Good Follow-ship

During a recent call, a colleague lamented that employee engagement was at an all time low, with 70% not engaged at work (Gallup), and yet there are over 60,000 books on leadership (she Googled Amazon).  She went on to say, if so few employees are engaged then we are failing at leadership (and not learning from all these books).   Are managers getting bad advice? Probably not, but as we discussed, the lack of soft skills, modeling behaviors, that encourage connections between people is the culprit.

I learned early as an adult the hard way, and often the best way, of failing at communication.  I found that communication has two parts, a message and a reception, and without both, there is no communication.  I’ve spent half my professional life working on problems of digital communications across far flung organizations, especially helping bridge the digital divide in emerging countries.   When two people make a connection, it’s a beautiful thing to witness the budding conversation.  But getting connected is no guarantee that communication can occur. 

Why is that?  While a message and a connection are required, there can be no person-to-person communication without listening, understanding and empathizing.  And that’s not a one-way street; it’s about both listening more deeply, both seeking to understand the other, and putting yourselves in each other’s shoes.  That’s where the most engaging conversations, what David Whyte calls the courageous conversations, can begin.

This person-to-person communication is not just something that leaders in an organization can do, it is also for the followers, who make up most of the organization, must do.  It means being a better follower, and practicing what I call good follow-ship. 

A brief story may help...

A few summers ago my wife and I traveled to Cairo to be a judge in the Imagine Cup student competition. While we were there, we made plans to meet with a colleague who offered to show us his home country, the "real" Egypt he said. Farouk was one of our long-term Field Office Regional Tech's. He reported up through my US headquarters IT group.

As is the custom of his country, Farouk extended a hospitality that is rare in my part of the world. He took us on a tour of the old city in Cairo, we visited the Egyptian Museum, and we traveled to Alexandria. He made all the arrangements and would take no more than our thanks in return. It was humbling.

The traffic in Cairo is, by western standards, insane. There are few traffic lights in the city, and no one pays any attention to them. The painted lines on the street and highways are at best guidelines; if four cars can fit in three lanes, they do. One evening in Cairo we parked near the edge of the old city and walked to dinner. At the first main street, we experienced the drivers of Egypt, up close and personal. How were we ever going to cross this street? My New York instincts were to look for a gap in the traffic, and run for it. But there were no gaps.

Though I was the boss, Farouk took charge. "Hold my hands," he said, "follow my lead, and don't look!" It was a strange experience, a throw-back to early childhood, grabbing Dad's hand before crossing the street; depending on him to get us safely across. "Go now," he said, taking five steps forward and stopping, then five more. Cars were swerving around us like a river around three rocks. "Hold on," he admonished, "do what I say; now go." In a dance I did not understand, he guided across the sea of chaos, to the other side.

When we caught our breath, and heart rates slowed down, I asked him how he got us across. In New York, we would have been killed. But these were Cairo rules. "When you step out," he said, "the drivers must take responsibility not to hit you." "...but you need to know when to step out," he added.

This story was a lesson I'll never forget, precisely because I needed to forget. I had to put aside my experience and preconceived notions of how to cross a busy street, and trust someone else to guide me through their country's rules. Letting others lead you and teach you is part of becoming a good leader. It is especially true of learning about other cultures--we will never get it as well as those who have it in their blood. This also applies to our areas of expertise. Sometimes we need to practice good follow-ship.

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Why ERP's are wrong for NGOs

The first edition of this paper was written in May 2012 and updated in May 2016.  It has since been a part of the IT Think Papers on my web site.  Though some of the figures have changed (some better and some worse), the conclusions still ring true for the nonprofits I continue to follow, now as faculty member of a university, where I teach IT leadership and management.  I’ve made further revisions to anonymize portions and rerelease it here.

