Joe Shepley

Just wanted to let everyone know I’ll be a little busy with our newest addition, James Matthew, born this morning.

So the blogs may be a bit slow in coming these next few weeks (months?)…I’ll dive back in to SharePoint, records management, and ECM once I come up for air!

Almost three years ago, I did some prognostication about SharePoint owning enterprise content management (ECM) in the not-too-distant future.

At the time, SharePoint 2010 was just released to market and the post raised some eyebrows because I thought it entirely plausible that one day SharePoint could be all the ECM anyone needed (other than heavy-duty workflow and image management).

Before you rush to judge me one way or the other, you need both to understand that I was fresh of the heels of a pretty amazing demo at a F500 client who had made the decision to use SharePoint 2010 as their sole ECM platform and to remember that in the summer of 2010, traditional ECM vendors were scrambling pretty hard to figure out how to position themselves relative to SharePoint.

Three years later, what do I think of my prediction?

It all depends

One the one hand, I was right, because SharePoint does own ECM today, in the sense that, no matter what other ECM tool(s) an organization has, they almost certainly have SharePoint. No other ECM vendor can make that claim.

On the other hand, I was wrong, because, as successful as SharePoint has been and as much market share as it’s taken from traditional ECM in the last three years, it has not displaced (or significantly disrupted) OpenText, IBM, EMC, Oracle, Hyland, etc., at the majority of F1000 organizations.

So, knowing what I know today, I have to admit that I’m less bullish on SharePoint owning ECM in the sense of being the sole/primary ECM system for the majority of F1000 organizations anytime soon.

Too risky, too costly, other targets

The main reason is that the risk profile of SharePoint as primary ECM system for a F1000 organization is higher than the risk profile of SharePoint plus a traditional ECM tool. Full stop.

I’m happy to scrap with Microsoft partners in the comments on this one (you all know I love a good fight), but I’d be much more interested to hear from all you end users out there on this one: would you rather bet on OpenText, IBM, EMC, Oracle, etc. as your provider for capabilities SharePoint can’t provide (e.g., workflow, image management, ERP integration, LOB applications) or a range of generally smaller Microsoft partners?

My guess is that having SharePoint plus two, three, four (or more) smaller partners is just going to be too risky for most F1000 firms to justify getting rid of traditional ECM in favor of this path. These partners are mostly under $200M – $300M in revenue–some of them way under. So as a responsible F1000 firm, you have to ask yourself what your plan is if they get bought, go out of business, change product direction, etc. All of which are very real risks to consider.

You also need to take into account the significant time, effort, and cost organizations have already put into making traditional ECM work for them. And while sometimes this is an inadvisable throwing good money after bad type situation, in the majority of cases, F1000 organizations have some flavor of ECM  humming along nicely, thank you very much. Quite rightly, then, they would balk at the idea of ripping and replacing their existing ECM with SharePoint. I just don’t think the ROI is consistently there to justify it…especially if you add in the heightened vendor risk I mentioned earlier. To me, taking all this into consideration, it becomes almost a total non starter.

The final reason I don’t think SharePoint will be the sole ECM system for F1000 organizations anytime soon is that I don’t think this is Microsoft’s goal anymore. Nothing in their product strategy for SharePoint suggests that they want to have organizations move hundreds of millions of images, for example, out of Mobius or IBM CMOD and into SharePoint; nor do they want to displace IBM, OpenText, Pega, K2, or whatever, as the workflow engine of choice.

Instead, I think they’ve eaten as much of traditional ECM’s lunch as they care to and are now moving on to a domain that holds out the potential for a much larger and much more lucritive lunch to eat: cloud content management providers like Box and Dropbox. I think they have their eye on all those terabytes and petabytes of unstructured shared drive and hard drive content just begging to be moved into a more managed repository, which traditional ECM vendors are not only bad at doing, but have pretty much given up on: enter SharePoint backed by Office 365.

 The final word

Okay, so that’s my take on SharePoint owning ECM in 2013. What do you all think? Jump in, share your thoughts, maybe some specifics about what your organization is doing, and let’s get a good discussion going on this one!

In the last post, I called it like I seen it: SharePoint out of the box can’t do records management. 2007, 2010, 2013—none of ‘em left to their own devices are worth much when it comes to automating the retention and (more importantly) disposition of your records according to the retention schedule.

