BankerVision

Commented on "Little Innovation Book"

There's a great write up of a speech I gave in Australia last year on Play-2-Win innovation strategy here, talking of Caja Navarra, probably the most innovative bank in the world.

Originally posted as a comment by jawgardner on Little Innovation Book using DISQUS.

iPad isn’t a thrill yet, but will be.

Like so many other people I know, I spent some time last night watching the live blogging from the Apple iPad launch event. Also, like so many other people I know, I was somewhat disappointed with what I saw.

The device itself, of course, is magnificent. It looks beautiful, it obviously feels beautiful, and the price, well it is a amazing. At that price - $500 USD - I’d say everyone who makes netbooks is in trouble. That, in fact, is the place Apple are pitching the device anyway. As a middle-man thing between your mobile and your laptop experience.

However, the fact of the matter is that Apple’s big product thrills only start to show up when they do their innovating in spaces aligned to the device they are trying to sell. I mean, iPad is magnificent from an engineering perspective of course it is, but that doesn’t make it thrilling.

We were thrilled with iPod because of iTunes and the seamless way it moves music from artist to the ears.

We were thrilled with iPhone because Apple made the shift from putting everything they could dream up onto amdevice to making it simple to put functions everyone else could dream up on the device.

I was hoping to be thrilled with iPad because Apple would make another play to move the stuff everyone else does  onto a screen in another unique way. They didn’t, and even iBooks is just a rehash of what Amazon is already doing.

Ultimately, the iPad is beautiful, but it doesn’t enable anything new.

I knew I’d be disappointed because the fact of the matter is Apple almost never get around to thrilling us with new in a first release.

iPod was released first in 2001, but Apple didn’t add the iTunes store to sell music until two years later.

And the first version of the iPhone had no AppStore at all. It was in late 2008 that Apple added that, almost two years after the first iPhone came out. Now “there’s an app for that” for everything.

So its reasonable to conclude that Apple (who lets face it are masterful manipulators of all of us), have left their powder dry on the iPad. There will be thrilling new ways to get stuff others do on screens. They’re coming, but we won’t have them for, probably, two years.

Everyone who is disappointed because the iPad lacks some gizmo – like a camera or multitasking – is looking for engineering thrills that change the game. But engineering so rarely does. Its always adjustment of business models around the engineering that does that.

And Apple aren’t stupid. They know how to play us. The probably engineered the whole hype thing just to disappoint us. They know their big, game changing play will turn all this discussion around overnight.

Its not like Apple are hiding anything here, either, since they practically told us what they’re going to do during the announcement: “We want to be at the crossroads between technology and the liberal arts”, says Jobs. In other words, wherever talent lives, and whenever it can be rendered on a 10” screen, Apple is going to be your distribution partner and manage your relationship with your customer.

It is a very grand play. And its one that Apple have had some experience in: they did it already for musicians and programmers and studios.

So, in 12 to 18 months or so, when they announce (probably as a sidelight to something else) their game-changer, I am very confident we will all be thrilled.

Commented on "Little Innovation Book"

Over at the Smarter Companies Blog (http://www.i-capitaladvisors.com/2010/01/12/innovation-and-intangible-capital/) there's a debate going on that there's no difference between Innovation Capital and Knowledge Capital. Interesting, but then how do you explain the failure of great knowledge capital companies like Sun Microsystems during the downturn?

Originally posted as a comment by jawgardner on Little Innovation Book using DISQUS.

Commented on "Mashable - The Social Media Guide"

I don't know how anyone could have expected the iPad to live up the hype it generated. Personally, I'm of the view that no matter what they released today - even if it had a camera and every other gadget known to man - it would have disappointed. There was just too much pent up expectation. Its like going to a theme park, having waited for days, and finding the biggest rides aren't running. But the thing is, they've done a competent job on the engineering. Had there been no hype in advance, everyone would now be going "wow, what a great product". And the fact is, once all the furor dies down, and people get to the buying decision, they'll take an iPad. Even if only because it looks fantastic.

Originally posted as a comment by jawgardner on Mashable - The Social Media Guide using DISQUS.