Considering an Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP, for short) is a natural event for nonprofit organizations at a certain stage of their development.  International NGOs (INGO) such as CARE, IFRC and Save the Children and UNICEF have had similar experiences with varying degrees of success and shortfalls.  Why are such run-the-business systems so difficult?  Here are some reasons to consider :

1. Too expensive. One of the first UN organizations to complete an ERP project spent an estimated $20M+ to roll out SAP to their 120 country offices.  Even limited ERP projects, with nonprofit discounts, take $2M+ to complete.  80-90% of the costs are for business process and implementation consulting.
2. Takes too long.  The typical ERP project at large NGOs takes 2.5 years or more to complete.  For 5-year strategic plans it means that the impact of the new system is limited.  One INGO  spent 3+ years to complete its donor ERP, from Blackbaud, missing its strategy window.  Confounding this is that technology changes and user needs are evolving faster than 3-year ERP development cycles, ensuring that the system once released will likely be out of date.
3. Failure rate is too high. According to the well-known Standish Chaos database, fully two-thirds of large IT projects fail.  One-third fail outright, while one-third are over time or budget.   A recent McKinsey report verifies this .  Smaller, chunked-down IT projects have higher success rates.
4. Don't meet financial objectives. The Nucleus ROI study found 57% of large SAP projects (a leading ERP) don’t achieve the ROI cited in the beginning as the justification for doing the project in the first place.   Furthermore, an analysis of 100 corporations that have implemented SAP shows that this group has significantly lower profits than peers. 
5. Too hard to change. The pain and effort to upgrade business processes and customize the ERP system results in a system that is resistant to change, in terms of time, cost and will. As a result the ERPs that often replaces a legacy system (or three), becomes itself a new legacy system.
6. Not optimized for the web. Many of the large ERP systems, like SAP, have not been optimized for the web and browser world.  Web features have often been bolted on to antiquated back-office architectures. Web users notice the difference from popular web apps immediately.
7. Almost impossible to please all departments. Given the enterprise nature of ERP systems, they cut across many departments.  Getting many departments to agree on features and functions often means a tendency to lower common denominators of need rather than an optimal solution for an individual department needs.  And yet each department wants its needs met, which often results in a high degree of customization.
8. Expensive to customize.  The short-term cost to customize large ERP systems is high, with as much as 50% of the project costs going to the analysis, definition and development of components.  However, the longer-term cost may be even higher, especially if the customizations are many.  Each upgrade to the system that the vendor provides will most likely require an upgrade to the customized components, at the organization’s cost.  This often results in a lagging behind the current market system, which gets worse over time.
9. User satisfaction is lower than for SaaS applications.  Applications that are built for a web-centered world are more likely to meet user’s expectations for how modern applications should work.  Users increasingly come to the organization with a strong experience base of using web-based applications in their education and personal lives.  ERP systems often do not measure up and don’t function in a browser as users expect them to work.
10. Many INGOs have a poor record of implementing large systems.  At one such organization, an HR SAP project, Logistics project and Web Reconfiguration project were all cases in point where large applications were over-budget and over-time estimates by significant margins. One  could take the approach of investing more in getting big systems right, or one could take the approach of chunking projects down to more fit-for-purpose solutions.  Fortunately, the organization chose the latter.
11. Not share-able with Field Offices.  For ERPs to be shareable across organizations, their customizations often need to be repeated for different country/location needs.  There is no multi-tenant model for ERPs that is comparable to SaaS applications, where each feature enhancement is made to the core code available to all.
12. Total cost of ownership (TCO) of ERP’s is affordable by only the largest organizations. For-profit organizations typically have 5 times more IT spending power per employee than large nonprofits .  With 25% of systems cost as a typical annual maintenance and support estimate, a $1M system can generate $250K in recurring costs, and this figure rises with the degree of customization.  Over five years, the TCO can more than double the cost of a project.  My advocacy position--with a bit of intentional hyperbole-- is that traditional ERPs will bankrupt Nonprofits and field and country offices, customized ERPs even more so.
13. The data integration model of ERPs is overrated.  One of the strongest selling features of an ERP is the shared database that underlies the system, providing the highest amount of systems and data integration.  However, the real-time integration needs of many organizations are rare.  If the data definitions are clear, the transfer of data among smaller applications is usually small enough for infrequent transfers of information.  Sometimes a manual transfer of data is sufficient.  Often a simple export and import of data will do. One-way integration may be needed.  Two-way integration should be avoided.  The key questions are: how often does the data change, how much of the data changes, and how many users are impacted?  A small scope demands a small solution.

