John Boyd

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Some new rules for IT

2010/06/15 in IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

The other week I had a go at capturing the rules of enterprise IT[1]. The starting point was a few of those beery discussions we all have after work, where we came to wonder how the game of enterprise IT was changing. It’s the common refrain of big-to-small, the Sieble to Saleforce.com transition which sees the need for IT services (internal or external) change dramatically. The rules of IT are definitely changing. Now that I’ve had a go at old rules, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what the new rules might be.

As I mentioned before, enterprise IT has historically been seen as an asset management function, a production line for delivering large IT assets into the IT estate and then maintaining them. The rules are the therefore rules of business operations. My attempt at capturing 4 ± 2 rules (with friends) produced the following (in no particular order):

  • Keep the lights on. Much like being a trucker, the trick is to keep the truck rolling (and avoid spending money on tyres). Otherwise known as smooth running applications are the ticket to the strategy table.
  • Save money. Business IT was born as a cost saving exercise (out with the rooms full of people, in with the punch card machines), and most IT business cases are little different.
  • Build what you need. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team building LEO[2] blew their own valve tubes. You couldn’t buy parts of the shelf so you had to make everything. This is still with us in some organisations’ strong desire to build – or at least heavily customise – solutions.
  • Keep the outside outside. We trust whatever’s inside our four walls, while deploying security measures to keep the evil outside. This creates an us (employees) and them (customers, partners, and everyone else) mentality.

Things have changed since these rules were first laid down. From another post of mine on a similar topic[3] (somewhat trimmed and edited):

The recent global financial criss has fundamentally changed the business landscape, with many are even talking about the emergence of a new normal[4]. We’ve also seen the emergence of outsource, offshore, cloud computing, SaaS, Enterprise 2.0 and so much more.

Companies are becoming more focused, while leaning more heavily on partners and services companies (BPO, out-sourcers, consultants, and so on) to cover those areas of the business they don’t want to focus on. We can see this from the global companies who have effectively moved to a franchise model, though to the small end of town where startups are using on-line services such as Amazon S3, rather than building their own internal capabilities.

We’re also seeing more rapid business change: what used to take years now takes months, or even weeks. The constant value-chain optimisation we’ve been working on since the 70s has finally cumulated in product and regulatory life-cycles that change faster than we can keep up.

Money is also becoming (or has become) more expensive, causing companies and deals to operate with less leverage. This means that there is less capital available for major projects, pushing companies to favour renting over buying, as well as creating a preference for smaller, incremental change over the major business transformation of the past.

And finally, companies are starting to take a truly global outlook and operate as one cohesive business across the globe, rather than as a family of cloned business who operate more-or-less independently in each region.

So what are the new 4 ± 2 rules? They’re not the old rules of asset management. We could argue that they’re the rules of modern manoeuvre warfare[5] (which would allow me to sneak in one of my regular John Boyd references[6]), but that would be have the tail wagging the dog as it’s business, and not IT that has that responsibility.

I think that the new rules cast IT as something like that of a pit crew. IT doesn’t make the parts (though we might lash together something when in a pinch), nor do we steer the car. Our job is to swap the tyres, pump the fuel, and straighten the fender, all in that sliver of time available to us, so that the driver can focus on their race strategy and get back out on track as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, the following seems to be a fair (4 ± 2) minimum set to start with.

  • Timeliness. A late solution is often worse than no solution at all, as you’ve spent the money without realising any benefit. Or, as a wise sage once told me, management is the art of making a timely decision, and then making it work. Where before we could take the time to get it right (after all, the solution will be in the field for a long time and needs to support a lot of people, so better to discover problems early rather than later), now we just need to make sure the solution is good enough in the time available, and has the potential to grow to meet future demand. The large “productionisation” efforts of the past need to be broken into a series of incremental improvements (à la Gmail and the land of perpeputal beta), aligning investment with both opportunity and realised value.
  • Availability. Not just up time, but ensuring that all stakeholders (both in and outside the company, including partners and clients) can get access to the solutions and data they need. There’s little value in a sophisticated knowledge base solution if the sales team can’t use it in the field to answer customer questions in real time. Once they’ve had to fire up the laptop, and the 3G card, and the VPN, the moment has passed and the sale lost. Or worse, forcing them to head back to the bricks and mortar office. As I pointed out the other week, decisions are more important than data[7], and success in this environment means empowering stakeholders to make the best possible decisions by ensuring that the have the data and functions they need, where they need, when they need it, and in a format that make it easy to consume.
  • Agility. Agility means creating an IT estate that meet the challenges we can see coming down the road. It doesn’t mean creating an infinitely flexible IT estate. Every bit of flexibility we create, every flex point we add, comes at a cost. Too much flexibility is a bad thing[8], as it weighs us down. Think of formula one cars: they’re fast and they’re agile (which is why driving them tends to be a young mans game), and they’re very stiff. Agility comes from keeping the weight down and being prepared to act quickly. This means keeping things simple, ensuring that we have minimum set of moving parts required. The F1 crowd might have an eye for detail, such as putting nitrogen[9] in the tyres, but unnecessary moving parts that might reduce reliability or performance are eliminated. Agility is the cross product of weight, speed, reliability and flexibility, and we need to work to get them all into balance.
  • Sustainability. Business is not a sprint (ideally), and this means that cost and reliability remain important factors, but not the only factors. While timeliness, availability and agility might be what drive us forward, we need still need to ensure that IT is still a smooth running operation. The old rules saw cost and reliability as absolutes, and we strived to keep costs as low, and reliability as high, as possible. The new rules see us balancing sustainability with need, accepting (slightly) higher costs or lower reliability to provide a more timely, available or agile solution while still meeting business requirements. (I wonder if I should have called this one “balance”.)

