Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

When Your IT Project Is Doomed to Fail

There is an old saying in golf that every golf bet is won or lost on the first tee.  For those of you who are non-golfers, non-bettors, or both, the first tee is where golfers' handicaps are discussed/negotiated and where they establish the number of strokes the better players will "give" the other players to even up the match. 

The specifics of golf handicapping are somewhat beyond me (kind of like quantum physics or Microsoft software licensing, in that "necessarily complex" category), but the overall gist of it lines up with a very simple formula for project success that I learned as part of PMP training:  "Success Equals Results Minus Expectations"

We were also taught as project managers that the time to negotiate the project's constraints is at the outset.  Once you agree to the project charter in the initiation phase and the project schedule in the planning phase, it gets a lot harder to negotiate or to complain about them later, even when legitimate reasons for doing so exist.

This week's Congressional hearings about why the enrollment portals for the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") reminded me of many of these things.  Seeing and hearing IT executives wish, retrospectively and very, very publicly, for more time to test their solution prior to rollout made me sad because I knew that their chances for success
were depressingly low right from the outset. 

When time is your primary project constraint, the only other constraints you can tweak are
quality and cost, and even adding resources/cost do not necessarily reduce time (in fact, they tend to increase it -- see also Brooks' Law from the classic:  "The Mythical Man-Month"). 

I do not envy the IT consultants who tried to build the ACA sites -- that was a tough job, and I doubt they'll realize much profit now (Congressional scrutiny, I would think,
would tend to have a dampening effect on profitability).  So, what can we learn from this? 

The lesson for me is that Project Managers get their first, best, chance, prior to the first tee, to walk (or run) away when we know we can't win.  Here are some great ways to assess your chances up front by looking for project "red flags"  (I love #3, personally): 

"11 Signs Your IT Project Is Doomed" 

Geek Reads v2010.1: “The New Know”

“I don’t know” and “we didn’t know” are becoming increasingly unacceptable answers every day, especially as “No one saw this coming” becomes less and less credible in the wake of the global financial crisis.  Culturally, expectations are rising of individuals and organizations such that ignorance about:
• Customers
• Risk
• Environmental impact
• Health impact
Of our businesses is less and less acceptable.

The latest book from the inimitable Thornton May, “The New Know:  Innovation Through Analytics,” makes a strong case for our position at a “hinge of history” relative to the use of analytics to combat that ignorance, the perils of failing to take advantage of them, and the significant competitive advantage accruing to those who do.

The book is one part wake-up call (e.g., not taking advantage of analytics is an error “similar in severity to choosing not to use fire”) and one part meta-analysis (how do we analyze and know things, what makes analysts tick, what do they eat for lunch, etc.).  A few of the most interesting of the many topics covered are:
• 10 fundamental dimensions of change under the “New Know”
• 14 industries being transformed by the power of analytics
• RAM (or “Relationship Asset Management”) for maximizing the value of analytics via strong, relevant relationships among “carbon-based information assets” (i.e., people).

Like Mr. May’s speaking engagements, this book will likely make you laugh out loud, marvel at the volume of ideas and quality of thought he generates, and (hopefully!) act differently as a result.  My takeaway is to allocate time more frequently to analyzing the results of my own and my team’s work (starting with KMA’s sales/marketing endeavors), and reallocating resources even more aggressively based on facts and analysis.

Additional resources of note on this topic include:
1. Tom Davenport’s books, including "Competing on Analytics"
2. The recent and fascinating Economist special section about the Data Deluge
3. The announcement of data visualization guru Edward Tufte's appointment to Obama’s economic recovery team (validation of the importance of tools to visualize and use big data sets)

Geek Reads 2009.2: Free

My reading this summer included Chris Anderson's book, "Free" (I got the Kindle edition, available for a limited time as a free download, of course).

Anderson's seminal work, "The Long Tail" helped explain to a generation how the distribution model of the Internet has fundamentally changed economics of many businesses by spreading fixed costs over previously unimaginably huge audiences/markets.  He continues in this vein in "Free" by tackling the "free economy" and what makes it tick.

