Idea-Log

Moving On ....

2011-07-07T11:32:00.001+12:00

Life changes and takes new roads. In this case I am moving on, and so is my blog.

My life has met a major fork in the road recently. I have left the Warehouse and the comparative comfort of a corporate job and I am setting up my own consulting practice.

My personal focus remains the same. That is looking to harness the power of technology and create value for businesses, communities, families and individuals but my business focus changes a little. Rather than being a CIO with the aim of delivering value of technology investments for one organisation I am intending to work with many CIOs, CXOs and senior technology executives and supporting them to be successful in delivering value from their technology investments to their organisations.

As a result of this my blog is changing. This blog will continue to capture my personal thoughts and ideas however my more business related ideas will move to a new blog at http://www.successfulcio.com/. If you like some of my ideas or are intrigued please, join me there.

Owen.

What is Success in Corporate IT?

2011-02-13T11:36:00.000+13:00

It’s 8.50 am and you are working on the IT help desk. You receive a panicked call from the Chief Executive’s PA. There is an executive meeting due to start in 10 minutes and she has a number of documents that she needs to print for the meeting. The problem is that the printer is not working! What do you do?

This scenario is one that my team often use in an interview for new team members. The answer normally comes in one of two generic forms.

In the first style of answer the person focuses on fixing the offending printer(s). They will go into great detail about how they would go about diagnosing the problem with the printer and getting the printer fixed so that it can be used and the PA can print the required documents. Often their answer shows that they have a logical and well ordered approach to problem diagnosis and an excellent understanding of how printers work. Some will go further and discuss collaborating with others to help them solve the problem with the printer.

In the second style of answer the person focuses on getting the documents printed within 10 minutes for the PA. Typically their first action is to print the documents to a different printer or to take a copy of the documents to a different desktop and get them printed. They then begin to look at the issue of how to fix the printer.

The answer to this question is often an “employment breaker” for our candidates. If you were the interviewer and this is all the information you have, who would you employ? The answer to this question depends on how you define success for your team. There are many possible answers to this. Here are some common ones:

IT operations comply with all agreed SLAs (operational and project)
Delivery of budget commitments including operational costs, recharges (if you recharge) and capital costs
A highly engaged IS team who love working here
Operating at or above “benchmark performance” for our industry and size of company
Our customers are happy with the service I provide to them (ie customer satisfaction)

All of these measures are important however when it comes to hiring decisions the major impact that a person can have is performance against agreed SLAs and/ or customer satisfaction.

If your criteria for success is SLA performance then I suggest you would employ the first candidate because they are much more likely to get that printer up and running quickly because of their technical knowledge and their demonstrated problem analysis skills. You would be supported in this decision by most of our industry best practice. Many industry frameworks highlight the importance of SLAs and your ability to meet them. How many times have you sat in a meeting where you (or perhaps your vendor) have claimed to be providing great service because all the SLAs have been met?

If however your criteria for success is customer satisfaction then I suggest you would employ the second candidate as their focus on solving the PA’s problem is much more likely to give you a satisfied customer even if your SLAs may suffer as it takes longer to actually fix the printer.

Which is right? I think the answer can be found by differentiating between means (what we do) and ends (why we do it). Or to put it another way we can find the answer by understanding why IS departments exist within large organisations? Simply put, IS teams are not responsible for the overall success of an organisation. Instead, the IS teams exist to support the organisation to be successful. As an example, the IS team at The Warehouse is not responsible for the execution of our retail business. We are however, responsible for providing technology and information to the rest of the organisation to support them to be as effective and efficient as possible. If this is the case, the best people to judge your ability to do this are the people you are here to support. That means that the “end”, or success, for an IT team is a highly satisfied customer and therefore I would hire the second candidate.

First Published on www.cio.co.nz

LGP'ers - Welcome to 2011!!

2011-01-24T20:28:00.000+13:00

http://www.lgp.org.nz/news/6-events/30-welcome-to-2011.html

Happy New Year and welcome to 2011! Well, 2010 was an interesting year for the Life Game Project. We achieved a number of really good things. My favorites are:

The release of the LGP video. Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this, especially thank you to Reuben Pillsbury who was the creative brains behind the video and produced the video. Awesome Reuben!!
Relaunching our website in Joomla which has many in built features and a strong development community that will allow us to advance the site. More on this later.
Forming an agreement with Brian Lawrence and the Ark to provide tech logistics to LGP.

As well as the good things we have achieved we have learnt a lot about how to not make substantial progress as a self managed community. We have really struggled to turn inspiration for LGP into forward momentum. Ian and I have taken advice and thought about why this is. Our conclusion is that there are two really important things currently missing from LGP:

Clarity about what people who want to support LGP can actually do, rather than a general invitation to exercise your passion in an area that supports LGP.
A central point of contact as the "Go To" person who coordinates all LGP activity.

What does this mean for 2011?

It means we have 2 key initiatives for the beginning of 2011 that we believe will allow us to accelerate our progress in 2011. These are:

Help bridge the gap between inspiration and action by continuing to develop www.lgp.org.nz - with the priority on ‘gamifying’ it to provide clearly defined tasks, quests and roles for LGP volunteers to undertake.
Appoint an LGP Manager as the central point for all things LGP. We see this as a part time paid role with the primary responsibility to support and coordinate all LGP volunteer and community activity. If you are interested or know someone who would be brilliant at the job please contact either of the LGP Co-Founders; Owen McCall or Ian Howard. Be warned; after an initial period one of the responsibilities of this role will be to source the funding for this key role.

So here’s to 2011 and here’s to LGP taking better steps towards supporting New Zealand becoming a place where everyone is safe and loved.

Remember Who You Are.

2010-12-31T16:06:00.000+13:00

As a teenager growing up in rural New Zealand if I ever wanted to go out I needed to borrow my parents’ car. Borrowing the car involved a pretty standard ritual of asking for it, explaining where I was going and who I would be with and when I expected to be home. Based on this explanation I would be given access to the family car (or the farm truck, depending on what was available). The final part of the ritual was that just before I left Dad would always say “remember who you are”. Every time he would say this and it drove me nuts. I interpreted “remember who you are” as an overt attempt to control me and my actions to ensure I didn’t sully the family name. As a teenage boy I wasn’t about to be controlled by anyone, especially my father!

As time went by I left home and went to University. There I met Jo, the love of my life. After a couple of years I took the big step of bringing her home to meet the parents. I was very nervous about this meeting. Much to my surprise she liked my parents and they liked her. One day while Jo was at my parents place we wanted to go out. I went through after the standard “can I borrow the car please” ritual and Dad added the usual “remember who you are”. As we left I muttered under my breath something about what a control freak my father was, although the language may have been a little more colourful. Jo just stared at me “what are you talking about?”. So I explained to her in simple clear (emotional?) language what the problem was.

She just shook her head in disbelief “is that what you really think? That’s not what he means at all. What he means is ...” and she proceeded to give me a big long explanation on what he really meant. I don’t remember exactly what she said but it was something along the lines of don’t go and get all caught up in the moment, cave into peer pressure and do something that you know is wrong and will regret later. Arts students!! Always reading stuff into things that doesn’t exist. I mean really, she barely knew my father.

Time continued on. I embarked on my career as a consultant and over time began reading a number of book and participating in a series of personal development and leadership courses. Many of these courses and books raised the notion of self awareness and authenticity as being critical to success in leadership and in life. Daniel Goldman’s EQ being one good example. Having been exposed to both highly authentic leaders and inauthentic leaders this rang very true for me. People can smell authenticity a mile away.

As I contemplated this new learning “remember who you are” came back to my consciousness in a new and unexpected way. It began to dawn on me that “remember who you are” was really short hand for “remember who you really are and act with integrity to that true self”. Or more concisely be authentic. Jo was right and perhaps my father was actually quite wise to say such a thing.

This caused me a bit of a problem however as it posed a question I couldn’t easily answer. “Who am I really?” It’s very difficult to “remember who you are”, and then to express that consistently if you have no idea who you are!!

So my quest to find out who I really am and to act in a way that is consistent with this has begun. I know that as I have become more self aware I have been able to express myself more authentically and that this has had a tremendous impact on people around me. In those moments I am a more effective person and leader. I also know that I mess up daily and act inconsistently with who I know myself to be. I’m human.and to borrow a phrase this is a “never ending journey”, a journey that begins each day by asking who am I really? and reconnecting to the answer with “remember who you are”!

So now I ask you. Who are you, really?

First published on www.cio.co.nz

The "I" stands for Information

2010-11-15T16:26:00.000+13:00

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it". Peter Drucker. or;

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." Lord Kelvin

The title on my business card says's "Chief Information Officer". The CIO title is considered by many to be the most coveted in the IT industry and typically represents the top IT decision maker in an organisation. I often wonder about the title of Chief Information Officer because as an industry we dwell on technology not information. We seem to spend more time discussing Blackberry vs iPhone than we spend talking about information and the use of information to drive performance. Interestingly, as much as we dwell on technology our biggest fear as an industry is that we will be seen by our colleagues as geeks. We are needed because someone has to keep the computers running but we are irrelevant to strategy and business decision making. It's a reinforcing circle. We focus on technology therefore our colleagues see us as geeks. When we do think about information mainly what we think about is fancy new technology tools not about improved use of information per sa.

I believe we need to re-balance our focus so that we spend our time more or less equally between use of technology and use of information, as our CIO title suggests we should. The question is how?

Peter Drucker and Lord Kelvin provide us with a clue to where to start and it is not with fancy BI tools. Step 1 is to understand your organisation and how it adds value. Step 2 is to provide accurate, or perhaps more correctly put, consistent and relevant measurement to key decision makers to allow them in optimise business performance.

Relevance is the key. The information needs to be relevant to the context of the decision maker. If it isn't then it doesn't matter how good the information is it will not be used. Those of you who have read a number of these columns, or my blog, will know that I believe that Maslow's hierarchy of needs provides a great analogy to define relevance, in this case relevance to what the decision maker is trying to understand and to guide a journey towards improving maturity. Below is my version of an Information Needs hierarchy to guide an organisations maturity in the better use of information.

As Maslow teaches us you need to begin with the most very basic needs and become more sophisticated over time. For decision making and information analytics the most basic need is help me understand what happened! While we may have access to many tools that can provide sophisticated and predictive analytics to be relevant you must start with the basics and build capability and awareness of the higher order needs over time.

First published on www.cio.co.nz

The Three Blind Mice Need Your Help!!

2010-11-15T16:01:00.001+13:00

An enthusiastic team has formed within The Warehouse Information Services who are in training to walk the Tongariro Alpine Crossing in November to participate in Delta's Mad Mountain Challenge and our goal is to raise $10,000 for the Kia Timata Ano (KTA) Trust.

The Delta’s Mad Mountain Challenge is an attempt to cross the volcanic alpine terrain, four times, non-stop, in 24 hours, a kind of Tongariro ping-pong. The group will be walking some 77.6kms, climbing 4200 metres up and 4200 metres down... and be busting a gut (or legs) to get this done in 24 hours.

Why is The Warehouse IS team doing this? To raise much needed funds for the Kia Timata Ano (KTA) Trust. This Trust is an independent women's refuge based in Rodney’s West District. It's for real people suffering real fear and physical abuse, right now, right here, at home in New Zealand. It is a charity to help women and children escape from intimidation and bullying, caused by those most able to cause them pain.

How can you help us achieve this BHAG (Big Hairy Audicious Goal)?

1) We would love you to donate $$ directly onto our fundraising page - Click here to donate.

2) Come and get your car washed at TWL Support Office on Friday, 12th, 19th & 26th November from 9am-12noon. Email carwashfundraising@thewarehouse.co.nz for pricing and bookings.

3) OR better still - Get me out of Car Washing!!! My PA believes there are many IT providers out there who never get past her great gate-keeping skills and would love to pay $500 for an hour of time with the CIO of The Warehouse to showcase/sell their product or services. I think she knows of my car washing skills but either way I'm committed to helping the team raise $10,000. If you'd like to take up one of these exclusive offers, please email: lynn.power@thewarehouse.co.nz

For all further info on the Event, please go to www.threeblindmice.co.nz.

I'll keep you updated with our progress and other initiatives we will soon be launching. Thank you for reading this email – and I hope to see your support soon!

Insource, outsource, everything as a service

2010-04-28T07:56:00.000+12:00

I have spent a long time in and around the IT industry - 24 years and counting. During this time I have been a consultant, lead an outsourcing team and now I am a CIO. As a result I have been both a seller and buyer of services.