While by no mean complete or definitive, I think that’s a fair set of rules to start the discussion.

References
1. The rules of Enterprise IT @ PEGLEO: Lyons Electronic Office. The first business computer. @ WikipediaThe IT department we have today is not the IT department we’ll need tomorrow @ PEGThe new normal @ McKinsey QuarterlyManeuver warfare @ WikipediaJohn Boyd @ WikipediaDecisions are more important than data @ PEGHaving too much SOA is a bad thing (and what we might do about it) @ PEGUnderstanding the sport: Tyres @ formula1.com↑

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Innovation linkage

2010/06/10 in Innovation, Presentations by peg | View Comments

I gave a talk on innovation at Chisholm tonight in their Business Innovation Seminar Series, and promised to provide links to some of my references. Here they are:

Leave a comment if I’ve missed anything and I’ll try and find a reference.

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BPM is not a programming challenge

2010/05/31 in Business Process Management, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

Get a few beers into a group of developers these days and it’s not uncommon for the complaints to start flowing about BPM (Business Process Management). BPM, they usually conclude, is more pain than it’s worth. I don’t think that BPM is a bad technology, per se, but it does appear to be the wrong tool for the job. The root of the problem is that BPM is a handy tool for programming distributed systems, but the challenge of creating distributed systems is orthogonal to business process execution and management. We’re using a screw driver to belt in a nail. It’s more productive to think business process execution and management as a (realtime) planning problem.

Programming is the automation of the known. Take as stable, repeatable process and automate it; bake the process into silicone to make it go fast. This is the same tactic that I was using back in my image processing days (and that was a long time ago). We’d develop the algorithms in C, experiment and tweak until they were right, and once they were stable we’d burn them into an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) to provide a speed boost. The ASICs were a lot faster than the C version: more than an order of magnitude faster.

Programmers, and IT folk in general, have a habit of treating the problems we confront as programming challenges. This has been outstandingly successful to date; just try and find a home appliance or service that doesn’t have a programme buried in it somewhere. (It’s not an unmitigated success though, such as our tumble drier is driving us nuts if its overly frequent software errors.) It’s not surprising that we chose to treat business processes automation and management as a programming problem once it appeared on our radar.

Don’t get me wrong: BPM is a solid technology. A friend of mine once showed my how he’d used his BPM stack to test its BPEL engine. As side from being a nice example of eating your own dog food, it was a great example of using BPEL as a distributed programming tool to solve a small but complex problem.

So why do we see so many developers complaining about BPM? It’s not the technology itself: the technology works. The issue is that we’re using it to solve problems that it’s not suited for. The most obvious evidence of this is the current poor state of BPM support for business exception management. We’ve deployed a lot of technology to support exception management in business processes without really solving the problem.

Managing business exceptions is driving the developers nuts. I know of one example where managing a couple of not infrequent business exceptions was the major technical problem in a very significant project (well into eight figures). The problem is that business exceptions are not from the same family of beasts as programming exceptions. Programming exceptions are exceptional. Business exceptions are just a (slightly) different way to achieve the same goal. All our compensating actions and exception stacks just get in the way of solving the problem.

On PowerPoint, anything can look achievable. The BPMN diagram we shared with the business was extremely elegant: nice sharp angles and coloured bubbles. Everyone agreed that it was a good representation of what the business does. The devil is in the details though. The development team quickly becomes frustrated as they have to deal with the realities of implementing a dynamic and exception rich business processes. Exceptions pile up on top of exceptions, and soon that BPMN diagram covers a wall, littered as it is with branch and join operations. It’s not a complex process, but we’ve made it incredibly complicated.

Edward Tufte's take on explaining complex concepts with PowerPoint

A military parade explained, a la PowerPoint

We can’t program our way out of this box, trying to pile on more features and patches. We can rip the complications out – simplifying the process to the point that it becomes tractable with our programming tools (which is what happened in my example above). But this removes all the variation which which makes the processes so valuable. (This, of course, the dirty secret of LEAN et al: you’re trading flexibility for cost saving, making your processes very efficient but also very fragile.)

Or we can try solving the problem a different way.

Don’t treat the automation of a business processes as a programming task (and I by this I mean the capture of imperative instructions for a computer to execute, no matter how unstructured or parallel). Programming is the automation of the known. Business processes, however, are the management and anticipation of the unknown. Modelling business processes should be seen as a (realtime) planning problem.

Which comes back to one of my common themes: push vs pull models, or the importance of what over how. Or, as a friend of mine with a better turn of phrase puts it, we need to stop trying to invent new technologies and work out how to use what we already have more effectively. Rather than trying to invent new technologies to solve problems that are already well understood elsewhere, pushing the technology into the problem, a more pragmatic approach is to leverage that existing understanding and then pull in existing technologies as appropriate.

Planning and executing in a rapidly changing environment is a well understood problem. Just ask anyone who’s been involved with the military. If we view the management of a business processes as a realtime planning problem, then what were business exceptions are reduced to simply alternate routes to the same goal, rather than a problem which requires a compensating action.

Battle of Gaugamela (Arbela) (331BC)

Take that hill!

One key principle is to establish a clear goal – Take that hill!, or Find that lost shipment! – articulate the tactics, the courses of action we might use to achieve that goal, and then defer decisions on which course of action to take until the decision needs to be made. If we commit to a course of action too early, locking in a decision during design time, then it’s likely that we’ll be forced to manage the exception when we realise that we picked the wrong course of action. It’s better to wait until the moment when all relevant information and options are available to us, and then take decisive action.