But as if that weren’t provocative enough, I also argued that, regardless of system (SharePoint, IBM FileNet/P8/CMOD, EMC Documentum, OpenText, Hyland OnBase, whatever), and regardless of the capabilities of that system, pretty much no one is actually doing real records management on their electronic content.

Check out the last post to see my reasoning for this being true (and let me know what you think of it). In this post, however, let’s turn to what might be driving the fact that almost no one is doing electronic records management (whether in SharePoint or any other enterprise content management system).

If only technology were the problem

I find myself saying this a lot in my day-to-day travels as a strategy consultant focused on ECM, but it’s especially true of automated records management. Here’s why.

Imagine you’re a Fortune 500 bank. One of your record types will be some flavor of account holder documentation, which in the U.S. will likely have an event-based retention trigger along the lines of death of the account holder plus three years. So far so good, except your ECM system has no idea when an account holder dies, which means it won’t be able to automate the retention and disposition of account holder documentation—at least not easily.

One option is to pull a list of all deceased account holders from your customer relationship management (CRM)system into your ECM system and then use that to drive the trigger. Except that at most organizations, simply getting an account holder’s correct phone number or email requires a database administrator to write a custom query, let alone something as exotic as the date they died.

Another option, and this is the most common, is to simply take the account opening date and add 100 years, because this should reasonably cover the lifespan of 99.999% of your account holders. The downside is that you’re keeping account holder documentation 97 years too long, which is akin to not disposing of it at all.

Let’s leave aside the issue of joint account holders (because you’ll need to check for them every time you’re getting ready to dispose three years after the death of a primary account holder), and just assume that you’re able to find accurate and timely death dates for all account holders in your CRM and pull them into your ECM system to automate the disposition of account holder documentation. Give yourself a pat on the back, but don’t celebrate too long: all that work only solved your problem for a single record type—now get cracking on the other few hundred you likely have kicking around.

Semantics

Ok, some of you might be saying, “But what you’ve described is a technology problem—if only the system could manage to know when an account holder dies, we could do RM!” And there’s a measure of truth in this, but that’s sort of like saying technology problems are what mainly prevent us from colonizing Venus. Yes, if we had the technology, we could do it, but really it’s the practical constraints on colonization (temperature, atmosphere, etc.) that are the problem.

Electronic records management offers analogous challenges: the way most organizations approach records management as well as the way regulators have framed the requirements for corporate record keeping are primarily what make electronic records management difficult/impossible, not weaknesses in technology (although these don’t help).

The final word

We’ve gotten away from the intentionally provocative start to this series of posts (SharePoint can’t do records management) and have reached the people/process heart of the matter: organizations need to reframe how they approach records management if they hope to manage electronic records in an automated way. Hopefully I got past sensationalism to offer insights you found valuable and maybe inspired you to think about how you could better address electronic records at your organization, whether or not you use SharePoint.

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been feeling especially cantankerous these days when I sit down to write. It all started with my “SharePoint can’t do records management” series, and I hoped I would cheer up once that was done, but I haven’t.

So, with my heightened cantankerousness in mind, I want to explore something that’s been on my mind for a while now and also see what folks think about it (because you all know how much I love a good heckle-fest).

Basically, I feel like the few viable enterprise content management (ECM) platforms out there (IBM P8/FileNet, EMC Documentum, and OpenText EIM) are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable, i.e., you could throw a dart to choose one and be as successful as if you did a full, due diligence RFP.

There is no 100% solution

Let’s face it, the answer to “what ECM  system should I use?” is (almost) never black and white. In 99% of the cases, the answer is, “You could use any one of the three market leaders and meet 70% of your needs”–but each will meet a different 70%, and you’ll need to decide what 30% you can live without.

And what’s more, for core ECM, you really could just throw a dart and be successful with any of the three, provided you tackled the people/process aspects (policies and procedures, governance, information architecture, etc.) successfully. If you don’t tackle these things, it likely won’t matter which solution you pick: you’ll almost certainly fail.

Can I really throw a dart?

No.

Why not?