Currently as the CIO of The Warehouse, I get approached many times a year by vendors who want to sell me something. Some of them (but not many) actually want to help me and my organisation succeed.

Trade magazines and online forums are full of articles about the merits of cloud computing and outsourcing. Most of these stories urge CEOs and CIOs to change the way they buy computing. The current theme is that everything should be bought on demand; don’t own anything as others can do it better and cheaper.

Not so long ago strategic outsourcing and ERP filled the magazines and while the buzz has gone from the media, vendors still knock down doors on a regular basis to impress upon you, your CEO and your team that their services are the ones that will make the difference. It is great to have choice, but how do you decide? Whenever I am approached by a vendor the questions I ask myself are:

• Is the process or functionality being discussed strategic and/or a source of competitive advantage for my organisation?

If the answer is yes then I am unlikely to commit to an externally-provided solution. Why? Because building and maintaining sources of competitive advantage are critical to the future success of the business and core to my job as an executive and as a member of the executive team leading the organisation. While you do need to avoid the tendency to see competitive advantage in everything you do, where it is genuine I will keep that in-house. Because to outsource the most important services, is in effect to outsource the primary responsibility for your job.

• Can the provider meet the service levels that I need?

Many vendors bombard you with a huge list of certifications and performance statistics to show how credible they are. ITIL and CoBIT compliant, ISO X, Y and Z certified, CMM level and so on.

Most vendors talk about availability, many are proud of there 99.99 percent or 99.999 percent availability. This list of achievements is impressive and very few corporate IS teams can match the full array of certifications and point to 5 9’s availability. The real question however is, does it matter? While some of the services I provide do need to be highly available (Eftpos for example) very few of my services need to be at 99.99 percent.

What does matter to me is geographical diversity. I need to provide services into many of New Zealand’s small towns. Greymouth, Alexandra and Kaitaia for example. The point is, I don’t want generic solutions and certifications I want my specific needs met.

• Are your services cheaper than what I can provide myself for the required level of service?

It will not be a surprise that cost is a major factor in any deliberation of how to source. I have had many discussions with sales teams where they have tried to convince me that cost is not all that matters. There are the vast array of value adding services that they can bring. Value adding to who?

As the services that I am looking for an external party to provide are unlikely to be strategic or critical to my competitive advantage (see question 1!), cost for the agreed level of service that I need IS THE criteria and anything past commodity prices is added cost for no value.

• Are you prepared to share my risk?

Most vendors are very good when talking about risk early in a sales cycle. Most vendors however, want no part of risk when it comes to the detail of the contract.

While you can never truly “outsource” risk as it is my business that suffers when a service fails, suppliers need to recognise the critical nature of what they do for their clients.

They also need to demonstrate they believe in the quality of what is on offer and the value of those long lists of certifications. The best way I know to do this is to put some skin in the game and agree to put things right when they go wrong.

So, how do you decide? What will you have to pay in order to meet the required level of service?

First published on www.cio.co.nz

The number cruncher’s guide to delivering IT value

2010-03-20T17:41:00.000+13:00

I’m a qualified accountant. I even sometimes read the Accountants Journal … there, I’ve said it!

As an accountant and a CIO I am intrigued by the debate within the IT community about how businesses should account for IT. Should it be a cost centre? A profit centre? Or a stand alone, semi-independent business unit? From what I can tell, the argument is that how an organisation chooses to do its accounting determines, or is an indicator of, how IT is seen strategically in the organisation. The logic seems to be that if you want to be an IT team that is strategic and adds value, then you need to be a profit centre as a minimum, or better yet a semi-autonomous business.

If you find yourself as a cost centre, watch out, because this means that you are seen as a non-value addition and simply a cost of doing business. It gets worse. As a cost centre the only questions that are asked of you is how can you reduce IT costs even lower than they are now. You are never asked about how IS can contribute to the strategic value of the organisation by driving revenue growth or helping to open up new markets.

The recommendation is that you get out of this cost mentality by becoming a profit centre or independent business unit. Charge the business for your services, create a profit, control your own balance sheet and then the business will begin to see you as adding value. As a result, the focus will shift from how can we drive down IT costs to how can we maximise the IT profit and strategic value?

My experience is that this whole debate is spurious. If I use The Warehouse as an example, it doesn’t matter if you are a cost centre or a profit centre your costs are scrutinised mercilessly. How the accounting works does not shield the profit centres at all. I admit that The Warehouse is particularly skilled at cost management. However, every organisation I have worked for or worked in for any length of time is the same. Costs are scrutinised in detail. I hear some of you saying that this cost focus is counter productive, as a company cannot cost cut its way to greatness. This is true enough, however no organisation ever became great by being lazy about its cost control.

To me this whole cost centre/profit centre discussion is a waste of time. In the complex world that we live in value is primarily about perception, not accounting numbers. If you are seen as a non-value addition cost of doing business, your focus should be on understanding why that is and putting in place an action plan to correct it. Most likely the issue will be in one of three areas, or a mix of all three:

The services you are delivering are not meeting the service level expectations of your business. This can be both under delivery of service and over delivery of service which embeds higher costs.

You are seen as slow and bureaucratic in working with your colleagues to plan and deliver changes. That is, you are not agile enough.

And finally, when you do deliver, the projects are late, over budget, cause disruption on going live and do not deliver the planned benefits (or some combination of these).

Delivering solutions to these three issues is core to a CIO’s job. If you have these issues, or are perceived to have these issues, it means you are perceived by your colleagues as not doing your job properly. Mucking around and arguing about how the accounting works is not going to solve this problem. The only resolution to these issues is solid, customer-focused delivery day after day.

First Published on www.cio.co.nz

Using IT for Competitive Advantage

2010-02-01T21:31:00.000+13:00

Over the Christmas break I read Nicholas Carr's "Does IT Matter". I figured it was about time I read it as I believe passionately that IT can make a difference to companies and within the community we operate. Based on a very quick skim read of his article and all the hype and hysteria it seems that Carr disagrees with this. If he was right or at least made some relevant thoughts I really should know.

My synopsis of his book is as follows. Competitive advantage is typically gained by "owning" items that are proprietary in nature. This makes them hard to replicate as it is expensive and takes a long time. Thanks to the long running effects of Moore's law and IT's relentless march towards openness and standardisation IT has rapidly become cheap and widely available. As a result competitive advantage cannot be obtained from IT as anything you do can be easily replicated by others so individual organisations cannot use IT for competitive advantage.

This is not true however for countries and or regions. Increasingly IT is becoming an open and easily accessible infrastructure. If a country or region does not have a "world class" IT infrastructure in place to support their local economy then they will be at a disadvantage compared to regions that do. The use of the word infrastructure is deliberate as this is how Carr sees IT evolving like other key infrastructures such as electricity, rail roads and the much more closely related telephone. A region with a good stable electricity supply has an advantage over one that doesn't. However individual firms cannot use electricity per sa to gain a competitive advantage as it is comparatively cheap and widely available.

His arguments make sense. The book appears to be very well researched and very well written and while there is likely to still be some way to run for true commoditisation of IT, particularly software, I have come away from reading the book believing that it is the most likely outcome.

So, if Carr is right what could this mean for the IT industry?

Hardware Manufacturers

Equipment manufacturers will continue to try and differentiate themselves by building bigger, better and only available here features. While this may allow one firm to perform better than their competitors at the margin increasingly this will become irrelevant as Moore's law will overtake all their efforts and continue to drive the industry to commoditisation.

Software Companies

Carr argues that traditional software companies provided the first major step towards commoditisation for software as packaging software made the IP widely available at a fraction of the price of in house bespoke systems. This model however will come under increasing pressure by the next wave of innovation/commoditisation. This includes both SaaS and open source software solutions which threaten to undermine the current model of licence, maintenance and on going expensive upgrades.

IT Service Providers

Whether they are currently software companies, hardware companies, Telco's, outsourcers or one of the many other service providers and contractors to the IT industry the IT service provider of the future will be the equivalent to the electricity company of the present and their support infrastructure. They will truly be "service providers" rather than product companies.

Corporate IT teams

Probably my main area of interest as this is where I work.

I don't see this as the death of the corporate IT team, at least not while I am still in the workforce. I do see the rise of the truly services oriented IT organisation. Many, maybe all, IT services will be outsourced to standardised utility providers. This can only be achieved successfully if the internal IT organisation is service oriented. That is, a service oriented IT department is be a prerequisite to be able to outsource standardised services to service providers. The main focus of the internal IT team will be to integrate these services both with each other and into the businesses operating model. I expect that an increasing number of these standardised utility providers will be open source communities. Corporates will actively contribute to these communities developing the open source software as well as using it for their core operations.

So my starter for 10 from my Christmas reading. I may well revisit this as I think some more about it.

Delivering Real Value

2009-12-19T11:16:00.000+13:00

At the Warehouse, we run regular courses on “Managing successful projects”. I often get asked to provide support for these courses on behalf of the executive, by welcoming the participants and leading one of the sessions. The irony is that the session they always get me to lead is “What leads to project failure”? During this session we interactively identify why projects fail. There are many reasons why projects can fail. However, I always emphasise what I believe to be two key causes of project failure.

The first is sponsors who are not active champions for the project. I tell our participants that yes; I and my executive colleagues are one of your biggest risks. Normally this is not because we do not believe in the project or that they are inherently bad leaders. Often it is because we try and do too much too quickly and simply run out of time.

If you have issues and your sponsor is not willing to provide the time and support that you need to resolve issues or align resources effectively for your project, then the project manager needs to have a conversation with the sponsor to resolve this issue.

The potential resolutions are many and varied, however you need to consider the possibility that the project should be stopped or put on hold until it can be given priority. Better to stop early than muddling through with the likelihood of ultimate failure.

The second major cause of project failure is that we stop too soon. A huge effort goes into delivering the project; we get to go live and provide a small amount of post-go live support. We have a party to celebrate success and then leave looking for our next opportunity. We arrogantly assume that what we have implemented the first time is the total and ultimate solution.

We fail to measure on a consistent basis to ensure we get the benefits we expect and we spend virtually no time working with “the users” to ensure they successfully make the transition to the new process. As a result the change usually doesn’t stick and we do not get the benefits we planned, and we wonder why the project didn’t work.

To help reinforce the point, I compare a project to raising a child. There are three phases to each process and below is the short G-rated (approved for general viewing) version.

In stage one both are conceived to high expectations and celebrations. Everybody celebrates what will be and see only the benefits to come, and none of the hard work.

In the project world, we call stage two, implementation. In parenthood it is called pregnancy. During implementation, there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done. There are many reasons for that, however one of the main ones is we often expect people to carry on with our day jobs while at the same time supporting the project.

The culmination of stage two is “go live”. Go lives are often momentous events where everyone is under immense pressure and as a result things are said that perhaps shouldn’t be. The result of go live is, however, miraculous. In one a child is born. In the other a new way of business is given birth too and handed over to the expectant parents.

Stage three is where we raise the child to adulthood so they can effectively leave home and independently contribute to the world. In childhood this process takes years, about 18 years if you are lucky, and lots more if you are not! In projects, however, we spend little time “raising the child”. In essence, we abandon the child to look after itself and seem to expect that everything will work out as it was intended.

In more corporate speak, we spend very little time institutionalising change from our projects. Usually it is a few weeks and we expect everything will work out. The reality is that often it doesn’t.

If as a project manager, or an IS department, we want to add value to our organisations, then I believe we need to ensure the change sticks and delivers the benefits.

Metaphorically, all the value is realised from raising the child to adulthood, it is not in the conception and implementation. If we are truly interested in value creation, we need to stick around for and be active in the terrible twos, through puberty and on into adulthood. If we don’t, the chances of everything working out decrease dramatically.

First Published on www.cio.co.nz

Paid to do nothing

2009-11-15T08:30:00.000+13:00

First Published on www.cio.co.nz

One night after a long day at work I came home wanting to chill out and relax. As a father of four that is seldom an option. This particular night I arrived home right on bedtime and soon found myself in the middle of stories and good night cuddles. In our house the bedtime ritual usually includes a period of time where we ask each other questions about our day. On this particular night my daughter asked me, “Dad, what do you do at work?”

This was not the first time she had asked me this question. On this particular night, being tired and not really thinking, I gave a glib “well, I get paid to do nothing”. I followed this up with what I thought was a pretty good attempt at describing what my job as a leader of a fairly large team actually is. It included an analogy between the principal of her school and what I did at work.

