BankerVision

Unconference Crowd Sourced Strategy Pt. 2

CIO Magazine were interested enough in the discussion about our approach to using unconference and crowd sourcing methods to do IT strategy, that they asked us for a write up for their magazine. Its published here, for any of you who are interested in a few more details about what we did.

The future of Australian banking

Over the past week, I’ve had the chance to reconnect with some of my Australian banking colleagues. Australia is very unusual from a financial services perspective – they were largely untouched during the global financial crisis, and my suspicion is this has made them a bit complacent.

Whilst the rest of the industry has started its thinking around the future of the industry, and in some cases, has started to modify itself, I couldn’t help but feel I was stepping back in time a bit last week. Nothing much has changed in Australia since I left it six years ago.

Mind you, not all that much has changed in the thinking of traditional banks here, either.

For example, everyone is still parroting on about “customer experience” and “customer relationship”. I say parroting because both of those terms imply something which just doesn’t exist in banks: a cultural imperative to put the needs of customers first.

Working in banks, it is never first about the customer. It is first about revenue and share of wallet. Anything a bank does in terms of relationship and experience is all about making more money under the guise of helping, and this sets up a relationship which is false. Its like the motor mechanic guy who says he wants to help you to your face, but actually cares about working out how to get as much money possible out of you for as little effort as possible. That situation feels false to customers, and when you translate it to banks, it feels just as false.

I mean, why not just admit to customers that you’re out to make money from them, and get rid of the falseness about it all? Banks aren’t there to help customers, they’re there to help shareholders. Would anyone really mind a bit of candour about this?

So I actually said all this to banking people when I was visiting last week, and most of them didn’t get it. Not only did they not get it, they didn’t even agree that their first imperative in all things was to make more money and reduce cost, not to service customers.

Theirs is the extremely dated view that “bank at centre of financial universe” is still appropriate today. It might have been the way things have been in the last several hundred years, but today things are changing.

Banks, today, should be aiming to be invisible, not the centre of all value. When you get a mortgage, the point is the house you’re buying, not the financial services product. You go to the bank as a consequence of house-buying, not because you want a multiple decade loan for its own sake.

Bankers should try embedding the loan into the house buying process so that the money part was as invisible as possible. Why is it even necessary that the bank has a brand on that, anyway? Loans are all about price, and you care about brand and stuff only if you’re going to have a “relationship”. That’s all part of the falseness, of course.

Clever institutions – including one in the UK -  are already starting to get the fact that the best strategic option is to integrate their stuff into things customers really care about, not be the centre of the universe themselves. If nothing else, it removes them from the falseness of their traditional approaches to customers.

Yes, that means giving up on owning the customer. Yes, it means giving up these dated notions that customers actually want a relationship with a bank beyond it working properly. And, yes, it means that the new game is courting people who will integrate your services, not those who will eventually be using them.

This last is the most important point, actually. I’m of the view that the bank that gets the largest number of organisations to integrate with them will win in a particular market. They’ll have a critical mass that makes it more attractive for more people to join up with them. Everyone else will be left in the dust to pick up crumbs.

Now, of course, in Australia, this is not going to happen any time soon. They haven’t had the burning platform the rest of us have had to make change. It is simple and easy to continue the way things always have.

But I will say this: the time is coming when a global major is going to show up and do this. It may not be soon, because there are bigger profit pools available right now. But it will happen, and they will be great at integrating businesses with them.  They are already working out they need to be invisible, not the centre of everything.

So, Australian Banks, if you want to play in this new world order, you need to start getting to this stuff soon. The problem you have is you don’t know how much time you have.

10 ways you know you’re with smart people

Update: My blog has moved! Please come and visit me at Innovator Inside for my latest posts. 

1. They don’t talk as much as you, because they know they got smart by listening.

2. They know lots of things other than what they’re specialised in. Theirs is the gift of a broad mind, constantly fed with the stimulant of being interested in what everyone else is doing.

3. They juggle home, work and personal interests with dexterity and never fall back on the tired old refrain about “work life balance”. And when they’re juggling, they somehow manage to seem 100% engaged with what they’re doing, on all fronts simultaneously, even though you know they’re taking appropriate steps behind the scenes to make sure their lives are perfectly, serenely balanced.

4. They probably do social media. Not always, but probably. It is not only another chance to listen, but one they use to ensure they can feed their brains with things they otherwise wouldn’t have come across.

5. Even when things go very badly wrong, they’ll be smiling. Smart people never get ruffled because their smart brains present them with alternatives faster than the bad stuff can happen.

6. They know they are usually the smartest person in the room, but they don’t spend their time dwelling on that. Instead, they take it as a personal challenge to see if they can make everyone else the smartest person in the room too.

7. If they are managers, they will make every effort to get people smarter, more connected and more popular than them in their teams. They’re not threatened because they know that smartness is synergistic. They also make sure that their smart people get to look smarter than them for the same reason.

8. They have hidden skills that never get rolled out until they’re needed. They don’t have any need to show their full capabilities for reasons of proving they’re better than others. 

9. They may or may not have expensive educations. You’d never know, just by being with them unless you had their CV in front of you.

