In many cases the CEO has worked his/her way through several steps of the corporate ladder – has demonstrated drive, ambition, hard work, understanding of their superior’s objectives, loyalty to their predecessor, ability to build a team around him/her self and ruthlessness, as required.

So, having gotten there.  What now?  Time to begin to shape the strategy, shape events, shape the organisation.  Switch 50% of focus away from internal to external, shareholders, marketplace.  Work on developing some key people, some key relationships.  Manage the Board.  Be accountable to the Board for everything, be accountable to staff for their wellbeing, security, future.

So what are the key skills to be a successful boss?  Don’t think Geoffrey James is far off in this piece.  Of these I would tend to focus on three skills:

1. management as service, not control
2. motivation from vision, not fear
3. fun, not toil

In a sports club I see coaches as there to enable the players to get the best out of themselves.  I see committee members as there to provide the environment for the coaches and players.  In a work environment management is about service – in the sense that you are there to enable the team, to empower them.  Fundamentally this is service, not control.

Ultimately fear is limited in what it can help you achieve.  In the end it will kill you.  Vision is what inspires, excites – causes people to go the extra mile.

And, if you are going to dedicate much (even most) of your waking time to something, then it must be fun.

So, I am looking for this in bosses.  I think if they do not see themselves in this light then they will struggle.  When you commit to the service model you do not worry about recruiting/ promoting people with skills and experience in excess of your own.  In fact, you seek them out.  Of course, this only works if you have real vision.

For bosses the challenge, for the good ones, is to keep time for the important bits: service/ coaching, vision and fun.

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None of this is to suggest that outsourcing is a straight forward slam dunk.

I think Jack Wallen in his recent article, 10 problems with outsourcing, does a good job of reminding us of some of the perils of outsourcing.  In particular I think you need to address:

• How will outsourced IT be managed post outsourcing?
• What will be the impact on morale within the company?

In listing 10 problems Jack may be seen to be leaning a little towards the ‘why would you ever do this?’ position.  However I think all of the problems listed represent potential issues – is not addressed adequately in scoping, planning and executing the outsourcing arrangements.

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American Medical News references a recent report from the Journal of Healthcare suggesting that medical practitioners and hospitals need to addess accessibility of their web sites – content should be written for the reader, not for the writer.

This is a challenge for all websites – not to bombard the reader with technical jargon.

Excellent example quoted is: ‘For example, some websites have data related to ventilator-acquired pneumonia, but they used only the acronym. Or they used “nosocomial infections” instead of the more understandable term “hospital-acquired infections.”‘.

The report also references limited use of social networks.  This is also consistent with findings of recent Deloitte report – suggesting only 6% of physicians using social media to communicate with patients.

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Core questions for me seem to be:

• Does adoption of IT solutions have the potential to improve patient healthcare?
• Can IT reduce risk to the patient?
• Can IT assist medical professionals in getting more of their decisions right?
• Can IT be implemented without significant impact on the business of the medical professional?
• Does IT offer the medical profesional and the patient improved communication/ cooperation/ collaboration?
• What are the downsides for the patient and for the doctor?
• Are there quality applications and secure frameworks available to the doctor and the patient?

This new report from Deloitte, based in the US, would suggest that adoption is slow and inconsistent.

It would seem to me that market forces will ultimately drive this – and by market force I mean choice for the patient, requirement to communicate/ collaborate and regulation or the increasing requirement to demonstrate the quality of proceses followed.

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Many of these companies generate no real benefit by managing IT internally.  They have acquired more IT and teams of people have been grown, recruited, assembled to support IT.  The working assumption has been that this is the way to work – find IT which helps the business, put the IT in place and put people in place who can support the IT and, potentially, work with the business to configure the IT to enable the business to be more successful.  Unfortunately IT turns out to be complex and demands a great deal of management – in fact IT, in many case, is problematic.  Year by year more and more effort and cash seems to have to be devoted to maintaining IT, rather than creating more value in the business.

But over the last number of years important developments in technology have given rise to real alternatives for business.  These developments have included increased processing power, availability of large scale storage, virtualisation, building of large scale data centres, potential for significant energy savings, widespread availability of cost effective broadband communications.

Companies are now presented with unlimited choices with respect to how they choose to provide, support and manage IT.  We have seen the emergence of all sorts of businesses offering companies any mix of internally and externally managed IT.  If as a business you believe 80% of what you do with IT is mundane, generic, represents risk/ distraction, you can now choose to have a specialist provide, support and manage this, while you focus on your business – including the 20% of IT which you believe represents value to the business.

For the established business this move to outsourced IT is not without challenges and risks:

• Understanding the true cost of current arrangements
• Selecting outsource provider(s)
• Defining service level agreements
• Managing transfer of key IT employees from the company to the outsource provider
• Providing safeguards in the contract e.g. termination should SLA performance not match expectations
• Managing expectations within the business – as more formal SLA defined response times kick in

However, if the following can be achieved, then there must be a real case for examining the opportunity:

• Lower cost
• Reduced risk (less exposure to limited, concentrated expertise)
• Improved service
• Predictable costs

There have been plenty of internal IT projects which have not generated the targeted benefits.  Likewise many outsourcing contracts have failed to deliver cost savings and improved service.  But fundamentally, selecting a vendor to provide services in which they are expert and well resourced, assuming a competitively priced landscape, should represent real value to business.  Businesses want to concentrate on their core objectives – provision, support and management of IT should be left to companies with a core competence in just this.

