Every IT department I’ve ever walked into has a linchpin. This individual is a stakeholder on all major technology initiatives, understands the organization’s platform code base and configuration, and is on every support email thread from business users.
A lot of managers and consultants will flag this as a problem, and it is, but let’s analyze the reasons why and what a technology department can do to turn this situation into a opportunity to build value.
There are reoccurring problem points I hear from technology and business leaders around this topic.
1. Technology projects are not being completed efficiently. Pending actions on the part of IT are viewed as the holdup.
2. Business users report low satisfaction levels on custom applications.
3. Enhancements and bug fixes to existing platforms take months to deliver. A long backlog of business requests goes untouched.
4. The department worries what will happen if IT Guy leaves.
My favorite part of a technology governance presentation is the Resource slide. A department has just spent months deploying a new software platform and receives a presentation from a software vendor or consulting company on the departmental roles needed to support the new technology. The roles are too theoretical to map to real people and departments know that even if this wasn’t the case 9 times out of 10 they won’t get additional headcount approval anyway.
So what is the real problem here?
1. Technology departments have limited headcount to utilize across new and existing initiatives.
2. A-list employees are misaligned to work that does not maximize value for the organization.
3. Projects are not planned and executed in a manner that can result in success for business partners and are sustainable by IT.
4. The current team size is inadequate to support and upgrade a custom code base.
I could go into a lot of detail here about how a technology leader can go about restructuring their IT department. However, most of these points involve long term changes. The following solutions revolve around the theme of a simple realignment to existing IT staff as the changes are simple to implement along with generating quick results from both business stakeholders and in improving team work satisfaction.
1. Align IT Guy to partner with business stakeholders
Business knowledge and problem solving are generally the most valuable skills of the A-list IT Guy. Aligning these individuals to program management functions allows more partnership time with stakeholders. Many organizations utilize non-technical staff to engage the business which generally increases frustration with IT and generates longer backlogs of unmet requirements. The IT guy can generally offer quick solutions based on a mix of organizational and technical experience.
2. Focus on getting business stakeholders and users to adopt then build.
IT has traditionally used a model of build then adopt. A solution is developed based on detailed business and functional requirements, adequately tested then deployed. After all this happens someone may start to focus on who will utilize the technology. Realigning IT Guy in this model will fail because the problem solver will over commit to custom application solutions. The rebooted IT Guy must instead approach business stakeholders with a model of adopt then build. Get business users using technologies through existing tools or free solutions. Plan ways of integrating a solution into the enterprise IT ecosystem, but only execute on that plan if the technology takes off.
3. Stop new custom development projects that are not supportable.
Many IT organizations do not properly calculate TCO around projects. Department focus can shift to managing issues on existing platforms by not properly anticipating lifecycle costs and skill sets that will need to be retained. Minimizing in-house custom development projects can allow more time to focus on business benefits that require less IT overhead.
4. You have to take a stand and shut off some applications.
Yes that’s right. That mission critical application that can only work with IE6 and has daily support requests from its 5 users needs to go. Like with any business, strategies that are not working within the IT portfolio need to be cut in order to focus on activities that will drive value. Many IT leaders will not take this step for career management reasons. However, not cutting failed strategies leaves IT Guy attempting to clean up the mess.
Brook Buchanan is the Founder and Principal Consultant for Collistic
Ten years ago today I decided to quit my job.
I remember November 5, 2000 as a day I saw Pearl Jam play Key Arena and decided to quit my job. Right out of college I was a sales rep for what would become Ameriprise Financial. I realized quickly financial sales was not my calling in life. The entrepreneurial structure of the business had drawn me in with the opportunity to build my own book of work. The day to day of the job though especially the cold calls started to do me in. At some point, probably to avoid picking up the phone, I started thinking about how the business was run. Everything about the job was very manual and completely paper driven. I began to spend a great deal of time thinking about ways technology could help the organization operate more efficiently. I’d been obsessed with computers since I was a little kid, but never really linked the interest to career. I walked into work the next day and quit. Technology was my passion.
The last 10 years has taken me through software and consulting companies both small and large. There are pluses and minuses to each but all eventually limited what I wanted to do in one form or another because what I want is to run my own business.
