The iRise Blog

Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path says “Don’t focus on technology and features.  Heck, don’t focus on the “product.” Focus on the experience you want to create, and build a system that gets you there.”

In this recorded presentation from the dConstruct2007 conference, Peter points out that “Experience is the Product.”

Peter Merholz is President of Adaptive Path, an experience strategy and design firm based in San Francisco. He is an experienced information architect, writer, speaker and leader in the field of designing for user experience (UX).  Peter is perhaps best known for his blog, published since 1998, where he writes about design, business, and technology. In fact, Peter was the person who coined the term ‘blog’ in the first place.

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This year’s CIO|08 looked at the forces of disruption and what one needs to manage them successfully.

After attending the conference, my reaction to the word disruption has changed. When the conference started, I would hear the word disruption, and it alone would put me into a change management state, where I could feel myself preparing to gently help people through change and mitigate risks.

Now after reflecting upon what I heard and the conversations that filled the Coranado’s rooms, I find myself allowing my mind to wander. The word allows me to ask myself:

1. What innovations can come of this disruption? How can people rebalance their budgets to take advantage of the, perhaps, yet unforeseen opportunities?
2. Who, or what, helped foster this environment of disruption?
3. Will the disruption of today be as commonplace tomorrow as some previous disruptions now appear to us?
4. When will I be willing to follow my “outlaw thoughts” and become a true disruptor?

Innovation and disruption now live together in my mind as a set pair. With true innovation comes disruption, and from disruption, innovation is fostered. No matter what comes first, I know that in the end there will be positive ramifications and it is our mission to seize them.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Although the above quote is often heard, I still find myself drawn to it to clarify how I now define disruption. Disruption is an opportunity to innovate.

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Lionel Etrillard joins the iRise management team as the VP of Finance.  Lionel is charged with scaling the finance and accounting team to support revenue and profit targets.  His background as a finance professional spans international, domestic, public and private industry experience. 

Steven Yamanaka was just appointed as CTO to lead up technology strategy behind the product and run engineering and development.  His background encompasses domestic and international technology industry experience.

iRise is expanding in many other areas so check out our Careers page to learn about more opportunities!

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Mike Friedenberg the President and CEO of CIO magazine kicked off day two of the CIO|08 conference by introducing Monte Ford, Senior Vice President & CIO of American Airlines (AMR). 

Monte has had a long and illustrious career, resulting in his induction into the CIO Hall of Fame last night.  Prior to his time at American, Ford held positions at The Associates First Capital Corporation (which was acquired by Citigroup), and the Bank of Boston, which became Fleet Bank, and  has now been acquired by the Bank of America.

Ford said the airline industry has several challenges impacting their business currently including: (1) high fuel prices (2) load factors (3) governmental constraints; and (4) service issues. With these in mind, it is a challenge to keep people informed about their journey and at the same time keep the internal systems up with all the external factors that are at times uncontrollable.

When asked about innovation, Monte spoke with reverence about Max Hoffman, the speaker and former Chairman of the Sabre Group at last night’s Hall of Fame ceremony.  Monte feels it was Max who is known as the “Father of Automation” in the travel industry who not only pushed his own organization to innovate, but also his vendors.   Innovation, Monte says, was top down at the time due to the hierarchal nature of organizations.  Today however, organizations are becoming more flat.   Innovation will be a derivative of this flat structure, and it must be embraced in these changing times as it from “The Wisdom of Crowds.”  Unfortunately, he warned the audience to be aware that innovation is where the risks will permeate from too.

The pace of innovation needs to be self-managed as it is never occurring fast enough.  The more you do, the more they’re going to want you to do, and the faster they want you to do it.  As such, you need to create your own metrics to determine what is the right level for innovation within your organization.  While the CIO’s budget can often be viewed as a cost center, it can also be viewed as an innovation center. As a result of this perspective, one way to look at the IT organization is as a portfolio.  IT spends are strategic discussions which are not insular and need to include other top C-level executives.  However, none of this can be done without people, so it is critical to hold these discussion first as a part of any budgetary discussion.

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Scott Kirsner the Business & Technology Journalist of the Boston Globe gave a brief, yet humorous overview of  Day One at CIO|08.  

