Oakwood Insights

What is Your Desktop Status?

2011-03-29T10:55:00.000-05:00

Has your organization deployed Windows 7? What about Office 2010? We have a four question survey out, asking those two questions, and, honestly, we've been surprised by the results so far. Can it really be true that less than 3% of deployed systems are running Windows 7? Less than 13% of systems are running Office 2010? And what surprises us most of all.... is that more systems are running Office 2010 than are running Windows 7. Really?

Please take the survey and add your input to the mix. An XBox with a Kinect will be given to one lucky respondent. Four questions - less than one minute for most, we promise.

There's no space in the survey to add comments, so please add them here. Why do you think these numbers are so low? Are people waiting to buy new systems with the new operating system? Do people not understand the immediate value of Windows 7? What has put Office 2010 ahead of Windows 7 in deployments? Could it be that SharePoint 2010 is helping drive users to Office 2010? Possibly some organizations are not well equipped to roll out a new OS version without having to visit every desktop?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas, would you please? We would like to learn.

Who Is In Charge of Mobile Application Development?

2011-03-11T10:14:00.000-06:00

Brainstorming with the key leaders of our mobile application development team this morning, trying to determine the best ways to get the word out about our capabilities in developing applications for the major mobile platforms - iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7. We looked at our portfolio - all of the apps we've developed so far for clients - and we determined that the major uses for the mobile apps have been in sales and marketing. In fact, in a strange coincidence, the vast majority of apps that we've done have been specifically driven around trade shows. While we've typically been hired by IT, the Sales and Marketing groups have been driving the requirements and the apps.

We were thinking that integration to legacy systems and extending them to the mobile devices is the primary need for mobile application development, but our experience to date does not bear that out. While we've done it, only about 20% of our projects to date have been in that area.

So, we are wondering... who really owns mobile application development in organizations? Where are the lines being drawn between IT and the business groups? Is IT being a thought leader in the organization, a "did you know you could do this" agent of opportunity to the business groups? Or is IT being told by the business group, "We need this; make it happen," and responding accordingly?

What's happening in your organization? You can let us know via email to mjohnson at oakwoodsys.com, or comment on this post. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Does IT Offer Value to the Business?

2011-02-28T16:48:00.000-06:00

What does a nationally (internationally?) known sales guru have to say to an organization's IT group? Though the Jeffrey Gitomer quote I happened upon last week was directed toward salespeople, I think it is very applicable to the conversation about IT and how it integrates to the business.

"There is an unspoken strategy for businesses to employ and that strategy focuses around the word "value." The more you offer, the more attractive you will become. The less you offer, the more anonymous you will remain."

One of our clients' IT groups has done something remarkable: they've made themselves indispensable to Marketing. Because IT has provided significant value to Marketing, IT is attractive to Marketing - to the point that Marketing is funding a major IT initiative. Prior to this occurrence, Marketing thought of IT as "just the network guys" - and IT was, as the quote suggests, otherwise anonymous.

Now the snowball effect is in play. Marketing says to Sales, "Wait until you hear what IT has done for me." Sales and IT engage, and now IT is partnering with Sales. Rather than spelling out the whole cascade, let's skip to the end. IT is providing value to the business. The business knows the value of IT. IT is integrated to the business.

It is a very good thing.

IT has Little Influence and More on Marketing IT

2010-10-28T00:47:00.001-05:00

Wow. "Why IT Has Little Influence in a Company" showed up again shortly after writing the last post on Marketing IT, and we're struck by how relevant this article is to the discussion we posed earlier, particularly these sentences: "Recently, it struck me that this reticence may be related to another facet of technical culture, the idea that deliverables should speak for themselves. Think of how we deliver our products to our users and clients."

Read the prior post, and then read this article on CIO.com. See if you don't think the two are related.

There's more to this article than marketing. Thought-jogging all around.

Should IT be in the Marketing Business?

2010-10-28T00:14:00.000-05:00

Most people aren't comfortable with singing their own praises, true. Marketing and PR are typically outward-facing groups within our organizations, working to attract and retain customers. So how does a department that typically faces inward, with internal customers, get the word out about all of the great work they are doing for and with the organization? Is it even necessary?

The last time you did a big upgrade, or migration, how did you let the user community know? Did you send an email? Or did you think about it more in terms of a marketing campaign? Looking back over your last big system rollout, something the IT group worked on for months no doubt, what kind of response did you get from the user community? Did you struggle with user adoption? Did you feel that "no news is good news," and were secretly relieved when you got no feedback? Do people in your organization regard IT as a necessary evil, or a cost center, a support center, or a partner?

Some IT groups have embraced internal marketing whole-heartedly, and those groups would argue that their marketing to the organization is as important as the technology that they implement. Their user adoption rates are way up, and their help desk calls are way down. The IT group is a bunch of pretty happy, secure individuals who work as a team with the business.

A lot has been written about marketing IT. Do you think it might be worth considering in your organization? While IT has a captive audience, it might be worth thinking in terms of "attracting and retaining customers" even when those customers are inside your own organization.

What do you think?

The 5 Dysfunctions of an IT Infrastructure

2010-10-27T23:59:00.000-05:00

Having just re-read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni (and highly recommending that you read it, too), we were inspired to share these thoughts with you based on what we are seeing in our work with various clients across the US. These items are critical to every organization, regardless of what platforms have been adopted, and are only just starting to get the attention they deserve. Have a look at our list and see what you think.

Inattention to the directory structure - the most frequently ignored yet easily the most critical part of any network infrastructure. Symptoms to watch for: cobbled together, out-of-control, too many administrators, inconsistent application of policies, inconsistent information, old user accounts, no group policies, too many group policies, slow user logins.
Inability to effectively and efficiently deploy system updates, new software, software upgrades, new images, etc. - too many images, too much traffic to the update site versus an update service, have to physically touch every machine to do an upgrade
Unmanageable assets - what we have and what is being used, what is capable of supporting new software and what will need upgrading or retiring, no understanding of how assets inter-relate, network diagrams that are outdated as soon as they are created, or network diagrams that are not updated at all, software we bought but can't find, buying too much software
Inefficient help desks with poorly defined SLAs, process challenges, or SLAs that are frequently broken, management systems that have not adapted to new technology, or are difficult to customize, or systems that have dictated how our help desk should operate
Siloed thinking - not taking into account how systems, processes, software, and people need to integrate together to form a unified infrastructure,

What dysfunctions would you add to or subtract from this list?

How Process People are Becoming Our Friends Again

2010-10-27T23:19:00.000-05:00

Process management has been bandied about organizations for a long time, and for just about that long, the "process masters" have been unpopular. Traditional process management has not typically been user-centered, but has focused on systems and their capabilities. The worm has turned, however, and the people who can address process with the users at the front and center of those processes are now becoming some of the most popular people in the place.

Why is that?

Processes have been documented, stressed over, and "worked around" for years. Yet only recently have our technology capabilities expanded to the point where a user-centered process is a realistic goal. We know of organizations where help desk processes were dictated by the inability to customize the help desk platform, or where HR processes were dictated by the HR system that was put in place ten years ago. Now, with new technology, we can create process that makes sense for our organizations and how we need to work today. We can do this without replacing old technology (if we have to or want to keep using it).

Process modeling has come of age as well. With new products (like Visio 2010 Premium) that allow users to model process quickly and easily, getting a handle on how things are - and how things should be - is more efficient.

For some, learning how people need to work, and modeling process that reflects that, will be a challenge, no doubt. It's a different mindset. For those who possess that mindset, however, friends are waiting around every corner of your organization. And for the IT department yearning to be more fully integrated with the business, process management is the new golden ticket.

Five Business Books for Any CIO and IT Leader

2010-10-25T11:20:00.000-05:00

Some people think that CIOs and IT Leaders are particularly challenged with "business leadership" because so many were/are highly technical people who got promoted over time, and who now find themselves in team leadership roles without a complete understanding of what it takes to be a leader.

What prompted this post is a recent CIO Magazine article entitled: 7 Essential CIO Leadership Skills That Get Results. It's a good article, but we all know that reading one article or one book is not going to change our leadership style. For CIOs and IT Leaders who want to manage truly high performing teams, and who want to be amazing team leaders, there are a number of books that I recommend from my own reading list. Each of these is a relatively quick and easy read, and, while the words and music are different, the messaging is remarkably similar. Seeing this message reinforced in a variety of ways is a great way to internalize the changes, assuming we need some, in our leadership styles, that can lead us to great success.

The Secret: What Great Leaders Know - And Do, by Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni
Gung Ho! Turn on the People in Any Organization, by Ken Blanchard
The Inside Advantage by Robert Bloom
High Five! The Magic of Working Together, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

Yes, you can probably tell that we are fans of Ken Blanchard, and we truly think these books are great resources for leaders of any group or any organization. There are a ton of others, including Good to Great by Jim Collins, and the only reason it's not on this list is because it is a tougher read (much more academic).

According to the CIO Magazine article, the seven essential CIO leadership skills are:

Commit to leadership first and everything else second
Lead differently than you think
Embrace your softer side
Forge the right relationships to drive the right results
Master communication
Inspire others
Build people, not systems

It's amazing really, that when you step back and really look at all of the books that are out there, how most of them say the same thing - different words, same ideas. Start your reading with "The Secret," and you'll see some great similarities to this list.

What books would you add to this list?

SharePoint #1 in Gartner's Magic Quadrant Sept 2010 - our take

2010-10-13T13:17:00.000-05:00

In case you've ever wondered about some of those "other" portal vendors, the new Magic Quadrant report from Gartner for "Horizontal Portals" puts Microsoft in the number one position, in the top right corner of the top right corner, closely followed by IBM and less closely followed by Oracle. Here are some things that we have seen over the last year or so -

Two multi-billion dollar companies with whom we work are using SAP, but have eschewed the SAP Portal product as too expensive, too complex, and too inflexible. One client tried for over a year to make the SAP Portal work, but dumped it for SharePoint. The other client decided up front that, as a primarily Microsoft shop, they would integrate SAP into the Microsoft stack, and do as much as they could within the Microsoft tools. We see indications that other large companies will be making similar decisions over the next year, particularly with the release of SharePoint 2010.
Microsoft has carefully moved SharePoint into the center of the known universe, increasing its influence over the enterprise and its capabilities to the enterprise. Project Server is now a SharePoint application. Commerce Server is now a SharePoint application. CRM 2011 will integrate to SharePoint and that integrations looks pretty rich. BizTalk and SharePoint speak the same language. Etcetera, etcetera.
Companies like Global 360, Nintex, Newsgator, Bamboo, and many others have "bet the farm" on SharePoint, starting with MOSS 2007 and now into SP2010. More will follow. It looks like a good bet.
Organizations which have struggled with SharePoint adoption are now getting on top of it, either re-formulating their SharePoint implementation to make it a better user experience, making SharePoint a destination point, or creating formal adoption programs. Our SharePoint Passalong Tips are being used by organizations near and far as educational resources to help people get more out of their SharePoint implementation.
IT groups are starting to ask their counterparts in other groups how they can help. SharePoint is a big part of helping those other groups. Played right (and in companies that still need this), SharePoint will be the matchmaker between business and IT.

We love us some SharePoint. How about you?

Windows Phone 7 - Why We Can't Wait

2010-10-13T12:44:00.000-05:00

Yes, we are excited about WP7. Even though we do application development for all the major mobile platforms (because we've had to, because WM6.5.. well, you know), we are eager to work with clients to integrate Windows Phone 7 into the enterprise. There's been a lot of talk about "is it enterprise-ready" and "it seems like another consumer phone," but there's a lot that has been lost in the conversation. Easy access to email through Outlook Mobile. Office Mobile. Access to SharePoint. Simplified management. Leverage existing IT knowledge. A robust set of developer tools with which developers are already familiar. Add to that the consumer pieces, and we think that Microsoft could have a winner on their hands.

Here's what we are eagerly anticipating - the true extension of the enterprise right into the hand. Interact with business processes right on the mobile device. Check in and check out of documents in SharePoint. Review a PowerPoint deck in a format you can actually read, edit it, and publish it to SharePoint.

Yes, Microsoft is late to the game. But hey, even Albert Pujols can sit out for eight innings and hit a home run in the ninth. Is this a home run for Microsoft? Only time will tell. Given the sheer might of Microsoft, we think that the ninth inning is going to be very, very interesting indeed.

Cloud and Mobile are Hot Career Choices - Really???

2010-10-13T09:35:00.000-05:00

IBM Tech Trends surveyed 2000 IT professionals and concluded that the best career choices for IT pros for the next five years are in the areas of cloud and mobile computing. Apparently cloud is going to overtake on-premise for IT delivery (no surprise there), and the need to create mobile applications is going to outweigh the need to develop for traditional PCs and servers. We think that the first point is pretty accurate in that those who understand cloud computing will add significant value to the firms for which they work. The need to know about cloud -and all of the permutations of cloud, is getting more urgent each day - more offerings to evaluate, more capabilities to learn about, and more questions to answer. So, we agree with the cloud piece of this survey.

Is mobile application development really going to outweigh app dev for traditional systems, though? May we say, just for fun, that the best application in the universe is not going to make anyone's fingers smaller, and "typing" on some of these mobile devices is a real test of dexterity and eyesight? We do mobile application development at Oakwood, of course, and we do see tremendous need for business-integrated applications to be usable on mobile devices. But we wonder, were these IT professionals thinking about business-integrated applications on mobile devices, or were they thinking of flashlights and levels and restaurant-finders?

There is no question that mobile application development is important. We suggest that the greater emphasis should be placed on business-enabling software architecture, which would incorporate the ability to interface with the enterprise from any computing device. Those who understand THAT will go far. Those who limit their universe to mobile application development will have a nice box to live in for a while, but may find themselves looking for a new job every six to nine months (unless they are in a consulting organization like Oakwood, working with multiple clients over time, or are working for a very large company).

What do you think?

Pressure Reducers for Project Managers

2010-10-13T09:05:00.001-05:00

While browsing on Executive Brief this morning, I discovered a good article: Managing Large Projects with Ease - Nine Pressure Reducers that Work. In honor of the Microsoft Project Users Group members who are meeting here at Oakwood this morning, it seemed particularly relevant to share. To the seasoned project manager who is accustomed to managing large IT projects, particularly software development projects, several of the items on the list will be quite obvious. However, as is the case with many how-to articles, a refresher course is generally welcome. Sometimes we can lose sight of the obvious in the face of the whirlwind of activity that we live in (how many times have we forgotten "measure twice, cut once" for example! LOL)

Read the article (linked above) for the full text - it's worth it. Here are the nine, some slightly re-worded to fit the context of a list.

Data load early in migrations
Document and manage requirements
Don't short-change the peer review process
Only work on authorized changes
Leverage knowledge
Don't sacrifice quality for completion
Keep a close eye on "resource bleeding"
Watch out for the lone wolves on the project
Get real - "pretty" is nice but "real" is required

To this we would add one more - Bad news does not get better with age. When something goes awry, address it early, emphatically, and productively. Sometimes bad news, when addressed promptly, can move a project forward in a totally unexpected way.

BTW, if you are a project manager interested in participating in the Microsoft Project Users Group, let us know! Use this form and just put MPUG in the box. We'll get you on the email list for meeting notifications for the St. Louis Regional Chapter, which meets here at Oakwood. If you are not in the St. Louis region, please visit http://www.mpug.com/ for more information. Great group, good people, good info shared.

How You Treat Your Customers & How IT Can Help

2010-09-15T13:18:00.002-05:00

Greg Smart of inContact wrote a very interesting post this morning, "Do You Treat All of Your Customers the Same? Stop It." It's worth a read, as it harks back to our earlier posts on the benefits of mapping IT to the customer process. Do you know your customers well enough to be able to distinguish the best customers from the average customers? As you read Greg's post, think more broadly in terms of your own customer base; while you may not have a call center, you do have customer relationships that need to be mined.

IT is sitting on a wealth of information - a gold mine of information in fact, about your customers, how they behave, what they do, when they do it, and how they react to stimuli (promotions, emails, etc.) from your organization. How can you leverage this information to drive revenue? Can you also leverage this information to reduce costs? If you aren't already providing the vast amounts of stored information in an easily-consumed-and-digested format, you are missing a key opportunity to integrate IT with the business.

From Greg's post: "...there are an endless number of ways to calculate and compare customers to determine which customers are better for your business. For some businesses it is purely a dollars thing. Which customers are the most profitable? Which customers spend the most money with us? Which customers are buying our most profitable products? For some businesses it may be more of a fundamental contribution. Which customers push us to be better? Which customers are asking hard questions that force us to get better? Which customers are asking for product improvements or products that we don’t have - pushing us ahead of our competition? Once you know who those customers are you need to serve them differently. These are the customers that are driving your business forward. These are the customers that deserve more than just your average customer interaction."

For IT, one of the biggest challenges is taking all of the information that the organization gathers about customers, in all of the different systems that interact with clients or client processes, and creating a meaningful presentation of that information back to the business. To advance the integration of IT with the business, integrate IT with the customer process. From a technology perspective, it all boils down to results-driven business intelligence, which is the framework for using expected results and expected use as the basis for building the data storage (marts or warehouses) that makes the most sense for the business, then providing the user community with a meaningful way to interact with the business data.

When we say that business intelligence is one of the most significant ways that IT can impact a business, this is just one example of why we say it. What other examples would you offer?

Organizational Change Management in and for SharePoint

2010-09-14T09:06:00.001-05:00

While Organizational Change Management (OCM) is not new, the evolution of technology platforms allows us to support OCM in new ways that are more compatible with the current ways in which people learn and adopt change. Specifically, the collaborative power of SharePoint can be leveraged as a change agent to communicate and sustain OCM within your organization. Remember that users typically only adopt new technology for two reasons - because they have to, or because they want to. OCM is the process that helps us drive users to the "want to," and it facilitates the communication of why they "have to."

The specific implementation of the methodology steps vary slightly based on the specific organization for which this approach is being utilized, and the methodology implementation is refined during each phase so that the end results (Execute and Sustain) are one hundred percent on-point and specific to your organization.

We offer the following points for consideration:

Utilizing decision support tools (such as Oakwood's), perform analysis of the organization as a whole, as well as teams and individuals to assess the readiness for change

Identify information gaps and change gaps
Draw conclusions as to business and team readiness
Evaluate potential points and pockets of resistance
Determine if cultural changes are needed to support the change

Ensure that key user community members are asked to be part of the solution. Studies prove that end users who feel a sense of ownership over a new process will not only quickly adopt that process, they will also become process evangelists
Identify change agents early, based on the analysis done in the first phase. Change agents can be people, teams, and/or technologies that will accelerate the change process
Design a communications plan that leverages the identified change agents. Some examples:

Create an intranet portal site where on-going communications, announcements, metrics, and scorecards are kept current and visible to all constituents
Utilize a formal internal marketing program; consider slogans, themes, posters, internal email campaigns, and newsletters as communication mechanisms on importance, priority, and progress
Leverage social networking to communicate achievements, foster and reinforce awareness and understanding among constituents

Create a user adoption program that drives usage of the various components of the solution. The following suggestions have been developed as a SharePoint user adoption program; adapt as needed for your specific solution set.

Short training videos on how to get more out of the standard SharePoint features (similar to the SharePoint Passalong Tips videos already developed by Oakwood)
On-portal exercises like a scavenger hunt with a prize drawing at the end
Tips and Tricks – ask a question and award prizes to the users who come up with the best answer as rated by their peers
Lunch ‘n’ Learn sessions on specific topics, scheduled at regular intervals throughout teams

Utilize a dashboard to communicate metrics being measured, such as “documents migrated to system” or “users on board”
Leverage social networking features of SharePoint 2010 to

create a community of subject matter experts who are a “click for help” away
create a reliable and non-threatening forum where peer assistance can be requested
create a blog where tips and tricks, successes, and lessons learned can be shared, commented on, and discussed

It's important for us all, as IT leaders, to recognize opportunities for our team members to embrace change. You don't need a formal OCM discipline or an OCM department or even an OCM leader to be "OCM aware" and create opportunities for your organization to accelerate user adoption and thus accelerate ROI.

