BankerVision

My first days at the DWP

So, it is start of my second week at the Department of Work and Pensions. I know many of you must be wondering what the transition from bank to public sector has been like. Was it as awful as some people predicted last week when I said I was moving over?

The fact of the matter is that so far, I’ve found many of the stereotypes thrown at me since I made this decision have been wrong, wrong, wrong. OK, well perhaps I still have rose colour glasses on (it has only been 5 days!) but let me give you some examples.

For a starters, there’s a lot that just works. Such as all the little things that make all the difference when you’re starting a new job. For example, I had a new laptop, building access, logon accounts, and working information technology on day 1. I haven’t had that since I left VendorLand. At my previous bank, you’d be lucky if you got that in the first two weeks, and it would only happen if your manager was especially good at working the system.

And get this: I can submit expenses and they will be paid the next day. Imagine that! In every single previous employer I’ve ever had the minimum time to settlement was at least a week. And don’t forget, this was at banks which controlled every single aspect of the expenses value chain, including the settlement bank accounts.

There are lots of other details too. Recruitment people who believe their job is to help on-board you, not just get a contract signed so they can move onto the next post. Support staff that actually check you have what you need, and do it with a smile. Speaking of smiles, even the cafeteria people do it here. Those of you reading from Lloyds will laugh at that: you’ll all recall me dancing up to Starbucks in the cafeteria every morning trying to get the dour-faced barista-lady to do more than grunt.

As a rule, actually, the people aren’t anything like the commonly held stereotypes of the Civil Service. So many of them have switched over from private sector, and in my team, in fact, there is an ex-architect from Lloyds Banking Group. It seems financial services has been, in the last 5 years or so, a fertile ground for department recruitment (there are lots of ex-bankers), but I also have ex-consultants, FMCG, and a range of other sectors as well.

And no-one is here just for the money. Everyone believes they can make a difference. Imagine the power of that.

And one last thing: despite what people think there are people in the government who not only want to make a difference, they are willing to go out on a limb to do it. Yesterday, for example, I found out that Direct.Gov, which is actually hosted here at the DWP, is running an innovation experiment where they allow citizens to put their own applications on top of government data. Yes, that’s right: an API for the government.

Show me a bank with API. You can’t, because there isn’t one. I have to go to a third party like Wesabe, who basically have to suck data out of banks without their permission, to get one. I think it is early days for what Direct.Gov is doing, but you can see the potential. More particularly, the fact of this experiments existence tell you lots about the sorts of things it is possible to do in the public sector.

So yes, I am pleased with the decision so far. And yes, perhaps I am still in honey-moon period. But I can tell you this: culturally, this place is about as far away from the eat-your-children culture of banking as you can imagine. This is a place where it is possible to make a difference on a very big scale.

I can’t wait to test the boundaries of what is possible.

Goodbye and Hello

Today is my last day with Lloyds Banking Group. Its been an interesting couple of years, and in that time, we've built what I'd call a "pretty good" innovation group. Its done some really leading things, like Innovation Market which now has a couple of copies in other institutions around the world. And of course, it has provided a fertile ground for material for Future-proofing, which is out next week.

Whilst most things come to an end eventually, innovation at the bank is not one of them. There is a highly competent team in place, one more than able to carry on the work we've started. Of course, in the context of the major merger presently under way, the kinds of innovation one can do is necessarily different than if you had a clear playing field. The team, however, will add their contribution of uniqueness to that process as they have always done.

This is also my last day as a card carrying banker, as I've accepted a role with the UK's largest government department, the DWP. I'm not entirely leaving financial services, though, as the department is one of the biggest makers of payments in the country, as well as being accountable for pensions. In the department, I'll have innovation, strategy and architecture responsibilities.

I'll be continuing this blog, and retaining the Bankervision title. I'll continue to comment on banking related matters as well, but you can expect to hear much more on innovation and technology. It should be an interesting transition.

Anyway, so I start with the department on Monday. I'd anticipate at least a week of no blogging from me while I get the lay of the land sorted out and work out what I can and can't say here. When you start a new job, that's always something that can be tricky. Every organisation has different boundaries, but rest assured I'll be back shortly.

