You should own your own data

In virtually every country there is a debate around privacy, driven most recently by the rise of Big Data, social networks and technology more generally.  Without doubt, the major technology companies recognise the value of the information they are collecting from individuals and are working very hard to minimise the impact of privacy changes by putting as much control as possible in the hands of the individual.

This debate will only intensify as the social networks push to also own the identity space.  Just look at the number of websites that encourage you to use Facebook, Google or similar services to log in.  In doing so, yet more of your data is available to these businesses which you are providing in exchange for the service of having your identity conveniently confirmed.

Citizens and consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of their personal information and hence are looking for more privacy options.  The default position of governments has been to revisit their privacy regulations.  This approach, though, is doomed from the start as no regulation can possibly keep up with this rapidly developing information economy.

In fact, it is likely to be economic forces that will provide the solution to the privacy risks of Big Data.  Both government and businesses are beginning to realise that they can make individuals much more comfortable to share their data if rather than providing an almost infinite (and incomprehensible) set of privacy settings they simply renounce any attempt at taking over ownership of the data and simply borrow or lease it with the permission of the true owner – you.

This approach is referred to as personally controlled records and is made possible by the databases that support the growth of Big Data.  No longer is it necessary to extract every piece of information and replicate it many times over in order to support complex analytics.  Rather it can be packaged as a neat record, kept in the control of the individual and purged upon expiry or the revocation of the lease that has been provided.

Rather than reducing the value to business and government, this approach actually opens up a huge array of new possibilities and leaves the individual in control.  The evidence is growing that when people feel confident that they can withdraw their information at any time and are not at risk of unintended consequences they are much more willing to submit their data for a wide array of purposes.

The protection of the individual in a world of Big Data is not through better privacy, but rather through clarifying who actually owns the data and ensuring that their rights are maintained.

Hear more in a Sky News interview I provided recently on trends in technology.

Teleworking requires good information sharing

Teleworking has been in the press recently after Yahoo! CEO, Marissa Mayer, banned the practice arguing that innovation and productivity require Yahoo! Employees to be present in the office. Many HR managers have seized on the reluctance of Yahoo! and some other tech companies such as Google to embrace teleworking to argue that the trend is coming to an end.

Taken to its logical conclusion, opposition to teleworking implies that global operating models also don’t work given that the objection to collaborating electronically must apply equally to employees who are in different offices as it does to those who are working from home. Clearly this can’t be the case or the modern multinational business could not continue to thrive.

Whether it is a single employee working remotely or a team operating virtually over the globe, there are five principles that are needed to make them successful. At their core they are about establishing a free flow of information.

Principle #1: Make activity and presence visible

Ensure that there is clear information demonstrating activity. In person, a manager can judge activity by seeing how many people are sitting at their desks. In a virtual team, it is important that some sort of live presence be available so that everyone knows who is working and when.

Principle #2: Show progress daily

There need to be clear indicators of progress. For knowledge workers it is hard enough when operating in person to know how much progress has been made to an elusive goal, whether it is a new product or simply evolving the business towards a more efficient way of working. Operating virtually it is vital that there are very short term objectives that are visible to the whole team. Ideally this can be done through use of gamification techniques.

Principle #3: Make knowledge sharing a core activity

Without the informal sharing that is possible through accidental encounters, it is even more important that knowledge is encoded and shared. There is no magic to this, it is simply critical that the loading of new artefacts is a core metric of everyone on the team and its value is recognised.

Principle #4: Build strong informal relationships

Just because the team is virtual doesn’t mean that they can’t develop strong personal bonds. Social networks have shown how it is possible for people who have never met to become close friends. Use similar techniques to develop relationships across virtual teams through a range of informal connections.

Principle #5: Encourage good phone conference etiquette

One of the biggest obstacles for teleworking is bad phone conferences. It is too tempting to have long calls where the majority of participants simply go on mute and do something else. These meetings wouldn’t be allowed to continue if people were present in the same room. Similarly, virtual teams fragment when small groups within the team are in the same location and put their phone on mute and compare notes. The rule should be that everyone is present, is free to challenge the value and that all comments are for all participants.

