Tag Archives: strategy

Corner cases kill innovation

http://tinyurl.com/cnv78z

For weeks after reading this post I kept being reminded of it.  It covers how difficult the balance is between planning for long-term goals at the expense of short-term success…. example – we plan to go worldwide so we should have a multi-language solution. 

In my opinion, we see this all the time in enterprise efforts.  Some call it overengineering but I prefer to think of it as having lost perspective to what is really valuable.  We seem to get carried away with more and more rich features that are only used by a very small subset of users (assuming they have the patience to find out which of the 100 features they will use).

Suck less

http://bit.ly/2JwUaP

Really fascinated by this post as it seems to suggest the thing that drives us to embrace change is “annoyance debt” whereby the user base just gets sick and tired of being annoyed with not being able to do little but frequently performed activities.  We don’t want another feature, we just want the features you have to work 100%.  The premise is if each release you tend to some of this “annoyance debt” then your users will still put up with some annoying things because at least you are iteratively improving… sucking less each release.

I think this is a bigger problem than many realize.  Although there are cases where I didn’t know I wanted a feature until it became available, more often than not I only discover those unscratched itches when my annoyance with a certain application has grown to such a degree that I am open to exploring alternatives.

 

Practical uses for web 2.0 – your annual review

We’ve all heard the stories about web 2.0 and social computing and the difficulties some have in understanding its value inside the enterprise.  Seems like many people are confused or uncertain about why social web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise even exist.  They struggle to know where to start and how to apply it to the work they do.

Well, we’re all on the hook to do our annual reviews.  And that assessment can have some important impacts on both our personal and professional lives.  Perhaps introducing how social computing can help us all tackle this annual review challenge can help to unlock the value for some folks.

  • Blogs – Lots of folks (including managers) have tips on preparing and documenting your annual achievements.
  • Social bookmarks – Find pages that others found valuable by searching bookmarks tagged as “annual review”
  • File sharing – Look for presentations and documents on sites like slideshare.net to help you understand and prepare for the process
  • Discussion forums & microblogs – Practical real-time discussions about different topics…. A whole community who can help

Once you’ve used Web 2.0 tools to help with a personal / business effort, think how you could use it in other ways.

  • Planning your career
  • Doing research for a new project
  • Learning about a new product
  • Getting help on a challenge you face
  • Learning more about the folks you work with
  • Finding a SME to help you
  • Etc.

There’s an old saying…..  give a man a fish and he eats for a day… teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.   Good luck fishing!

 

Is Moore’s Chasm theory telling intraprenaurs something? Are we listening?

Media_httpuploadwikimediaorgwikipediaen445diffusionofinnovationpng_ohvlrzrmktojedh

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is written with a specific focus of marketing high tech products to mainstream consumers. It cautions how many high tech new ventures fail in reaching mainstream adoption primarily because those companies don’t evolve their marketing strategies to cater to the tastes and preferences of a the very pragmatic early majority audience whose motivations and risk tolerance differ significantly from their existing visionary/early adopter clients.

I believe there is some wisdom in Moore’s pages for internal innovation teams as well. Complementing Andrew Chen’s recent blog, it seems we largely lack a consistent process or approach with respect to stimulating demand with more pragmatic and conservative user communities inside the firewall. Some firms have great internal programs for gaining early adopters and refining some of their technical innovations. But what happens we the pilot ends? Where is the graduate program that guides those early successes into more mainstream audiences?

Don’t get me wrong… being successful with innovator and early adopter types accounts for nearly 16% of the user population. In a firm with 300,000+ employees, 16% represents nearly 50,000 users. Reaching 50,000 internal users is remarkable and should be celebrated as an incredible success in and of itself.

BUT if we can break through to the early majority types, that is where the significant economies of scale and ROI really kick in. By gaining traction in the early majority, the usage would grow from 50k to 150k users. That is 3 times the value at nearly the same cost to support just 50,000 users.

Sure there are some internal innovations that have made it to the “big show” primarily through viral growth inside the firewall. But there are many other promising capabilities that seem to plateau and don’t quite make it to the more mainstream internal user. I believe we can overcome this adoption challenge through marketing innovation rather than technical innovation.

Goverance – Good news & bad news

I recently heard a very telling story about Lou Gerstner, the executive largely credited with turning IBM around in the mid-1990s. When he joined IBM he commissioned a benchmarking study on payroll systems used by large enterprises. When the group presented their findings, they told Lou they had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the firm had the best payroll system they had ever come across. The bad news was that the firm also had the 4th, 8th, 23rd and 28th payroll systems. The message was clear and Lou took aggressive action.

My experience tells me this overlap and redundency is a frequent and widespread occurance in large firms where there are substantial business units that either had the autonomy to build infrastructure to support their activities or they were acquired with little integration with the “mother ship” of the acquirer. I’ve seen this silo-driven culture saturate many critical enterprise efforts ranging from simple web site management to corporate strategic planning. Why is this so prevalent and what is being done to prevent making the same mistakes again and again?

Seems to me this is clearly a question of governance (or lack of governance) and the expense of poor/weak governance grows steeper with each new application and business unit that gets created rather than brought into the fold. There don’t seem to be many hard-liners who are willing to say “this is when the madness stops” followed by swift and meaningful action that includes going after legacy efforts.

I guess I just wish there were more big game hunters in corporate America. There’s plenty of productivity and cost savings to be had if you can fell a few elephants. I’ve often seen many who are willing to pounce on fledgling efforts to make them join the flock but few want to try going after the bigger legacy items. The hard and unglamorous decisions to effectively govern internal processes and systems (that aren’t necessarily broken) seem to be inevitably delayed until the firm is in dire trouble. Why wait until its nearly too late?

Content governance in a web 2.0 world?

People are interested in acquiring knowledge and insight. I assert the line of ???official content??? vs. ???unofficial information??? is being erased in today’s online world where more and more relevant and high-quality information is found in little nooks and crannies both inside and outside the enterprise. If that is true, what are the ramifications for enterprise content governance?

I’m honestly torn. Certainly there is a need to organize and put forward the “official” corporate versions of content. However, we see more specialized topics (“long tail”) seeping into our everyday online activities and user expectations continue to evolve towards requiring more granularly focused content. As a result, the effort of traditional content management in the enterprise seems very rigid, slow and expensive. Further, traditional content management only covers a small percentage of knowledge available about a particular topic.

As they say, the devil is in the details. Consider all the “unofficial” but very valuable specialized information details exchanged every second through Web 2.0 and traditional communication mediums. Whether you are seeking a romantic restaurant for Valentines Day, tax planning strategies, or IBM???s latest SOA offerings, you leverage Web 2.0 to uncover specialize knowledge and insight. Blogs, wikis, email, instant messaging, forums, user ratings, mashups??? they are all adding more fuel to the fire.

Certainly social tagging has a place in addressing some of this evolution but I’m struggling with how much it addresses and whether it replaces or supplements traditional content management and governance. This leads to questions about where to spend resources with respect to traditional content management, effective marketing strategies for surfacing “official” content, user navigation, proactively providing tools for sellers to gain knowledge/insight, etc.

Alas, I have more questions than answers.