10. They never, ever, under any circumstances, make you look stupid, even though it would be easy to do so. They’ve learnt through bitted experience that the only thing that happens when you make someone look bad is you look bad yourself.

That higher degree

I’m sighing here, because I’ve just heard from an another very good IT professional who has decided their career will be immeasurably enhanced by doing a higher degree.

I’m sighing not because I don’t think there is value in higher degrees from an academic perspective, but because this individual thinks that anyone cares about the higher degree when it comes to what makes someone’s career take off.

There is this false expectation that “if I just get this MBA, I can get to the next level”.

Tied in with this false expectation is the thought that anyone in IT is going to get their career managed for them by their employers.

I have news. You will not have a boss long enough in IT for them to manage your career for you in any substantive way, and most large organisations are rubbish at long term talent management anyway. The fact is, long term IT professionals who don’t change jobs frequently enough get painted into a corner where their skills devalue over time. And IT organisations are full of people who know this, and who therefore  move every few years, making long term talent management pretty impossible.

Now, considering that a higher degree is going to take a few years to get, and everyone on the playing field who matters (and stopping you progressing) will be gone in a few years, how is the new piece of paper going to make any difference at all, really?

When people look at CVs, they don’t usually care all that much about the education, so long as there are signs there is some. They only care about what you’ve already done in your career to that point. Anyone can get a degree, after all, even a higher one.

But not everyone is able to make things happen. That’s especially true in IT, where we have optimised ourselves to make sure that change can only happen in extreme circumstances. “Protecting live service” – which is very laudable of course – has ultimately had the effect of making sure that only those with the largest sticks can make any difference.

A new degree does not give you a large stick. Hierarchical position is a large stick, or control of a budget is a large stick or the ear of someone important is a large stick. You get such sticks by doing stuff, not by having an advanced degree. People who can hand out sticks do so because the have worked out it is OK to trust you.

Really, there are only two times it makes sense to get further degrees, with all the attendant cost and time commitments.

The first is if you’re new to work, and you have no career history. Then, having that advanced degree is a nice CV stuffer that can help differentiate, but I do wonder if the personal ROI on maybe getting selected for a few extra interviews is really worth the extra years of study.

The second reason – really the only reason I think – is you’re interested in the content.

So often, good people with good jobs in IT go and get that extra degree, but not for either of these reasons. That’s why I sigh. Its such a waste for most people.

They’d be far better off cultivating people who can give them big sticks instead.

When failure is not an option

Over on The Little Innovation Book, Malcolm Lowe asks the question:

What are your thoughts on organisations were failure maybe is not an option. For example nuclear physics, NASA or a government organisation that pays benefits. In these situations failure could be disastrous. What strategy would you recommend in these types of organisations?

This is such an interesting question, that I thought it worth a whole post all on its own.

The point I was making in that chapter of the book was that 80% – on average – of new things innovator try will fail.

When you start new things, there are all these processes you have to go through before anything happens. You have to write business cases, win money, and eventually, deliver stuff.

Failure that occurs at any point before delivery starts is “good failure”, and in fact, is something that innovators should develop competencies in if they want to stay in business. The fact is, before delivery starts, you probably haven’t spent much money on whatever-it-is, so the downside of stopping isn’t that great.

On the other hand, the further you get into delivery, the more money you’ve spent. If you have to stop then, its very bad indeed. As innovators, you don’t want that situation occurring if you can help it. It leads to what academics call “innovation trauma” – the scenario where everyone is so burned by a failed innovation that no-one will ever sign up for anything new again.

For a great case study of innovation trauma, do a Google search on “SunRay”, the Sun Microsystems thin client which wrecked the careers of a number of smart people, and made the company’s salespeople unwilling to take any risks on innovative new products for years.

The point is, failure which is “good failure'” should be most of that 80% that I refer to in the book. It doesn’t damage anyone, and probably offers instructive lessons to the innovation team

Even one bad failure, though, can close down an innovation programme. And clearly, in the cases that Malcolm mentions, that kind of failure has very dire consequences indeed.

One last point on this: “failure is not an option” is a mentality that leads to – you guessed it – failure. Trying new things is a process that requires lots of stops and starts. There will, inevitably, be more stops than starts, actually.  In an organisation that doesn’t celebrate good failure, what you get is a scenario where nothing new starts at all.

That, clearly, is a very bad situation to be in, and is one of the main reasons people complain they “don't have enough innovation”

Local knowledge is everything

As I mentioned in my last post, I was doing work on the frontline with some our staff in JobCentre Plus last week. I was in a disadvantaged area in Scotland, somewhere around Glasgow, and  as I said before, the experience was incredibly valuable.

It is so easy to imagine how things will work in production when you’re remote, but you don’t really know how they’re going to work in practice. That’s why (as I said in my last post) you see good people at the frontline who cover over the cracks with manual workarounds, paper based systems, and their own home-built IT.

I mean, let’s face it. No matter how many requirements you gather, no system is going to be perfect for every single user in every single situation. I suppose the art is to get as many use cases that suit as many people as possible whilst minimising the inconvenience you cause to everyone else.