As a result of these considerations, the strategic direction for applications at NGOs is clear.  The arguments are stronger for small, fit-for-purpose, web-based, loosely coupled applications.  A more agile organization is built on systems that are quick and easy to change, and faster to deliver.  Those applications that meet a specific need are more likely to succeed.  This is the most prudent use of NGO donors’ funding.

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Circuit Breakers

On October 19,1987 I was sitting at my desk in California when a colleague called from Chicago.  

“Have you seen the market news?” he asked.

“No...but I’m looking now”

“It’s fallen 20% and counting…”

I pulled up my market application on my PC and stared in disbelief.[1]

There were a variety of factors that caused the crash of ‘87.[2]  One was program trading, computer programs used by hedge funds and others to execute groups of trades directly and rapidly.  

In response to the crash, regulators developed policies known as “circuit breakers” so that stock exchanges could halt trading when large swings in prices crossed a threshold. They were essentially alert systems that watched the trading systems and took rapid action to pause. This temporarily stopped the chaos and allowed people to step in and restore order.

The metaphor of a circuit breaker comes from the common electrical circuit box in many homes.  If you’ve ever experienced a power outage, you know that sometimes running the toaster, dishwasher, and a space heater in the kitchen can overload the electrical circuit, cause the breaker-switch to “pop” and turn off the flow of current to that room.  That’s the breakers purpose: to stop the electricity flow from increasing to the point of burning up the wires (or the house!) And, as a colleague pointed out, the tripped circuit breaker is an important indicator that something went wrong that needs attention.

It’s evident why the circuit breaker name stuck for the “trading curb” systems that the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) put in place following the market crash.[3]  I believe this is a useful metaphor for the current day and the concerns about runaway artificial intelligence (AI) programs.  

The key feature of this metaphor is that a rapid overload in the wrong direction can be automatically halted so human beings can step in to correct things.  It also implies a dash of humility and avoids the hubris of insisting we can build the failsafe system.

This is not fundamentally different from the “endless loop” interrupt or bottom of an else-if chain in programs.[4]  The graceful exit when unexpected situations occur is good design, as is the expectation that the system will at some point fail.  Most programmers would pick an orderly shutdown over a system crash.  How the system fails is important. This same expectation needs to temper our AI designs.  Self-healing and machine learning systems aside, a key interrupt in systems needs to be the human judgment interrupt.

What I’m suggesting is that our AI systems should be designed and programmed with this feature in mind.  When a system starts to cross a threshold that we’ve agreed is dangerous, the system halts and asks for some human judgment.  Defining those thresholds and boundaries may be hard work and such standards may be elusive, but as has been said in other realms, “I’ll know it, when I see it.”  The point is if we build the need for human judgment pauses into our systems --human interrupts, if you will, we just may avoid the system barreling forward at great speed and potential damage.

_______________

[1] At the time, I was Client Marketing Director for Lotus Signal, a PC-based real-time stock market application.  Lotus bought Dataspeed in 1985 primarily to get this technology.
[2] See the discussion in Wikipedia on “Black Monday (1987)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987) .  Also see “Algorithmic Trading,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

[3] See “Trading Curbs”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb

[4] The story I heard when learning to code was about the software engineer who put at the end of an exhaustive else-if chain the message “this can’t happen.” which of course was displayed one evening as the program merrily ran.  

