BankerVision

HSBC (First Direct) does do mobile

Back in May last year, I complained about HSBC and its apparent lack of a mobile strategy. My complaints were purely selfish, because I wanted to be able to bank on my iPhone, and couldn’t find a way to do it.

As an HSBC customer, I was jealous that other banks were offering something I couldn’t use.

Well, last week, HSBC released their iPhone app to customers of its direct banking unit First Direct. It is an excellent first step.

The App itself has been getting pretty good reviews on the App Store. Oh, there are a few people who don’t see the point and say so (“The website does more, why bother?”), but generally, everyone seems really pleased. When I checked a minute ago, it had a 4.5 star rating.

I think HSBC have done something that should make them pleased, though. By creating their own application, instead of going the generic route with the same vendor as everyone else has done, HSBC have created a space for themselves to iterate and innovate.

If they’re serious about mobile, that’s going to be a pretty big advantage they have over everyone else.

First Direct say in their press release that:

“…plans for the next generation of mobile banking applications already afoot. In a post on "talking point", first direct's customer forum, the bank… plans to collect online feedback in order to understand which new features are most in demand”

Now, it may not quite be customer co-creation, but this is rather more than anyone else is doing, frankly. And, by owning their mobile technology, First Direct are in a position to actually do something when customers make a suggestion.

The interesting thing to watch unfold in the coming months will be whether the bank pushes its platform advantage in mobile. It will be quite obvious and transparent if they’re doing so: the app will update regularly in the AppStore and we’ll all see every time it does.

Good on them.

There’s another morsel in the press release too:

"We chose to go with the iPhone first because that's where our customers are. Over the last 12 months, the iPhone has grown to become the 6th largest source of visitors to our website and whilst Android is growing rapidly, it's nowhere near the iPhone just yet."

Why is that interesting?

The most recent data I can find on iPhone demographics suggests that owners are richer and older than those on other handsets. It is pretty well accepted there are more Androids selling than iPhones now. And in terms of overall handsets in use, my understanding is they’re neck and neck.

Conclusion?  First Direct must be doing more stuff right than just releasing a halfway decent mobile app if it is seeing its online demographic skewing in this interesting way.

Anyway I instantly tried the new First Direct app with my HSBC accounts, hoping it would work. It didn't.  I'm guessing  it will soon though: there were 303 reviews on App Store this morning: a sign that people want the thing and are passionate about it. I can't imagine the bank will ignore this early success for the rest of its customers.

 

Never waste a crisis

I'm in Malaysia presently speaking at a banking conference (civil service watchers - I've taken annual leave to do so).

A question I've just gotten is "what is necessary to make a bank go after radical innovation"? My answer was "you need to be staring death in the face".

This is true for most organizations, I think. Truly business radical, game changing innovations that affect core business almost never comes from large organisations who can sit happy on their current operations.

"But", I hear you ask, "what about Apple? What about Google. What about.. what about..?".

Notice that I said game-changing innovation that affect core business. Apple, with iPhone went after a new segment. Google, with Docs and so forth, are going after a new segment. They're not doing anything that disrupts where they got their money previously.

Banks, and to a lesser degree, the public sector are different. Bankers don't have any new segments they can go after. They go after incremental innovations that let them do more of the same, certainly, but you either are a banking customer or you're not. And for public sector, you are a customer, whether you want to be or not.

In both cases, there is no reason to change anything unless you're facing a crisis of titanic proportions and your back is against the wall. You have to innovate because there are no other options available. If you fail to pull something out of the bag, its game-over.

Banking had it's crisis, but conveniently got a bit of a boost from the public sector. This meant it dodged the "do or die" transformation it might otherwise have been faced with. Whether that was the right thing or not, I won't comment on. But let's face facts. There will likely be no radical transformation of the banking service offer, because profits are returning and "going back to basics" is a perfectly reasonable strategy in this scenario.

The same cannot be said of the public sector though, which has its back to the wall substantially. We will not be able to do the things we've done in the past the way we've done them, because the money to do so doesn't exist. Ergo, we are forced into new ways of doing things, whether the entrenched hierarchy likes it or not.

Here is the conclusion I draw from all this. If you want to be an innovator, and you want to make a real difference, you can only go to organizations in crisis. They are the ones that are forced into changes rather than choosing to adopt changes. No-one chooses to change without a good reason.

Where is the HSBC Mobile Offer?

The results of the election in the UK have not yet been called, which means I still can't talk about some of the things I've got backed up. In the meantime, Aden Davies (@aden_76) provokes me that I should "write a constructive post with a dedicated URL to get us off the ventilator". So let me use the election hiatus as an opportunity to comment on mobile banking, and more particularly, the lack of it at HSBC.

