Graham Chastney (oak-grove)

Seth Goblin: "You need to increase your value"

Sometimes someone says something in such a succinct way that it resonates.

Today it's Seth Goblin:

Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.

It's not true.

You need to increase your value. If people don't want to pay, it's because you're not delivering enough value for the money you're charging.

You're not selling a commodity unless you want to.

IT service delivery has become a commodity sell; so much so that the only focus is cost reduction.

The huge opportunity is this - no end-user really wants to buy their IT as a commodity, it's only their organisation that wants to buy it that way. End-users want loads more value than the value they are getting today. They need to innovate, and we need to help them to do it. we either help them, or they do it without us.

The death of the "classical geeks"

A quote from ReadWriteWeb:

Today, there still may be plenty of businesses employing ‘classic geeks’ in their I.T. Department, but that’s about to change. Don’t misunderstand - the world will always need a good engineer, but the I.T. leaders of tomorrow - the ones guiding the business in the use of their computer resources, the ones working with the CEOs to execute the vision and direction via information technology - they will no longer be what we think of as the classic ‘computer geek.’ You know the type - the stereotypical introvert, who’s more comfortable behind the glow of computer screen than interacting with the rest of the human race. The one who likes to speak in acronyms that only he or she understands. The ones who know how to do everything from a command prompt. These folks will be a dying breed…at least around the office. Instead, tomorrow’s computer ‘geek’ will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong.

Instead, tomorrow's computer "geek" will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong. So what does the "new geek" need to know to run tomorrow's I.T. Department? An entirely new skill set, as it turns out.

It then goes on to talk about the shift to "Enterprise 2.0", "Cloud Services", "The Mobile Workforce" and "A Self Provisioning User Base". I'm not sure that the titles are as important as recognising the general shift away from in-house provisioned and in-house constrained services to services that are leveraged globally and have few constraints.

I speak to many I.T. people, because I'm an I.T. person and very few of them see that there is a change lurking just over the other side of that hill over there. A change that isn't going to swoop down in a huge rampage, but is going to work under the radar and change their lives without them even knowing it. The ones who choose to go with it and to become valuable to their customers within the business will thrive, those who hide behind existing policies and standards will have their value steadily eroded until their value is difficult to see.

Change shouldn't bring fear, we are used to it, we do it every day, we just need to recognise it and embrace it. As I.T. people we can, at least, see that the change is there. Business people, in general, have no idea about the change that is coming their way. Security organisations, as an example, will have massive changes to make, the old rules will no longer be valid. I know of organisations where there has been a huge backlash against the security organisation when they have insisted on locking down Internet provided Instant Messaging. There view was that it was an unnecessary security risk, the business's view was that it was essential to operations, user innovation had overtaken them. It's just one example of many of the things that are going to occur.

It's just one small example of the mind-set change that will need to take place. Organisations that don't change will themselves find it difficult to survive, those that go with the changes will thrive.

Today is Monday, it's the start of a new week, perhaps now is as good a time as any to start embracing some change.

Technorati tags: Enterprise 2.0, Cloud Services, Mobile Workforce, Self Provisioning

Taking Technology Away

For a while I had a working Blackberry, then my Blackberry got broken and it took some weeks to replace it. I was shocked at the impact.

I spend a lot of time working on two monitors. When I only work on my laptop I am shocked at the impact.

Why shock?

When I was given or invested in these technologies I would have put a relatively low value on them, in the case of the Blackberry I would have put a negative value. Now that I have them I am surprised at the impact when you take them away.

I'm not a crazed crackberry addict who can't survive for 30 seconds without looking at it, I have my Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) and Disconnect Anxiety reasonably under control. I'm talking here about all of the things that I had integrated into my day-today working that I hadn't even noticed until they were taken away.

When I am working on two monitors I naturally start and use applications on the different monitors without too much rational thought. When I am working on a single monitor the switching time between applications becomes so noticeable that it gnaws away at me.

I suspect that if you took my iPod away (also a relatively recent addition) I would also be annoyed at the impact.

Much of my career has been spent convincing enterprise customers of the value of some piece of technology. This discussion goes all the way back to arguments about 20MB hard disks. Over all this time it has been a recurring them that IT has had little understanding of the value of the technology that the end user is wanting, IT is normally focused on cost containment.

End users sit outside wanting value, and IT is just worried about the cost of the new value.

There are a lot of technologies, probably as many as at any time in the history of IT, that give end users value, but have a cost impact upon the IT organisation. the problem with many of these technologies is that the value is not clear cut although it is potentially massive. Within this context it is often difficult to get organisations to move forward.