The story went that at school her job was to learn as much as she could and the teachers job was to help her learn. The school principal’s role was to support her teacher and all the other teachers in the school and make sure it ran properly so she and her friends could learn as much as possible.

He didn’t get paid to learn, but he got paid to make sure all the children did learn and to help the teachers to make that happen. At work I don’t get paid to work with computers, I get paid to support the managers, team leaders and all of the team to do their work as effectively as possible and make sure the work is done, I told her.

My daughter went very quiet and looked to be thinking about the ramifications of the answer I had given. I was quietly quite pleased with the answer I had given and then she said, “Dad, if you get paid to do nothing, why does it take so long?” I was stunned, quickly said goodnight and left disgruntled.

Now, when I said I get paid to do nothing I was half joking, but it was only half. If I look at how I actually spend my time, virtually all of my day is spent in meetings.

The form and topics of these meetings are many and varied. They may be one on ones, team meetings, executive briefings, steering committees, operating reviews, meet and greets or many other forums and topics.

If I am not in a meeting chances are I am preparing for a meeting, doing the occasional necessary action that comes out of meetings or reading and answering email and occasionally doing some personal research and study. Not a “productive” task there anywhere!

The organisational focus on meetings is often criticised loudly and with passion. How many times have you said or heard others say, “if only I didn’t have so many meetings, I could actually get something done!” Well what if you didn’t have meetings? How would we get our job as CIOs or senior IT leaders done?

In reality, as leaders of large teams, meetings are the job of CIOs and senior IT leaders. It is how we do what we do, which is to inspire, motivate, align, communicate, prioritise, discuss, decide, reward and recognise our team. There is no other effective way to do these things.

So, if you find yourself or your team lamenting about too many meetings, the problem isn’t too many meetings but that your meetings are ineffective and don’t add value. The answer is not to stop your meetings, but to find out how to have more effective, value-adding meetings. How do you do this?

As some of my previous columns have suggested, thro-ugh focusing on the basics. In this case be prepared, have a clearly defined objective and supporting agenda and ensure you have clear outcomes and next steps that are followed through.

Indeed, I believe meetings are so important that anything we do outside of a meeting should be completely focused on making our meetings more effective, so we can make a difference for our teams.

LGP Fundamentals - an Update

2009-10-16T07:05:00.000+13:00

LGP Purpose

Games for Living; Supporting New Zealand as a place where everybody is safe and loved by harnessing the power of immersive games technology to foster the development of life skills and positive lifestyle choices.

Values

We believe that collaboration and leadership occurs naturally in an environment where everyone feels safe and loved. We do this by:

living life with a sense of play
acting with integrity and for the highest good of all
learning and improving
seeing people as the best they can be
encouraging action
being open and inclusive

BHAGs

1. Create a self managing framework for the New Zealand IT industry and Educationalists to engage and connect New Zealanders with today's immersive games experience to teach life skills in fun and sustainable ways.

2. Deliver a pilot LGP Project by Christmas 2009

3. Measurably impact the lives of 2,000 kiwis, their family and friends through the delivery of immersive games technology by Christmas 2012 by:

Establishing 50 effective Games Delivery Operations by Christmas 2012
Commissioning two immersive games for our communities and for sale

Operations Guidelines

LGP delivers Products and Services through LGP Projects based around individual Underserved Communities
LGP people honour the LGP Values
LGP Teams collaborate to establish and support LGP Projects that deliver measureable outcomes to Underserved Communities

LGP Projects contribute to the LGP Purpose and BHAGs
Each LGP Team develops and applies effective Selection Criteria and Outcome Metrics

Finance and Administration

The LGP is looking for an existing and related registered Charitable Trust as a home that will support, nurture and administer us so that we can concentrate on ‘doing stuff.’ Is this you?

Invitation

To participate and Do LGP Stuff, start by joining the LinkedIn Life Game Project Group and Subgroup that suits you best ...

Life Game Project (LGP)

2009-09-11T06:43:00.000+12:00

LGP Vision

Games for Living - Harnessing the power of immersive games technology to foster the development of life skills and positive lifestyles throughout New Zealand communities.

LGP Purpose

Creating a self managing framework for the Auckland based IT industry and Educationalists to engage New Zealanders with today's immersive games experience to teach life skills in fun and sustainable ways.

Background to LGP

The concept for LGP was born recently out of a meeting between Ian Howard, Parikshit Basrur and myself. Exactly how it came about is something of a blur to me. However, in my brain this is what happened.

My family and I are committed to making a difference in New Zealand society. The vision we have for this is that we want New Zealand to be a place where everyone in New Zealand can be and is "Safe and Loved". I have been thinking about what I could do to make a difference and move us forward towards this vision. As I thought about this several threads of internal conversations began to form:

I believe in the power of technology to make a positive difference. It is one of the main reasons that I do what I do as everyday I get to think about and work on real solutions that make a difference for The Warehouse and for New Zealanders. I wondered, how could I apply technology to this broader mission?
The current trends in technology are beginning to change how people are defining reality and community, and how people interact with each other and can support each other. While this movement has huge positive potential, it also has the potential to simply ingrain the "have and have not's" in our society through the digital divide. Once again, communities most in need could miss out as they cannot afford access.
I believe in the power of education. When I say education I mean education in the holistic sense. Yes, this includes reading writing and arithmetic; but it also includes learning how to lead a successful life and develop yourself to fulfil your potential. It has been a major part of my life and has provided me many opportunities and there are many examples of programs that show that if people have the skills to be successful in society then virtually everyone will choose a positive role. My favourite example of this is the Delancey Street Foundation who turn around the lives of hardened criminals through peer support and mentoring. Over 90% of Delancey's graduates never offend again. This compares to their peer group where recidivism is typically well over 90%.

I was thinking about all of this and thinking about how I could put it together. As I pondered this my mind turned to the possibility of introducing learning labs into less advantaged communities. That is when I met Ian Howard (thanks to Baz).

Ian introduced me to the huge potential of using modern games to educate in a compelling, fun and personal way. Many modern games today are driven by participants decisions and their ability to complete specific quests or tasks. As Ian showed me some examples I began to see how you could shape the experience in a way that the gamer would begin to naturally assimilate powerful lessons in life in a fun and positive way. I could also see how gamers could be supported by peers and mentors with social networking technologies.

Thus the concept of the Life Game Project was born; and the rest will be history in the making. Game On!

If you would like to know more or contribute in some way then contact me and let's talk!

The Power of Focus

2009-08-15T19:59:00.000+12:00

First Published by CIO New Zealand - www.cio.co.nz

The technology industry, indeed business in general, is enamoured with innovation. Any business oriented magazine you pick up talks about innovation and how to be more innovative. Innovate or die is our mantra and we are constantly on the look out for new bright ideas. If you judge us by our actions it seems we all believe that the person with the most ideas will win and all others are doomed. The result is we are constantly looking for and implementing new initiatives. If something is wrong then start a project to fix it. If your competition seems to be better at something than you are then start a project to fix it. If there is a hot new technology out there you better have an innovation fund available to be able to explore it and get ahead. Change is constant and if you can’t change faster than your competition then you will loose.

I am a big believer in the need for innovation in order to be successful but is it true that the person with the most ideas wins?

While I am no expert I have spent a fair bit of time reviewing the “success literature” and trying to understand what it takes to be successful. One of the common themes within the literature is that all successful people are incredibly focused and they practice constantly. It doesn’t matter if you look at sports stars, musicians’, authors, or business people constant focus and practice wins the day. Being a Kiwi bloke, who grew up in the deep south of the South Island one of my favourite examples is Jeff Wilson. Jeff was an incredible sporting talent who represented New Zealand in both cricket and rugby. As a teenager he also represented the south Island in age group basketball. For all his talent however it wasn’t until he decided to focus solely on rugby that he became a true superstar and one of the world’s elite.

Another great Kiwi example is Dan Carter. Maybe the best first five we have ever had. Dan Carter (and Jeff Wilson in his day) practices constantly. As the greatest first five in our history what does Dan Carter spend most of his time doing at practice? I mean he is already brilliant!! My guess is Dan Carter spends most of his time working on the basics, his fitness, his kicking, his passing and his tackling, over and over again trying to get a little better each and every time. I could go on and on with many examples. There are after all enough examples from any walk of life you wish to name to fill libraries.

When I get to work do I see this pattern of practice in the IT industry? Do we focus on the basics and look to get a little bit better at the basics every day? Often the answer is no. Rather we look for that one killer initiative, the emerging technology that will change the world or the silver bullet that will solve all our problems. Some times we even have big initiatives for continuous improvement. ITIL, maybe Six Sigma or Lean IT. Better yet what about Lean Six Sigma (maybe there’s a marketing opportunity for Lean ITIL)! We work hard on these initiatives and we spend a lot of money on them. And when they don’t work what do we do? Do we look to practice and improve a little day by day like the most successful people do or do we look to the next initiative. Usually we look to the next initiative. Indeed, I suggest that if you look back through our history as an industry it is full of silver bullets that didn’t quite fulfil their promise.

I suggest it’s time we stop looking for silver bullets. We stop defining and implementing initiative after initiative, innovation after innovation. Instead let’s look at and understand the basics of what it means to be world class in IT and work hard to implement these basics and get a little bit better at them everyday. Not very glamorous I know, but then how glamorous is it for Dan Carter to take dozens of kicks at goal every day? While it might not be glamorous practice and continuous improvement is the key to success.

How to sell to a CIO (aka tips for tech companies)

2009-06-27T15:15:00.000+12:00

First published in CIO New Zealand. www.cio.co.nz

Before I took up the role of CIO at The Warehouse I was a partner with Deloitte Consulting. As with most professional services firms my role was a mix of selling and delivering services to clients. Because of this when I joined The Warehouse I was quite open to meet with potential service providers to see what value they could add to us.

I was unprepared for the onslaught however. Every week I get many phone calls and emails from companies who have a great product or service to sell. When I respond to these calls I find that they never provide me with value for my time. As a result I now work diligently to avoid all and any approaches from companies wishing to sell me something. While this preserves my time I am convinced that there must be solutions out there that will help our organisation and talking to the owners of those solutions seems like a sensible way to find out about them. The question is how can I do this in a way that adds value rather than destroys value?

I have talked with other CIOs about this issue either in person or online over one of several social network groups I belong to and I have discovered that I am not unique. This is a very prevalent issue so to try and cut through this here is Owen’s tips for how to successfully sell to a CIO.

Do your research before you come to see me. Doing your research shows that you are serious about us as a client because you have invested your time. As a publicly listed company our business strategy is available in public domain if you are prepared to look. Don’t stop at the company level either. Research what is going on in our IS team. For better or worse I have a reasonably high profile and so there is a lot of information available about what we are trying to achieve.

I don’t buy technology I buy solutions to business issues so when you come and see me sell me a solution to my business issue. Selling technology isn’t a bad thing. It just doesn’t work for most CIOs. If I like your business solution I probably won’t buy straight away. I will probably refer you to one of my team and someone in our business outside of IS. You will then need to sell to them to as they will need to live with the solution day by day.

Listen and act on what you hear. If I ask you to change a proposal or to pitch it in a particular way trust that there is a reason. I will tell you if I can but I can’t always tell you. If I do this it’s a great sign as it means I’m interested and one of the best ways to build a relationship is to show that you have listened and responded to my needs. If you can’t for some reason then be up front and acknowledge it. I’ll appreciate the honesty and think of you next time when you may be able to help me.

Be honest at all times. If you aren’t it will only come back to bite you and your organisation. In particular, don’t tell me how important I am to you and that you want a long term relationship with me if you don’t really mean it. If you are successful in winning business with us I will find out if you are serious the first time I ask for a change to our arrangement and you begin to quote the contract to me. This lacks integrity and you are unlikely to win any additional business.

Never tell me I’m strategic because every time someone has said that they very quickly try to increase the price or decrease the discount I receive.

Finally, for me pitching via email is better than by phone. I don’t answer the phone but I do at least browse all my emails. If you follow some of the guidance above and I like what I see you might get a response and a chance to pitch your solution to me or one of my team and that might just lead to value for everyone.

IT and Business Alignment – Holly Grail or Fools Gold?

2009-04-26T14:59:00.000+12:00

There is a lot of literature out there that talks about the importance of IT and business alignment. If you search for the term at gartner.com you get “about 1700” hits. You can’t go to a conference without it being the topic of at least 1 of the speakers. Nearly every survey of CIO concerns has IT and Business alignment as one of the top concerns. Often IT dedicated websites have whole sections devoted to the topic of alignment.