When Marketing Backfires - a Mini-Rant (just for fun)

2010-09-07T18:43:00.002-05:00

Last week, a telemarketer called us to schedule an appointment to talk to us about our telemarketing needs. She called for the CEO and left a voice mail which he then shared with me via email. This firm, she suggests, is staffed with very professional telemarketers and has a great success rate. The problem? Well, the telemarketer who called to sell us on telemarketing was clearly reading from a script. Pauses in the wrong places, a bit sing-song in her delivery, and totally unconvincing. Oh yes, exactly the kind of service that we want representing our firm. Telemarketing FAIL.

Today, someone reached out to me via LinkedIn with the statement that his firm could help in our marketing efforts, particularly in the area of social media. He offered that we could affiliate ourselves with his firm, or (gasp) even hire them to do our social media outreach. When I saw that his firm was in the same city, I clicked through to the website to learn more about them - exactly what you'd hope someone would do, right? It's hard to describe the growing dismay I felt as I read through their web pages. This organization has never heard of a semicolon; sentences like this one would have a comma where I placed the semicolon. Incomplete sentences. Questions that end in periods. The best part, though, was the content. How about this sentence: "Bob is married to his beautiful wife and has five children." Would Bob be married to anyone other than his wife? Does this mean that the children are his by a different wife? Finally, the "Meet the Management" section of the website has a profile of one person (and yes, he is married to his beautiful wife), thereby indicating that this is a very small operation indeed. He also apparently is holding down two jobs to make ends meet, because the website clearly states that "Bob," the Founder and CEO of this company is also the EVP of Sales for another company, and though that other company is this company's parent, it sure implies that this company isn't very busy. They've certainly taken themselves out of contention for any business, affiliation, or recommendation based on the content they've created for themselves. (Note that had this company been selling anything other than content, I would not be nearly so concerned.) Website FAIL.

Finally, over the weekend, I was on the Facebook page of a giant retail organization, reading the postings of both that organizaton and its "fans." A fan posted that they wanted to know where to get a particular product that had been introduced over the summer. A number of other fans posted helpful hints, but the conversation came to a quick close when someone, not identified as a rep of the organization but sure sounding like one, stated that the product "sold out of stores in less than a month. Limited means limited." It just came across as rather snippy to me, and I hope it was not a representative of the organization in question. The lack of engagement on a very popular Facebook page was a bit surprising, in fact. Facebook FAIL.

As we all know, marketing is more today than it has ever been - more than coffee mugs and logo-bearing pens, more than press releases and campaigns. Every opportunity to engage in conversation is marketing. Every representation of your organizaton out there in the world is marketing. Every community in which you participate with your brand is... yes, that is marketing too. Every bit of marketing should be on-brand, consistent, and for pete's sake, spelled correctly, punctuated correctly, and stated correctly. Marketing can backfire if no one is watching.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with IT. Well, we hope you don't mind that these stories actually have pretty much nothing to do with IT. Sometimes, "ya just gotta rant."

Rant over. Do you have any similar stories to share?

Scrambling to Fill IT Openings Doesn't Mean Throwing Caution to the Wind

2010-09-07T12:21:00.000-05:00

The Business Journal had an article last week on IT firms scrambling to fill openings. Based on what we are seeing in the marketplace, we don't think that IT firms are the only organizations with IT openings to fill. We have clients who are searching through dozens, and in some cases, hundreds of resumes, trying to find the one person who is a great fit for them. Based on what we are seeing and hearing, and our experience through years of hiring ourselves, we offer a few nuggets. Everyone knows these; sometimes it helps to see them again, especially in a "frenzied" hiring state like the IT industry is in.

You can train tech; you can't train 'tude. A person with the right attitude, who is open to new ideas, and is a cultural fit within the IT organization will usually be a better hire than an extremely technical person with the wrong attitude. Take a great person with some of the IT skills you seek and train them in the rest of the skills they will need.

If you aren't sure about a person, the answer is no. Seriously, how many times have you been unsure, done it anyway, and regretted the result? This holds true for hiring team members, buying a new suit, painting a room in your house, and most other decisions. If you aren't sure, wait until you are sure. An unfortunate hiring decision that lasts for two weeks can cause damage within the team that takes months to repair. Being unsure is your gut's way of telling you "it's a bad call."

The only people you can train at 90 miles an hour are those who can go 90 miles an hour with you. If your organization is so fast-paced, active, and downright busy that there is no time to take time out and train someone in the skills they need, devise a way to determine in the hiring process if a candidate can keep up with the pace of your IT organization. If he can, and is the right fit, hire him (or her). He will learn quickly.

Don't be tempted to compromise in your hiring profile. If you can't find someone who fits your hiring profile, don't settle. Use an IT company you trust to do a project or provide resources while you continue to look for the right person or people for your organization.

Remember the triangle. Some of the best advice on evaluating candidates was given to me years ago, along with a picture of a triangle. The three legs of the triangle are labelled "Can-Do," "Will-Do," and "Team Fit" and the concept is that the candidate is only as strong as the shortest leg. Can he do the job? Will he do the job? Does he fit within the team that we have already built? It is possible to have people who "will do" but don't have the skills (or the motivation to learn them), and people who "can do" but don't fit within the team, etc., and the overall evaluation of the potential hire needs to be based on the shortest leg of that triangle. If a person does not have all three attributes, they are a "no-hire."

Get the right people on the bus, then worry about the seats. Sometimes, the right person comes along but doesn't fit exactly into the pigeonhole created by your currently-open job description. Think about whether reshuffling the existing team members and adding this new person would fill all of the gaps - just not in the way that you originally expected. Added bonus - the existing team members usually love to be a part of adding a great person to the team, and a situation like this is a great way to get them involved.

There are dozens of other factors in getting the right people into the organization and keeping them engaged - having clearly defined growth opportunities, employee development programs, on-line knowledge libraries, great processes in place and in action - these are a few that come to mind. The bottom line is, in what is feeling a bit like the "prelude-to-Y2K-hiring-climate," we should not throw caution to the wind nor ideals to the curb.

What other key "nuggets" would you add to this list? Any disagreements with the nuggets we've shared?

Does Your IT Roadmap Deal Strictly with IT?

2010-08-12T12:52:00.000-05:00

We see a lot of IT roadmaps. We participate in the creation of a number of them, too. We have clients who ask us to create a SharePoint roadmap, or a Business Intelligence Roadmap, or a Desktop Deployment Roadmap. The one thing that all of these roadmaps have in common is that they all have everything to do with technology. Is that a bad thing?

If people outside of IT cannot understand how the IT roadmap will benefit them, it's a bad thing.
If people inside of IT don't understand how the IT things they do support the goals of the organization, it's a bad thing.

I am reminded of a time when we did a project for a gigantic organization in the consumer/retail space. They had IT roadmaps for everything. They had identified problems in the store operations, specifically that the systems supporting the stores point-of-sale systems could go down and IT would not find out about it for hours. So we built a management platform and dashboard designed to monitor and manage the store operations from an IT perspective, and to involve the business unit leaders, we also included a running ticker of the store sales numbers. When we started dissecting the network to find the actual network pieces that supported the stores, we found one giant flaw. Every single store was tied in to one single solitary piece of cable running into one single solitary port on a single solitary router in the main data center. Which of course meant that one single solitary outtage would take out over 1200 stores. Yup. That was a big ah-hah moment for our client for sure.

You see, the network services roadmap didn't take into account the services that the network provides to the organization. It took into account things like upgrade paths and capabilities to be added. It included current and planned wiring closet diagrams, saturation estimates, uptime statistics, and new purchase estimates. It did not include anything to do with actually supporting the key parts of the business.

This ties back to our earlier conversations about looking at IT as a mechanism to provide services to the organization. When you look at the services that the business requires in order to meet its goals and objectives, and create the IT roadmap to support the corporate goals and objectives, you've got something that an entire organization can rally behind.

We're glad to create SharePoint roadmaps, Desktop Deployment roadmaps, etc., and we'd love even more to work with our clients to create IT roadmaps that relate directly to the goals of the whole organization. That would be a really cool place to be. Don't you think?

Unexpected Ways Organizations are Monetizing Social Media

2010-08-10T11:37:00.000-05:00

Mack Collier's post this morning, 5 Ways Companies Are Using Social Media to Lower Costs, was a very educational read. We keep hearing about organizations that are making sales, and needing to find ways to track the sales impact of their social media. We're hearing about Twitter, and the need to have a Facebook page. Mack's post shows us that there are more metrics to measure than just sales, and more to social media than Twitter and Facebook. HR departments in particular should take note - an effective social media strategy can lower recruitment costs AND increase employee retention. Take a minute to read the stats that Mack shares.

Which brings up an interesting question: Who should "own" the social media strategy within our organizations? Is it Marketing? Human Resources? Sales? We think it must be Marketing (because of the inherent brand messaging), but there must be significant imput from HR and other departments as well. Marketing needs to pull together a strategy meeting to discuss, take input, and leverage the knowledge of others to formulate a strategy that will work for the whole organization. Now that there are new tools available to create an in-house social media platform, there's the potential to really involve the corporate constituents in new and different ways, and to really capitalize on this social media platform.

It's a lot to consider.

Here are the five ways Mack suggests that corporate costs can be lowered with social media. Please go to his blog (linked above) to see the details.

1. Lowering recruitment costs or employee turnover
2. Lowering Customer Service Costs
3. Lowering marketing and product design costs via social media
4. Lowering restocking fees and increasing sales via customer reviews and ratings.
5. Lowering advertising and PR costs by using social media

What are your social media plans?

Make Corporate Decision Making More Scientific

2010-08-04T12:56:00.001-05:00

MIT's Andrew McAfee posits that there is no change for organizations that is "as big as the transition from intuition-based decision-making toward an approach based on science."1 We've talked about this before; in our words,"making decisons based on fact, not opinion." What happens to an enterprise when IT can provide the tools to allow more "scientific" decision-making?

Mr. McAfee states, "If you don't try to migrate your company and your decision-making in that direction, you're missing out on a huge opportunity, and you had better hope your competition is also not moving in that direction." We agree. In fact, we would offer that "he who applies the most science wins."

A sample of a worst case scenario: A meeting is convened by the CEO to discuss Customer Service. "Our customer service is terrible," he says, "and it needs to be improved immediately! I want a plan on my desk in two weeks!" The meeting attendees all give a deep sigh, pull out their planners, and start scheduling meetings so that they can deliver a plan for improvement on time to the CEO.

A sample of the same scenario with a happy ending: A meeting is convened by the CEO to discuss Customer Service. "Our customer service is terrible," he says, "and it needs to be improved immediately! I want a plan on my desk in two weeks!" The head of Customer Service says, "Here are our stats. We have a 95% first call resolution rate, we are looking at re-allocating two CSRs into other departments because we are so efficient. Our customer satisfaction scores are higher than anyone else in our industry. Why do you believe we have a problem?" And the CEO says, "I got a letter from an unhappy customer, right here!" and he pulls out the paper and waves it around. The Customer Service head asks for the letter, turns to her laptop, and accesses her CRM system, and then informs that CEO that this particular customer has already been taken care of and in fact has just completed a customer satisfaction survey in which he gave the company very high marks. "In fact," she adds with a smile on her face, "he even tweeted about it."

Facts will save time, money, effort, anguish, toil, turmoil, and headaches. Any war stories you would like to share?

1 These quotes are from an MIT Sloan Management Review Supplement to the June 2010 issue of CIO Magazine.

Try Ignoring Technology - and watch IT's value prop go up

2010-08-04T12:14:00.000-05:00

You've heard us before, "aligning" IT with the business doesn't cut it. Aligning implies disparate paths that are striving to move in a parallel way toward a (hopefully) common goals. Integrating IT with the business however, is exactly where it's at, and one of the best ways to foster integration is to totally ignore technology. That's right, ignore it. Fuggedaboutit. At least for now.

We must focus our attention totally and completely on the business. How does the business want this to work? How do the user community members need to do their jobs? What is holding us back as an organization? What is moving us forward? Where do we need to concentrate some efforts to improve?

Even more focused - what are our corporate priorities? For some, it's time to market; for others, it is customer service. It's likely something different for every person who reads this post. What is our performance scorecard for those priorities? Where can we improve on the things that are critical to our business?

Having this deep level of understanding of WHAT is needed will position IT to help answer the question of HOW to achieve the desired improvement. IT can always be a part of the HOW but seldom drives the WHAT. And the WHAT is what should be driving nearly every IT decision. Do you agree?

Why IT Gets Blamed -

2010-06-02T14:17:00.001-05:00

Having just read a blog post by Wayne Eckerson (here), who is one of the great thought leaders in the areas of Business Intelligence, Performance Dashboards, and of course Data Warehousing, it occurred to me to think about all of the ways that the relationship between "Business" and "IT" erodes. When we start managing the business based on facts rather than opinions, it stands to reason that the people in possession of the opinions just might get a little testy. And of course, I was thinking back to our series on "The CEO, the Sales Manager, and the CIO" with the surprise twisty ending, and realized how it all ties together.

If IT can provide objective analytics and leading indicators, that information could expose weaknesses within the organization. Once weaknesses are exposed, there are only three options, right? Own up to the weakness as individuals and commit to doing better, challenge the facts, or blame someone. And, in many organizations, whether spoken or unspoken, it is just easiest to blame the messenger - in this case, IT.

Wayne's blog post points out that Business has as much responsibility to heal the rift between "Business" and "IT" as IT does. I think it starts at the top. In a culture of accountability and responsibility, when confronted with facts that show organizational weakness, those with the power to cure the weakness will step up and do so. IT and Business will integrate together to create a stronger organization. However, in a culture of "every man for himself" and "blame-storming," IT will get the blame and the opinions will rage on. Which shores up another of Wayne's points - corporate culture is critical to the success of business intelligence as an organizational tool.

Wayne and I do think differently in one area, though. Wayne talks about "aligning" business and IT. We think "aligning" implies disparate entities that strive for parallel paths. Business and IT need to be "integrated" together, woven into a single fabric, walking the same path toward a common goal. That's the grail, the fleece, the cup, the pot of gold. Of all that IT has to offer the business, business intelligence is the most potentially difference-making.

What do you think?

The Foundation of All Things New and Exciting ...

2010-05-25T09:52:00.000-05:00

...is the most boring, easiest to overlook, and probably most bandaided, convoluted, spaghetti mess we have in our network. Yep, we are talking about Active Directory.

We might need an Active Directory re-vamp - or at least a frank assessment of the current state of AD - if...

it takes a long time for users to get logged in to their workstations
there are a lot of old users still in AD because we're afraid of what might happen if we delete them
we've had more than two systems administrators over the past few years
we don't know what all of our group policies do
AD does not contain information about our organizational hierarchy
we need to reorganize our organizational units
there are multiple errors in the AD logs, specifically dealing with replication
there are sites and domain controllers that still appear in AD that no longer exist
we need to rename the domain (usually for political reasons)

In an earlier post, we suggested that the first thing to do to get ready for new business requirements is to get Active Directory into rock solid shape: "Make sure our Active Directory is well planned, well executed, clean, and current. How many admins have had their hands in our AD, making changes (and usually failing to document them), creating groups, policies, who knows what? If we don't know "what," it's time for an overhaul. Don't wait for server upgrades to get AD into shape. We are really going to need AD because it can streamline a lot of the business-critical work we are going to do."

Assess and take action. It truly is the foundation of all things to come.

The CEO, The Sales Manager, and the CIO - Part Tres

2010-05-25T08:35:00.000-05:00

The CEO was about to come out of his chair. "I don't understand! Why did they stop selling maintenance contracts? We make a ton of money on maintenance contracts! What happened?"

The CIO looked at the CEO and shook his head. "I think we need the Sales Manager in here to continue this discussion productively," he said.

The Sales Manager joined the group a few minutes later, and as he was settling into his chair, the CEO asked him, "How are we doing with selling maintenance contracts?" The Sales Manager beamed. "You know, I realized that maintenance contracts were very profitable, but we weren't selling a lot of them. So two months ago, I hired an inside sales person whose specific job is to sell maintenance contracts. She calls every customer to offer them a maintenance contract. I've really been working with her, and her close rate is starting to climb as she gets more comfortable with the sales spiel I've given her. She closed two maintenance contracts last week!"

"Hmmm," the CEO begain. "So, two months ago, when you hired the inside sales person, did you communicate with the locations that you had done this?" The Sales Manager replied, "Yes, I notified all of the locations that maintenance contracts would be sold out of corporate, by our inside sales team."

"Okay, I have just one more question," the CEO continued. "Five or six months ago, did you have any personnel changes in the Southwest region?" The Sales Manager thought about it for a moment, then replied, "Yes, now that I think about it, about six months ago I hired a district manager to take over District A, which has six stores. I think she was a real catch. I've heard nothing but great things about her."

"Well, she is more than just a great catch for us," the CEO exclaimed. "She is our new Sales Manager. You're fired."

The Sales Manager left the room in the company of an HR person who had been standing by outside at the request of the CEO, rather in shock.

The CEO turned to the CIO. "I don't care what it takes. We need this kind of insight at our fingertips every day, for every region, district, and location. Can you do that?"

"You bet," the CIO replied. "And once we have the platform in place, we can analyze all sorts of information from all of our departments, so you can have a better handle on what is happening in this organization, and you can make decisions faster and based on facts rather than opinion."

The CEO was visibly thrilled. "I can't wait to get this in action! In the meantime, though, I'm going to promote that district manager and suggest to her that her first act be to institute a training program for all locations across the company, to get them all better at selling maintenance contracts and accessories. That kind of initiative is exactly what we need in this organization!"

The CEO, The Sales Manager, and the CIO - Part Dos

2010-05-25T08:11:00.000-05:00

"Well," began the CIO, settling in for a chat, "When we pulled all of the sales information together and started analyzing it, we quickly saw that sales figures were trending upward, and, a few months back, there was an 11% jump month to month that we sustained for three months straight. But the last two months, the numbers have dropped back 9%." "Yes, I knew all that," the CEO interjected. "I thought you were going to tell me something new." "Patience," said the CIO, clearly enjoying the spotlight. "It's the analysis we did next that is really eye opening." And the CIO continued.

"We started analyzing the sales performance by region, and we found that the Southwest region had experienced a sales surge of 28% while the other three regions had remained flat. So of course we wondered what the heck could be going on in the Southwest. So we kept analyzing the data. And what we found was eye-popping. The Southwest region had six locations that were outperforming the rest of the locations in the region by nearly double. So we dug deeper into those six locations to find out why."

The CEO was on the edge of his seat. "What did you find out?"

"We found that those six stores were selling accessories and multi-year maintenance agreements with every single sale, and that there were a number of sales of accessories and maintenance agreements by themselves. These add-on sales allowed those six locations to virtually double their revenue. However, two months ago, the maintenance agreement sales abruptly stopped. Those six locations kept selling accessories, but the big ticket, highly profitable, multi-year maintenance plans just vanished from the sales logs."

NEXT: What the heck happened?

The CEO, The Sales Manager, and the CIO - Part Uno

2010-05-20T18:04:00.001-05:00

"There's been a great upswing in sales the last couple of months. I wonder what's causing it?" said the CEO to the Sales Manager. "I think there are a number of factors," answered the Sales Manager, rather studiously. "We are just doing a better job of getting out in front of more people." "Well, keep up the good work," said the CEO, as he went back to analyzing his financial statements and chatting with the CIO.

Three months later, the CEO and the CIO were meeting once again, when the Sales Manager stopped by - much to his regret, as it turned out. "Sales have tanked, and I want to know what is going on!" the CEO ranted. "People just aren't buying right now," the Sales Manager offered, to which the CEO responded "Not good enough! I want to know exactly what has changed!" With that, the Sales Manager left the CEO's office, and the CEO went back to meeting with the CIO. The CIO cautiously raised his head. "Would you like to know what really caused sales to uptick a couple of months ago, and fall back this month?" the CIO asked.

The CEO was surprised. "How would you know that? Seems like the Sales Manager should have a handle on what is causing these ups and downs, not IT." "Well," the CIO said, "Since this came up three months ago, I've been doing some work with our database people. We've been pulling information from all of our systems and doing some analysis. I can show you exactly what has happened to sales, why it is fluctuating, who is responsible, and offer suggestions about what we can do about it."

Naturally, the CEO was curious. "Have you offered this analysis to the Sales Manager?" he asked. "Well, I have, yes, but the Sales Manager thinks that IT is just to keep email running and the laptops working. The Sales Manager does not think that IT can help with a sales problem. Or should I say, a sales 'opportunity?'" the CIO said with a smile.

NEXT: What is going on in Sales?