Because despite the high-level overlap between the ECM platforms offered by OpenText, IBM, and EMC, there are some important, more granular distinctions and contextual differences that make one solution a clear winner over others in certain situations. For example:

• The incumbent is always the presumed first choice – in order to justify the switching costs involved in rip and replace scenarios, there better be some huge problem with the current platform or vendor, and “huge” does not mean “we find the UI kludgy” or “adoption has been low”, it usually means something like “we have no clear upgrade path from version X to version X+1, so it’s the equivalent of a new install”, and so on
• Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance will tend towards IBM
• Heavy Industry (mining, oil and gas, manufacturing, construction) will tend towards OpenText
• SAP shops will tend towards OpenText
• If you need SharePoint integration, OpenText is the only one with proven success
• Pharmas will lean heavily towards Documentum

Some generalizations

Over and above these situations, we can make some generalizations about each platform to help drive a decision:

• OpenText will be amazing…if you survive the first 18 months - built from a wide range of acquired products on different code bases, with a technical complexity that approaches an ERP platform, and offering the FULL STACK of ECM capabilities, you will have everything you need to succeed with OpenText…if you can manage to successfully deploy it and don’t collapse under its weight.
• Documentum has been a market leader for years, but is struggling of late to find its way - five years ago, they were consistently a top contender; today, they have to fight hard and swim upstream to hold onto their market share. Some of that has to do with misses on the sales/account management side of the house, but a good deal of it has to do with missteps on the product development side. The product development teams have done a tremendous job of late to articulate a compelling vision, but the jury’s still out on whether EMC will manage to execute on it and deliver the goods in time to remain relevant.
• IBM is the middle of the road, solid choice - no one gets fired for hiring IBM, or so the saying goes. They are also pushing the envelope with information life cycle governance and advanced case management solutions–giving them an edge in organizations where these are key use cases.

The final word

I could go on, but this captures the main outlines of the differences (and similarities) between the Big Three ECM vendors. Jump in and let us all know what you think of my take on the ECM vendor space–let’s get the conversation started!

Let’s start this admittedly provocative post with a question: Anybody out there actually doing records management in SharePoint?

And before you answer, let me emphasize that  I mean real records management, like, with actual, system-enabled automated disposition according to your retention schedule.

If you answered “yes” to this question, please jump immediately to the comments section and let us all know (and while you’re at it, give us some indication of how on earth you’re doing it), because based on my experience, I’d be willing to bet the answer to this question is going to be “no” in 99.9% of all cases.

And while I’m in a betting mood, I’d also be willing to bet that if you answered “yes”, you 100% aren’t doing it with out of the box SharePoint, because out of the box SharePoint can’t do records management at the level the vast majority of organizations require—it just doesn’t, people, no matter how much Microsoft claims that it does, or trumpets that fact that they themselves use it to. But don’t just take my word for it, ask Bruce Miller.

Gauntlet – thrown

And lest you think I’m heaping blame on already blame-laden records managers out there, let me say right off the bat that the real problem with records management in SharePoint is that Microsoft doesn’t really understand records management or what it takes to enable it with an enterprise content management (ECM) system.

Exhibit A: SharePoint 2007, which was supposed to be “records management ready”, but required users to put all their records in a separate area (the records center) to manage them. Getting users to work in two different sites, one for records and one for the rest of their stuff? Say it with me: never, gonna, happen. And never did happen.

Exhibit B: SharePoint 2010 didn’t get much better. True, you could now manage records in place, but 2010 drove records retention and disposition using content types, which, if you had a few hundred of them, were incredibly cumbersome to work with from an administrative and architectural perspective; which is precisely how many most organizations need at a minimum to support their retention schedules; which is why I haven’t seen a single organization using SharePoint 2010 to do real records management (i.e., with actual, system-enabled retention and disposition according to the retention schedule), and I run into a few hundred Fortune 1000 companies a year between projects, sales calls, and events.

The problem is bigger than SharePoint

Now before I get accused of bashing SharePoint here, let me let you all in on a dirty little secret: 99% of organizations are not doing automated records management on an enterprise scale. And this is true whether they have SharePoint, IBM FileNet/P8/CMOD, EMC Documentum, OpenText, Hyland OnBase—whatever. In the end, it doesn’t matter: for a whole host of reasons, some of them technical, some of them organizational, so few folks are actually doing automated records management that we could accurately say that no one is.

Let’s look at some anecdotal evidence for my claim and then turn to some of the reasons why before exploring how we might turn this around.

First, at every ARMA, AIIM, EFM, or other ECM-related event I speak at, I always ask the audience, “who’s doing retention and disposition on electronically stored information (ESI) according to the retention schedule?”, and I never get more than a hand or two in response…and then I ask a follow-up: “Even on shared drives and hard drives?”, and all the hands go down.

