Chris Weston - Making IT Work @chrisweston - Tumblr Blog

The idiot’s guide to Y2k.

I was reading the news this evening and I came across a quote from the Member of Parliament for the 1930s, Jacob Rees-Mogg. He said that the consequences of Brexit were being overstated "like the millennium bug".

As someone that spent a fair amount of time researching risks to the IT world from the vote to leave the EU, and who had worked on the Y2k issue, this gave me cause to shout forth a series of unpleasant words. I don't want to go into those Brexit issues here - I have in previous posts. But I do want to go back over Y2k, and why the likes of Rees-Mogg think they way they do. Think of this as your own special guide, Jacob.

For those that are too young to remember, or were unaware of the techie problems, it went a bit (ha!) like this.

Once upon a time, computer memory was expensive. I mean, really expensive. If you try to buy a one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) memory stick today, you'll struggle to find one that small and it might cost you a pound. In 1980 it would cost over $6 million dollars for that kind of memory. And it wouldn't fit in God's pocket, never mind yours.

In 1990 that came down to about $100,000. And that's when a hundred grand was a hundred grand ;) So, we live in a time when storage for computer software, the space it gets to play in when it runs on your computer, is as near to free as makes no odds. The amount of storage for files, documents, pictures, videos etc is also vanishingly small. (The cost of managing it all is another matter, by the way!).

So it's hard for us to remember the time when programmers had to find innovative ways to fit computer programmes into memory not measured in gigabytes, but megabytes and even kilobytes. The early version of Excel at the top of this article tells a story, check out the free memory on that Mac :)

Back then, every character was precious. If you didn't need to use up extra memory for no reason, you didn't. Especially if that was in data that repeated. Lots of dates were stored in the format YYMMDD. This means 1st September 1971 would be 710901. This is really easy to sort into date order, and why would you bother putting the 19 in front of 71? Every date had a 19 in it. And if you had 10000 rows of data that was 20000 extra characters (20k out of your 303k free).

So, if you were writing software in the 1980s, or even 1990s, when the year 2000 was a long way off, and you didn't expect your software to be in use by then, you could be excused for leaving off the first two digits of the year.

The problem with this of course is that some software hangs around for longer than expected (before you even start thinking about "embedded" software in devices). And newer software often has to use or understand conventions used by older software in order to be compatible. So the 'millennium bug' lived in our computers for a long time. We knew about it - I first read about the problem at university in the early 90s. But the reality of business is that nobody wants to spend money on tomorrow's problems. (See Climate Change).

Around 1996 things really started to happen - some failures had been reported on systems booking future dates and governments were taking action. The UK government set up a new agency to deal with the problem and in 1997 a new administration increased the funding. It was also raised at the G8 summit in 1998.

Microsoft released tools to help scan computers for date issues, some of you might remember this -

I was working as a programmer in the late 90s and spent many a happy (ahem) hour fixing date bugs in my employer's works management system. They ranged from the two-year date issue I described previously, through strange date calculations and even finding ways that people had found to use dates (11/11/11 for example), to denote unusual records. All needed fixing.

This happened all around the world. Every system of importance had an owner and most got fixed or replaced, because the alternative was bad. Here is one example.

Chrysler Corp. shut down its Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in mid-1997 and turned the plant’s clocks to December 31, 1999.

“We got a lot of surprises. Nobody could get in or out of the plant. The security system absolutely shut down and wouldn’t let anyone in or out. And you couldn’t have paid people because the time clock systems didn’t work.”

Chrysler Chairman Robert Eaton.

But despite this testing, fixing and replacing there were many failures. Guess what, companies don't shout from the rooftops every time their systems fail. We do know about a lot of them, from banks in the USA to transport systems in Japan. An example from the UK was when new born babies were given birth certificates with 1900 printed on them.

But overall the effort to mitigate the Y2k problem was a success. It took a lot of work, and it cost a lot of money. Much of this was bringing forward investment in new systems, rather than exceptional extra spend. Of course, lots of people took advantage of the problem. For people selling business software it gave them to opportunity to play on people's fears. Lots of software and consultancy was sold that was unneccesary. But, this doesn't change the fact that the problem was real and took a big effort to fix.

Those that have the luxury of experiencing the non-event can be forgiven for not understanding the complexity. But when they dismiss facts as fake, when they try to use a simplistic narrative to justify their narrow beliefs, it is important to look at the history behind their claims.

We live in the age of Digital Transformation. If there's a phrase that's overused in my LinkedIn feed, it's that one. Articles about why it's so difficult, articles about why it's essential. Jobs looking for Digital Transformation experts. People describing themselves the same way looking for jobs.

I'm not going to poke fun at this trend, since if I want to shoot fish in a barrel I can write about Amber Rudd and encryption, or Donald Trump and anything. The fact is that we are, as always, evolving and transforming our businesses in reaction to changing customer needs. We are sometimes moving to a point ahead of the curve, if we're very brave. And today this is often driven by something we're calling 'digital'.

Since I've been around the block a few times, I can say that I've seen it all before, in that depressing way that experienced people do. My first job after leaving university saw me implementing (and writing half of) a system to automatically schedule maintenance engineers, using mobile data technology (pre-gprs!). That was 'digital transformation', even if it was 20 years ago.

