Every now and again you read something you really wish you’d written – admittedly not always in Harvard Business Review which is a publication I’ve often derided  however the post below is one of those rare examples

So good, I felt the need to repost here

Its particularly relevant to those of us who are a certain age and have ventured into the wacky start-up / scale-out world.

Having spent the last 2.5yrs working with people sometimes young enough to be my kids, I recognise the one-line trade agreement: “I’ll offer you some emotional intelligence (& experience) for your digital intelligence.”

Also…. “Wisdom is about pattern recognition. And the older you are, the more patterns you’ve seen.”

From Chip Conley @HBR – I Joined Airbnb at 52, and Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and the Tech Industry is a great read

https://hbr.org/2017/04/i-joined-airbnb-at-52-and-heres-what-i-learned-about-age-wisdom-and-the-tech-industry?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

Google by numbers

(taken from Developer I/O Keynote –  May 2017

• Over a billion monthly active users across seven key services like Gmail and YouTube

• Over one billion hours of video consumed each day on YouTube

• Over one billion kilometres navigated on Google Maps every day

• Over 800 million monthly active users on Google Drive

• More than 500 million active users on Google Photos

• 1.2 billion photos uploaded to Google every day

• Two billion active users of Android globally, as of this week

Wow!!! 

You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes well you just might find

You get what you need

Time to plunder the Rollings Stones catalog and these lyrics came to mind in a quite bizarre recent client meeting.

Many of you know that one of my ‘go to’ questions for certain clients who tell me what they are planning to do is to ask them “why”. What do you think “doing this stuff” will actually achieve. Essentially, what do you want to be at the end of all that effort.

But this time it was different. This time the question was “How do we become a digital business?” As my eyebrows rose they added “You know, like one of those startups you advise”.

Pause for thought. This was a successful and profitable business and sure, tapping into the current digital narrative makes perfect sense, but that wasn’t the question. The question was “How do we become a digital business?”

Pause again and, after what seemed like an age, I replied “you can’t” – and here’s why.

Firstly, I have no idea what they actually meant by a “digital business” – this was an organization that created physical product, had complex distribution and owned outlets. It was about as physical as you could get and they certainly weren’t gonna become a software of services company overnight

Equally, this was a business with a strong orderbook and good revenues. Surely they didn’t want to suddenly ditch everything, operate with little or no profit, scrambling around to find the next big client and continually iterating their product to try and find that secret sauce. Surely they didn’t want to swap a healthy balance sheet for VC/PE investment (aka debt) that comes with additional board members solely focussed on the fastest route to a target multiple.

So what were they looking for? Turns out there were a few things. Passion for one but also there was a sense that they were perhaps going through the motions. That they didn’t feel as connected to their customers as they once were. They knew what people bought from them but they had no idea why – sounds familiar?

In fact, they didn’t need to be a digital business at all – they just needed to be a better business. And often that’s fine. Just use all this new tech to digitize what you already do to make it more than it already is.

Sure, many digital businesses and startups have a certain cadence and sense of purpose and those are great things to add to any business but they are digital businesses because they are – at their core – digital. So yes, by all means observe, experience and learn from them but also recognise what you are.

There’s nothing wrong with “digitizing” an existing business if it gets you closer to your customers, makes you more responsive and adaptable and enables you to be decisive based on new levels of insight. But that’s not being digital – that’s just good business.

So sometime you can’t always get what you want – it’s better to just get what you need.

Is your “customer centric” strategy genuinely about the customer or is it more about yourself?

It’s all about you – not me

It’s all about the things that you’re expecting me to be

There’s not enough time – to live

And all that you’re expecting me to give

Slightly more obscure lyrical reference today but “You Not Me” from the band Dream Theater has been ringing in my head at a number of customer meetings recently.

And the subject that’s to blame?? “Single view of the customer”.

Ah that old chestnut I hear you sigh. The problem is that it keeps coming up in discussions about being “customer centric”, which is indeed a laudable thing to be – if it’s done for the right reasons. “We put the customer at the heart of everything we do” is a phrase that’s used up more ink in your average strategy document than almost any other in recent years but increasingly I find myself asking why?

Why do you want a “single view of the customer”? Why do you want to be “customer centric”?

No, I’m not having an emperor’s new clothes moment but it’s an important question. Who are you doing this for – you or them?

Ah, there’s the rub. Because It’s rarely, if ever, about the customer. This so called customer centric strategy is actually all about you and whether you can cross-sell or upsell more effectively. It’s about increasing metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) or share of wallet. In fact, I’d contend, the reason why so many of these initiatives fail is that they rarely consider the most important party – the customer.

They are invariably “inside out” ie something WE do because WE want more. They’re about solutions that WE create and then point outwards, in the hope of engaging the customer. And when they fail, much like the Englishman on holiday who cant be understood locally, we just shout louder – ie we build bigger programs with loftier ambitions which are even less likely to connect with our customers.

But what if we changed – not just the narrative but the whole approach? What if we stopped thinking about us and started from a different premise? What does the customer really want? What do they need? How do we empower our customers? How do we give them the ability to engage with us and most importantly how do we then listen and respond? How do we become genuinely “Outside In”?

