BankerVision

Using people as glue

Sometimes, you're in a meeting, and the technical people will say that they have to do huge amounts of integration to get X old system to work with Y new one. The integration, because it involves your old stuff, will be expensive and time consuming. You sigh and wonder how you are ever going to get out of the legacy trap.

You know that, even if you mandate a new systems approach, you're always going to have to spend piles of money doing legacy integration, because that's where the data is. It is data on which the business relies, so it has to be available, and, obviously, the job of moving it all, and the business rules and all the rest, to a new system in one go is far to large and politcally charged.

And then, you wake up one morning and realise on top of everything, you have the "die or retire problem". Everyone who knows the guts of legacy is either dead or about to retire.

You have to do something about legacy, so you sigh, and sign up for truck loads of integration anyway.

it occurs to me, though, that there are solutions to this problem which don't involve piles of expensive technology work. What about, for example, using people as glue? Why can't they look up data in both systems and perform appropriate updates?

The thing is, technologists have spent decades trying to systematise and automate everything. The idea that you'd de-automate is an anathema. "What about error!" they cry whenever you suggest it. "What about security!, How about our data quality, how about... how about... and how about...!".

There are obviously lots of objections to putting people back into a system but they all miss the major point: if you are time constrained, and you need to get something out the door right now you can get almost any system up and running instantaneously with paper and people.

That is certainly true when you have the die-or-retire thing to deal with.

As far as I can see, the only time this absolutely won't work is in those circumstances when a process is entirely automated from end to end with no people in it at all. Like, for example, an ATM transaction or a web purchase online. But whenever you have people intermediating the machine for other people, you can use people as glue.

Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone put people back into systems permanently. But as temporary, good enough, solution while something better is worked out, surely it makes sense to at least consider the option.

The next big sale

I am amazed, constantly, that people fail to get that being an employee is no different to running any other kind of small business. Everything you have to do to make a small business work has to be done when you're an employee as well. The only difference is that you've got guaranteed income.

Guaranteed income is something that makes it easy to be lazy. Is there any point marketing your achievements when you're going to get the pay-cheque anyway? Why bother to drum up new activity, actually, when doing additional work fails to result in an increase in income?

The illusion that you don't have to run yourself as a small business comes about because most people only have to sell their services those few times they're planning to change jobs. If that happens infrequently enough, it is easy to forget that everything you do right now is collateral for making the next big sale of yourself.

Those who change jobs more frequently are likely to inherently understand this fact. Contractors, especially, get it. It is why I advocate that everyone has a blog and does social media. It makes it simple to be visible.

One objection I always hear when I talk about this stuff, though, is that "some people aren't good at self promotion".  Considering that being visible is so easy in this digital age, that argument doesn't really wash much with me. It is far more likely,  I think, that people who are poor at self-promotion actually have little or nothing to promote in the first place.

Another objection - perhaps a more relevant one, really - is that one should be thinking of doing the best they can right now, not worrying about the next big sale. Whatever happened to loyalty anyway? This is myopic thinking, because only the very lazy plan to be doing the same job forever. Can you imagine anything more boring than doing the same role, decade after decade?

Treating yourself as a small business has the consequence of reminding you, every day, that you are eventually going to have to make a sale, regardless of the present guaranteed income stream. This has the focusing effect of making sure your performance today is as good as it can be, because it is all marketing for the next big thing.

5 signs you are stuck with an Oxygen Thief

Oxygen Thief (def): An individual who uses up the air supply in a meeting at a disproportionate rate compared to their contribution.

The top five signs you're in a meeting with an oxygen thief are these:

1. They always speak more quickly than anyone else. They speak so quickly because they know the supply of oxygen in a room is limited, so they have to use more words per concept spoken in order to ensure they get more of the air than everyone else.
2. They never listen to anyone else, except in order to determine when it is next their turn to speak. This is a very critical thing for an Oxygen Thief, because their main interest is getting more of the air supply for themselves. The content from whomever is presently speaking is just air they're forced to give up.
3. The cup of tea you are drinking starts to boil spontaneously. What has occurred is that the oxygen deficit has resulted in a lower pressure zone in the room, reducing the boiling point of water.
4. If water droplets start forming on your devices or dripping onto your papers, it is for the same reason. You have a low pressure zone in the room, and precipitation is about to occur. Don't worry though, this is a local weather condition that will go away as soon as you open the door.
5. The top sign you have an oxygen thief in the room, however, is that as soon as all the oxygen is gone from the room, they will find a reason to leave early. As everyone else is gasping for breath, or else wobbling shakily because of the neuron-death, they will determine their work is done and escape to greener pastures.

Beauty is the new must-have feature

 There is a new must-have feature in tech products, and that is "beauty". I don't know if you've noticed, but everyone seems to be advertising their "beautiful" design lately, and I know that when I'm choosing software at home, I always want to see what it looks like before I even bother to download.

Beauty may be the new feature, but it is hardly the technological high-ground in the design stakes. That honour goes to Apple, who have gone from Usability, to Beautiful, to Magical. Apparently, when you have something that is "magical", you've really just trumped all competition. Magical implies things that mere beauty doesn't even attempt. Magical is unexplainable, an enigma that amazes just by being.  Even for Apple, that's a pretty big jump. The rest of us, still doing Usability, can only aspire to Beauty, I suspect, and most of us won't have even a chance of that. Not everyone can be the prettiest person in the room.

Anyway, there is a point to all this, and it is this: we in large IT organizations always find that whatever feature the consumer has now, they will demand in the workplace in the next two years. Consequently, I'm predicting that we'll start to have a non-functional requirement around making beautiful experiences when we build systems, and that we'll be rubbish at it when it happens. We are always surprised when stuff makes the jump from consumer to enterprise, and we never learn each time it happens.

So, in two years time, we're going to have a dilemma. Shall we design "beautiful experiences" for staff, when that is going to layer additional cost into a system? I mean, its not like large organizations have service designers just sitting around idle, nor do they generally have a design mentality when they build technology. So this stuff is going to cost more, at least at the start.

I think it will be easy for us all to say "not essential, cut it".

This leads somewhere difficult though: the comparison between what people have at home and what they have at work is only going to get more odious the more the "beauty-feature" becomes a main differentiator. It won't matter if our systems are "magical' in terms of functionality when everyone looks at the interfaces and scrunches up their faces.

My prediction is further deterioration in the perception some users have of their IT partners and their capability to deliver.

Going slightly dark

Here in the UK, we've just had a General Election called. Because I am presently employed by the UK Civil Service, there are a range of special rules that come into force about what it is possible for me to say and do publicly. Social media is a grey area in many of these rules, but needless to say, it is silly to split hairs when we're talking about a period of less than three weeks till the election itself.

So, I'm not going completely dark on this blog, but I'm not in a position to talk about anything very much that relates to my professional work at the Department. I'll still be posting from time to time, but I'll be steering clear of all anything even remotely juicy.

Little Innovation Book Finished

Over the Easter break, I finished uploading the whole of Little Innovation Book to the web. The whole is about 100 pages printed, so its an easy read that can be done in a day or so. I've also completed preparing the ePub version, which is available for download now if you have an ebook reader (like a Kindle or an iPad, or appropriate software), and there'll be properly published versions available from the site and Amazon within the week.

To those of you who who tipped, or bought individual chapters, or helped otherwise, your free downloads have already been sent to you. I'll continue to post updates here on the progress of the book from time to time.