Why Collistic, Why Now
Why not now can be one of the greatest obstacles you can face in life. In the short time since starting Collistic in the spring the company has grown to include a brand, initial service offerings, a small band of collaborators, and yes clients!
A lot of organizations are challenged by how to build successful technology programs that really add value to customers and employees. These challenges occur both in product planning and roll-out. There are many services companies focused in the middle on project execution. We have expertise there too, but our main focus is helping clients build technology programs that stand the best chance of being widely adopted and successful.
Next Steps
Something is changing about how people want to work. Namely with the amount of focus work takes in our lives people want more. Most organizations are struggling as this concept of “more” is individualistic and isn’t static. The growth of Collistic will be tied to this direction. Nothing would make me happier than building new partnerships anywhere in the world and never buying central office space or servers. Collistic (collective + holistic) as a company name was chosen with the hope that other unique people would join the organization and shape its path. Collistic may not see the fastest growth as a result, but unique growth is the goal.
I hope you’ll follow us as this story unfolds.
Brook Buchanan
Founder, Collistic
Great brief on the Business Case for Emotional Intelligence http://j.mp/adfltc #EQ #Leadership
Great copy around this @MailChimp campaign http://j.mp/cyulWG. Single page site layout definitely a growing trend esp for mobile.
Last night I attended the inaugural Red Winged Leadership Award ceremony created by Seattle University MBA students in the Graduate Leadership Formation Certificate program. The Red Winged Leadership Award was created to recognize Seattle area business leaders for their social impact.
More for-profit companies should have a focus on social change. This is the premise of the statement I provided @AlbersatSU to get into next year’s graduate leadership cohort. In starting a business the choices of profit (focus on bottom line) or non-profit (focus on service goals) should not be mutually exclusive. I believe building a profitable, service oriented business isn’t easy, but achievable through a people oriented culture which can create unique value to the community.
People are sick of the status-quo at work and want something more. I just finished reading Rework http://37signals.com/rework/ and Linchpin http://www.squidoo.com/linchpin which both reached similar conclusions that people are looking for something that inspires them to do their best work. Listening to the stories of the Red Winged Leadership finalists http://bit.ly/bdiCOR inspired an auditorium of people last night. My hope is the cohort I am a part of next year is able to foster the awards program created by this year’s team to inspire even more.
SharePoint 2010 integrates with Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 to provide offline access to SharePoint resources. This functionality however causes users to receive an ActiveX message when browsing through the site. For internet sites I’ve found it helpful to disable offline functionality so users don’t receive this prompt.
Offline client availability settings are configured on each site. To disable, browse to Site Settings and click Search and Offline Availability.
Change the Offline Client Availability setting to No.
Happy designing,
A few nights ago I started thinking about some of my favorite concerts from earlier in the 2000s. I started searching for some of them and came up with this gem flier from an early 2000 concert. Hunting down band and concert info from 10 years ago made me realize how much the web has changed music since 2000. Ten years ago I would spend hours in front of my computer with a slow internet connection hunting for new music and favorite band tidbits. I used AltaVista to hunt down most of this info, and the other night found myself going back to this search engine as it produced the same page results I remember seeing a decade ago in their GeoCities like glory.
Concert recordings stopped at the guy with the recorder and mic taped to his chest. (A note to any bootlegger with a tape of this Sleater-Kinney concert, it is on the top of my want list). In short, if a band wasn’t a big name act, there isn’t usually a ton of info out there that has been preserved. Flash forward to 2009, I was out of town when Corin Tucker, singer from above said defunct band was played a mid-week solo show in Portland. I considered going to some great lengths to fly in, but had to let it go. A week later I was elated to find someone had posted the entire set on YouTube. Wasn’t the same as being there, but definitely was a happy find.
The findability, quantity, and relevance of content generated by both artist and user is continuing to increase. A personal experience is also increasingly needed to offset the standardization of content on cookie cutter MySpace pages and search results. Don’t get me wrong, standardization has brought a lot of value. When I discover a band, the time to preview tracks, purchase, and sync to my devices is seconds to minutes. Looking into the 2010 and beyond, availability of music across platforms will continue to be increasingly important. Much has been written and speculated on how this will happen as netbooks become more popular and more content moves to the cloud.
