Prior to the ’68 Olympic games, most high jumpers used ‘the straddle’, the ‘western roll‘ or some other style of high jump approach. Heck…some people just stood there by the high jump bar and tried to jump over the bar.

When Fosbury began competing in the High Jump, he realized the existing jumping styles weren’t suited to him so he began to experiment.  And experiment he did…he came up with a new approach to the high jump.  That new approach allowed him to win Olympic gold.  This new approach also turned out to be the dominant high jump style to be used throughout the next 40+ years.

Why all this talk of the Fosbury Flop and the high jump?

Well…for one…I like to say ‘fosbury flop’. Repeat with me. Fosbury Flop.  Fosbury Flop. Fosbury Flop.  It’s a fun to say, right?

On the serious side, the story of the Fosbury Flop provides us with a nice little tale for those of us in IT.  Why?

Well…IT has been doing the sane things the same way for a long time.  During my career, I’ve constantly heard people talk about changing IT, making IT more efficient, making IT more like ‘the business’, make IT more innovative, etc etc etc.

Have we made any progress in IT? Sure we have…there are some IT groups that can be held up as shining examples of the ‘new’ IT…look at Amazon, Google and others.  The Amazon technology infrastructure is more than just an investment to be managed by IT Operations…its a revenue generating juggernaut for Amazon with some people estimate the Amazon cloud services being a $10 billion business in five years.  Now…you probably won’t turn your IT infrastructure into a billion dollar business, but what if you can add 1% to revenue for your business just from existing IT infrastructure?

So…its time for most of us in IT to come up with our own ‘fosbury flop’.

Its time for us to stop doing things the old way. Stop doing the ‘western roll’ or the ‘straddle’.  Stop standing there looking at the bar.

Start looking for an approach that lets your IT group perform better.  Start looking for ways to improve your processes and your capabilities. Start looking for ways to help the business.

Start working on your Fosbury Flop today…who knows…maybe it’ll be the next big thing for you, your company and IT in general.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

The basic premise of the book is that most change efforts fail. Change efforts don’t fail just because the change wasn’t the ‘right’ change.  They don’t fail because the change management principles weren’t followed correctly or that leadership wasn’t driving change.

Change efforts fail…and they succeed.  No amount of academic thought, leadership or management principles will create successful change 100% of the time.

That said….there are a few things that can be done to help any change effort get started down the right path.

In their book, the Heath’s provide a fairly simple framework for change.  That framework is:

Direct the rider – What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

Motivate the elephant -  What looks like laziness is often exhaustion

Shape the path – What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

Now…let me say this right up front…I hate the names given to these three ‘steps’ in the change framework.  Hate them.  Without understanding the context of their use, they make no sense at all.  Much like Jim Collins ‘get the right people on the bus’ analogy….what bus or we getting on?

Again…without context, this framework make no sense.

In essence…the framework is attempting to highlight that every person has two sides: a logical side (the rider) and an emotional side (the elephant)…without having a change plan in place that addresses both, that change might not succeed.

Once you read the book…it makes more sense.

Why Change?

I’m not a change management expert but I have worked on many projects that were driving major change within organizations.

I’m thinking (and writing) about change today because its something that many organizations and people are looking for today.

Organizations are looking for ways to cut costs, improve productivity, reach more customers, increase revenue, etc etc.

People are looking for changes of their own. Many are looking for a way to be happier.  Many are looking for a job.  Many are struggling to keeping their home…and many have lost their homes.  Heck..there are some folks in this world looking for change that will allow them to live a life free from violence and war.

Change is real…and required; especially for IT

Change has come before…and it will come again.

You’ll find it in your personal life and you’ll find it in your professional life.

If you’re like me and have come up in the world of IT and Technology, you’ve seen your share of change.  You’ll continue to see change too…the future of IT isn’t what we thought it would be.