In "Free," I learned about Anderson's six models of free:

• Freemium
• Ad-supported
• Cross-subsidized
• Zero marginal cost
• Labor exchange
• Gift Economy

and the important but often-overlooked distinction between "gratis" ("free as in beer") and "libre" ("free as in speech").

The lessons I took away from "Free" are twofold:

1. Buy side: When I am offered something for free, I am more guarded, inclined to want to understand why I'm getting the offer (what is the premium item they will have earned the right to sell me? do they want my contact information? am I expected to contribute content back to a community in return? can I "free ride" on this offering?)
2. Sell side:I am more cognizant that the best way to sell consulting services is to give a little bit away. This frequently means providing clients and prospects with something of value at no charge during what consulting guru David Maister calls the "courting" and "super-pleasing" processes.  I've always known intuitively that this was the right thing to do, but this book helped me sharpen my thinking about it, and consider it as part of the professional service firm's economic model.

Geek Reads, 2009.1: The World Viewed Through the Lens of Randomness

The Drunkard's Walk:  How Randomness Rules Our Lives

The coin toss at the start of Sunday's Super Bowl was won by the NFC for the 12th straight year.  The odds of that happening, depending on whom one asks, are approximately 1 in 2,048.  Astronomical odds?  Ask Leonard Mlodinow, professor at Caltech and author of this fine book about the phenomenon of randomness, and how people (mostly) misinterpret it. 

It's as much a book about decision-making as about math, citing many examples of people's failure to understand and account for the effects of randomness in their decision-making.  From the iPod needing to be re-programmed because the shuffle function was, in fact, *too* random, to how stock pickers' or CEOs performance is not necessarily attributable to skill, to why the better team might not always prevail in a seven-game World Series, we see again and again how humans are poorly equipped to understand, handle, and account for the effects of randomness.

Mlodinow skates the reader from Cicero to Bernoulli, Pascal and Fermat, through Marilyn vos Savant and yes, Monty Hall, with exposition on historical milestones and figures.  Concepts such as the Law of Large Numbers, Bayesian inference, margins of error, order and chaos, and sampling bias all are tackled with a storyteller's color and a scientist's rigor.

Reading The Drunkard's Walk makes me want to:

1. learn more about the lesser-known historical figures who made some monumental contributions to human knowledge (e.g., Gerolamo Cardano, Richard Price).  Their persistence in their work, even in the face of tragedy, failure, heartbreak, persecution, etc. is inspiring.
2. consider randomness more in every decision I make, and analyze why things happened in a little more depth.  (e.g., polls, streaks, luck, performance measurement, etc.)

Geek Reads v2008.5: Predictably Irrational

[Like two bloggers I really admire, I have chosen to take some of the summer off, needing a break from blogging to take some time away from work, etc.  Unlike them, I am asking for forgiveness rather than permission.  I'll work on more frequent posting going forward.]

While on vacation, I devoured about five books, the most notable being Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational," a fascinating look at how we make decisions, guided by invisible but measurable forces.  [sorry, no blog articles about Elmore Leonard beach reading]

Ariely, in addition to having a truly compelling personal story that I won't spoil here, details at great length the research he and colleagues have done into how we make decisions.  Some of the insights he provides into such subjects as:

• the allure, and the true cost, of free things
• how our perceptions of value can be influenced and "anchored" by pre-suggestion (with an interesting example of how Ariely valued his reading of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" to his students)
• placebo effects, and why more expensive drugs increase them
• people's over-valuation of, and over-attachment to, things they already have
• how arousal changes people's decision-making processes
• things that make us more honest and dishonest

will be useful in assessing my own decision processes, and those of my clients, colleagues, friends and family. Although many scientists consider the social sciences to be the "softest" or "least pure" of all disciplines, the empirical evidence that Ariely uses to prove or disprove his hypotheses really brings to life these themes.