Every time I've done a similar thing I've come across objections by people that don't want to change the way they do things. And they have great reasons. They are often passionate about what they do. They have built a way of working that fits them and their customers. They have been successful. And then some arrogant kid tells them there is a better way.

The kid is perplexed at these attitudes - there really is a better way, it makes the whole organisation work more effectively. It gives management better information. This allows them to make more informed decisions. And the changes needed by individuals are small. Irrelevant, in the great scheme of things.

For the people experiencing the change, these things are not small. They are important. They represent their individuality and their freedom, at the risk of being too grand about it.

How to solve this problem? My strategy is perspective. It's something that we see in astronauts going back to the 1970s through to the present day on the International Space Station. They call it the Overview Effect, and it's so powerful they have built a group called the Overview Institute to communicate their ideas.

This is what they say

For more than four decades, astronauts from many cultures and backgrounds have been telling us that, from the perspective of Earth orbit and the Moon, they have gained such a vision. There is even a common term for this experience: "The Overview Effect"... It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, the astronauts tell us, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.

In our organisations, we don't have to blast people into space, however much we might secretly like to. We can generate this perspective by showing them how our organisation is growing, how important it is to so many people, and how seriously we take its health. This can be difficult for some organisations that are very hierarchical - they don't like to share the view from the lofty perch. But if you can leverage this perspective, it can make those emotional attachments to cherished processes fade much faster than what might seem like a logical, reasoned argument.

When you have passionate, successful people it shouldn't be a surprise if they resist being changed. So a shared perspective might be the most effective tool you have.

What a difference 10 years makes. The Platform-as-a-Service market has grown from (essentially) zero to 12 billion USD worldwide in that time, and back in 2007 Gartner predicted that Software-as-a-Service would reach 11.5 billion USD by the end of 2011 - in fact it was double that, and now that market is estimated to be over a hundred billion US dollars.

The ability to buy software, infrastructure and platforms on a pay-per-use basis has transformed the way organisations think about their technology investments, and the equally rapid increase in sophistication of consumer technology has changed the way employees, customers and supply chains want to interact with businesses around the world.

Businesses now know they have to adapt quickly, provide new ways of consuming and providing data, adjust their business models, pivot and innovate as part of their normal operation. More than ever they look to their IT teams to move out of the back-office shadows and into the role of enablers, and the tools are there to do it.

There is a catch, of course. It's all very well that the capability exists to spin up a Hadoop cluster, or a MongoDB instance, or a hundred Office 365 accounts with Active Directory etc, with the click of a mouse. The question that haunts the IT Director is, who is going to know how to design, implement and manage this stuff? IT budgets are not increasing relative to this new exalted position in the business. I know of few IT leaders outside companies undergoing rapid growth that get more money to spend year-on-year. Yet their requirement for diverse skills is unrelenting. The IT world is increasingly complex, and the all-rounders that can, for example, take a number of those Azure services above and turn them into a working product are very rare. We can't all get all the skills we need in permanent employees - there aren't enough to go around. So we need to find ways to fill those seats in different ways.

Options exist - you can go to a systems integrator who will come and create something for you. It will be expensive, it probably won't be exactly what you wanted, and you'll generally be left with something you don't know how to manage or develop. You can turn to the contract market and pay less, but it's more difficult to do your due diligence on the quality of the people you employ, and your long term options are equally limited.

Nature abhors a vacuum however, and a new breed of service provider is starting to emerge. These provide skilled people as a managed service - mirroring the options available for technology. They have a core team of experienced technologists, a wide range of associates and access to recruitment teams. They take time to understand the businesses they are working with and provide skilled people when they are needed. Skills-as-a-Service may be a clumsy term, but if the conversations I'm having with IT leaders are anything to go by it's an essential component of the world we now inhabit. The 'Gig Economy' gets bad press, because a lot of people find themselves part of it without having any choice in the matter. This is a matter for regulation and government intervention. But those that have scarce, transferable skills are increasingly choosing to join this workforce and make themselves available through value-added skills providers.

As someone who has also made that choice to work independently, I see this evolution happening on a daily basis. I'm working with companies that see and are embracing these changes, and I wonder what will happen to those that don't. I think the gig economy will continue to grow and people will offer their skills on a contingent basis far more commonly in the next few years. Will I look back on this blog in 10 years time and wonder how I could have been so dumb, or will I pat myself on the back for my prescience? Time will tell, as always :)

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I'm working with Jumar Solutions who offer the kind of flexible managed service for technology skills mentioned above. If you think this is an option you'd like to consider for your business, please get in touch. If you're thinking of joining the gig economy and want some advice, shout up.

Find me at http://chainmakerconsulting.com or if you're tired of listening to John Humphrys in the morning check out the podcasts at http://wb40podcast.com or search for WB-40 on iTunes.

Do the following phrases ring any bells?

"We've all had enough of experts"

"The bureaucratic centre is over-complicated and inefficient, we don't get out anywhere near what we pay in"

"We have to struggle day in, day out - those guys are just creating jobs for themselves, I'm not even sure what half of them do, and most of them speak a different language..."

