shared across sites.

Since I was new to the company, I had asked for an application map. None existed. It took us several weeks to put the pieces of the puzzle together. No one had ever looked at the business process support systems in this way before.

But when you do, it can tell you an awful lot about the company.

Just for fun, why not ask your I.T. folks if thay have an application map of your business processes. If they don’t, you may not be able to easily understand I.T. consolidation opportunities and achieve potential cost reductions, flexibility and the ability to improve the speed of change.

If they have one, take a look at it and perform your own CSI forensics.

It’ll tell you a lot about how your company operates and where your big I.T. opportunities are.

Fleeting Business Models

I was interested to read a recent post at O’Reilly Radar about a new auto insurance concept called Milemeter.

Milemeter is an insurance company that allows you to purchase car insurance by the mile (actually increments of one thousand miles), with the premiums dependent upon requested coverages and geography (where you typically drive your car). Milemeter’s premiums do NOT include gender as part of their underwriting criteria.

It’s an interesting concept and a potential game changer. As an alum of Allstate Insurance (I worked there for a decade), I’m sure the concept is causing more than a few ripples within the industry.

I don’t know whether their model will include all vehicle types (motorcycles for instance), but this model could tread upon some very profitable segments of the industry.

Progressive Insurance has made a very profitable existence in the motorcycle segment – a somewhat counter-intuitive strategy, considering how dangerous motorcycle accidents are to their drivers. But they found out that many of their customers were middle aged white guys, whose motorcycles spent more time idle, in their garages, than being ridden. Identifying and selling to this customer segment was genius.

But if Milemeter covers motorcycles, all that could change.

If you’re in the auto insurance business, your world could potentially be flipped upside down.

Your homework assignment: Identify a game changing technology or approach in your current industry and figure out how to get there before someone else does. Unless you aggressively try to obsolete your current business model, someone else may do it for you.

Want to position your business for longevity?

Work everyday with the understanding that your current business model is temporary.

Seven Words that Change the Game

This past weekend, I saw a documentary on Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest men. Warren’s “secret” to investing is simple…and extremely difficult. Simply locate undervalued companies, whose businesses you understand and buy them.

The documentary focused on Berkshire Hathaway’s most recent acquisition, a company based in Israel, that makes cutting tools, used in a wide variety of manufacturing companies.

This is significant because it’s the first time he has purchased a non-American company.

But this isn’t what caught my attention.

Rather, it was an offhanded comment he made discussing where to search for the next great value. The reporter didn’t catch it and never followed up with a question.

The comment was: “Your competitors know everything that you do.”

As soon as those words were spoken, a lightbulb went on in my head. I have spent years in various businesses talking strategy, identifying core competencies, trying to identify and leverage competitive advantage.

These exercises were both energizing and comforting. We, after all, had a competitive advantage – core competencies that we could rely on to drive us “to the next level”. We could take solice in the fact that we possessed the magic, secret sauce (whatever that was) that allowed us to continue to make money and keep the shareholders happy.

I wonder how the tenor of the sessions might have changed, had Warren Buffett been in the room and had made the statement.

Would we have had a heightened sense of urgency? Would we have become more action oriented? Would we have stressed results accountability more? Would we have generated “bigger ideas”?

“Your competitors know everything that you do”. Seven words that change the game.

Try opening your next strategy session with Warren Buffett’s statement and see if it changes the entire nature of the debate.