In the meantime, thank you everyone whose been reading for the last three years, and I hope you'll continue to read me for a few more years to come. I can promise some interesting discussions, and, now that I am no longer employed directly by a bank, much broader commentary on things I felt constrained to avoid before.

See you in a week, or perhaps a bit less.

Microsoft engineers for rudeness, Apple designs for polite

Last week, I reported that I'd lost my iPhone on a train. Because it is impossible to actually do any meaningful work without a phone, I found I was forced to resort to my old Windows Mobile device, and just assumed that I'd make do for a while.

Now this was a quite late-model, latest version of operating system, all singing, all dancing handset.

And it was appalling.

The problem, you see, is that you get so used to the intuitive design centricity of iPhone that using anything else reminds you of going back to the dark ages. By no means am I an Apple fan-boy, by the way. That iPhone was the only Apple thing I own.

But losing it, and being forced to go back to what I thought was the ultimate mobile device makes me see just how programmed my thinking had been about Microsoft. Once you get into a habit, you just don't see the flaws in what you're doing. For example, I really noticed the fact that at least 25% of calls just aren't even received on Windows Mobile. It fails to notice, apparently, that someone is ringing. Before, I accepted that. Now, I can't tolerate it under any circumstances.

So I've gone out and bought a new iPhone, one of those 3GS versions. It is an incremental improvement on the old version, but I don't care. I'm back.

Here is the experience: get new phone. Plug it into iTunes. iTunes notices it is new hardware and asks me if I want to restore everything to the way it was on the old phone. I say yes, and voila, the phone is exactly the way it was before I lost it.

Emboldened by this experience, I then decided that I'd really better just try out OS X, the Macintosh operating system as well. Those who've been reading here for a while know that I spent some time experimenting with various flavours of Linux, and waxed lyrical about the performance and stability of those systems. In the end, though I was forced back to Microsoft because I had to use some remote connection software I just couldn't get to work on Linux.

Anyway, so I loaded the Mac OX X on a netbook (yes, I made a Hackintosh), and oh-my-god. Intuitive design centricity again. It just feels like its been designed with the user in mind. It makes you want to load apps and exit them just to play with the little dock thing. I love the way the little icons bounce up and down to let you know that something needs attention, rather than the approach in Windows which is to steal the focus away and throw a dialogue box in my face. Of course there are no freezes, or crashes, or anything else like that either. Bliss.

Now these experiences have taught me something.

Apple designs things to be polite. Like asking me if it might help me bring my phone back to life.

Microsoft engineers things to be rude. Like phone that can't be bothered to answer calls, or dialogs that demand my attention right now.

I'm sitting here writing this on my work XP machine, and wishing I had my netbook instead. It has about 25% of the power, mind you, but runs at least twice as fast. Let me have snappy over laggy any day. XP reminds me of that surly waiter in a restaurant who strolls over the second before you get up and leave. Engineered rudeness again.

Is it possible that Microsoft don't get this? Or perhaps their engineers and designers are too arrogant to think it matters. Either way, the comparison between the experience on Apple compared to Microsoft is extremely unfavourable to the latter.

Oh, ok, I'll admit it. The whole iPhone loss thing has made me an Apple FanBoy. Not one of those tragic ones that queue up to hear a Steve speech or waits outside an Apple store to be the first to get the new iPhone. But I am eyeing off a new MacBook Air. I will keep it in my briefcase next to my klunkarama XP machine and use it for everything possible from now on.

PS: To those Microsofties who will no doubt rush to regale me with stories of the miracle of Windows 7, I make this commitment: I will try it, when you release it, and evaluate with my recently opened mind. I might do so first inside a virtual machine on my MacBook Air, but I will give it a good go at least.

This time I’ve lost it. No, really.

My iPhone. Lost. Really, this time, and I've blocked it with O2 already.

Actually, I left it on a train last night, after texting to say what time I'd be home. Obviously I dropped it after doing so, and it could be anywhere in the UK by now.

Such a bother, but really, just the excuse I was looking for to do an upgrade. Am off to look at 3GS later this morning.

AMPlify09

Today I want to write about something amazing, and that amazing thing was Amplify09, the corporate innovation festival organised by financial services company AMP in Australia last week.