"We'll be better off if we can run our own affairs, we can spend the money better ourselves"

Some people might be thinking 'Brexit'. But for those who work in large organisations it can just as easily apply to an IT function. How many CIOs and IT Directors can remember conversations like this?

Bob from Sales calls. "Hi, we've got a problem here. We have a new CRM system, we've imported all of our customers from the ERP, and we've been using it for a while in one part of the business. It's really great but we need to expand it now, and we want to track emails. The company says it can integrate with our email system but we need you to make it happen. And some of our people have had trouble connecting to it, and when they call the IT service desk they aren't getting any help. That's not really good enough, can you sort it out?"

Often the response will go something like this

"You've done WHAT? What data are you storing in this system!? Where is it located? Are you following our data retention policies? Who has access to it? How long have you committed for? How are you linking the data to our ERP system, how does each system know if some details change? How many users are you expecting - I'll need to man up on the desk, we'll need training etc etc etc"

And Bob hears - 'You've done WHAT? What data are you moan moan moan moan moan moan moan moan whine moan moan'. He sees a person trying to put obstacles in his way, rather like the Daily Mail picture above.

The Brexit situation is similar in many ways. A lot of people are very cross that since we've voted to leave the EU that it hasn't happened already. Many want out immediately. Many want to start the process immediately. But there are lots of obstacles. Firstly, the government has a constitutional puzzle to solve, since it seemed to think that it has the ability to revoke citizens' rights on a whim. Then there are other unfortunate details, such as 40 years of integration of EU law into British law. There are EU budgets set to 2020 that Britain has committed to. There are trade negotiations, pressure from every globalised corporation that sees the chance of putting pressure on the UK (Nissan, JLR being the early leaders) and skills shortages currently being filled by EU citizens.

When 'experts' point these things out, the ardent Brexiteer hears 'Remainers remoan, remoan, remoan, remoan'.

This was the situation on the day after the Brexit vote. Faisal Islam from Sky News...

CIOs will recognise the symptoms. Having been sold an easy answer, the more complex issue of how it is actually implemented comes back to the 'experts' in the end.

I'm ambivalent about the EU, just as I am about corporate IT. Both have inefficiencies, both can seem impenetrable to the wider population. But I'm equally sure that if you want to throw away these things, you need to think it through properly. I don't think we've done that with the EU vote, and it often doesn't happen when businesses go outside their corporate IT teams to buy software and services.

Whatever happens with the Brexit process, we need to learn a lot of lessons - and if you're thinking of buying a software product without involving the IT department, maybe you should think of Faisal Islam beforehand ;-)

I've been talking about the subject of information security weaknesses in smart buildings for a while now, and maybe it's coincidence, or maybe just an example of the Baader-Meinhof effect, but the news around this has appeared to be getting noisier recently. We had a serious botnet attack on the DNS infrastructure at Dyn in October, French hosting company OVH were attacked in September and whilst researching attacks on journalists I found that Google are running a free service called Project Shield, created specifically to protect news media sites from denial-of-service attacks that are becoming a regular feature of online publishing. There is of course a debate to be had about how this puts Google into a position where they protect those they feel worthy of the service - but that's for another day.

My attention was then caught by this story about a German steel mill that suffered damage after their systems were compromised by a phishing email leading to a widespread attack on the plant, including the industrial control systems. Best practice says that this type of equipment is not connected directly to the internet, but this rule of thumb is often ignored, mainly because the systems are diagnosed and/or managed remotely. The assumption that best practice will be followed is a dangerous one.

This vulnerability in cyberspace, caused mainly by poor practice in manufacturing or installing new devices, must cause us to think hard about how we protect data. There is an ever-increasing amount of personal information being gathered about us, which can be used to help us understand our own lives, and make better choices - or it can be used by people or organisations that do not have our interests at heart. So the current debate around the Digital Economy Bill in the committee rooms of Parliament is an interesting, and important one. One of the key proposals of the bill is to allow sharing of individuals' data between government departments. This is a good thing in many ways and could lead to better service provision and reduced replication of services in the civil service machine. The bill also makes provision for mandatory age checking for certain websites, notably pornography. Again there are laudable reasons for this, but what this essentially becomes is a porn-viewers register. Once all this information is stored and shared, where are the controls on *how* it is shared?

The bill allows for information to be shared for 'research' in the public interest, and there are no definitions of who would be carrying out this research or what the definition of 'public interest' is in this case. Given that the National Audit Office report into how government protected our data last year recorded 8,995 data breaches by the 17 largest departments in 2014/15, I believe it's fair to question the competence of the government to manage such large amounts of aggregated data at this point in time.

This all points to a need for companies and individuals to take a serious look at how they manage their information and the systems that process it. The GDPR regulation coming into force in 2018 provides for fines of up to €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover - whichever is greater - for data breaches of personal data, and breaches must be notified within 72 hours.

Understanding this world and building coherent strategies for managing data is not impossible, but it does need a conscious decision and consistent effort. If you don't think you've got a handle on it today, my advice is to start thinking about it tomorrow.

Is IT Business Partnering working for you?