From a modelling point of view, we need to establish where are the key events at which we need to make decisions in line with a larger strategy. The decisions at each of these events needs to weigh the available courses of action and select the most appropriate, much like using a set of business rules to identify applicable options. The course of action selected, a scenario or business process fragment, will be semi independent from the other in the applicable set, as it addresses a different business context. Nor can the scenario we pick cannot be predetermined, as it depends on the business context. Short and sharp, each scenario will be simple, general and flexible, enabling us to configure it for the specific circumstances at hand, as we can’t anticipate all possible scenarios. And finally, we need to ensure that the scenarios we provide cover the situations we can anticipate, including the provision of a manual escape hatch.

Goals, rules and process: in that order. Integrated rather than as standalone engines. Pull pull these established technologies into a single platform and we might just be closer to a BPM solution inline with what we really need. (And we know there is nothing new under the sun, as this essentially a build on Jim Sinurs rules-and-process argument, and borrows a lot from STRIPS, PRS, dMARS and even the work I did at Agentis.)

As I mentioned at the start of this missive, BPM as a product category makes sense and the current implementations are capable distributed programming tools. The problem is that business process management is not a distributed programming challenge. Business exceptions are not exceptional. I say steal a page from the military strategy book – they, after all, have been successfully working on this problem for some time – and build our solutions around ideas the military use to succeed in a rapidly changing environment. Goals, rules and processes. The trick is to be pragmatic, rather than dogmatic in our implementation, and focus on solving the problem rather then trying to create a new technology.

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Is “agile enterprise IT” an oxymoron?

2010/01/25 in Cloud & SaaS, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

Have we managed to design agility out of enterprise IT? Are the two now incompatible? Our decision to measure IT purely in terms of cost (ROI) or stability (SLAs) means that we have put aside other desirable characteristics like responsiveness, making our IT estates more like the lumbering airships of the 1920s. While efficient and reliable (once we got the hydrogen out of them), they are neither exciting or responsive to the business. The business ends up going elsewhere for their thrills. What to do?

LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin

LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin

An interesting post on jugaad over at the Capgemini CTO blog got me thinking. The tension between the managed chaos that jugaad seems to represent and the stability we strive for in IT seems to nicely capture the current tensions between business and IT. Business finds that opportunities are blinking in and out of existence faster than ever before, providing dramatically reduced windows of opportunity leaving IT departments unable to respond in time, prompting the business to look outside the organisation for solutions.

The first rule of CIOs is “you only have a seat at the strategy table if you’re keeping the lights on”. The pressure is on to keep the transactions flowing, and we spend a lot of time and money (usually the vast majority of our budget) ensuring that transactions do indeed flow. We often complain that our entire focus seems to be on cost and operations, when there is so much more we can bring to the leadership team. We forget that all departments labour under a similar rule, and all these rules are really just localised versions of a single overarching rule: the first rule of business, which is to be in business (i.e. remain solvent). Sales needs to sell, manufacturing needs to manufacture, … By devoting so much of our energy on cost and stability, we seems to have dug ourselves into a bit of a hole.

There’s another rule that I like to quote from time-to-time: management is not the art of making the perfect decision, but making a timely decision and then making it work. This seems to be something we’ve forgotten in the West, and particularly in IT. Perfection is an unattainable ideal in the real world, and agility requires a little chaos/instability. What’s interesting about jugaad is the concept’s ability to embrace the chaos required to succeed when resource constraints prevent you for using the perfect (or even simply the best) solution.

Vickers F.B. 5 Gunbus

Vickers F.B.5. Gunbus

Consider a fighter plane. The other day I was watching a documentary on the history of aircraft which showed how the evolution of fighters is a progression from stability to instability The first fighters (and we’re talking the start of WWI here–all fabric and glue) were designed to float above the battlefield where the pilots could shoot down at soldiers, or even lob bombs at them. They were designed to be very stable, so stable that the pilot could ignore the controls for a while and the plane would fly itself. Or you could shoot out most of the control surfaces and still land safely. (Sounds a bit like a modern, bullet proof, IT application, eh?)

The Red Baron: NAME

The Red Baron: Manfred von Richthofen

The problem with these planes is that they are very stable. It’s hard to make them turn and dance about, and this makes them easy to shoot down. They needed to be more agile, harder to shoot down, and the solution was to make them less stable. The result, by the end of WWI, was the fairly unstable tri-planes we associate with the Red Baron. Yes, this made them harder to fly, and even harder to land, but it also made them harder to hit.

Wizz forward to the modern day, and we find that all modern fighters are unstable by design. They’re so unstable that they’re unflyable without modern fly-by-wire systems. Forget about landing: you couldn’t even get them off the ground without their fancy control systems. The governance of the fly-by-wire systems lets the pilot control the uncontrollable.

The problem with modern IT is that it is too stable. Not the parts, the individual applications, but the IT estate as a whole. We’ve designed agility out of it, focusing on creating a stable and efficient platform for lobbing bombs onto the enemy below. This is great is the landscape below us doesn’t change, and the enemy promises not to move or shoot back, but not so good in today’s rapidly changing business environment. We need to be able to rapidly turn and dance about, both to dodge bullets and pounce on opportunities. We need some instability as instability means that we’re poised for change.

Jugaad points out that we need to allow in a bit of chaos if we want to bring the agility back in. The chaos jugaad provides is the instability we need. This will require us to update our governance processes, evolving them beyond simply being a tool to stop the bad happening, transforming governance into a tool for harvesting the jugaad where it occurs. After all, the role of enterprise IT is to capture good ideas and automate them, allowing them to be leveraged across the entire enterprise.

