December 2007

Scot Herrick over at CubeRules had a very interesting post today titled “Innovating Like Crazy; Executing Like Crap“. Great title and great thoughts in his post, including this one:

Innovation is essential to your work. Yet delivery of the innovation is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that you provide to your work.

As Scot says, Innovation is essential. In fact, its critical….but execution is as critical (and dare I say more critical) because without the ability to deliver your innovations to a market, the innovation has been nothing more than an exercise to see what cool stuff can be developed.

Need an example of Innovation needing execution?

Easy…one word: Xerox.

Many innovative ideas that have shaped our world today came out of Xerox PARC….but none of these ideas were turned into marketable products that made money for Xerox. Think about the following list of innovations…and think about how poorly Xerox executed the delivery of these products to market

• The Graphical User Interface (GUI)
• Mouse
• Laser Printing
• IPv6 (arguably a standard and not commercialized by anyone)
• pervasive computing
• and many more

The GUI was commercialized by Apple and has become the standard for interacting with computers…as has the mouse.

Xerox PARC was (are they still?) the research and development arm of Xerox but very little of the innovative ideas that were developed there became mainstream because of Xerox. They lacked the ability to excute on delivering these ideas to market.

NOTE: I’m sure that there are those readers that disagree with me about Xerox PARC and Xerox’ inability to execute to deliver marketable products….and you may be right. My knowledge of the situation is from reading many articles, books and speaking with people who were around at the time, but I’m not an expert in this field by any means.

The moral of this story is this: Before you innovate (or at least while you innovate), make sure you think about how to execute and deliver the new ideas you are cooking up.

Thanks for the idea for the post Scot.

[tags] Innovation, Execution, Delivery, Xerox PARC [/tags]

For background, see here, here, here and here.

The car is back in the shop….waiting to hear from the dealership on the prognosis.

FYI - I’m filing the Texas Lemon Law complaint form very soon.

[tags] Customer Service, Saturn Aura Problem, Saturn of Plano [/tags]

Diamond Consultants released the results of their Digital IQ Survey recently (download the full survey here) that provides some very interesting (and surprising?) insights into Business and IT Alignment.

Before we dive into the results, let’s set the stage with some basic info about the survey:

• 456 executives surveyed with about half the respondents being CIO, CTO or other senior IT executives.
• 90% of companies surveyed had annual revenues over $1billion.
• Broad range of industries - finance, manufacturing, health care, insurance, high tech, government, etc.

Interesting tidbits from the survey:

• 82% of respondents believe that IT is a strategic part of their business
• More than 80% of respondents believe that IT is creating significant competitive pressure in the services industry
• less than 10% of respondents say IT projects meet user expectations

Surprising tidbits from the survey:

• 33% of the respondents said that the CIO was significantly involved in strategic planning
• 19% “totally agree” that their strategic planning process is effective while 46% “somewhat agree”

Let’s look at one particular topic: IT’s role in creating strategic advantage.

More than 80% of survey respondents believe that IT is a strategic asset for their business and can create competitive advantage….but only 33% of the respondents said that the CIO and/or other senior IT executives were significantly involved.

Does that make any sense? Why would you believe that your information technology can create an advantage but not ask for the involvement of the the CIO and/or other senior IT execs’ involvement?

I think the reasoning is probably pretty simple…there’s been a lot of talk about IT & Business Alignment and many senior execs understand the importance of this alignment but don’t know understand how to execute to truly align business and IT.

The only way to truly align IT and Business is to do the following:

• Involve IT leadership and organization in the business planning process.
• Rethink IT projects. There really isn’t “IT projects” any longer….there are only business projects that have a strategic affect on the organization.
• Empower the IT organization. Stop holding the reigns tightly and let your technology people innovate.
• Engage the IT organization. Want to know a secret? Salary isn’t the only thing people want…they want to feel needed, they want to learn, they want to be engaged. Find ways to keep your IT human capital engaged.
• Reward the IT organization. Are you rewarding your IT personnel for the work that they do? In addition to salary, bonus and other rewards, are you giving your IT organization the credit it deserves?
• Grow the IT organization. You can’t create a strategic advantage with a skeleton IT crew augmented by contractors. You have to grow your IT organization so that you have full access to the entire library of knowledge needed to compete….I don’t think you can do that with more contractors than full-time staff.

These are just a few of my thoughts…I’d love to hear some feedback and/or your thoughts.

[tags] Strategy, Information Technology, IT, technology, alignment [/tags]

I’ve just completed my first semester of my doctoral program and I’m ready for a break.

I took 2 courses this semester worth 6 hours. The courses are:

• Introduction to Research (INFS 614) -  This course was a bear.  I did more research and writing in this course than I’ve done in the last 5 years I think.   I’m glad this course was required as it made me sit back and really think about research, research methodologies and Information Systems.
• Systems Analysis and Design using CASE Tools (INFS 720) - This course was your normal graduate level IS course but was very informative.  I’ve never taken an IS Systems Analysis course and did enjoy this one for the most part.

Time to take a few weeks off….Spring semester starts in exactly one month (Jan 16).  I’ll be taking two courses (6 hours) in the Spring: Project & Change Management (INFS 724) and Knowledge Management (INFS 834).  I’m really looking forward to the Knowledge Management course as it should cover a lot of really interesting material.   Look for another post in January once the semester starts.

[tags] Doctorate, Dakota State, D.Sc. [/tags]

Check out Scot Herrick’s Cube Rules blog, especially the new series that started with “Laid Of — A new journey begins.”