Geek Reads 2008.4: The Last Lecture

I had the opportunity this weekend to read the book by Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. It's called, "The Last Lecture," and it centers around a last lecture he gave at CMU in September, 2007 after he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. You can watch it here.

This is no "Chicken Soup for the Soul"-style pap.  Pausch had an edge to him, and was extraordinarily smart and talented (and knew it!), but his lecture and book are deftly delivered.

Although I'm not big on the feel-good, self-help, how-to-live-your-life genre, I had heard about it from three separate people whom I respect, and that's usually sufficient motivation for me to pick up a new book. It's a quick but powerful read, a summary of lessons on living dispensed with the sense of urgency that only a dying man can impart. 

That said, it's more about living than dying.  Read, learn, enjoy.

Geek Reads 2008.3: The Big Switch

I was fortunate a few weeks ago to attend a breakfast meeting where the featured speaker was Nicholas Carr, he of the recent Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and the famous and controversial essay (and, later, book) "IT Doesn't Matter."

The topic of Mr. Carr's presentation was his new book:  "The Big Switch," which I received at the event, took home and devoured.  The quality of the writing affirmed Mr. Carr's place at the top left of my PageFlakes "A-list Blogs" page, the digital equivalent of "Page 1, above the fold" in the world of newspapers (remember newspapers? see pp 151-157 in the book).

Carr builds on many of themes first surfaced in "IT Doesn't Matter," such as the metaphor of electricity to describe the evolution of information technology from an in-house component of the business to an outsourced utility that organizations can obtain more efficiently from a utility-style "grid."  Carr's historical research recalls many of Doug Burgum's keynote speeches at Microsoft events -- he grabs an historical figure of great relevance to the story but little notoriety, then he weaves a great story around an inflection point that this person created. Everyone has heard of Thomas Edison, but who knew about Samuel Insull?

Similarly to Sun's Eric Schmidt ("The Network is the Computer") expression in the 1990s, Carr puts forth the idea of the "World Wide Computer" to describe how computing power, human intelligence, and programmability of applications on the Internet can be put to use under the utility model he envisions. 

Carr goes on to review some of the consequences of this phenomenon, including:

• Companies executing against this model today (e.g., Salesforce.com, WorkDay.com, Amazon Web Services, Flickr, 3Tera, etc.)
• Broad societal and economic effects of the rise of the  "World Wide Computer" (e.g., concentration of wealth and control, fragmentation, polarization, crowdsourcing)
• Security and risk related to the "World Wide Computer," (e.g., the death of privacy as we know it)
• changes in how we as humans think and process information -- a precursor to an idea explored in greater depth in the Atlantic article

The last paragraph of the book was possibly my favorite.  In it, Carr describes technological change as generational change.  Remember this, you who have young workers entering the workforce:

"The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins."

In speaking with knowledge workers and executives, I often remind them that they will soon have a workforce who has never known a world without tools like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.  "The Big Switch" details quite ably, in the language of economics, history, business and technology, what we should be prepared to do about it.

Geek Reads 2008.2: Everything is Miscellaneous

If you manage, store, or search for data in your job, read this book.  Twice.

In probably my favorite work-related book of the past two years, David Weinberger has written a classic of the Information Age in "Everything is Miscellaneous."  Different from many other books of this type, it feels not at all like a Wired magazine or Harvard Business Review article stretched by another 100 pages to make the author some money -- this book is at once dense and broad, bursting with information and context for information workers.  I feel as if I need to read it again to do it any sort of justice in blogging about it. 

In chronicling how humans have sought to make sense of the physical world, and how this can be translated to the digital world, Weinberger travels far and wide from UPC codes to Wittgenstein to Dewey to Flickr to Aristotle to del.icio.us to Darwin to Wikipedia to Britannica to McCallum's railroad organization chart to Amazon to Linnaeus to the semantic web.