Second, no client I’ve ever worked with (somewhere north of 120, all Fortune 1000) has managed to do automated records management on any significant basis. And if you widen the sample to all the Fortune 1000 clients my firm has worked with (somewhere between 400-500), there is only one, a North American bank, that is doing so.

In addition to this lone firm, I had one person speak up one time at an event to say that their firm (a global construction company) was doing automated records management on all ESI…and she stuck to her guns even after my follow-up question about all ESI.

So that’s two organizations out of 400-500 my firm has directly worked with, which is about a half a percent—not good numbers considering we’ve had automated records management software in some form since at least the turn of the millennium. And the number gets worse if you include the 1000+ firms I’ve informally polled at events or talked to as part of the sales cycle.

The final word

So SharePoint or no, we are terrible at automated records management across the board, irrespective of industry or platform—I think that’s an indisputable fact. If you disagree, by all means jump in and let’s get a good argument going.

In the next post, I’ll move on from the problem to a discussion of why we might find ourselves in this mess and suggest some ways that we could move forward–ways that some forward-leaning organizations are already exploring to fix their records management problems.

I’m at the end of a series of posts looking at how enterprise content management (ECM) can transform oil and gas (O&G) organizations. In the last post, I walked through some of the strategic transformations ECM can contribute to if it’s aligned properly. In this post, I want to wrap things up by looking at more tactical transformations that ECM can align with to drive tangible business benefits.

Without rehashing the last post, let’s review the main areas of strategic alignment that ECM impacts at O&G organizations before digging into the tactical:

• Mergers and acquisitions - scope and price more accurately, integrate more effectively, realize value more quickly
• New ventures - scale to support the breakneck growth of current O&G environment
• One culture - move from being merely multi-national to truly global
• Goal zero - produce hydrocarbons at the highest level of safety at maximum efficiency

Tactical alignment

Ok, so when we come down from the airy, empyrean heights of strategy, there are some very tactical, very important areas of day-to-day operations at O&G organizations that are right in the crosshairs of ECM…and that are central to producing hydrocarbons safely and efficiently:

• Operational disruptions - Getting the right documents in the hands of the right people at the right time is absolutely critical for maintaining operations with minimal disruptions.
  • For example, the conveyor belt that pulls dirt away from an onshore well is up for replacement; the home office pulls the specs and sees that the belt is 35 meters long and orders it; when it gets to the hole, it turns out the belt is 40 meters long because the topography of the well site required this change during construction; but because the as-builts never made it back to the home office, they were working off out of date specs. The result? Production stops for three days while they get a new belt (and pay rush shipping charges to do so). Oh, and we lose millions of dollars.
• Operational efficiency - As with preventing disruptions, running operations as efficiently as possible requires, among other things, strong document management. After all, designing the most efficient process and implementing the tools to monitor it does you far less good if the people responsible for the process don’t have the policies, procedures, and guidelines that articulate that process and direct users how to perform it.
  • For example, when shutting down a refinery for a turnaround, contractors (sometimes dozens or even hundreds of them) are brought in to help with the work. If they can’t easily find and access the documents they need (like standard operating procedures, maintenance logs, spec sheets, etc.), the turnaround will take longer than it would if they could easily find and access them. And the longer the turnaround takes, the longer the refinery is offline. The result? We lose millions of dollars while the refinery sits idle waiting for the turnaround to complete. And if the contractors not only have trouble finding the documents they need, but happen to find the wrong one? You could be faced with an incident that leads not only to fines, sanctions, and negative PR, but loss of life as well.
• Operational improvements - Almost all O&G organizations that are north of $3B in revenue or so spend a good deal of time and effort to continuously improve their operations. Whether they call it kaizen, six sigma, lean, or simply operational excellency, these organizations are trying to find the best way to execute their core business processes, promulgate these best practices across the entire organization, monitor the execution to ensure adherence, and use the results of this monitoring to continually improve their operations, i.e., plan, do, check, act. As you can imagine, these efforts have significant document management and collaboration requirements.
  • For example, when trying to integrate a new acquisition (or even just get a single engineering contractor up and running on a process), the availability and quality of process documentation is directly related to how quickly these new employees “get on the bus” so that they’re executing processes in accordance with the global process models that operational excellency has developed. And when these same folks have questions about or issues with the global process models, being able to collaborate across sites using the kind of tools that ECM provides can go a long way toward solving these problems before they have operational impacts.