However, I find initial discovery of music still difficult. I listen to a lot of new releases and it is just a small fraction of the music available in genres that I am interested in. Similar to the news industry which has seen content begin to spread out from traditional news sources due to real-time services, I see music discovery heading towards a transition. Some glimpses of this trend have been seen in the last couple years. Muxtape started as a site to share user generated digital mix tapes until the RIAA stomped it out. The site is in the process of reemerging as a platforms for bands to share music. Blip.fm is another Twitter-like site to discover new music and follow stations of friends. As services like these continue to expand over this decade several opportunities will be realized:
1) More content experts will emerge leading to an increased number of trusted sources of discovering music. In the 2000s I discovered new music using recommendations from local radio station KEXP, a few blogs I follow, and suggestions from friends. Music services attempted to recommend content, but only generated picks cramming Coldplay down my throat, provided genius content I already knew about, or related content reducing music to a shopping cart item. Two of the most successful experts of the 2000s were Dave Fridmann, and Alexandra Patsavas. Fridmann created indie hits by producing a broad range of brilliant albums from Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, Sleater-Kinney, and others. As the music supervisor for shows like The O.C., and Grey’s Anatomy, Patsavas helped launch bands like Death Cab for Cutie and The Fray into the big-time. My prediction is more genre specific experts will add value over the coming decade, some promoting the tops of genres and others making sense of the noise within a genre’s depths.
2) Deeper content will be found in every genre that you want to listen to. Increased efficiency in discovery will lead to the ability to digest more content in a genre. A lot of this content is there now, but it still takes a lot of effort to listen through what is good and what isn’t (some of which is interpretation). Also, with studio equipment costs decreasing and the increasing ease of distributing content online, many bands starting out may ask themselves what benefit they get out of a label. If more good to great artists were to strike out on their own innovation could increase faster by weakening the influence of the RIAA.
3) More content will be available around an artist. As I mentioned in the starting example, the amount of content around your favorite artist will continue to increase. Part of this will be user driven as the lone bootlegger morphs into a entire concert venue of video enabled devices. Artists and services however will create this content as well. As content trends towards free there will be a need to differentiate from other services and torrents. Some of this has already started with special deals when purchasing through iTunes or Amazon on album release dates.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with my “Best Of” lists for the 2000s and 2009 ordered by release date.
BrookBuchanan.com Best Albums of the Decade
Radiohead - Kid A (2000)
The White Stripes - White Blood Cells (2001)
Death Cab for Cutie - The Photo Album (2001)
The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)
Beck - Sea Change (2002)
Bright Eyes - I’m Wide Awake Its Morning (2005)
Sleater-Kinney - The Woods (2005)
Cloud Cult - Meaning of 8 (2007)
Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (2008)
Sons and Daughters - This Gift (2008)
BrookBuchanan.com Best Albums of 2009
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Death Cab for Cutie - The Open Door EP
Conor Oberst - Outer South + Gentleman’s Pact EP
The Horrors - Primary Colours
Girls - Album
Monsters of Folk - Monsters of Folk
The Gossip - Music for Men
The XX - The XX
Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Boat - Setting the Paces
Last week I attended Microsoft’s FASTforward ‘09 conference in Vegas. The event, which was by far the best MS conference I’ve been to, showcased vision and trends in search technology and set the stage for the next wave of FAST products.
Search Trends, SharePoint 14, and the Net Generation
The traditional model of information portals is fading in favor of search driven experiences like topic pages that allow for greater ease of publishing and information access. Social software is becoming part of everything and has stopped being a mere feature. The vision, business value, and technology that will drive the next several years of enterprise search is available to you today. What is not as easily accessible are the answers of how do we get there and what change the technology will bring to an organization. The answers will come as more search driven solutions are developed and best practices shared. Dell for example gave an excellent presentation on their work with SharePoint and FAST. I expect there will be at least some search implementation sessions at SharePoint Conference 2009 in the fall. There definitely needs to be.