Five years from now, will IT be the main technology driver / owner it once was…or will IT be more like the ‘facilities’ group within most organizations like Nicholas Carr has argued in Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (amazon affiliate link).

Will IT matter in the future? I think so…there will always be a need for strong technical people within organizations…but will the IT group remain the central technology authority and technology management arm of organizations? Not sure about that.  Should it remain that way? Probably not for most organizations.

Like I said…change is real and change is required. And its coming.

Whether you are directing the rider, motivating the elephant, riding the elephant or watching that elephant do circus tricks…change within IT is coming.  The Heath’s book can help you understand how to manage and prepare for that change…or you can pick up one of the many hundreds of books on the subject…but don’t forget to do something once you’ve read the books.

For the CIO’s, IT Managers and IT professionals out there – what are you doing to prepare for the coming change?  Are you driving that change or waiting for it to drive you?

While the open source world has been a viable area for quite some time, there seems to be a lot of talk these days of open-sourcing many things. Google has opened up Android, the Department of Homeland Security has just announced an open source intrusion detection engine, and more organizations are embracing open source platforms while also complaining about open source software overload.

Welcome to the open source world…whether you want to be a part of it or not….open source is here to stay.

Open Source

Take a second to jump over and read the definition of Open Source as defined by the Open Source Initiative.     Lots of interesting stuff there: Access to source code. Redistribution rights. Technology-neutrality.  Integrity of original code.  Good stuff….if you can understand how to take advantage of it within the enterprise.

Open source has its roots in the ‘free software’ movement but the open source world of today is a far cry from that of the free software movement in the past.  No longer is the main argument for free software….its moved into a more pragmatic argument of making software development a more open environment.

The open source world is an amazing one…and its an environment that many CIO’s and IT departments have tried to stay away from. I think its time to change that.

Open Source & The Enterprise

In the past, many people have argued against Open Source in the enterprise.  Most of the arguments against the open source movement have been based around security concerns, support concerns and/or intellectual property issues.

While some of these concerns are valid, I think many organizations, CIO’s and IT departments have a pre-defined prejudice against the open source world. They see this world as nothing but a bunch of hackers giving things away for free.

Far from the truth….but even if it were the truth…what’s wrong with it?  If I were working within an organization that had resource constraints (budget, people, etc), I’d have to look for ways to be more effective with the resources I do have.

Take a second to step back and rethink the open source world. Think about the people. Think about the willingness to give. Think about the community that exists out there.  Think about the hundreds of people that are willing to give their time to develop a piece of functionality that could be beneficial to you.

Look at WordPress (also WordPress.com) as an example.  Its one of the largest blogging / content platforms in the world with over 25 million people using the software to power their blogs. Its also an open source project with hundreds of volunteers contributing to the code base to extend features and functionality. The WordPress platform is used by individuals (it powers this blog) and Fortune 500 companies to run their blogs and content platforms….its even used by the Boy Scouts of America‘s  to run the website for Boys’ Life magazine.

If you were looking for a content management platform and couldn’t spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars buying and implementing one, WordPress could be an ideal choice. So could other platforms like Drupal or Joomla among many others.

With these open source platforms, you’ve got thousands of people willing to give their time and effort to build more functionality (in the form of plugins and themes), most of which wouldn’t cost you a dime.  If you did want to add some specialized functionality to your platform, there are thousands (or more) WordPress developers out there who can do some amazing things for very little money (think thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands for closed-source platforms).

But…what if you’ve already got money sunk into another system?  What if you already have a fully built IT architecture based on Microsoft platforms….open source isn’t an option for you….or is it?

Open source is always an option….you’ve just got to change how you think about the open source approach.

Open Source, The Enterprise and The Community

Let’s say you are a .NET shop.  Your entire IT architecture is built with Microsoft systems.  You run windows as your web server, SQL Server for your database platforms, Sharepoint for collaboration and content management and you have zero interest in replacing any of these platforms.