Scot and his wife were both laid off at Washington Mutual last week and Scot has started a series on the subject with some very interesting insights into the mindset of someone going through this journey. Instead of being angry (at least in a visible way) Scot and his wife are looking at this problem as a new challenge to overcome.

I don’t expect the journey to be a long one as I expect Scot and his wife to find jobs quickly but I’ll be following along closely and hope everyone else will too.

[tags] Scot Herrick, Cube Rules [/tags]

I finally got my new 30MB/15MB FIOS service installed (see here for more info)

Wow…here’s the result of my speed test:

[tags] Verizon FIOS, Broadband [/tags]

For background, see here, here and here.

I picked up my Saturn Aura today from Saturn of Plano…so far, so good.

I received a call today at ~3:30 telling me that they received the replacement PCM but they had been told by GM not to replace it and to give me my car back without fixing it because they hadn’t fully diagnosed it. Luckily, the Service Manager has a little bit more client focus and forced the issue and the dealership replaced the PCM (so they said…I did see the old PCM…or at least an old PCM).

I guess good ol’ GM doesn’t care that this problem is potentially life-threatening…what would happen if it had stalled and I lost power while driving down the highway?

My next step is to make sure that GM/Saturn Corporate know what a horrible experience this has been and to raise the visibility of this issue (3 trips to the shop with the 3rd trip being a day short of 2 weeks in length).

When I buy a car, I don’t expect to be treated any differently than anyone else…but I do expect the dealership/manufacturer to treat me like they actually cared about my business.  I also trust them to fix the problem…but GM/Saturn has lost that trust now.

[tags] Customer Service, Saturn Aura Problem, Saturn of Plano [/tags]

For background, see here and here.

Received a call Monday afternoon (December 10) and was told that the tool that the dealership was waiting on had arrived and they have narrowed the problem down to the PCM.

They ordered a new part for overnight delivery and would be installing it today (Tuesday).

I’ve been promised a call from the dealership when the part arrives and then later in the day when they have some news on the progress.

Looks like things are moving forward.

[tags] Customer Service, Saturn Aura Problem, Saturn of Plano [/tags]

Read an interesting article on GigaOm yesterday titled “Google’s Infrastructure is its Strategic Advantage” (go read it if you haven’t).

This post, and Google’s strategy, is a great example of using Resource Diversity and Immobility to build an advantage in your market. If you’ll recall from my previous posts (here, here and especially here), using the concept of diversity and immobility allows an organization to create a competitive advantage…and that’s exactly what Google has done with its infrastructure (and to some degree, with its people).

According to Om:

To better understand Google and its business model, one needs to break it down into three data inputs.

• Relevancy of results.
• Speed of search.
• Cost of executing a search query.

And later in his article, Om says:

In other words, the company has to make sure that the speed of its search is really, really fast. Any random search on Google these days takes between 0.12 to 0.06 seconds. Now that is really, really fast. Google does this by indexing the Internet quite well. The magic is in delivering the search results from this index at lightening speed, and that requires an infrastructure…

So…how did Google create their competitive advantage in the search space?

They created Resource diversity and Immobility by building their own infrastucture and are rumored to be buying unused fiber. According to Om:

With the exception of optical systems, Google has built or is building the gear. It has been rumored to be a big buyer of dark fiber to connect its data centers, which helps explain why the company spent nearly $3.8 billion over the past seven quarters on capital expenditures.

By building and owning their own infrastructure, they’ve created both resource diversity and resource immobility by creating a huge barrier to entry that will be almost impossible for other competitors to match.

In addition to using infrastructure to build immobility & diversity, Google has also used these concepts with their people. Google has had the ability to go out and hire the best and brightest to develop their infrastructure and software products.

Google has created an environment that makes it extremely difficult to compete…they’ve built an infrastructure that is almost impossible to replicate and they’ve hired the best and brightest.

This is Resource Immobility and Resource Diversity at its best.

[tags] Strategy, Business, IT, competitive advantage, technology, resource immobility, resource diversity [/tags]

Background info is here.

I *think* the shop has it narrowed down to one computer and they are now waiting for a tool to check connectors for that computer. This tool will be in the shop on Monday and I hope to hear something on Monday evening or Tuesday.

On a positive note…I feel like Saturn is actually listening to me now. I was contacted yesterday by Kyle Johnson, Director of Communications from Saturn and he has offered to help look into this issue. Coincidentally (and it my be exactly that) I received a call from the area manager handling my case about 15 minutes after the email from Kyle.

The area manager was quite nice and had much more information for me (e.g., he told me that they had narrowed it down to 1 computer) than the Saturn of Plano Service Tech was communicating to me.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I receive a phone call on Monday evening saying that they found the problem.

This is from a poster on the SaturnFans.com forum…if the computer isn’t the problem, this will be the next step that I ask Saturn to try:

…we had a few of these “nightmare” cars in the shop a few months back. After many, many, many hours of testing wires, finding everything ok, driving again to get the vehicle to act up, testing more wires, etc for free since Saturn wasn’t going to pay 10-15 hours to find the problem we found that the fuse block in the trunk on the passanger side had loose bolts where the fuse block bolts to the harness connectors. A month later another car came in with the same concern. We went directly for the fuse block bolts, and a different electrical problem was fixed..My guess is that a different connector at that same fuse block was loose. I think the first 5000 or so vehicles must have left the assembly line with a lower torque spec on those small bolts. We now check every aura’s fuse block bolts in the trunk for proper tightness as part of our inspection when they come off the truck from Tennessee. Besides the very first couple aura’s sold we haven’t had this problem since….Just a flaw for the first few (relatively speaking) off the assembly line. I would start there.

[tags] Customer Service, Saturn Aura Problem, Saturn of Plano [/tags]