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There’s a new Federal CTO in town and early looks at his agenda are filled with words like innovation and transformation. Aneesh Chopra was previously the Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia and will now be working alongside the new federal CIO Vivek Kundra. According to a recent article in Federal Computer Week, Mr. Chopra outlined four themes that will guide his work in this newly created role:
1. Bring as much policy rigor as possible to transforming the country’s economy through technology-based innovation. “It will be important to think about how we introduce policy to foster innovation” nationally, as well as across state and jurisdictional boundaries.
2. Look for game-changing ways to address the president’s priorities through so-called innovation platforms, or new approaches using technology. Three areas of focus will be:
- Open standards. “We need the private sector to lead, but we need a culture of open standards,” he said. That doesn’t preclude proprietary standards, he added. But open standards and applications that could be shared and replicated easily would remain at the center of efforts to drive innovation.
- Government research and development. Chopra also envisioned redirecting where the government might focus its research and development commitment. “There’s an emerging debate of how far up the [R&D] food chain we should go” and whether the government should target resources closer to the application stage, he said, adding that he would examine opportunities “in the middle ground, south of procurement and north of R&D.”
- Crowd sourcing. Chopra said the government would continue to tap the potential of crowd sourcing, or the use of networks of contributors, to gather new ideas and fuel public-sector innovation.
3. Deliver on the president’s commitment to ensure that the country has a reliable and trustworthy digital infrastructure.
4. Commitment to greater transparency, citizen participation and collaboration.
An interesting quote from the article was directed at software developers: “We’re going to have start a dialogue to develop bug-free software or bug-free software development.”
In addition to focusing on policy recommendations and technology innovations that support the president’s priorities for the economy, health care costs and education, Chopra said he would also look for tools that could help spur innovation. One possibility is working with the General Services Administration to develop an “innovation sandbox” where project ideas could be tested and shared across the government. He also said the government would use new interactive technologies to seek broad public input and then begin to craft policy recommendations.
Sounds like visualization might be a good vehicle for this kind of collaborative input?
At iRise we applaud the focus on improving federal IT and applying best practices learned from the commercial world to the public sector. As taxpayers we should all be concerned about cutting wasteful government spending; failure is simply no longer an option. There is a huge opportunity to modernize and innovate along the themes outlined by Mr. Chopra and we support the effort.
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The Standish Group and others have reported over the past decade that more than 30% of all software made for users was, in hindsight, never needed or used to accomplish their mission. The project stakeholders discovered this only after the solutions were delivered at more than several thousand projects surveyed to date. Also reported widely, more than 20% of the code related to functionality and/or usability was found to be “missing” or “wrong” after the users had a chance to interact with the software in real-world mission scenarios. In the survey responses, the terms requirements “reworked” and “moved to the next release” are used interchangeable with the terms “missed”, “misunderstood”, and “changed.”
The Federal IT Budget – With the Standish statistics in mind, more than $10 billion dollars of the $70 billion dollar federal IT budget this year is earmarked for software modernization efforts. Most American citizens and government employees know these efforts are long overdue. The opportunity exists to reduce this expenditure by more than 10% or alternatively to get more for the taxpayer dollars invested on projects already in flight. There is a rapidly increasing “expectations gap” by users and acquirers alike as to what “good software” means for individuals and organizations to take care of business and fulfill assigned missions, tasks and goals.
The Government Needs To Innovate – Michael Schrage, a senior adviser to MIT’s Security Studies Programwrites, “Innovation’ isn’t what innovators do….it’s what customers and clients adopt. His research and advisory work explores the role of models, prototypes and simulations as collaborative media for managing innovation and risk. His ongoing work on strategic and “just-in-time” experimentation is at the core of several corporate transformation efforts. His insights into the economics of “hyperinnovation,” “‘iterative capital” and “innovation cross-subsidies” are redefining executive investment criteria for supply chain and customer relationship initiatives.” He is the author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate. In the forward provided by Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence; Tom writes, “this is simply the best book written on innovation I’ve ever read.” …. “Read! Act! Now!”, he concludes.
Robert Austin, Harvard Chair of the CIO Executive Program focuses on management of innovative and knowledge intensive activities, especially as applied in creative industries and information technology management. He has written on these issues in Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (co-authored with Lee Devin) and The Role of IT in Innovation-Based Value Creation; where Rob writes, “it will soon be all too apparent. IT, finally mature enough to think of itself as an old dog, very badly needs a new trick.”
Partnering With The Government – Richard Frost is a Global Director at General Motors where he has responsibility for driving systems development, software engineering, and program management globally, including agile development, streamlined development processes, and requirements visualization. As a senior advisor to the SEI CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ), a collaborative effort of GM, DoD and NASA, Rich has helped identify best practices for systems acquisition at GM and is helping incorporate these into a CMMI framework for the customers of technology.
