Collaboration is a word that gets used in the business world a lot.  We want people to share their thoughts, ideas, and musings in real time in the hopes that we can achieve accelerated performance or innovation.  Way before technology came along, people collaborated in person, or maybe even slowly through the mail, so this concept is nothing new.  What is fresh are the technology tools the Internet has spawned that help us all collaborate much faster, better and cheaper. Continue reading →

We have quite a cast of characters in the Republican presidential race this time around. Newt Gingrich is especially intriguing to me because he is a historian bytraining. He states that this skill allows him to know how Washington works and that is an advantage for us all if he gets elected. I have given some thought to this because Newt is clearly a smart person with a great command of the past, the facts, and the realities of Washington. The question that comes to mind for me is, as aleader, how much does the skill of looking backwards help a leader? Continue reading →

If you like big thoughts, you might like this blog.  It is about helping our kids avoid a lot of pain.  I like kids, so I am all about helping them avoid pain.

I am busy working on my latest book, Did God Invent the Internet that is all about whether technology will ultimately be good or bad for humanity.  The great thing about writing a book is it forces me to think about the world in a different way. I find myself using the word discretion more lately and slowed down long enough to evaluate why. Continue reading →

If I am not challenging your thinking, I am probably not saying anything too important now am I…

People pay me a lot of money to help them learn to use technology tools in ways that will give them an advantage in the market.  And the truth is I love the work.  I also realize that I am losing patience with a large segment of people I interface with.  The other day someone asked me what I say to people that don’t really believe that social technologies are an important tool.  I said, “I don’t say anything to them because I don’t have time to waste on people that have such little vision.”  I care less and less about trying to convert people into understanding that technology will forever change humanity, and the organizations that serve it.  There is a digital divide in this world and you either value technology as tool, and are willing to invest in it, or you don’t.  I make no value judgment on those that don’t get it, I just don’t have the patience to waste time convincing them of something so patently obvious.  Watch this video for 60 seconds and if you can’t see a bit of the future, quit reading this blog.

For those of you that are digitally converted and understand the power of the tech toolbox, please pick up your game.  I might be more frustrated with people that understand it but make excuses as to why they are not better at leveraging it than the people that are just plain ignorant on the subject.  There is nothing worse than a half converted semi believer who says all the right things, carries an iPhone but is clueless how to really load apps on it that might actually improve their life.  At lunch today a 61 year old CEO told me he would send his kids to one of our bootcamps because he wanted them to learn, but he wasn’t coming because he is too far gone – and he is… because he believes that.  If I hear one more person tell me:

“I don’t have time to learn about this new stuff”

“I can’t keep up with all the change”

“I get it, I just don’t like to use it personally”

I am going to ditch being polite and tell them the truth, “Your a self selected dinosaur.”

Dinosaurs were big and powerful in their day, but the environment changed and they were killed off.  The environment has changed my friends and it is decidedly more technology augmented.  Natural selection will now bump off leaders who think they can get away with being ignorant of technology – be it personal use, or corporate digital plumbing.

By the way, some of the worst examples of this are people I meet that work in the technology industry and cant fight their way out of an iPad or Windows problem to save their life.  You know who you are – admit it, you are a walking Oxymoron – confession is good for your soul.

Do you need technology to be happy?  No.  Do you need technology in order to be a good human being? No.  It is just a tool after all, and you can paint, create music, love people, and connect with others, and think great thoughts without technology.  Of course you can do all of those things even better with technology.

Let me draw an analogy… Can you play golf with an old wood driver, a blade 5 iron, and an old putter?  Sure you can.  Will you score as well as you would with a GPS rangefinder, a full set of the latest clubs, and a mobile app that describes each hole?  Of course not.  Don’t think this applies to you?  Do you use a 3 year old laptop your company supplies that is locked down so tightly you can’t add the apps you would love to run?  Have you moved to an iPad and mobile phone that are synced with your laptop and automatically backed up in the cloud?  Do you have a full suite of applications that help you do just about any task in life?  Have you built a powerful social networking presence?  Do you use the Internet crowd to help you with tasks? Can you search for any piece of information and find it in seconds from any device 24/7?  These things are just the standard price of admission today.