A week or so ago, I downloaded the NatWest iPhone banking app, apparently the only banking app in the UK on iPhone at present. Why this is so I have no idea - in other countries like Australia, you're almost not a bank unless you have an iPhone app. Anyway, I downloaded the app because I'd heard rumours that you could use it to access your HSBC accounts if you had a NatWest account. This is true, actually.

I am a long-standing HSBC customer, and I don't mind admitting I'm a bit of a fan of Premiere. I love that I can move money around the world free of charge with instant settlement, and I like it that you get all these special spaces in branches. I even like the internet banking service, which, whilst its nothing that special, is perfectly functional and does everything, almost, that I need.

I am, however, at a loss to understand the complete lack of a retail mobile banking application. Not just for iPhone, but at all. What is going on HSBC?

I have a feeling i know the answer though. I'll bet that someone, somewhere, has decided that mobile is strategic, and therefore a global, multi-market solution is needed. I'd guess the whole mobile thing is so strategic to everyone that a big-bang approach seems the only way to make a splash. Never mind that you can build iPhone apps for practically nothing these days, and never mind the fact that everyone else has a mobile offering, even if its not on iPhone. I mean, even the DWP has an app these days, and we're the government.

The NatWest app, by the way, is pretty lacking in functionality, and it is based on the generic service that banks in the UK get from Monetise. They're the same people that run the Link ATM network, and apparently the app uses that transaction network to get its data. In other words, there's no integration or effort required to get the Monetise app to work for a particular bank, and is the reason that I can use my HSBC accounts in the NatWest version.

Anyway, whilst a mobile app from HSBC would be nice, what is striking to me is that the bank hasn't recognised that there is a need to get early experience in this space if you want to take the lead later. Shoving a poor application out the door - like NatWest have done - is teaching them valuable lessons about how customers like to use Mobile.

Moreover, they're building a committed and loyal base of customers from the ground up. These are early adopters who have no choice but to open an account if they want to bank on iPhone. There are only so many early adopters available in a given market, and NatWest are getting all of them. Typically, somewhere between 15% and 18% of any audience will bother trying something new - but they're the ones that will tell everyone else about their experiences. Recruitment of these people is the key to building a base.

And lets not forget that, as the only bank with an iPhone app in the UK, Apple have been shoving the app in front of everyone through their TV commercials featuring "there's an App for that".

Of course, all this is pretty incidental to the real business of retail banking if all you're doing is offering transaction histories and balance checks, which is almost all the NatWest app does.

But consider this: if all the early adopters are somewhere else, and then you decide to drop a major game-changing new feature in, who will be around to talk about it? Who's going to tell their friend and friends of friends how their experience has changed?

The point of mobile banking, really, is what the next generation of apps is going to be able to do. Contactless payments, point-of-sale loans, banking related geo-games and so on and so forth. The potential for integrating banking services into the day to day of life is the game changing play that mobile enables.

Too bad if you haven't got any customers willing to try those features though. Hurry up HSBC, if you want a shot at it.

Update: Finextra have picked this up, and and Brett King add his thoughts here as well.

Update 2: I was wrong about HSBC and their lack of mobile. They do have an offering for supported handsets (not iPhone, though), powered by Monetise. The link is here. However, I have to say, at this point, that I couldn't find out how to navigate to that link from any of the products I have, and furthermore, mobile doesn't come up in their search when you ask for it. Despite all that, I think I stand by most of the comments in my post.

Banking innovation’s death predicted early

Chris Skinner, much respected banking commentator and author suggests that banks have dropped the word “innovation” from their mantra. He says the focus on being innovative in banks was “a focal point during the 2000 and now its all over”.

Supporting this point, he says that the number of times banks use the word in their annual reports has dropped and that all the Heads of Innovation jobs in banks have gone.

I have to beg to differ, because as one of those “gone” Heads of Innovation, I find myself talking more than ever to big innovation programmes in banks. Last time I looked, all the big innovation programmes at the top banks around the place were still very much going on strong.

Perhaps Chris isn’t talking to the right people. I’ve never seen so much interest in the work I’m doing (even though I’m now in the public sector) from banks, and the book I wrote on banking innovation seems to be doing quite a brisk trade.

The point of the argument that Chris makes, really, is he thinks that big high profile innovation teams are fading away, to be replaced with some kind of “innovation culture”, which works away behind the scenes to create outcomes which are invisible in overall tapestry of what banks are doing. He goes on to say that:

“the lesson learnt for most banks is that innovation is not a function or a label, but a culture so it is gratifying to see innovation has been remove from the mantra of the banks”

Personally, I think he’s missed the point. All the examples he quotes of an innovation culture working in banks are actually examples of innovative new things that have been adopted as part of business-as-usual in the past. That’s not a sign of an innovative culture, rather it shows that in the past these banks have created some new way of doing business which is now part of ongoing operations.