Key quotes Kirsner recapped from yesterday include:

• “The best way to predict the future is to prevent it,” was a slant on the Alan Kay’s now famous quote. Kay is the President of the Viewpoints Research Institute.
• “When the network is faster people will do more with it,” from Joseph Ferra, the Chief Wireless Officer for Fidelity Investments.
• “Leave room for failure, but learn from it,” from JP Rangaswami, the Managing Director, Service Design of the BT Group PLC.
• “I’m a constructive disruptor,” from John Boushy the CEO, President & Director of Ameristar Casinos.
• “Divine discontent: a healthy but constant leave of self-critism,” and “There is a difference between helping to not fail and helping them to succeed,” both from Kevin Turner, the COO of Microsoft.

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The Chinese symbol for disruption is crisis and opportunity. How you deal with the disruptive nature can help balance the degree of danger vs. opportunity. Disruption for forward momentum vs. for the sake of it. Once you can define the reason why, it is easier for people to buy into it.  If it is difficult for people to do the things you are asking them to do, then perhaps disruption would be a benefit.  This is the theory which John Boushy the CEO, President & Director of Ameristar Casinos (NASDAQ: ASCA) shared with Gary Beach Publisher Emeritus of CIO magazine as they discussed the topic of disruption.

John declared, “Disruption is all about ’show me the money.’   How do we make more money in the business, increase revenue or reduce expenses or both?  It gets only easier when an organization learns there is life after disruption. If they’ve encountered disruption before, the change will be easier.

Management has to have an interest in recognizing a disruption can be good and there can be great innovations. Intentional or external disruption can be difficult. But the internal can usually be more managed.” 

John believes you can grow the company on your own terms and in your own way, and if management has bought into it can be easier than the unknown.

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Joe Fraser, Americas Healthcare Account Executive of EDS led a Technology Briefing Session at the CIO|08 conference.  He spoke about his client Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), EDS’ largest healthcare client. BCBSMA has been an EDS client since 1969.   While EDS must support its clients’ needs, it must at the same time ensure its change control and scope management issues are managed to mitigate its own risk that are introduced through fixed bid engagements.  Based upon industry analyst recommendations, EDS’ experience at other clients (such as General Motors and a pilot project, EDS decided to leverage iRise at BCBSMA. 

Joe discussed two projects today at the CIO conference.  In the first project, EDS used iRise in response to an RFP in order to clarify ambiguities.  In the second project, EDS presented BCBSMA with a new potential application (based upon their understanding of a potential future business needs) in an attempt to not only win business, but also to strengthen their clients’ market positioning. 

At BCBSMA, iRise helped improve time to market, while providing a method to foster innovation.  One member of the BCBSMA team told Joe’s team, “I wish we had this tool a long time ago it would have saved us a lot of time.”  He added, “It is a lot easier to understand how the application will work using the simulation tool. This takes out the guesswork.”  The BCBSMA EDS project team said, “iRise helped us develop better requirements earlier in the life cycle by enabling us to quickly build a visual representation. This in turn enables our users to quickly understand what functionality we will build for them and our software developers to understand exactly what needs to be built.”

Some unforeseen benefits for the EDS team included improved user acceptance testing. Moreover, the development had fewer defects when complete. One element Joe did not foresee was having to manage his clients’ expectations about delivery. Once the business saw the final simulation, they felt they were seeing the final coded application as it is high fidelity and data rich.

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The CIO|08  Conference kicked off its first full day of sessions with an opening keynote from Alan Kay the President of Viewpoints Research Institute. Kay is a true innovator in computer science. From his development of the dynamic object-oriented programming to his involvement in the design of the ARPANET, he has been a leader and innovator in the field.  As Kay coined the phrase “the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” I was keenly interested to hear his take on innovation and communication of new concepts and ideas.

First, I was impressed by his ability to have “outlaw” thoughts and run successfully with them. But by the end of his presentation, it was his clarity around how difficult, yet essential it is in our society to not only have these thoughts, but also to promote them. That clarity will leave me with more lasting impression of Alan Kay.

Kay feels that the willingness to accept one man’s view of the world as truth, may prevent the truth and, hence, innovation from being given the forum to root itself and grow. From this my mind wanders to collaboration and visualization as tools to innovation. If we leverage the potential “outlaw” thoughts gained from a greater group (the book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations), over and above that of just one analyst and their view of reality, will your software too not be more innovative by its very nature?

Kay mentioned these quotes from Marshall McLuhan during his presentation:

• “People are driving faster and faster into the future…but steering only by looking through the rearview mirror”
• “Remembering is not the same thing as thinking. Don’t worry about whether it is right or wrong…try to find out what is going on!”