Managing chaos has become something of a science in the aircraft world. Tools like Energy-Maneuverability theory are used during aircraft design to make informed tradeoffs between weight, weapons load, amount of wing (i.e. ability to turn), and so on. This goes well beyond most efforts to map and score business processes, which is inherently a static pieces/parts and cost driven approach. Our focus should be on using different technologies and delivery approaches to modify how our IT estate responds to business change; optimising our IT estate’s dynamic, change-driven characteristics as well as its cost-driven static characteristics.

This might be the root of some of the problems we’re seeing between business and IT. IT’s tendency to measure value in terms of cost and/or stability leads us to create IT estates optimised for a static environment, which are at odds with the dynamic nature of the modern business environment. We should be focusing on the overall dynamic business performance of the IT estate, its energy-maneuverability profile.

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Innovation and the art of random

2009/12/21 in Innovation, Mailing List, The Art of Random by peg | View Comments

A little while ago I was invited to speak at an event, InnoFuture, which, for a mixture of reasons, didn’t end up happening. The theme for the event was Ahead of the trends — the random effect. My take on it was that innovation is not random, it’s just happening faster than you can process, and that ideas are commoditized making synthesis, the creation of new solutions to old problems, what drives innovation. I was pretty happy with the outline I put together for my talk, that I ended up reusing the content and breaking it into three blog posts, rather than letting it go to waste.

Innovation seems to be the topic of the day. Everyone seems to want some, thinking that it’s the secret sauce which will help them (or their company) bubble to the top of the heap. The self help and consulting communities have responded in force, trying to bottle lightening or package the silver bullet (whichever metaphor you prefer).

It was in this environment that I was quite taken by the topic of a recent InnoFuture event when I was asked to speak.

Ahead of trends — the random effect.
When a concept becomes a trend, you are a not the leader. How to tap into valuable ideas for products, services and communication before they are seen as trends, when they are just … random? Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Let’s open the doors and let the imagination in for it seems that in the current crisis, the right brain is winning and we may be rationalized to death before things get better.

I’ve never seen the random effect, though I have been delightfully surprised when something unexpected pops up. Having been involved in a bunch of companies and projects that, I’m told, where innovative, I’ve always thought innovation was not so much random, as the result of obliquity. What makes it seem random is the simple fact that your are not aware of the intervening steps from interesting problem through to novel solution.

I figured I’d mash together a few ideas that capture this thought, and provide some (hopefully) sage advice based on what I do to deal with random. I ended up selecting:

  • John Boyd on why rapidly changing environments are confusing,
  • Peter Drucker‘s insight that insight (the tacit application of knowledge) is not a transferable good,
  • the struggle for fluency that we all go through as we learn to read,
  • John Boyd (again, but then he had a lot of good ideas) on the need for synthesis,
  • KK Pang (and old lecturer of mine) on the need to view problems from multiple contexts,
  • the need to follow a consistent theme of interest as the only tractable way of finding interesting problems to solve, and
  • my own experiences in leveraging a network of like and dissimilar minds as a way of effectivly out-sourcing analysis.

The result was called Of snow mobiles and childhood readers: why random isn’t, and how to make it work for you. I ended up having far to much content to fill my twenty minute slot, so it’s probably for the better that the event didn’t go ahead, as it would have taken a lot of time to cut it down.

Given that I had a fairly well developed outline, I decided to make it into a series of blog posts (plus my slides these days don’t have a lot of text on them, so if I just dropped the slides online they wouldn’t make any sense). The blog posts ended up breaking down this way:

  1. Innovation should not be the race for the new-new thing.
    Points out that innovation only seems random, unexpected, as you don’t see the intervening steps between a problem and new solution, and that innovation is the result of many small commoditized steps. This ties into one of my earlier posts of dealing with the speed of change.
  2. The role of snowmobiles in innovation.
    Argues that ideas are a common commodity, and that the real challenge with innovation is synthesis rather than ideation.
  3. Childhood readers and the art of random.
    Argues that the key to innovation is to find interesting problems to solve, and suggests that the best approach is to be fluent in a range of domains (sectors, geographies, activities, …) to provide a broader perspective, focus on a line of inquiry to provide some structure, and build a network of people with complimentary interests, providing you with the time, space and opportunity to focus on synthesis.

I expect that these are more productive if taken as a whole, rather than individual posts.

If you look at the path I’ve charted over my career then this is the approach I’ve taken, and my topic of choice is how people communicate and decide as a group, leading me to John Boyd, Cicero, human-computer interaction, agent technology, biology (my thesis was mathematically modelling nerves in a cat), and so on.

I still have the slides, so feel free to contact me it you’re interested in my presenting all or part of this topic.

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Childhood readers and the art of random

2009/12/09 in Innovation, Mailing List, The Art of Random by peg | View Comments

Note: This post is part of larger series on innovation, going under the collective name of Innovation and Art of Random.

Innovation can seem random. We’re dealing with so much change in our daily lives that we miss the long and tortuous journey an innovation takes from it’s first conception through to the delivered solution, causing the innovation to seemingly appear from nowhere. We’re distracted as we’re trying to cope with the huge volume of work our changing environment creates, adjusting to the new normal, while trying to find time to sift through the idea fire hose for that one good idea. However ideas are common, commoditized even, and our real challenge is to make connections.

As Peter Drucker pointed out: insight, the tacit application of knowledge is not a transferable good. The value we derive from innovation comes from synthesis, the tacit application of knowledge to create a new solution. The challenge is to find time to pull apart the tools available to us, recombining them to synthesis new (and hopefully innovative) solutions to the problems we’re confronting today.