The final word

Well, those are my thoughts on the transformational impact ECM can have on O&G organziations. There are more than these, of course–lots more. But these are the top of mind areas I’ve been seeing out in the trenches over the last 18 months; hopefully they resonate with what you’re experiencing at your organization. Either way, and as always, I’d love to hear from you all out there…so jump in, and let’s get the conversation started!

In the last post, I began to talk about how enterprise content management (ECM) can transform Oil and Gas (O&G) organizations in some fundamental ways. By way of a prelude, we spent most of the time talking about how not to sell the benefits of ECM to business stakeholders. In this post, with the prelude out of the way, let’s turn that frown upside down and talk about how you in fact should sell the benefits.

Without recapping the entire last post, suffice it to say that O&G companies care about one thing: producing hydrocarbons safely and efficiently. So business stakeholders need to understand how exactly ECM–or anything else, for that matter–contributes to that effort. Otherwise, no amount of best practices, industry standards, or smart-guy consulting frameworks are going to get them to support ECM at their organization.

It’s all about alignment

To effectively communicate the value of ECM to business folks you need to get tangible and relevant, and the best way to do that is not to try to educate them about the complexities of ECM from a practitioner’s perspective–that’s a recipe for failure. Instead, you need to align your communications with their strategic and tactical reality so that the benefits of ECM make sense on an immediate, intuitive level, i.e., a light bulb goes off and they just get it.

Strategic alignment

In terms of O&G, then, let’s look at the business value of ECM first in terms of some key strategic concerns:

• Mergers and acquisitions - When you’re doing M&A, you need to get a few things right: you want to buy it for the right price (at least what it’s worth, but ideally less, and under no circumstances more), understand the work required to integrate the acquisition, and start realizing value from it as quickly as possible.
  • Better ECM means an improved ability to create, find, and share documents, which, if they’re documents relating to the deal, will lead both to increased accuracy of sizing and pricing during discovery and negotiations as well as to faster time to value post acquisition.
• New ventures - Most O&G organizations are enjoying boom times and experiencing breakneck growth, not only from acquisitions, but also from new ventures. And the pace of growth is not being measured in tens or even dozens, but in hundreds of percentage points, e.g., instead of one offshore platform every three years, we’ll bring one online every year for three years or growing from 1,000 wells to 6,000 over the next five years.
  • In order to enable this level of growth (and do so safely and profitably), having the right documents in the hands of the right people at the right time is absolutely critical–if we’re all not on the same page, how can we scale to triple or quadruple our current capacity? Answer: we can’t.
• One culture - Most O&G organizations are global–but that’s in name only, i.e., they have offices and operations in multiple countries around the world. But if you ask whether these organizations function globally in the highest sense of the word, the answer is usually no: multiple and disparate corporate cultures, conflicting national cultures, and siloed operations make them merely multi-national rather than truly global.
  • ECM can contribute to the process of “going global” by fostering collaboration to build a unified corporate culture, from the level of individual sentiment (how deeply each employee identifies with the larger organization) to process standardization (that all employees doing the same job will do it in the same way) and everything in between. And more practically, ECM can ensure that everyone is looking at the same version of key corporate documents (from policies and press releases to standard operating procedures and engineering drawings)–one culture doesn’t do you much good if we’re still siloed in the information we have access to.
• Goal zero - a big part of producing hydrocarbons safely and efficiently is, well, safety. And the culture of safety is a huge part of every O&G organization I’ve every worked with, zero incidents being the bar they set for themselves. Folks with more of an insurance, fiserv, or banking background are always shocked when an O&G meeting begins with a thorough review of safety procedures and evacuation logistics, followed by a visual inspection for slip, trip, and fall hazards in the room (“Wait, isn’t this is a session to gather requirements for accounts payable automation?”).
  • Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) relies as much on accurate, easily accessible documentation available when it’s needed (real-time or just in time) as it does on adoption by users and their compliance–in fact, adoption and compliance are much more difficult, expensive, uncertain, and risky without the kind of document management access ECM done right can provide.

The final word

This has been a long post, so we’ll break here, take a breath, and close things out next time by taking a close look at some of the areas of tactical alignment ECM can effect at O&G organizations. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from folks out there about their own experiences working in O&G or ECM (or both): how does what I’ve outlined here fit with what you’ve seen? Thoughts on areas I’ve missed or things I haven’t considered? Whatever it is, jump in and help us get the conversation started!