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

A Tale of Two Resumes

I review many students' resumes each semester, as part of the IT Leadership & Management course I teach, as an advisor to students immersed in career planning, and as a practitioner who has interviewed and hired many candidates.  The conversations that result convince me that having two resumes may help in your career search.

The first may be formatted to ease the AI review by an increasing number of applicant tracking system (ATS) apps HR departments are using to sort thru the many applicants.  This is often playing the game of matching phrases in your resume with keywords in the job description. For an interesting article on this, see beat the robots.

The second resume may apply more marketing intelligence to make your uniqueness pop. Since I arrived at UMSI, I've been encouraging the use of "about me" sidebars, and highlighting the impact you had in each job, as well as what you learned. As a manager, I care less about what you did than about the difference you made--on the organization as well as yourself.  For some interesting (some off-the-wall) and memorable designs, see the Piktochart site.  Start with the tamer #24, 40 and 44 for some ideas.

These two approaches may be two ends of the spectrum, but they recognize that (a) you are more than a collection of keywords, and (b) in a crowd of applications, standing out takes some creativity.


"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Working Backwards

One of the hardest things for technology people to do is be succinct, replace the details with a story about benefits, and to ask for the sale.  After all, isn't this what marketing and sales people do?  Perhaps it's a surprise, but that is what you need to do if you hope to get a technology project, new product or new way of doing business, approved by a senior management team.

And please be brief!  It's not that senior managers have short attention spans, they need to get to the bottom line and make a decision.  Your job is to help them do that.

Each semester, I ask students to prepare a presentation for a mock senior management team.  Masters students know how to do the research and write the effective paper.  The goal of a senior management presentation is different.  It's about making the "ask," the bottom line decision you need them to make to proceed, and that's based on how much it will cost, how long it will take and how many people we need to commit to do it. Along the way, it's good to identify the benefits we will realize, the risks the organization will be taking to do this, and how you plan to mitigate those.  All of this should take less than 15 minutes with 10 slides plus Q&A.

Senior managers will want to know you are competent (what are your credentials and have you done this before) and that you've done your homework.  The 30-page report is impressive; it's not likely anyone will read it... beyond the executive summary.

A student team did a fine job talking about their research and the conclusions of their study.  When it came time for the Q&A, the CEO said, rather bluntly, "What the hell are you asking me to do?"  That's not the likely response to a presentation in an academic environment.  But it is what you should expect from a CEO, whether from a corporation or nonprofit organization.

A CEO told me once, "I can't use the students schools a graduating today; it takes me too long to retrain them."

"Retrain them how," I asked?

"To be able to talk with customers, manage a project with a diverse and dispersed team, and get to the bottom line of things!"

So to learn effective presentations, we start with the bottom line and work backwards.  That way, we are keeping the end goal in mind.  Here are ten slide headlines for a hypothetical project, in reverse order from an approved and funded proposal:

1. The ask - what Senior Management Team decision are you asking for?
2. Time and cost - how much time will it take to complete your project proposal and at what cost (one-time and recurring)?
3. Risks - what risks are there to your project's success and what are the mitigations you see?
4. Benefits - what benefits accrue from going with your recommendations; what's the value proposition?
5. Your recommendation - Among the options, which are you recommending?
6. Options - what are the alternatives you studied and the pros and cons of each
7. Approach/method taken - how did you go about your investigation, sources consulted, tested conducted, etc.
8. Assumptions made - what is the scope that you narrowed, what is your scenario?
9. Problem - what problem are you trying to solve? what are the key questions you are trying to answer? 
10. Intros - who are the members of your team and what are your credentials?

Everything else may be important, but it is appendix.  Now reverse the order.  Go.


"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

BLIND SPOTS: When it Comes to Data, it’s About the Conversation

The following post was initially posted on LinkedIn.

