In the latest issue of CIO Insight magazine from Ziff Davis Media, Larry Bonfante (CIO, US Tennis Association) writes that “Enterprise Infrastructure is Really About People.”  For those who follow this occasional blog, my sentiments should not be a surprise – since 2004, when I first published the proposition that WE are the platform, I’ve been explaining the fundamental relationship between our information systems and the people that build/support them.  So many of my colleagues (all of them good and smart women and men) focus solely upon the technology, only to find themselves mired in “fire fights” (Larry’s term) or relegated to non-strategic roles in their organizations.

Technology challenges are simply matters of time and money.  For exceptional compute environments, we must begin with exceptional people.  For transformational IT, we must first transform our organizations.  Larry Bonfante is on to something (we even have the same publisher), and though my list of Things To Read is long, I might just buy his book.

Yet, howsoever extraordinary the path of that first over-achieving neutrino, this unfolding day promised more: that radical change in universal physics was merely Act I, as anyone who follows “the market” knows, for it is also The Day That Gold Lost $100 of value in one trading session.  That’s never happened before, but on this day of days, headlines about unique financial milestones can, indeed, be over-shadowed by radical changes in universal physics.

And yet, more.  (Some of you might be thinking “He’s going to finish this entry” but not me, not me, I’m here to note more history): it is as if the Einstein-Midas phenomena has a 3rd act, a third remarkableevent:  32-tons of satellite metal just crashed to the earth, landing in someone’s backyard, and while we’ve all been appropriately forewarned not to touch or pilfer, pieces of space detritus will surely appear on eBay before my first cup of coffee tomorrow.

It is a chaotic and varietal world, I know, and there are many marvels in this midsummer’s night, but on such a day as this, when the sky fell, when gold became less than the sum of its parts, when even the outermost limit of humankind’s velocity had been broken, I am compelled to honor this majestic triad of garbage, glitter, and gravity – and grant my solemn acknowledgement to this moment in time.

As our necklaced string of days goes, this one sparkles a bit more than the rest.

The place: our public library in Danville, Illinois.  The time: a Saturday morning, 1965.

This entry is not, however, about the publication of a book forty years later, or about the profound sense of purpose when I returned to my hometown a few weeks ago and located a copy of my book on its shelves.  Good topics, both.  Rather, it involves a small story about that small town library, a modest anecdote resonating a much larger theme. 

The new library building, with modern brick facades, bronze sculptures of children reading on the lawn, and a fully-computerized infrastructure not unlike many libraries in many other towns, is situated across the street from the old library of my childhood, now a museum.  As the town readied for the opening of the new library (several years ago), the last phase of the project involved the transfer of books from old building to new.  They didn’t hire specialists.  They didn’t use crates or forklifts.  They used little red wagons and dozens of children.

The wagons were donated by their manufacturer, just for this purpose.  And so it was, one Saturday morning, that a very organized but energetic line of little people – each with their own red wagon – moved an entire library’s contents from the library I knew to their sleek new home one hundred yards away, back and forth with their numbered, Dewey-catalogued pile of books, somewhere among them the one I held in my hands in 1965 and the one I published in 2005.  And it doesn’t require much imagination to visualize that scene from the air: the living channel of content and containers, the transfer of immense (incalculable) amounts of words and pictures from one physical location to another, the simple-but-important protocols each child was instructed to follow, and the sequencing-validation-archival of librarians chartered with ensuring that not a single word or book (or child or wagon) is lost in the transfer.

It reminds me of the advances in technology we now all take for granted, how gigabits of data (books and songs and movies) are so easily transferred across great (unimaginable) distances from one (now unknowable) physical location to the tiny device in our hands.  My teenage son does not know what a card catalog looks like, but he navigates the universe of information as easily as those kids navigated their wagons.  Information transfer is now measured in milliseconds. Fonts can be changed via menu.  Foreign languages translated with a click.

And yet, the physical space of the library itself – the quietness of reading rooms, the cluttered bulletin boards in the lobby, the airy ceilings of light – still remain a place for community, refuge, safety, and those moments of occasional delight.

In the August issue of CIO Magazine, one of their staff writers has finally declared this unspoken principle of successful project deployment. (Her name is Kristin Burnham, and the topic of the article was how to sell executives on Google Apps, but the little gem applies to the launch of any new project or application.)  She quotes the CIO of Dominion Enterprises who disclosed 5 lessons he learned during their recent launch – there it is, at the bottom of the page, in black and white for all to see: “Sell it to your administrative assistants first.”

They are the gatekeepers to successful adoption.  They are the pathway to executive acceptance.  Nurture them as you would your most important stakeholders, for they may be your salvation.

True innovations in such an environment are worthy of applause.

With a disclaimer that the actual innovative thinking for these product enhancements likely occurred in 2009, I offer The Best of 2010 because, as a consumer, I noticed them in the past 12 months.

What I find most interesting is that both innovations are evidence that improved usability (of a product) can also lead to a measurable reduction of operational cost – a paradox that should inspire anyone who is asked to do more with less.