Managing the Customer Engagement Process with IT

2010-05-11T07:17:00.000-05:00

We've talked before about how integrating IT with the customer engagement will effectively integrate IT with the business. Every business has customers. Every customer has to go through different stages within the relationship with our organization. Customers represent the biggest area of risk and the biggest area of potential reward for every company, right? Get more customers buying products or services, and corporate revenues should go up. Lose customers and revenues generally go down. This creates a target-rich zone for IT. How can IT help the organization get more customers and retain those customers? What can IT do to help make it easy for customers and prospective customers to do business with us? And of course, there's the converse -is IT doing anything to make it difficult for customers and prospective customers to do business with us? (See prior posts on the Sales Prevention Department for some ideas there.)

Recently we've been talking with friends at Global360, a firm which specializes in Business Process Management (and designated a "leader" in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPM), and sharing some of these thoughts. Come to find out, Global360 has a number of case studies that specifically address how automating the business processes that surround the customer have been incredibly successful for their clients.

If we can model one aspect of the customer engagement process at a time, automate it to reduce buyer "friction" and make it easier to get and keep a customer, and thus contribute directly to the revenue stream, why wouldn't we do that? Because it costs too much? A cost-benefit analysis is a must, to be sure. Fixing a ten dollar problem with a twenty dollar solution rarely makes business sense. For most companies, however, customer acquisition, retention, and management has the potential to add six figures, seven figures, or more to the revenue stream. Getting better at those processes seems like a great priority for IT to adopt.

On Time, On Budget... On Track?

2010-05-11T06:57:00.000-05:00

According to 60% of business and IT leaders surveyed by Diamond in their 2010 Digital IQ Survey, projects don't regularly deliver their planned scope. Yet, we suspect, these same projects were heralded as successes because they were delivered "on time and on budget."

From Chris Curran, frequent writer for CIO Magazine, CIO.com, and other august publications, and Chief Technology Officer for Diamond Management & Technology Consultants:

“On-time, On-Budget” has got to be one of the most over used and largely useless measures of project success. The reason is that many times this magic is done by cutting scope. In Diamond’s 2010 Digital IQ survey, 60% of business and IT leaders said that their projects don’t regularly deliver their planned scope. So, just bypass the scope-budget metrics and go straight to the scope. Its the business capabilities that a project’s sponsor wants anyway. Cutting scope cuts business value and customer satisfaction.

(You can find the full article here, and it is recommended reading for any CIOs, not just new CIOs.)

When a project is evaluated up front, it is most likely evaluated in terms of the value it will return to the business, and approved or declined based on the business case. In some organizations, it is apparently more important to deliver the project on time and on budget than to deliver the promised scope, yet delivery of the scope is what will deliver the business value. How is this logical? At the proposal stage of a project, whether the project is being proposed by an internal team or an external team, the time and budget estimates are derived based on the very best information available at the time, yet when the project team digs in, it frequently finds that all was not as it was anticipated.

This happens in every kind of project, not just IT projects. The plumber didn't realize that the pipe that was hidden in the wall was old and would need to be replaced, and it's going to take another day and another $200. Would you tell him to only hook up the cold water because being on-time and on-budget is more important than actually having both hot and cold as the project was originally supposed to do?

One of the best project managers I've ever met shared that he has managed wildly successful projects that were nowhere near on-time and on-budget. The key, it seems, is to make sure everyone on the project team and the business sponsors understand why the project is taking longer and/or costing more, and always relating back to the business value that the project will bring at completion. On-time and on-budget with a failed scope is, in many cases, wasted time and wasted budget. Would you agree?

Mobility, the New Information Technology Platform?

2010-05-10T14:23:00.000-05:00

Mobility is a many-faceted topic, and some IT leaders think it has everything to do with marketing and little to do with IT. In our last post we suggested that standardizing on a mobile platform is one of the five most important things IT leaders should do right now. Here are three reasons why:

Email is now an expected benefit on mobile devices. If we've not standardized on a single mobile platform, our IT group is expected to allow email on any mobile device a user brings in. Whether the organization pays for everyone's mobile device or not, having a published standard allows us to declare our support - or non-support - of a specific platform.
Most organizations have line-of-business applications that make sense to extend to the mobile platform. If we don't have a standard, we are hampered in our ability to create mobile interfaces for our business applications. Some examples: time entry, shipping and receiving, inventory, CRM, sales systems queries/customer history reports, production reports, executive dashboards.
Mobile devices need management too. Candidly, most mobile devices today are just tiny laptops with a telephone capability. Why wouldn't we care about proactively managing the mobile platform, at least as much as we care about managing the desktop platform? Mobile devices represent a higher level of risk and arguably managing them is a critical business decision. The risk becomes exponentially higher if the mobile devices aren't being managed, because in that case the organization has no idea what is accessible or stored on the mobile device.

Need more evidence? Here's a true story. In one organization we know, a new person joined the team with his personal mobile phone. The company then purchased him a new mobile phone and allowed him to choose the phone he wanted. He then downloaded an application that would move everything from one phone to the other. However, that application had a bug in it, and his phone sent cancellation notices to every participant of every meeting he had accepted since he had joined the company. Who even knew that was possible? Suffice it to say, a mobility standard within the organization, and management of the platform, would have avoided what turned in to a serious business faux pas.

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming THE platform that is most critical for IT to support. How can we do a better job of getting out in front of it?

So, About That Plumbing - 5 Things to Do to Prepare to Address New Business Requirements

2010-05-10T13:55:00.000-05:00

In the last post, we talked about focusing on the water, not the plumbing. Great information and we hope you read it and got some ideas or crystallized some of your own thoughts. Let's talk for a minute about that plumbing, though. New information management systems, new ways of looking at data, new integrations between systems, new workflows, new business process management - all things that will move the company forward, provided of course that the infrastructure is there to support them.

Here are five things that we should all do to ensure that we are prepared to give the business what it needs in order to continue to grow and prosper.

Make sure our Active Directory is well planned, well executed, clean, and current. How many admins have had their hands in our AD, making changes (and usually failing to document them), creating groups, policies, who knows what? If we don't know "what," it's time for an overhaul. Don't wait for server upgrades to get AD into shape. We are really going to need AD because it can streamline a lot of the business-critical work we are going to do.
Implement a system configuration automation solution (like Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager) so that we can easily roll out upgrades and updates when we are ready, configure new workstations no matter where they land in the enterprise, and maintain a desired configuration if we wish to do so.
Get a handle on all of the applications that are running in our organizations - on the servers sure, and most importantly on the user desktops/laptops. Based on our experience, there's at least a handful that we don't know about. (Note that the system implemented in #2 above should be able to do a software inventory for you, too.)
Create an organizational standard for mobile devices, and make it a standard that we can manage from within IT. More on this in a future post.
Re-categorize our infrastructure in terms of the services provided, not the systems that provide them. If server #8 goes down, what business processes will grind to a halt? If the router in the fourth floor wiring closet shorts out, will we stop selling, stop hearing the phone ring, stop business conferences from occuring, stop receiving email? In one case that comes to mind, everything stopped because no one realized that one little non-backed-up, non-redundant router was configured to be the absolute center of the universe. That fact was not uncovered until the IT organization started looking at services, not systems.

While this isn't an exhaustive list, in our experience these are the five most critical things that IT organizations need to be doing right now. Whether we are virtualizing or not, upgrading or not, moving to the cloud, or not, if we don't have these five things in the bag, we are handicapping our organization's ease of future growth.

What else would be on your list?

It's The Information, Not the Technology, Right?

2010-05-10T13:05:00.000-05:00

Read a post this morning - Telling Statements on the CIO Role - from Brian Watson over at CIO Insight. He quotes an interview with Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris, authors of Analytics at Work. In the interview they mention that "CIOs have been pretty preoccupied with the plumbing as opposed to the water." We are seeing a lot of engagements that are "plumbing" related - upgrades to Active Directory, Exchange migrations, virtualization of servers and of desktops, systems management initiatives. What is the real purpose of these engagements? Typically, to reduce the time, money, and effort it takes to keep the "plumbing" running. Nothing wrong with that; in most organizations, the plumbing cost is still too high and the organization will benefit from decreasing costs in those areas.

But hey, what about the water? Or, to take the analogy in a different way, most CIOs are focused, not on sizzle and not on steak, but on building the grill properly. When the steak gets to the table, will the guests care if it was cooked on a half-barrel or a state-of-the-art stainless steel grill?

So what is the steak, or the water? It is the Information - the I in IT, the I in CIO, the most critical asset that any company possesses (outside of its people, of course). How do we get a better handle on our information? According to most industry surveys, Business Intelligence is still very high on the list of CIO to-dos for 2010. Why? The grill-building is taking too many resources, perhaps, or the organization doesn't understand what it can do with the information so getting budget for a project is a challenge. It takes more than a business case. It takes a true educational effort on the part of IT to the rest of the organization.

Information is the steak. Presenting the information in usable form is the sizzle. Information is the water. Presenting the information in usable form is the sparkle.

These are just a few ideas - you'll have plenty of your own.

If we could map our marketing campaigns to sales results, we would be able to spend our marketing budget more effectively. Figuring out how campaigns affect sales will allow us to do more of the right things and fewer of the less-effective things.
If we could analyze daily sales on a real-time basis, we'd have the information we need to be much more accurate in our sales forecasting, which would allow us to streamline our inventory and improve our supply chain management.
If we could see specifically why and how one particular location is routinely out-performing all others, we could learn from what they are doing and repeat their success in other locations.
If we could focus our entire organization around the few things that make us successful, how much more successful could we be?

It's time to get a handle on the information. The company doesn't really care if the information is served up on a state-of-the-art, virtualized, clustered, fail-over, five nines server environment. The organization cares about taking action. The infrastructure is the dial tone of today, and it needs to be both reliable and cost-effective, so we can't ignore it of course. There is no steak without the grill; there is no water without the plumbing. Got it. Likewise, there is no growth without timely and ready access to business critical information.

Can you handle one more analogy? "This guy spent twenty minutes explaining to me how to build a watch. I just want to know what time it is." Perhaps that is the most relevant analogy of all. What time is it?

What CIOs Can Learn from Sales - Abbie Lundberg's Interview with Steve Bandrowczak

2010-05-07T15:13:00.000-05:00

Steve Bandrowczak, former CIO of DHL, Lenovo, and most recently, Nortel, has recently made the transition into a sales leadership role. Abbie Lundberg, former Editor-in-Chief of CIO Magazine, documented her chat with him here.

Our favorite part: "Where a lot of IT guys get hung up is they talk about “the data center is up 7/24” and “I’ve got five nines reliability” or “I can role out projects…” But you know what? That’s a commodity these days. The real value that you have is where you understand a business unit and its key metrics. I’ll just take a real simple example: If you’re going to roll out a CRM project, the sales team, in general, is looking for… well, they’d say it’s really about lead management, it’s about getting my contacts in a single database, it’s about making my day easier. No it’s not! It’s about sales productivity and driving revenue."

This aligns with our point of view that CIOs must integrate IT with the business, and, even further, with the customer engagement process.

Thanks, Abbie, for an insightful interview!

Business Process Management - Above the Water Line, and Below the Water Line

2010-05-04T14:32:00.000-05:00

When people are doing tasks within a business process, life is easy yet in most cases less efficient. When business process gets automated, getting there is not easy, but the efficiency gains can be game-changing within some organizations. People color outside the lines, work outside of the rule book, do whatever it takes to get the job done. Systems can't do any of that. Automation forces us to look at the ways in which work gets done, apply rules, make decisions about what happens in what order and at what time. The payoff can be huge, though, and worth thinking through the positives and negatives for our own organizations. Consider these:

A major US wireless carrier implemented a business process management solution and saved $3.5 million in the first year.
Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation streamlined business process with an automated solution and now books deals and funds the dealers faster. Before the system was implemented, approximately 40,000 contracts in a single month took 125 people plus additional temporary workers, working six days a week, ten hours days, to process that volume. After the system was implemented, the same workload was processed by 102 people working forty hour weeks.
Kansas City Power & Light had challenges in its Customer Service Center, with inefficient and error-prone manual processes. Implementing a BPM solution has provided an end-to-end customer service process management solution which has decreased customer service processing time dramatically.

The key to business process management is analyzing the organization objectively and making decisions about where automating process can have a big payoff. Does your organization have lots of hourly workers, or high turnover, or are you growing and adding people? Automating the human resources on-boarding and off-boarding processes might have a huge impact. Is your organization very transaction-based, with lots of unique customers and more coming in every day? Possibly automating the customer on-boarding process would be a difference-maker for you. Do you have a heavy customer service emphasis, a big customer service department, and challenges with one-call resolution and/or high drop rates? Business process management could save you six or seven figures each year.

The key is to look at how work gets done, from the people angle, and couple that with what works gets done from the systems angle. People are "above the water line," the first gate, the most critical component of any process. Systems are "below the water line," the mechanical means to make a business process run more smoothly, integrating disparate systems, creating the appearance of a single resource for information.

For most organizations, automating business process will have a credible, and cost-justifiable, impact. Thinking through where our organizations can handle and benefit from improvement on that level is the next logical step.

Breath of Fresh Air - IT Figures Out How to Use New Tech to Advance the Biz

2010-04-27T07:10:00.000-05:00

One of our clients has a director-level person on the IT team whose job is to figure out how new technology can advance their business. Wow. Don't see that every day. He lives on the bleeding edge, reviewing all the newest stuff, and, when he finds something intriguing, he sometimes invents new ways to use it so that it works for their business. His goals? Find ways that IT can help increase revenue, streamline the customer experience, or reduce costs. One of his recent successes? He found a single device that will do a specific customer interaction for a fraction of the cost, produce a better customer experience, reduce implementation and maintenance time, and it will have less down time. As a result of installing this device, sales of that particular service are expected to increase, which will of course increase corporate revenue.

This is a great example of integrating IT into the very fabric of the business. Well done! Should we all have people on our teams who live on the bleeding edge of technology and who have similar goals to this fellow? What more could we accomplish for our organizations if we did?

"Undercover Boss" and How Every Person Affects the Bottom Line

2010-04-26T17:06:00.000-05:00

"Undercover Boss," if you haven't seen it, is a TV show where the head of a big organization goes undercover as a worker, learning from his own unknowing employees and discovering where "corporate" may have missed the mark. It's a cool show, but I wish it were longer than one hour, so we could really see how corporate changes and how employees change in response to what corporate has learned about them. Some of the stories have been rather poignant, and some have been rather pointed, and the themes of "corporate doesn't care" or "corporate doesn't know what it's like out here" have been recurring in nearly every episode.

What would it be like if every single person within an organization knew exactly how their work affects the bottom line of the company? What if everyone understood how his or her contribution matters, and how a lack of execution ripples all through the organization? Would the workplace be more energized? Would the team members encourage other team members to meet or exceed their personal goals? Would there be more ideas flowing, more creativity, more accountability? You bet.

If you haven't watched "Undercover Boss," you can find episodes here at CBS online. Watch the looks on the people's faces in the final scenes and you might get some ideas for your own organization. If you haven't read "Gung Ho" by Ken Blanchard, you'll probably enjoy it. It's a pretty candid and easy-to-read look at what power to the people can do for an organization.

It's something to think about.

Removing IT from the Center of the Universe

2010-04-26T16:18:00.000-05:00

IT shops have done a great job of kingdom building over the years. The power of IT has grown exponentially in the past twenty-five years or so, and with it, the ability of IT to be a universe unto itself (no pun intended), without a great deal of regard for all of the other universes within the organization. We see examples every day of where IT has dictated the way life will be, to the detriment of the organization as a whole (and we have mentioned some of these examples in previous posts). The good news is that there's a shift in IT to be more "big picture." The bad news is that it is taking too long.

How quickly can the organization make decisions, get a new product to market, isolate a group for a targeted marketing campaign? How "customer centric" is the organization? It doesn't matter how many servers we have, or if we are running on the latest and greatest operating systems, or if we've improved the way we deliver a new application to the users if we can't answer a customer service query in one call, give sales a current view into customer behavior, or facilitate a customer engagement that results in a sale.

The kingdom-building, center-of-the-universe outlook of IT started out with all the right intentions. IT had magical things to share with the business that no one else understood. IT spoke foreign languages (Fortran, anyone?) and created complex systems that ran on giant machines that had entire floors and special rooms of the office building devoted to them. IT was mysterious. IT was a cost of doing business. Now IT must adapt. We must remove IT from the center of the universe and recognize that IT is simply an enabler of the business. An IT shop that is integrated within the fabric of the business will allow that business to achieve great things. An IT shop that has yet to "align" with the business is, for most organizations, not getting it done any longer.

Who Owns Your Data, Anyway? Who's on First?

2010-04-26T15:11:00.000-05:00

If you are like most organizations, the answer is "everybody!" And therein lies the rub. Data is the most strategic asset we have, outside of our people, yet it is not typically treated as a strategic asset, coddled, managed, massaged, and modeled by a select individual or group of individuals. Everyone in the organization is creating data, managing data, and coming up with their own unique ways to use data. And while everyone might treasure their own data, they have no idea how many other groups or individuals might be tracking the same exact data, only differently. Lots of data; not enough data management.

We see one firm who prints expensive marketing materials and mails them to everyone on their list twice a year. One person might get three copies of the magazine because there are three different systems that maintain client contact information at that firm. How much does inadequate data management cost them on an annual basis?

One of the most common things we see is the failure to think through all of the ways that data could be used, and, as a consequence, certain data does not get tracked. Then a department realizes they can use a certain piece of data, so the data gets fragmented once again so that department can track that one field. In many organizations, Finance has driven the need for a data warehouse but never talked to Marketing, to whom data is becoming increasingly important.

A Forbes survey recently completed offers that "fragmented data ownership" is the single biggest roadblock to a successful information management program. Companies that want to maximize their use of data might consider appointing a "Data Czar" who is responsible for overall data management and data quality.

Our data is critical to our ability to navigate in the ever-faster-paced world in which we work. Taking control of that data as an enterprise initiative will save money and create operational efficiency in the short term. Artfully using that data and allowing its use among all departments will, in most organizations, increase revenue as well.

We Sent You Three Boats and a Helicopter...

2010-04-23T12:53:00.000-05:00

IT Departments may need to trim down the number of vendors they use, but a limit to the number of vendors should not keep IT leaders from seeking new ideas and new information from outside sources. When we limit ourselves to the vendors and suppliers we know, we are limiting ourselves to what THEY know. Remaining open to new ideas and the possibility of new relationships will keep our current vendors on the top of their game and give us opportunities to engage with people and organization who are leading the charge in new and different ways. Don't eliminate a potential relationship just because it isn't on our list of approved vendors. Heck, some of us can remember a time when Microsoft wasn't on the list of approved vendors. Especially in the past couple of years, so many changes have taken place with technology that doing things the same old way just isn't practical anymore.

There's an old joke about a devout fellow whose house is being overtaken by flood waters. (If you haven't heard it, go here - this is the very short version.) The fellow sends away each rescue attempt, stating something on the order of "My faith will get me through this trial." Unfortunately, he drowns, and as he is standing at the gates of the ever-after, he says "My faith is broken. I thought I would be sent a miracle." And the response is... "I don't know what you're complaining about; we sent you three boats and a helicopter."

We share that story because sometimes we are so conditioned to look for one thing, we fail to see that it has actually been delivered to us. These are exciting times in technology and in business - economic downturn notwithstanding. We really can do more with less. We really can create revenue opportunities for our organizations. We really can cut costs. We really can do a lot of things we could not do five years ago or twenty years ago. And, we really can miss the boat if we are waiting for a miracle.

TAG You're IT - Get Ideas, Get Jazzed - like Woman's Day Magazine Did...

2010-04-21T16:44:00.000-05:00

This will be a game-changer for some who read this. Will it be you? The idea behind Microsoft Tag is simple - basically a barcode that, when "snapped" or photographed with the mobile phone camera, will take the user, well, basically anywhere. When one creates a Tag, one defines the action that the tag will take - so you can "snap" someone to a website, or "snap" someone to a V-card, or even "snap" someone to dialing the mobile phone that just "snapped" the tag. Pretty simple. Figuring out what to do with this technology ranges from the very simple to the incredibly complex and cool.