While ideas may be cheap, the time and space needed to create insight are not. We need to understand our problem from multiple contexts, teasing out the important elements, bringing together ideas to address each element in the synthesis of an original solution. This process takes time, often more time than we can spare, and so we need to invest our time wisely. Which steps in this processes are the most valuable (or the least transferable), the steps we need to own? Which can we outsource, passing responsibility to partners, or even our social network? And is it possible to create time? Using technology to take some of the load and create the breathing room we need.

Dr. Khee Pang

Dr. Khee Pang

One of the best pieces of advice I picked up at university was from Dr. K. K. Pang, who unfortunately passed away in March 2009. Dr Pang taught circuit theory, which can be quite a frustrating subject. It’s common to encounter a problem in circuit theory which you just can’t find a way into, making it seemingly impossible to solve. Dr. Pang’s brilliant, yet simple, advice was “If you don’t like the problem, then change it to one you do like.”. Just start messing with the problem, transforming bits of the circuit at random until you find a problem that you can solve.

Fast forward to my current work, far removed from circuit theory, and I still find myself using this piece of advice at least once a week. It’s not uncommon to come across a problem, a problem with little direct connection to technology, that needs to be approached from a very different angle. When stuck, take a different angle, make it a different problem, and you might find this new problem more to you liking.

You often bump into the same problem in different contexts as you work across industries and geographies. Different contexts can necessitate a different point of view, making the problem look slightly different. This highlights other aspects of the problem that you might not have been aware of before, highlighting previously hidden assumptions or connections to other problems. However, while this cross industry and geography insight is a valuable tool, the time required to go spelunking for insight is prohibitive. We find ourselves spend too much decoding the new context, and too little teasing out the important elements.

Learning to read, something I expect we all did in our childhood, is a struggle for fluency. We work from the identification of letters and words, through struggling to decode the text, to a level of fluency that enables us to focus on the meaning behind the text. Being fluent means being good enough at identification and decoding that we have the time and space for comprehension.

The ability to change the problem in front of you is really a question of being fluent in a range of environments; understanding a number of doctrines. These might be different industries (finance, public sector, utilities …) domains (logistics, risk management, military tactics, rhetoric …) or even geographies (APAC, EU, US …) as each has its own approach. We need enough experience in an environment to be able to decode it easily. Generally this means in the trenches experience, focused on applying knowledge, allowing us to weed out the common place and find the interesting and new. But building fluency takes time though; we can’t afford to immerse ourselves in every possible environment that might be of interest.

For quite a few years (from back in the day when my email address had a .oz at the end) I’ve been collecting a network of colleagues. Each is inquisitive in our own way, each with our own area of interest or theme, covering a huge, overlapping range of doctrines, while always looking for another idea too add to our toolbox. With the world being small, or even flat, this network of like minds has often been the source of a different point of view, one which solves the problem I’m working on. More recently this network has been migrating to Twitter, making the shared conversation more dynamic and immediate. It’s small networks of like-minds like this which can provide us the ability to effectively outsource the majority of our analysis, spreading the effort amongst out peers and creating the time and space to focus on synthesis.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem: innovation relies on the synthesis, and the key to synthesis is in finding interesting problems to solve. An idea, no matter how brilliant, will not go far unless it results in a product or service the people want. Innovation exists out at the surface of our organisations, or at the production coal face. Just as with the breath strips example, interesting problems pop up in the most unexpected places. Our challenge is prepare ourselves so that we can capitalise on the the opportunity a problem represents. As a famous golfer once said:

Gary Player

Gary Player

The more I practice, the luckier I get.
Gary Player

The world around us changes so rapidly that innovation can seem random. The snowmobile was obvious to the people who invented it, as they worked via trial-and-error from the original problem they wanted to solve through to the completed solution; it didn’t leap from their brow as a fully formed concept. Develop your interests, become fluent in a wide range of relevant topics and environments, use your network to extend your reach even further, and look for interesting problems to solve. In a world awash with good ideas, when innovation relies on your ability synthesis new solutions by finding an new angle from which to approach old problems (possibly problems so old that people forgot that they had them), the key to success is to find our own focus and then use your own own interests to drive yourself forward while effectively leveraging your network and resources around you to take as much of the load as possible. Innovation is rarely the result of a brilliant idea, but a patient process of finding problems to solve and then solving them, and sometimes we’re surprised by how innovative our solutions can be.

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The role of snowmobiles in innovation

2009/10/26 in Innovation, Mailing List, The Art of Random by peg | View Comments

Note: This post is part of larger series on innovation, going under the collective name of Innovation and Art of Random.

Innovation has become an idea arms race, an arms race that most of us cannot hope to win. We spend so much time trying to consume ideas, drinking from the innovation fire hose, that we have little time to devote to what really matters: synthesis.

When we’re focused on harvesting ideas from the environment around us—either inside or outside our organisations—we are, by definition, on the back foot. We must assume that we’re not the first to see an idea, when it’s discovered outside our organisation. Nor can we assume exclusivity on the ideas we generate. As Sun likes to point out, statistically all the smart people with the good ideas work for someone else.

My guitar teacher of some years back, Tom Fryer, had a bit of sage advice. It’s pointless to try to be original, as someone will always have had the idea before you. A more productive approach is to simply plow your own furrow; focus on the problems you want to solve, steal ideas shamelessly if they seem useful, and invent what you need to fill the gaps.

Tom has a good point. The challenge with being creative is in knowing what problems to solve, and bringing together old and new ideas to create a new solution. Hoarding ideas or worrying about their source, debating the worth of internally generated ideas against those sourced externally, misses the point when we have tools like open innovation at our disposal.

