hello 2010

I’ve stopped making New Year resolutions – they are too easily broken – but that won’t stop me from setting objectives. I always try to make them SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and with timescales.

In 2009 had two main objectives. Firstly, I needed to get better at my job. For the first few months I struggled even to define what my job was there to do: since it’s largely about strategy it’s hard to find ways to measure success or even to define it in a way that makes sense to people. I’ve come to realise that the job is defined more by the organisation you do it in than by some abstract “gold standard” definition, and I’ve gained a considerable degree of comfort from that thought. So good progress there but the objective remains in place for 2010.

My second objective was to finish my degree. It was touch and go for a while as deadlines piled up, but I made it in the end. After a well-deserved break from studying I have been on the lookout for new learning opportunities: I now think that I won’t truly have learned anything until I start applying what I have studied, so I am looking to maybe setup a small-scale social enterprise and help my partner launch her own company to gain some experience on the ground. This should feed back into better performance in my main job as well.

I have some personal challenges and targets, but I won’t be sharing those here because they are personal

The main theme is just to get on and do some stuff. The economic recovery is almost upon us: let’s get on with it!

Happy 2010

Martin

geekmeet

I attended my first #geekmeet last night, at the Mill on the Exe in Exeter. A geekmeet is like a tweetup but is more for technically minded people: we wanted some space to have the sort of discussions that might bypass normal folks

It had been set up quite quickly following on from the tweetup the previous week. There were drinks and conversation about everything from Oracle’s takeover of Sun to the relative chances of Android versus the iPhone, different development tools, the fact you can now buy a desktop supercomputer, community wi-fi schemes, and pretty well everything else.

The group decided that we’d put up a web page somewhere with links to people’s blogs, web sites or twitter streams and use that to decide when to have the next one and take some things forward.

I really enjoy meeting new people and this group was small but lively. Looking forward to the next one!

Gartner Symposium and ITxpo 2009

I have just finished my first ever visit to the Gartner symposium as a representative of SOCITM – the society for IT managers in UK local government. Every year SOCITM produces a report detailing what they think local government needs to know about the fast-changing landscape of the IT industry in general, and since this is of relevance to an enterprise architecture function I was priviledged to go.

So what did I learn there? Gartner’s main focus was in a few areas:
- preparing for the economic cycle to start to move in a  positive direction again (less useful for us as government spending cycles are lagging the private sector)
- cloud computing, and all its forms, challenges and opportunities
- social software and what it means for management, government, technology and strategy
- what Gartner calls “Pattern Based Strategy” – their take on an emerging way of organising the strategic thinking in business (more on this in another blog post as its quite an interesting topic in itself).

In other words, lots of interesting stuff. Since SOCITM paid for my ticket (no local government budgets were harmed during the making of this blog!) I was assigned a range of topics to cover (all based around security, app development, and risk management), and consumed about 25 hours of Powerpoint in 3 and a half days. I am now in the process of turning all that stuff into coherent papers for SOCITM’s membership.

If you’re an IT person and get the chance to go, even as a slave to someone, do it! It’s a quite incredible experience. That doesn’t mean it’s magical, though: there are problems just like there would be if you went anywhere. To help I have compiled…

Martin’s top tips for attending the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo

1. you need a mobile device with good battery life and wifi (if you want to tweet from the sessions themselves -and you do). smartphones and netbooks are good: laptops are a brick once the battery goes
2. by the end you’ll be staggering drunkenly round the conf centre wondering if you really are aligned with the dominant agile strategic paradigm. Don’t worry, the feeling will pass.
3. just because you’re here it doesn’t mean your company is Shell or HSBC and has gazillions to blow on all the amazing stuff you have seen. Be reasonable
4. similarly, Just because you were here doesn’t mean you are an analyst: your insights don’t make you invulnerable
5. when you get back to the office, no-one will believe anything you say
6. don’t leave your critical faculties at home: remember that everyone, including your friendly analysts, have a bias
7. there is some kind of biting lice in the conference centre – take some cream
8. food is expensive, so nick as much as you can from the centre and try to blag your way into as many receptions as you can.
9. despite the combined brainpower of all the attendees, actual networking opportunities are quite thin on the ground. Tweet! GartnerSym needs more tweeters. I met 3 people this way. (Yes! 3!)

The social media ROI braindump

Akey topic from the last #LikeMinds event was the issue of measuring the return on social media investment. There was a good (and entertaining) treatment of the topic from Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) which covered the effect on sales and how to decide if the usage of social media had, in fact, improved your bottom line. Olivier’s presentation is available on Slideshare here.

This is all good stuff, but I believe there is another set of dimensions to the ROI that you might get from using social media – and so the LikeMinds crew only dealt with part of the subject. This is because, as one commenter put it, social media is just people having conversations – what’s the ROI on talking?

Indeed, no-one asks what the ROI on a telephone is – it’s just accepted that the telephone is essential for a modern business to function. And I believe that social media is headed the same way. But many people remain to be convinced: a story last week ran on the BBC website that stated that “Twitter costs businesses £1.4Bn a year” – indicative of the cultural resistance that this platform has to overcome if it is to be accepted just like the telephone.