Woman's Day Magazine, is calling their May 2010 issue "interactive" and has tags sprinkled throughout the magazine - 17 in fact, eleven of which are contests that can be entered from the mobile device. One tag, when snapped, takes the user to a webisode from Raisinets, and still others are for money-off coupons. One is for recipes, and one is for organizing tips. But what, you might be thinking, does this have to do with IT? This is just marketing, right?

If IT were not involved, I'd wager that this interactive issue might not have happened. IT needed to be in the mix to create the various websites, all scaled to render properly on a mobile device/smartphone. IT is maybe the group who thought up using the tags. And IT is definitely allowing this organization to take greater advantage of the Internet in its quest for more subscribers/magazine buyers. And, keep reading, because the sky is quite literally the limit when you are using a Tag application like this one.

For example, Tags can be on billboards and snapped from the car (by the passenger of course). Are you a hotel chain who puts up billboards? What if you could reinforce your message with a nifty mobile-aware website? Are you an insurance company? Perhaps having a Tag on the back of your proof-of-auto-insurance papers would allow a driver to "snap" and be taken to your interactive mobile-enabled claims information or even submittal website. Are you in retail? A Tag on the shelf to create an interactive buying experience, perhaps? What about manufacturing? Could you put a Tag on a piece of equipment and be taken to the intranet site where all of specs and engineering change orders are stored? Perhaps a restaurant chain - imagine "snapping" a Tag on the menu to get to the calorie and nutrition information. Real estate agents, how about a Tag on the for sale sign that takes prospective buyers to the online interactive tour - that they can see while sitting in their car, parked outside the house you want to sell them? Internal uses abound also - create an HR card with a Tag on it and "snap" your team members to the HR portal, as an example. The possibilities are endless and bounded only by your imagination and your capabilities.

This is better than sending out USB drives, and a great way to combine printed material with an online interactive experience. Smartphones are gaining ground every day, and we can leverage them more than we've ever been able to before.

What does it take? Mobile-capable/aware websites (if you want to take people on an interactive experience) and being open to all of the possibilities.

Want to try it? Here's a custom tag that I created very easily. You can download the app to your smartphone at http://gettag.mobi/ or through the AppStore if you have an iPhone, then snap the tag and see where you go.

Want to learn more? Here are a couple of other links.
http://www.facebook.com/microsofttag
http://www.microsoft.com/tag

How many ways can you think of for your business to use a Tag? For us, the idea storm does not end, so if you'd like to brainstorm, give us a call!

What Does Increasing Revenue Have To Do with IT?

2010-04-15T11:26:00.000-05:00

How many different ways can a company increase revenue? Sell more stuff, get more customers who buy stuff, get more stuff to sell to more customers who buy stuff - all obvious answers. Whose problems are those? What groups in your organization are resposible for making sure these things happen? Some who read this will answer "every group." Others who answer will say "Sales." No one will say "IT," and though some might lump IT in with the "every group" answer, very few will think in terms of IT having a significant contribution to make. After all, IT doesn't direct the sales force, or the marketing team, or the product development group. So why is increasing revenue even coming up in an IT conversation?

If IT could create an environment where the product development group could get products to market faster, would that contribute to increasing revenue? See the Microsoft Case Study on Taser for some ideas (and note that this is not an Oakwood case study, though Oakwood has developed similar solutions for clients).

If sales and marketing have great databases from which to work, could they get in front of more customers? Probably they could. If your organization offered a fully integrated view of each customer relationship, could the sales team be more strategic in their customer calls? Can you integrate the invoicing system with the CRM system so that purchase history is in the hands of the salesreps within a keystroke? What about inventory information being available on a mobile device so that a salesperson can close a deal when he or she is right in front of that client? How about streamlining the quote process? IT can have a profound effect on the way sales and marketing work, which will then have a profound effect on the sales and marketing results which then....increases revenue!

More and more IT leaders are thinking in terms of what IT can do for the overall business. If you are one of those leaders, perhaps some of the things we write in our blog here will give you even more ideas. The industry writers are pretty united in their thoughts that the IT leaders who are focused on moving the corporate needle are the ones who are going to remain critical to their respective organizations.

Are we there yet?

Mapping the Customer Engagement - Where Does IT Touch? Where Can IT Touch?

2010-04-12T13:50:00.000-05:00

Grab a piece of paper and draw a circle in the middle of it. Label it "Customer." Now draw lines out from the circle, each line representing the way that a customer can interact with the business. You might end up with something that looks like this:

Now recolor the boxes to represent all of the places where IT intersects, or where IT can intersect, with those interactions. How many of these boxes do you have in a different color? Think about pulling together a meeting of your peers who head different groups, and collaborate on the mapping and re-coloring project. Get their thoughts about how IT can strategically enable their customer engagement.

You might look at these boxes and think "what the heck is that doing there?" We have seen IT have a profound effect on the execution of process in nearly every one of these boxes (recognizing that of course IT cannot control personalities - like salespeople and service technicians, but IT can provide tools to help them do a better job).

This is just a sample and your organization might have more boxes, different boxes, or fewer boxes. It is a noble target - and an achievable target - to be the best and easiest company in your industry with which to do business. Aligning IT strategically with the customer engagement process is the path to aligning IT strategically with the business itself. And sometimes, the answer is as simple as understanding where IT can hurt a process and getting out of the way (don't be the Sales Prevention Department).

Recommended Reading: Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge - by Janelle Barstow and Paul Stewart - not directly related to IT but certainly gets the brain cells moving in a possibly different way.

80/20 Spending Rule - Get Better 1% at a Time

2010-04-12T12:24:00.000-05:00

As humans, sometimes we make projects so huge that there's no way to get them done. "We must reduce our IT maintenance budget by 10% so we have more money to spend on innovation" isn't that much different from the conversation I had with my young neighbor over the weekend. "We desperately need new windows, but we just can't afford them," she said with a sigh. "Well," I asked, "Can you afford one window?" "Well.... yes..." she said, confused. "Then replace one window each month or every other month, and before you know it, they will all be done," I suggested. "Just make a plan and stick to it as best you can." Her face brightened considerably. "We can do that."

The same thing happens in business, and especially in IT. To break the 80/20 spending rule - typically 80% of IT budgets go to just "keeping the lights on" and 20% is available for new - let's not create a 10% reduction target and create a giant project to make it happen. Create a 1% reduction target. That's right, just 1%. 1% every month. What tiny thing can we do to reduce our IT maintenance spend by 1% right now? Get the team together and ask that question, and you'll be amazed at the suggestions you'll get.

Here are some that we have heard:

Stop paying third party software licensing fees for services we can provide with the licensing we already own (typical for Microsoft shops with Enterprise Agreements in particular) - a couple of examples:

Paying anti-virus vendors instead of using Forefront
Paying systems management vendors instead of using Systems Center
Paying for desktop security instead of upgrading to Windows 7 and using its features

Virtualize as much of the server farm as possible
Take inventory of our software usage and reduce our licensing fees where possible
Switch away from third party conference call providers and use a software-based approach (Microsoft Office Communications Server, as an example)
Off-load non-proprietary services, like email, into the cloud
Put systems and/or processes in place to better manage projects
Add the phone systems to the IT group responsibilities much like IT took over copiers a few years back

These are just a few examples, and each can lead to a 1% reduction - or more - every month. And, if we reduce our maintenance spend by 1% every month, at the end of the year we will have exceed our 10% target.

One window at a time.

Recommended reading: Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard. Although the book is about wowing your customers with fantastic service, it applies to all areas of the business - and does a great job of explaining the 1% rule. Enjoy!

We're Awash In Data; Are We Awash in Meaningful Insight?

2010-04-12T11:56:00.000-05:00

Organizations of all sizes have been collecting data about their customers since the day they opened their respective doors. From business cards and index cards to accounting and CRM records, the data is within the organization, buried perhaps, but in there somewhere. As organizations, we know more about our customers today than ever in the past - or we could, if we could somehow manage the data and use it to gain insight into our own business as well as our interactions with our customers.

But more importantly, what we need to gain is foresight. How can we predict sales and revenue? How can we use the historical data we have gathered to predict what will happen next month, next quarter, next year? At the end of 2010, what will you wish you would have known? How will you be looking back on your business?

If it hasn't been done already, put the fields in place in your data systems today so that you can not only go back and draw conclusions, but look forward and apply predictive analytics to figure out what is most likely to occur. For example, you have a pretty good idea that some companies go on a flurry of buying activity in February. Have you tracked that back to their fiscal year end? Which customers have a fiscal year end on June 30, or have some other non-calendar fiscal year? If you are selling to other businesses, do you have information stored about your customers' peak times of business? Is all of this information within your systems? Without doubt you can look at your sales trends and figure out which months are big and which fall short each year - can you go one step backward and determine the causes of those peaks and valleys? Are you measuring lagging indicators? Or are you measuring leading indicators?

Recommended reading: Performance Dashboards by Wayne Eckerson, which has a great section on leading versus lagging indicators, and much more valuable information for those who want to get out ahead and use insight to gain foresight.

Windows 7 Isn't Just for XP Replacement - Are You Missing the Boat?

2010-04-09T18:22:00.000-05:00

In doing Windows 7 Application Compatibility Factory engagements with several clients over the past few weeks, it has become evident that many organizations don't understand all of the capabilities available when thinking about the move to Windows 7. Yes, Windows 7 is getting more traction in the marketplace. It is cool and it works - what more could you ask? Well, if Windows 7 is not at the top of your to-do list, you might need to know more about this desktop operating system.

Windows 7 is a difference-maker and a money-saver. The new features that are available in Windows 7, especially when used in conjunction with Windows Server 2008, are extraordinary. AppLocker, BitLocker, Direct Access, and more - all should be stirring up the desktop O/S conversation in a big way. Our team met with a client yesterday who is planning on going to Windows 7 next year. They already own the product. They own the hardware on which it will run. They own the distribution engine for deploying it (Systems Center Configuration Manager, in this case). And - here's the rough part - they are paying some other company for software licenses to secure the desktops when they already own the Microosft technology that will do it at no additional cost. They have an opportunity to save tens of thousands of dollars by not licensing that software any more.

Windows 7 is much more than a replacement for Windows XP. We're putting together some educational materials for clients, sharing some of the new features that can really make a difference in an organization. We are finding that folks don't know what they don't know, and when they do know, they go to Windows 7 very quickly indeed.

CIO-Led Revenue Growth and Customer Engagement - Gotta Happen

2010-04-06T16:44:00.000-05:00

In some companies, it is happening already. In other companies, not so much. According to InformationWeek's Global CIO, CIOs who refuse to consider their responsibilities in the areas of revenue growth and customer engagement will be ex-CIOs by June. That's a pretty impressive stake in the ground, and in some companies, it's probably right. Just yesterday we heard of a major change in the leadership team of the IT department at a billion-dollar-plus retail/consumer goods business, and the new Head Fred of that department has an absolute mandate - increase revenue. (Plaudits to the CIO there, BTW.) Of course this leads to the very reasonable conclusion that the former Head Fred was *not* increasing revenue. So there's an example. While this was not a CIO-level change, it's certainly an indicator that Global CIO hit the nail on the head.

Go back to every (okay, nearly every) business "how-to" book you've read in the past ten years. Note we said "business how-to", not "IT how-to." Nearly every one of them, in some way or another, offers up some basic rules for business, and in this day and age more than ever, IT needs to be integrated into the very fabric of these rules.

With a tip of the hat to Ken Blanchard, Jim Collins, Verne Harnish, Robert Bloom, and others, we offer the following suggestions for CIOs and IT teams:

Understand - thoroughly and completely - how your organization attracts, engages, and retains its customers. How does your organization achieve growth? Why do customers choose to do business with your company? Why do customers choose to stop doing business with your company? What do you do better than anyone else? Map the customer engagement process. Infuse the IT organization with this knowledge.
Determine what IT is offering to the business that is an essential enabling factor in the quest for the organization to achieve its goals. What is IT doing that holds the organization back from achieving its goals?
Refocus the IT organization to the corporate goals - not to IT goals. I once had a CIO at a good-sized university tell me "Beds and heads. If we aren't contributing to getting heads in the classrooms or beds occupied in the dorm rooms, we aren't doing our job." That made it easy for him to decide what IT projects made sense and which didn't. Some CIOs need to get their teams out of the way of the business - see prior posts on the Sales Prevention Department, among others, for more on this topic.
Encourage breakthrough thinking. Incremental improvements are great, but breakthrough thinking is going to really put IT on the front lines of the business. Wouldn't it be great if the IT team at Nationwide Insurance was the group who said to the business "You know, we think we can make an application that runs on a mobile phone to allow people to file claims from the roadside." (I don't know who said it; I hope it was IT and not marketing, because that would be such a victory for IT, wouldn't it?)

Enough rules for a Tuesday. What are your thoughts?

Spreadsheet War Stories

2010-03-25T09:49:00.000-05:00

We were talking about data management this morning, and some interesting stories came out of the group. One Oakwood consultant just spent two weeks with a client automating a series of reports. When finished, the client told us that he could reallocate ten people now because they spent all their time doing spreadsheets that were now obsolete. His tongue may have been firmly in his cheek, but his point reminded us of several other companies where we have seen similar situations.

One client had a financial analyst on their team. However, he could not spend much time actually analyzing financials, because three weeks out of every month were spent re-keying data from various reports from various systems into spreadsheets, which were in turn provided as reports to the corporate management.

Another company has to have a report out daily on the day's production. They issue a report from their systems that is "mostly right" then re-issue it again the next day in a spreadsheet that is actually correct. Huh?

We're aware of another company who bought Office 2007 for their accounting team because Excel would go up to one million rows. Yikes.

We heard from a project manager recently that he spends a day a week re-formatting data into spreadsheets so that he can give graphs to the management team, because they want to see pictures, not numbers. 20% of a person devoted to.... making graphs? Really? This fellow is an extremely accomplished project manager, who is not managing projects for 20% of his work time. Seems like a net loss, right?

When we talk about the "one bite at a time" approach to business intelligence, this is where it all starts. What do you need from your data? Let's figure out the best way to get you what you need while allowing spreadsheet jockeys to go back to their real jobs.

Mobile App or Mobile Website? There Should Be a Debate!

2010-03-23T10:12:00.000-05:00

We were talking to an insurance company the other day, and the subject of mobility came up. "Oh, we are going to have an iPhone app," the CIO tossed out.

So, let's say you have an iPhone. You get into an accident. If you have not already downloaded the iPhone app, you have to first figure out where to download it, and download it. Do you go to the App Store? Do you hit the insurance company website and see if you can download it from there? Do you even know if your insurance carrier has an iPhone app? What if you don't have an iPhone? You might be tempted to try going to the insurance company website. However, if that website is not mobile-aware, you are just going to end up dialing the claims number anyway - assuming you have it or can easily get it.

To test this out, we picked on Nationwide Insurance, who had run TV ads featuring their mobile application. http://www.nationwide.com/ on Windows Mobile 5 yielded a nicely formatted mobile website with four links that were relevant to the mobile experience. Same site on Windows Mobile 6 was the exact same site, though it looked a little better. Then we went to http://www.nationwide.com/ from an iPhone. The same exact site came up - with no reference to the iPhone application. So then we went to the app store, searched on "Nationwide" and found a free app to download that would allow us to record the accident details. Nice app. Had to go searching for it. Now I guess if you are Nationwide customer with an iPhone, you might have the app downloaded and stored just in case you need it. But if you don't, you can't find it from the mobile site - one minor modification that would give Nationwide an A+ in Mobility.

http://www.allstate.com/ does not recognize a Windows Mobile 5 device, so the entire website is delivered to the cell phone. Terrible interface.
http://www.statefarm.com/ automatically recognized the mobile device and gave us a mobile-relevant experience, including a "vehicle information" link that would allow us to look up information on cars - presumably while car shopping. Aside from providing more information about what "Vehicle Information" might be, this is a pretty nice site. If they have a mobile app, it was not obvious from the mobile site.
http://www.geico.com/ did not recognize the mobile browser and displayed their entire website on the phone. Bad experience again.

When people are in an accident, and they need a good source of information on their mobile device, having an application developed for one and only one phone interface is not the end of the road. If you feel that you must have an application, combine it with a mobile-aware website that delivers mobile-relevant information. You can't rely on your user community to purchase the only phone you have developed for.

The Sales Prevention Team Strikes Again - and Marketing is the Culprit

2010-03-18T10:57:00.000-05:00

An email came in yesterday from an organization who implements the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products, inviting me to attend an event they are holding at a local restaurant. Since we work with clients all the time to integrate to Dynamics products, it seemed releveant to reach out to these folks and suggest that there might be opportunities for us to partner together. So, I replied to the email, to Mary Smith, who sent the email. And that is where the Sales Prevention Department came to the meeting.

My reply to Mary Smith bounced. It was rejected by Postini. Not being an Exchange expert, I didn't read through all of the code and try to decipher why it was rejected. I concluded that the graphics load inside the email must not be to the liking of their email scanner product. So I grabbed Mary's email address and wrote an entirely new email to Mary.

That email bounced, too. So, I went back to the invitation and looked for a phone number to call. No phone number. The only link in the email was to register. Since I didn't want to register, I didn't click it at that time. (I clicked it later and there wasn't a phone number there, either.) So now what? I went to their website and found a phone number of their corporate office, and I called. When the receptionist answered the phone, I asked for Mary Smith.

Guess what? There is no Mary Smith that works for this company.

So, I asked for their marketing director, and ended up leaving her a voice mail, with details - difficulty finding someone to contact, would love to offer some input so that they could adjust if they want to, etc.

This morning I got a call from someone who was NOT the marketing director, asking if she could help me. I explained the situation to her and her response was to offer to register me for the event. Argh. She did not understand what I was saying. Hopefully you will.

If you send an email from someone who does not exist and cannot receive email, you might as well send it from "no-reply@" because it has the same effect.

This company completely excluded the opportunity to engage with people who are interested in the topic but can't make the event. Since they scheduled the event for a half day starting at 8:30 Monday morning (yes, you read that right) I think it's entirely likely that they will miss out on a big part of the potential prospect pool, because there's no way to interact with this company except to register for the event.

And finally, the fact that my call got returned by someone who was clearly NOT in the know was, to be honest, a little irritating. As I was speaking with this woman this morning, I realized that working with this company might be more effort than it is worth. And if I, a potential partner for them, feels this way, how would customers and prospects feel in a similar situation?

Marketing needs to be certain it is not part of the Sales Prevention Department, don't you think?

Microsoft - Make the Windows Phone Team Listen!!!

2010-03-18T10:35:00.000-05:00

Great article on eWeek - here - about Windows Phone 7 Series. Microsoft is hoping that their new mobile OS will take some marketshare away from the iPhone and the up-and-coming-quickly Android phones. I hope Microsoft people read the eWeek article and will make some folks listen!

If Microsoft can make inroads into corporate America with Windows Phone 7 Series (still hate the name, any Microsofties who are reading this), the consumer market will follow, to a degree. Here's why:

Developing true and integrated business applications will be cheaper and easier in Windows Phone 7 Series (I'm just going to call it WinMo7, okay?) than in any other platform
Managing WinMo7 phones will be done from within our network management platform
Security for WinMo7 phones will be handled from our network security platform and our network management platform
We'll be able to control our WinMo7 phones as much or as little as we want to, establishing corporate standards if we want to, and creating a truly dynamic and business-usable mobile environment
If the corporate-paid-for-and-supplied phone has a terrific user interface, users won't complain that they don't get to use their "other" phone
If users can get fun apps, a great web experience, and a terrific user interface, they will be thrilled that the company is providing a phone
Business enterprises can create standardization with minimal push-back
Business users - who are "consumers" and drawn to iPhone and Android for what they want to do personally - will be more likely to stick with the corporate standard when they have a great user experience (can we emphasize this enough?)

Dear Microsoft, please get the Windows Phone 7 Series Team to read the eWeek article. We think it will really pay off for you!

Assessments Can Light The Way

2010-03-15T12:38:00.000-05:00

It seems that we have been flooded lately with assessment engagements, and our clients are gaining significant value from these short engagements that, in some cases, can be performed with zero out-of-pocket client expense. Whether considering a move to Windows 7, or needing a handle on how the application platform can be utilized better to move the company foward, or wanting to understand Cloud Computing, an assessment can form the basis of a roadmap to move a company down the path toward more integrated IT.

Here's a quick rundown of the assessments that we've been performing for clients lately. In some cases, once a client has been through the assessment phase, we have also been able to get funding for a proof of concept in a specific area.