Success in innovation is driven by a smart approach to synthesis. Work to solve a problem. Take ideas from around you to incrementally building something new. Learn, tuning your approach as you go.

Take Sony’s Walkman as an example, an innovation which created the market for personal music devices.

The Sony Walkman was originally designed as a music player for couples, based on Akio Morita’s observation of teenagers lugging their radios with them on vacations (an incongruity) and came equipped with two headphone jacks and a recording facility. It even had a “hotline” button, partially overriding the sound from the cassette and allowing one user to talk to the other over the music.

Of course, nobody really used it like that and Sony was quick to see that most people used it as a personal, portable music player (unexpected) and redesigned it accordingly.

Snake Coffee

The Walkman wasn’t conceived and developed in response to a brilliant idea. Akio Morita noticed an incongruity in the market, which Sony created a new product to address. When they realized that the Walkman wasn’t being used as expected, the product was tweaked to align it with reality. As Peter Drucker pointed out with his seven sources of innovation, innovation usually has more prosaic drivers than brilliant ideas or shiny new technologies.

John Boyd

John Boyd

John Boyd called this process, creating snowmobiles. His area of interest was military strategy: the challenge of creating novel, unexpected and winning solutions when dealing with a rapidly changing and constantly evolving environment. Creating snowmobiles represented a thought experiment he used to challenge an audience near the start of his briefing on strategy.

The thought experiment goes something like this:

Imagine that you are:

  • on a ski slope with other skiers—retain this image,
  • in Florida riding in an outboard motorboat—maybe even towing water-skiers—retain this image,
    riding a bicycle on a nice spring day—retain this image, and
  • a parent taking your son to a department store and that you notice he is fascinated by the tractors or tanks with rubber caterpillar treads—retain this image.

Now let’s pull the:

  • skis off ski slope—discard and forget rest of image,
  • outboard motor out of motorboat—discard and forget rest of image,
  • handlebars off bicycle—discard and forget rest of image, and
  • rubber treads off toy tractors or tanks—discard and forget rest of image.

This leaves us with

  • skis,
  • outboard motor,
  • handlebars, and
  • rubber treads.

Pulling all this together, what do we have?

  • A snowmobile.
Snowmobile

Snowmobile

As Boyd points out, there are two distinct processes at work here. First we need to pull ideas apart and understand how they will work in different contexts (analysis), building a library of interesting tactics we can use in solving a future problems. Second, we need to put these ideas back together in new combinations (synthesis), providing us with the opportunity to understand how apparently unrelated ideas and actions can be connected to one another.

How do we create a situation where we can make snowmobiles?

We often strive for diversity, as we believe diversity brings with it a range of points of view, which in turn encourages innovation. This has prompted some organisations to search for T-shaped individuals: someone professional in one area, but with complementary skills. Their broad experience, so the theory goes, will enable them to look across a number of domains to harvest useful ideas. However, this does not address our core challenge: understanding which questions to ask, the questions which will driven the synthesis process.

The first step is take a mountain climbing approach to knowledge and ideas. At each stage in the innovation cycle we need to establish camp, scout the path ahead and then prepare our tools for the journey to the next camp further up the mountain. This requires a process of constant learning, and a willingness to explore new environments. Environments which might range from the various business functions, across technical and business domains to seemingly unrelated areas, such as John Boyd’s work on military strategy.

Low Cost IVF Foundation

Low Cost IVF Foundation

The Low Cost IVF Foundation is a good example of this approach. The program started with a clear goal in mind: of converting IVF from a luxury of the West into a tool for alleviating the public ridicule, accusations of witchcraft, loss of financial support, abandonment and divorce, not to speak of the shame and depression associated with being childless in the third world. At each innovation camp they scouted the path ahead, exploring the environments around them, identify the problems, and challenging the conventional assumptions about how they should be solved. Incrementally, over a number of iterations, they synthesised a new approach which radically cut the cost of IVF. While the journey might seem prosaic (much like Sony’s), the result is quite profound.

To support this approach to innovation, we need to become fluent in a wide range of environments, the second step. Fluency implies that we have sufficient experience in an environment to make understanding ideas automatic. We’re not devoting our time to basic comprehension. This creates the cognitive time and space to focus on understanding the connections between ideas, and their application to the task at hand. Fluency creates the time and space for synthesis.

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Innovation [2009-09-07]

2009/09/07 in Innovation by peg | View Comments

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

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From doctrine to dogma: when did a good idea become the only idea

2009/08/17 in Business-Technology by peg | View Comments

When does a good method become the only method? The one true approach to solving a problem; the approach which will bind them all. The last few decades has seen radical change in our social and business environments, while the practice of business seems to have changed relatively little since the birth of the corporation. The problem of running a business, the problem we work every day to solve, has changed so much that the best practice of yesterday has become an albatross. The methods and practices that have brought us to the current level of performance are also one of the larger impediments to achieving the next level. When did the yesterday’s doctrine become today’s dogma? And what can we do about it?

Our methodologies and practices have been carefully designed to help steer our leviathan ships of industry, tuning their performance to with five and three year plans. The newspapers of today, for example, hold a marked resemblance to the news papers of 100 years ago, structured as large content factories churning out the stories with some ads slapped in the page next to them.

The best practices evident in companies today represent the culmination of generations of effort in building, running and improving our businesses. The doctrine embodied in each industry in a huge, a immensely valuable body of knowledge, tuned to solving the problem of business as we know it.

doctrine |ˈdäktrin|
noun
a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group : the doctrine of predestination.
• a stated principle of government policy, mainly in foreign or military affairs: the Monroe Doctrine.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, from Latin doctrina ‘teaching, learning,’ from doctor ‘teacher,’ from docere ‘teach.’