• Tablets - another type of device for IT to manage, but what's the real tangible value?
• RSS - another set of tools to manage and loads of data all over the place, but what's the real tangible value?
• Web 2.0 - stuff that IT can't even control, but what's the real tangible value?
• iPhone - far to sexy for corporate IT, but what's the real tangible value?

So, why don't we ask the question the other way? Why don't we see what the value is by giving it to someone, and then take it away. If you can take it away with little impact then the value wasn't that high anyway. Take it away and get a big push back then you have found something of true value.

For some time I've wanted to create an internal free market in an organisation for IT capability and technology. This would work by giving people a set of credits and a choice of technology. They would then trade in the technology in a free market manner, buying and selling at the credit value they chose without reference to the physical cost. If the supply and demand (credits) were properly constrained so people had to make choices you would start to see the true value of the technology to the end user.

It would be interesting to see the value of an iPhone v the value of a Tablet PC, a second monitor v an RSS reader.

I've always been uncomfortable just giving people technology to evaluate without any clear link to value, but it's often difficult to define what the value might be. Rather than just giving new technology to people to evaluate the internal market would allow the evaluation to be undertaken within the context of perceived value. Perceived value is probably a lot closer to real value than people think, especially in a knowledge worker type environment. The things that have little value are the things you should give back. The things of high value are the ones that you should invest in.

My Tools: Twitter & Twhirl

I suspect that some people might struggle with me calling Twitter a tool, but that's what it is. For me it certainly fits into the category of "anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose".

What purpose does Twitter help me accomplish?

The main purpose it help me accomplish is the massively important one of social connections and network building. The people that Twitter allows me to interact with are between 10 and 1000 miles away from where I am sitting. I'm not working on a project with these people so I have no need to be in regular contact. But there is real value in interacting.

There are real gems in the information that people share. My organisation, like many others, has a very string informal structure made up of many loosely coupled networks of people all interacting to get things achieved. Twitter is absolutely fabulous for this. I know who is connecting with who, I see who is interacting with who, I get to interact.

Twitter has become my virtual coffee machine, or my virtual office foyer. It's the place where I catch-up with people.

The problem I have with Twitter is explaining this to other people. This video has helped some people get their head around it, but to be honest, it's one of these things that you have to see.

I'm not sure I would use Twitter if it wasn't for a client tool keeping me interested. My current tool is twhirl.

Not really sure how I settled upon twhirl, but I'm very pleased that I did. It has a few foibles but does what I need it to do.

A browser based interface is OK, but it requires you to go there, it requires you to go and to see. If something is expecting me to go and look then it will be disappointed, it doesn't really matter what it is. A client based tool goes and does the looking for me and tells me when there is something worth looking at. It also means that I can write my own tweets in a micro-blog manner with the minimum of disruption.

Technorati tags: twitter, twhirl, micro-blog, social interaction

Simple Change Saves and Costs a Fortune

I've been thinking a lot about all of the little things that make life simpler in tiny little ways, and also all of the things that do the reverse.

A few weeks back my employer changed the default policy for attachment forwarding. In the past email was forwarded with attachments by default, now it's forwarded with the attachment stripped out. It was a really simple change, I even read about it in the communication material. The business justification was quite simple - save on some storage. I'm sure we were using lots of storage that we didn't need to use because of redundant attachments floating around the place.

A nice sound direct cost reduction opportunity, who could argue with that.

I've been using (and support) email systems since they weren't capable of handling attachments. All of that time attachments have been forwarded by default. If someone sends me something and I know that someone else needs to see it - I forward it, all of it. It's obvious.

And there in lies that challenge - a direct cost reduction opportunity v my expectation.

I have already lost count of the number of times I have had to resend something that I forgot to send "with attachment". I know that the default has changed - but I can't make the change in my working practice. The cost of these mistakes is huge, it's not just my time resending the item, it's the time of the people who receive the denuded email. They have the thankless task of trying to get back in contact with me so I can send them something that they can use.

The other day I watched Emily struggling with cut and paste. I showed her how to use ctrl+x, ctrl+c and ctrl+v. She can't get over how much easier it is for her to use. I thought about the amount of time she was wasting and wondered about the people using the 1 million+ desktop devices that we look after as an organisation.

I've recently been involved with a customer who was suffering from performance problems. One particular senior person was suffering the worst. An engineer looked at the contents of the device and noticed running software to synchronise to just about every hand-held device that has ever been produced. This person only uses a BlackBerry and don't synch it with their laptop, they synch over the air.