The question I would be asking is this: how did those successes get generated, and how did they get so well adopted that they are now part of business as usual? If the answer is the individual heroics of a few key people, then what you have is random innovation, not an innovation culture.

You see, innovation cultures don’t work unless you put the systems in place to support them. Everyone talks about companies which are supposed to be inherently innovative and fails to recognise that what makes them so is not the goodwill of their employees who engage in individual heroics. They are all companies which have systems, structures and active goals that support an innovation agenda. They are organisations that have decided that innovation itself is a business process.

Naturally, there is usually some kind of team that is responsible for running that business process.

I don’t disagree for a moment that the high profile, bet-the-bank innovation team has gone underground to a degree. That doesn’t mean these teams aren’t around any more and innovation magically happens by itself, regardless of any cultural imperative set by leadership.

I’d say, though, it is a sign that innovation teams are getting recognised as part of a business as usual process, so are naturally getting less visible as they become less different.

Five IT-Shop Sacred Cows

1. Myth: If you get more “efficient” at IT, you will get a more “efficient” organisation. Reality: The more cost you take out of IT, the worse it is for users and customers. Optimising your cost  base to the point, for example, where users have a PC that is orders of magnitude less capable than their delightful home consumer experience will just cause them to bring their own laptops to work. Then they’ll break all your security rules in order to use them. And what are you going to do about it? Fire them?

2. Myth: You must have IT security people who must approve everything you do in order to secure the organisation and manage your risk. Reality: Most Some IT security people don’t have much understanding of the new stuff they’re asked to adjudicate on. They just make it up as they go along. The worst ones can’t be bothered to keep up because it involves too much work, and anyway,  they always have the ability to just say “no”. This doesn’t manage your risk, all it does is slow you down.On the other hand, count your blessings if you have been lucky enough to get a security group that know how to show you what you can do to do new things safely and efficiently.

3. Myth: High quality on-time and on-budget delivery are the development objectives and this will make you an IT leader. Reality: Who cares about whether you’re an IT leader or not from a development perspective? Superb delivery is a waste of time if what you’re delivering is crap in the first place. Forgive me the arrogance, but my observation is that many traditionalists don’t get the way the new world is changing as a result of technology, so what makes you an IT leader is if you can help them understand that, actually, what they’re trying to build is rubbish.

4. Myth: Most IT projects fail or are late, so we have to improve our failure rate to be successful. Reality: Causing any change whatsoever to happen is a success, since everything is optimised around stopping change in an IT organisation. If improving the “success rate” means doing less new stuff, then you’ve got a big fail coming up when your organisation fails to adapt because IT stopped it doing so. All in the name of improvement.

5. Myth: Governance is the key to discipline and control in an IT organisation. Reality: Governance is like a virus. It grows as swiftly as possible to consume all available resources, and then declares success when there are no project failures. Usually, this will be because there are no projects, or at least, none that have much way of progressing. Why does this happen? Because Governance is a licence for people without much capability to drive change themselves to get in the way of those who can and declare that they’re “part of the journey”.  ‘Tis a rare Governance person who knows when not to govern.

What other sacred cows do you have in your IT-Shop?

The dark, middle and current ages of IT organisations

In the dark ages, your position in an IT organisation was determined by how many systems and people you controlled. This was a useful proxy for money, of course, but the real deal was how big an impact things had when they went wrong. If you were “mission critical”, boy were you safe in your position.

In the middle ages, your position in an IT organisation was determined by how many important relationships with the business you were in charge of. The more directors, and executive directors, and board members rank and file in IT had to get your permission to talk to, the more important you were. This was the age of IT relationship management. Only the specially anointed ones could be trusted to give the “right messages” to the business, and they made sure to reinforce their absolute control of the lines of communication.

In the current age, your position in an IT organisation is directly proportional to how much change you can cause to happen. And people who are seen to be able to “get things done” get asked by everyone around the place to do just that.

This, of course, is very unnerving to the middle ages hierarchy, whose modus operandi (if they wish to ensure they retain their positions) is to make sure no change happens unless they have personally agreed that its “the right thing for the business”. They have to have this say-so, of course, because otherwise, they don’t have any position at all.

And it is doubly unnerving for the dark ages hierarchy, who try to stop all change because they are there to “protect service” or “managing uptime”. For these people, retention of their positions is determined by how good they are at saying no to everything.

Here is an interesting diagnostic question: how happy are you with your prospects for progression in your IT organisation? If you feel stuck at the bottom of the heap, struggling always to get noticed, I bet you work in a dark ages IT hierarchy. Those are places where longevity of service is the only way to progress.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a quite good manager, who cares about you, thanks you for your efforts,  but despite everything can’t offer you very much progression you’re likely to be stuck in a middle ages IT hierarchy somewhere. They can’t offer you very much progression, by the way, because it would imply giving up control of some relationships, and that would imply reducing their own positions. Here, your progression is determined by how quickly those above you resign.