So what is alignment anyway? Since there has already been a lot of discussion about alignment rather than making it up here is what reference.com has to say:

Alignment is the adjustment of an object in relation with other objects, or a static orientation of some object or set of objects in relation to others.

Business/IT alignment, Business/IT alignment optimizes the relational mechanisms between the business and IT organization by working on the IT effectiveness of the organization in order to maximise the business value from IT.

So business/IT alignment is important because without alignment it is unlikely that you will be perceived to be investing the organisations money wisely and nor will you be perceived to be adding value. I guess if you boil it down to a single self centred statement for a CIO, if you are not aligned then you’ll probably be looking for a new job soon!

So if alignment is the mechanism that allows us to “maximise the business value from IT” then alignment it not only important but it is the “holy grail” as what CIO is going to disagree that maximising business value is not the most important outcome of their role?

The problem is that while I agree that maximising the business value from IT is the central mandate for a CIO I believe that the logic supporting alignment as the way of doing this is fatally flawed. Why? Because to believe that alignment is the most important thing requires that you believe that IT and the business are separate objects (alignment is “the adjustment of an object in relation with other objects”). Alignment in a world of unity or an integrated world is nonsensical. Actually, I’ll take this a step further; the fact that we practitioners of IT see ourselves as somehow different from the business in which we operate creates the problem of needing alignment. If we simply changed this belief and replaced it with a belief that IT is the business, or perhaps more correctly, is within the business, then the issue of alignment goes away.

That’s to simplistic I hear you say? You’re just playing with words? Maybe, but no other function talks so much about the need for alignment as IT does. It’s interesting that while reference.com has a definition for business/IT alignment it doesn't have a definition for business/[insert name of any department except IT here] alignment. Have you ever heard of business/marketing alignment or business/finance alignment? Now this is not to say there are not issues with silo behaviour and the need to work together within and between other departments but the thought of this being a problem of two independent entities needing to be aligned is a little bizarre.

One Approach to Strategy

2009-04-06T20:24:00.000+12:00

This post was first published by CIO New Zealand

“Forget the arduous, intellectualised number crunching and data grinding. In real life, strategy is actually very straight forward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” Jack Welsh

I love this quote. It captures so much of where I have ended up when it comes to understanding strategy. Not long after taking up my role as the CIO of The Warehouse I began to turn my mind to producing an IS strategy. However as I went through a traditional strategy exercise as a CIO rather than a consultant I came to realise that traditional strategies don’t work to well in the real world. The best possible outcome of a traditional IS strategy is that you produce a list of technologies and projects to be implemented into your organisation over a three to five year period that while they maybe rationally correct they are usually unrealistic and unexecutable. Why? I struggle to answer why with any precision however, if pushed, my answer is that an IS strategy provides a static view of some future nirvana based on conditions today, foisted onto a dynamic and ever changing organisation. Static and dynamic do not mix well no matter how often static is updated.

So if a traditional strategy doesn’t work then what are the alternatives? When I am confronted with these types of questions I revert to type, deep introverted thinking, and try and answer some basic questions. In this case the basic questions are:

Question 1 – Why are we here? Whether this is expressed in the traditional sense of mission, vision and values our alternatives such as an organisational Core Purpose as The Warehouse does, or a “general direction” as Jack Welsh expresses it you need to understand why you exist. A clear definition of purpose provides meaning to the team and if it is truly alive will guide all decisions.

In our case the team decided we were here “to help the Warehouse achieve it’s purpose of making the desirable affordable by becoming a world class IS organisation that provides great solutions and great service that makes life easier for our customers and our team.”

Question 2 – What does success look like? The “game” of business is played over a long period of time and you need to know if you are making progress towards meeting your purpose. This is the world of measurement and I love measurement as it very powerfully determines what gets done. The real question is what should you measure? We determined that there were 5 key dimensions of what it meant to be a world class IS organisation and we have developed measures for each dimension. The dimensions are:

Customer Satisfaction – Are our users and colleagues delighted with our service?

Operational Effectiveness – Are our core IS operations efficient and effective and are we actually providing a quality service? (actual service quality and customer satisfaction with the service is not the same thing)

Employee Engagement – Is our team a place where people want to work and are they motivated to do their best work?

Project Delivery – Are we agile and do we define, prioritise and deliver the projects the business wants and needs in a timely fashion?

IS Value Add – Are we delivering value to the organisation for the money invested and are we bringing great ideas on how to use technology and information to help the organisation succeed?

Question 3 – How mature are we as an organisation? More detail on this can be found in my blog post about the IS hierarchy of needs however the answer to this question will form the context in which you choose your priorities.

Question 4 – What initiatives should we undertake to meet these needs? The initiatives you undertake will vary depending on the culture of your organisation, your leadership style and what needs from question 3 you are trying to meet in the short term

Question 5 – What are the target measurements that will show we have succeeded? This is how you will know you are making progress and provides cues of when to celebrate and when to dig deeper into an issue that is not making progress.

After much thought and discussion within our team answering these 5 questions forms the basis of our strategy. It is simple. So simple we can fit it on a page, two pages if you count the scorecard with all our measures on it and we hang it up through out our work area, always visible. Now all we have to do is execute like hell.

Thoughts of a Trainee Parent

2009-02-08T14:54:00.000+13:00

This post was first published at www.cio.co.nz

There is a great little poem by Robert Fulghum about life called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It is a very simple and common sense approach to life. Once you have read it you wonder why life is so complex. We seem to get some form of satisfaction and sense of self esteem by making things complex. Did you ever hear someone boast that their job was so difficult, complex and important that they couldn't possibly explain it. I often wonder about this. I mean really, if you can’t explain what you do how can you do it?

Now here’s the rub. I find it really hard to explain what I do as an “IT Leader” to people who live outside of the corporate environment, especially my family. If I explain what an Information Systems Department does my mother and brother will ask me to fix their PC. After I have checked the power and done the standard reboot I’m lost. On the other hand if I explain to them what I do from a task perspective then it’s: I go to meeting (talk and listen), prepare for meetings and send and receive email. They just look at me as if I’m stupid and go “yeah but what do you do?”.

Another approach I have taken is to say I lead or manage an Information Systems Department. This is more accurate but often all I get is “…well what does that mean?” It’s a good question, what does it mean? There are libraries full of books on leadership and management but does anyone really know? Surely libraries full of books make leadership far more complex than it needs to be. So in the interests of simplification and as a show of admiration for Robert Fulghum here is my version of leadership from the perspective of a parent:

“All I Really Needed to Know about Leadership I Learnt as a Parent”.

Love is the most important thing.
Be respectful. Children might be short but they are people.
Your job as a parent is to help your children to learn right from wrong and become independent. That’s all. (aka it’s their life, let them live it)
As the parent you set the tone and the rules.
Actions have consequences. Be consistent, always.
Do not have rules you do not want to enforce.
It might not look like they’re listening but they are.
It might not look like they’re watching but they are.
Yes sometimes you do have to repeat yourself a thousand times before they get it.
What you said and what they heard are not the same thing!
Accidents happen. They know they screwed up you don’t need to tell them but they do need to clean up and put it right.
Making mistakes and the bumps and bruises that result are part of learning and children should not be protected from them.
Sometimes there is real danger. They actually don’t know better and they do need to be protected until they learn (see above).
True forgiveness is healing. If you want to understand true forgiveness then observe your child after you have screwed up.
If you always resolve the arguments and always make the decisions then you will always have to resolve the arguments and make the decisions.
Always end the day with a cuddle and talk about the day (topics of choice: What was great? What was not so good? What would you do different? Do you have any questions?).
Finally, have fun together. You learn a lot, it builds great relationships and it’s, well, fun.

There are two more things that I would like to add to the list. I didn’t learn these as a parent I learnt them from my parents, specifically my father. They are more to do with the relationship between the parents than they are about being a parent. Think of them as rules for “executive relationships” and they belong here because of their impact on the children:

Never go to bed on an argument
The most important thing that a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

So there you have it, leadership from the perspective of a parent as seen by Owen McCall (parent to 4 amazing children and CIO of The Warehouse).

Remember Who You Are!

2008-12-27T18:18:00.000+13:00

As time went by I left home and went to University. There I met the love of my life (Jo, now my wife and mother to our 4 amazing children). After a couple of years I took the big step of bringing her home to meet the parents. I was very nervous about this meeting. Much to my surprise she liked my parents and they liked her. One day while Jo was at my parents place we wanted to go out. I went through after the standard “can I borrow the car please” ritual and Dad added the usual “remember who you are”. As we left I muttered under my breath something about what a control freak my father was, although the language may have been a little more colourful. Jo just stared at me “what are you talking about?”. So I explained to her in simple clear (emotional?) language what the problem was.

She just shook her head in disbelief “is that what you really think? That’s not what he means at all. What he means is ...” and she proceeded to give me a big long explanation on what he really meant. I don’t remember exactly what she said but it was something along the lines of don’t go and get all caught up in the moment, cave into peer pressure and do something that you know is wrong and will regret later. English students!! Always reading stuff into things that don’t exist. I mean really, she barely knew my father. If she did she wouldn’t say such ridiculous things.

Now as it happens my father and I got on a lot better when we were apart from each other (something to do with being so alike I’m told) and over time I began to see that maybe there was another possible interpretation to “remember who you are” and maybe, just maybe Jo was right. Without getting into it too deeply eventually I made peace with my father and remember who you are. That is until I started participating in a series of leadership and personal development courses and reading a number of books on leadership. These courses and books raised “remember who you are” back to my consciousness but in a new and unexpected way. It began to dawn on me that “remember who you are” was really short hand for “remember who you really are and always act with integrity to that true self”. Jo was right and perhaps my father was actually quite wise to say such a thing.

This caused me a bit of a problem however as it posed a question I couldn’t easily answer. “Who am I really?” It’s very difficult to “remember who you are”, if you have no idea who you are or who you want to be!! “Ummm, best I find out”, and the quest began!

I won’t bore you with the details of the journey to answering this question. It was long, often frustrating (frustration being my negative emotion of choice) and in truth continues daily. I would however like to share some of the things I have learnt along the way.

My first major insight came from Stephen Covey (see stephencovey.com). If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that the work of Stephen Covey has had a major influence on me. One major learning for me was when I really began to understand that Habit 1 – Be Proactive, actually meant that everything we experience in life is a choice and that the person who is doing the choosing is me. It wasn’t someone or something out there, it was me. I was responsible both in the common understanding of the word and also in the sense of “being the cause of …” whatever it was that life sent my way. Life is a choice. (the actual definition of responsible referred to above goes on to say “being the cause of something, usually something wrong or disapproved of”. No wonder we hate being responsible!! The true definition of being responsible does not differentiate between good and bad it is simply being the cause of something.).

My second major insight on this journey is that who you are is not the same thing as what you have or don’t have. Nor is it a description of what you do or the roles you play in your life. It is much more to do with what you stand for, what’s important to you and how well you reflect that in your life now, in the moment. I explored some of this in my first blog entry Living Inside Out which described that the order for living is BE, DO, HAVE. The message of living from the inside out is that what you do and what you have is ultimately determined by who you are being, or, to say it another way who you are being causes (is responsible for) what you do and what you have. The irony is the world seems to work exactly the opposite to what we have all been taught.

My third major insight was that while I do believe in the fundamental premise that I can do anything I want, the reality is that we have all been given a unique set of gifts, both positive and negative. In life I can choose to use these natural endowments to my advantage or not. There is no right or wrong answer, however, I am likely to be more effective and happier in life if I work with my strengths and mitigate my weaknesses rather than the other way round. There are a lot of good teachings on this. My favourite is Marcus Buckingham (see marcusbuckingham.com). So the question is what do I love to do? That is, what is it that makes me stronger and feeling great? You probably will not be surprised to know that sharing (either written or in person) about things I have learnt, insights I have gained and changes I wish to see in the world is something that makes me feel stronger!! What’s interesting is that working consistently with your strengths helps to build energy and passion. Energy and passion are two things I want more of in my life!!

My fourth major insight is that there is no success without focus. We all have our strengths, however, if we never focus these strengths we are unlikely to succeed on any significant scale. To take an often cited example, Tiger Woods clearly has a series of gifts and strengths that mean he is a good golfer however it is his unrelenting focus on honing and building on those gifts that has made him a great golfer. The chances are that with focus Tiger Woods could have been exceptional at a number of different things. He chose golf. At the end of the day talent without focus does not create lasting success.