An open letter to the business

My dear Colleague,

I heard on the grapevine the other day that you think your information technologists are getting a bit above their station. Apparently, they’ve made some suggestions which don’t have much to do with technology. I realise that’s outrageous, and I quite sympathise with your annoyance.

I mean, how dare they. They may actually have business and management degrees, but they work for information technology. The very idea that they’d know anything about the way business works is patently absurd. After all, you can only trust an information technologist to plug wires into a wall, I quite agree with you on that. You certainly don’t want them to take on anything more complicated, because lets face it, when you’ve given them complicated tasks in the past, all you got was fail, fail, fail.

That big system that didn’t deliver? You know that if you’d just had different technologists, everything would have been fine. Or maybe they were personally OK, but they chose the wrong technology. Whatever the reason, the IT folk are personally, absolutely to blame. I mean, you tried to tell them what you wanted, didn’t you? But they were all too bits-of-tin and spools-of-wire to understand.

The best thing to do is treat your IT colleagues like glorified order takers. Like, for example, you’re in some really expensive restaurant. You want them to show up, and ask you what you want, and go away and get it. You want them to do it often enough that you never want for anything, but not so often you get annoyed by all the attention. I mean, the best IT person is the one that just does what they’re told, right? Even better if they’re like that perfect waiter in the perfect restaurant that knows what you want without  even being told.

Oh, and I know you’ll agree with me that you can’t ever like the price you’re charged no matter what. Yes, its an expensive restaurant, and you can, like, buy the whole place if you want, but you have a duty to drive value. Because you just know, no matter what you say, that once your IT folk and their vendor friends get together, there’s going to be some kind of cash-spend party where they buy just anything with a few blinking lights that takes their fancy.

But anyway, lets get back to the point, which is ensuring that IT doesn’t get out of its box.

You know, there was a time when we didn’t even need the box. But now, all these upstarted IT people think they know the business as well as we do. They imagine that just because they’ve built a few systems that happen to work and which we now rely on completely, they understand what it was they were doing when they designed those systems.

So I understand how offensive it is when they come yammering away at how they can improve a particular business process, or implement a new customer channel or something.

And don’t even get me started on the subject of digital. Yes, I get the fact that the internet is, well, technology, but lets not forget that we know more about the business and the customer than anyone. That makes us uniquely qualified to be the font of all knowledge on how we will do digital, even though I know that some of those techies have actually run scale digital businesses of their own.

Anyway, any kind of business that techies could be involved in are not the same as the ones we’re involved in, right?

Anyway, I think I’m at the point where we almost don’t even need the techies. I know that you – like me – are on twitter constantly, have our own Facebook pages, and can even build workflows on Sharepoint. I know we used to ask the techies to do that stuff for us, but these days, I just get a few business grads in who’ve done a few technology subjects to do the work.

So much easier than asking those people with business degrees over in the IT group. Somehow, I just feel better knowing that they aren’t employed there.

Frankly, its obvious the time has come for us to stand up for ourselves. Just the other day I caught our CEO having a business meeting with the IT guy. You know that if we don’t take action soon, its going to be totally game over.

Anyway, dear colleague, I just wanted to write this to show my support for you. The way those people in Information Technology are going, they’ll think there’s no difference between them and us soon. Next, they’ll be wanting to our jobs directly. Or, even worse, build things we didn’t ask for and don’t control. We can’t have that, now, can we?

We face the sundering of the great wall we built between us and them during the nineties. I know you agree with me when I say I can’t imagine anything more awful than it come down whilst on our watch.

My best regards

Your fellow IT user from the business.

Commented on "Little Innovation Book"

Welcome, everyone, to the Little Innovation Book. Hope you enjoy it.

Originally posted as a comment by jawgardner on Little Innovation Book using DISQUS.

GovCamp is tomorrow

Tomorrow, is UK GovCamp, a bar-camp for Government. I’m going, and it’ll be at Goggle’s offices in Victoria from 10AM. Here’s the list of everyone whose going. Unfortunately, though, I think the tickets are all gone but there is a waiting list, if you’re interested. If you want to know more, there’s a vertical social network running.