Application Compatibility Factory - determines how existing applications will work with Windows 7 and identifies remediation steps if needed. Typically one week; some clients qualify for Microsoft funding to offset the cost; otherwise a $5,000 investment.
Deployment Planning Services - goes through a process of determining the best way to deploy certain technologies. Three DPS engagements are available - Desktop Deployment Planning Services, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, and Exchange Deployment Planning Services. These engagements are most often paid through Microsoft vouchers that are a part of Software Assurance, though fee-based DPS engagements are available as well.
Cloud Computing Assessment - four hours of interviews/questions, followed by two hours of report delivery, all around whether moving anything to the cloud makes sense for your organization. We can submit for Microsoft funding to cover the cost of this engagement.
Application Platform Optimization Assessment - using a tool formulated with information from industry analysts, and developed by a third party, Oakwood's consultants work with clients to determine how they might better utilize business intelligence, application integration, and application development models. We can request Microsoft funding to cover the cost of this engagement.
Business Value Planning Services - looking at a specific business process and determining how to utilize technology to streamline that process within an organization.
Microsoft Desktop Optimization - determining the best way to deliver the desktop and considering a variety of tools and options.

In the words of the Cheshire Cat - "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Whether an assessment is part of your strategy or you choose another way to develop your vision, having an eye on the end goal and a well-lit path to get there is the most important piece.

The Challenge of User Adoption

2010-03-11T09:05:00.000-06:00

We have a couple of clients right now who have had challenges with user adoption of new platforms and tools that the IT department is rolling out - specifically, in these two cases, SharePoint. Both have already tried corporate intranet sites, but regard them as failures due to lack of user adoption. Here's why: the user community did not understand the value that SharePoint would provide for them. And, when you are asking people to change habits that they've had since email became mainstream, they need to understand the value of that change.

Based on our experience, there are three key things to do in order to get the user adoption you seek.

First, design the intranet site and subsites so that they provide more value than email, email attachments, and shared drives. Work with the users to figure out how they use documents so you can design document libraries with metadata and version control. Monitor email for announcements and create your Announcements on the intranet site with categories. Review frequently accessed information and create links from the main page. The key to a successful intranet implementation is not just storing information - it's being able to easily retrieve information.

Second, plan, plan, plan the rollout. Consider special training for key users in each department and give them an "Intranet Guru" button to wear at work for a few weeks. They can help other users in their department use the new Intranet site. Plan user activities, like an Intranet scavenger hunt, with prizes at the end. (I have one of these designed, if you're interested. Glad to share - that's why I created it!) Conduct a survey. Start a discussion board. Start a wiki for particular departments. Create a photo gallery and ask people to upload office candids - turn it into a contest if you want and offer prizes.

Third, get agreement from key people that they will utilize the intranet site for anything they can, and that they'll stop sending documents to colleagues via email, stop scheduling happy hours via email, etc. When the only source of information is the intranet site, people will go there. If they can find what they want, they will be happy they did.

Here's a freebie - when you implement a platform like SharePoint, it can do so much for your organization that it can become overwhelming. Choose key features and/or key departments to be a part of the rollout, then embark on a plan of continuous improvement. When you re-invest in the value proposition, you will end up with a user community who cannot live without the intranet you have helped to create.

A Room Full of Project Managers, Talking About Dashboards

2010-03-10T08:51:00.000-06:00

The Microsoft Project Users Group, St. Louis Regional Chapter, is meeting right now at Oakwood. (I'll give more info on the group at the bottom of the post if you want to learn more.) The room is filled with project managers, and this morning's topic is Project Management Dashboards. It seems that it is an on-going struggle - how to roll up information about projects and their progress in a fashion that can be easily consumed by those who are not necessarily project management savvy. My favorite is the "stop light indicators" - green, yellow, red. Red is bad; something is out of kilter and needs extra attention or a recovery operation of some sort. Yellow means it could go either way, so pay attention and get it moving into the green category. And the green category, of course, means things are good.

So if you are reviewing project progress, and you see a stop light indicator that has a couple of reds, a couple of yellows, and a couple of greens, to which indicators do you give your attention first? Most people will go to the reds, wanting to know what is wrong. I offer that, in an effective project management office, the reds are being handled, and your project managers will let you know if outside intervention (more people or more money, most common) is required. The yellows are being handled as well, and many times these are alerts that something is not tracking properly and needs to be watched. The greens, however, ahhh the greens, now those can be the most enlightening indicators of all.

What is going right? What is going well? In a project filled with green indicators, you want to know how this happened, so you can help the team get all of the projects flowing with green indicators. You want to know details about those green-indicator projects so you can tie success back to a type of project, a particular project manager, or a specific team. You want to find the people who are doing everything right and heap praise upon their heads so they will feel valued and inclined to replicate their success with their next project. Green indicators are a target, a goal, something that the team can strive for, a rallying cry. Green indicators are so awesome that there should be a second color of green to indicate "way ahead," because some projects will be so wildly successful that "way ahead" could become the norm.

I know, you are wondering what planet I live on. Fact is, I live on a planet where project managers are given full responsibility, accountability, and power for their projects, where they are accountable to the client and to the project team member, and where a red indicator is an indicator that team members are already working to mitigate whatever risk exists. I live on a planet where a green indicator is scrutinized just as hard as a red indicator, to be sure that the true project health is accurately represented. And I live on a planet where project managers, like those in the big conference room down the hall, want to use tools that will easily allow them to represent their projects accurately to their organizations. You don't sign up to be a project manager, after all, if you are averse to taking responsibility and being accountable. Personally, I think that a planet where the hard work that goes in to making an indicator green is acknowledged and even touted is a great planet to live on.

The Microsoft Project Users Group meets monthly, on the second Wednesday, from 7:30AM to 9:30AM at Two CityPlace Drive, St. Louis, Missouri 63141. All project managers are welcome to attend. For more information, please visit the MPUG Global site, or check our Oakwood event calendar where we always list the chapter events.

Why Aligning IT to the Business Isn't Working

2010-03-08T10:01:00.000-06:00

When two entities need to be "aligned" that implies that they are separate entities that must be brought into a parallel path. IT Leaders who are moving their way down the path of alignment may well be missing an opportunity, and we offer that "integrating IT into the business" is a better way to look at the opportunity. When you align IT to the business, you are creating an entity that supports the business goals and provides services to the different business units - not at all a bad thing. But, when you integrate IT to the business, IT comes to the business units as an equal. Yes, it is just a difference of words, and, in our view, and important difference.

IT can and should have tendrils reaching into every business unit, every strategic meeting, and most strategic business decisions. IT, now more than ever, can create new ways to do things - new ways to interact with customers, new ways to interact with trading partners, new ways to purchase materials or to sell products, new ways to communicate with stakeholders, new ways to distribute operational information, new ways ... well you get the idea. Companies who are already looking at the new ways to do things have IT sitting at the table next to them. Companies who are not integrating IT into every facet of the business may well be overtaken by those who are.

IT is everywhere, creating new business opportunities and new ways to do things. Companies are no longer content with "thinking outside the box;" they are now building new boxes entirely - and those boxes nearly all involve integrating IT into the solution. Companies who build those boxes first will have the edge in the current marketplace.

Cool Mobile Marketing Idea - Reduce No-Shows, Increase Productivity

2010-03-03T14:44:00.000-06:00

Most businesses have a problem with clients who miss meetings, or people who say they will attend an event and don't show up. While the example in this article is about a hair salon, I can see it applying to a variety of business models, including B2B. I'd never thought of this before, and now I wonder if sending a text message reminder to those who say they will attend a breakfast briefing wouldn't re-capture the people who drove in to their offices on auto-pilot, only realizing they had an outside appointment when they sit down at their desks and open their email and calendar.

I like simple ideas. The breadth of the problem - and the opportunity - for your organization would dictate whether you'd want an automated system for SMS-based appointment reminders, or if you would do something like this manually. Of course, there could be many reasons to ask your clients to opt-in for text messages from your organization. This could be the reason that tips the balance in favor of the opt-in.

An example: I get an automated phone message from my dentist when I have an upcoming appointment. The first few times I got it, I hung up on it, because I didn't realize there was an to-do item for me at the end (press 1 to confirm your appointment). Had I gotten a text message, it would have been much more effective. And, if the dentist office had my mobile number (which, actually, they do), they could text me at appropriate intervals with "time to set up your cleaning." Now apply this idea to your own organization and see what you come up with. SMS marketing is not a fit for everyone, but I bet there's a case to be made where most businesses can take advantage of it in one form or another. This just happens to be a terrific, simple idea that caught my imagination.

Would it be okay if I share that Oakwood has significant expertise in deploying mobile solutions? I hope so, because I think I just did. :-)

Have You Connected Anyone Today?

2010-03-02T15:04:00.000-06:00

Today I reached out to one of our clients to connect that business with another one of our clients. Client A has a lot of land. Client B uses land to house their "product." If Client B builds their product on Client A's land, great things could happen. And I do love it when people who never would have talked to each other can connect and make great things happen. It doesn't matter what kind of business we are all in, or what kind of job we have. We all have connections that are meaningful, even in some small way, and the choices we make every day create opportunities. It's a ripple effect, and can lead to a pretty good wave of results.

I've always enjoyed connecting people. A couple of years ago, I was at an auction and a lady was there selling desserts at a card table on the side of the room. She'd made them herself - and they were wonderful. The next day we were at a restaurant - and we suggested that they use this woman to provide their desserts. This past weekend, I ran into Jessie at a market event. She is doing very well, providing her desserts to the restaurant we suggested plus several more, and getting ready to open her own store. How fun to think that we might have had a part in her success.

We are in St. Louis. We buy Energizer batteries, Schick razors, Schlafly Beer, and Roundup. We support local restaurants instead of the national chains (unless the chain is headquartered in St. Louis - think Hardee's and Bandanas as examples - yum). We just think it's the right thing to do. If you have a client who is a trucking business, and a client who ships a lot of freight, doesn't a warm introduction make sense? If you sell shoes, and you know someone who runs a homeless shelter, there are opportunities there, too. In today's WIIFM climate, I contend that there is always something in it for you, a by-product of the sheer pleasure you get from making a connection like this. And, just to be specific, the more money your clients make, the more they will have available to purchase products and services from you - so, if you'll follow me around the corner here, creating opportunities for our clients to make more money actually creates more opportunities for us all to make more money. The ROI may not be immediate, so be patient. Good deeds beget good things - sometimes sooner, sometimes down the road a bit.

The challenge for today: find a way to connect any two of your clients, or any two of your suppliers together. Trust me, it is more fun and more gratifying than you can believe.

Business Partners, Better Relationships, Streamlined Processes

2010-03-02T13:51:00.000-06:00

We met last week with yet another organization who is communicating with their business partners via email, trusting that their valuable communique is getting read in the glump of all of the email noise with which we are all increasingly confronted. (If glump isn't a word, it should be.) When we got to talking about the information that this organization routinely shares with its business partners - orders, tracking information, and business information, primarily - it became evident that there are a myriad of ways to tighten the relationship.

Business processes that involve those who are external to the business are ripe for streamlining. Whether a simple extranet implementation where documents are shared and information exchanged, or a system-to-system integration for passing structured information, mapping out the possible integration points is the first place to start. Consider whether you have business partners with whom you could be more tightly integrated. Approaching this proactively could lead to a better and stronger relationship with those partners, certainly. It will also lead to increased efficiency, fewer errors and/or missed opportunities, and could well save your organization money. And finally, the administration time saved by not having to track a relationship through an email trail will be an extraordinary time saver in itself.

Dumb Names for Products - Will You Be Buying a Windows Phone Phone?

2010-02-17T08:30:00.000-06:00

Just for fun this morning. The announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series, in Barcelona on Monday (YAY), has caused some serious thinking about the names that some companies give to their products. And while I might be picking on Microsoft a little bit, there are tons of examples of product marketing failing to think through all of the uses of the name they've given their newest creation.

From the sidelines, here are some helpful hints to use when naming a product:
1. Use the product name in a sentence - several sentences - constructed by all sorts of people - to see if it works. Windows Phone 7 Series is a great example. Did no one really think that people would be looking at "Windows Phone phones?"
2. If you are naming something with the intent that the product name will be a verb in the marketplace (dare I say, like "google"), recognize that verbs have tenses. What is the past tense of Bing, for Pete's sake? It is Binged. Just like the past tense of "binge." Hello. If you are saying it, it works. If you are writing it, not so much. Imagine getting this in an email - "I binged last night and found a great restaurant in Florida." Yikes. I don't know, maybe if you capitalize it...
3. Say the word or combination of words aloud. Several times. Get others to say it while you listen. I truly believe that if the Cisco people had said Cisco Clean Access a bunch of times to each other, they would have recognized that it sounds like Cisco Kleenex. Which is bad.
4. Name your product something that is not also something a person might say in a sentence that has nothing to do with your product. Try to find a product called "Simple Menu" and see what your search results are.

The Windows Phone phone note almost crosses me into the Department of Redundancy Department conversation - but I'll save that for another day. Enjoy your day.

Windows Mobile 7 - Really? Yes, Really.

2010-02-16T09:27:00.000-06:00

Windows Mobile 7, or Windows Phone 7 (dumb name IMHO) made its debut yesterday in Barcelona. As a Microsoft consulting firm who has been, dare I say, bitterly disappointed with Windows Mobile 6.5, we have been eagerly awaiting this announcement. WM7 looks good. It might even look great. But WM7 won't be available until the end of the year (supposedly), and pundits are positing that the end of the year might be too late for Microsoft. "Gone are the days when Microsoft can put a market on hold," states one writer. And, in terms of the personal-use mobile devices, he is no doubt correct.

For the business world, however, there are business risks inherent in mobile devices, and the more powerful they get, the higher the level of risk becomes. Microsoft brings a lot of clout to the table with regard to mitigating that risk, through integration with other Microsoft platforms and applications. IT shops who are heavily invested in the Microsoft stack may well wait for WM7 before commiting to a corporate-funded mobile plan. And we might see BES servers (I think that's redundant) going away as the management platform for Windows Mobile devices does not require that kind of extra investment.

I agree that end of year is really pushing things, and the pressure on organizations to make a mobile decision is not lessening. However, a truly viable mobile operating system from the worldwide leader in operating systems is worth waiting for. But Microsoft - hurry up!

Mobile Marketing - a Must for B2B Organizations

2010-02-15T12:40:00.000-06:00

Our friends at MarketingProfs have delivered an excellent post on "Five Reasons Why Mobile Marketing is Prime for B2Bs - and Five Key Questions B2B Marketers Should be Asking." Depending on what you are selling, and to what audience, there is little doubt that today's marketers must be mobile-savvy. Most organizations need to start in the most obvious of places - their website. You can't depend on everyone having a device (just yet) that will allow your full web experience to do anything other than frustrate them. Thinking through what your audience needs most to see from the mobile device, then optimizing your website to accommodate that need, is critical.

Once the website is in hand, it is time to think about new ways to engage with your audience across the mobile device. Are you in the manufacturing business? Perhaps allowing your customers to subscribe to text alerts of product changes. Do you have a business partner extranet? Being sure an "available parts" query is accessible from a mobile device would be key. Who is buying what you are selling? How can they interact in a new and different way from their mobile devices?

Mobile marketing is more than creating cool apps that are fun and graphical. We have the opportunity to create a new level of customer interaction, and it's up to us to make the most of it.

Self-Assessments for CIOs - Don't Narrow Your Thinking

2010-02-15T10:48:00.000-06:00

SearchCIO.com published a self-assessment guide for top IT professionals, here. There are twelve different assessments ranging in topics from SOA to IT Leadership. It's all good stuff, and certainly important for CIOs to have a conversational knowledge of what is out there. However, not one of these assessments deals with what we are seeing as the biggest job of a CIO - understanding how best to move the business forward. How does your organization attract and retain customers? How can IT enable that process? How can IT stay out of the way of that process?

A CIO who is laser-focused on being part of the Sales Enablement Department and NOT part of the Sales Prevention Department, and who guides his or her people to think in the same way, will have a more strategic role in the business than a CIO who is "up to snuff" on project and portfolio management. Wouldn't you think so?

Is the answer for old code always new code?

2010-02-15T10:02:00.000-06:00

We hear it all the time. "We have old code in (put language here) and we need to re-do it in .NET." There's even a term for it - refactoring. Is refactoring always the right answer though? Our experience says no. With the plethora of modern technologies and modern capabilities, we feel the right answer is to examine the service being provided to the business by the old code, then modernize the delivery of the service. In some cases, modernizing the code is the right answer, but it is just as likely that the answer could be SQL, or SharePoint, or BizTalk, or most likely some combination of techologies that, together, will deliver the right result to the business while keeping costs low. We call it "Service Driven Development."

One of our clients is using an "application" that was architected, designed, and delivered by the Oakwood team. It incorporates .NET development, SharePoint, SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Integration Services, the Windows Entity Framework, Excel Services, ISA Server, Active Directory, a workflow engine from Nintex, and webparts from Bamboo Solutions. By examining the specific needs of the business, the techology platforms the client already owned, and leveraging other pre-built components, we were able to craft a solution to maximize the client's investment and provide a supportable and efficient application to meet their needs.

Had the client hired a .NET development shop, they would have ended up with a .NET application - workable, yes, but it would have taken longer to deploy and the services would have cost at least 20% more, by our estimation. Had the client hired a SharePoint shop, well, SharePoint just would not do everything that this application does (sorry SharePoint), so they'd still be writing and debugging and trying to make it work.

So, we are suggesting that the answer to old code is not always new code. Broaden the thought process to evaluate all of the technologies you own, and leverage a partner who can bring you the best possible solution to the true problem - the service that is being or needs to be provided to the business.

Defining the Best Next Move for Legacy Applications

2010-02-01T13:30:00.000-06:00

I don't know a single IT shop of any size that isn't maintaining at least one legacy, custom-developed application. Maybe it's a mission critical application that absolutely must be kept running or the business falls to its knees. Or it might be a relatively critical application that provides one or two key services. Or maybe it's just an application-of-convenience that, if it became unavailable, would not cripple the organization but would sure make it harder to get work done in the short term. No doubt these legacy applications need to be addressed. How do you do that effectively?

It seems that most organizations look at replacing a custom-developed application or service with another custom-developed application or service. Certainly there are times when modernizing an application is the next logical step to take. But is is the best step to take?

The best next move for legacy applications might be to replace them with functionality that exists in other platforms (SharePoint is a good example), or to replace the service with a more integrated approach that will allow you to abandon the legacy application, or to look at replicating the services those legacy applications provide through other means. Custom development, web development, and cloud development can all be considered as well.

How do you know what the BEST next move is for your legacy applications? Your organization needs to be aligned with a partner who can help you assess ALL of the possibilities so that you have all the information you need to make the BEST decision.

Food Allergy Sufferers Get Fed Text Messages

2010-01-28T08:19:00.000-06:00

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland has set up a text messaging service which will directly inform food allergy sufferers of the presence of allergens in inappropriately labelled foods. People with allergies or parents of children with allergies can subscribe to receive e-mail and SMS alerts via the authority's website http://www.fsai.ie/. [The Irish Times via MobileHealth News]

Another way that lives are being improved through the use of mobile phones. I wonder if it only works for Irish food though?

It's Only Worthwhile Work If Everyone Knows It

2010-01-25T15:21:00.000-06:00

The concept of "worthwhile work" is an important one. Ken Blanchard and company articulated it best (in my opinion) in his book Gung Ho! and I've found it to be an important lesson that carries from employee motivation all the way to Business Intelligence. People need to do "worthwhile work," and they need to understand why their work is important to the success of the organization. I touched on this last week in my post on Managing the Sales Prevention Department.

When an organization establishes its key performance indicators, how does the organization typically inform its employees of those key performance indicators and how the employees help achieve them? I've asked groups of people to whom I have presented, and I've been actually rather shocked at how few of them even know what their organization's KPIs are, let alone how they affect them. And, in organizations where KPIs are publicized, the vast majority of employees don't take any ownership of them because they don't think they apply to them. For example, an IT department worker might be told that an organizational KPI is "order-to-cash" (meaning the time it takes from when an order is placed to when the payment is received from the customer for it). How does an IT department worker affect the achievement of that KPI? Unless he or she is specifically told that answer, most won't take the time to think it through. But if you tell the IT department worker that he or she can suggest efficiencies that could be enabled by technology, suddenly the organization has an important ally in the order-to-cash process.