A while back, I did a series of posts on transformational ECM that looked at the value ECM could provide in industry-specific terms, from insurance and financial services, to mining, for-profit education, health payers, and consumer packaged goods. In the time since, I’ve had the good fortune to do a slew of projects in some other industries and want to share some of my insights on how ECM impacts them.

First and foremost have been some great Oil and Gas (O&G) projects, both for global, integrated organizations as well as folks who specialize in upstream and midstream operations–all of which have offered wonderful insights into how O&G organizations can benefit from ECM in very business-specific (read, non-IT) ways.

But before we dig into the ways ECM can transform O&G organizations, let’s spend a little time talking about how not to frame up ECM benefits for O&G folks.

A Word About Selling ECM Benefits to an O&G Organization

Anyone who’s worked in any capacity with O&G companies will tell you that if it ain’t about producing hydrocarbons safely and efficiently, your mouth is moving, but all I hear is “blah blah blah blah”. So if you’re looking to sell an O&G business person on the merits of ECM, you better be able to articulate clearly how managing documents and content better will directly impact their bottom line, i.e., producing hydrocarbons safely and efficiently.

We’ll get to what this looks like in a minute, but what this definitely does not look like is the following:

Your employees spend lots of time searching for documents they need but can’t find, and aren’t even sure whether the documents they can find are the right versions. Doing better ECM will make it easier to find and share documents, which will save your employees tens of hours a week each on average, which will lead to millions of dollars a year in savings.

First of all, forget O&G, your explanation of ECM benefits to the business in any industry should never look like this, not because it’s not true–of course it is–but because it tells the truth about bad document management practices from a very shallow (and very lazy) perspective.

Here’s what I mean: it’s a bit like telling a grossly overweight person who smokes that they’ll “get sick” if they don’t change their ways. Yes, they’ll get sick, but as a doctor who has hands-on experience with exactly what happens to folks in this situation, you are privy to details that would paint a more graphic picture and potentially more effectively help get this person to change their ways.

It’s the same for ECM. General, net to productivity benefits are indeed important and will follow from improving document management practices. But there are a whole host of other benefits that are far more tangible and far more meaningful to business folks. Focusing on those will get ECM further at the organization and increase the likelihood of realizing the net to productivity benefits as well.

The Final Word

Okay, so much for my soap box digression on how to talk about the benefits of ECM. In the next post, we’ll dig into how ECM specifically can help O&G organizations–hopefully avoiding any net gains to productivity type generalizations and honing in on tangible business value. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from folks out there about their own experiences with articulating the value of ECM, whether for O&G or other industries…jump in, and let’s get the conversation started!

I found out over the weekend that I was named one of the Top 50 SharePoint influencers for 2012. It’s a great list of folks, and I’m honored to be included with all of them.

Just got a note that Clayton Christensen is speaking at BoxWorks this year.

Now, I’m a huge Christensen fan, so I’m excited to get the chance to see him in person.

But I’m also excited because a while back, I wrote a post on SharePoint’s radical disruption of ECM using Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation as a heuristic. In that post, I examined the growth of SharePoint along the basic contours of how Christensen views all radical, disruptive innovations, closing with the thought that, if Christensen is right, ECM will become a commoditized, run of the mill capability, able to be practiced by the majority of non-specialist users out there.

So seeing him at BoxWorks, a conference run by a software company whose product disrupts SharePoint in the very same way SharePoint once disrupted big ECM, is a good I-told-you-so moment. Which makes up for all the regrettable “Future of ECM” posts I’ve written that turned out to be as inaccurate as 1950s visions of the home of the future that, as regrettably, never became reality.

So I’ve been involved in municipal government for a few months now, and my biggest takeaway is, “Damn, things move slow.” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with (and at) some execution-challenged organizations in the private sector, but they look positively agile compared to my experience with municipal government.

Now, I don’t mean this to be some kind of anti-government rant—I really don’t. But in retooling this blog to chronicle my foray into state and local government, I wanted to remain true to my outsider status and call it like I see it, for what it’s worth.

And I’ll be honest, one of the biggest stumbling blocks so far has been the Open Meetings Act (OMA), which was created to prevent back room, nefarious dealings in government (a noble and important goal), but which seems more often than not, these days at least, to prevent well-intentioned government stakeholders from being able to get a blessed thing done when not in a public meeting.