Through innovation and partnerships like GM’s collaboration with SEI, iRise’s expansion into the Federal Market announced last month is tasked with saving the Federal Government a “fistful of cash” and helping accelerate the software modernization efforts over the next several years.
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Do you know any IT Leaders who have made a positive impact on their organization through technology?
Premier 100 IT Leaders are known for:
- Promoting an IT vision that supports the company’s business strategy
- Tying technology and innovation to specific business needs and goals
- Using technology to gain a competitive advantage
- Being viewed as a leader by executive, IT staff and others in the industry
Computerworld has launched its annual search for technology professionals who have demonstrated leadership in their organizations through the use of IT and have the strategic vision to align technology with business goals.
The nomination form is available from this link and the deadline for submitting a nomination form is June 30, 2008.
Check these links for more information:
- Award Overview
- Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2008
- Computerworld IT Leaders Conference – iRise was a Platinum Sponsor for the 2008 conference
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In the March 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, David Upton and Bradley Staats from the Harvard Business School wrote an article about a radically new approach to developing IT systems called the path-based approach. As the authors state in the opening sentence, “enterprise IT projects continue to be a headache for business leaders.”
The article is a case study of Japan’s Shinsei Bank IT department and how they revolutionized retail banking in Japan. Masamoto Yashiro, the former chairman of Citibank Japan, was brought in as the new CEO in 2000 and he hired Jay Dvivedi, who used to run IT operations for Citibank Japan as his Chief Information Officer. Together, they led the development of a new enterprise IT system using the path-based method of application development. They call it the path-based approach because it focuses on providing a path for the system to be developed instead of attempting to define all of the specifications or requirements for a system before the project is launched. Shinsei succeeded in developing and deploying an entirely new enterprise system in one year at a cost of $55 million.
Traditionally, there are two choices for building a major enterprise system – the “big bang” approach of replacing the current system and processes all at once or the incremental method of improving the existing system one piece at a time. Shinsei did not want the risk of the “big bang” method and did not have the time to implement the incremental method, so they chose a third method called the path-based method. Some of the principles of the path-based method are variations on old themes while others are totally unconventional.
Here are some things they learned:
Don’t just align business and IT strategies – forge them together — Besides having the CIO report to the CEO, Shinsei business managers spend significant amounts of time in learning about IT. In addition, they focus on understanding “foreseeable business objectives” and the interaction between business and IT groups is iterative and continuous.
Strive for extreme simplicity — Shinsei succeeded by employing the simplest possible technologies. There were three keys to their simpler approach, limit the number of standards, create simple re-usable solutions and apply modularity to clearly specify user interfaces.
Give (some) power to the people — Many project failures stem from organized resistance to new systems. When Shinsei rolls out a new system, they start by offering an interface that is similar to the old system – and only after users are comfortable with a new system do they turn off the old screens. Shinsei also created a system for including feedback and requests from employees, customers, business users and technical users. Comments have averaged about 100 requests per day which helps Shinsei continually improve systems and processes.
The conclusion is that “businesses must focus on building IT systems that cannot fail to improve…and adopting the path-based approach will provide flexible systems that can change as the business demands and can shift IT from being a simple platform for existing operations to a launchpad for new functions and brand new businesses.”
Imagine what would happen if you marry path-based method of application development with the visualization capabilities of iRise?
The complete article is a worthwhile read and is currently available for free from the Harvard Business Review website.
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I was reading an essay titled “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike” in the NY Times recently. The essay went on to describe the Curse of Knowledge – and how this curse impacts innovation and stifles new ideas. The author described the curse as the reason why managers sometimes have trouble convincing others to adopt new programs and why engineers design products that are ultimately only useful to other engineers.
There is a way to exorcise this curse. The essay mentioned a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Die written by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Chip is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Dan is a consultant for the Aspen Institute. In their book, the brothers take apart sticky ideas (natural ideas, urban myths, proverbs, rumors and other ideas) and figure out what why some ideas are more memorable and why others die.
Based on their research, they identified six principles of successful ideas. The six principles can be summarized in a checklist for creating a successful idea: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story which form the acronym SUCCES:
- S – Simplicity (the message must be both simple and profound)
- U -Unexpectedness (the message must generate interest and curiosity)
- C – Concreteness (the message must be clear)
- C – Credibility (help people test ideas for themselves)
- E – Emotions (make people feel something)
- S – Stories (stories act as mental flight simulator)
The book also mentions that not every idea is ’stick-worthy’. In fact, the range of stick-worthy ideas for most people ranges from one per week to one per month. They also point out that creating sticky ideas is something that can be learned.
What’s the take-away? “A little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference.” Using these six simple steps, we can take our ideas and transform into ’sticky’ and powerful ideas.
To learn more about making ideas stick, here are several link to follow:
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Nicholas Carr wrote an interesting and fascinating thought piece on Google in the most recent issue of strategy+business. Nicholas is a renowned author and speaker, and is probably best known for his essay and book Does IT Matter?.