Whether it's the restaurant worker who doesn't understand why checking the silverware before putting it out for customers is important, or the mailroom person who doesn't understand why mailing the invoices should be a priority, or the IT worker who decides to re-do the website without consulting the business stakeholders, it's clear that organizations need to do a much better job of not only communicating their KPIs (and goals and objectives, but that's another story), but translating the KPIs into a language that every worker, regardless of their role or level within the organization, will understand.

At Oakwood we call this the KPI Value Chain. More to come on that topic at a later date.

No Competitive Differentiators for our Custom Development Practice :-(

2010-01-22T15:49:00.000-06:00

We don’t have any competitive differentiators for our custom development practice. We just don’t. We’ve been discussing, arguing, debating, brainstorming, and otherwise dissecting the issue for years, and we can’t come up with a single thing. We have a list of things that SHOULD make us stand apart, but so many other companies all say these things that they aren’t exactly competitive differentiators at all.

Wait, maybe the competitive differentiator is that NO ONE BUT OAKWOOD can say ALL of the things on this list - every one of them. What other consulting firm offers this kind of knowledge, flexibility, accountability, responsiveness, and broad thinking? Clients who have used us for custom development work have good things to say about us. We have earned the Microsoft Software Development Competency and Web Development Competency because our clients are glad to be references for us. We just plain do good work, and we stand behind it.

Is that enough of a competitive differentiator for us to earn your business, or at least the opportunity to talk with you about the possibility?

Here is our list – you decide (sorry it is so long):

We recommend the right solution to our clients that meets their needs and their budget and will work well in their environment, even if it costs us the business.
Our rates are reasonable and competitive.
Our developers are extremely knowledgeable; most have Microsoft certifications. They are personable, conscientious, and dedicated to the client for whom they are developing.
We manage projects incredibly well. We have daily time checks, and status reporting is done to our clients weekly at a minimum. We create rock solid project plans. We follow change management procedures. Our project managers are PMI certified PMPs. Our organization runs on project management.
We offer local people, physical accountability (and by that I mean if our clients wants to look someone in the face and discuss the project, the face is right there, in person), and project accountability.
Our business model is flexible to meet the needs of our clients. Fixed fee engagements, milestone-based billing, strategic partnerships - we’re open to figuring out with our clients where these make sense.
Our clients know what they are going to get, when they are going to get it, and for what cost. Deliverables are defined, time and scope are managed, and cost is scrutinized every step of the way.
Thanks to our Accelerated Development Center, we allocate resources in such a way that our clients do not pay for “thumb twiddling” time. If one project has a lag, the developer switches to another project. The developer stays utilized while our clients get maximum value for the fees they are paying.
Oakwood is not just a development house. There’s an old saying, “when you’re a mason, you build brick doghouses.” When you are just a development shop, the answer to a client question is ALWAYS custom development. At Oakwood, the answer to a question might be a number of other things, like “let’s not re-build it, let’s integrate it to your other system,” or “did you know you could do that in a portal?”
Oakwood works with the leading edge technologies and the stuff that’s been around for a while. We’re cloud developing, web developing, mobile developing, and plain old .NET developing.
We have code bases and knowledge objects that we can re-use to shorten development time.
We are a consulting firm that does custom development, not a code shop that only does code. Our broad range of expertise across our consulting organization saves our clients money by providing the opportunity to leverage a variety of technologies into a single solution.
We are an effective partner to our clients whether the project is small-ish or large-ish, single-person or many person teams.
We are in client relationships for the long haul. We still work with some of the clients we worked with during our early years – and we are nearly thirty years old!

Taken one at a time, they are all statements that nearly everyone says. Taken as a group, it could just be one big competitive differentiator. What do you think?

Managing the Sales Prevention Department

2010-01-22T13:05:00.000-06:00

Every time a representative of your company interacts with a customer, they could be reassigning themselves to the Sales Prevention Department. Every time one of your company's processes or systems touches a customer, they could be part of the Sales Prevention Department too. I alluded to this in a previous blog post here. People need to understand their role in the customer interaction process. And people who manage systems and processes need to understand the same thing.

The most important thing any organization does is attract and retain customers. So doesn't it make sense that every organization would provide education to the team members as to how they affect that relationship?

Here's an interesting tidbit from Brenda Gelston, Demand Generation and Customer Engagement Consultant at Marketing Momentum Associates out of New England:

Ask any business owner or a senior manager if they know how their customers reach the decision to work with them and they start talking about their white papers, their product fact sheets, their webinars… well, you get the picture. Not too many businesses take the time to map out the purchasing journey and then try to match content to milestones identified on the roadmap. It is time consuming and labor intensive but in my opinion it is absolutely necessary initial step.

I would take it one step further. Map out not only the purchasing journey but the entire engagement journey. Educate your people, for sure. Design your systems and processes to remove roadblocks in the purchasing journey, not to create them. In my previous post, I shared how one company lost my business because there were too many roadblocks and a distinct lack of interest in actually receiving an order. Had the journey been mapped out and IT brought in to the picture, the roadblocks could have been removed.

Here's one more example - silly, but true and to the point. Last night we had a pretty good meal at a newly-changed-ownership Mexican restaurant. The food was good, the service was okay, the price was right. We concluded that we would probably go back there. We took a sip of our half-full drinks and stood up to put on our coats. Before our coats were even on, the busboy was there throwing a rag on the table, putting his fingers into our drinks, and scooping them up to carry them away. I said, "I was going to have another drink of that before we left." He just looked at me wide-eyed for a moment, took the drinks, and split for the kitchen, breaking every customer service rule in the book in the process. The sad part is, the owners will never know why we decided not to come back after all. The truth is, that busboy just became part of the Sales Prevention Department.

Why Would You Buy a $6 Haircut Anyway?

2010-01-21T14:31:00.000-06:00

An email arrived this morning with the title "Build a Project Office on SharePoint in 30 Minutes," and I am so flabbergasted by this concept that I hardly know what to say. It's just plain wrong. Here's why in so many colloquialisms:

You can paint the body of the car and it will look great, but if it doesn't have an engine it's not going to take you anywhere.
Automating bad process just gets you to chaos faster.
If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Clothes don't make the man. Tools don't make a project run smoothly.
If you don't know how to manage a project, implementing a project office is sort of like remodeling a closet in your house specifically to store saddles - because someday maybe you'll have a horse.

You can build anything in SharePoint in thirty minutes once you know exactly what you need, have planned how you are going to use it, and have thought through all of the parameters, have user buy-in, and have processes in place already that will easily translate to this new tool - or support for new processes and a healthy dose of organizational change management to support their implementation.

There's an ad running right now where this established barbershop sees a mega-barber-store go in across the street and put up a big sign that says "Haircuts $6." The barbershop owner knows he can't compete so he goes to the sign shop and buys a banner that says "We Fix $6 Haircuts," and he puts the megastore out of business. (And in yet another marketing failure, I have no idea what the ad is promoting. I think maybe it's the place where he got the banner made but I can't remember who that was.)

We fix thirty minute project office implementations. I don't know why you would want one in the first place, but maybe that's just me.

Jazzed Up About Driving the Business with BI

2010-01-18T18:46:00.000-06:00

A few folks around here, myself included, are pretty jazzed about the conceptual metaphor: “Driving Your Business with BI”.

The spot-on clarity of the comparison—and how importantly it relates to the business culture and competitive marketplace we now operate is astonishing. It’s critical to understand the depth of this seemingly obvious observation.

Entertain yourself for a moment to the idea…
The business marketplace is the gasoline.
Your business and the related business transactions are your business engine.
Your BI system and data architecture is the automobile frame.
You and the key personnel running your business are (of course) the driver.
Your dashboard is—well—your dashboard, providing the most critical key operational data.
Your goals and indicators are your windshield, and your long term strategic plan is your GPS.
Your bottom line is the destination (victory circle—or Pike’s Peak—or wherever you’re going).

It boils down to whether you want a Chevy Chase vacation or a Lance Armstrong finish.

While “driving the business with BI”, your car and the act of transporting yourself within it is analogous to steering your business using BI as your physical and strategic co-pilot. In business, I’ll opt for the Dr. Spock-like copilot awake at the wheel!

Those who travel with a particular destination in mind have a transport method, map, accurate information and other critical travel tools, since you’ll not go far smoothly or too fast without them. Our driving business metaphor again rings very true considering BI delivers fundamental operational, tactical and strategic actionable information to the right people at the right time in the right format (closer to like Southwest, not TWA).

I’m reminded there’s a whole lot to this metaphor. I’ll tackle it over a few blogs, leaving this post with these metaphorical thoughts:

By now even your baby sister (or baby sitter) knows about BI dashboards. The dashboard and BI portal is your business windshield. It is the clear vantage point for the daily navigation for the most important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of your business. It literally aligns those you expose to it and hold accountable to it. This is similar to how all people in the car end up at the same location the car does ---no matter who in the car might have wanted to go elsewhere.

Our society—like it or not—is largely a dashboard-first consumer. That doesn’t mean information is shallow. It means that we require complex information to be delivered timely and precisely (right time, right format, right now). Business operations critically require the same, each day of the business journey.

Dashboard-first doesn’t imply shallow thinking either, but actually the opposite. The information required for deep and wide business analytics must often be increasingly detailed and drillable to the last detail, but first presented for quick analysis at a high level for overall understanding to the strategic big picture. Welcome BI, for giving us the information to navigate through and around the pot-holes, broken bridges and closed roads.

From experience, I believe the medium is the message when it comes to ‘stewardship and steering’ of your business with BI. Folks at all levels of your organization need to know they make a difference. What better way than a BI value-chain scorecard built exactly to how their efforts contribute to the operational, tactical and strategic goals?

With that, I’ll blog on value-chain scorecarding and other BI travel tales in the next post. I need a vacation—a real one, not metaphorically speaking (and unfortunately not happening in Q1 2010).

Until then, safe travels.

Reduce the Cost of Social Media Marketing

2010-01-18T10:05:00.000-06:00

I read an article the other day that discussed that "free" social media marketing is a terrific time and money hog in the corporate environment, and my own experience bears that out. We have developed a new utility that takes a little of the cost out and makes the monitoring and responding to certain social media types more of a "hands-off" experience. It is a great fit for B2C companies and unfortunately, not so much a fit for Oakwood. (This utility will be announced this week on our website and via email to selected subscribers.) I am juggling the same things that every marketer is juggling - delivering relevant content to the right people and developing that content to begin with - with too many tools that don't talk to each other and a need for a master's degree in flowcharting.

Reduced to its lowest common denominator, the challenge for marketers today really resides with the data. We can use any tools we want as long as we can integrate them back to a database of clients, prospects, or consumers. Lucky for me, Oakwood is expert at integrating data from different sources into a single version of the truth. Now if only I can get the cobbler to make this kid some new shoes...

Do IT Projects Have Organizational Value?

2010-01-14T09:07:00.000-06:00

Several folks were gathered at Oakwood today and the topic of Portfolio Management came up. One of the main tenets of portfolio management is demand management, and the key to making it work is to be able to measure the value of a proposed project to the organization. This is typically done by assessing the proposed project against organizational targets and goals - not IT targets and goals. Whether an organization has deployed a portfolio management tool or not, IT groups can get more projects approved when the projects are able to be linked to the organization's direction.

So, let look at two different ways to propose a data management project. I've chosen a data management project as the example because it links to a prior post (Wasting Money on Marketing), which will help build our case for an IT project.

The old way:
We need to upgrade from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005.

The new way:
Marketing is working hard to attract new customers, and we need to be able to provide them with the most up-to-date database we possibly can. Recently we realized that we are not updating our marketing list with the new subscriber list, and we can cure that with an upgrade to our database system. Doing this will save us money in mailing, allow us to engage more immediately with new subscribers, and allow marketing to use their budget to maximum advantage. It's also going to have benefits for other departments, like the subscription department as well as customer service. We'll be able to provide better service to our customers and our prospective customers.

Wow. Now this IT project has some legs! What do you think? Will it get approved?

Wasting Money on Marketing

2010-01-05T16:55:00.000-06:00

2010 is the year of the targeted marketing campaigns to segmented lists of potential customers, without doubt. Whether email or print, the industry is telling all of us that segmentation is the key to success. One would logically think that sending customer acquisition marketing materials to someone who is already a customer would be a waste of money, right?

So, shortly before Thanksgiving, I got a spectacular mailing from AAA, inviting me to join. The mailer was compelling, filled with valuable content, and irresitable. I joined up immediately. I actually then had occasion to call AAA for help a few days later. My permanent membership card arrived the next week. I am now a card-carrying and, having already used the service, fully initiated TripleA member. Yesterday, I received a mailing from AAA. And, when I opened it, it was exactly the same package to which I had responded in November. Warning: Now I am going to start making up statistics to make my point. Let's say this little piece cost $1.00 to print, fold, do all the inserts, and mail. (Based on the quality and weight of the piece, I could be low here.) Let's say they mailed 10,000 pieces, so that would be $10,000, right? If their response rate was as high as I think it could have been - say around 10%, they got 1000 new members. So every time they mail the same piece to these 1000 people who have already signed up, they are throwing $1000 down the drain. And, if they do it over and over... well, you get the idea. Are you okay with throwing 10% of your mailing budget down the drain?

The second mail I got was from Best Buy. They are offering me services on my new LCD TV that I just bought from them. However, I returned the TV two days after I bought it (never having taken delivery of it). So, mailing to me - a non-customer - is again, throwing marketing money down the drain.

Clearly both of these companies need to examine their data handling routines. Clearly Marketing is not being properly fed with correct data. This is incredibly correctable. And, I would bet, in the case of both of these organizatons, correcting the problem right now would cost less than pitching 10% of their marketing budget down the drain.

Another $50K Into the Hopper

2010-01-04T13:47:00.000-06:00

This morning I read another case study about a client who saved a lot of money (around $50K) by replacing a third party tool with a tool that they already owned by virtue of their Microsoft licensing agreement. In this case it was replacing the anti-virus solution with Microsoft Forefront Client Security. Microsoft certainly has not been top-of-mind in terms of security solutions; in fact I've seen clients chuckle at the thought of using a Microsoft solution to provide security. Yet Forefront is a darn good product and we are seeing more and more clients implement it. Microsoft seems to slowly be winning over the hearts and minds of the IT community with some of their newer products.

Over the weekend I wrote a post on Quickly Reaping the Benefits of an Acquisition. Consolidating the anti-virus solution into a single platform is a quick way to reduce duplicate costs between the acquired and acquiring organizations. When we talk about cost reduction, this is one of the easiest places to save money - and for some organizations, pretty big money indeed.

Quickly Reaping the Benefits of an Acquisition

2010-01-02T17:50:00.000-06:00

We published a white paper a while back called "Twelve Steps to Managing a Corporate Acquisition in IT." While it might seem elementary to some, we pretty consistently observe organizations who are moving rather slowly through the process of integrating the acquired organization into the corporate mix. Could this be a symptom of the IT group not fully understanding the motivation behind the acquisition?

Any time one organization acquires another, there must be financial benefits to the transaction for the acquiring organization, and IT is the key contributor to making those financial benefits quickly attainable. Think about integrating the disparate systems together, not combining them right away - that takes too long. Examine every aspect of the organizational integration and then think through how IT can make it simpler in the short term and sustainable in the long term. Develop a comprehensive project plan. Identify the risks of moving quickly and the risks of moving slowly.

When it takes two years or more to integrate companies together, the costs may well outweigh the financial benefits. IT can create and support an environment where that does not happen.

End-Of-Year Employee Expectations

2010-01-02T17:28:00.000-06:00

Employees are typically told, when they are hired, that they will get a performance review on a periodic basis, usually annually. How do you think they feel when the end of year approaches and they learn that it takes two months, or three months, to complete the review process? And, if your organization makes salary adjustments retroactive to January 1, and you don't complete the review process until March, the impact on cash flow can range from moderate to extraordinary.

Automating the performance review process can take a lengthy ordeal and turn it in to a relatively painless event. Employees will be happier. Finance managers will be happier. And the organization will be doing one more thing toward making itself a great place to work.

Does every organization need to be a Best Place to Work?

2010-01-02T16:53:00.000-06:00

Every organization is on a quest to hire and retain the best people, wouldn't you agree? So how do you get the people you want interested in working for your organization, and, once on board, how do you keep them? While there are many answers to these questions, to be answered by groups across the organization, let's focus on how the IT group can contribute to the employee experience. After all, the first step in becoming a Best Place to Work has got to be becoming a good place to work.

How about some of these ideas?

Have a help desk that quickly and promptly resolves user problems. Consider a self-service portal so that help is available 24/7 if your help desk is not staffed 24/7
Support continuous process improvement through employee surveying
Make the on-boarding process not only painless, but flawless and impressive
Automate the processes supporting your performance management system (employee reviews)
Create a system for information that employees need on a regular basis, whether HR policies and procedures, departmental information, or how-to-guides
Enable a culture of transparency by making key information available to employees, based on their roles and responsibilities

While the IT department is not in charge of corporate culture, there are significant contributions that IT can make to an organization's goal of becoming a great place to work.

What do you think? Other ideas?

Your 2010 Forecast is Not The Headline News

2009-12-23T16:18:00.000-06:00

Don’t be swayed off of an accurate tangible real-world 2010 forecast by generic public news and reporting.
Let the crystal ball do the magic, ensuring to:

1 Avoid over-factoring for irrelevant economic influences to your business.
2 Identify and model the directly-relevant influences on your business.
3 Confirm your accurate forecast processes. Fix what is broken for accurate forecasting results.

1 Avoid over-factoring for irrelevant negative economic influences: Do not allow your forecasting methodology to fall prey to negative groupthink.
A forecast is sometimes wrongly influenced by over-saturated irrelevant negative data/news or the prevailing mindset of insurmountable economic challenges ahead.
You are operating in a unique market different from any generic report, economic index or current market leader/loser’s results.
• Take the time to identify and discard the useless misinformation.
• Focus your forecasting model to exclude outdated drivers. Omit irrelevant information that may wrongly influence your forecast.
• Balance key objectives and relevant proven information for your strategic forecasting decisions.

2 Identify and model the directly-relevant influences on your business. For best results, embrace the detailed tough work that must be prioritized early in the process.
Never allow your forecasting methodology to reflect unsubstantiated Pollyanna optimism (or overbearing negativity).
Any unsubstantiated suggestion for 2010 that cyclical economic recovery is likely (or unlikely) may be a potential trap, so beat on the
foundation of your predictive forecasting model as required to ensure you believe the drivers of it and the results from it.
• Take the time to identify and model the relevant key information to create your forecast.
• Focus your model squarely on the key fundamental predictive indicators driving your business. Break these down as required to obtain accurate overall results.
• Balance key objectives and proven predictive information for your most important strategic forecasting decisions.

3 Confirm processes. Fix what is broken in your forecasting process for accurate results.
• Target simple processes and confirmed definitions in forecasting communications to improve the accuracy of your forecast.
• Eliminate operational timing issues and communication gaps contributing to forecasting in-house errors. This may be the easiest win.
The significant gain in forecasting accuracy that can be enjoyed from this simple but sometimes overlooked process step is often amazing.
• Build off accurately-validated historical data for your forecast model, when appropriate. Don’t over-factor on historical data as an easy crutch.

Although a financial forecast inherently reflects the strategic, tactical and operational execution required to obtain the numbers, the numbers themselves are only partially useful (sales targets, and budgets, for example).

Forecasted numbers by definition can only be predicted with horseshoe-like accuracy. Take the high road and balance the common desire to hit numbers against the also-important strategic objectives.
Be sure to walk strategically and operationally from where you are now to where you are targeting with your forecast. Balance the will to ‘grow’ or ‘succeed at all costs’ with accepting reality and steering your business in a balanced direction,
whether it’s a period of growth or cost-reduction. On first draft, let the numbers fall where they may. Often there are valuable insights within a forecast scenario draft that may first appear as ‘way off’.
Find out why things are as they are in the numbers and learn. Re-evaluate for what steps are required within the overall forecasting approach to sharpen the forecast to a real-world tangible business tool for planning.
A true value of your forecast is the underlying plan for driving and thriving your business.