When I talk about open source….you probably shrug your shoulders and say “not for us…we’re a .NET shop”.  Well…you’d be wrong. Look at Umbraco for example….its a .NET open source CMS platform.  Brilliant!

Open source isn’t implementing the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack…its an approach to your business.

You can still be a .NET shop and embrace the open source community.

So…now you argue that open source isn’t secure.   Bollocks I say! (I’ve been waiting 4 years to use that on my blog).

Open source can be as secure as you want it to be.   You define the entry- and exit-paths for open source software and data flow.  Perhaps you setup an API that allows non-sensitive data to flow in or out.  Perhaps you setup certain non-critical functions to allow open source software to be implemented.

There are lots of ways to argue against the “open source security” argument.  The biggest argument is that security is as security does….you make your systems secure today with closed-source software…the same can be done with open source software too.

Open source platforms & software can bring a lot of value to an organization…you’ve just go to be willing to open your mind to open source. An open source approach & mindset can help in many ways.  It can save you money…but it can also allow you to reach out to the community (either your internal community or an external community) for help.

The open source community could be a lifeline for non-profits and community groups.  Imagine what an organization like the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America or The United Way could do if they embraced the open source movement and then embraced their community for help?

What about a for-profit company?  Can you still ‘embrace your community”?  Maybe…maybe not.  You’ll have to figure out if you have a community first…but that shouldn’t stop you from embracing the open source community as a whole.

There are a lot of smart folks out there just itching to solve a new challenge…reach out and find them…you’d be surprised just how much you can do when you open not only your IT platforms but also your mind.

The open source approach is much more than a philosophical approach to software / hardware /IT….its an approach that allows you to embrace your community to help you move forward.  You’ve already started embracing the community on the marketing side of the house to help ‘spread the word’….why not use that new-found good will and ask for help on the technical side of the house?

Join me next week for more on how non-profits can embrace their community (more specifically how one non-profit has not embraced theirs).

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• IT’s Three Key Organizational Transformations by Andrew McAfee on Harvard Business Review’s Blog

  Quote: I see companies in all industries using computers to accomplish three broad and deep transformations: they’re becoming more scientific, more orchestrated, and more self-organizing. None of these is complete yet, and I doubt that they ever will be. This is because innovation keeps opening up new opportunities to go further with orchestration, self organization, and science, and companies keep taking advantage of these opportunities.

• Technology goes public changing IT value by Mark McDonald on Gartner Blog Network

  Quote: Technology has gone public. Changes in the technology stack over the last forty years have changed every aspect of IT, including IT’s value.  The figure below provides a summary of the structures within the technology stack.  The model is a little simplistic, but it does illustrate some of the deep structural changes going on in technology.

• But you’re not saying anything by Seth Godin on Seth’s Blog

  Quote: Most people work hard to find artful ways to say very little. Instead of polishing that turd, why not work harder to think of something remarkable or important to say in the first place?

• Innovation is playing offense, not defense by Jeffrey Phillips on Innovate on Purpose

  Quote: Innovation is offensive in nature.  It assumes there are new markets to address, new customers to reach, new problems to solve.  Innovation is proactive – it forces the firm that embraces innovation to change and it forces the firms that are impacted to change as well.  Given the fact that innovation requires change, both internally and externally, you can understand why some firms would prefer to play defense rather than offense

• Listening To What Isn’t Said by Chris Bailey on Thinking Big Thoughts on Business, Work, and Life

  Quote: But instead, how many times do businesses listen for what they want to hear from their customers? Or maybe get defensive about what is said? Or take what is said at full face value and miss out on so much of the subtext and subtle (but far more powerful) meanings behind the customer’s experience? If you’re only paying attention to what sits at the surface, your business is missing important data that could mean the success or failure of your product, service, or full brand proposition.