For social networks, volume is the enemy of value

In this blog I often talk of the value of information. Information is a valuable asset and companies increasingly place great store in identifying new sources of data about their products and customers.

Individually, we are also quickly assembling a mass of personal information through our social networks. Professionally, the most popular social network is LinkedIn.

When LinkedIn launched a decade ago we enthusiastically started to build our portfolio of contacts. Each contact has a value to us in our career. While that value is intangible it motivates us to maintain the contact as a relationship that enhances our network.

However the volume of our contacts is starting to become overwhelming. In many cases the accepted invitations can be counted in the thousands. Projecting forward a decade, it is easy to see that many of us could be facing a set of contacts in the tens of thousands.

While a list of several hundred people reflected a set of connections that was meaningful in a business context, the accepted invitations that are spilling over are starting to resemble a mailing list more than a premium set of relationships.

The social networks are trying to help by adding data to the mix, enabling us to find out who values our status updates, how our connections are progressing through their careers and who is interested in our profile. However there is an argument that this is perhaps the information equivalent of “quantitative easing”. That is, when we are concerned that the information economy is stalling we publish more information.

The inevitable consequence of quantitative easing is, of course, inflation.

The social network that finds the solution to the inevitable inflation, that is the need to add more information just to maintain a static real value, will have a huge edge over its competitors and perhaps find a new role in the information economy.

Maybe the professional network of the future will allow contacts to degrade and eventually disappear if they are not maintained. It could be that we will augment our relationships with other data about our interactions and hence score their real relevance to us. At the very least we will develop better ways to mutually identify the bonds that have the greatest potential value.

What is most exciting is that the most effective solutions to managing the overwhelming number of contacts that we are accumulating probably haven’t been invented yet. Let’s hope the solutions appear before the networks lose their value through sheer volume.

Is there a silver bullet in a volatile world?

There is little doubt that the business environment is changing faster than at any other time in history.  The recent book from Peter Evans-Greenwood, The New Instability, argues that shift in the economy is a response to technology introduced over the past few decades.  Written from the perspective of business transformation, Evans-Greenwood uses examples from virtually every industry to argue that it is how you partner rather than what you own that defines success in the digital era.

Some leaders believe the best response to volatile business environments is to focus on operational excellence, in fact even going so far as to design and operate the enterprise as a living computer.  Evans-Greenwood argues that the key to success is agility and business relationships, two things that require less rather than more systems.  Information Technology can be an operating platform for agility or it can lock-in existing ways of working.

Arguably, many organisations’ claims that they are innovating with Big Data is actually an example of inward-facing operational excellence.  I am reminded of an article by Steve Lohr in the New York Times: Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition.  Lohr, who is a proponent of Big Data, traces its lineage back to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management”.

Both Evans-Greenwood and Lohr argue that a war of data algorithms which is limited to the same datasets will naturally deliver diminishing returns.

What the “unbusiness”, or enterprise that is unburdened by a focus on its assets, delivers is the freedom to find innovative relationships.  While organisations such as Twitter and Craigslist are obvious exemplars of this model, it is more interesting to read the case studies of businesses such as Kogan Technologies and Rolls Royce (the aircraft engine company, not the maker of luxury cars).

We are introduced to the partnerships that both Kogan Technologies and Rolls Royce have formed to find new and innovative ways of managing expensive assets.

None of the success stories we are introduced to in The New Instability could have achieved their goals using conventional tools such as Business Process Management.  I’ve made the case many times before that much of the value of organisations is in their complexity.  Any governance model that tries to force every situation into a limited number of responses by necessity reduces individual innovation and value.

Most of the investments we’ve made in enterprise technology, such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Process Management and now Big Data were started as ways differentiating the businesses that were the early adopters.  Beyond the first wave of implementation, most organisations seek to build on existing design patterns to manage costs.  What starts as an innovation quickly becomes a ticket to play and certainly doesn’t allow any business to respond to the next wave of instability.

Reclaim email as a business tool

As many of us prepare to go on leave over the Christmas/New Year period we’re cleaning-up our email and perhaps grumbling about the avalanche of electronic messages!  I was reminded of a post I wrote in 2010 when I defended email as a business tool.  Two years later, and I think that email is as much a part of our lives as it was then.  That doesn’t mean we can’t do it better and I figured that it is timely to re-post my earlier comments.

