Welcome
Welcome to the Foresight Newsletter, a free monthly publication of Prevoyance Group Inc. This newsletter shares tips for high performance IT organizations and observations that we hope will prove informative and enjoyable.
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Contents
CONTENTS
Foresight is published by the Prevoyance Group, and this month contains four sections:
Work
Life
Heard in the Hallways
Travels with Patrick
Work
Apple has been a company on the move lately, going from stagnant
computer sales and relative obscurity to posting record profits and
becoming a major consumer electronics player. While other CEO's
have fallen on their swords in the midst of option backdating
scandals, Apple's luster shines brightest on its captain Steve
Jobs, keeping him immune from the fate that has befallen several of
his peers. Apple's success has not only cheered investors, but
provides several lessons for IT leaders as well.
Lesson 1: Own the Ecosystem. Apple's resurgence began with the now
ubiquitous iPod. Apple took an existing technology, the digital
music player, and created an "ecosystem" that allowed the player,
software and an online music store to work seamlessly together. The
iPod broke with its peers and shunned interoperability with a
multitude of software, none of which worked very well, and instead
pursued tight integration within a single solution. Owning an
ecosystem is critical to corporate IT as well. Rather than
attempting to allow any and all systems, process exceptions and
one-off tasks to rule your world, seek to perform critical business
tasks in an efficient, integrated manner, providing the right
transactions and information to the right people at the right time.
Make the process design and systems work seamlessly as one, rather
than two distant entities often at odds with each other. Apple
focused on creating a music experience rather than making a
consumer electronics device and writing some software. Focus your
corporate systems and processes around excellence in a particular
business transaction, rather than some processes and some systems
cobbled together in an attempt to be all things to all people.
Lesson 2: There is room for artistry in IT. After years of boring
beige boxes, applying a sense of design to a computer product
instantly set it apart from its peers. The sleek look of the iPod
was revolutionary at the time, and has inspired a slew of copycats.
In its initial versions, Apple used commodity technical components,
and instead focused on making the device and its interface look
good. Elegant design can have a similarly effective place in
corporate IT, and one can look to other obvious examples like
Salesforce.com, which has excelled at providing an elegant, simple
and targeted interface revered by sales executives.
Lesson 3: Be Bold. Another key lesson from the iPod is that it
represented a departure from the products a traditional computer
company would be expected to sell, but not one that is completely
removed from Apple's core business. The iPod has generated a huge
revenue stream for Apple, but has also increased the visibility of
the company's core computing products, and sales of Macintosh
computers have increased dramatically in conjunction with the iPod.
Consumers saw the capabilities of the iPod and its tight
integration, and made the obvious conclusion: "If the iPod works
this well, the Mac must be something else!" IT leaders should seek
areas where IT can contribute that may not be part of its usual
purview, and allow excellent execution to speak volumes about IT's
other capabilities.
Life
It is intriguing that many of us who manage tens or hundreds of
people and barely bat an eye at the thought of delegating a complex
task fail to do so in our own lives. From spending hours pondering
tax returns to serving as a liaison between the vendors that
provide our insurance and banking services, we often fail to value
our time appropriately. I have long been guilty of this, but
recently have begun to look at service providers not based on
price, but based on how little of my time they require. An
insurance agent who follows up with various other parties on my
behalf and presents me with a final set of options gets my business
now, versus the cheaper alternative that requires weeks of
negotiations, prodding and follow-ups. As life becomes increasingly
complex, the tools we use in choosing employees and vendors at work
become all the more appropriate at home.
Heard in the Hallways
In a past edition of this newsletter, I lamented the intrusion of
technical terms into business parlance. Perhaps even more insidious
is the dreaded "C-word:" Customer. Management fads from the late
1980's and 1990's encouraged everyone from the CEO to the janitor
to think of themselves as a "consultant," and constantly look for
their "customers" and determine how best to please them. You could
no longer walk into a department store to try on shoes without
being accosted by a "Footwear Consultant," and in the halls of
corporations everywhere, internal organizations spent hours
speculating on what the "customer" wanted, or how the customer
could best be served, even though that customer was an internal
entity.
This is all well and good when the customer in question is waving a
checkbook and clamoring to buy your goods and services, but
counterproductive for internal support organizations like IT.
Customers are not partners; rather they are an entity that attempts
to get maximum value for the least investment, and then move on to
another transaction. A customer relationship is not one between
peers; rather it is an exercise of one party getting its way in
exchange for allowing the other party into its pocketbook. Customer
service is not a collaborative effort among equals striving towards
a similar goal, but a transaction where each party wants to invest
the minimum effort to get what it wants.
Consider whether the goal of your internal service organizations is
really to engage other business units as customers, or collaborate
with them to meet the objectives of the business as a whole and
boost the bottom line. If it is the later, a good start to getting
out of the customer service mindset is to stop calling everyone a
customer.
Travels with Patrick
Dieting is one of life's great challenges, and my wife and I
recently adopted a downsizing approach in order to streamline our
"operations." While I frequently joke that I will one day pen the
world's shortest diet book, consisting of one sentence: "If it
tastes good, it's bad for you," this recent attempt has found us
rediscovering the joys of the kitchen. We were spending far too
much time eating out in the name of convenience, and had forgotten
what relatively tasty vittles could be put together in a minimum of
time. While "Pizza a la Beer" is unfortunately not on the approved
list, time in the kitchen has proven a more enjoyable way to spend
time together than even a fine restaurant, and hopefully will pay
off in far less organizational bulk.