In many ways that’s what this digital stuff is all about – being responsive, adaptive, insightful and decisive. Placing the real power in the hands of your customers. Sure, you have to be able to make good on the “outside in” promise and also have the enterprise systems to transact and fulfill in a similarly responsive fashion. But success in this digital world requires the effective marriage of a company’s outside in AND inside out capabilities. And not just from a technology perspective but across every element of the company – design, product management, operations et al.

In many ways it’s about becoming a responsive and agile company that’s geared around customer need.

So next time you’re having that “customer centric” moment, ask yourself the most important question – it this all about you ?

You got me on the line, Now tryin’ to call your bluff

But you just won’t be satisfied, Too much ain’t enough

Yes this time I’m back with lyrics and title from the 1978 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers hit – Too Much AIn’t Enough… but when it comes to collecting data, and more specifically our personal data, when is too much enough?

This came up in conversation recently at the board meeting of a “connected homes” start-up I’m involved with. You see, through smart sensors and apps, we’ll have the ability to capture all sorts of data but the key question was “what should we collect”.

It got me thinking about a study conducted by the German motorists organization ADAC late last year which found that in addition to distance data, driving modes, engine revolutions etc, a BMW 320d was being used to collect a whole lot more. The car was transmitting all keyed  SatNav destinations along with other personal information such as contacts synchronized from mobile phones. Now why would BMW need my contacts?

Do you know what data your car is capturing and transmitting?  Perhaps you should. It’s not like you have any control over its network security. So what would happen if your data was compromised – after all you approved the sharing of your personal data via your car – didn’t you?

And from April 2018 all new cars will have to be fitted with eCell, a system that sends the exact location of a vehicle to emergency services in the event of an accident. Of course, to do that it needs an “always on” mobile data connection. Now, I wonder what your friendly neighbourhood marketing director might want to do with that?

As the current “IOT (Internet of Things) Wave” continues to gather pace, more and more of our lives will become connected to faceless corporations who will suck up our data at the first sight of a mistakenly unchecked opt out box. So whose responsibility it it to guard our privacy or make sure companies “do the right thing” with our information. Surely It can’t be us? We’d sign our lives away for the simplicity of a one click sign on to the latest messaging app – we can’t be trusted

Here’s a thought. For years we lived by the maxim ‘caveat emptor‘ – buyer beware – until consumer rights came along to protect us from unscrupulous behaviour. I wonder what the equivilent will be in the data world because it seems that nowadays, not only do we we have to be protected from ourselves,  but we also have to be protected from the things around us. Maybe it’s time for the CIO to step into the whole data collection debate and ask the question no one else seems willing to tackle; in a world where we can collect everything, what information “should” we collect to retain the trust of our customers. I mean, the “I” in CIO is information isn’t it?

Here’s a really good and well written piece < here> on a topic that has, in the past, had way too much consulting BS associated with it.

<   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dept-dead-long-live-technology-innovation-team-justin-vaughan-brown?trk=hp-feed-article-title-share   >

A wise ex boss of mine once asked….. “help me make ‘the IT’ silent so we can use technology to really transform this business”.

That was well before “DevOps” and “Digital” became the new boardroom buzzwords but I’ve never forgotten those words and have done my best to both remember and apply them wherever I’ve been

…. everything’s just the same

These words are starting to resonate with almost daily regularity – which is about the same frequency I hear the words ‘cloud computing’. Now first let me declare a position – I am of an age! That’s an age where I still see all this IT stuff as really just ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ and I bore people with the fact that, while I work in technology, I’m actually way more interested in “what it does” than “what it is”.

So I have to admit I’m struggling to be swept along on the wave of this so called new era of cloud computing.

Let me explain. When I was a mere slip of a thing there were these things called mainframes – huge computers, often from IBM, that performed all manner of wonders. Operators tamed these Visigoths of computing power through green-screen terminals that actually did very little computing – in fact, they did so little computing we called them dumb terminals – and they were connected by some cables and switches. Often, the mainframe was shared among many users via a sharing service (for IBM systems, TSO – Time Sharing Option) and the really sophisticated ones were even divided into partitions so that they could look like lots of computers at the same time.

Back then, what were the big issues the DP professional faced? Identity, security, reliability, recovery, etc.

Lots has changed since then – three-tier client server, middleware, the network effect, web 1.0, web 2.0 and now the all-conquering cloud. But hang on, we always knew things would get smaller, faster and cheaper – Moore’s law told us that much – and that nice Mr Berners-Lee made sure access and interface would be simpler. So what actually is this cloud computing then? Well, there’s this huge computing capability (what, like a mainframe?) that’s accessed via a browser that actually does very little computing (what, like a dumb terminal?) and your communications flow over the Internet (so, a pretty large cable then?).

And what are we worried about in this new computing age? Identity, security, reliability, recovery… need I go on?

Now, plenty of you will say I’ve missed the point and that cloud computing is actually all about lowering your total cost of ownership, time to market, etc. And of course you’d all be correct – in certain circumstances. But as a far as the IT management issues are concerned “nothing changes – everything’s just the same”.

So perhaps we should forget the hype and go back to what all this “cloud stuff” can do rather than fixating on defining “what it is”.

JMHO

This post orignially appeared as my first contribution to the 360°IT Blog