People often tell me that I am too harsh, and that the only reason I am good at technology is I work in the field.  Not true.  The reason I am good is because it is a powerful toolbox and I love the power. I see clearly how the mastery of these tools has allowed me to operate at a level of creativity and efficiency that was not even close to possible in the 80’s and 90’s.  Scott Klososky + Technology = a powerful force.  Scott Klososky on my own is just average in many ways.  Lots of you are choosing to be average because of stupid excuses like “you don’t have time to learn to use new tools.” In other words, you don’t have time to learn to win – so you will just be average.

You could multiply your gifts in the world – if you would just invest the time and energy to learn how technology would augment their delivery.  The choice is yours.  I would love to see you quit wasting the opportunity…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I often comment that technology is just a tool.  It’s not magic, nor mysterious, it is just a tool.  I do admit that some aspects can be complicated, and if one adds together all the technology we face in life, it can get overwhelming.  However, it is just a tool in the end, but a very powerful tool to be sure.  Those who master it have a distinct advantage over those who do not.  We all choose to what extent we invest time into adding technology skills to our lives – be that social tools, devices, software applications, or operating systems. Continue reading →

OK, here is the final section of the digital plumbing series…  I mentioned that we have been building a model that can be used to grade, and organize how a company does technology from a digital plumbing viewpoint.  We display it graphically as a pyramid so I will start at the top and work down through the layers.  In each layer, we grade the company’s performance in that layer.  The really useful part of this is to have a framework through which you can evaluate how technology is getting applied.

The top of the pyramid is the concept of matching technology to the business needs of an organization.  So how will do the investments in technology support the company in reaching its goals.  This sounds simple but we often have to grade clients low because they invest in what seems like good technology when the truth is they are implementing things that have much less value than other options they leave on the shelf.  This happens because they lack technology strategic planning, and they invest tech dollars based on who screams the loudest, or has the largest budget – not what would benefit the bottom line the most.

The next layer is a series of technology basics that every organization must be able to do well:

• Normalizing data
• Flowing data
• Storing data
• Analyzing data
• Process improvement
• Process automation
• Device quality
• Training

In each case, we can grade the organizations ability to do this list of foundational activities.  Stand back from which software applications you run, and just consider the general performance in these areas.

The next layer is staffing.  What is the level of technology expertise in the organization?  This includes the IT department, and the user base.  We must measure not only ability of the staff to build, implement, and use tech tools, but also the willingness to adopt and pioneer new technologies.  You can invest in technology forever and if people will not use it wisely, you have wasted your money.

Then we move to the layer of technology strategy processes.  What are the methods by which we do IT budgeting, IT strategic thinking, planning, priority setting, etc.? There are a number of processes at this level that dictate whether an organization is efficiently aiming the resources in the right direction at the right time.

The foundational layer of the pyramid is the operational IT processes.  Things like how you make build versus buy decisions, disaster recovery plans, vendor selection rules, implementation processes, IT hiring processes, etc.  A low grade here means you will not be able to execute on your planning in an efficient way.

By grading each of these layers, an organization will get a clear picture as to the overall health of how they do IT.  Everywhere that anything below an “A” is earned, there is room for improvement.  Added together, this is a scorecard that can help the C-suite work with IT people to improve the holistic application of technology.  The result will be stellar digital plumbing that will result in an organization having a clear path to prosperity.  Fail to improve this scorecard, and an organization is in danger of falling on the rocks of irrelevance over time…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

It takes a particular skill to step back from something that has been done a certain way for years, and reimagine a better way. It can even be difficult to evaluate the efficiency of a process that you have been doing for decades. Once it works pretty well, that fact becomes the enemy of excellent. Such a situation exists with how we build and apply digital plumbing to organizations. We believe because technology brings many productivity gains that we must be doing it right for the most part – we give ourselves a B+ or A- in many cases when we are barely rocking a C.

There is not a generally accepted grading system to measure how well companies utilize technology. Organizations can point to gains, but they would have a hard time measuring what the delta is between their current state and the perfect state. For this reason, I have been spending a lot of time lately building a holistic model for measuring IT effectiveness, and assembling a model of best practices to apply that measurement system against. People get excited about various things in life, and I get jazzed when I can figure out how to bring definition and structure to something that is undefined and unstructured for the most part – such as grading the effectiveness of digital plumbing.
Allow me to share some early foundations of the work we are doing. Imagine a model for organizing and measuring technology effectiveness as a pyramid, and let’s start at the top. The first thing we need to be concerned about is how well the digital plumbing supports the business strategy of the organization. This is the seminal question because the more technology enables and facilitates reaching the business goals, the higher the ROI will be – ergo, the more successful it is as a tool. Scoring how well technology is supporting the business is not easy because leaders often have little reference as to how good it could be – they just know what they have. They convince themselves that it would be too expensive to have better digital plumbing or that what they have is good enough. Every executive team should now learn how to answer this question; what is the delta between how well technology supports my business goals, and what we currently have in place. If that delta is large, you have lots of upside potential. This is great news – and lots of work.