There has been a fashion in corporate IT to utilise IT Business Partnering as a way of getting 'closer to the business' - ensuring the IT team are working in alignment with the organisation as a whole. This is often a good model if the organisation has many diverse business areas with specific requirements and challenges. As the advance of consumer technologies removes barriers to entry and lowers investment costs for new entrants it could well be argued that in large organisations this is critical to future success, or indeed survival.

Ideally, the Business Partner works alongside the business areas, supporting and advising their strategic and operational decision-making. This should include providing strategic insights based on industry and technology trends and competitor information. In order to do this the BP has to wear a commercial hat as well as a technology one and in that guise should be 'mini CIO'.

So why do these efforts often fall so far short of their aims? These are several behaviours that can signal a problem -

The BP is seen to be 'going native', beating up their IT colleagues on behalf of their customer.

The BP is used as an 'order taker', collecting requirements from the business area but not advising or shaping the demand.

Frustrated by a lack of delivery from central IT, the BP builds a 'shadow IT' capability, circumventing the core team

The BP becomes a project manager, delivering IT with or without the core IT function

Any of these are a sure sign that the process is failing, and this can be for a number of reasons. Often it is down to a lack of direction in prioritisation of projects, or a misunderstanding in the IT team of what their objective really is. All of these behaviours can be extremely costly if not managed effectively.

Business Partners must build relationships with their key operational stakeholders and the CIO in order to help the prioritisation process and also to manage expectations on all sides. It is a role that requires technical knowledge, strategic planning, market awareness and diplomacy. Above all it needs communication skills. I believe one of the key tasks any BP should complete when they begin this role is a strategic plan for the consumption of all parties. It should explain the role of the business unit, the commercial expectations placed upon it by the board (growth, costs, etc) and how it is going to achieve those things - and how technology is going to support those activities. It should give an overview of the market, what IT is used by competitors and the technological aspirations of the business. It should be written in language that is understandable to all stakeholders and of course it must be written in conjunction with those stakeholders.

By creating and maintaining this document, the rules of the game are established and the Business Partner has a framework on which to build. All too often this information is missing, leading to a sense of frustration in the core IT team who don't understand the problem they are being asked to solve, and bewilderment in the business team who do not appreciate the complexity of the enterprise IT landscape.

The role of an IT Business Partner is not an easy one, but with careful planning it can be a successful and rewarding one, for the individual but also for the CIO and the business teams they are supporting.

Almost the first thing that I saw this morning on looking at Twitter was what seemed like a new dawn for the Australian Girlie Magazine market, the first gay edition of Penthouse in that country. As it turns out, it's merely a disgruntled employee (probably ex-employee if not then but definitely now) with the Twitter username and password.

The 'hacking' or more usually stealing, of corporate social media accounts is not new, but there are often so few processes around storing and using the credentials it's hardly surprising it happens a lot.

A few years ago I saw a presentation from a national UK restaurant chain, a young marketing executive gave a very good account of how they'd formed a team to man their Twitter account, search for mentions, engage with customers and generally improve their brand. I caught up with her afterwards, impressed that the business had seen fit to invest the hundreds of thousands of pounds necessary to keep that team going and (presumably) see measurable output.

The conversation rather came to a sticky end when I asked how they secured that investment - how were they ensuring that someone didn't change the password, change the twitter handle, and steal the followers? Or maybe worse, post unwanted messages as with our friend from Penthouse Australia? I genuinely thought that such a significant investment would have some protection around it. The embarrassed and irritated response told its own story.

Even in 2016 corporate governance is yet to really understand the power, good and bad, of social media and how it is managed, but if you're investing good money in promoting and managing your brand, why would you be amateurish about how it is protected?

Disruption is coming to Facilities Management - five key technologies that show how

Over the last few years we have witnessed the phenomenal success of a taxi company that doesn't own taxis, Uber; a website that doesn't generate its own content, Facebook; and an accommodation business that doesn't own any hotels, AirBnB.