Don’t ever assume anyone knows your business forecast better than you (if you’ve squarely focused on building a solid forecast methodology).
Your 2010 forecast may or may not turn out to be headline news of the day, but like a well-constructed bridge, build it right and don’t be afraid to walk on it.
Trust your forecasting results—specific to your market, your strategic plan and your people. Begin the new year aligned to a substantiated forecast built off fundamentals, not simply the headline news of the day.

A Planning Puzzle for the New Year

2009-12-22T17:21:00.000-06:00

A business owner had two employees both who had important planning responsibilities (He/She).

Employee #1 (He) didn’t have the self-motivation to contribute to planning for the business.
There were reasons #1 didn’t have motivation to contribute to planning the business.

Employee #2 (She) contributed to planning for the business.
There were reasons #2 was motivated to contribute to planning the business.

There was no management termination of either employee.
Which employee is no longer with the company one year later?
Is the business thriving one year later?

For those thinking there is not enough information here …turns out there is a simple answer…

The company is thriving with #2 leading the charge planning for the future.
She contributes to the plan because she intends on being key to carrying out the plan.
The company thrives as a direct result of people like her who plan and carry out their plans.

Here’s the takeaway:
Consider adding planning contribution ratings to performance evaluations for those responsible for planning in your organization.
In its simplest form, successful businesses are folks who plan and carry out their plans.

Plan your business for what you want your employees and your business to be.

Goal Setting for 2010 - Staying on Track

2009-12-22T08:45:00.000-06:00

You can find applicability in anything, I reckon. Chris Brogan, Social Media guru and all around interesting fellow, has written some interesting posts lately on personal goal setting. While his suggestions are terrific (particularly the Goal Box idea!), his 12/18 post - Keep SMART Goals in Front of You - really resonated with me. He suggests that we formulate our goals into three to five very brief statements, and keep them SMART (you know the acronym - Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Realistic, and Time-Bounded). His example: "Get 3000 blog subscribers by June 2010" is all of those. He then suggests writing very simple questions that reference the goals: "Will doing this get me 3000 subscribers by June of 2010?"

When we look at the goals of our organizations, should we treat them any differently? Wouldn't you want every single person in your organization united by the goals? And wouldn't you want every single person in the organization to understand how their daily work helps to achieve the goals?

With Chris Brogan's Goal Box, he has created a personal dashboard for himself. The corporate dashboard is a visible reference as to how we are doing, organizationally, against our goals. Corporate goals are translated to every level and every role in the organization, and every person understands how they contribute to the achievement of that goals. If that is the overarching theme, it will help your organization to set goals. For example, you could have a goal of "Get fifty new clients in first quarter." You could achieve that goal because of your sales team, right? But what about the people who deliver your product or service? If they are not aligned with the goal, they could tick off existing clients and you could lose more than you gained, but you'd be celebrating because you met your goal. Would "increase our client base by fifty in first quarter" be more relevant to the entire workforce?

When you align the entire organization around SMART goals, you become a powerhouse. IT can provide the mechanism for showing the Goal Box to the entire team, in the form of a dashboard. Every person will be able to ask themselves, "If I do this, will it help us increase our client base by fifty in the first quarter?"

Thanks, Chris.

Saving $50K and Improving Services

2009-12-21T17:07:00.000-06:00

I'm writing up a Microsoft reference on a Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) implementation we did for a company that is headquartered in Dallas. The company was paying over $50,000 a year for a competitive product (Symantec Altiris) to do imaging and package delivery. They have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement with a Core CAL license (Windows Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint, and SCCM client access licenses all in one bundle), so they already owned the client licensing they needed; they just had to add the server license to their EA.

The way Oakwood people deployed the solution, their network bandwidth requirements decreased significantly, and the reliability of the package delivery went up by a double-digit percentage. When we talk about decreasing costs and creating efficiency, this is pretty much a text book case. $50,000 in hard cost savings, plus probably some hard cost savings in WAN load reduction, plus soft costs of more available bandwidth, more reliability, and less network bottlenecking.

This seemed worth sharing. Deploy software that you already own instead of continuing to pay another company for licensing that does the same thing. It's a great way to reduce costs - and you'll probably create efficiency into the bargain.

Getting Your Product to Market - Part 2 of the Competitive Landscape

2009-12-21T15:42:00.000-06:00

So, IntegratedCo beat SeparateCo to market with a new product, and not just by a little - by months. IntegratedCo caused quite a hubbub in the marketplace, too, because this new product was revolutionary in their industry. Industry experts were all atwitter, and the president of IntegratedCo was even on the cover of their industry's most well-respected magazine. Wow. How did they do it?

You'll recall that both companies came up with the idea for this product around the same time - August of last year. Here's how things went at IntegratedCo.

The brilliant people who dreamed up the idea immediately scheduled an on-line meeting, so that all of the key stakeholders could be on a call and viewing a screen at the same time. Because no one would need to travel to the meeting, and they could maximize their time together, the group was able to get together for a two hour brainstorming session during the second week of August. During the meeting, notes were taken electronically, and a to-do list was developed and filed on the Product Development Portal Page on the corporate Intranet. As people worked through their to-do items, they put any documents, drawings, and feedback surveys up on the portal site for all to see. Each person on the team was automatically alerted via email each time a document was created or edited.

Target dates were established for each to-do item, and reminders were sent automatically, again via email, of pending deadlines. When one person modified a document, the changes were tracked and a new version was created, so it was easy to compare versions and determine the best route to take. Weekly meetings were held online to make sure the project was moving forward smoothly. The meetings were automatically recorded, and the recordings were also stored on the portal site, so a new person to the team could catch up as quickly. As things rolled on, the team got Finance involved to help determine pricing, and the Finance person was able to go to the portal site and get completely caught up on the development project in about an hour.

Because of the agility of the team, the automation of reminders, to-do-lists, and workflows, and because the team could get together electronically to meet, the product was fully developed in four months and ready to go to market. IntegratedCo was able to keep the market cost low because they were able to develop the product so quickly and efficiently. And most important to them, they beat their arch-rival to market.

What about the IT department? All of the solutions discussed here were based on software that the company already owned. Since IT is fully integrated to the business, the IT leaders had already determined that online meetings would save money and time, and that the ability to quickly create a new workspace on the Intranet was a critical enabler of the business. Because IT had already done the groundwork, the release of this product was a significant contributor to increasing revenue this year, raising the brand image of the company, and making the employee teams very proud to work at such a progressive organization.

Getting Your Product to Market - Part 1 of the Competitive Landscape

2009-12-21T15:07:00.000-06:00

This is a story about two competitors in the marketplace, each vying for the position of "Market Leader," and each manufacturing products geared toward the same exact buyer pool. Each has a product development team, and each has an engineering group. One company, let's call them "IntegratedCo," views the IT department as a strategic partner. The other company views the IT department as a group that is just supposed to keep the PCs and those boxes in the server room running. We'll call that company "SeparateCo."

Both companies have brilliant people who work there, and, in an odd coincidence, brilliant people in each company dreamed up a new product idea at about the same time, right around the first of August of last year.

At SeparateCo, the people who thought up this new and fantastic product needed to pull a meeting together of key stakeholders and get their input. In August, though, it's tough to get everyone in the same room at the same time (because of vacations, kids back to school, etc.), so they set the meeting for late September. This also gave the out-of-towners time to make travel arrangements and get the best fares. Finally, everyone gathered together in a conference room, dry-erase markers at the ready. The brainstorming session went well, and a good to-do list was established and recorded on the white board for all to note down. Everyone went back to their day-to-day work, adding their to-do items from the session to their list.

The engineering department did drawings, the marketing people did concepts, and the sales leader talked to clients about whether or not they would buy this new thing. Each time a piece of information was gathered, a drawing or concept completed, it would be emailed to everyone on the team, with attachments and a request for input. The engineering drawing was modified by two other engineers, the marketing concepts were modified by sales, and soon there were multiple versions of every single document, drawing, and conclusion.

However, the brilliant people at SeparateCo worked through all of this, and right around the first of August of this year, they released their new product into the market.

Unfortunately for the nice people at SeparateCo, their product wasn't as revolutionary as they thought it would be, because their arch-rival, IntegratedCo, had released a product months earlier that does exactly the same thing, and for a little less money. Our next installment will show how IntegratedCo managed to achieve that.

Making the world a better place for the Finance group

2009-12-18T13:15:00.000-06:00

One of our clients shared with us recently that they saved between five and six million dollars in 2009 because they are able to make decisions so quickly now that they've implemented a comprehensive business intelligence solution. That's ten percent of their annual revenue! With results like that, what is holding up the rest of us?

Historically, the Finance group would be looking at budgets at this time of year, and determining that we should be able to cut the pencil budget by 10% for next year. Spending too much in another area, and not enough over there. Number crunching at its best. The eyes of Finance have been typically focused in the rear view mirror, driving down the road by looking backwards. Driving by looking through the windshield is a relatively new concept. We run reports on what we did, not what we are going to do. We measure our teams by what they did, not how they are positioning us for the future. We plan our budgets by what we spent last year, not how changes in the market are going to affect us next year.

Most importantly, we correct behaviors only when we get those reports - after the fact, and sometimes long after the fact. In the age of "instant on" in which we live, we must also be able to live by "instant off." If something isn't working, we need to know quickly and respond quickly. Here's an example: The shipping department, unbeknownst to Finance, has started shipping everything by priority mail (they've seen those ads on TV, of course, and think it's a good idea). The shipping expense for your organization tripled in the last month, and no one knows about it. When do you find out? When the financials are done, distributed, and digested - which, for most organizations, is somewhere between the tenth and the twentieth of the month following. So, now a situation has gone out of control, and it has been out of control for six weeks. Six weeks of $10,000 in shipping charges instead of $3500. Nearly $40,000 in unnecessary expense just because. What could you do with that $40,000?

Well, what if shipping expense were tracked in real time, and the data was integrated into a corporate dashboard that was managed and monitored on a daily basis? Could you see a sudden spike in shipping charges and take corrective action right away? You won't save the whole $40K from the dustbin, but you'll save most of it.

How many areas of your business would benefit from an accurate, daily view into the numbers? Sales are up but profit is down? When do you know and how quickly can you act? Do you know what the sales results will be for next month? Do you know how many orders will be shipped today? Do you know how many shipped yesterday? Will you know when a shipping clerk falls prey to a good advertising campaign?

Getting your reams of corporate data into shape is not an overnight thing, but there are ways to chip off little bites and begin the process of being a completely proactive, driving-through-the-windshield organization. And not only will the world be a better place for Finance, there will much more gold to go around at the end of the year.

Year End - Holidays, Budgets, and Performance Reviews

2009-12-18T12:34:00.000-06:00

Isn't it odd that in the month with more holidays, more parties, more distractions, and possibly more stress than any other month than any other month, many of our organizations are finalizing budgets for next year and getting ready to do year-end performance reviews on all of our people? What were we thinking?

It's unlikely we'll get the holidays moved. I did hear on TV the other night that Christmas really should be celebrated in March, but I think it unlikely that will get much traction. And, sigh, for most organizations, the fiscal year and the calendar year are one and the same, so January 1 starts the treadmill again. So how can we make this time of year less stress-inducing - at least on the professional front? (Shop early and wrap when you buy is the best advice I've heard for reducing stress on the personal front, and I have yet to heed it!)

We still see a lot of organizations with a completely manual performance review process. Sure, there are templates (maybe), written in Word, most likely, but that's not automation; that's just word processing. And, sorry to say, attaching a Word doc to an email and sending it to someone isn't automation either. That's just email with attachments. Unless you are automatically attaching documents to emails and automatically sending them to the right people for comments and approvals, and automatically then sending the final version to HR and to the reviewing manager.

You can cost effectively automate the performance review process, govern the templates, and automate the circulation of the reviews to the right people for comments and approvals. Oakwood has one client whose performance review process took them three months to complete. Ugh. Well, now it takes them less than three weeks to complete - and the organization has grown since we implemented a solution. People are getting their reviews faster, the process is consistent, and the HR department knows what is going on at all times.

While you probably won't be wrapping anyone's Christmas presents for them, you can reduce the stress for all of your people, and for all of your peers, by evaluating the performance review process and applying some workflow automation. It will be your own little year end miracle.

Mobile Phone and Retail - Oh, the possibilities!

2009-12-16T13:24:00.000-06:00

This post by Mark Jaffe over at Mobile Mandala makes some incredibly interesting and thought-provoking points. IT leaders and Marketing leaders need to be sitting at the table talking about this kind of thing - if you are in a business where it makes sense. We can all think of places where we wish that some of the scenarios Mark describes would happen.

I don't want to end up in a society where no one talks to anyone else though. I would hope that applications like those he describes would complement the face-to-face experience, not replace it.

Social Media, Marketing, and the Modern World

2009-12-16T13:01:00.000-06:00

Chris Brogan is an expert in social media. He posted to LinkedIn, someone commented on his post, and I ended up reading his article on writing better blog posts (go figure). As I was cruising through the rest of his site, I was impressed with his insights and his frank, conversational writing style. Come to find out, he also does speaking engagements in front of (sometimes) enormous groups of people. I found myself wondering what would happen if Oakwood had him speak at an event. Would our clients be interested? Who would attend? Why would a technology organization like Oakwood have an event about social media, anyway?

Why does a grocery store have cooking classes? Why do Home Depot and Lowe's have how-to clinics on building bird houses and tiling? Addressing the world of social media is a key target for us in 2010. We are already implementing social media applications based on Twitter - a mapping application and a "Lights Out Marketing" application are two examples. We are talking to more marketing leaders in organizations than ever before. So talking to Chris makes sense for us. Does listening to him make sense for you?

Social media - blogging, microblogging (Twitter), Facebook pages, interactive websites - is happening in your organization whether you intend it to or not. Is there a way that you can use technology to take advantage of the social world? There might not be; if you're selling whatchamadoodles and there are only five people in the world who buy them, then, well, social media isn't going to do much for you. If, however, your prospects are living in or using the social media world in order to do better at their job, then, from a marketing perspective, figure out how you can talk to them. And from an IT perspective, figure out how you can turn social surfers into your customers. It's just data. It's out there. You can use it. You can make things out of it. You can advance the achievement of your organizational objectives by paying attention to it. We have clients who are doing it already - could they be your competitors?

What makes sense for your organization?

Is IT A Vendor of Choice? Or a Vendor of Force?

2009-12-16T09:55:00.000-06:00

Today will be a bit of a rant. As you all know, I'm a tech geek. As such, in my background, I've been in IT organizations early in my career, and I've led them as well. I strived to create organizations that were "vendors of choice" rather than "vendors of force."

Now as an entrepreneur and a marketing techie geek, I'm amazed that in many organizations IT let's marketing know what's going to happen, rather than serving the interests of what you need to produce results. I'm amazed that in many organizations IT owns the website, as well as the updates to it. With all of the technology available today -- yes, even affordably priced for small organizations -- not having tools that marketers can manage WITHOUT having to learn HTML coding or techie stuff to manage and deliver marketing results -- is INSANE - if you hope to compete effectively and produce the results you're after.

But what got me started on this? I'm going to relay a story to you. An organization is migrating off their vendor, replacing the system with in-house built systems. Doing this disrupts a bunch of integration that has already been put in place between the company's systems and this vendor. This is a B-to-C organization, and based on a recent report form Forrester that came out yesterday (ROI of Relevance, 2009), one of the things they're doing (and have been doing for literally years) is the placement of dynamic content, tailored to an individual recipient and where that recipient lives.

Since the integration will no longer be possible between the systems - this little email "widget" will no longer function. The vendor outlined this requirement to the organization's IT guy, who went back to figure it out. What he came back with is this: Instead of the dynamic content that would lay out the information in the body of the email, they will now place a link in the email and the user can click on it if they want to find out what's happening in their area.

Here's exactly why IT should NOT own anything associated with marketing. They DON'T get it! That solution is NOT a solution for marketing. It's an easy solution for IT. According to even the latest study by Forrester mentioned above, having this sort of relevant dynamic content within an email can increase conversions by 7%! If you're sending out 40,000 emails, that's 2,800 conversions -- that you will NO LONGER GET by removing it and taking a giant leap backwards because that's what IT is dictating they'll now support.

Forget that the organization has already spent the money to integrate their systems with the solution they've been using for years. Now IT is rebuilding the system, and because they want to migrate away from this vendor, they're not going to offer an alternative. And offering a solution like that can only be done, if the business is FORCED to accept what IT says they can have. Would any marketer truly be OK with that as a solution? Behavior like that gives all techie geeks a bad rap -- and it's just downright annoying.

Unfortunately, it happens a lot more than anyone might think -- how about you? Do you rely unnecessarily on IT to deliver your marketing campaigns? Do you have any freedom to choose a different and perhaps better path? What if doing so could increase the results you get from your marketing efforts (i.e. more conversions; more sales) -- would you be interested then? Would you even be willing to "go rogue" and step around the limitations imposed by your IT group or Webdev folks if doing so enabled you to produce better results for the organization? I say marketers today, given the pressures to drive revenue, need freedom from IT and the ability to launch and manage marketing without that IT reliance. What then might be possible?

If you want to evaluate the degree to which you're empowered to create and manage online marketing campaigns and nurturing strategies, get our Get Hitched; Not Ditched Guide #2: Websites That Deliver guide - it's got an easy evaluator that will help you understand what's possible (and affordable).

Enjoy -- please send me your thoughts -- I'd love to hear your feedback.

Kim Albee, Founder and President of Genoo - the most affordable and comprehensive Marketing Automation service available!

Unlikely matches and unexpected links

2009-12-14T16:40:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend, I watched a recorded TV show (thank you DVR) in which different singers were asked to do a duet of a popular Christmas song. These singers had never sung together before, so this was a special opportunity to see something unusual - unusual in that you would not think that these singers would even perform in the same city - let alone on the same stage and in the same song! The pairings were interesting, to say the least. One in particular stood out and is the inspiration for this note today. Andrea Bocelli and Mary J Blige collaborated on a rendition of "What Child Is This" that was blow-your-socks-off awesome, wonderful, and a fantastic musical gift to those of us who watched. (You can see it here; drag the bar to 1:07 to start at this performance.)

Thing two that happened over the weekend: In 2010, we are identifying ways in which our solution groups and their service offerings will work more closely together, and I am laying out "Linkage Maps" to illustrate to our entire team how our offerings interrelate. For example, (deep breath here) a SharePoint implementation can add workflow, which can rely on Active Directory, which is part of Windows Server, which might need an upgrade, and it is all managed with System Center, and SharePoint might show a dashboard, which is part of Business Intelligence, which needs to collect data through SQL Server Integration Services and work with SQL Server Analysis Services, and everyone needs notifications in Exchange, and it all runs on a Virtual Infrastructure and is delivered to the desktop through virtualized applications, and there might be some custom code required, which leads to a discussion of... well, you get the idea.

So from Andrea Bocelli and Mary J Blige collaborating on a Christmas carol, to how technologies can relate together - how the heck did I connect those two? I flashed back to a conversation I heard recently - in typical organizations, historically, the IT folks have the computer stuff, the phones are handled by a different group, and the copiers are handled by a third group. Sales is responsible for client acquisition, and marketing is responsible for creating relationships with prospects who can become clients. IT needs to be at the center of it all. You've seen me post before on how a phone system broke a sale for a leading on-line retailer, and you'll see me post again soon on how IT took marketing out at the knees with one simple decision. If IT is not integrated into the very fabric of an organization, in today's day and age, in my opinion the organization will not be as successful as it could be.

When things that historically don't go together are put together, you have a unique opportunity to create something awesome and wonderful that will be a fantastic gift to all who participate - whether musically, organizationally, or technologically. It's this kind of stuff that makes me thrilled to be in this particular industry at this particular time, talking to folks who feel the same way.

A Breakthrough, or a Nap?

2009-12-11T08:44:00.000-06:00

The pond outside my office window has a thin film of ice across most of it at this point, and this morning I had the joy of watching a flock of Canada geese come in for a landing. It's always entertaining to see, whether in the summer when they make a frothy V in the water as they land, or in winter as they try to skate across the ice. The ice, however, is very thin in spots, and some of the geese, as they landed, broke through the ice to the water, while others deliberately landed in the little bit of open water left. The fun and interesting part of this story, though, is what is happening now. The geese that are floating are bathing with an energy and fervor that makes me think they feel lucky to have broken through the ice to open water, and the geese that landed on the ice are all napping.