OS X Dictionary, © Apple 2007

However, a number of fundamental changes have taken hold in recent years. The pace of business has increased markedly; what used to take years now takes months, or even weeks. The role of technology in business has changed as applications have become ubiquitous and commoditized. The assumptions which existing doctrine were developed under no longer hold.

Today, most (if not all) newspapers are watching their as revenue is eroded by the likes of Craigslist, who have used modern web technology to come up with a new take on the decades (if not centuries) old classified ad.

Let’s look at Craiglist. I’ve heard people estimate that they are doing close to $100mm in annual revenues at this point. Many say, “they could be doing so much more”. But the Craigslist profit equation is interesting. They apparently have less than 30 employees. That’s about $4mm/year in employee costs. Let’s assume that they spend another $6mm per year on hosting and bandwidth costs and other costs. So it’s very possible that Craigslist’s annual costs are around $10mm/year. Their value equation then is 10 x (100-10) = $900mm. That’s almost a billion dollars in value for a company with only 30 employees.

Fred Wilson, A VC

Craigslist has taken a fresh look at what it means to be in the business of classified ads, and used technology in a new way to help create business value, rather than restrict it to controlling costs and delivering process effencies; an approach Forrester have labeled Business-Technology.

The challenge is to acknowledge that the rules of business have changed, and modify our best practices to suit the new business environment because, as Albert Einstein pointed out “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If we can’t change our best practices to suit, then our valuable doctrine has become worthless dogma.

dogma |ˈdôgmə|
noun
a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true: the Christian dogma of the Trinity | the rejection of political dogma.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek dogma ‘opinion,’ from dokein ‘seem good, think.’

OS X Dictionary, © Apple 2007

Enterprise architecture (EA) is prime example. As a doctrine, enterprise architecture has a proud history all the way back to John Zachman’s work in the 70s and the architecture framework which carries his name. EA has leveraged large, multi-year transformation programs to deliver huge operational effencies into the business. These programs have delivered a level of business performance unimaginable just a generation ago.

The pace of business has accelerated so much in recent years that the multiyear engagement model these transformations imply is no longer appropriate. What use is a five or three year plan in a world that changes every quarter? Transformation projects have been struggling recently. Some recent transformations edge across the line, at which point everyone moves onto the next project exhausted, and the promised benefits are neither identified or realized. Some transformations are simply declared a success after an appropriate effort has been applied, allowing the team to move on. A few explode, often quite publicly.

This approach made sense a decade or more ago, where IT was focused on delivering the next big IT asset into the enterprise. It’s application strategy, rather than technology strategy. However, the business and technology environment has changed radically recently since the emergence of the Internet as a public utility. The IT departments we’ve created as application factories have become an albatross for the business; making us incapable of engaging anything but a multiyear project worth tens of millions of dollars. They actively prevent the business from leveraging in innovative solutions or business opportunities. Even when there is a compelling reason to do so.

Simply put, the value created by enterprise architecture has moved, and the doctrine, or at least our approach to applying it, hasn’t kept up. For example, a common practice when establishing a new EA team seems to involve hiring architects to fill each role defined TOGAF’s IT Architecture Role and Skill Definitions to provide us with complete skills coverage. Driving this is a desire to align ourselves with best practice, and ensure we do the job properly.

Some of TOGAFs IT Architecture Role and Skill Definitions

Some of TOGAF's IT Architecture Role and Skill Definitions

Most companies don’t need, nor can they can afford, a complete toolbox of enterprise architecture skills inside the business. A strict approach to the the doctrine will result in a larger EA team than the company can sustain. A smarter approach is to balance the demands and available resources of the company against the skill requirements and possible outcomes. We can tune our approach by aligning it with new techniques, tools and capabilities, or integrating elements from other doctrines—agile or business planning techniques, for example—to create a broader pallet of tools to solve our problem with. This might involve new engagement models. We can buy some skills while renting others. Some skills might be sustainable at a lower levels. It is also possible multi-skill, playing the role of both enterprise and solution architect. Similarly, leveraging software as a service (SaaS) solutions can also force changes in our engagement model, as a methodology suitable for scoping a three year and $50 million investment in on-premises CRM might not be appropriate for a SaaS solution which only requires 10% of the effort and investment as the on-premises solution.

Treating doctrine as prescriptive converts it into dogma. As John Boyd pointed out, we should assume that all doctrine is not right—that it’s incomplete or incorrect to some extent. You need to challenge all assumptions and look outside your own doctrine for new ideas.

Our own, personal resistance to change is the strongest thing holding us back. It seems that we learn something in our early to mid twenties, and then spend the rest of our career happily doing the same thing over and over again. We define ourselves in terms of what we did yesterday. If we create an environment where we define ourselves in terms of how we will help the organization evolve, rather than in terms of the assets we manage or doctrine we apply, then we can convert change from an enemy into an opportunity.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. For all the talk of the end of newspapers, some journalists are banding together to create new business models which can hold their own in a post-Craigslist world. Some old school journalists have taken a fresh look at what it means to be a newspaper. Young but growing strong and profitable, Politico’s news room is 100 strong and they have more people in the white house bureau than any other brand.

As TechCrunch pointed out:

Journalists still matter. A lot. Especially the good ones.

The challenge is to focus on what really matters, get close to your customers and find what really drives your business, question all the common sense (which is neither common or sensible in many cases) in your industry’s doctrine, look into the doctrine of other industries to see what they are doing that you can use, and use technology to create a business which their more traditional competitors will find it impossible to compete against.