A new paradigm for business is evolving because of technology. It is a time of opportunity: disruptive strategies in all sorts of markets are coming to the fore. Marc Dowd, a highly respected technology commentator, describes these as “vectors of disruption”. Taking this concept and applying it to facilities management reveals both the threats and the possibilities. Here are the five vectors of disruption that as a combination of factors will change the way FM is approached. The first is the Internet of Things. This is generally defined as ‘a network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate, sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment’. Or, to put it another way, kit that tells you when it needs fixing. The number of devices that are now fitted with interfaces for remote management and status reporting is growing all the time as this technology becomes more cost-effective. Almost all air-conditioning units on the market today have this capability. Aftermarket sensor equipment can be inexpensively fitted to older assets. Whereas building management systems have been linked to a relatively small number of assets in the past, the entire estate will increasingly be connected to a central control point. Almost in parallel with the increasing connectedness of assets is the remarkable leap forward in both functionality and reduced cost of Business Intelligence tools. BMS systems have arguably not fulfilled their potential in the past, even with the small number of systems connected to them, because the data they provide is not easily understood and sometimes not even readily available. The increased connectivity of IoT, combined with new BI tools, allows us to analyse and predict based on condition monitoring information in far greater depth than ever before. ‘Machine learning’ can help us predict failure based on a wide range of factors without manual intervention. Not only can this data tell us when to intervene, it can also tell us when to suspend maintenance activity during anticipated periods of high utilisation and predict occupants' needs for light, heat and other services. BI tools also allow us to understand the impact of tactical changes in preventative maintenance scheduling. For example, PPM is traditionally managed on a duty cycle basis (check it after 1000 hours of use) or on a calendar basis (check it every 3 months). New analysis now allows us to modify our PPM activity to the individual asset. The third vector of disruption is the ubiquitous nature of Smartphones. The smartphone is a component of the Internet of Things, providing data about its owner and their environment. The evidence of the last few years is that people want to use their smartphones to access services, and in many cases people prefer to use their own devices rather than rely on those provided by their employer. Organisations that exploit this phenomenon are stealing a march on their markets. If we take it as read that everyone carries a device that can take a picture, and send and receive information, it is possible to provide far better details of reactive issues. This means we can send the right people with the right skills to fix the problem first time. Engineers can call up historical information, equipment help sheets, COSHH info, indeed a staggering amount of relevant data that can help them make a first-time fix more often. Not so long ago this required PDA devices that were slow and had poor screen capabilities. Now we can use HD images and video, and access 4G internet in more areas than ever before. Number four – Social Media. Combined with smart phones and ready internet access, social media provides unique insight about our clients and their customers. Organisations are actively managing their brands on social media platforms to protect their reputations. People now find that if they interact with a company using Twitter or Facebook, they are far more likely to get a response than if they call a contact centre or send an email. FM companies that can see this opportunity can track these systems to get feedback on their own performance. For example, monitoring tweets to food retailers will unearth many complaints about the state of stores. An FM company that is proactive will suggest ways to prevent these problems. This may also produce opportunities to up-sell extra services on the basis of protecting a brand. Social media works because communities form around things like events, locations, families or alumni groups. The community in an office block or a hospital is no different. They're now using social media tools to look for information, comment or complain, and as FM providers it's up to us to be part of those communities. The fifth vector of disruption is known as the API economy. APIs are the way modern computer systems talk to each other and share their data. FM companies collect a lot of data (e.g. energy, waste, utilisation), which has value to them, but it also has value to other organisations. By using API technology to share this information, whether selling it or giving it away, we can produce a better outcome for our customer. Our supply chain can use it to better inform their own investment or manufacturers to improve product design. This technology also allows us to link our systems with those of our customers and suppliers. The ability to integrate systems to reduce error and improve efficiency will be a common customer requirement in future. This is not an exhaustive list, and in six months it will be out of date. The FM industry has not always embraced technological innovation but these are societal changes that cannot be ignored. Organisations that can build these disruptors into their business model will put themselves at a great advantage. We should all be up for that challenge.

This article first appeared here on the I-FM website. I wrote it on behalf of my employer, Bellrock Property & FM, the best and most innovative Facilities Management company in the world.

Are you an Angry CIO?

Over the years I've met a lot of IT leaders. I like to network, to find out what others are doing, to keep my knowledge of the market up to date. I'd far rather find out what mistakes others have made before I blunder into the same traps, and happily share my own triumphs and failures for the same reason.

There are many different kinds of men and women (a growing but still disappointingly small number, so I'll stick to the male pronoun) in these roles but the Angry CIO is always somewhere to be found.

The Angry CIO is frustrated by 'the business'. They don't understand his challenges. They aren't 'mature' as an organisation, like the IT team is. They don't see the business opportunities/risks as he does, having his unique view across the organisation. If, and it's a big if, he is on the board, nobody takes any notice of what he says, and IT is always squeezed right to the bottom of the agenda. This guy is not a happy man.

We've all had these frustrations, of course. It's easy to get caught up in them, and feel that you're powerless to change the situation. If you spend time listening to the likes of Gartner they can often make the situation worse. They'll tell you that you've got to get more influence, or chuckle that the IT team has far greater maturity than the rest of the business, or scare you with stories that the marketing team will have more tech budget than IT.

If you suspect you might be an Angry CIO, try to take a step back. What does it feel like to be a customer at your door? What do the rest of the board see when they look down the table at you? Are you gazing with silent pity at the morons that didn't approve your infrastructure upgrade, and that don't understand the difference between IaaS and PaaS no matter how many times you explain it? Have you actually said 'the business isn't mature enough' to the board? (Yes? They're hiring your replacement.) If so, maybe that's the reason people stopped asking for your opinion. Maybe that's the reason they bought that mobile app in marketing without considering the information security issues. Maybe that's the reason they've invited you along to meet a man from a software company that they've already committed to an order with.

Somehow, the Angry CIO has got to become the Friendly CIO. The Patient CIO. The Forgiving CIO. People will always do things that are less than optimal, people will always have emergencies and jump to a poor solution. It's up to IT teams to pick them up, work with them and get them to where they need to be, and if we can't get them where they need to be, at least get them to where they want to be. Yes, we know they're not the same thing. But sometimes that's just the way it is.