Given that, it’s probably time someone tried to start mapping out the benefits of SM right across the piece so that a full business case can be made by those who are trying to make the change in their own organisations. So how might we go about doing that?

Business theorists have many ways of modelling organisations, and I’m going to pick one. Other models are available. This one is simple, which is why I chose it (you could also try ITIL service management , or if you really want to go the whole hog try the Zachman Enterprise Architecture matrix. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you!).

Value Chain Analysis

This was devised by Michael Porter in his seminal work, Competitive Advantage (1985). Porter argued that all parts of a business add value to the finished product, and it looks a bit like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From wikipedia: “A value chain is a chain of activities. Products pass through all activities of the chain in order and at each activity the product gains some value. The chain of activities gives the products more added value than the sum of added values of all activities.” A typical example is a production line in a car factory: the finished car, delivered to the customer with a finance package and their old car towed away and recycled, is worth much more than the components added at all stages of assembly (but see also Scott Gould’s critique of factory thinking ).

Now we’ve got our model, we can start looking at ROI. Olivier’s presentation points out that there are two ways ROI comes in – through increased revenues or through lower costs.

Increased revenues are either a result of increased volume, or by a higher quality product or service that people will pay more for. Remember that a “product” also includes the experience that people have when buying or otherwise consuming the service – what some marketers might call the “augmented product”.
Lower costs result from reduced friction and waste, either internally in a company or in the supply chain. What we’re looking for here are things like higher staff competence, better processes, better communication and teamwork, and lower materials costs.

The Porter value chain model identitifes 9 areas of activity. Here are some ways that social media can benefit them:

• Infrastructure (administrative management of eg buildings) -> need maintenance and planning (and even strategy) -> SM can streamline maintenance processes, alerts, and educate people in how to get the best out of their investments.

• HR management -> social media tools can be used to provide early warnings of things that are bothering the workforce, ways to access employee resources (like workplace counselling or learning and development); conversely the blocking of social media sites can be demotivating for employees

• technology -> Social media can reduce email, provide mashups, enhance remote, mobile and flexible working. This is a big topic in itself.

• procurement -> getting the right product (using crowdsourced reviews) at the right price (customers communicating with each other reduces supplier power)

• inbound logistics -> “@customer @acme is held up at roadworks on #M25. will b 2.5hrs l8″ can save you money.

• outbound logistics -> “@customer @acme is held up at roadworks on #M25. will b 2.5hrs l8″ can save your reputation.

• operations (production) -> the benefit here is in collaborative working and low-cost messaging systems. Teams can work together better even if they are geographically separate, and the creative use of APIs can automate some processes (eg in publishing an author may submit a document which triggers workflow for editing, proof-reading and then sends it back afterwards).

• marketing, sales and service -> Apart from the customer relationship (dealt with comprehensively by Scott and Olivier) social media can yield valuable intelligence about what the market wants. making the organisation truly marketing-oriented by enabling all parts of it to hear the customer can yield a massive increase in product or service quality.

Each of these areas is probably worthy of something much more detailed – along with actual methodologies. Actually measuring these things quantitatively might prove more expensive than worthwhile, however: and not everything can be measured.

Anything I’ve missed?

LikeMinds review

On October 16th, I attended the inaugural LikeMinds conference in Exeter.

In the fast-paced world of social media, 13 days is an awfully long time. I’ve been slow to blog: others have blogged about it ages ago, such as here, here, here, and here, to name a few: a more comprehensive list of blogs on the conference is here on the LikeMinds site.

I took my time in reviewing the event, partly because I’m slow to thought and partly because I wanted to let the noise die down so the signal could come through and I could sort it out in my mind.

So, regardless of what events we go to, why do we go to conferences? Good question. Here’s my list of reasons:

1. to learn something new
2. to contribute to a movement or school of thought
3. to network with like-minded (or not!) people
4. to get ideas and stimulate my brain
5. free food and coffee

LikeMinds delivered on all these and more.

The conference was billed as exploring the “ROI on social media”. I want to talk about this in more detail another time because its…well, kind of geeky and interesting, and because I want to just make some general comments on the event. My blog posts are generally too long!

The whole conference was devised, marketed, organised and delivered through social media, and as such was a triumph of the movement. Over 200 people attended in person and over 500 watched the video stream with a load more hitting up the #likeminds twitter hashtag. The venue – Exeter conference centre – was a great place to hold such an event, the sound quality was great, the speakers were uniformly excellent.

Since the conference I have changed the way I use social media, started this blog, and had a whole series of thoughts about my job and how it links to other areas of business, most of which were unconnected to the actual content of the conference – LikeMinds has been a catalyst.

The next one is on the 26th Feb 2010: I’ll be there!

Welcome

I usually blog about my job at http://devonenterprisearchitects.wordpress.com
This blog is for stuff that might be related to my job but is more related to me: the above blog is a team blog so this place is somewhere with more relaxed house rules!