It's been an issue in the industry for a very long time - how to make people efficient. We don't seem to be any further on. I suspect that I could save an organisation millions, and make a lot of people very happy by giving them small amounts of efficiency coaching.

One of the ways that we normally measure efficiency is to measure something and then improve it. But even there we don't seem to be in a good shape. I'd quite like to be able to measure who long it take an application to start across an organisation - but there are scant tools available. I'd quite like to be able to measure how long it takes a desktop device to start-up and become usable - again, scant help tools available. As we are moving beyond reliability being our biggest issue, perhaps we'll start to focus our attention on performance, real end user performance.

We definitely need to start assessing changes on the basis of overall end user cost, as a minimum. This should be offset against the direct cost savings.

Technorati tags: Use Experience, User Performance, Reliability, Efficiency

Concept of the Day: Disconnect Anxiety

Sometimes I feel I'm turning into a grumpy old man before my time and all that I am doing is raising the ills of IT. Unfortunately today is no exception.

Today's ill is disconnect anxiety:

Disconnect Anxiety refers to various feelings of disorientation and nervousness experienced when a person is deprived of Internet or wireless access for a period of time.

If you are reading this blog you have probably experienced this anxiety and you are not alone. The Solutions Research Group has done some research in the US and the numbers are quite startling:

Overall, our research finds that 27% of the population exhibit significantly elevated levels of anxiety when disconnected. In terms of profile, 41% of this group are 12-24, 50% are 25-49 and 9% are over the age of 50.

A secondary group of 41% exhibit above-average levels of anxiety occasionally, depending on the situation.

The balance, 32% are below average in their anxiety response when unable to use their cell phones or the Internet. This group is disproportionately older than average (i.e., majority being 50+).

Or to put it graphically:

They went on to do research to try and understand why and how the anxiety was manifest. It's a good report and links in nicely with a number of the things I've said previously about ADT and the machines taking over.

Perhaps that is why laptop free meetings are such tense affairs these days - everyone is experiencing disconnect anxiety.

Personally, I'm only occasionally anxious about being disconnected.

The summary of the report is here (pdf).

Hat tip to Endgadget.

Technorati Tags: Disconect Anxiety,ADT

The Great Big Monitor Mystery and the Multiple Monitor Mystery

There is clear research that giving people more screen real-estate makes them more productive. This has been recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. Numerous studies have shown similar results before (here, here).

So where it the mystery?

I work for an organisation that supports hundreds of thousands of desktop and laptop devices for its customers. As far as I know not a single one of those customers is beating our door down to provide large or multiple monitors to their staff.

These studies show significant productivity gains with a potential return within weeks. The equation would appear to be quite simple - spend £150 and get back hundreds of hours each year.

I've talked to a few customers about the research and the response was lukewarm at best.

If someone said to me that I could work 10% fewer hours if I spent £150 I think I would be quite interested.

So why such a tepid response from customers?

There are a number of possible reasons but two of them stand out:

• They don't believe it.
• They don't care.

If you have been around IT for any period of time you will have been involved in a project that promised significant productivity gains but delivered little, or was perceived to deliver little. No one believes it anymore, the level of cynicism is just too high. I have some sympathy for this point of view.

I suspect that it's difficult to measure the real productivity benefit of screen real-estate for most knowledge workers because it's difficult to baseline their productivity in the first place. There are, however, all sorts of ways of getting some level of understand and the cost of running a pilot deployment, for instance, could be quite low. So why don't they?

I suspect that lack of belief isn't the primary reason for the lack of interest. I think that the primary reason is that they don't care, and the reason they don't care is that it's not their problem. Most IT organisations that I speak to are focused on managing the cost of IT rather than the value of IT. Productivity is a value - an extra monitor is a cost. These IT organisations don't get the credit for adding to the productivity of the organisation, they just get beaten-up for adding to the costs.

Perhaps we need to abolish IT organisations, and turn them into productivity organisations.

Keeping a clean machine - so difficult

I've recently started afresh with a completely clean new machine. The aim of this machine is that it will eventually become my production machine.

I'm only adding things to this machine that I actually use. I've not made any pre-judgment on what I use, I have decided that I will start with a blank machine and add things as I need them.

My aim with this has been twofold:

• I wanted to see what software I actually use - not just what I think I use.
• I wanted to see how long it would be before I collected something that I will never use.

Today I received the first piece of software that I will never use - Adobe Photoshop Album Start Edition. How did I get it? I installed Adobe Reader. Just like that I now have software taking up resources on my device, and not just disk space, it also loads Adobe Photo Downloader. 2MB of memory stolen, just like that. I am now kicking myself. I nearly didn't go with Adobe Reader, I nearly installed the Foxit Reader.