• How to Discover Your Core Values and Why it Matters by Donald Miller on Donald Miller’s Blog

  Quote: What was most interesting, though, is that the stories I tell out of my core values are going to be better because they are taylor made for me. If I work on books and projects that set people free from manipulation and lies, from bullies, my projects will be fueled by who I am and my story will be authentic. And the opposite is also true. If I work on projects that are not out of my core values, the work is sluggish and hard and feels like, well, work.

• Innovation success is based on enthusiasm by Jeffrey Phillips on Innovate on Purpose

  Quote from the article: What sustains innovation over time is the ability to fail occasionally, which is an ironclad certainty, without a loss of enthusiasm for the concept of innovation

• The future of marketing in a technology world by Scott Brinker on Chief Marketing Technologist

  Quote from the article: It’s time to embrace a new class of professionals in the marketing department: marketing technologists, who are software architects and engineers with marketing and business savvy. To assemble and lead this group, there needs to be a new senior leadership role for a marketing CTO or chief marketing technologist.

• The CIO is Dead! Long Live the CIO! by Vince Kellen on The Cutter Blog

  Quote from the article: To argue that the CIO role will disappear is to suggest that IT is no longer complex or dynamic and does not rise to a level of management difficulty that requires a C-level executive to attend to it. This means that at some level in the organization, and probably very high, dabblers and part-time professionals will be sufficient. Perhaps. But the kind of competitiveness in industries that heavily use IT is not for armchair strategists or part-time enthusiasts.

• Why tell stories anyway? by David Willows on Fragments

  Great question. Stories provide context…something that might be missing in lot of areas these days.

• Three truths of IT success by Michael Krigsman on Enterprise Irregulars

  Quote from the article: The persistence of high failure rates suggests that IT projects are more complicated and difficult to complete successfully than we generally recognize. The common view that projects are merely a bundle of implementation steps does not sufficiently address underlying business, organizational, and human dimensions essential to success.

• Why You Should NEVER Listen to Your Customers by Mark Cuban on blog maverick

  Quote from the article: Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happen. Listen to them. Make them happy. But they won’t create the future roadmap for your product or service. That’s your job.

• The Social CRM Process by Jacob Morgan

  Quote from the article: social CRM is a strategy and as Bob mentions, it’s important to separate the strategy from the technology.  My image below doesn’t make it clear that you can do social CRM without social media/networks since the entire image is based around online data from social spaces

• What IT, Business Really Think of Each Other By Susan Cramm on CIO Insight

  Quote from the article: As leaders get smarter about IT, they increase their adoption of key IT leadership practices and start breaking through the negative stereotypes. For example, in organizations with IT-smart IT and business leaders, ROI is acceptable or great (93 percent), business leaders drive business change associated with IT-enabled investments (90 percent), and IT products and services meet the needs of the business (88 percent).

• Communication: Meaning Is In The Response by Steve Roesler on All Things Workplace

  Most of us concentrate on what to say and how to say it. In our zeal to  get our message across we forget that at the other end of our message is a real, live person with her own zeal, goals, and concerns. These may not coincide with ours, especially at the moment when we are about to start communicating our new ideas

In this article, Chase argues that Creativity isn’t enough for people working in the creative world (photographers, designers, etc).  Jarvis argues that creative folks need to embrace other mindsets (such as being different, brilliant and innovative) to be successful. According to Jarvis, The key to success in the future for creatives is innovative thinking.

But what is innovation?

To me, Innovation is ‘creating something new’. This ‘newness’ can be built upon something old, but it is a new implementation of the old that is innovative.

Jarvis describes it this way:

it’s hard to say what innovation is. But if I can’t say exactly what it is, I most certainly know what it is not. It doesn’t look or sound at all like the status quo.

Excellent.

Innovation is not the status quo.

The act of innovating is the act of moving away from the status quo.

Then why is there so much status quo around if innovation is the buzzword of the last few years?

I can’t really say….some people blame the recession.  Me?  I blame organizations.  I blame the herd mentality that exists in most organizations today that doesn’t allow individuals’s ideas and creativity to flow.

