Archive for the ‘Change’ Category

IT Needs to Focus on Your Core Business

29 Dec

Tags: Business Focus, Change, IT
Posted in Change, IT | No Comments »

IT must have a seat at the strategic decision making table. In order to earn that seat IT must make an ongoing business to understand your organization’s core business. Too many IT departments never gain the required business knowledge , see themselves as nothing more than a “service” department and begin to focus on providing services that they shouldn’t.

IT needs to get out of the role of constant firefighting and become much more focused on strategic issues that will be impacting the organization going forward. In order to do that IT needs to have rock solid infrastructure in place. In my view, that means outsourcing any service that does not directly impact key business processes of your organization.

Email?? Why not look at hosted email services? Do your IT people need to be experts in managing email infrastructure or do they need to be experts in helping make your business more competitive, lean and agile? All businesses rely on email which in my view makes an even more compelling case to leaving to the experts. Every minute one of your people spends managing email servers/issues is time they are not spending on your business.

Data Storage?? Why not look at the cloud? This one is still a relatively new area but Amazon has recently announced their Elastic Block Store which is essentially limitless data storage which can be added to on the fly for a fraction of what it would cost to manage that infrastructure internally. Does having people on staff that understand SAN architecture and all the associated peripheral knowledge make sense? Possibly, but we need to be thinking outside the box. Your competitors are. Actually this is not even outside the box anymore. This just makes sense.

Portals? SharePoint? Why in the world an organization would want to manage all the infrastructure and complexity of an installation of something like a SharePoint farm is beyone me – unless you are a SharePoint hosting company I suppose. I speak from painful personal experience here. There are options out there.

I think of it this way. If I was launching a greendfield manufacturing facility my IT team would have to make a damn compelling case for each server they want to have on site. Being at the fore of the coming IT revolution means being able to focus on your business and leaving all the other stuff to the experts. Be an expert on your business.

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Changing the Paradigm

10 Nov

Tags: Social Networking, Web 2.0
Posted in Change, Enterprise 2.0 | No Comments »

The democratization of an organization is a change frought with uncertainty and fear. We might now we need to do this “social networking” thing because we thing that’s what others are doing but we don’t have a clue to how to go about it. If the perception of control is given up overwho can post what information the notion of dramatically increased risk is a hard one to stomach.

We keep hearing about the profound demographic shift that will soon be upon us couple with the fact that the generation coming up to replace them is “wired” and work in a completely new, unstructured, unbounded way. How can we find the balance between mitigating the risk of these people retiring while creating a work environment that the best and brightest want to be a part of?

Tough question.

First of all I’m not that convinced that this new generation of non-conformists will lead an overnight shift that breaks down organizational hierarchies and turns top down organizations into bottom up democracies. This is partially due to my experience in a large global manufacturing company that prides itself on being progressive and an excellent place to work…which it is. I’ve been pushing the power of the idea of social networking for a few years and while there is some traction there is a long way to go. I’m not convinced people have the same social networking expectations inside the firewall as outside. Personal life is typically more unstructured than professional life and people know and expect the difference.

Also – if we unleash power of social networking what do we do with the information? Tags, communities, meta-data – how do we mine it for our competitive advantage? More thoughts on this in an upcoming post.

We must remember that the tools of social networking are based on technology. The culture and rate of change of an organization is driven primarily from the top. These are the same people that will be retiring in a few years and either don’t understand or don’t give a hoot about social networking. In order to be effective at articulating the value of this change its imperative that we first deeply understand our core business and secondly are coherent enough to develop a strategy around tying the benefits of social networking to the achievement of business objectives.

Which means the first step is hiring smart, articulate, technology-savvy, enthusiastic people to help your business succeed over time. But I guess we have always known that…

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Obama & Canada

06 Nov

Tags: politics
Posted in Change, politics | No Comments »

I’m hoping the election of Barack Obama may put to rest, or at least reduce, Candian’s Eurosimilar sense of moral and cultural superiority over the USA. The last time I looked Canada had not elected a black Prime Minister. Obviously we have had a female Prime Minister in Kim Campbell but that was much more of an anomoly than the will of the voters. In her party was decimated in the subsequent election and never recovered…and in fact no longer exists.

Let’s not forget that the long, divisive battle between Hillary Clinton and Obama for the Democratic nomination. Let us not forget the Vice Presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin – regardless of how wierd that whole thing was. Watching Canada’s leaders debate was a picture of stuffy male whiteness + plus Elizabeth May who barely clawed her way into the debates as the leader of a fringe (but admittedly growing) party.

Being a conservative and a reasonably astute politcal observer I couldn’t help but notice the general vacuity of Obama’s soaring rhetoric…but nonetheless I still would have voted for him. His election represents incredible progress from the days of Selma, Alabama only 40 years ago. He also has the fortune of not being George W. Bush or in any way associated with him.

One outcome I hope to see from the election of Barack Obama is the disappearance of the raison d’etre of the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton Victim & Guilt machine. I just watched a video of Jesse Jackson crying while listen to Obama’s speech and can’t help but wonder he was crying because he has no clue what he’s going to do now.

Congratulations to the U.S. for showing the power of freedom (the Patriot Act notwithstanding) and progress. Canada would be well served to use this as a catalyst for similar change.

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Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs

13 Aug

Posted in Change, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

I leave the detailed description of this pyramid concept to the Wikipedia entry.

I believe though, that other than the lowest level of the pyramid – Physiological, which could be thought of as “Do it or your fired”, that these needs can be thought of in the context of finding creative ways of selling social networking in the Enterprise.

Safety – I suppose in the IT context this could be considered a security issue. To me this might mean not worrying about hacking, about knowing the responsiblity and ability to manage your information is yours and yours alone.

Love/Belonging – this is one of the reasons that the social networking phenomenon has exploded. It’s a new, simple and effective way of forming communities with like-minded people and creating a shared experience with those with whom you may never had a chance. I’ll leave the sexual intimacy aspect out of it from a corporate perspective but it’s easy to see where this can fit. In a global company like mine, allowing people to be parts of communities or to easily search out people that have common skills, functions, interests will increase their sense of being part of something bigger. I find with a large organization, especially one as decentralized as mine, dispersed globally people can easily lose this perspective.

Esteem – this is a no brainer. I believe that the power of social networking to identify subject matter experts, top contributors etc. is empowering to say the least. It gives people more opportunity to get feedback on their content and to refine their thinking to take themselves to the next level (see Self-actualization). Surfacing the highest rated users, most heavily trafficked blog authors, subject matter experts will not only motivate those people but motivate others to contribute.

Self-actualization – social networking provides a medium for people that want to realize their creativity. The idea of that one can spontaneously generate content that can be consumed globally and solve problems that might be outside their traditional scope of responsibilities is an incredible step forward. A finance person using their unique perspective to solve a marketing issue or an engineer assisting with a cost reduction strategy on another continent can only add both value and agility to an organization.

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Archive for the ‘Change’ Category

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