One last thing on focus. As you work to hone your skills through focus and to become the very best you can, you will find that you become very good at a number of auxiliary things as well. These are things that although not what you are focusing on, are capabilities that support you in what you are focusing on. For example, Tiger Woods is by all normal measures physically strong and flexible. Not because he wants to be strong and flexible, but because it helps his golf. If I look at my own case, my focus is on building and leveraging world class IS organisations. As I focus on this I am beginning to build skills in leadership. This is not because I want to be a great leader (truth be known, leadership scares me to death) but because these skills support building a great IS team.

Finally, the world is a very big place and it is not just about me. I have to admit to being somewhat disappointed when I made this realisation. I, as in fact most of us do, live my life from my own perspective. That is, what is important to me? What do I want? How does this impact me? In my generous moments I would include my family and maybe even friends and colleagues. Even then however, it was still what I thought they would want, from my perspective. It is in fact all about me!! I know some of you are sitting there thinking “I’m not like this. I often think about other people and their feelings and do many things for others selflessly”. Maybe. I would ask you to consider, is your selflessness really about others or is it about what a great giving person you are, sacrificing yourself for others and therefore really about your sense of self worth? Don’t despair it seems to be the standard human condition. Standard maybe, but not normal. (Normal - physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy).

If you pause and think about it for a while we all know that it is not just about us. As the saying goes no man (or woman) is an island. We are social creatures by nature. That’s why we build halls and other meeting places and live in towns and cities. We intuitively know that it is not about us, it is about our family, our community, our society and that all of these things interrelate and depend on each other. When we allow ourselves to remember this, the question is what are we doing to make our families, our communities, our society a better place to live? Or how are we contributing?

That’s what I’ve learnt. So, who do I understand myself be? Well, as of today:

I believe my natural strengths include:

A natural desire for and attraction to new challenges. This includes being naturally curious about why things are the way they are, and a real drive to question the status quo.
The ability to take complex situations and circumstances, distil them to their essence, and communicate them in a way that people can understand and relate to.
The ability to design systems, processes, mechanisms and measurements that support teams and organisations to achieve their goals

My focus is to be the authority on how to build great IS organisations that deliver on the promise of technology and add real competitive value to businesses and other organisations
I will contribute to my community and society by working to make New Zealand a place where everyone can and does feel safe and loved
To do these things on a consistent basis I need to be a role model of inspiration, opportunity and vitality

So now that I know who I am, I can begin to remember. Now that I can remember, the challenge in life is to fulfil the promise of who I am meant to be.

Safe and Loved

2008-11-15T13:01:00.000+13:00

Earlier this year my 14 year old daughter came to Jo (my wife) and I to ask if she could go to the movies on a Friday evening. Her proposal was that her and her friend would catch a bus to Takapuna watch the movie and then catch the bus home. She didn't ask to be out late. The movie started around 6.00pm and she expected to be home by 8.30. We said no. We were concerned about her safety because of the "wilding" and issues in and around Takapuna especially the bus terminal area. As a compromise we drove them there and picked them up again. I tell this story to people fairly often and they all agree they wouldn't let their daughters do it either. BUT SURELY THIS ISN'T RIGHT!! My daughter should be able to catch the bus to a movie in the early evening and be safe!! We shouldn't have to say no!!

Now about this time several other events thrust themselves onto our consciousness. These include a series of local events such as the much publicised suicide associated with Takapuna Grammar. While we were not at all close to this it impacted our family as our oldest daughter is a student at Grammar. There were several incidents on the streets around Devonport which either were or were alluded to be attempted abductions. In addition through my increasing involvement with the stepUP Foundation I have become aware of many issues affecting the teens of our country. In particular I am shocked at the rate of teen suicide and depression and the number of families for who violence in the home is a regular occurrence. The ongoing publicity surrounding the Kahui twins really highlights this issue and for those of us who sit in our comfortable middle and upper income suburbs let's not forget about the Tony Vietch affair. It happens everywhere.

It's highly likely that these "events" as I call them are happening all the time and that we had just been sensitised to them (mainly as a result of our involvement with Landmark Education's Curriculum for Living). Up until that point all of my life had been concerned with what had been happening to my family and I. Really little else mattered. Over time came to the twin realisations of:

WHAT IS HAPPENING WITHIN OUR SOCIETY ISN'T RIGHT AND WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

YOU CANNOT IGNORE WHAT IS HAPPENING IN SOCIETY AS IT WILL ALWAYS FIND A WAY TO IMPACT YOU AND YOUR FAMILY!

The synergy of this struck me immediately. Because of the interconnectedness of our world ultimately if we wanted to do what was right for my family we had to do what was right for our community and society in general. While you may be able to ignore what is going on outside your family in the short term in the long run my family and New Zealand society are interconnected and can not be separated. (Well they could. We could move countries but then the same applies for wherever you go). Selfishness of wanting the best for my family and the selflessness in working for a better society are in fact the same thing!

So all fired up we set out to change the world!! But how?? Where do you start?? Our focus immediately went to the two core issues above:

We have one of the worst records in the world for teenage suicide and depression. The future of our country see so little for them that they are constantly depressed and killing themselves in large numbers.
People are not safe in our country. In fact people are not even safe in their own homes. Violence, particularly domestic violence, is everywhere and as a society we are ignoring it.

As I looked into this closer I noticed that many approaches to these issues took a fairly negative stance. Indeed I noticed that we tend to look at nearly every issue in our world from a negative stance. What do I mean by this? Well we tend to focus on what we don't want rather than what we do want. We don't want violence in our society so we are anti violence. We don't want our teens to commit suicide so we set out to prevent suicide. It really struck me that this "get rid of the negative stuff" approach is reactionary and in many ways blame oriented. That is your violent, so you are bad and you need to be punished is a typical response. Really this is just treating the symptom of a problem not the cause - if you lock up the bad people forever they will not be able to do any harm. The problem is it never gets to addressing the cause and so our society keeps producing ever increasing numbers of bad people (or more depressed people) to replace them.

I do not want to be part of the "anti world". Yes these are real issues and they need to be addressed (we'll get back to that again soon) but I want to be part of creating something positive. What I wanted was not the elimination of bad but the creation of a community and society that I would love to live in and would love my family to live in. What would that world look like? I began to imagine.

To start with, my daughter would be able to go to the movies on a Friday evening and there would be no fears for her. Let's take it further. I or any member of my family would be able to go anywhere in New Zealand and be safe. Not just my family. Everyone would be able to go anywhere in New Zealand and be safe. I began to see my 73 year old pakeha mother from Southland walking through Mangere on any given night night with her gammy knee in the middle of an open, festive and welcoming atmosphere. People of all ages and every ethnic background you can imagine including families, teens and twenty somethings and many grandparents partying together.

What's next? Let's be specific on an issue that I think really matters and that I mentioned earlier. Everyone would be safe in their own home. Children and partners (both male and female) should be excited about the arrival home of their parent, carer and partner. In too many houses they are terrified. What I could see was mum or dad walking through the door and children of all ages would excitedly rush up to them to greet them because they are so pleased they are home. Their loved one is back. Now that's a family!! (OK some realism. The teenagers would look up, grunt and maybe smile to acknowledge their arrival!).

Let's extend it. We know our neighbours. All of them. In your own street and adjoining streets. When I say know them I mean know them as people. Not just enough to politely say hello as you pass each other to of from your daily chores, if you acknowledge them at all. It doesn't mean we live in each others pockets or be best mates but it does mean we stop hiding in our houses and we socialise together and support each other. Now that's community...or is it simply an extended family?

No one would be depressed. No wait. Being sad or depressed on occasion is actually part of a complete human experience. It is often said that you need to experience sadness so you know when you are happy. Perhaps more appropriately then, no one would be so depressed for so long, that they would contemplate taking their own life. If I think about that more, if everyone knew that they were loved and that the important people in their lives loved them and cared about them, I mean really knew and personally felt it, then it would be very unlikely that they would be constantly depressed and take their own lives.

My thoughts and imaginings went on and on but to get to a point I wanted to create a society where:

EVERYONE CAN AND DOES FEEL SAFE AND LOVED

That was it. If everyone was safe and loved then there would be nothing that could stop us from expressing who we really are in the world. If you can truly express who you are then imagine the impact to your self esteem and also the "esteem" in our society. It is very likely that from this base every one's creativity can flow and all things would be possible for us. We discussed this as a family over several weeks (everyone from our 5 year old up) and yes this is what we wanted to stand for! FANTASTIC - so where to start!!

After much discussion we determined that the right place for us to start was twofold:

Firstly we would open our home and our family to children who needed a place to go so they can be safe and loved. Practically for us this meant becoming a foster family. We have now completed the process to become a foster family and 2 sisters (5 and 8) have joined our family, at least for now while they need us. As an aside, pretty much everybody thinks that we are nuts to do this. Most just think we are nuts period. The rest look at us and go "but you already have 4 children of your own .... why (and how!!) do you do it?". The how is you just do. While six children make for a busy life it's not as different to four as you'd think. Jo answers the why very elegantly - "if they were your brother's or sister's children who needed support would you do it?" Most people acknowledge that they would. "well, it is all just a matter of how you define your family!". Selfishness of wanting the best for your family and selflessness are ultimately the same thing as you cannot separate your family from society!

The second is domestic violence. It didn't seem to matter how I thought about it this had to be the start. I could not get past the notion that everyone had an absolute right to be safe in their own home. Safe and Loved would never be possible if domestic violence was allowed to continue and flourish. So the question then became very simple if somewhat large - how do you stop domestic violence? I had no idea so I began by doing some research. I have documented what I found in my blog entry "causes of violence". I then began to look at solutions and models that could be applied. I documented this in my blog entry "potential solutions to violence". The conclusions I reached from this exercises were:

Causes of Violence

The literature and opinions I have researched suggest there is no easy definitive answer to what causes violence. Many factors correlate but a causal link has proven elusive. In the end however most commentators seem to believe the core causes of violence are likely to be:

Lack of or bad role models
Feeling alone, as if no one cares
Inability to resolve highly charged emotions

As a result, I speculated that the explanation for this is that the critical factor is not what has happened to a person but how the person perceives what has happened and how they react to it. In particular a persons ability to express and "complete" unresolved emotions is critical. If you cannot resolve the emotional state then you tend to suppress the negative energy. If you do this enough it is likely to erupt! With this as a framework the correlations to violence begets violence, poverty etc are reasonably explainable. The more intense the event the harder it is to resolve. Correlated yes but not causal as there is a way to change the outcome through the choices we make as individuals and through completion of the associated emotional reaction. If you then put this in the context of no one cares about me (probably including myself) and a lack of positive role models and therefore probably a lack of any real coping skills then violence is almost inevitable!

Potential Solutions

So what can we do about this. To answer this question I primarily looked to use the vital behaviour framework proposed by the authors of Influencer. Based on this framework I concluded that the following seem like a good place to start:

Make domestic violence unacceptable. Within New Zealand we too often see something going on that doesn't seem right but rather than act we turn away because "it is none of our business!!". While we do not support the behaviour, by doing nothing and "turning a blind eye" we create an environment where we make it acceptable and allow it to continue. I am not advocating that you put yourself into harms way however the message needs to be loud and clear - violence is not acceptable, it cannot be allowed to continue and we need to take action to demonstrate this every time we encounter it so everyone gets the message!
Develop active parenting skills. Various studies have found that for children growing up in very disadvantaged and violent neighbourhoods, the one factor that seems to protect that child from growing up to be violent is having a parent who supervises her child very strictly and who nips misbehaviour in the bud. It appears then that parenting skills and active parenting in particular can help to break the cycle.
Build emotional resilience and self esteem. The literature suggests that violence is usually a result of suppressed emotions bubbling to the surface and lashing out. This is often referred to as the silence / violence cycle. We can break this cycle by teaching people how to positively (or harmlessly) express their emotions.

So there we have it. Three places to start. They are not going to be the total picture but they are good places to start. I looked at them and pondered. I'm no educator and while I'm a parent and I think a reasonable good one I don't hold myself up as an expert. Although psychology fascinates me I am no psychologist and certainly no councilor!! Also there are plenty of great organisations and people working these areas. For me then it seemed that the logical place to start then was to champion the cause of making domestic violence unacceptable in every sense and ensure people actively oppose it whenever they encounter it and in so doing removing the current safe space created by society turning a blind eye.