Think of it this way: imagine if a corporation couldn’t make decisions or do substantive work unless they held a public meeting, the agenda of which had to be published 48 hours beforehand, and no real work could go on outside of these meetings. I mean, it’s a common complaint that meetings are the main thing preventing corporations from getting work done. So given these constraints, what could you expect them to really accomplish if meetings were the only vehicle for doing work?

Without answering that semi-rhetorical question, I want to take a look at an avenue for both complying with the OMA and getting work done in spite of it: social media. Consumer social media tools like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, hold out the promise of fostering ongoing productive government work while complying with the OMA…an exciting possibility for those of us frustrated with the limitations on how municipal stakeholders can work to do the people’s business.

To that end, I’ve been doing some research on how government entities can use social media, and I’ll have to admit that there are no clear answers out there—heck, there aren’t even really any clear directions emerging. But based on my research, I’ve built a light infographic that sums up the possibilities open to government entities looking to use social media tools/methods to get work done.

The horizontal axis tracks three things:

• Level of interaction between government entity and citizen
• Degree of risk
• Level of value

The vertical axis tracks:

• The platform being used
• The goals of each platform
• The laws and regulations in force for each platform

The final word

This should give you all a good overview of my experience to date with the OMA and trying to foster effective municipal government. In the next post, I’ll dig into the specifics of the figure above to talk about how municipal (and state and local governments) could begin to use social media to further their agendas and get work done despite the very real barriers presented by antiquated legislation like the OMA.

But in the meantime, I’d love to hear from you all out there about this stuff—so jump in and let’s get the conversation started!

I live in the village of Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago that borders the city directly to the west. I was appointed recently to the Civic Information Systems Committee (CISC), a body charged with advising the village board on village’s use of technology and information systems, both internally and with the outside community of residents, vendors, partners, and the wider world in general.

Although I’ve been following developments in Gov2.0 closely over the last two years or so, this is my first direct involvement with it. And in the interest of jumping in with both feet, I figured it would be a good idea to use this blog to document my experiences on the CISC and with Gov2.0 more generally.

In the coming weeks and months, then, I plan to cover a full range of Gov2.0 topics, from the airy heights of theory to the nitty-gritty, down-in-the-weeds view of trying to actually get stuff done on the committee. And I look forward to making this a place for you all to share your thoughts and experiences with Gov2.0, not only to keep me honest with good old-fashioned heckling, but also to widen the conversation beyond my point of view to include yours.

My first post will be after the winter recess, but in the meantime, jump in and make suggestions for topics I should address, and I’ll get them on the docket for 2012.

I hope you all have safe and enjoyable holidays with family and friends and look forward to seeing you back here in January!

I’m a total book snob. The list of great books out there that I want to read is so long that, even if I spent twelve hours a day doing nothing but reading and lived another hundred years, it would be difficult to get through all of them. So I’m pretty protective of the few hours a week I actually have to devote to reading.

Given this, I was fairly skeptical when I dove into Patrick Lencioni’s Getting Naked last Saturday, because it was written as a fictional account of the takeover of a boutique consulting firm by a “big five” type firm.

I was ready for the worst that business books have to offer: hackneyed story line, wooden dialogue, obvious, Dr. Phil-esque “learnings” (just typing the word makes me cringe…when did “lesson” stop being good enough?)—and I was imagining all the books on my bucket list that I would never get to read because I chose to read Lencioni’s.Cut to an hour later, with me fifty pages in and not only totally engrossed but fired up about putting my suit back on Monday morning and getting back in the trenches with my clients—this is a fantastic book.

Lencioni does such a great job telling the story of Lighthouse Partners, the boutique firm that gets gobbled up by a Big Five firm, that you quickly forget how trite the idea of a business fable is and just get engrossed in the story. And the lessons here are anything but obvious, especially for folks used to working in the cutthroat, work-em-to-death environment of large professional services firms.

Lencioni gets at what the heart of consulting should be: a complete focus on serving the client. He shows us a firm where no one sells, they simply consult. Sales calls are just the opportunity to begin solving the client’s problems. If they find value in that activity and want to pay for more they will; if they don’t, they won’t, and both parties shake hands and part amicably.

Projects are not the delivery of the work agreed to in an SOW. They are the creation of value for the client, and the SOW is merely a starting point for that activity. And the creation of value for a client does not happen through having the smartest, most confident consultants in place telling the client what to do; it comes from having consultants who are egoless, fearless, and graceful under pressure work with clients to help facilitate solutions, all predicated on doing what’s best for the client, even if it means losing the business.