Once the connection between business needs and technology solutions is scored, you can move onto the next level of the pyramid – grading how an organization deals with a handful of core aspects of IT. We have created a list of all the major areas of IT that must be done well. For example, you must be able to automate transactions, store data, move data, analyze data, normalize data. If you struggle with any of these, it shows up in your IT’s value to the organization (and possibly wasted expense.) This is easier to score because it is less subjective in many ways. Still, someone that has a great vision of how technology should be done in the best case must do the grading, or the grade will be incorrectly high in most cases. The great thing about grading out technology implementation in this way is the bringing together of leaders in an organization to a like minded viewpoint of what is done well, and what needs to be improved. This is far better than what we have in most cases today, which is a vague feeling by many that IT is not being done well, or as well as it could be.

For too long, the application of technology in organizations has been a black hole. The business side of the house does not understand how it gets built, when it will be done, or how to get functionality that would seem to make sense into their hands quickly. They often look at technologists with hope and disdain. Instead of being like mythical elves that build the digital plumbing at night when no one is looking, technology people must have structure, accountability, and reward systems so that they architect digital plumbing that has a huge positive impact on the organization reaching it’s business goals. Instead of just keeping the servers up and running and helping to implement whatever software they grudgingly accept to install or build.

I will finish the overview of the pyramid and grading system in the next blog.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

This blog will start a three part series that could be a great help to you.  I am writing this to help everyone that wants to have a new picture in their minds as to how technology works in an organization, and how to optimize it.  Get ready for some new ideas, and vocabulary, and I hope this becomes something you can really use to win!

A constant piece of the consulting work I do is helping companies with their general IT needs. At an increasing rate, technology is making an impact on whether an organization prospers – or flounders.  This is causing many executives who did not grow up steeped in tech to call for help from someone that has both business and technology acumen.  The cool thing about them calling me is that I get to see the pain they are in over and over across different industries, and sizes of operation.  After the 10^th client or so, I would have had to be an idiot not to notice the patterns.  After the 20^th, I have been able to build processes and systems to rectify many of the issues.  At this point, I am deep into applying these models over and over in order to help clients smooth things out.  At this point, I am really excited about the fact that I can help them to step forward into a whole new way of viewing how technology gets done in order to set them up to win for years to come.  With that said, let me share the problems with you that need to be universally addressed:

1.     The users of technology do not understand the big picture of the overall organizational digital plumbing – so they make bad decisions on software buys, the tools they use, and how they use them.   This is generally caused by the fact that technologists in the organization have not architected the overall picture well, and rarely communicate it to the field. The result is that data and information does not flow well.

2.     IT departments are often stuck in triage mode where they spend 96% of their time struggling to do break fix, help desk, or keep their heads above water on new software projects.  Because of this, they are reduced to being tactical and not strategic in nature.  They literally cannot “stop mopping long enough to turn off the spigot” so to speak. Because of this they do not spend time architecting the digital plumbing holistically, nor are they given enough control over the standards.  The result is a mish mash of software applications and horrible data flow

3.     The leaders of the organization do not understand technology architecture, design, or standards so they are no help in guiding the company towards robust and effective plumbing.  They outsource all decisions to IT staff and vendors with generally average to poor results.

There are other problems of course, but let’s stop with those three big ones for a moment, and begin to address some ideas for fixing these…

Let’s start with the top of the pyramid of solutions and over the next couple of blogs we will work our way from the big picture to the more detailed.  The first thing that needs to happen in an organization that is going to re-engineer how they do technology is to have the executive team study and grade the organizations ability to match technology to the business side needs. Technology is just a tool and the better we can apply this tool to the business needs, the more successful we will be.  In addition, the leaders must get clear on how technology can be applied to give the organization a distinct advantage in their market – and focus on this.  Technology is not just plumbing, it can also be a weapon to use to beat the competition in the market. To accomplish this, I have leaders answer the following three questions:

1.     On a scale of 1-10, how well do you think the company leverages technology as a tool.  Not compared to competitors mind you, but if 10 was the perfect use of tech, where do they stand now.