My suggestion if you work in either of these kinds of organisations is to take a gamble. Take a gamble on driving change no matter what your managers think. The worst thing that can happen is you’ll be fired. But, lets face it, if you’re wanting a big career in IT, you’ll be leaving anyway for an organisation that wants what you have... is there any downside here, really?

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.

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?

2010 Predictions

Last week, I wrote down some of my thoughts for 2009. There have been both lows and highs, but mostly highs. 2009 was a good year. I’m expecting that there’ll be some pretty big highs in 2010 as well. As is everyone’s want to do at this time, I thought I’d make some guesses what the year holds ahead.

No doubt, we’ll all look back at this next year and laugh. That’s the fun of it of course.

Anyway, onto my top predictions for the coming year.

1. Banks, governments and everyone will get really, really, serious about innovation

The last couple of years have seen a lot of talking about innovation, but not really all that much doing it. There are enough high profile innovation successes starting to emerge though (even though they may have happened by accident) that people can now begin to see the power of this stuff when applied properly.

I think this is going to result in a number of very big programmes starting this year. It will all be copycat, of course (“What? They’ve spent that on innovation? We have to double that…!”), and I’d expect a few very high profile programme cancellations in the next 18 months. But overall, the momentum is going to be huge in 2010.

And that is going to lead to some game changing plays from organisations we’d always thought were anything but innovative. I would not be surprised to see a bank doing something so unusual that people’s mouths drop. Like, for example, someone running a similar model to Caja Navarra’s here in the UK.

Or a government department reaching out to citizens and bringing them right inside service delivery.

Or a major corporate releasing a hit product that’s been 100% designed by customers, and which climbs the adoption curve so quickly that their large competitors go out of business.

All that will drive us to an “Innovation Frenzy” by the end of 2010, and if you are a corporate innovator, you can expect 2010 to be a very big year.

2. Citizens will start to deploy tools that do the things that big companies and governments used to do.

Governments and corporates are beginning to make their data available online so that citizens can do what they want with it. But I predict that if government doesn’t make its data available quickly enough, citizens will find ways to get it anyway. Screen scraping works, you know. Then they’ll build what they want, and waiting for government to provide stuff… well why?

3. Crowd-think emerges

This is the year someone senior in a large corporation is going to discover that if you put 10 Gen-Yers in a room and give them a project, the outcome is likely to better than if you put a single, experienced person with 10 years on it. The next generation of workers is quite different to what we’ve been used to, and their hyper-connection means their work operates in a parallel, and highly synergistic fashion.

Then I’d say we’ll begin to see strategic decisions being made by committees of these people. They’ll be small at first but the power of these groups of generation – Y thinkers will get more obvious. Success will breed more success.

It will be 2010 when the signs this is happening really become obvious.

In the next decade, by the way, these are the same people who will be in real management positions in their own right, and crowd-think will happen no matter what the current managers think, whether they like it or not.

And what will happen to the experienced people of today? They’ll still have a role of course, but they’ll be advisors to the decision makers rather than decision makers themselves.

Don’t believe me?

Check out your graduate programme, if you have one, and watch how those people are interacting now. Watch them work together on a project, and don’t fail to notice that no single leader emerges in overall control. Leadership moves around dynamically based on skills and competence.

Then project that forward a few years when we  starting giving them management jobs of real importance.

4. Those who don’t get “social” will never get a decent performance review again.

I’ve written about the difference between those who are connected (online) and those who aren’t, and suggested that there’s a visible performance gap between the two groups.

Well, I’m of the view that this is the year that the difference is going to make itself felt at performance review time. Oh, not everyone will likely recognise the fact that they’re being marked down because they aren’t connected enough, but it will begin to happen anyway.

Here’s why.

Those with the right connections have much superior, and much much more timely data at their fingertips. They consequently make robust decisions fast, and their pace of output goes up. Their work is not only produced more quickly, its quality rises.

One person in my team, for example, can turn around a report in a day or two, whereas everyone else quotes weeks – even a month sometimes – to do the same thing.

Now, when you’re the manager in that position, who do you give the top marks to?

This will all be bad news, of course to those who “don’t have time to read blogs”, or whatever social media tool is currently in fashion. It will also be bad news to those who think that you get to turn off the moment you leave the office.

Those days are gone.  There is a new level of performance emerging, and the bar is getting raised in 2010. People are going to have step up this year, or expect there will be personal consequences.

And not, as I said earlier, because anyone will do anything deliberate, like impose a performance improvement plan or something. It will be because all the top marks will go to those who are connected from now on.

Experience is important, but performance is the new yardstick in 2010

Welcome to 2010, everyone, and I hope you have a fantastic year.