Sure there are those companies that are innovative and creative (think Apple and Google) but why can we only think of a handful of ‘innovative’ companies (Fast Company lists the Fast 50 – the 50 most innovative companies).    50 out of how many thousands and thousands of companies in this world?

Why so little true innovation?  Is it because it’s hard?  Maybe.  Is it because innovation is risky? Perhaps.

But…from my experience, innovation is difficult because people don’t realize that the status quo (i.e., what you are doing today) isn’t enough to keep you where you are or get you where you want to be.

So…Is Creativity & Innovation enough?

Nope.

You’ve got to add a little chutzpa (four year of blogging and I FINALLY got to use that word!). Take some risk. Do something bold and daring.

I’ve been hearing the cliche ‘move the needle‘ an awful lot around the workplace lately.   Every project is measured against whether it will ‘move the needle’ or not. Although no guidance is given on what that needle is measuring. I can move the needle all day long with small un-risky projects that don’t do anything to change the status quo.  Or…I can break the damn needle off and move the organization. Which do you want to do?  Move the needle…or move the organization?

With a little creativity and innovative thinking added to a little sprinkling of courage, you’ll make a positive and lasting change in your life, organization and in this world.

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The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be killing your ability to execute by Olivier Blanchard on The BrandBuilder Blog

HR Hint of the Day: Let Them Run Through the Sprinklers by Frank Roche on KnowHR Blog {If you click on no other link today, click on this one!}

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I had the pleasure of writing the first article to be published on CIOE and wanted to share it here for my regular readers/subscribers.  I hope you decide to join Gene and I over at CIOEssentials.com where we’ll be writing more on the topics of business, leadership, technology, and the people technology serves.

Culture and the CIO was first published on CIOEssentials.com on March 1 2010.

What’s the culture of your organization?

Have you built a hard-charging, do anything organization that demands things get done now? Or are you working in an organization that thinks things through, plans them out and takes years to get anything done? Perhaps you’re somewhere between these two extremes.

Personally, I’d rather be closer to the get it done (and get it done right) scenario than planning everything to death, but I’ve seen both types of cultures work. As the CIO, before you can deliver value to your organization, you must understand the culture within your organization.

“When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.” – Chinese Proverb

Culture and the CIO

What is culture within an organization? Most agree that organizational culture is the shared beliefs, values and norms that are held by the people within an organization.

What are the shared beliefs of your organization? Are you focused on moving quickly to beat your competition? Are you an innovative organization that wants to be at the forefront of the market? Or are you one of those companies that like to plan things to death and take years to get anything done?

Whatever your organizational culture, you’ve got to stay in sync with that culture or you might find yourself out of a job.

Story Time

Patty is a newly hired VP of IT for a mid-sized business in Chicago. Patty’s previous employer was a large, demanding company and Patty really thrived in that type of environment – she essentially grew-up in that hard driving organization.

In her previous role, she expected her staff to be as demanding and driven as she was, and for the most part, they were. Patty had worked her way up the ranks to a Director level role but was itching to move further up the ladder. After some internal review, she quickly found a VP role that seemed like a good fit and after a few months of negotiation, she accepted the position as the top IT person within the organization.

Patty was excited to have to an opportunity to finally run her own shop. After all, she’d been working towards this opportunity her entire career. Patty had finally arrived. She was the head of IT and could implement all the really cool processes and technologies that she’d been hearing about.

Patty brought her driven, hard-charging approach to IT to her new position – and immediately flopped. The culture of her new company was a slow-moving one. The people were methodical and planned things out to the ‘nth’ degree before moving forward with a project. There were committees and task forces for everything and not a single decision was made without going through a few rounds of committee discussions. Change was tough.

The Slow Pace of Progress

Patty railed against the slow pace of progress. She drove her IT staff to ‘pick up the pace’ and drove her managers into a frenzy trying to accomplish everything she wanted to get done as quickly as possible.