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Why we can’t keep up

2009/06/22 in Business-Technology by peg | View Comments

We’re struggling to keep up. The pace of business seems to be constantly accelerating. Requirements don’t just slip anymore: they can change completely during the delivery of a solution. And the application we spent the last year nudging over the line into production became instant legacy before we’d even finished. We know intuitively that only a fraction of the benefits written into the business case will be realized. What do we need to do to get back on top of this situation?

We used to operate in a world where applications were delivered on time and on budget. One where the final solution provided a demonstrable competitive advantage to the business. Like SABER, and airline reservation system developed for American Airlines by IBM which was so successful that the rest of the industry was forced to deploy similar solutions (which IBM kindly offered to develop) in response. Or Walmart, who used a data warehouse to drive category leading supply chain excellence, which they leveraged to become the largest retailer in the world. Both of these solutions were billion dollar investments in todays money.

The applications we’ve delivered have revolutionized information distribution both within and between organizations. The wave of data warehouse deployments triggered by Walmart’s success formed the backbone for category management. By providing suppliers with a direct feed from the data warehouse—a view of supply chain state all the way from the factory through to the tills—retailers were able to hand responsibility for transport, shelf-stacking, pricing and even store layout for a product category to their suppliers, resulting in a double digit rises in sales figures.

This ability to rapidly see and act on information has accelerated the pulse of business. What used to take years now takes months. New tools such as Web 2.0 and pervasive mobile communications are starting to convert these months into week.

Take the movie industry for example. Back before the rise of the Internet even bad films could expect a fair run at the box-office, given a star billing and strong PR campaign too attract the punters. However, post Internet, SMS and Twitter, the bad reviews have started flying into punters hands moments after the first screening of a film has started, transmitted directly from the first audience. Where the studios could rely a month or of strong returns, now that run might only last hours.

To compensate, the studios are changing how they take films to market; running more intensive PR campaigns for their lesser offerings, clamping down on leaks, and hoping to make enough money to turn a small profit before word of mouth kicks in. Films are launched, distributed and released to DVD (or even iTunes) in weeks rather than months or years, and studios’ funding, operations and the distribution models are being reconfigured to support the accelerated pace of business.

While the pulse of business has accelerated, enterprise technology’s pulse rate seems to have barely moved. The significant gains we’ve made in technology and methodologies has been traded for the ability to build increasingly complex solutions, the latest being ERP (enterprise resource planning) whose installation in a business is often compared to open heart surgery.

The Diverging Pulse Rates of Business and Technology

This disconnect between the pulse rates of business and enterprise technology is the source of our struggle. John Boyd found his way to the crux of the problem with his work on fighter tactics.

John Boyd—also know as “40 second Boyd”—was a rather interesting bloke. He had a standing bet for 40 dollars that he beat any opponent within 40 seconds in a dog fight. Boyd never lost his bet.

The key to Boyd’s unblemished record was a single insight: that success in rapidly changing environment depends on your ability to orient yourself, decide on, and execute a course of action, faster than the environment (or your competition) is changing. He used his understanding of the current environment—the relative positions, speed and performance envelopes of both planes—to quickly orient himself then select and act on a tactic. By repeatedly taking decisive action faster than his opponent can react, John Boyd’s actions were confusing and unpredictable to his opponent.

We often find ourselves on the back foot, reacting to seemingly chaotic business environment. To overcome this we need to increase the pulse of IT so that we’re operating at a higher pace than the business we support. Tools like LEAN software development have provided us with a partial solution, accelerating the pulse of writing software, but if we want to overcome this challenge then we need to find a new approach to managing IT.

Business, however, doesn’t have a single pulse. Pulse rate varies by industry. It also varies within a business. Back office compliance runs at a slow rate, changing over years as reporting and regulation requirements slowly evolve. Process improvement and operational excellence programs evolve business processes over months or quarters to drive cost out of the business. While customer or knowledge worker facing functionality changes rapidly, possibly even weekly, in response to consumer, marketing or workforce demands.

Aligning technology with business

We can manage each of these pulses separately. Rather than using a single approach to managing technology and treating all business drivers as equals, we can segment the business and select management strategies to match the pulse rate and amplitude of each.

Sales, for example, is often victim of an over zealous CRM (customer relationship management) deployment. In an effort to improve sales performance we’ll decide to role out the latest-greatest CRM solution. The one with the Web 2.0 features and funky cross-sell, up-sell module.

Only of a fraction of the functionality in the new CRM solution is actually new though—the remainder being no different to the existing solution. The need to support 100% of the investment on the benefits provided by a small fraction of the solution’s features dilutes the business case. Soon we find ourselves on the same old roller-coaster ride, with delivery running late,  scope creeping up, the promised benefits becoming more intangible every minute, and we’re struggling to keep up.

There might be an easier way. Take the drugs industry for example. Sales are based on relationships and made via personal calls on doctors. Sales performance is driven by the number of sales calls a representative can manage in a week, and the ability to answer all of a doctor’s questions during a visit (and avoid the need for a follow-up visit to close the sale). It’s not uncommon for tasks unrelated to CRM—simple tasks such as returning to the office to process expenses or find an answer to a question—to consume a disproportionate amount of time. Time that would be better spent closing sales.

One company came up with an interesting approach. To support the sales reps in the field they provided them with the ability to query the team back in the office, answering a clients question without the need to return to head office and then try to get back in their calendar. The solution was to deploy a corporate version of Twitter, connecting the sales rep into the with the call center and all staff using the company portal via a simple text message.

By separating concerns in this way—by managing each appropriately—we can ensure that we are working at a faster pace than the business driver we supporting. By allocating our resources wisely we can set the amplitude of each pulse. Careful management of the cycles will enable us to bring business and technology into alignment.

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