I’ll post impressions next week, and of course will be on twitter during.

Enterprise Architecture – the big catch up

Here is the problem with EA – it is never complete at the point instant when a project asks some question of it. I think that is true no matter how many architects you have or how good they are.

This is the third time I’ve been responsible for “Architecture”, and – no disrespect intended to architects, who aren’t the problem – it never seems to be in complete enough a state that it can answer the specific question a project needs answering at a specific time.

In an organisation that respects its architects – and I think that DWP is one – that means the projects ring up the architects to get advice. Which is all very well, of course, but since the architects are spending all their time trying to build their architecture out to the point  where projects need it to be going, they don’t have time to write all their advice down and add it to the architecture.

Of course, you could have an architecture team that builds things at such a high level that you get completeness simply because you’ve abstracted away all the detail altogether.

But I think that kind of defeats the purpose of having decent architects. You’re then into the realms of strategy, and lets face it, architects are supposed to be working out how to get to the endpoint that the strategy defines, not defining the end point itself.

Now I know that this set of statements will be like waving a red flag at a bull for some people. I don’t mean to cause offence, really I don’t.

But I have come to the conclusion that demand for architecture – at whatever level of detail – will always outstrip the supply of architects available. No matter how much money you spend.

Now, this presents a quandary, I think. On the one hand, if projects can’t get what they need from the architecture, I wonder what the point of having an architecture is at all. But on the other hand, the chaos that results from not having one at all seems pretty likely to have awful repercussions. I’m not certain anyone wants to go back to the days where people did exactly what they pleased, and dang the consequences.

Anyway, it would be impossible now that we have to do “service orientation” and “reuse” and “integration”.

But I can’t help but wonder if the real answer is to decentralise architecture in some way  - make it a more collaborative and participatory activity, one in which projects do a degree of self serving. Where, maybe, the architects are curators of the content, rather than the creators themselves.

I’m going to be talking to my teams about an interesting experiment I have in my mind along these lines over the next week or so. If we go ahead and try something new, I’ll write about it here.

In the meantime, does anyone else have experiences that are relevant? How did you get your architecture ahead of project’s demands for it?

How to crowd source an IT strategy

1.5 days. 100 people. 20 design sessions, and 200 ratified decisions.

It’s the reason I went dark last week online. We were running a crowd sourcing un-conference event to work out the details of IT strategy in as short a time as possible.

It was an event that showed me the reputation the public sector has for being bureaucratic and unable to do anything quickly is unfounded.

Lots of people doubted us when we said we wanted to crowd source strategy development. “Crowds won’t give you anything you can use”, someone said. “They don’t have all the background” someone else told us.

The thing is, they may not have all the data my strategy team had, but collectively, they had deep insight that we would never have gotten ourselves. All we had to do was provide this big group with a way of expressing it in a reasonable way. 

Just like most organisations, whenever there is a decision to be made in the Department, lots of people like to have their point of view. The traditional approach is to call various meeting with various stakeholders until you reach what passes for consensus. This can sometimes take a long time. Everyone complains about it, but nothing seems to make things go more quickly. It was exactly the same at Lloyds Banking Group. Big organisations are challenged when you ask them for quick decisions.

But none of that happened at the strategy event last week. In each design session, the subjects were discussed in detail, but since we made it a rule that anyone making a proposition would automatically trigger the chair to call a vote, people naturally put their cards on the table quickly. It worked well.

Now, I don’t propose to go into the IT strategy we’ve come up with here, though I have to say it is a very powerful document, and vastly more detailed that you could expect to get when you task a small secret-squirrel team to do the work, who then do a big reveal once everything has been watered down appropriately.

But for those of you who are interested, I though I’d explain exactly how we ran the day. Several of you who’ve been reading my Tweets have been asking.

So we started out by doing PowerPoint to the whole group. We laid out the problem we were trying to solve, and provided some stimulating material that people might liked to consider across the event. This was the only time we did Powerpoint, actually.