And now, to uninstall this software (that I never wanted in the first place) I have to close down all of my browser sessions because presumably it's installed some extensions in there that I will never use either. And for some reason, that is bizarre in the extreme, I'm also having to close my Lotus Notes session.

This free software that I never wanted is proving to be very expensive (in terms  of my lost productivity) indeed.

last night I spent an hour at a friends house cleaning up a PC that had collected so much tat and rubbish that it was becoming unstable.None of the software was malicious, I'm sure that it would all be useful to someone, but it was all tat. Is there any wonder that people get to the point where they hate PC's.

It's like junk-mail, only worse and like junk-mail it needs an industry answer. In the UK we have a service that allows people to opt out of most forms of junk-mail call Mail Preference. Organisations that continue to send junk-mail get heavily fined. Perhaps we should start to do the same for software.

Airports and Airlines - Customer Service Lessons

Over two weeks ago now, I was collected by a taxi at my house, we picked up a couple of colleagues along the way (The taxi driver was slightly late because he believed his satnav when it said he could drive down a dirt track to my house).

We eventually arrived at Manchester Airport.

We took our things along to the check-in desk and started to use the new automated check-in system. This change in procedure was new to me, and came as something of a surprise.

Check-in went quite smoothly until the machine decided that it didn't like my passport, fortunately there were plenty of humans available to sort it out for me. Only after looking at the tickets afterwards did we realise that we had each been upgraded to Business Class for the main leg of our trip from London over to Seattle. In classically British fashion, no-one made a big deal of this, it was just something that happened.

It wasn't until we were actually on the flight that we realised that we had the joy of Club World with beds. It was a wonderful surprise.

Customer Service Lesson #1 - Nice surprises are a good thing.

After a few days in Seattle and a trip down to San Francisco it was time to come home. It was a bit of a mad schedule and personally I was getting rather tired. We were already booked into Club World on the way home and I was really pleased that it was going to be a good opportunity to get my body clock back onto UK time.

I slept for nearly 6 hours on the way over from San Francisco, which is not bad going for a 9 hour flight.

Customer Service Lesson #2 - People really appreciate innovations when they add to the quality of their experience.

On arrival in London we had a couple of hours to wait before our flight to Manchester, being Club World travellers we had the use of the lounge.

Having reached the lounge I booked in for a shower and went to get a cup of coffee. I was only a couple of sips into my coffee when my shower slot was announced.

A shower proved to be just what I needed, it was wonderful to get clean for the day ahead, it also helped in convincing my body that it really was morning already.

Back from the shower I sat down with another coffee. Everything was well with the world. I was only a short flight from home and time with my nearest and dearest. But things were not going to stay that way for long.

Barely two sips into my coffee and another announcement changed everything. "Due to technical problem flight XX1234 from Manchester to London has been cancelled. Would all passengers please report to the ticket office for re-booking". My first hope was that the receptionist at the Executive Lounge would simply sort it out for us - but I was wrong. We had to trundle off to the ticket office along with everyone else.

At the ticket office we stood and queued to see what our options were. The person at the front of the queue was clearly very upset and was not getting any resolution to the issues that they were facing. Things didn't look good. People kept arriving at the back of the ticket office, but still only a single till was open and the person at the front of the queue wasn't going anywhere.

The air was becoming thick with tension.

After several minutes of little progress it was time for a new announcement. Passengers with bags that had been checked in would need to go and retrieve them from international arrivals before you could re-book - that was us. But we couldn't just go and get our bags because we needed someone to escort us. After even more minutes some more staff arrived to escort us to international arrivals. We were desperately putting together contingency plans for the seemingly inevitable disappointment.

All of us saw our hopes of getting a flight out of London on a Friday evening steadily transforming into a dim hope.

Customer Service Lesson #3 - Have a clear plan before a problem occurs, don't make it up as you go along.

Customer Service Lesson #4 - Give people clear instructions, and keep to them.

So off we trundled to international arrivals for baggage collection, but we didn't enter through any normal route, we entered through the staff security entrance.

It was chaos. A few hundred angry passengers, mixing with staff trying to get to work funnelled through a single security checkpoint with the most officious security staff that I have ever met. They were clearly put on the staff entrance because they were too rude to be allowed out the front with the real customers. The security staff were absolutely insistent that staff had priority, the paying passengers were treated like sheep, and dirty sheep at that.