So that's what I'm up to. I have decided to start close to home in my community, Devonport and we will see what grows from there. Specifically I am initiating a number of projects aimed at raising awareness of domestic violence. Raising awareness that it happens here in Devonport just as much as it does anywhere else and we need to stop kidding ourselves that it doesn't. At the end of the day it is up to all of us to act positively if we want it to stop and we want to progress towards a society as a positive expression of being a place where everyone can and does feel safe and loved.

So, do you want to join me?

The IS Hierarchy of Needs

2008-10-11T18:55:00.000+13:00

About 5 years ago I made a major career move. I left the consulting business, a business I had been part of for 18 years since leaving University, and moved into the corporate world. My reasons for the change were many and I won't bore you with all of them but one major motivating factor was that over many years as a consultant I was frustrated that I seldom got to see the fruits of my labour, that is the final results, from the projects I had led or been a part of. As a consultant we tried to build ongoing capability within our clients (yes really we did try!!) so I usually left my client after the implementation project was over. Most IS enabled projects however take time to actually deliver the promised benefits so I rarely got to see the final results achieved. Worse yet I could see that in many instances the decisions that my clients were making meant that they were well on the path to ensuring the project failed to deliver on the promises that were made. I found this very frustrating as it meant all my hard work and all the hard work of the team would be wasted or worse we would get blamed for a bad result.

I do believe in the power of technology. I believe that technology has the potential to be a major catalyst of change and a source of competitive advantage. What we as an industry deliver however is somewhat different. As an industry we consistently fail to deliver against the expectations that we set. The statistics and evidence for this is everywhere. For example depending on the study you look at 30% to 70% of all projects fail. Most CEOs and senior non-technology executives believe that IS costs them too much and does not represent value for money and worse that IS is a drag on the organisation and slows change and agility!! Oh and to take perhaps a silly example has anyone seen the paperless office? I wanted the opportunity to deliver on the promise of IT and consistently add value to the organisation and indeed provide competitive advantage. I felt that by "changing sides" I would get this chance.

So full of the joys and hope of the world I set off to be a CIO. What I found was an IS organisation in disarray. There was no time or money to focus on driving competitive advantage because our systems didn't work or at least didn't work consistently. In the first 60 days in my new role our IS department had 62 priority 1 issues, issues that directly impacted our ability to trade, or buy and move inventory (which is a bit of a problem for a retailer) or meant that hundreds of people were stranded unable to work. Most of our time was spent fixing these systems. When we did get a chance to think about broader strategy issues and issues of competitive advantage no one wanted to listen!! The general feeling - don't talk to me about IS for competitive advantage please just make sure the systems work!!

The IS team hated that no one wanted to listen. They worked hard (some times all night to bring systems back up). They were smart. They held the keys to so much potential. They felt that no one understood them. No one valued them. As for me. I had a lot of empathy for my team, they were smart and they did work hard, but really I was on "management's side". As I looked at our department and our systems there was no way I would trust us to deliver major strategic initiatives. We couldn't even run our systems!!! We were nowhere near competitive advantage and the realities of corporate IT began to sink in. I began to ponder - how do we get from where we are today to be in a position to deliver value to our organisation and ultimately be a source of advantage??

I began to research. I read, books and analysts papers, I talked to peers I went to conferences and seminars. No matter how hard I looked however I couldn't find anywhere a consistent map or guideline of how to move from a dysfunctional under performing "anchor" to a team that was the source of advantage for our organisation (perhaps to complete the nautical metaphor the sails that provide the power to push the organisation forward)!! I found pieces. One important piece was a outline of what an IS department in a high performing organisation looked like. Surprisingly high performing companies generally had high performing IS departments!! These IS departments spend less on average than their peers but still manage to invest more in competitive advantage and (presumably) deliver the value of that investment. The implication - they are very operationally efficient (about 40% more efficient than average).

We weren't very operationally efficient. Based on some statistics I managed to put together I reckoned we were about 20% - 25% less efficient than average). So what to do?? I sat back and thought. Over time a few things came to mind.

Firstly if our systems don't work nothing else matters!! Our priority number 1 was do whatever we needed to do to make sure our systems worked. I couldn't believe that anybody was going to engage us in a strategic conversation if we couldn't get the systems working. I had used ITIL in a previous life and while not an expert it seemed to be a sensible framework to help us move forward, create a common way of running our systems and to improve system reliability. Also many members of the team talked about ITIL as something that they thought had value. So there we had our first key decision. Drive system reliability and use ITIL as an organising framework for everything we did and use ITIL methods as a way to improve system performance. Bringing this to a reality became the major focus for the majority of the IS team for the next 4 years.

The next thought came as I was reflecting on the teachings of Stephen Covey and the the 7 habits of highly effective people. Specifically I began to dwell on Coveys concept of the Private Victory and how the Private Victory needs to precede the Public Victory. Broadly speaking I interpreted this as meaning you need to sort your own shit out before you were in a position to effectively engage with others. That is you need to be independently healthy before you can effectively synergise with others. Now Covey's work was primarily directed at the individual however I could easily see parallels to our department and our business and I began to realise that before we could work with other parts of the organisation to drive competitive advantage we first had to be very good at what we were primarily charged to do. That is we had to be a very good IS department!! Only then would we have sufficient credibility with other departments to allow us to proactively work with them to help them improve their areas of the business and through this create competitive advantage. In hindsight this seems obvious. Why would anyone ask me to help them if they couldn't at least see that I was capable of helping ourselves and were good at our own job!! (Later came to realise that this was true for all parts of the business and that the way you work with a department who hasn't achieved the private victory is very different to the way you can work with one who has. Maybe I'll write more on this later).

So I began to turn my attention to answering two questions.

what does a very good IS department look like? (I had some guidance on this from the high performing organisations work mentioned above) and
what do you need to do to create a very good IS department?

I started researching maturity models. It seems that in and around IS we have maturity models for just about everything but I couldn't find one for an actual IS department!! Maybe I needed to make one up!! My mind fell onto Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I have no idea why or how this happened. While I was aware of the concept of the hierarchy of needs I wasn't really a great scholar of Maslow's work or psychology generally (this has changed over time and the more I study leadership, myself and people's reactions to the world and others the more the topic fascinates me).

Through the hierarchy of needs Maslow teaches us that when it comes to motivation some human needs are more important than others thus forming a hierarchy. For people the first basic set of needs relates to our physical needs such as the needs for food and shelter. While these needs are unmet nothing else really matters. If you are starving to death the only thing that is important is finding food. There is no room for anything else. Once these physical needs are met however then they stop motivating you and you move on to the next level of the hierarchy. In Maslow's case the need for safety. This compulsion until satisfied and then failure to motivate cycle continues until we reach the ultimate state of self actualisation. (for those who are interested wikipedia and Businessballs.com both have good summaries for Maslow's hierarchy as I'm sure do many other sites).

It seemed to me that Maslow's concept of a hierarchy of needs fitted very neatly with Covey's work of driving change from the inside out (ie private victory precedes public victory). I began to mess with these ideas and came up with the following IS hierarchy of needs:

The hierarchy of needs provides a basis for understanding what needs to occur in order for you to be able to deliver business model innovation and differentiation for your organisation. Further it explains what you need to focus on today to meet today's needs and provides an explanation as to why we do or do not have influence as a department or as a CIO within our organisation.

You'll notice that the first two layers of the hierarchy are internally focused and represent the private victory of IS becoming a high performing IT organisation. The top two layers of the hierarchy represent IS's ability to build synergistic relationships with all departments to create sustainable advantage. The reality is if you haven't shown your ability to operate a high performing IS department then the organisation will not trust you as a partner with issues of enablement outside of IS or with issues of enabling substantial changes to your business model.

One point of clarification. The IS hierarchy of needs shows where the IS organisation needs to focus. It does not say that innovative projects are impossible if your main focus is on for example cost effectiveness. It does however say that this innovation is probably at the request of the business rather than as a result of a true partnership between IS and the business as you are unlikely to have the credibility to effectively partner. In these circumstances clearly the projects must be done and they represent a great opportunity to do them well and further build credibility while still primarily focusing on the core need of cost effectiveness.

So let's look at the hierarchy in some detail:

Systems Reliability

The most basic need for an IS department is to ensure that the systems that you currently operate are running when the users expect them to be running. In today's world if the systems are not running then the organisation will not be able to complete its most basic operations and in the extreme will very quickly close down. At this level of the hierarchy the focus is not really on whether the functionality is any good just is it available and does it work? There are many things that you can do drive reliability. For us, with ITIL as our framework of choice, the emphasis was initially on defining services, measuring service levels, problem management particularly for major incidents and change and release management to ensure we were not introducing new issues to our production systems. As we all know ultimately there is a trade off between systems reliability and cost. It is important that you agree this trade-off with key people in the business. 99.999% is not always appropriate. It depends on your business. Initially I agreed service levels with my colleagues as an aspirational target. I had no way of meeting them but asked them to agree to the targets so I could begin to measure my team and their progress. For us this meant 90% compliance with SLAs (standard 4 hours for P1s, 8 hours for P2s etc) and 99.5% availability for business critical services. They agreed. We began to measure our performance and improvement began (I'm a big believer in that you always get what you measure). It took nearly 2 years before we met these targets, now however, we meet and exceed these levels and my colleagues are very happy with the level of service.

Cost Effectiveness

It is at the level of cost effectiveness that you begin to demonstrate your commercial acumen. You do this by demonstrating that you spend money with care and you understand that cost control and value for money are critical for the ultimate success of the business. In this stage all IS business cases must have a positive impact on the cost of IS operations, however you choose to measure it (for us it is a combination of net present value and payback). The only exception to this is if you need to explicitly invest in such things are disaster recovery which directly target reducing business risk. Even here you should show that you are cognisant of the need for a balance between cost and risk. One of the outcomes that you should seek to achieve as you progress through cost effectiveness is to reinvest at least some portion of the operational savings into projects to help move your systems forward (through economically positive projects). For us our total IS spending basically remained flat for years (as a percentage of sales) as we progressed through cost effectiveness however during this time we reduced our operational costs by over 35%, built our capacity to deliver more projects and increased our capital/project spend by nearly 300%.

Many IS commentators believe that you shouldn't look at you IS department on the basis of costs but rather you should as quickly as possible move towards a profit center or even an investment center so all discussions are based on "value". While I have no objection to accounting for IS an a profit center I do not believe it is necessary. The main aim here is to demonstrate commercial acumen not to avoid scrutiny. My experience is that most executives are quite capable of understanding value no matter what the basis of accounting is. Also every organisation that I have been in looks at it's costs hard no matter how the accounting is done. The bottom line, however your organisation typically accounts for things is fine. Work within the accounting framework and show your competence.

As you work through the first two layers of the hierarchy and towards achieving the private victory it is likely that you will find that there are many initiatives that serve both reliability and cost effectiveness purposes. For example the less faults you have the more reliable but also the lower the operational costs as you can redirect peoples time and therefore costs away from operations towards improvement initiatives. Another example is that the modernisation of old legacy systems will often provide substantial cost savings and improved reliability.

Business Enablement

Having achieved the private victory most of your colleagues will have at least begun to reevaluate the IS departments contribution to the organisation. If our example is anything to go by you will begin to receive reasonably regular recognitions for the work that you have done. Also the types of conversations you are having with your colleagues will be changing. It is likely that your colleagues have all but lost interest in talking about service levels and if you are charging for your services it is likely that they have stopped talking so much about the charges. Rather most of your conversations will be about the projects they want delivered and increasingly they will engage in conversations about their longer terms goals and the role IS can play in helping to achieve them.

The purpose of business enablement then is to leverage the reliable and cost effective systems that you have created to enable all parts of the business to optimise the current core business model. This enablement will take two main forms. Firstly to use technology to improve operational efficiency through process automation. For many organisations this is likely to lead to a move towards greater process orientation. Secondly, to make better use of your data and information and begin to present this information to key decision makers in a way that will support them to make more effective decisions. Generally, process automation works on business efficiency and therefore cost reduction. Decision effectiveness however tends to work on improvements in sales and margin through better decisions. Both sets of tools operate side by side although they may be more effective in different parts of the business. For example in retail, process automation works best in operational areas such as supply chain and store operations whereas decision effectiveness is the tool of choice for our merchandising teams.