Corporate innovation festival, I hear you ask? Well, yes indeed, and when I first heard about it, I was impressed, but couldn't for life of me see how anyone could possibly get a business case together to support such a thing.

Let me paint you a picture: get your Head of Innovation to go around the world and find the most interesting people she can. Doctors, political advisers, new media people, web psychologists, and, yes, even a banker. Then bring them all to Australia and let them talk about their work to the whole institution. See if it inspires new and creative thinking in your people.

But don't just stop at internal. Have an event in a pub where local ph.d students can pitch their research on a mic in two minutes of less, and give prizes to the best as voted by the crowd. And then have your CIO decide that everyone deserves a prize and give each struggling student $1000 to roaring applause.

And since you're not just doing internal, how about you broadcast the whole event, including all these expensive internal guest speakers, so that the world can share the inspiration. Do this even though traditional thinking would suggest that allowing just anyone, including competitors, to participate, would reduce any potential competitive advantage you might generate from the investment.

And just as icing on the cake, bring all your top customers and investor in to meet all these interesting people. Don't just stop at confronting traditional thinking in your staff, make sure your most valuable customers get their thinking challenged as well.

Finally, finish it all off with a staff expo where everyone gets to show how off their work in new and creative ways. Have, for example, a mock cave complete with cavemen to explain how your legacy systems have evolved to their present state.

You can understand, being somewhat a traditionalist myself, that when I looked at all this, I couldn't understand the business case. That's because the results aren't obvious when you just look at the numbers. I'm very busy running an innovation function that tries to get all these nice predictable returns from investments, so doing a festival hardly seems a great use of money.

But then I realised this: Amplify09 is the most magnificent ideation campaign I've ever seen. It makes the ones my team and I run internally at the bank look ridiculous in comparison, and we know how to turn our little attempts into money predictably.

Can you just imagine how much differentiation AMP will have as it actualises all that out-of-band thinking it generated from this event?

But the more important point is this one: quite obviously, AMP is an institution that's realised that the real competitive advantage it has is the people who choose to work there. Who cares about technology and products and processes, when you have the ability to invent uniqueness whenever you want?

Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is very busy with dark ages thinking about the nature of competitive advantage. They're all still doing trade secrets and patents, and trying to close down the ability of their staff to collaborate in, and outside, their institutions.

Want to bet which institution I think will really differentiate in the long term?

The death of experience

As you know, I spent last week at Amplfy09, an innovation festival hosted by AMP of Australia. At one of the events, I had the chance to sit with some financial planners and their clients. The question I posed was this:

Which do you think has more brain power: 25 twenty-three olds (i.e., brand new graduates) with a year's experience each, of one 65 year old with 25 years of experience?

The obvious answer, of course, is that the crowd of 23 year olds has more brainpower, but the real question is whether the value of experience outweighs the obvious advantage in mental watts of the group.

My thinking is it does not, and here is why.

Experience is a result of the formation of mental models about the way things work. Essentially, one observes that certain actions produce certain effects, and over time one learns to generalise so that even actions which are only marginally related to those previously observed can result in reasonable predictions of outcomes. Because the mind has limited abilities to accept information and process it, developing experience is something that takes a large number of years.

This is why you generally reserve very accountable positions in organisations for those who have lots of experience.

But try this experiment. Get a group of new graduates together, and confront them with a crisis. You will be amazed when you watch what happens: instead of some alpha-male/female attempting to take control of the situation, the group optimises itself, using rapid fire burst of communication, to solve the problem synergistically. It looks like chaos, and you wonder whether or not anything will ever come of it, but invariably very good outcomes do. And the order that emerges from all this chaos tends to be a highly optimised resolution of the problem at hand.

I know this, because I've had lots of time to study our new workforce at the bank, and they do things in quite different ways to those that my peers and I do things. We try to take control, to lead. They don't bother with any of that, and self organise into a non-structure that produces results, which are often unexpected.

Coming back to my original question, then, the value of experience as a differentiator in this case is very much reduced. Because you have 25 minds processing things in parallel, the amount of information that can be involved in a mental model is incomparably greater than that for a 65 year old with experience. 25 minds working together can accept all the evidence a 65 year old accumulates over their career in hours or days, and Instead of building models over time, they do it in real-time. The result will tend to approximate the best available outcome given a much broader analysis of data.