2.     What 5 areas of technology can the company not afford to lose at against the competition?  For example, we must have the best customers data, we must have the best ability to analyze trends, or we must have the best uses of technology to facilitate transactions.

3.     What 5 aspects of technology are unique to us that our competition does not have? These of course must be used in the market to gain an advantage, and must be protected.  If you don’t have any, you are in danger.

Answering these three questions will begin to set the framework for how an organizations digital plumbing should be re-constructed.  It will also begin to close the gap between the business side leaders and the IT people that build and support this plumbing.

Our next blog will cover the areas of technology that a company must be proficient in and how to score those so you have a metric for improvement…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

One of the foundational aspects of social technologies I talk about is the ability for a person, or an organization to use new tools to harvest huge amounts of information from the Websphere and pack it into our brains. I often regale people on the concept that it is a knowledge economy and the smart people will win. When I say smart by the way, I do not mean just the high IQ people, I also mean those that are best informed on what is happening in their industries. After all, it takes both an ability to process data and find the useful analytics, combined with a huge amount of relevant data to do magic things. One without the other is useless. So in a practical world, a smart person without access to new and complete data has a quickly declining value. A person with terabytes of powerful data is worthless if they cannot process it and draw correlations. The world is full of people at both these extremes.

Last week I moved to a new house and my paper newspaper was not delivered to the new house. So I went online and downloaded the iPad app for my local newspaper. That was the last paper based information source I still relaxed with on the couch at night. Now I use my iPad as the delivery source for all my information on the couch. I use Flipboard to digest everything on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, etc. I read the current news on MSN.com, and have a few other dashboard sources built so I can bury my brain in a flow of information in 45 minutes a night and assure that I see most everything that might be important to me. I have become an information digestion bigot. I say this because I get annoyed if it takes me 3 minutes longer than necessary to get the information I want into my brain. Maybe it would be better to say I am an information snob. I want it all, I want it now, and I want it into my brain with the least work possible.

I was technically on vacation last week, but I found myself feeling naked without harvesting my normal reams (just a metaphor now) of information and digesting it. I had this sneaking suspicion there would be a hole in my knowledgebase if I ignored the flow all week. So from time to time I found myself drinking from the flow little bits at a time just so did not miss anything critical. Am I addicted to the river of information? Maybe… Actually I think I am addicted to having answers to the questions people ask me. I am addicted to being current with my knowledge – and by current I mean up to the minute, not the week. Have I mentioned that it is a knowledge economy and the smart people win?

We have a lot of tools at this point to harvest information on any subject and get it into our brains. The tools will also get better. They will help us filter more concisely, and will aggregate the right kinds of information to the proper places for us automatically. They will alert us to specific pieces of information that might be critical to us. Even though we have a growing toolbox to do this, most people are still stuck in the rut of digesting tiny amounts information at a slow pace. Stanford did a study that said that we now consume 3 times the information as we did in 1960. I have to believe that the curve is speeding up, and that in 5 years we will be digesting 3 times what we are today. The toolbox we have been given (and will be given) allows for this. The question is are you ready? Your brain has capacity from what I hear, so will you use it? It is a knowledge economy and the smart people win – and being a “smart people” is a choice…

P.S. For those of you that like to make excuses for continuing to digest information at the slow pace that used to be acceptable, here is the top five so you don’t waste brain cells convincing yourself…

1. I don’t have time to digest more information. (Really? Don’t have time to get smarter?)
2. I am overwhelmed with the information that is out there. (Really? That is what all the new aggregation and filtering tools are for.)
3. I don’t know where to start. (Email me and I will send you a document that teaches you how to do this
4. I already learn about my industry from magazines, meetings and trade shows. (And how stale is that information?)
5. I already know everything there is to know about my industry, or I don’t need to know much about my industry because I am in the middle to lower part of the org chart. (In both cases you are deluded and will not prosper with this viewpoint. I say that as a friend that would like you to reexamine…)

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Let’s finish up our conversation on putting the practice of Technology R&D into your organization. Just a reminder, the need for this has arisen because technology has crossed the tipping point to the place where it is having a huge impact on the prosperity (or not) of organizations. Couple that with the fact that we have new technologies of every breed coming at a faster rate, and you have this new requirement of putting in some form of tR&D into the organization. Without further ado, the steps we suggest… Continue reading →