• ATM User Interface - How many of us (in previous years) have used our bank’s ATM machine, completed our transaction, and walked away without retrieving our ATM card?  The problematic behavior cost the banking industry hundreds of thousands of dollars annually because of replacement costs and the diminished productivity of bank employees distracted by customers who lost their cards, or turned in someone else’s card that they found in a nearby machine.  It used to happen 1000′s of times in most bank branches, but no more. Kudos to the usability designer who recognized that this was actually a business process problem – one that was completely solved by simply changing the sequence of tasks during our transactions.  We are now asked to remove our card before the transaction is finalized.  This small change in the order of instructions has almost entirely eradicated the CLB issue (Card Left Behind) and has been adopted as a “best practice” by all major ATM vendors, saving the consumers and the banking industry both time and expense.

Now, that’s good thinking.

• Hotel Hand Soap – Originally noted by visitors to Yellowstone National Park, I discovered mine at the Turkey Run Lodge in Indiana: a bar of soap without a middle (soap with a hole in it) that is much easier to handle and, for the hotel industry, the solution to their WDWDWTWS problem (What Do We Do With This Wasted Soap).  It has been heralded in other columns as a “green” or eco-friendly innovation, however, I’m inclined to consider the cost reductions for the manufacturer: each bar of soap uses 30% less material, allowing them to produce the same number of items while dramatically reducing their cost of goods.  Kudos to the engineer at Green Natura soap products for their solution to the paradox of reducing cost while simultaneously improving the product.

Now, that’s good thinking.

As managers, we need to give our employees some breathing room because it is possible to reduce costs and also deliver an improved product.  As employees, we need to give our bosses a break when they dare to assign us the impossible task, because it is possible to reduce costs and deliver an improved product.

The “Cloud” is neither a new advance in technology nor an architectural transformation.  Rather, it is another way of marketing an infrastructure and application paradigm that’s been with us for more than a decade and can no longer be considered “cutting edge.”  In fact, it is standard fare, something that everyone does, with minimal risk, a library of “best practices” and little that is truly “new” besides the term itself.

Before we moved “to the cloud,” we heralded a new generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS, think Salesforce.com) and before SaaS, we applauded the ingenuity of Application Service Providers (ASP) which, from my point-of-view*, was just another way of describing a “hosted” application, which was really little more than a new way of talking about distributed computing.  Yes, ten years ago, as Jamcracker’s CIO, I was traveling the country as a champion of the “next generation” of software provisioning, but even then, was it dramatically different than dialtone telephones with local devices connected to “someone else’s infrastructure?” Not really.

Yes, there have been improvements in the architecture, the protocols, and certainly in the adoption of user-centric design (i.e., a good UI) but the real change in the past ten years has not been in the technology, but in the general population’s willing adoption of the model. 

So, the next time an entrepreneur (with all the energetic sincerity that such courageous souls bring to any conversation) asks how to “sell” a cloud-based platform or product, give them the answers that have been true for as long as “Silicon Valley” has been in our geographic vocabulary:  Does the product solve a problem? Is it easy to use?  Is it modestly priced for the features it delivers? Is there exceptional Customer Support for problem resolution? 

Living in the Cloud does not preclude these important considerations, it’s just another way of saying that the physical location of the software is not the same as our access to that software, something that’s been true (for most of us) as long as our use of email or http.  Even when the next wave of marketing terminology (post-Cloud names in lieu of actual innovation) appears early next year, look past the fancy words and you’ll see the same architecture we’ve been selling since the early 90′s. 

The key selling point, as always, should be about value.  ( The old adage “Location, location, location” is just that, an old adage from the time when having an actual storefront with steady foot traffic was actually a business imperative.)  As for me, I’ve adjusted my internal taxonomy, and moved “the Cloud” terminology to my Who Cares? repository.

Technology innovation from the U.K.?

Trade missions aren’t unique, and yet, yesterday’s discussion (part of the UKTI Cloud Mission, see http://ukinusa.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/other-locations/sf/news/events-san-francisco/ukti-cloud-mission-event) was most interesting, above and beyond the truly engaging dialogue, for their most daunting challenge – we, in Silicon Valley, don’t think about the U.K. w/regard to innovative technologies.

In fact, in a time when so many are looking for work or holding on tightly to the job they might lose at any moment, we may also be losing our ability to notice innovation anywhere.  A side effect of our current anxiety about jobs (lost or soon-to-be) is a kind of tunnel vision, a blindness to that quintessential element of success: new ideas, new ways of doing things, whether they are more efficient processes or the seeds of a breakthrough product.

My sense is that those ideas are still there (not only “across the pond” but in the next cubicle), we’ve just stopped looking for them. And the only cure?  If your co-workers or strategic partners don’t seem to be doing anything new, remove the blinders that come with job insecurity and take a second look, you might just notice something interesting.

Imagine my surprise (delight) to hear a new word, one that I have not ever heard from a CIO when describing what makes his/her organization unique: empathy.

Empathy.

This is beyond “partnership,” deeper than good “customer service,” much more meaningful than “alignment with the business,” all of which are good, but not sufficient.  By driving his organization toward an empathetic response to each and every person they serve, Todd Pierce at Genentech Informatics asks for the deepest kind of connection between IT and the world it serves: true understanding of needs, sincere interest in problem resolution, a genuine bond.