There have been countless articles and discussions about Google’s success over the last few years and it is hard to imagine that Google has been around for less than 10 years. Since incorporating in September 1998, Google’s growth has been dizzying - even when looking at just the last couple of years when revenues have grown from than $500mm in 2002 to over $10.5 billion in 2006. And that is before mentioning its astronomic market value of more than $216 billion. People continue to argue what industry or business category to place Google. Is it a software company, advertising agency, search company, telephone company, publisher, processor, movie studio or an entirely new kind of business?
Nicholas simplifies Google’s business model as follows: “Google brokers and publishes advertisements through digital media. More than 99 percent of its sales have come from the fees it charges advertisers for using its network to get their messages out on the Internet.” Nearly everything Google does is aimed at “reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use”.
But is it a business model or innovation program to follow? Nicholas says that executives have to be cautious before jumping on Google’s bandwagon. First, Google is still a young company and has not been tested by adversity or a complete business cycle. An interesting viewpoint is that it is not clear if Google’s management and innovation approaches are a cause or result of its success. Second, Google’s model may not apply to other companies because it is so different.
Can we learn from Google’s approach to innovation? Nicholas says “yes and no”. Most of Google’s success and profits can be traced to three innovations: changing the way search engines rank and present results, perfecting the process of letting advertisers bid on key words and the design of its parallel-processing computer system which incorporates hundreds of thousands of computers. These innovations predate the now famous Google innovation process and provides the company with advantages and freedoms not enjoyed by most other companies. For example, Google can hire the best software engineers and provide them with perks and salaries to keep them happy. Plus, Google has the ability to throw more resources at innovation than other companies. Google also organizes product development into small teams with considerable freedom and allows engineers to devote 20% of their time to pet projects with little oversight.
Nicholas points out that Google, like all smart and consistently profitable companies, exhibit the same three qualities:
- Hire talented people and give them room to excel
- Measure progress and results rigorously
- Be disciplined in work and in spending
In conclusion, Nicholas ends with this lesson – “Beware the inevitable hype about how the latest business trend or the newest overnight success “changes everything.” Yes, markets and technology change, sometimes with devastating speed, but through the turmoil, the underpinnings of business success remain fairly stable”
For the complete story, read the entire article here.
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Thornton May, Futurist and Dean of the IT Leadership Academy kicked off the World Congress for Business Analysts (WCBA) conference this morning with a fast-paced, entertaining and thought-provoking session.
Wearing his signature bowtie, Thornton started out with a series of slides and open-ended questions showing how technology and the world are changing including:
- how will you deal with a more interactive world?
- how will real-time information processing impact you?
- why do projects fail?
- do you always have the best and brightest on your projects?
- do you grade project team members?
- should we be able to “vote them off the island?”
- are we allowed to fail?
- will you be aware of all the information available?
Just before wrapping up, Thornton offered these nuggets of wisdom:
- “the questions we ask will bias the answers we get”
- bring the future to the present
- go to the endpoint of your analysis and work the problem backwards
- remember the power of end-to-end perspective
Thornton ended his presentation with a slide of a rocket tied to a dog. He mentioned that the rocket represents technology change and asked, ”Is the puppy going to be happy if you light the rocket?”
Save the puppy!
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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:
- What innovations can come of this disruption? How can people rebalance their budgets to take advantage of the, perhaps, yet unforeseen opportunities?
- Who, or what, helped foster this environment of disruption?
- Will the disruption of today be as commonplace tomorrow as some previous disruptions now appear to us?
- 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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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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Are you taking advantage of design to generate strategic business differentiation?
I got turned onto the topic of design thinking from Cone Johnson - an iRise user who helped organize an event around design thinking in Dallas today.
So what is design thinking?
From the Design Thinking event site, they talk about design thinking as follows:
“Classic business models are threatened—the economics of competition have changed. Quality, efficiency and price are quickly matched. Being different requires flexibility—it’s squishy. Squishy seems to imply risk.
Such is the conundrum of the balance between science and art—a balance readily facilitated by Design Thinking, fundamentals for strategic business differentiation.”
At the Corante blog, Paula Thornton describes design thinking as “leveraging implicit elements of design practices, as a means to approach problem solving” and calls it a “critical factor for innovation”. Paula also notes that “Good Design Thinking is the ability to see things not readily apparent to others (that’s where market differentiation can occur).”
The Noise Between Stations blog provides 6 building blocks of design thinking:
- Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
- Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
- Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
- Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
- Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
- Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions
The net-net is that design is good – and that design can and should be leveraged to even greater heights by coupling it with business strategy to generate new innovations. I’d love to hear comments about how others are using design to solve problems.
(For some additional background information, here are some del.icio.us links on design thinking provided by Cone. This entry was originally posted in the Catalyze Current Wisdom blog.)
10/25 update – Here’s some more information I ran across this morning on Design Thinking from Bruce Nussbaum’s blog (NussbaumOnDesign) where he compares Design to Design Thinking.
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