Then we moved straight into propositions for the first design session, using the basic format pioneered by unconferences. We asked the question “What do we need to design”, in order to prompt proposals for sessions, and then voted as a group on what was needed. The top voted four sessions were immediately scheduled in breakout rooms.

At this point, I’ll pause to let you know that we decided to use electronic voting systems throughout. There were a couple of reasons: firstly, there 100 people in the room, so it was too hard to count hands every time we wanted to put something to the group. But secondly, we were hoping there’d be a bit of contention and provocation, and we wanted the anonymity of electronics. Plus, it gave us the ability to get actual metrics on how positive people were about each thing that came up.

Each design session used standard unconference principals. You got to move freely between sessions as the mood took you, and could interject at any time once the preliminary points were made. In each room, the discussion eventually got to real proposals – and we asked the group to vote if they “agreed to add it to the strategy”. With a majority vote, it was tentatively added. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

We ran screens in each room so that attendees would know what was going on in other sessions, updated live as the tentative decisions came up. The idea was that people should be able to bolt from one room to another if they felt things were going on they had to be a part of.

We realised pretty early that walking out of meetings  for some people normally constrained by traditional formats didn’t come easily. We had to get specific in encouraging people to do it, actually. Perhaps they felt it was rude, or something.

Anyway, we ran 20 design sessions of an hour each over the 1 and a half days, and you’d not believe the breadth of topics. Or perhaps you would, if you’ve been to a BarCamp.

And the final step, after each design session, was we brought everyone back into the main room and had them ratify, electronically, every single tentative proposal that came out of the breakout sessions.

Just as a side note, I have to admit I was very, very nervous about how this format was going to be received. Firstly, we didn’t know if it would work in a corporate setting.  As in, when the outputs have to be more than networking and learning. We wanted a real document, and who knew if people would engage enough to do that?

But there was another worry as well, and that was that we’d find people in such violent objection to each other that we’d never get any decisions at all.

What actually happened was that most of the propositions were carried by a landslide. There were some, the especially contentious ones, that didn’t of course. I rather liked that, actually, since it showed that people weren’t just pushing the Yes button every time.

But I think the big learning is this: if you put people in a room and give them a novel way to make decisions, you will get decisions. It has proved to me that struggling against the big corporate stakeholder machine (which is highly optimised not to make any decisions) need not be the only approach one takes when trying to introduce change. At least, it seems to work for us.

If any of you want more details, feel free to reach out.

The innovation economy

You should read this article that argues another phase change is occurring: from a knowledge economy to an Innovation economy. It’s suggesting that even when you have great structural capital (factories, assets, and all that stuff), great financial capital (money!) and great intellectual capital (knowledge and know-how) you will still not be a successful organisation.

Nothing really happens unless you also have innovation capital,  which are the assets you build up that let you do value creation.

Now, of course, since the discipline of corporate innovation is still so young, we’re as far away from a decent system of valuation of Innovation Capital as we are from manned starhips that cross the void. At least with intellectual captial you can compare the difference between the book value of all the assets on the balance sheet and the market valuation of a firm and say “yep, that’s how much our know-how is worth!”.

This is a concept that resonates strongly with me. I’ve worked in banks and technology companies – both Lloyds and Microsoft for example – where all of the traditional assets were available in spades. How come, then, neither of these companies has truly produced anything that was game changingly value creating in the last decade?

Organic growth is not the same thing, even though its highly desirable, obviously.

I’m of the view that both lack Innovation Capital, and furthermore, that almost all organisations do. Lloyds has spent the last couple of years building its Innovation Capital up, and it may be we’ll start seeing some interesting new stuff eventually.

I’ve been away from Microsoft too long to have any insight about its capabilities in this area, but no-one is stupid there, so I’d not be surprised to discover they get this also.

Anyway, the point of al this, if its true, is that the role of innovation groups suddenly fits neatly into the value hierarchy of an organisation in the same way that accountants and marketers do.

But I’m also thinking that without a reasonable system for the valuation of Innovation capital, we’re going to be nowhere for a while yet.

Academics and other big-brained people… do you care to take on the challenge?