Any serious business discussion about information must include email.  Like it, or loathe it, email is a major part of every knowledge worker’s life.  Unfortunately many staff have grown to hate its intrusion into their personal time, the fragmentation of their work and the expectation of a rapid reply to important messages.

The result has been that many people argue that email should be phased out and replaced by the next generation of social networking and collaboration tools within the enterprise.  To some extent, this is true with collaboration and business messaging tools continuing to gain in popularity.  However, email still remains the most popular way for most people within business to share information.

There are some things that we can do and in this post I suggest two quick actions that can change the email culture.

First, create the concept of “email bankruptcy”.  The term has been around for a while, but it is time to give it some formality.  Many staff report that exiting the company they work for, and the resultant clearing of their email, is a tremendous relief.  In effect we’ve created a reward for resignation, which is usually the exact opposite of the behaviour we want to encourage.

A potential solution is to allow staff to declare themselves “email bankrupts”.  The act of doing so will result in a declaration, through a message to all who have sent an email outstanding in their inbox, that nothing prior to the given date will be read or actioned.  The bankrupt then has a clean inbox and a fresh start.

Declaring bankruptcy should have some consequences, but they must not be too serious (name and shame would normally suffice).  In addition, like a financial bankrupt, they should be given some assistance to help them avoid the situation in the future.

Second, encourage staff (starting with yourself) to batch email sends.  Email was created based on the analogy of paper memos.  Those memos went through an internal or external mail system (“snail mail”) that caused a natural lag in the communication.  People typically looked at their incoming mail in the morning when they came to work.  If there was a backlog of mail they took it home in their briefcase to read and reply – but the sending was done the next day.

There is nothing wrong with doing work out-of-hours.  What is a problem is that the resulting messages appear in our colleague’s inboxes within moments of us sending them, creating a reminder that they should perhaps be working as well.  Worse, the near instant nature of email encourages responses that are rapid rather than considered – leading to many people working through something that in the past required just one person to do it properly.

The solution is to batch email in the same way that paper memos were in the past.  Email clients typically allow you to select a “delay” option.  For instance, in Outlook, go to the options tab and select “delay delivery”.  Set the delay to the next business day when working after hours and to a time several hours hence when responding to an email during business hours.

The result of this batching is that you still get the sense of being in control of your inbox without the depressing reality of a flood of replies coming in as fast as you deal with them.  As people get used to you working this way they will consider their reply carefully so as to maximise the value in the information that you return, knowing that they can’t create a dynamic conversation.

Email is a powerful tool and to reject it outright because of its shortcomings would be a mistake.  We must, however, all work to make it much more effective.

A prediction for the mobile era

Since the dawn of the personal computer, the hardware industry has relied on a cycle of obsolesce of just a few years.  Working with their partners in the software community, they created a symbiotic relationship where each operating system and application upgrade strained the performance of existing computer hardware forcing consumers and businesses to regularly upgrade their machines.

In the last decade, though, this endless cycle of upgrades has been challenged as “Moore’s Law” has finally given us computers that outstrip the upgrades of even the most aggressive of software providers.  Fortunately for the manufacturers, the battle has moved on to tablets and smartphones.

With the release of yet another wave of devices for Christmas, headlined of course by the iPhone 5, its time to wonder if we are repeating the upgrade arms race of the PC era or ask if this time it is different.

The mobile era is not the same as the PC era

The first generations of mobile devices have each added desperately needed features that required major changes to the machines themselves such as better cameras, screens and more processing power.  However more recently, unlike the early years of PCs, software developers aren’t helping the manufacturer’s cause.  For the developers of apps, the main game seems to be to move functionality into the cloud and to get closer to their users online rather than relying on the hardware or operating system provider as an intermediary.  Good examples of this include applications such as Dropbox and Spotify.

At the same time, mobile technology has inherited the Moore’s Law driven hardware of the PC era giving it a head start and the ability to rapidly out-perform the requirements of app developers.  Many users are sitting on first generation tablets and third generation phones with no need to upgrade even to run the latest software releases.  “Cool” is now more often in the features, particularly delivered through the cloud, than in the device.