While his department helps fight cancer, and is perhaps a higher order of social good than merely improving shareholder return or simply selling more widgets, we can all borrow from the sentiment; whether it is a desktop upgrade, a custom BI report, or yet another new logo for the website, we need to aspire to that higher standard of an empathetic IT.

I had a harsh lesson in this topic when, after years of executive-level consulting in which I taught managers how to listen to their teams (even purchased stethoscopes for one group to be prominently displayed in their offices, provoking their employees to ask Why The Stethoscope, and inviting a conversation about listening skills) one of my dearest colleagues stopped a meeting and told me to get my stethoscope.  I wasn’t listening.

Metaphors abound, all telling the same story.

I once met a truck driver in Pennsylvania who always rolled his window down when his rig entered one of the Fort Pitt tunnels.  They were an echo chamber, he said, for how well the truck’s engine is doing.  He claimed that he could hear an emergent transmission problem weeks before a mechanic could find it.

Good listening skills are more than important tools in your organizational relationships.  They help us hear the emergent problems in the mechanism of our departments.  As any first year Mechanical Engineering student knows, it is critical to recognize (and compensate for) the smallest vibrations in the construction of (for example) a suspension bridge, rather than waiting until the entire bridge fails from increasingly strong resonant vibrations.

Executives are so accustomed to fire-fighting (shifts in the market, unhappy customers, competitive risk) that they can lose sight of the too-small-to-be-noticed-until-there-are-flames problems.  They presume that their employees will attend to them, but the absence of listening skills (no one wants to hear bad news) replicates itself through the hierarchy.  Have you been surprised by the sudden departure of a key staff member?  Missed project milestones?

Here are a few (of the many) things you can do to encourage the information flow in your organization:

• Town Hall meetings:  Bring everyone together with the sole purpose of answering anyone’s questions, and do this regularly.
• Skip-level Lunches:  Invite 4-5 randomly selected individuals to lunch and listen to the conversation rather than dominating it.
• Cross-attendance of Team Meetings:  Encourage (or even insist upon) “outsiders” in each departmental meeting where the visitors are tasked with taking news back to their teams.
• Walk the Halls:  Don’t wait in your office for people to come to you with an issue (classic open door policy) but take the time to roam, and engage.
• Check-in with your colleagues, visit your remote offices, launch an employee satisfaction survey, give an award for the Best Question of the Week.

We know how to monitor the health of our servers and can respond to email notifications alerting administrators when a server is a 95% capacity and on the verge of failure, but what methods do you use to learn that an employee is at 95% capacity?

• Direct decisions (executive declaration, appealed only to the Board of Directors)
• Delegated decisions (management declaration, by the accountable parties designated by the executive)
• Consensus decisions (consultative decision by identified team of experts)

Some of the myths about these models that should be addressed in one-on-one or group management training sessions are:

1. Every decision is ultimately a direct decision of the CEO as the ultimate party accountable to the Board.  In dysfunctional organizations, large and small, every issue is brought to the CEO (like kids who run to daddy or mommy because they can’t agree).  Not true.
2. Delegated decisions are rarely effective because someone always runs to daddy when they disagree with the intermediate manager’s call (leading to countless “appeals”) Not true.
3. Consensus decisions are time-consuming and can slow down any progress (one juror prevents the verdict)  Not true.
4. No model works in a) companies that are in rapid growth mode where “Just do it…” reigns, b) large institutions with political fiefdoms, c) teams in which passive resistance is prevalent, or d) during major transitions such as merger/acquisition initiatives involving two different corporate cultures. Not true.

There is a corollary to these models, and herein lies “the trick:”

Few companies/organizations use only one model.  The key is to utilize the correct approach for each issue, and to do so, there must be a “framework discussion” among all stakeholders in advance of any specific issue.  This framework discussion occurs before any debate, and agreement is reached before anyone’s vested interest emerges.

By agreeing in advance upon how the decision will be made, the members of the team commit to an approach.  The framework discussion might only require a one-hour meeting, while the absence of any framework often leads to delays, detours, disputes that may add weeks* of unplanned confusion.

* I have recently observed a single technology decision (estimated for three weeks to review/decide) that ultimately consumed nine months of counter-point , arguments that cost thousands of hours of lost productivity, all of which could have been avoided by holding a single, one-hour framework meeting at the outset of the review period.

Yes, politics and urgency and new leadership and corporate culture all play mitigating roles, and few significant business decisions meet unanimous approval.

However, if all managers/directors/VP’s in a company were offered an initial training course in these models (with vocabulary appropriate to the company), the leaders would have a shared constitutional process, a basic mechanism that can be optimized for 80-90% of the issues they will face in their teams and departments.

Where models are defined and framework agreements occur with regularity, organizations operate effectively.  Without any constitutional discussions, and lacking any similarity of approach at the executive level, projects fail.  Schedules slip.  Initiatives drift off course, and most importantly, our finest employees (the ones who should be spending their time building and fixing things) are left waiting in the hallways while their managers argue endlessly.