SharePoint 14 is poised to drive intranet search experiences for the masses similar to what SharePoint 2007 did for information portals. FAST Search for SharePoint, the next evolution of FAST ESP shipping with Office 14, along with the recent inclusion announcement of PerformancePoint, is building a solid value-add story for SharePoint enterprise customers. Microsoft has worked out a licensing model where customers can, and in my mind should, start planning for search solutions using the current FAST and SharePoint 2007 toolsets. The benefit of search is there, but in most cases is going to require considerable planning.
There was much talk of the Net Generation (Millennials/Gen Y) during the conference, and how this generation is changing the shape of business as they enter the workforce. While this discussion was very thought provoking, the demand generated by this cohort is not the business case for search within your organization. While the younger members of your workforce can help speed adoption of new technologies, greater ease of access and management of information is the reason to move toward newer capabilities in enterprise search.
Tweetstream at #ffc09
The Twitter activity at FASTforward was a very exciting thing to watch. I had TweetDeck open for the majority of the conference and activity was constant especially during the keynote presentations. Some people acted as reporters, tweeting comments from the speakers in realtime. Others engaged in further discussion on some of the topics. Conversation like this a few years ago would have happened in delayed blog posts and not been as candid. Especially with the virtual conference option for FASTforward, there was a way to keep connection between those in Vegas and remote. A few speakers even looked at the Tweetstream while on stage to catch the pulse of how the presentation was being received and any questions. Twitter as much as FAST technologies had a win from FASTforward.
A Changing Microsoft
The talk is turning into action as I saw a changing Microsoft at this event. This Microsoft was focused on the user experience aspects of search design and providing value to customers. The technology was there, but not in the frame of technology for technology sake that I have seen in the past. As the recession continues, it was reassuring to see the energy and innovation at this conference as the work in enterprise search is really just getting started.
Partner Awards
EMC walked away with the User Experience Solution of the Year from FASTforward. Many people stopped by the booth to see the live demo which incorporated Microsoft Surface. It was great getting to talk with some of you and hearing some of the current SharePoint implementation challenges facing your businesses. I’ve included a video of the solution.
An Introduction
Recently enough time has opened on my calendar to come up for air and start blogging. A little about me. I’ve been a program manager for a number of years, and most recently took a solutions architect role with the Microsoft solutions practice of EMC Consulting. This latest career move has been an effort to connect with customers and work to solve complex problems in the enterprise. My experience has ranged from building a startup technology department from the ground up to work at large scale enterprises. In addition to the U.S., I’ve been fortunate to also get to work with a lot of great IT professionals across Europe, India, and China.
If you were to ask me my specialty, I would probably tell you a number of things depending on who you are and how long you’d listen. My main goal is to work with technology organizations to plan and design enterprise solutions that connect the information worker and improve IT efficiency. Enterprise content management, business intelligence, along with agile project management processes and tools are my main specialties. The technical implementation of the solutions I design are centered in Microsoft SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Server, SQL Server BI and Reporting Services, and Microsoft Enterprise Project Management.
The Focus of this Blog
There are many successful Microsoft, MVP, and Partner blogs today that cover code walkthroughs and feature implementations of custom Microsoft solutions. Additionally, many process centered blogs exist around methodologies such as PMI, Scrum, and XP. These topics are an invaluable part of the IT community that I utilize every day, but will not be my focus in writing this blog. Instead this blog will focus on the planning and design topics that precede a sprint or build phase of a project. While this may at first glance seem like a very broad concept that is handled differently across organizations, there are trends in the questions I hear from customers, both directly and indirectly, and common solutions that can be found in Microsoft technologies.
- What can enterprise content management do for my business and how do I get there from where I am at today?
- How can I design a BI strategy that lets me keep a pulse on my key priorities and is flexible enough for a changing and growing business?
- What projects should I focus on and how do I ensure they are delivered and the value understood and realized?
- How do I keep my information workers, development teams, and IT professionals trained and able to absorb the change that will be needed to attain the value of implemented projects?
- What is this going to cost me year over year, and how do I continue to do more with less?
I see the benefit in answering these types of questions resulting in more successful Microsoft ECM, BI, and EPM solutions along with increasing the value and efficiency of a technology driven organization.
Thanks for reading,
Brook Buchanan (.com)