Winning with cloud

Cloud has created a revolution in the capabilities that users can access and potentially broken the endless need to upgrade devices every couple of years.  However, people have been left confused.  How many people actually understand how iCloud works to backup their iPhone or iPad?  People are often surprised and worried when they find out how much information they are sharing about their location or online activities through cloud services.

In the device wars playing out in the tablet and smartphone space, the winners won’t necessarily provide the best hardware, rather they will be able to explain the complexity of the cloud services in a way that gives consumers both confidence and the ability to fully exploit features that today they are only scratching the surface of.

Imagine a world where you can easily share music across all the devices in your house, seamlessly watch the first half of a movie on your TV and finish it on the bus and just know that all of your work documents are securely backed-up.  All of this is possible today, but few people actually know how to do it.

A prediction for 2013

I’ll make one prediction for the next year.  There will be a major security breach in a mainstream service that will make consumers and corporates alike get nervous about the proliferation of cloud services.

It’s into this breach that a trusted brand that is ready to make mobile devices, apps and cloud simple and safe can step.  If they do, then we could see them dominate this space like the “Wintel” alliance did for two decades.

Can enterprise solutions be built from individual projects?

Imagine an electronics company planning a new tablet or phone and building the business case based on pre-committed orders.  Similarly, imagine a utility trying to get residents to sign-up to their electricity plan ahead of the advertising campaign.  It just wouldn’t happen.  And yet, this is the model that information technology finds itself obliged to adhere to inside many large organisations.

How often do we hear of how an organisation needs an enterprise data warehouse and the first step is a departmental project?   Similarly many a business is crying out for identity management, middleware and customer relationship management solutions that span divisions and other organisational siloes.  Despite the chorus of agreement on the need, taking the first steps and then following through on the journey to implementing these foundational capabilities often seems too hard.

Technology projects are inherently complex but the last twenty years has seen the disciplines around the project management of information technology mature.  Regardless of whether the approach is waterfall or agile, the objective of formalising the implementation is to reduce the rate at which information technology projects fail.  The proponents of waterfall require thorough specification of requirements ahead of development with clear stakeholders.  The advocates of iterative or agile methods require the organisation to stand-up fewer capabilities at one time through the engagement of a smaller group of stakeholders who are actively involved.

Increasingly, as a result of this maturing, our profession can be proud of our success rate at delivering solutions for individual departments or divisions.  However, when the solution provides a service that spans the enterprise, problems and general dissatisfaction still seem to be more common than not.

Part of the problem is the very focus on individual projects that has helped to so dramatically improve the success rate of information technology investments over the past couple of decades.  Like the utility company launching a new electricity or gas plan, enterprise solutions are typically providing a service that will be used in a myriad of different ways by their stakeholders. Rather than intricately collect the requirements of these individual users, the best that the information technology team can do is to define a service with specific parameters and test them with focus groups.

The situation is even more complex when the funding of these enterprise solutions is considered.  Even businesses that reject cost recovery from individual stakeholders struggle to kick these projects off or sustain them past the first tranche of functionality.

When treated as a series of individual projects, someone has to go first.  For a data warehouse that might be marketing, finance, or an individual line-of-business.  Similarly for customer relationship management, one product area might have the most obvious and compelling need.  Individual needs can always be delivered more effectively as standalone solutions without establishing capability for the future.  Even the most enlightened team, supported by the most visionary executives, find it hard when focused on delivering a project to avoid compromising the future for the sake of dealing with the complexity of the present.

Worse, when progressing to the second and third drops the focus and urgency is often lost as the initial surge of enthusiasm supported by the most pressing business need begins to dissipate.

There is, however, a solution.  Increasingly business and government is moving beyond a model that only supports new functionality as a series of projects and is shifting the focus to capabilities and services.  The concept of a service enables the business to look at the return on investment in the same way as consumer focused businesses, like an electronics company, look at the potential of a new product launch.

As the tools of service management mature, and there is a convergence of thinking on the funding and resourcing of technology delivery, far more complex capabilities are becoming easier to develop with fewer missteps.  In this environment technologists don’t need to apologise for the complexity of the foundational technologies that the organisation needs rather they can make them available and support their evolution without requiring any one group take that first big leap of faith.