While this level of the hierarchy is not characterised as providing competitive differentiation the reality is that very few organisations truly optimise their existing models. As a result you are likely to begin to gain significant competitive advantage within your market place as you work through the process of optimising your existing business model.

Finally a quick note on the skills you require within your IS team. When the focus is on the first two layers of the hierarchy the primary skills you want in your team is great technologists who know how to really make your IS systems hum. As you move into business enablement however the core skill set changes. Yes you will still need great technologists but now your focus is on proactively teaming with other departments. This means you will need some new skill within your IS team. Specifically, you will need to build a deep understanding of how the business works and adds value to your customers (ie how it makes money). Indeed, the IS team needs to understand the business and how it operates as well as their colleagues in the departments they are engaging with. Only then will they begin to engage with you proactively as peers and in a strategic way.

Competitive Differentiation

Having worked with your colleagues to get the most out of your existing business model the door is now open to begin to look at ways to either change your business model or introduce new business models that will substantially change the basis of competition within your industry. This is where all the industry hype says you should be but it is a place that few achieve, especially few for large traditional industry incumbents. Honestly I do not really know what happens at this level of the hierarchy as we haven't achieved this and are some way off getting to here (our current focus is business enablement). I do believe however that when you seriously focusing on new business models there is a lot more at play than simply technology. For example the role of disruptive technology and the difficulty that incumbents have in nurturing disruptive technology will need to be examined. I am a fan of the work that Clayton Christensen has done in this area.

So, that's my version of the IS hierarchy of needs. It plays a major role in our IS strategy, what we do day to day and how we explain why we do what we do in IS. The hierarchy of needs philosophy is beginning t be picked up by other parts of our business. They are looking at the technology and asking how they can apply it to their parts of the business so we are starting to get a shared development language across the business.

Another key part of how we operate is the concept of persistent
needs. That is focusing on those issues that are ever present no
matter how good or bad you may be. I will explore this topic and how
it relates to the hierarchy of needs in more detail in a future post.

Finally some acknowledgements. None of the ideas presented here are really mine. Pretty much everything is borrowed. While I have acknowledged two key sources being the work of Abraham Maslow and Stephen Covey the reality is that this thinking is the result of many ideas from many sources and many tangential thoughts. While I was developing this framework I thought the final outcome was unique. I have since discovered that a number of other people have taken the ideas of Maslow in particular and applied them to IS. This includes Stephen Sheinheit CIO for Metlife, Cathy Harris from Gartner and Claude Durand from Osiatis.

It is very reassuring to me that others have reached similar conclusions as it provides a source of validation to my thinking. To the extent that I have inadvertently borrowed someone else's ideas, thank you for helping me on my journey and I apologise if it has caused you angst as it was unintentional.

Guide the Passion

2008-08-31T18:39:00.000+12:00

During the last Christmas holidays our family choose to tour the South Island. So we packed up the family, including the dog, and set off from Auckland for the South Island. It started with a trip to Granny’s, in Tapanui for Christmas and ended at Grandma’s in Nelson for a classic Kiwi summer holiday. It was an amazing trip with one of the highlights being the West Coast and Franz Josef in particular.

We stayed with the Tinirau’s who operate a small bed and breakfast just out of Franz. Their dedication to us and ensuring we enjoyed our stay was amazing. This story however is not about their customer service but rather a lesson in leadership I received from Ryan, my 5 year old son.

We decided to spend the day walking into the glacier terminal. Haka Tinirau hosted and guided us on our walk. The trip begins with a short bush walk. As is often the case with family outings everything started out extremely well. The children were keen and striding out in front. As we walked along there were frequent stops as we were introduced to the native flora and fauna along the track. It looked like the start of a great day. It wasn’t long before we broke out of the bush and the river bed opened up before us.

We stopped and took in the view. The river bed was huge and strewn with massive boulders that the glacier and floods had pulled out of the mountain. The river ran along the right hand edge of the valley. It was swift and a dirty milky colour full of glacial dirt and rock. The track we had to follow was clearly set out on the very right hand fringe and off we set. Well most of us did. Ryan saw the large rocks and immediately began to climb up on them, and jump off (as a five year old boy does). “Daddy” he called “can you help me down?”. He was up on top of a large boulder, about 5 feet up. I grabbed his hands and swung him down. He was rapped!!!! Off he went to the next rock and up he climbed. “Daddy, swing me down”. I did. He burst out laughing, an exuberant, incredibly loud “ha ha” and away he ran to start the cycle all over again.

His passion was infectious so off we went. The only problem, he was heading left. The track and the rest of the family were heading right. We were already well behind and in no way going in the right direction. “Ryan” I called, “we need to catch up with Mum.”

“One more time Daddy”. It was a statement not question.

“OK but then we need to catch up to the others”. Away he went and found another great rock. It wasn’t hard, there were plenty to choose from!!! Up he went and down he swung. This is life and he could do this all day, which is exactly what bothered me. The others were getting further ahead. Come on Ryan lets go and catch up with the others. He happily grabbed my hand and off we went. Maybe 10 yards later he dropped my hand and was off in the wrong direction clambering up a rock!! This one was not so big so off he jumped landing beautifully and at full speed away to the next rock.

“Ryan, you’re going the wrong way mate. Mum and the others are over there. Come on”. He looked at me and I could see the struggle on his face. The rocks, so much fun or do what Dad has asked?

I gave him a look “come on”. He sighed bowed his head and came over. I offered him my hand and off we went trying to catch up.

We had gone maybe 100 metres. He was getting slower and slower. Suddenly he throws himself in front of my legs arms extended “I’m tired, carry me”.

I looked at him. He was listless and pathetic. All that went through my head was it’s 5kms and there is no way I am carrying this child!!! “No I’m not carrying you. You can walk”

“But Daddy I’m tired, carry me”.

I physically move him out the way grabbed his hand “come on let’s go”. So much energy one second complete exhaustion the next. I shock my head in disbelief. Kids!! Off we trod. Every few steps it was the same cycle.

“Daddy carry me”.

“No you can walk.”

Then suddenly he was off at full speed up onto a rock and ready for me to swing him off. I gave him an exasperated look but grabbed his hands and swung him off. Off he charged in the wrong direction to the next rock. I called after him “Ryan you’re going the wrong way. We need to go this way. Come on.” His head dropped. Suddenly he was tired again. I could feel myself getting frustrated (frustration is my negative emotion of choice!!). I opened my mouth ready to growl when it hit me.

“Ryan” I said. “Can you see where Mum and the girls are?”

“Yes.”

“Well we need to go that way and catch them up. How many rocks can you climb on between here and Mummy?”

He paused and then ran full tilt towards his mother. Found a rock and climbed up! “One!” he yelled

“Awesome”. I grabbed him and swung him down. “Where’s Mummy now? Can you find another rock on the way to Mummy?”

Off he went at full throttle. Found a rock and up he went. This one was small so off he jumped and away he went, in the wrong direction!! “Ryan, towards Mummy remember!!”

He stopped momentarily and then off he set going in the right direction. Big rocks, little rocks, boulders. He was having a blast. Going in the right direction and catching up fast. As I walked along with him, swinging him off sometimes and others not I was also having a great time. Not just because I wasn’t carrying him, but his joy and energy were infectious.

Soon enough we caught up with the rest of the family. Ryan continued to climb up rocks and jump off. It wasn’t long until Sarah, his older sister, noticed and joined in. The laughter, enthusiasm and joy captured everyone. Soon our oldest two children Emily and Katie noticed. They joined in sometimes climbing rocks, sometimes swinging their younger siblings off.

This carried on all the way to the glacier terminal and all the way back. At the terminal we all had a great time with the ice and posing for pictures!!

Later I reflected on what a great day we had and I wondered why? Why was this day so great? My mind went to that moment where I choose to stop trying to control Ryan and make him do things my way and instead found a way to use his enthusiasm and passion to get us along the path we needed to go. Not only did this mean that Ryan had a great time but so did everybody else as we all got caught in his energy. I need to remember this and use it again and again with Ryan. What learning.

As I let the triumph sink I heard myself thinking, “You know, you do this at work as well.”

“What?”

“Kill people’s passion by trying to make them do things your way!”

It was true I did. This wasn’t about parenting this was about me and my leadership style. Trying to be in control had infected all parts of my life not just my relationship with Ryan.

I began to see many instances where I had been killing my team’s passion by trying to make them do things my way. I resolved there and then to begin to look for ways to guide people’s passions at work rather than crushing them. What a difference it would make.

I wouldn’t need to explain everything and passionate people don’t need to be managed they just go. They do need to be guided so they remain on track but they don’t need to be managed. My job then is not to manage them and their tasks but to guide them on how to use their passions more effectively for themselves, the team and the company as a whole.

“Ummm” I muttered, “I think I now understand one of the differences between leadership and management.”

Potential Solutions to Violence

2008-07-22T21:44:00.000+12:00

There are many many books written on how to lead and create change. Of all the books that I have read on this topic the framework that appears to be the strongest to me is presented by the authors of Influencer. This book sets out a simple and intuitively appealing approach to creating change.

Step 1. Focus on Vital Behaviours. In most change efforts people tend to focus on the outcome they want to produce. Influencer recommends focusing on behaviours that need to change. Not just any behaviour but a limited number of high leverage behaviours, typically the most difficult to change, so that when they are changed it will cause a significant ripple effect.

Step 2. Make Change Inevitable by utilising as many influencing strategies as possible. They identify 6 key sources of leverage working on a persons motivation to change and their perceived ability to change across personal motivation, social enablers and structural enablers.

So how would you apply this model to the issue of violence?

Identify Vital Behaviours.

What makes a vital behaviour vital and how do you "discover" them? On the Influencer website, David Maxfield one of the book authors says that a vital behaviour has three critical characteristics:

It leads directly to the desired results.
It breaks a self-defeating cycle.
It is likely to be the toughest and most obnoxious part of the problem and so solving this solves a bundle of other behaviours as well.

He also recommends 2 critical steps to identify vital behaviours. They are look for crucial moments where cycles are repeated or broken and look for positive deviants - people who are succeeding against the odds.

In my previous piece I wrote about the result of some basic research I had done on the causes of violence. What I discovered is that no one really knows what causes violence. There are many things that correlate with violence, for example experiencing violence and abuse, poverty and a perception of abandonment, however identifying one or several causes is elusive. I speculated (with some support from literature) that the explanation for this is that the critical factor is not what has happened to a person but how the person perceives what has happened and how they react to it. In particular a persons ability to express and "complete" unresolved emotions is critical. If you cannot resolve the emotional state then you tend to suppress the negative energy. If you do this enough it is likely to erupt! With this as a framework the correlations to violence be gets violence, poverty etc are reasonably explainable. The more intense the event the harder it is to resolve. Correlated yes but not causal as there is a way to change the outcome. Through completion of the associated emotional reaction.

So if we do not know the causes of violence how can we identify critical behaviours? While I am not certain the following seem like a good place to start:

Make domestic violence unacceptable
Develop active parenting skills
Build emotional resilience, and self esteem

Make Domestic Violence Unacceptable

Within New Zealand we too often see something going on that doesn't seem right but rather than act we turn away because "it is none of our business!!". This happens all the time. Maybe it is bullying, maybe it's a fight of some kind, maybe it is verbal abuse maybe it is the constant fighting, crashing and beating next door!!! While we do not support the behaviour by doing nothing and "turning a blind eye" we create an environment where we make it acceptable and allow it to continue. I am not advocating that you put yourself into harms way however the message needs to be loud and clear - violence is not acceptable, it cannot be allowed to continue and we need to take action to demonstrate this every time we encounter it so everyone gets the message!

Develop Active Parenting Skills

Various studies have found that many delinquent teenagers are not consistently supervised. More importantly studies have found that for children growing up in very disadvantaged and violent neighbourhoods, who look like they have everything going against them, the one factor that seems to protect that child from growing up to be violent is having a parent--overwhelmingly, a mother--who supervises her child very strictly and who nips misbehaviour in the bud, rather than waiting for the principal to call or the police officer to knock on the door (H. Wilson, "Parenting in Poverty,"). It appears then that active parenting can help to break the cycle.

Build Emotional Resilience

The literature suggests that violence is usually a result of suppressed emotions bubbling to the surface and lashing out. Unfortunately suppressing emotions is something kiwi's, particularly kiwi men, specialise in. We are taught to suppress our emotions, "get yourself together and be a man." For abusers as long as these emotions remain unresolved the violence is likely to reoccur. For the abused if they are not able to complete and resolve the emotions attached to being abused or witnessing abuse then there is a heightened chance of repeating the cycle!! We can break this cycle by teaching people how to positively (or harmlessly) express their emotions.