As business people, are we ready to look for open water, which we will approach with energy and fervor? Or are we content to land where we land and take a nap? I don't think the geese planned where they would land, and certainly a goose who landed on ice could have made the extra effort to walk (skate) on over to open water, had it chosen to do so. But it didn't. Content with the way things are, it just settled in to nap.

Those who constantly search for open water are the leaders in leading organizations, in my experience. There are a lot of shuttered storefronts and "office space for rent" signs that are a testament to those who landed where they landed and took a nap.

Corporate Disconnect: The maintenance man who thought his job was to clean the floors

2009-12-10T11:06:00.000-06:00

How critical is the building maintenance crew to your business? I read an interesting story yesterday about an organization that lost millions of dollars because of a pretty common failure - the failure to communicate the true worth of every job, all up and down the line, and how each contributes to the overall success of the company.

This maintenance man was charged with cleaning the floors in the warehouse. So he did. He understood that his job was to keep the floors clean. So he did. When the company ran out of the regular cleaner, he cleaned the floors with another product, figuring, after all, that a clean floor is a clean floor regardless of what product is used to clean it. Well, that turned out to be wrong, as a forklift carrying a multi-million dollar piece of equipment skidded on that clean floor into shelving containing another million dollars of parts - and everything was damaged. Multi-million dollars in loss of inventory, and potentially even more lost in productivity and customer service while waiting for replacements to be ordered and arrive.

What if the maintenance man had been told, instead, that his job was to keep the floors safe for the forklifts, the people, and the equipment? What if he knew exactly how critical his job is to the success of his company, and how a failure to perform could affect them? Would he have elected to clean the floors with an inferior product? Did the company even realize, before that moment in time, how a maintenance guy could affect the bottom line of their company?

Every single position in an organization has the power to affect a key performance indicator being managed and monitored at the top levels of the organization. Does the mailroom clerk know that invoices need to be mailed on the same day they are issued, and why? Does the receptionist know that the person he or she is greeting could be the next big client, or the next major-contributory team member? Does everyone understand that their work, whatever it is, is critical to the success of the company?

And does the company understand the actual criticality of every single position? You don't buy a hammer because you want a hammer; you buy a hammer because you need a nail pounded into something. Right? If you can relate every position in your company to your organizational objectives, goals, and KPIs, and communicate achievement for every position in a way that is appropriate to the position and the worker, your company will achieve goals. Costs will go down. Revenue will go up. The workforce will stabilize. Everyone will feel like a contributor. It will be a great place to work.

You might be wondering how this relates to technology, since Oakwood is, after all, a company who implements technology-based solutions. Here's how: communicate via a portal. Create a KPI value chain and display relevant information to every worker, specific to their role, through a dashboard. Develop your Business Intelligence roadmap since much of the data you need to succeed with this kind of initiative is already contained within your systems. Home in on the things that make you successful and use technology to monitor, manage, and proactively predict the results. Budget challenged? Start small. Think big. Make it happen.

That maintenance man? He now knows the true function of his job is to maintain a safe and effective environment so that product can get out the door quickly, accidents won't happen, and workers will be productive. And he has plenty of the right floor cleaner on hand at all times to help him achieve his goal.

Upgrading Your Organization's Web Presence

2009-12-09T10:20:00.000-06:00

Oakwood recently polled clients and prospective clients, asking, among other things, where certain types of projects fall on the list for 2010. We listed twenty-one projects (plus an "other" field) and offered the choices: Absolutely, Very Likely, Maybe if Budget Permits, Already Done It, and Not on My List. "Upgrading the Organization's Web Presence" was on the Absolutely or Very Likely list of the majority of respondents.

So what does that mean, exactly? The survey didn't ask people to explain their answer, nor did it provide specific guidance as to how to interpret the list we provided. So, those who responded could have been thinking "we need a new website" or they might have been thinking "we need to get more into social media" or, really, anything else having to do with the web.

In reading a recent study released by Raab Associates Inc., sponsored by Silverpop, one thing that is very clear is that most organizations (including ours) have to create a more engaging website where relevant clicks can be tracked and cycled back into the prospect profiles, so that sales can take action when action is appropriate. Someone from Eloqua (CEO?) has written a book on Digital Body Language, explaining the process of gathering information on prospects based on where people click, how much time they spend, and what they download (a simplistic explanation, perhaps).

Websites do need to be re-done. Here's some insight from Kim Albee, the founder and president of Genoo Marketing Automation:

I was in Boston to speak at Marketing Sherpa's B2B Summit there, and I signed up for the extra day Landing Page Optimization seminar that was held following the conference. In a nutshell, here's what I got:

OPTIMIZATION BASICS

1. Each page needs to have a single purpose for it's existence.
2. Each page needs to have a compelling call to action.
3. The structure of the page greatly impacts visitor eyepath and hence, the effectiveness of conversions.
4. Minimize unsupervised thinking on the part of the users (i.e. reduce friction)

I applied what I learned in the Landing Page optimization class to the fundamental and primary pages at the Genoo website -- we treat each of those fundamental pages as a landing page now -- where before we were trying to do too much on our pages. Our pages had two almost same size columns -- and we learned that if you structure pages that way, you confuse people -- they aren't sure what is primary (i.e. too much unsupervised thinking). It's critical to have a main column that takes the eye down that column, and a narrower second column for supporting information only.

So we modified our pages, we got clear about the purpose of each page, and we simplified. If you take a gander at our home page, we've got our headline that lets you know what's possible by utilizing our tools. And that content takes you down to the call to action, which is to watch an overview/demo of Genoo. Underneath that -- the items there are for browsing -- but more importantly, they are there to help with SEO -- so it's OK if those don't necessarily get a lot of clicks. We don't expect them to. To the right, we've got the 3 essential things Genoo can enable: Generating more leads, nurturing those leads, and converting them into customers. And each of those 'support' our main message, and provide specific information about any one of those three primary goals.

I won't go into it here, but we also redesigned our account sign up process based on some things we learned about forms and friction. And we took most of our forms and put them in line with the main content -- why? because you can increase conversions by keeping it all on track for your users. You are guiding them along -- so make it easy.

Results? It's been a full month since we made the changes, and we've had a 140% increase in new account sign ups, and approximately 200% increase in lead generation at our site.

So when organizations talk about upgrading their web presence, they could mean about ten different things in terms of a "project." However, we hope that every one of those organizations is talking about one specific thing with regard to their business - doing a better job of engaging whatever audience they are targeting, and increasing the interaction between the organization and the buyers of its services or products.

Corporate Disconnect - You've got the data, why aren't you using it?

2009-12-08T10:25:00.000-06:00

I got a voice mail from someone at Microsoft yesterday. The voice mail was quite professional, the speaker was professional, and the call to action would have been compelling if it had been delivered to the right audience. This is one of those things that makes me laugh out loud. Let me share.

We are a Microsoft Gold Certified and Managed Partner, and we have twelve Microsoft competencies, fourteen Microsoft Virtual Technical Specialists, and we are involved in many different Microsoft programs. We are also, among other things, a Microsoft Online Services Accelerated Partner.

The call from Microsoft was to follow up on the fact that I had downloaded a white paper that had been offered through LinkedIn, and to offer me information about the Microsoft Online Services. The fellow went on to say that he would be glad to send information, provide me with a demonstration, or introduce me to a partner who can help me.

This kills me. The biggest software company in the world, with potentially more data than anyone, and can't put together the fact that Oakwood, who downloaded the white paper, with this specific phone number, is in fact the same Oakwood, at the same phone number, who is one of our nearest and dearest partners?

This happens all the time. I bought a TV last weekend, but hadn't picked it up yet, and then returned it. Four days later I got an email from the company, congratulating me on buying a TV and offering me services to install it.

When data doesn't support the business efforts, you might as well not have it. Used properly, it can save you money and time (no more wasted phone calls), support your brand, and connect you with your customers. The data is there. It's just a matter of putting it all together.

The Corporate Disconnect - How technology could have helped

2009-12-07T10:18:00.000-06:00

This morning, bright and early, I called the toll-free number of the place where I had decided to purchase a new TV stand. I'm ready to make a purchase, and had a couple of quick questions that I was confident could be answered quickly in a phone conversation. This is an on-line purveyor of furniture, and I have been all over the web looking for the TV stand that will fit within our decor. This is it. Credit card number ready to go, all set, dial the phone. And what happens?

I got a recording telling me to leave my name and number, and informing me that I would be called back within twenty-four business hours.

When someone dials the phone number, would it not be a logical assumption that they are ready to make a purchase? Especially for an organization that sells on-line, the potential buyer has now shifted from passive mode into active mode - the buyer is ready to engage. To tell them it could be three days before someone returns their call is tantamount to saying "we don't really need your business."

This is a great example of how effectively implemented IT could really make a difference. The phone system at this business offered the following: "To place an order, or if you have a question about an item on our website, press 1." I pressed one. Wouldn't it be more effective to have the phone system say "to place an order, or if you have questions about the item you want to purchase, press 1" and "if you have questions about something on our website, press 2" so that the people who are ready to make a purchase could be handled differently?

I called the number back and when I got the recording, I pressed zero. The phone system informed me that the key I pressed was invalid. The only "contact us" on the website is a customer service contact where I fill out a form telling them about my "issue." I did that, and got an automated response (with a typo in it!), explaining that I would receive an email once they have solved my issue. Oh, and if I submit my issue more than once, my response could be delayed.

I placed my order with another company.

Someone needs to look at the business processes involved in doing the most fundamental thing this company does - sell things - and fix it. There are many ways in which technology can be leveraged into that equation, and this is a sterling, crystal clear example of why IT (and marketing) should be integrated into every aspect of an organization, and why IT needs to clearly understand how their organization gets customers and keeps customers.

And One Way Furniture, if you're wondering why sales are down, in my opinion, it's in part due to the fact that you are not easy to do business with, and your recording and your automated email response are as far from "customer centric" as you can get without saying "get lost."

Actionable Business Intelligence is not a million dollar project

2009-12-04T08:19:00.000-06:00

Just realized that Business Intelligence is number one on the CIO "must have" list for the fourth year in a row. It's starting to seem sort of like a "goal weight," isn't it? It's something you put on the board as a target, but never develop a plan that will get you there - or don't stick with the plan you've developed. You look at it as a great big hairy audacious goal rather than a series of smaller goals that will move you along the right path. It's daunting. It's costly. It's going to take too long.

None of that has to be true. Start with small steps. Find a partner who knows how to lead you down a path with opportunities for short term wins on the way to the ultimate goal. Aim for the first ten pounds of BI, then the next ten pounds (just to extend my analogy a bit further!). Before you know it, you'll be at your BI goal weight.

With BI in the number one position again, there's a clear message here. Folks just aren't getting it done. Break the cycle. A great goal would be to have BI move to the number two position next year, don't you think?

Is SEO always a worthwhile investment?

2009-12-03T21:29:00.000-06:00

So this company makes a widget that goes inside a machine. The company's clients are other companies who use the machine. The way to grow the business is to find other companies who will use the machine, and then make sure their widget is inside the machines that these other companies will buy. The company thinks they need a new website (and they do, if only because their current website could have been done by anyone's ten year old), and they think they can justify the cost of the website revanmp by also paying someone to maintain their search engine optimization. Huh. This is where it's important to step back and review some basics, IMHO. Who is going to their website? Why are people going to their website? What would people search on that would lead them to the website, and what will those people do when they get there?

I realize this is a short version of a long story, so let's skip to the answers. The people who go to the website are people who already know this company. They go there because the widget broke and they need to fix it, or they need to buy a replacement widget. Maybe they need a service manual for the widget. And it might be nice if there was a wiki or something to search through where other people who have had broken widgets can share fix-it tips. However, the average person in the universe will not search for this widget because it is merely a piece inside a machine as far as most are concerned. While the website should certainly answer the question "why this widget versus our competitor's widget," the website is unlikely to ever get a lot of traffic from people who are shopping for widgets.

So, review who your customers are, who are your potential customers, and whether or not those potential customers are likey to be searching on the web for the widget you make. Then decide if SEO is a worthwhile investment. SEO is terrific, don't get me wrong. Sometimes there just isn't a compelling business reason to make the extra investment in keeping up with it.

Is "Aligning IT with the Business" the Right Goal?

2009-12-01T10:16:00.000-06:00

In a folder hidden in a drawer, I found a file this morning labeled "Marketing IT." In it, I found a draft of an IT department newsletter that I had created for a client organization, as well as a number of articles talking about the importance of marketing IT to the business. I also found an article from a blog on TechRepublic with the interesting title, "Sanity Check: If you're working on IT-Business alignment, you've already lost." The article is by Jason Hiner, from March of 2008. It's as relevant today as it was when written, so I thought I'd share some thoughts.

We never hear about challenges with aligning sales with the business, or HR with the business, right? So why do we talk about aligning IT with the business? Alignment implies separation - two disparate entities that need to be going down parallel paths? Two different groups that need to be thinking in tandem? How can you move a business forward when you are dealing with groups or departments that must be "aligned" with the business?

Instead of aligning IT with the business, let's change the goal and integrate IT with the business.

For some, maybe it's just semantics. I think it's more than semantics; it's a mind set that needs to be changed. In the words of Home Depot, let's "turn up the doing."

Is Your Website Mobile Enough?

2009-11-30T14:57:00.000-06:00

A frustrating thing happened one day while on a series of appointments in western St. Louis suburb. I needed to land someplace for an hour between meetings - preferably someplace where I had Internet access and where they also would have good sandwiches and a comfortable place to sit. I had a place in mind, and knew that they have locations all over the place and no doubt one nearby. So, using my Windows Mobile smartphone with its handy-dandy Internet access, I went to the website of this organization to find the closest store.

The frustrating thing that occurred is that I never found the closest store. Their store locator, which works wonderfully when you are sitting at a PC, did not work on my smartphone. Their smartphone experience was just to deliver the regular website to me. It looked horrible, was hard to navigate, and some of the pages were so heavy they would not load.

The short end of this story is that I ended up driving up and down the road looking for the store, never found it, and used so much of my available time in the search, both on-line and vehicular, that I missed lunch, did email on my phone, and went off to my next appointment. Oh - and later I found out that when I was sitting in a parking lot surfing their site on my phone trying to find them, I was less than 500 yards from their store - it was hidden by another building and not visible from the road. FRUSTRATING!

How many other people have done the same thing? How much business has this organization lost because their website is not set up to recognize a mobile browser? How many times has someone driven by instead of coming in because they could not find the store?

The industry is telling us that mobile browser access to our websites will eventually overtake stationary browsers. Is having your website mobile-aware enough though?

Do this: think about what a person needs so badly that they hit your website from their car, lunch table, or lobby. Do they need the flashy graphics and your latest news? Or do they need directions to your office and a phone number to call to tell someone that traffic is horrible and they are going to be late?

Technology allows you to detect the browser as it hits your site. Customize the experience for the browser, with relevant information delivered based on the device, and you will have not only hit a home run, you might even pick up some revenue you'd otherwise have lost.

Musings on a Great Year, and IT for 2010

2009-11-30T10:08:00.000-06:00

I went to high school with a man who has since become one of the most influential people in the technology world. We have recently reconnected, and I shared with him some of Oakwood's success story for 2009 - the fact that we have grown by 25 people, we acquired the app dev division of another company (which brought 14 of the 25), and that we have not had a layoff or a RIF. We have successfully held the line in profitability and continue to grow as we start winding down our fourth quarter and gearing up for Q1 of 2010. His reaction? "You have no doubt had the most successful year of anyone in IT." Wow. I didn't really expect that comment. I have seen others in the industry who have held the line in 2009 (almost sounds like a marketing theme, doesn't it?). However I guess most have not grown as we have. Yet despite our success in 2009, we don't know what 2010 will hold. Our pipeline has never been healthier. Our clients have never been happier (did I share that our CSAT score, based on Microsoft polling, was at the top of the charts?). Our team has never been more solid. Our clients are also pretty uncertain about what their 2010 decisions will be.

Two things are certain - IT departments are very concerned with getting more aligned with the business, and "reduce cost" has given way to "increase revenue" as the number one business priority. So the IT departments are going to be very concerned with figuring out how they can do more than "keep the lights on" and make sure the infrastructure is operational. The network infrastructure is the dial tone of the 21st century - no matter where I connect, the network needs to be there. So with that as a given, what are the projects that IT should be undertaking for 2010?

My opinions, based on a ton of reading and our own survey -

Enable better decisions to be made faster by getting a handle on the massive amounts of data the business collects and presenting it quickly, accurately, and in a format that can easily be consumed by those who need to know and act
Figure out how your organization is getting customers and keeping customers and then figure out how technology can better enable that process. In many cases that will mean being open to the demands of the sales and marketing teams. They know the answers to these questions, and if IT doesn't get involved with them, they will do things on their own.
Improve the service you provide to your own customer base - your internal user community, with the creation of self-service help portals, easy-to-use help desk, better internal IT processes.
Market the successes as well as the planned successes for the IT department in business terms. Don't hesitate to let people know how you are affecting the business.
Look at all of your business processes, understand which ones are slowing down the business in some regard, and start the path of improvement. Don't automate bad business process. You'll just get to chaos faster.
Create a climate of accountability via managing projects more effectively, tracking technology investments (software, hardware, and most importantly people and time), and tracking business results of your investments
Improve the service you provide to your external customer base by becoming the easiest organization in the world for your customers to do business with (bad grammar, but you get the point). For some that means improving the corporate website to make it a go-to resource. For others that means putting your customer service people on Twitter. Find someone who can help you figure this out. It's big.

2010 has the potential of being a game-changing year for corporate IT departments. Don't you agree?

Gotta Love These Marketing Success Stories

2009-11-23T16:53:00.000-06:00

These three stories are great examples of how technology can enable some truly creative marketing. (When I tried to link directly to the blog post, I got an error message, so allow me to credit Justin Jackson of Donnelly Marketing for this post on the Strategic Marketing Ideas blog.) Good info to share!

One example of a company making a connection, while using the latest technology, and sharing that connection in the office, is with the Dunkin Donuts Dunkin Run program. The Dunkin run combines an online order by an individual that is forwarded via email to your friends in the office asking them if they’d like to add anything to your order when you make a Dunkin Run. Their orders are sent directly to the nearest location and you are able to pay and pick it up. Payment can also be made directly from your Dunkin Card to make pick up that much simpler. So now you look like a hero to your office, Dunkin Donuts has cross sold and upsold your business, and the office is stuffed or wired from eating donuts and drinking great coffee. The end result is a win for all parties.

Another example of a company making a connection comes from Itickets.com. Acquiring tickets online and picking them on at the event is a nice feature, but after collecting an email address in the process Itickets.com takes the next step by continuing the relationship in a very personal way. Following the event an email is sent out requesting photo’s taken at the event, and if you don’t have any you are invited you to view other photos that are donated by fans at the show. Iticket.com can now add you as a friend on Facebook or Flickr, depending on the distribution channel, you look like a hero to your family for collecting these memories and the event get additional exposure and publicity. Again, everyone wins.

Finally, a Las Vegas golf course wanted to grow it’s Facebook fan club and promote more amenities via social media. They determined that since many golfers were not bringing clubs they could offer a free rental if you signed up as a Facebook fan and booked your tee time on line. Since Facebook allows you to share specials easily with your friends, you look like a hero for finding a great deal, the golf course gets players that may have stayed in the casino instead, and Facebook is able to help show more compelling reasons to choose one course over another.

In Justin's words, "the stories depicted here are just the tip of the iceberg but represent the change in thinking and the different factors that should be used when putting together a marketing strategy. The elements of technology, multi-channel communication, and social media are all utilized to make each effort better. Following this roadmap can boost your business as well."

The Blurring Lines in Content Management

2009-11-23T16:46:00.000-06:00

InformationWeek published a terrific article on the how collaboration and social networks have changed the game for content management. This is a tool-agnostic, objective viewpoint that is well worth reading. You can find the article here.

Interview with Guy Kawasaki on Marketing

2009-11-20T12:35:00.001-06:00

Good information shared by arguably one of the industry’s leaders. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5173/Interview-with-Guy-Kawasaki-on-Marketing-and-Building-a-Brand.aspx

Marketing and Social Media - Ponder This!

2009-11-20T12:33:00.000-06:00

Really enjoyed this article from the FastForward Blog – great example of how marketing is using social media to stay ahead of the game – and where marketing needs to get more in the game!