Here's another experiment you can try if you don't believe me: talk with a group of twenty-somethings about a project they've been working on, and ask them for detail of things they didn't work on personally. They'll have no clue at all what their peers are doing, and will refer you onwards. They don't care what their peers in the crowd are doing, because they have self-optimised their handoffs and interactions so they don't have to care.

That's quite different to the way that I, for example, would approach something. I need to know that the whole outcome is under control. I need to know the detail is in hand. And I must certainly feel able to explain the whole project to anyone who asks me. I am accountable; therefore, I must know what is going on.

In other words, I am unable to harness the power of multiple minds in any way which makes the whole greater than the parts.

Now, before I leave this topic, I want to make one last point, and it is this: the communications and collaborations technologies in the hands of our new workforce already let them collaborate at lightning speed. But these are not technologies that one expects in any way to slow down their advance. The power of crowds of young people to do things previously reserved for only older, more experienced people will continue to grow, probably in an exponential fashion.

Consequently, I predict the death of experience as the defining decision factor in who gets what job in our workforce within the next 10-15 years. That's the timeframe, by the way, that significant numbers of these collaborating crowds of young people will start to win their first senior jobs away from the old guard non-collaborators who presently rule the roost.

I'll close this post with another discussion I had at Amplify last week, and it was with a senior executive I'd made these points to. He wanted to know, if the end of experience was nigh, what would happen to all the older workers out there? Now, I don't have a convenient answer to that, because I don't know. But what I have observed so far is that collaborating groups in this age band tend to make collectively moral decisions which include the social best interests of most players.

The probable result? Our experienced workforce will get taken care of, whilst at the same time, they are pushed to the edges of major decision making. They will be reference encyclopaedias that can be called on for historical facts quickly and easily, but won't be core to the actual process of creating substantial change.

Where is James?

I wanted to write a quick note to let you know that I'm presently engaged in reviewing the typeset proofs for Futureproofing, which arrived last week. You have to go through every single page, and use all these funny little coded marks to tell the publisher what changes you want made. It is all very tedious and very time consuming, especially as I have just found a significant error I made a few months ago in the manuscript.

That means I have to write out all these pages of coded squiggles, using a crib-sheet the publisher conveniently supplied. The poor crib-sheet has been referred to so much now that it's basically just two pages of crumpled stained paper, valiantly holding on to its life by a dog-eared staple.

Anyway, I'm doing the review in my normal blog posting time, so forgive the momentary break in transmission here. I'll complete the task on the plane to Australia on Sunday, and will be resuming an enhanced posting schedule from down-under

0.5% of your customer base will use twitter

Finally, someone has shown up with evidence that Twitter probably doesn't stack up for banks. Ron Shevlin, long absent from the blogosphere, describes the results of a quantitative survey his company has done on Twitter usage in credit unions. There's so real surprise- hardly anyone is interested in doing their banking via this new stunt.

Thank you Ron, for coming back to the blogosphere, however briefly, to give us this insight.

PS: Note to the Twitterati – yes, I am on Twitter (@bankervision), so clearly I get Twitter. Just thought I'd head off that potential comment before anyone utters it again.

Travel plans

In case you're interested, I'll be in Australia from the 23^rd through 26^th of June. Mainly in Sydney. Most of the time, I'll be attending Amplify, but am free for other meetings as well if anyone is interested.

Let me know by email.

Lost my iPhone

No doubt, my friends at Microsoft will be ever so delighted to hear that I have misplaced my iPhone and am forced back to Windows Mobile temporarily. This probably happened when I was out with them last night, so no doubt it is a conspiracy.

Lorraine, my ever indispensible assistant, is calling everyone madly to try and find it, however. Since her investigatory powers rival those of the legendary Sherlock, I am certain the iPhone will resurface.

But in the meantime, I am experiencing an 80s style level of disconnection. No mail, and certainly no calls, when on the move.

Not that that's a bad thing, but takes some getting used to.

Update: The phone has been found. The colleague I was with in the cab last night found it after I got out and has returned it to me this morning.