During my 40 years in IT management, I often encountered people who were great computer scientists. But they couldn’t hold a business conversation with a group, let alone senior managers. We often had to provide special coaching to teach these bright, dedicated professionals how to describe technical opportunities in “normal” English.

This inability of IT professionals to have consultative conversations is a common problem in business --and it’s likely to get worse.

As we journey further into the data-driven age, corporations are facing a looming shortage of university graduates trained in data science. That alone is a concern.

Meanwhile, those who already are, or soon will be, working in the corporate world may be able to speak fluent algorithm and statistics -- but they can’t explain how they use data to their non-data-science colleagues responsible for strategic planning, training, reports, sales, and so on.

This forms a gap between technical skills and communication/consultative skills in the workplace. It is a disconnect between data science-speak and soft skills that are basic to business life. I call this disconnect “blind spots.”

As an IT professional and a now a faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI), I am keenly interested in this growing problem, which can affect graduates’ marketability as much as the corporate bottom line. In fact, addressing these gaps is key to my role at UMSI. Among my responsibilities, I teach a class on IT Leadership & Management

As I was preparing my curriculum last year, I attended a Gartner CIO Summit in Toronto. Gartner, Inc. is a leading research and advisory firm that focuses on technology.

It was the perfect place to talk about needs and gaps with CIOs and their trusted advisors. One comment provides the economic context: “The universities can’t graduate data scientists fast enough for the 10x growth in demand.”

Other comments I heard only added to this theme: "Technology is not the problem; people and culture are the challenge." CIOs need to hire “collaborative facilitators.” Data science students have the technology skills, but "they need to know executives’ questions before asking the questions of the data." “Data scientists are statistics magicians and super coders, but they lack domain (business) expertise.”

And finally: "Students need to learn compassion."

You get the idea.

These comments put things into some perspective. If the demand for data scientists is far outpacing the supply of new graduates, and the required skill set is becoming more consultative, something has to give. Salaries and starting bonuses may skyrocket, but that’s not going to meet the need. Neither is more tech skills.

Informed by all of this, I assigned to my master’s students this past year to prepare a corporate-style presentation of a technology-based project proposal and present it to a panel of senior manager volunteers. I wanted to test what I had been hearing.

The results were mixed. Some student teams struggled with a focused, executive-style presentation. Other teams were able to navigate it -- with some practice and coaching. Their biggest challenge was converting a conclusion into an “ask”—a call to action, decision and commitment from their audience.

In contrast, teams with students who had prior consulting or corporate world experience fared much better. That underscored my concern: Real-world experiences are doing a better job teaching the communications skills than educational institutions.

This means we educators need to figure out the best way to prepare students for the workplace. We have many excellent professors and guest speakers at U-M. I have sat in their classes and I have watched their online presentations. We often model the communication and consultative skills our students need.

We need to teach what we do well in the better classes we teach, on campus and in our online courses. We are passionate, animated and adept at getting new and even difficult concepts across to our audiences. We also know how to be consultants with our students. We are our own case studies. We need to be more explicit about how we do this, so that students learn not only by observing, but also by learning the theory behind good communication and then practicing it in business and other settings.

While it is essential to train students to code with the latest tools, we cannot neglect communication and negotiating skills, and even psychological sensitivity. Organizations should be able to require these skills rather than having to provide remedial training.

Meanwhile, if we want to teach the soft skills effectively, we need to take our own advice: Go to business leaders, analysts and academic designers for answers – and hold the kind of discussion we need to model for our students.

I look forward to the ensuing dialogue.

Edward Happ is Executive Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Hot Button Values

I was recently cleaning some old folders on my laptop to make room for the new.  (No matter the  model purchased, I always seem to run out of hard disk space.) I came across a memo that I updated from time to time for my team when I was CIO.  This edition is from 2006, when I was at Save the Children.  It still rings true for me, which means it's likely part of my values that endure across the years of  change.

Now that I'm teaching in the fall at U. of Michigan I thought I'd look at this through the lens of leading a class of students and research projects.  My sense is that it still applies.  What are your thoughts?