Both quotes challenge you to ask what is “Normal”?, and is that what we should really strive towards? These are the questions Kay continued to present to the audience. He indicated that most people in the world deal with NOW as “normal” and “reality,” however, dealing with NOW as “an arbitrary construct that can be qualitatively changed and improved” can allow for new thoughts, for innovation.

One could counter with “We’re in business to Make Money!  It is from this stand that Kay challenged the audience that the desire for money in terms of billions should not be enough. Trillions should be their focus. His proof was to say the “ARPA/PARC has now generated more than $20 trillion from an investment of a few hundred million in today’s dollars.” To get this type of real ROI, Kay says one needs to embrace new paradigms to get you from billions to trillions. For that you need to take higher risks on new ideas, and it’s only working on more grandiose and out of the box projects where that type of impact can occur.

Remember, a few people who can have an enormous impact so try and find out what is going on not just what is normal. One of Kay’s last slides says “How many lines of code, and for what?” indicated to me, he too asks that we consider what we are building before we do so. As Heinlein says “the bull wears itself out on the cap but fails to see the sword.”

We must see the sword, we must find context and clarity in our activities as technology professionals.

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The CIO|08 Conference is taking place this week in San Diego, California.  Bob Melk, the Publisher of CIO Magazine, opened the conference this morning and introduced Alan Kay as the opening keynote.

In my conversation with Bob, he noted “Business and Technology disruption has resonated for our team this week as we prepared for the conference in context of the fires raging in San Diego. I’m thrilled to see so many CIOs here today to discuss and engage on this topic in context with positive and negative business disruption. Thanks to iRise for taking part in this week’s program.”

Here are links to the:

• Agenda
• Speakers
• Sponsors

iRise will be blogging live from the conference this week.

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For the last several years, the Society for Information Management (SIM) and Professor Jerry Luftman, Associate Dean of Graduate Information Systems Programs at Stevens Institute of Technology, have conducted a survey of CIOs.  The 2007 survey sponsored by SIM included IT executives from 112 companies across a range of industries.  Dr. Luftman administered and interpreted the results and presented the survey results at the 2007 SIMposium conference in Memphis, Tennessee on October 16, 2007.

In the 2007 SIM Survey press release, the highlights of the findings and insights were as follows:

• Retaining IT professionals has surpassed IT-Business alignment as the No. 1 concern for IT executives, a major change from the 2006 Survey. Compared to the 2006 SIM Survey, the focus on IT-Business Alignment came in second.
• The market for IT professionals is the fastest-growing in the US economy. More than 1 million new jobs are projected to be added between 2004 and 2014. Six of the 30 occupations projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to grow the fastest in this time period are IT related. IT job prospects are expected to be good as demand increases because of rapid advancement in technologies, new business opportunities for leveraging applications, and the number of baby boomers expected to retire.
• But there may not be sufficient IT talent in the pipeline to meet this growing demand. The IT hiring downturn during the early part of this decade and the fear of offshore outsourcing have caused a drop in enrollment for computer science and information systems courses at many universities. In the past decade, the number of students majoring in computer science has dropped 40%. A report from UCLA’s higher-education research institute shows an even steeper decline of 70% between 2000 and 2005 of freshmen who planned to major in computer science.
• The loss of IT skills and IT professionals will only accelerate the shift of IT jobs overseas. This inaccurate fear that IT jobs are going offshore has caused this shortage in the pipeline. If nothing is done to turn this trend around to meet the anticipated strong demand for IT workers in the United States, organizations will be forced to source their IT resources offshore. Additionally, there is a significant change in the type of skills required for IT professionals; with the softer (e.g., communication, marketing, negotiating, business, industry) skills clearly on the rise.

CIO|Insight also summarized the top 10 Things that CIOs Worry About from Dr. Luftman’s survey.  The % of CIOs who identified each concern are listed in parentheses next to each finding:

1. Attract, develop and retain IT workers (51%)
2. IT business alignment (42%)
3. Build business skills in IT (40%)
4. Reduce the cost of doing business (29%)
5. Improve IT quality (28%)
6. Security and privacy (27%)
7. Manage change (26%)
8. IT strategic planning (25%)
9. Make better use of information (24%)
10. Evolving CIO leadership role (19%)

The press release also mentioned that you could interview Professor Luftman and receive a copy of the report on the survey of information executives by contacting Patrick A. Berzinski at +1-201-216-5687 or pberzins@stevens.edu.

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