But there was a particular eye-opening, smack in the face, ah-ha moment in the whole week for me. And I know, as I relate it to you, you’re going to say “well, duh!”, especially given the fact that I do work in the trend space as part of my day job.

Here it is: Local knowledge is everything. 

There is a particular stage in the present back-to-work regime in the UK that requires people who’ve not worked  for about two months to attend a 1 hour group session with a staff member for Job Centre Plus, who explains to them what they’re required to do from a benefits perspective, and who provides a basic refresher on what to do to get a job.

There is a script full of guidance notes on what to say, and you have to be trained specially to give the session.

Anyway, so I sat in on one of these, and got to watch.

The script, had it been given verbatim, would not have provided all that much additional value at all to the attendees, I suspect. But the presenter in my session had detailed local knowledge of who was hiring, who wasn’t, and what facilities were available in the local community to help job-seekers. Questions weren’t answered in generalities: there were specific, do-right-now action points. The local stuff made all the difference, and you could see the attendees going from disinterested, to interested, to pleased they’d attended.

I mean, I don’t know why I was surprised at how valuable locality turned out to be, because we’ve all been talking hyper-local on social sites for a few years. But to see it in action for people suffering the recession: well, it made me recognise the value of all this stuff more than intellectually. I mean, I believed in it before, but now I believe it.

The value of local knowledge is no great revelation I suppose. But it certainly is good to get reminded of the fact that at the edges, small things – like which specific building sites are hiring today - are the most important things.

Now, of course, there is a lesson here for those of us who are responsible for building systems. When we build them, rigidly prescribing every sequence and every transaction, what we tend to do is eliminate the value of locality.

We seek to use systems to impose standards of service and uniformity across the offering. “People are unreliable!”, we scream as we write as much discretion away from users as possible, thinking, as we do so, that we are serving both them and the customers.

Well, we’re not. What we’re actually doing is eliminating those things that would really make what we do thrill customers. At the edge, where people meet real customers, such a standard offering doesn’t thrill anyone. It may provide some value to most people. But I suspect that only outliers would actually be thrilled.

And, yes, I do think it is possible even for job-seekers to be thrilled in their interaction with a government department.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that  people recognise this and find their own ways to generate thrill. That’s why you see all this stuff springing up around the systems, service, and processes that get provided centrally. 

Thank you, Jobcentre Plus, for reminding me of something so fundamental as this.

Commented on "Little Innovation Book"

It is certainly true that not all benefits of an innovation programme are financial. My point, though is that only the financial ones are going to count when the chips are down and a business has to chose between investment opportunities. Money talks.

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

Halfway through my week at the front line

As you know, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, this week, I’ve been working at the front line of the Department – in a Job Centre in a challenging area in Scotland.

Banking readers: Job Centres are the UK goverment’s centres that help unemployed people find work. They are also the face to face contact points for administration of benefits that the govermment pays to people out of work.

Anyway, in my Job Centre, I’ve been working with the staff as they’ve dealt with a range of things, from bereavements to people with no money at all (as they’ve lost their benefit payments, and now may be sleeping out in the snow).

Did you know there are money illegal money lenders walking the streets, who forcibly take the money people on benefits get? They hover around outside and take away what people get to pay for food and shelter.

It is presently snowing here.

So you get all these people coming in who have nothing, who explain that they’ve “lost their money”, because they are worried what will happen to them if anyone from the Government knows they’ve dealt with an illegal financial service.

When you are sitting around after a crisis loan interview, hearing what is likely going on behind the face the customer has presented, the experience is extremely eye-opening. Staff were telling me about the (regular) times they’ve had to tap on the glass to wake up drug-affected people in interviews, for example.

Drug dealers and money lenders. Two financial traps for vulnerable people. You can imagine my wide-eyed response, having sat in my nice comfortable cocoon in London all this time.

But here is another thing I’ve found in this Job Centre, and it is something I’m not surprised about.

Staff build their own stuff to get around the limitations of systems we provide. There are Excel based spreadsheets which are used for diary management (“oh, I can’t have this open too long, otherwise no-one else will be able to make appointments”). There is email based workflow, where each step is a new inbox that gets manually monitored. And there’s any number of self-made data capturing things that are used for statistics and business reporting.

And all of it is stitched together with another technology: paper. They create their own forms, and their own paper based systems in order to supplement their jobs.

Consequently, the work is processed in a highly efficient way. I’d make a guess that each JobCentre does things slightly differently, depending on how good their custom additions to each of our centrally provided processes are.

If there was ever proof needed that decentralisation of the core is a good thing, then I’ve been immersed in it for the week so far.

I wonder what would happen if we put the appropriate end-user computing tools in the hands of these people and said “design the perfect Job Centre system”. My guess would be something good.

Commented on "Little Innovation Book"

Your points were valid for me at Lloyds too. Real innovation is hard to do when the business wants to do more of the same.

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

Commented on "Little Innovation Book"

Oh thanks for the tip... I'll look that up. Sounds like it will dovetail nicely with Rule Four, which is all about th emoney

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