It’s the API economy, stupid

Back in 2012 Forbes welcomed us to the API Economy. At that time, Salesforce.com was making over $2bn in revenue from use of its APIs and that’s enough to make Forbes take notice. But Salesforce.com had launched their APIs to the developer community at the turn of the century, along with others such as eBay and Amazon. The UK Government started to publish APIs for digital public data a few years later. So, this is not a movement that has appeared from nowhere, but the recent appearance of affordable cloud services and the fact that smartphones and tablets are almost ubiquitous has suddenly provided the fuel for a genuinely disruptive movement.

It’s not news that we live in an increasingly connected world. Hardly a day goes by when someone doesn’t mention the ‘Internet of Things’ and the 6 trillion dollars the sector will be worth within five years. We’re also in the universe of the ‘lean startup’ where patience is not a virtue, and Minimum Viable Product is the mantra. Integration of data remains an issue when design is something you pretend you’ve done after the fact, but the breathtaking amount of compute power available through cloud services does give us the chance to bash just about any data into submission in the short term, and if your service makes it through the Darwinian world of MVP you can always do it properly in the next release...

So what’s the big deal? With a little bit of imagination and some technical nous, APIs can move a business from being an island, interacting with customers and suppliers in traditional, costly and restrictive ways, to a platform on which customers and suppliers can create and consume the services they need. Platform thinking has permeated business models and now finds an audience in Government too, where the need to find better, more cost effective ways to deliver services and have a smaller cost base is a common problem around the world.

So, APIs and related technologies such as webhooks give us the ability to provide platforms for others to consume our expertise and our data (and for us to provide greater value), and to create tools and services that offer solutions to problems quickly, when the need is greatest. Our challenge is to be imaginative enough to grab the opportunity, wise enough to do it securely, and confident enough in our service to allow it to happen.

When planning an organisation’s strategy for the next 3-5 years, as Bill Clinton very nearly said, “It’s the API economy, stupid”...

Working From Home - Don't Eat Your Brain

The Sea Squirt is a creature that wanders around as a juvenile, looking for a good rock to cling to, where it will stay for therest of its life. When it has found this place, it famously absorbs its own brain, no longer needing this organ. Is there a danger that turning up to the same desk, in the same building, every day, causes us to lose a little of our own minds?

Homeworking has become an almost expected method of working in many organisations and disciplines. People involved in creative work, whether they’re writing code or copy, are often to be found working from home. Accountants, salespeople, researchers, the list goes on. But this isn’t always seen as a good thing, a couple of years ago the subject was suddenly in the news when Yahoo famously banned ‘remote working’. It’s certainly true that it leads to a loss of control – if ‘control’ is your company’s management style then it’s not going to work for them.

I believe there are huge benefits in employees having the option to work from a home, or different office. Traditional workplaces have their roots in industrialisation of administration processes. They do create an environment where ideas and information can be easily shared with colleagues, but they also provide a million distractions, and almost (skirting dangerously close to Pseud’s Corner) place a strait-jacket on the mind – this is how we do things here. Working in different locations makes it easier to think in different ways, approach problems from different angles. It’s not always about solitude – working with different people can provide new inspiration. Movements like #weworkunbound and the related Responsive Org actively promote people linking up and exchanging ideas. These are possibly extreme examples but they demonstrate the point nicely, change makes for better days.

So let’s use some of the the tools we have, such as the amazing (and if you’re over 40 it’s still amazing) transformational ability of the Internet, and the extraordinary power of our own imaginations, to make work better.

#leadership #management

Five Signs Your Change Programme is Doomed

A new manager lands in an organisation with a background of transformation, and a remit to cut costs, improve service, change the model, or whatever other important thing it appears needs to be done. The analysis is completed, to a greater or lesser extent, and a new way of working is envisioned. What can possibly go wrong?

You're implementing a model from your last organisation that worked really well

Yes, I know it was a real success, and that's why you've landed this role. But just because it was right for one organisation, doesn't make it right for another. Many managers carry their operating model around with them from job to job. It's a good one, it's convincing in an interview and/or board meeting, and it costs less than whatever they've got now. All this is great for getting a programme approved, and less than useless when objectively assessing whether it's the right approach for this situation.

The people you're changing are suffering from 'change fatigue'

How many change programmes have your team been subject to in the past five years? Have you asked? Will the change effort require a 'short term push' from people who have been on various 'short term pushes' for most of their time at the organisation? Are you planning to form a change 'champion team' of the brightest and the best to push your new model through? Chances are they've done it before, and everyone knows they're the same bunch that didn't do it last time, whether it was their fault or not. Your story might start to look all too familiar to the people you're hoping to change.

Your leadership haven't been able to properly articulate their strategy and don't expect to help out with your change programme

If you've been employed to change a business unit, division or department, have your leaders been able to articulate the opportunity, or just the problem? Often the latter is the case, and whilst it's possible to run, spanner in hand, at the faulty component, it's only when all the pieces are on the floor that the realisation occurs that it's not clear what the new machine is really meant to achieve... True, worthwhile change in any business area needs the full, active support of the overall leadership. If change has failed before, it can even be that these leaders are themselves suffering from change fatigue, and are wary of linking themselves to the effort until it's looking like being a success. This, of course, is a good way to ensure it won't be.