At one point the security staff called a halt to it saying that there supervisors were not happy with it, an argument between the airport staff and the airline staff ensued right in front of us passengers. After a few minutes the British Airways representative came out and said that the only thing we could do was to go and book onto a flight without our bags and then to declare them as lost. The cries of "absolutely no way" could not have been stronger if they had suggested that leave our children behind.

Customer Service Lesson #5 - Even in the staff entrance I am still the customer and I expect to be treated as such.

Customer Service Lesson #6 - If multiple organisations are coming together to deliver a service I don't want to see them working against each other. I want to see them working together for my benefit.

The security staff clearly understood that they had a problem and changed their minds, letting people through in groups of three to collect their bags. But only one member of each family. A mother travelling on her own with four children who was just behind me had to leave her children with a staff member to go and get her bags.

Customer Service Lesson #7 - Just because I am the person with a problem, does not mean that you can treat me as a problem person especially when you created the problem.

Talking to the airline representative she let slip her frustrations. She told us how she used to work in Nigeria before working in London - and how Nigeria was far more organised.

Customer Service Lesson #8 - If you've lost the support of your staff things are very bad indeed.

She also let on that bags used to be taken to the domestic lounge for collection but the number of cancellations was so high these days that the baggage handlers refused to do it anymore.

Customer Service Lesson #9 - If your service has a problem - fix the problem, don't make the customers suffer for it.

Having retrieved our bags we were now out in the main arrivals lounge and had to go to the ticket desk there. Our hopes of achieving a rapid return home were diminishing fast as it was now more than two hours since we had started out on our little adventure. Everyone without bags had already rebooked and we were amongst those at the back of the queue. We were fortunate though, we managed to get a flight out in the early evening - with another airline.

With new tickets in hand we go to check-in at the new airline. That's when the next snag landed. We are too early to check our bags in for the new flights. We can check-in, but we can't get rid of our bags. We are all in need of another shower, one of our group has got a bad back which is worsening by the minute and we are all more fed up than we were expecting.

Customer Service Lesson #10 - Have a plan that covers all of the problems and doesn't leave people stranded.

We make our way into one of the local eateries and order a burger and chips.

The food arrives and has to be some of the worst food I have eaten in a very long time, absolutely no flavour. I know that there is nice food waiting for me in the lounge, but I can't get to it for another two hours. We can't even be bothered to complain.

Eventually time passes and we check-in, walk to the lounge, sit there and wait like scolded school boys for our flight to depart. We are beaten.

Customer Service Lesson #11 - If your customer feels defeated - you have lost.

Eventually our flight departs, almost on time. It had taken us 9 hours to get from San Francisco to London (5400 miles) and a further 9 hours to get from London to Manchester (185 miles).

Customer Service Lesson #12 - It doesn't matter that you give out a free upgrade on the flight out, people only remember the last time they interacted with your organisation.

Customer Service Lesson #13 - When people are paying premium prices (and they were premium prices) they expect premium service.

Customer Service Lesson #14 - Even when it's "the companies" money that people are spending they still expect good value for money.

Customer Service Lesson #15 - Everyone has a choice, it will be a long time before I choose to go through that experience again.

Customer Service Lesson #16 - It doesn't matter that you serve someone well for 99% of the journey, it's the last 1% that makes all the difference.

How many of these mistakes do we make in the IT Service industry? Most of them I think.

Half Hour Meetings

We all avoid things we dislike, it's in our nature. I am always trying to find ways of avoiding meetings.

It's not that I don't like interacting with people, it's because I think that most meetings are waste of time. there are multiple reasons for this, and the primary one is lack of planning.

I work in a culture where an meeting agenda is a rare thing, meeting minutes are even rarer, people reading either minutes or agenda prior to a meeting are as common as an excited man in Ikea.

This lack of planning makes the whole thing drift along like a discarded quavers packet. As you may have picked up I'm definitely a task oriented individual.

The other issue I have with meetings are that they are always booked in 1 hour slots. It's the default in the company Notes system and I'm sure that is a big reason for it.

Today I have five separate 1 hour meetings booked. Three of the meetings are update meetings on which there are few update because we have been off for nearly two weeks since we last met, I have no idea why one of the sessions even exists.

The one remaining meeting is with one of our senior managers. He has an attention span of less than 10 minutes. I have some information to communicate to him. I have structured it to fit into the 10 minute attention span I know that I will get from him. His PA has still booked an hour, and always does.

Perhaps we should all agree to 30 minute meetings so that we regain the focus that they deserve.

Perhaps I'm being too task oriented though, perhaps all of the other things we  talk about during our meetings are just as important as getting on with the task. Perhaps the meeting is the important thing and not the agenda.

Or perhaps not.