MEMORANDUM

To:           IS Managers

Date:       April 17, 2006

Subject:  Hot Buttons

What Gets Recognized and Rewarded? Here are my management and work values:

1) Work hard, with passion

• Enthusiasm and high energy are contagious

2) Be on-time

• Set deadlines and make them
• Raise the "red flag" early about projects running late
• Call, or email in advance, changes in your schedule
• Make up missed time, on the honor system
• Do what it takes to deliver results, with self-directed flex time as the guiding principle

3) Don't waste mistakes

• Screw-ups are OK; they're an opportunity to change and improve something
• Be able to say: 

          a) What went wrong,
          b) What you changed so it doesn't happen again,
          c) How you're going to be faster fixing it if it does occur again.

4) Say what you mean, do what you say

• Honesty and integrity are fundamental to a team; there can't be mutual trust without it
• Say what's on your mind (keeping problems inside is a good recipe for ulcers)

5) Take ownership

• Admit mistakes, take responsibility
• Say what you're going to do to improve
• “Sign-up" and commit to get things done

6) Propose solutions

• Identifying the problem is only half the job; “no problem identification without recommendation.”
• When you have a problem to solve, take time to think about and suggest possible solutions to discuss
• Avoid complain mode and "dive-bomb deliveries;" keep ownership of the problem.
• That way we problem solve as a team, instead of hosting a gripe party.

7) Be frugal

• Handle time and expense records as if they were your mother's checking account
• Look for a low cost solution that doesn't lose quality
• Travel as if it's your credit card and bank account

8) Continuous Improvement

• Everything can be better the next time
• Check your work for quality, accuracy --you are your own QA department!
• Take initiative to constantly learn new things

          o Build prototypes
          o Test hypotheses
          o Dig into things with some research and analysis
          o Have a "book-of-the-month" (CD, seminar, etc.) mentality

9) Think positive

• Look for the bright side, the silver lining, the prize at the bottom of the box
• The glass is not half-empty, it's half-full

10) Play hard

• Have fun with everything you do
• Foster a rich sense of humor (it's the best antidote for stress!)
• Play seriously - play is work: it's the key to innovation

11) Teamwork

• Respect your neighbor
• Hold inclusive meetings: every opinion counts
• Solicit all participants input; “no wall flowers!”

12) Bias for Action

• Meet, discuss, build consensus.... but then take action and “do something!”
• End every meeting with a clear understanding of who will do what by when
• Look for the pragmatic solution; “80% solutions are good enough.” “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
• Planning is good, but so is humility: “50% of what you need to know is learned by doing;” so get started!

13) Service orientation

• Take the time to help somebody get something done
• Take the time to teach - help others become self-sufficient
• Treat other departments as if they are your customers, as if they are writing your paycheck.

14) Servant Leadership

• The management pyramid is upside down - managers serve their people

          o Help remove obstacles
          o Champion causes up the line
          o Get people what they need to get the job done.

15) Keep Score

• “Teams that don't keep score are only practicing”
• Gather data, run the numbers, prove the difference, “move the needle” forward

Of these 15, my top "hot" buttons are these 4:

#1 Bias for Action

• Meet, discuss, build consensus.... but then take action and do something
• End every meeting with a clear understanding of who will do what by when
• Look for the pragmatic solution
• Keep score
• Deliver!

#2 Service orientation

• Take the time to help somebody get something done
• Take the time to teach - help others become self-sufficient
• Treat other departments, vendors and each other as if they are your customers

          o As if they are writing your paycheck

#3 Take ownership

• Admit mistakes, take responsibility
• Say what you're going to do to improve
• “Sign-up" and commit to get things done

#4 Play hard

• Have fun with everything you do
• Foster a rich sense of humor (it's the best antidote for stress!)
• Play seriously - play is work: it's the key to innovation (prototype everything)

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."