You can't articulate what measurable things will be happening when the change is successful

I'm afraid 'we'll all know it because it will feel right' doesn't cut the mustard. And simple reduction in headcount or other cost-based metrics are not really useful either. You're changing the fundamental mechanics of the operation if the change is worthwhile, so metrics that show the internal workings of the system have to be agreed beforehand and measured throughout the process. Cost and/or quality measures can follow, because if your change process is anything to shout about they are inherently linked to the process.

The culture of the organisation is resistant to change

Do your direct reports exchange knowing looks in meeting when you explain your plan? Transformational managers don't worry about this. They know their plan is different from all those previous bad ones. They know their staff will soon have the scales fall from their eyes and realise how stupid they were to doubt the Chosen One. What we all come to realise is that there's not much new under the sun, and if previous programmes have been done poorly, not followed up, torpedoed by more politically powerful parts of the business and allowed to wither on the vine, your reports probably understand the culture of the organisation better than you.

This is undoubtedly not an exhaustive list of toxic signs for a change effort. It's just those that I have seen, either tripping over them whilst implementing change, blinded by my own self-belief, or subject to them as cog in the wheel. I suspect there will be a few people that can recognise these problems from their own past, too.

There is a stat out there that tells us that 70% of change programmes 'fail'. So it's worth looking out for the signs of doom and working to correct them before they drag you down like all the others before you...!

#Management #leadership #change

If you manage nothing else, manage expectations

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with my father about a restaurant, and he wasn't recommending it. When I asked about details, it turned out the food wasn't bad, and the price wasn't wrong, but it just didn't meet his expectations, which has been set by the advertising he'd seen. I've spoken to people who complain about five star hotels but lavish praise on budget chains that get the basics right, not because they are objectively 'better' but because they deliver on their less ambitious promises. Over the last few years I've had similar chats with business people who felt let down by their IT teams. When pressed, they wouldn't actually say the tech teams had done a bad job, just that things seemed to cost a lot and didn't deliver what they expected, despite admitting they could have done a better job of communicating requirements.

The common theme is a lack of management of stakeholder expectations. Staff at the restaurant might say 'well what do you expect for that price?', placing blame on the customer for their unrealistic expectations. Spend time in a busy IT team and you will hear the same thing, and I know this because I've rolled my eyes and said it myself! Is that a winning strategy? I suspect that's the road to runaway Shadow IT...

It's only when you take a step back, and consider the situation with the benefit of perspective, that this problem becomes clearer. Tackling this issue isn't simple. It's about defining the core of what you do in more detail, and explaining the available options that can be achieved by small efforts and/or increase in cost, maybe like optional extras on a new car (when was the last time you heard someone ask Ford for a car in a colour not on their list?).

Sometimes people ask for things that are difficult, either in terms of features or timescales, because they don't know (or believe) the real choices. Given a list, people will often choose the best fit for their needs, and work around deficiencies. Given a blank sheet of paper, they will (proven again and again!) design a monster. The trick of course is to be able to deliver the things on the list in a repeatable way to an appropriate level of quality. Start to do that and the lure of Shadow IT will be less shiny, and dare I say easier to integrate into your service catalogue?

Manage expectations well and your customers will give you five star reviews, recommend the service, and return for more, because they got what they thought they were getting, and in the end that's the most important criterion you'll be judged on.

This short clip about 'Bronze Orientation Day' is both very funny and very pertinent in a world which is bringing new technology to bear on old problems at a frightening rate. To put it into what is probably ridiculous perspective, the Stone Age is reckoned to have lasted something in the order of 500,000 years. The Bronze Age only seemed to last for 2000 years before iron came along. Moving along slightly, we've had powered flight for little over 100 years, space flight for 50, and the iPhone for 7...

The emergence of new technology or methods can seem like a solution looking for a problem, especially if the techniques you've been using for years have never failed you. And whilst it's true that it's possible to carry on in the same way, the world moves on around you - that's where the danger lies. There's a trick to knowing when to jump onto a new technology, and you can easily leap too soon, but too late carries its own perils!

Your organisation's culture can kill collaboration

Collaboration is a hot topic at the moment, and I don't believe it's just because it's having it's moment in the sun. The shift in personal connections and communications, powered by social media tools, has led people to share ideas and experiences in far greater numbers than ever before. Personal technology (according to this survey soon over 80% of internet traffic will be generated by smartphones) allows us all to communicate with our industry or professional peers, regardless of whether it's promoted / allowed by corporate policemen.

Smart organisations are looking to take advantage of this. They know that when people share ideas and information good things happen. They know they have valuable information stored away in archives and in people's experiences, and that these connections can help unlock that value and allow it to be applied to the problems and opportunities the organisation faces every day. What company wouldn't want to find a way to stop the dispiriting waste of effort when one team replicates the work of another, simply because they didn't know that the work had already been done? How many times have you found someone else was working on the same problem you were, or at least something similar enough that a combined effort would have done the work in half the time?