Motivational Strategies.

So what motivational strategies can we use to make change inevitable. As with the vital behaviours I am not certain but here are some suggestions:

Drive a publicity campaign that talks about violence, and it's unacceptability and what alternatives there are. It addresses what can be done if you are the abuser, the abused or a witness of the abuse. An example of this type of campaign that has already begun in New Zealand and is getting results is "It's not OK!". We need to roll this out to all communities and repeat as often as needed,
There are a number of examples overseas of media programming that has set up a storyline and characters who are the perpetrators and victims of violence. These characters are "normal people". During the course of the story the community of friends intervene to stop the violence. In one of these documented in "Influencer" the neighbours gathered outside the home of the abuser as he was beating his wife and banged pots and pans together. This let them know in a safe way that they knew what was going on and that it was unacceptable. After this episode was aired communities across the country spontaneously began the same technique!
Teach/show people how to deal with negative emotions and negative situations in a positive way. There are many ways this could be done. Some examples:

anger management courses
counselling for offenders and victims
skills development through education. Examples might include Stephen Covey's 7 Habits, Crucial conversations (by the authors of Influencer), and courses/events such as stepUP the Landmark Forum or school programmes such as though documented by the University of Colorado's Blueprints for violence prevention
self help and peer support "institutions". By far my favourite model is that used by Delancey Street. Imagine the power of teens supporting each other to build new skills, break the cycle of violence and build genuine and powerful leadership skills. (watch this space. I think we should do this one!!)

Improve parenting skills especially active parenting (ability, personal/social). There are a number of great organisations out there who are working on parenting issues. These include the Grant's Parents Inc, DIY Father, and the more established Plunket and many others.

So even though this is probably incomplete it provides a lot of ways to start. If your reading this and are wondering what can I do. Pick one. Any one. It all helps.

Causes of Violence

2008-06-03T07:22:00.000+12:00

Several months ago my family and I resolved that our vision is to create a society in New Zealand where everyone can feel safe and loved. As a result of this over the past several months I have been investigating what are the causes of violence and abuse as it is highly unlikely that you can feel safe and loved while you are under the threat of violence and abuse. This investigation has taken me down many paths and many views. The literature and opinions I have researched suggest there is no easy definitive answer to what causes violence. Many factors correlate but a causal link has proven elusive. For example see this article on "risk factors" for youth violence from the USA Centre for Disease Control (Note also the protective factors). In the end however most commentators seem to believe the core causes of violence are likely to be:

Bad role models. This starts in the home and in the family. If you grow up in an environment where violence and abuse is the norm then it is highly likely that as you grow up and get more physical power that you will act this way as this is what was modeled for you. While role modeling starts in the home, bad role models go beyond the home and can come from anywhere in society. In this context a role model is anyone or anything that has a significant impact on a person. It maybe a teacher, a sports star, a social worker, a coach, a TV show, a computer game, or any other person or thing who forges a connection either intentionally or not. Any positive role model can help to turn a life around. Yes they have to overcome the conditioning of the home but it is possible as pretty much everyone craves connection and love. The main hurdle is establishing trust as a basis for influence. This sounds simple but if your experience is violence and abuse then you will likely believe that no one can be trusted so building trust takes time and patience.

The problem is that for many people, young people in particular, the only role models they have outside of the home come from the media and games. While I am no psychologist it doesn't take a lot of imagination to consider that if you come from an abusive home and your main release is Grand Theft Auto that this only serves to reinforce violence, abuse and drugs as an acceptable, indeed normal lifestyle.

Feeling alone, as if no one cares. This may occur as a result of violence and abuse but this is certainly no prerequisite. The key issue here is not reality but what the person feels. If they feel abandoned, then they feel abandoned. If they are abandoned but don't feel it then they aren't. This can lead to violence as a person feels that there are no consequences for themselves or for other people. Although this can lead to violence it can also lead to depression and suicide. Violence being an external expression or flash point. Depression being a withdrawal. Indeed one can lead to another and a vicious cycle can be created (see silence/Violence ).

There is a growing concern that we are raising a generation of teens who feel abandoned. This trend is being driven by significant changes in the structure of the family and while it is not PC to say so the rise of two income families. Traditionally parental responsibilities within the family were split. One parent would primarily work outside the home and be responsible to provide for the economic needs of the family. The other parent would work primarily within the home and be the main care giver and nurturer. Increasingly either both parents are now active in the work force and the role of the primary care giver is "outsourced" to day care centers, nannies and schools ....etc... or there is a single parent. This circumstance can lead to little continuity of care or care where while all physical needs are well catered for emotional needs are neglected. Why is this an issue? Rather than recreate a discussion on which I am no expert, here are a couple of interesting Wikipedia articles on Psychosocial Development and Attachment Theory that point to the importance of children's connection to others, especially their parents while very young.

Inability to resolve highly charged emotions. The bottom line in a lot of the research is we simply do not know the root cause of violence. Yes people who are exposed to violence are more prone to violence however most are not violent. From my research to date the same is true for every possible "risk factor". Yes there are correlations between certain events and conditions but nothing that can be said to be causal. Why? I don't know but one possible answer is that it is not your circumstances that are important but how you interpret them or how you react to them. In particular a persons ability to be able to express and resolve potentially harmful emotions. This may explain why the vast majority of violence is perpetrated by men. Men are basically emotional incompetents whereas woman are much better at expressing and resolving conflict. This thinking is reflected in the silence/violence piece above and also in several other references I have come across.

Well, that's about it. Everything I have learnt, or not learnt about violence. This is very much an initial review as the literature and study on this topic is huge!! The key question however is so what? What do we need to do to make substantial progress towards eliminating violence in our society? This is the subject of another article so watch this space.

Forget being PC - Results Count!

2008-02-26T19:57:00.000+13:00

If you look through history for examples of great leaders they all have 1 thing in common. They have achieved amazing results. I cannot find one person who has achieved nothing or little who is considered a great leader. BAsed on this it seems reasonable to assume that the ultimate measure of leadership is the results that are achieved. Maybe the correlation is not perfect but it is there and it is strong.

To me this is remarkably uncontroversial however as I have talked to others about this many people are horrified at the idea that results are the ultimate measure of leadership. For them the way the result is achieved is just as important if not more important than the results themselves. Generally you can summarise their view as being the means are more important than the ends and the ends do not always justify the means.

This is a moral dilemma and clearly there are cases where the ends do not justify the means. This is particularly true where the freedom to choose is not present or is significantly diminished. Examples of this would include living within a dictatorial or repressive regime or in relationship, especially an abusive relationship, where one party seeks and achieves complete dominance over another. However where there is freedom to choice I wonder about the practical impact of this moral dilemma. If there is freedom people cannot be compelled they must agree to participate.

In a business context which is my primary interest for now no one can be compelled. If they do not like the “means”, the way results are achieved they can and do vote with their feet and leave. If we can accept then a pretext of freedom to choose then ultimately leadership must be judged by the results that are achieved. If this is true then the ultimate leadership question is….

"Is there a recipe or formula that can be used to guarantee, or at least enhance, the chances of achieving the results they desire and therefore leadership success?”

I think there is such a formula. Based on my study to date (which I will admit is somewhat random) here is a starter for 10 on what I think it takes to be a successful leader:

1. Lead yourself. If you are not capable of effectively and constructively leading yourself how can you lead others? The best exposition of this that I have read is Stephen Covey's 7 Habits.

2. Articulate your purpose or mission (why you exist) and your values (what's important to you).

3. Get clear on what you want to achieve (vision and goals) and on how you will know if you are successful (measures).

4. Work out what needs to be done to get you from where you are today to achieving your goals (strategy). Monitor progress using the measures and adjust your actions as required.

5. Enrol others to join you on the journey and to contribute everything they can to ensure the success of the journey. Two great books on this that I have read lately are:
• The 4 Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni
• Intrinsic Motivation at Work by Kenneth Thomas.

6. Don't give up until you succeed. Stay true to the vision but adjust your actions based on your results until you get there.

Living Inside Out

2008-02-04T21:23:00.000+13:00

Over the last 12 months or so I have been lucky enough to complete a number of "personal development" programs and events. Each of these was different and I played very different roles fro participant to coach to leader of the team. One of concepts that has really stayed with me and changed my outlook on life has been the concept of "be, do have" as a driving force for how to live life. It is not the first time that I have been exposed to this concept (one of the best is Stephen Covey's 7 Habits) but it really stuck with me. This happened when I was at StepUp and at once I understood that I had been living my life the wrong way round. I have subsequently built on this understanding so that for the first time I now believe I understand the power of identity to shape my experience in life.

What exactly do I mean by living my life the wrong way round? Well I spend large parts of my life focusing on what I what to have. As I reflect on this I think this is a reflection of my and societies focus on goals and achieving goals. Focusing on goals isn't bad but actually if all you do is focus on the goal this doesn't actually help you to achieve the goal. An example. Those who know me probably privately wonder why I never address the issue of my excessive weight. The reality of my life is I think about this all the time and over the years I have created many very detailed goals and images of how I would like my body to look. As I look back some of these goals or images are quite funny and embarrassing. At one stage the six million dollar man loomed large because why wouldn't you want to be able to run at 60 miles per hour!!! One thing you can be certain of is none of these images had excess body fat!! . As I get older and thought I knew more about goal setting this process became quite sophisticated. You could guarantee I had SMART goals!! (SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time bound). But here I am not the trim bloke of my visions!!

So why didn't I achieve my goal. The answer probably seems obvious - I didn't actually do anything!!! Or to be more precise I didn't do anything different than I had been doing previously or if I did I didn't keep it up or do it well enough!! So focusing on what you want to have is useless unless it translates into consistent action to achieve. No let's reconsider. Focusing on your goals is worse than useless unless it leads to action. Worse than useless because as you focus on what you want to have, you come to inescapable conclusion that your life is not what it should be or that you want it to be!!! If this sense of lacking is a consistent experience it's depressing. Ever noticed that when you are depressed or in my case perhaps more realistically "a little down" the last thing you think about doing is taking serious action to achieve something. As time goes by and the goal doesn't happen you begin to realise you're unlikely to ever have it and you give up. What a BUMMER that feeling is!!

So focusing on what you want to have is great but getting it requires that you do something. Actually it requires that you do whatever it takes to achieve the goal!! So how do you get yourself to do something?? Knowledge is not enough. I know what I need to do to loose weight and create the body and energy levels I want. Indeed we all know. Eat less (and more healthily) and exercise more. It's a basic law of the universe - energy in minus energy out equals’ weight gain or weight loss.

So how do I get myself to act? Perhaps more precisely who would I need to be in order to do things that need to be done to have the result? I pondered this problem for quite some time with no real success. Then it hit me!! The insanely simple truth is I would have to be the type of person who exercised more and ate less!! So what's stopping me?? This answer came quickly. I am not the sort of person who exercises quickly and who wants to eat good nutritious food!! It is not how I see myself. Yes I have just discovered the power of identify. Who you believe you are governs who you are!!

This raises two big questions. Who do I actually believe I am? How do I change who I think I am (and do I really want to)? This is too much for one little story and I am not sure I actually know the answer!!! For now however I have a breakthrough - live life from the inside out - BE-DO-HAVE.

Short Thoughts on Leadership

2008-01-20T12:05:00.000+13:00

Over the past year or so I have been reading and thinking a lot about leadership. The catalyst for this came from a number of sources. Firstly our company invests a lot of money on performing employee engagement surveys. My teams level of engagement was terrible and it seems that no matter what I did it would not improve. Secondly it became aparent to me that while I didn't see myself as a leader (the whole concept made me quiver with fear) other people did. So I thought best I find out some more about this. The short results of my search to date:

The Essence of Leadership

Play to peoples strengths.
Be a role model.
Ensure everyone knows what's important and what we are aiming to achieve then let them make their own decisions on how things are to be done to make this happen.
Performance measures are a powerful way of showing people what is important.
a. Set the direction.
b. Celebrate progress.
c. Coach and mentor
Set expectations of trust based on demonstrated trustworthiness and an individuals personal growth goals
Support and coach people on their journey. Remember you can't travel for them (or it's not their journey)!
Remember that ultimately great leadership is measured by the results achieved.
Great leaders grow based on their extraordinary strengths not their lack of weakness.

So a starter for 10. Maybe I'll add some more thoughts on leadership later.