11.29.06
My Favorite Question….
I’m a really big fan of asking questions, especially of ourselves. My absolute favorite question is “Are we operating at maximum effectiveness? What could we do to improve right now?” (okay, two questions). This is hardly a radical idea, but I have found it is useful for dealing with two situations I routinely run into both inside our company and at customers or prospects….
First, the problem is “THEM” or “IT”. If you work in a company of more than one person, you know this one — “I can’t believe <substitute THEM here, i.e. sales, marketing, engineering, IT, logistics> did that. We cannot do anything until THEY do <substitute incredibly unlikely action here>”. Basically this is the situation where we have successfully identified the problem, and it is definitely, 100% not us! When you hear this (because, of course, you would never say anything like this….), just ask “okay, but is there absolutely nothing we can do without THEM, that would improve the situation?” Almost no one will say no to this, but it is a good way to get a boatload of “yes, buts”.
Second, the problem is “not enough <insert scarce resource like people, money, or time>”. The crux of this situation is the absolutely amazing assumption that we are using every resource available at maximum effectiveness and the only possible way to improve is to add more. If you have kids, they may get bored on the odd day off of school, and insist the only cure is a new toy/videogame/movie/whatever.
A few months ago I was in a meeting with a B2B team of a well-known company, and asked how happy the B2B team was with their partner enablement program (this was a variant of the “Are we operating at maximum effectiveness?”). I was told it was fine and there were no issues, the business was perfectly happy with the progress. This was absolutely amazing, for two reasons:
1. NOBODY is happy with the pace of partner enablement, it’s just one of those things you cannot do well. Like collecting bills or reducing costs, there is no level that is “good enough”
2. We had not stumbled into this conference room randomly, we were responding to a request for proposal on precisely these kind of services
The REAL PROBLEM was the internal applications teams, who needed to completely change their infrastructure to adopt to the modern, SOA, ESB, Zzzzzzzz . . .
Now for a contrary example, we are happy to claim Dell as not just a supplier, but also a client, and I had the pleasure some time back to sit down with the guy who was running one of their B2B teams. This was a period when Dell was the absolute media star of the business press for its supply chain model, and I was excited to get a chance to chat over dinner about how they achieved such success.
When I told him how much I respected their B2B, he responded “we’re doing okay, but we have a long way to go….”. In the course of the conversation he had no difficulty whatsoever telling me what they could do to improve right now….
If you want some really good, advanced questions, check out my favorite Podcast “Killer Innovations”
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justindz said,
November 30, 2006 at 5:48 pm
People often struggle to gain a 5% efficiency out of an existing familiar process when trying a new process entirely may gain an immediate 10% increase with the future possibility of another 5%. It’s this tendency that sparked my interest in Agile way back when.
Document-driven, monolithic processes have been around for so long in many companies that they have generally reached their peak efficiency *for that company.* You could make noticeable strides by improving your documents or their hand-off. But you might get twice the benefit by moving towards interaction-driven methods.
Or, I could have just said “don’t get tunnel effect,” which applies to what you posted. But then I couldn’t have incorporated as many buzz words.
dalevile said,
December 5, 2006 at 9:08 pm
There are a few problems that lay behind the phenomenon you describe of IT not being particularly well alighed to business priorities. One of them is not enough communication between the two camps - our research has shown quite clearly that the more touch points you have between IT and business people, the more they think positively about what each other is doing - just get people talking freely, not just in finger pointing project review or operational performance meetings. Beyond that, if senior IT people have a peer-to-peer level relationship with senior business management and are not viewed as simply a “service provider”, then you get the next level of alignment and harmonisation.
The other big impediment is lack of portfolio management. By this, I mean managing IT capability as an overall portfolio of investment, which means focussing on the things that add the most value and (often) killing systems or projects that are not contributing significant value or outsourcing things that are best handled by a third party. Too many IT departments are focussing on the wrong things - e.g. in the context of this blog, trying to keep control of a B2B integration project that really should be outsourced, while simultaneously failing to deliver in other areas of the business that are crying out for new developments and not getting what they want because there is not enough internal IT resource to go around.
I also have to agree with Justin’s comments about people getting themselves wed to existing processes and ways of doing things. I am a big advocate of the business outcome being the pivot point for discussions around automation rather than the business process, on the basis that there are many ways to skin a cat. See my blog entry on the topic here from a few weeks ago:
http://freeformcomment.blogspot.com/2006/10/process-modelling-and-design-dont-get.html
All of this is very front of mind at the moment as I am in the process of writing a book on IT-Business alignment with three colleagues that directly addresses the issues being talked about here (and others). More details of the book project can be found on the related blog here for those that are interested:
http://technologygarden.wordpress.com/
I will be monitoring the GXS blog from now on as there is clearly some like minded thinking going on