In very general terms, here are some of the themes he explores:

• the death of rigid information taxonomies in the digital world because data can be in more than one place at one time
• the fallacy of a neutral point of view because in practice this merely means the consensus of the community at a particular point in time
• information is evolving away from being represented like atoms in physical space (first "order of order", like a bookstore) or even metadata used for splitting and lumping items into categories (second "order of order," like a card catalog), and into piles, tagged with data by everyone, effortlessly resorted/re-organized to fit the user and the context (third "order of order," like Flickr or Del.icio.us)
• implicit relationships between ideas are far more important and less limited than explicit ones in describing complex, meaningful phenomena.

As search capabilities and collaboration technologies mature, and as "web 2.0" has provided users with a read/write experience on the web, this third order of order has taken root.  The ramifications of this are incredibly broad, from the specifics of users not storing e-mail in folders (store in a pile, sort by author or search to quickly find the relevant messages) to how organizations architect their enterprise collaboration environments (finding the best way to leverage traditional navigation + metadata + rich search to fit user needs).

This has already been a hugely influential book to me, and I expect to continue to explore the themes herein for many years to come.  I encourage you to read it yourself and learn, and think about these themes as you consider your own, or your organization's information architecture.

Geek Reads 2008.1: "The World Without Us"

I got some books I had been very anxious to read for Christmas (thanks, Sis), and plowed through the  first over the holidays.  In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman answers the question:  "What if all humans were to disappear tomorrow?"  In a similar vein to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel," Weisman answers "big questions" about civilization -- except he looks forward, not back.

In "What if...?" mode, he details how the planet, wildlife, and our human artifices might survive, thrive, heal, or fade away in our absence.  More specifically, how would our world change if we were all to disappear at once?  Cities, farms, forests, oceans, and energy infrastructure are all examined.

The principal way these themes apply to me in a work context is not just to make me think and say "Why bother?  This will all be gone in a million years anyway," (although that is an unfortunate side effect, I suppose).  The most interesting piece was the reference to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a storage facility in New Mexico for US low- to mid-level radioactive waste.  By law, the US Department of Energy is required to warn people away from the site for 10,000 years. (more info on how they propose to do this, a fascinating process worthy of more reading, here)

This point made me consider whether the data that I create and manage (and help my customers to create a manage) is designed to outlast or outlive me or not, and more importantly, how much it matters.  As John Maynard Keynes once famously said, "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."

So, I'll think about more, for myself and on behalf of customers:

• what is the life expectancy of my data?
• who will use it, and how, after I've moved on?
• what regulatory requirements is the organization subject to?
• how would someone who has never met me or worked for this organization find this information?

For what it's worth, if anything I do in this lifetime lasts for 10,000 years (other than generating non-biodegradable waste), that would be cool.  :-)

Geek Reads, Summer 2007.4: The New Influencers

This serves as a fine counterpoint to the doom-and-gloom, "the world is going to hell in a bucket [because of new media]" point of view from Andrew Keen I posted on recently. As one of the founders of the very successful local technology marketing firm TechTarget, Paul Gillin could be forgiven for being overly zealous about new media and social networking technologies as marketing tools.

I recently saw Paul speak at a meeting of the Sales and Marketing roundtable of the Mass Technology Leadership Council, and found some of the ideas covered that day around adding communications channels with our customers via new technologies to be very worthwhile. At this meeting, Paul plugged his book, "The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media," which I recently read with interest.

While I enjoyed the freshness of the ideas and his obvious mastery of the subject matter, I found some gaps in Gillin's book around how social media companies like Fark, BoingBoing, Digg, and others are actually making money. Maybe it's my "upbringing" as a CPA, but when I can't get my head around how a business model works (i.e., generates profits) and I see investors lining up to throw money at them, I get concerned about a bubble (2001 says "hi.").

The real usefulness of Gillin's book to me is as a primer as I seek to understand the best way to direct marketing effort and investment into new social media, such as blogs, podcasts, search engines, tagging, etc. It catalogues tools of the trade and where they might be usefully applied, and I hope to adapt some of the tools and techniques to fit a professional services marketing model, which is far more about conversations than broadcasts.