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The theory must be that there is potential for a win/win.  For the company outsourcing, perhaps some combination of

• Cost savings
• Reduced risk (depedence on key people)
• Quality of services
• Flexibility
• Pay as you go/ pay as you consume
• Service Level Agreement
• extended hours support as may be required
• Avoidance of upfront capital outlay

For the third party providing the managed services:

• Recurring revenue -  contracted for an extended period, profit
• Scale:  buying opportunties
• Opportunity to develop/ retain expertise/ IP
• Opportunity to sell additional services

In any such outsourcing of jobs S.I. No. 131/2003 — European Communities (Protection of Employees on Transfer of Undertakings) Regulations 2003 applies.  In general this will result in transfer of the employees from the company choosing to outsource to the outsourcing provider. For the employees this may be seen in a positive or negative light – depending on their perceived opportunitie before and after the outsourcing decision.  For the managed services provider this requires significant management and development in order to consolidate the new team with current resources while providing a seamless service to the new client.

Will be interesting to see whether current trend towards outsourcing continues – supported by the ongoing development of data centres and clound computing.   And will be very interesting to see what happens these managed services providers as they build up large teams of IT professionals under the Transfer of Undertakings legislation.

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When you see facebook adopting a version of RDFa then you can assume you are onto something.  And now we’ve seen this.

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On the downside mentions some negatives e.g.’ to radically redefine individual privacy, and to expose our children to unprecedented levels of violence and pornography – disincentives to innovation’.

Have to say as someone who grew up in a time of far less surveillance this does worry me a lot for the kids of today.  Many’s the stupid things that we did when we were growing up – which were better not being video’d and posted to the world.  To be honest the prevalence of digital cameras and similar devices are probably more of the problem than the web itself.  But I’m not sure hor w this will work itself out – potentially a nightmare version of Orwell’s 1984 is playing itself out – where Big Brother is now a combination of ‘citizens’ snooping on people and the web as Big Brother processing and forwarding the data.

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Main focus of the book  seems to be Bruce Mau and his approach to Design – of his philosophy re Design and its place in the world.

The ‘Glimmer Principles’ are:

Ask Stupid Questions, Jump Fences, make hope visible, Go deep, Work the metaphor, Design what you do. Face consequences. Embrace constraints, Design for emergence and BEGIN ANYWHERE.

The book and the examples are built around these principles.

There are basic entry level introductions to a number of frameworks and concepts e.g. Doblin Inc.’s five phases of a consumer experience: attraction, entry, engagement, exit, extension (pp 134-137).

As someone who has been involved in BPR for many years now I could certainly relate to the principles referenced.  Asking Stupid Questions and Going Deep are critical to any effort.  I think current focus on lean processes in start ups also echoes many of the ket principles, in particular Make Hope Visible and Face Consequences – in the context of maximising learning/ experimentation with the potential users of the solution.

In summary, I found the book more to be an interesting introduction to Mau and a number of other Designers rather than a ‘how to’ type book.  In this sense I found the title a little misleading and the book a little disappointing.  On the positive side the book is a call to action for everyone to put on their Designer Hat – that design is not something limited to a small few creative types.

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“We are amassing an unimaginable amount of data in the world. In just three years, [internet] traffic is expected to total more than half a zettabyte. That’s a trillion gigabytes – or a one followed by 21 zeroes,” he tells industry, academic and political leaders.

“Where we once inferred, we now know. Where we once interpolated and extrapolated, we can now determine. The historical is giving way to the real-time and it’s not just about volume and velocity. The nature of the data we are collecting and analysing is changing, too.

“All this data is far more real-time than ever before. Most of us today, as leaders and as individuals, make decisions based on information that is backward-looking and limited in scope. That’s the best we had, but that is quickly changing.”

This just reinforces my previous blog of June 2009: here.

And this week we had the official launch in the UK of its government linked open data site.

We’ve seen the debate – back and forth – about linked open data.  We’ve seen the debate about top down v. bottom up approaches to semantics.  We’ve seen the arguments about the merits of RDF as against other frameworks.  But the volumes of data continue to increase – as does participation in social networks.

On a daily basis we see announcement about new products.  Nova Spivack tells us that the days of ‘Search’ are running out – we need ‘Help’ not ‘Search’.  We eagerly await his Twine 2.0.  We have seen significant product advancements announced this month in products such as Open Calais and Open Amplify.  One other product which caught my eye last week is Kngine.

Products such as Amplify aim to deal with the ‘tricky’ content – e.g. the ‘opinions’ implicit in content of social networks.   And this is a key element of what we are looking for: context for the content.  I am more interested in information on a particular subject when I understand the context, the perspective of the provider of the information.  I also want the richness of analysis possible through the combination of wider sources of data – including data compiled by government agencies which should be available to me.  Linked open data initiatives are required in all countries.  For Ireland – the sooner the better, if we consider ourselves a smart economy or a knowledge society.

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