So far, so good. The tools are out there, the willingness is there from the top. But still, it doesn't always work. Sadly, corporate culture is not always threaded with a collaborative attitude. I have heard people respond to a request for information with 'Yes, we've done that research. But why should *you* get the benefit?' To people in their own company. People that are working to create value for the entire organisation.

Sounds crazy, but I bet a lot of people reading this have been there. Why do people act this way. Sometimes because of the simple 'knowledge is power' maxim. Sometimes because of a lack of trust - will this be passed off as your work? Sometimes because of a lack of faith in the information itself, or the relevance. All of it is unhelpful, some of it toxic, and if collaboration is going to work in your organisation, it's got to be addressed.

Tackling the silo mentality takes effort, but the tools exist. If your internal intranet / collaboration tool allows anyone to contact anyone, regardless of function and position in the hierarchy, that's a start. It should explain who does what, who's worked on which projects, and where they are in the world. Cross-functional mentoring is also a cool way to encourage collaboration. Seeding an interest in what other teams do and the synergies between the various parts of the business is a win-win.

As with any problem, solving the collaboration conundrum isn't about the tool you choose. It's about creating the culture that recognises and rewards sharing as a value-add activity in its own right.

Collaboration - avoiding Eternal September

Collaboration tools are fast becoming a superior way to communicate and share knowledge, especially around projects and specialist subjects. The creation of communities that subconsciously curate and value contributions, improving quality and relevance, trumps the data tomb of email in many ways. However, there are lessons from history about how these tools should be deployed.

Often, a collaboration tool is first used by a bunch of cool folk who want to do something different. It's rarely a corporate edict, like most (all?) innovation it's driven by a need in a branch of the organisation. People start to see the value, get involved, and the fun starts to snowball. These people are often collaborative by nature, interested in new ways of working and embrace change. Once a critical mass is reached, and higher levels of management get on the bandwagon, tools start to become recommended, or mandated. If you're not using that tool, they say, you won't be on the project.

This is the danger point. Let's go back to 1993, when Usenet was around 10 years old. Usenet, for you young'uns, was the way we communicated on the internet before there was a web, world wide or otherwise. A huge collection of newsgroups on just about every subject, many of them very technical - Usenet was essentially an academic network for much of its early history. The old guard on Usenet used to see a spike in 'noise' in September, when freshers went to university, found Usenet and immediately breached all of the 'netiquette' that kept the thing ticking over. SHOUTING IN POSTS WAS A CLASSIC ERROR. It usually took a month for this to die down, and everyone got on fine. In 1993 something changed. AOL arrived, sold internet access to the world, and thousands of 'ordinary' people started to appear on Usenet. September 1993, for the Usenet old guard, never ended. Usenet became a messy, murky place and ceased to resemble the thing they knew and loved. It was the 'Eternal September'

When launching a collaboration tool in an organisation, those early adopters mentioned above are the vast majority. They work well together. When the tool becomes mandated, the demographic changes quickly. How to manage this change? Set the rules early on. Let people know why the tool is there, and what it's to be used for. Use moderation sparingly, but do use it if necessary (especially if people from outside the organisation are involved) and set out the ways that moderation will be applied, for the benefit of everyone not least the moderators. Promote a positive attitude from veterans to the newbies, encourage volunteers to provide help and guidance. The long term use of the technology is more important than the baby steps.

Think about the future of your collaboration effort and plan for it to succeed, and you can avoid Eternal September :)

The slow, lingering death of email

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a CIO about technology, and how younger people relate to it. He told me that he had recently started helping out with his son's football team, and at the end of a training session told them he was going to email them all the dates for upcoming fixtures and practice. The response he got was one of muted hilarity at the ancient method of communication. When I joined the world of work, the telex had been replaced by the fax machine as the electronic method of choice for sending documents or text, and if you saw one of these telex beasts, it was generally sitting in a corner, unused and unloved. The same fate has befallen the fax machine, although there are still strong pockets of resistance in locations where telecoms infrastructure is poor, or where companies cling to the 20th century in the hope that it might come back one day.

The signs are all around us that email has already gained significant momentum on the slide to irrelevance. There's a saying now that work is where you go to use old technology. People have a panoply of communication tools available to them (literally) in the palms of their hands. Social messaging tools like WhatsApp, Kik and Snapchat are beloved of the kids and they use whatever is the most appropriate at the time. Not to mention the hairy old(!) monsters of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter... In more forward-thinking offices collaboration tools such as Huddle and Yammer supersede email by bringing messages together around a subject or community. Run your messaging on one of these platforms and you find that the 'who has access to Bob's emails' question doesn't present itself when Bob wins the lottery and disappears to Bermuda. That's got to be worth the entrance fee on its own.

Even the name 'eletronic mail' now sounds anachronistic, it's hardly suprising that kids find the idea funny. I am not enough of a soothsayer to know how long email has left, I don't expect it to disappear overnight. But I believe the writing is on the wall for anyone who cares to look.

Postscript : I first posted this on LinkedIn. One of the first comments was from someone I have a ton of respect for, who said 'email is where organisational knowledge goes to die. The sooner it's gone, the better'. Perhaps that is another reason email will be ushered out in successful organisations in the coming years.

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Chris Weston - Making IT Work