Sadly (and predictably), after six months, Patty had accomplished nothing. None of the high-priority projects had been completed and most hadn’t even been started. Patty’s boss, the CFO, pulled her into his office one day and suggested that she reign things in. He shared that the organization had always taken the slow approach and that wasn’t something that was likely to change any time soon.

This slow-and-steady approach had proven to be the success factor for them. He went on to explain that, while they weren’t the industry leader, they were extremely profitable. It was their organizational culture that was the driving factor behind that success.

Patty countered with her standard argument that the organization moved too slow and that she couldn’t get anything done at that pace. She couldn’t fund any of the projects that she’d made a priority. All projects were well-vetted before being funded because every project that was funded took money away from other parts of the business.

Outcomes

While there are actually a few points that can be made with this story, the one I want to highlight is the cultural issues apparent.

Patty didn’t understand the role of organizational culture within the company. She didn’t understand that culture exists for a reason and that the culture is made up of the values and belief systems of the people within the organization.

Patty thought she was railing against the snail’s pace of progress, but she was actually telling every single person within that company that they were wrong. Nobody likes to be told that they’re wrong, but telling an entire organization that they way they’ve done business for years is wrong is a career suicide mission. It can be difficult to recover once you’ve alienated enough people within the organization.

Patty never recovered. She was shown the door withing a few months of her meeting with the CFO. The reason for her dismissal? She didn’t fit the ‘culture’ of the organization.

Focus on Culture

Whether you’re looking to move another organization or you’ve moved into a new role at your current company, you’ve got to consider the organizational culture while considering how you’ll reach your objectives. You can’t be successful as a fast-moving IT manager if your team’s spent the last 20 years moving slowly.

Keep organizational culture in mind while planning out your next project, job or strategic plan.

Culture and the CIO was first published on CIOEssentials.com on March 1 2010.

Hutch recently wrote a post titled “Apple iPad and Google Buzz: Harsh Reality of Innovation” where he argues (successfully I think) that you’ve got to be OK with failure to really be innovative.

In the article Hutch points at Apple and Google as examples of companies that have amazing successes as well as amazing failures.

Hutch does a great job tying innovation with failure and showing that you’ve got to embrace failure to truly innovate.  It’s a great read.

The best part of the article wasn’t written by Hutch though….it’s a quote from Teddy Roosevelt. This quote really resonates with me and is a perfect addition to this argument. The quote is:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Emphasis mine.

Failure and the CIO

Is it OK for your IT staff to fail?

Have you built the proper culture that allows your teams to step out of bounds and innovate without fear of retribution if the attempt fails?

If you’ve said yes…good for you.  But…what would happen if I asked your team?  Would they say the same?

Think about the last three projects you’ve undertaken.  Have they all been a success?  Have they all been innovative? Can you point to projects that you’ve undertaken that have changed the ‘game’ for your organization?

If you can’t think of any innovative projects that you’ve undertaken recently…perhaps you’ve stepped into the realm of playing it safe.

Culture of Failure?

Nobody likes failure.  I hate it…but I’ve had my fair share of it.  I’ve watched my projects fail and I’ve watched my teams fail.  But…I’ve also seen some amazing things happen by those same teams.

So…am I saying that you should create a culture of failure? Absolutely not.

But I am saying that you need to create a culture that makes it OK to fail.

Ask yourself this question:

Do you want your IT staff to be known as folks that put themselves out there and bring  innovation to the organization….or do you want to be known as the IT group that plays it safe?

It might be easier to play it safe for some, but don’t expect to find and keep the best people if you’re playing it safe.  The best and brightest out there want to work on the ‘cool’ stuff. The ‘new’ stuff.  They don’t want to be relegated to a life of maintaining your COBOL application…they want to build a new app that will make the organization (and world) stand up and take notice.

Build a culture that says failure is OK and you’ll build the potential for a high performance team that can get some great stuff done.  Don’t do this and you’ll be relegated to being the also-ran.