In this way, Getting Naked shares its fundamental orientation with Mahan Khalsa’s Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play, although the latter is more about how to transform your sales process from a transactional approach to a consultative one.

And before you dismiss Lencioni’s approach as pie in the sky and untenable in the real world of management consulting, you should know that it’s based on the work he’s been doing with his own real-world, boutique firm for years now. And if you take a deep breath and think through your own experience with clients (with what’s gone well, what hasn’t, your successes, your failures), I think you’ll begin to see that the times you were most successful were the times you were focused on the client rather than the contract, your numbers, or selling, and that Lencioni’s approach is a powerful way to do that on a more consistent basis.

The final word

Clearly I think this is an important read for anyone who works in consulting. But I would expand that to include anyone who works with consultants, because you should be getting this kind of service from the folks you’re paying good money to (and lots of it) to get help solving your most important business problems. And if you’re not, Getting Naked will help you know what to ask for or, if that doesn’t work, find the kind of consulting firm that puts client service first, and everything else second.

At long last, I’ve finished James Gleick’s The Information: A History. A Theory. A Flood. As those of you who are regulars here know, I’ve been on a bit of a Gleick kick over the last six months, so I had high expectations for his latest work.

I’m happy to say that The Information doesn’t disappoint. This book is a tour de force, even for Gleick, who specializes in tours de force. His scope is sweeping, from Plato to quantum computing, and, as we’ve come to expect from Gleick, he gets deep into the details of long-forgotten science and technology innovations.

Disclosure: I received a  free review copy of this book to use in preparing for this post.

My wife and I just welcomed our second child into the world last week, so I’m taking a few weeks off from the blog to spend some quality time with my family.

While I’m doing that, here’s some oldie but goodie posts you may not have seen before:

• Putting one foot in front of the other
• Speaking of Leadership – Interview with David DeLuna
• The execution cycle
• Speaking of Leadership – Interview with John F. Moore

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

• From the larger organizational context
• From the work being done on the ground
• From wider communities of practice
• From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the last one, insulation from the marketplace.

The problem

Of the four kinds of insulation, this one is the easiest to fall prey to and the most difficult to counteract. After all, the marketplace is made up of your competition and your customers—two very difficult folks to get familiar with. But without knowing as much as possible about both, you won’t be as effective a leader as you could be.

For those of you out there in sales, marketing, and customer service, being attuned to your customers or your competition (or both) is part and parcel of your job description. But for the rest of us, our day-to-day, short-term responsibilities can keep us so busy that we forget about the larger context of our work.

The solution

There’s no single best way to get to know your customers and competition better. But I want to share a few techniques I’ve used over the years to fight against this kind of insulation.

• Spend a day doing side-by-sides with customer service reps, both veterans and newbies. Hearing what customers have to say about your products and services (as well as what the reps have to say about their own experiences on the job) will give you a crash course in who your customers are and what they want.
• Get to know the sales team. These are the folks who are most intimately acquainted with your competition…because they go toe-to-toe with them every day out in the field. Ask to sit in on their sales meetings; take individual reps or managers to lunch/coffee to pick their brains; and when you get to know them better, see if you can tag along on visits to existing accounts—the latter is a great way to get in front of customers directly.
• Become an expert in your products and services. Maybe it’s because of the time I spent in IT, but I can’t tell you how many co-workers I’ve had who were bit fuzzy on exactly what we did at any given company. Sure, they knew in general what we did, but if they had to explain our product catalog to an outsider, they’d be a deer in the headlights. This might be okay for a line level employee, but if you want to be a leader, this should be ingrained in how you think at work.
• Use the marketing department as a resource. Your products and services don’t come out of thin air; they’re based on tons of market research that looks at potential customers and the competitive landscape. So, now that you have a solid grasp on your product catalog (see last bullet), reach out to folks in marketing to learn about the strategy and positioning behind the catalog: who are/aren’t the target customer segments? Who are/aren’t our main classes of competitor? What’s our go to market strategy for different product classes, customer segments, and markets?

The final word

That’s my best advice for how to get to know your competitors and customers—how about you folks? Got any tried and true advice on how to do this? Horror stories of what happens when you’re out of touch with either (or both) of them? Success stories about how you connected with either (or both) of them? Jump in, and let’s get the conversation started!

I’m on a bit of a James Gleick kick right now, and before I dig into reading The Information in earnest, I figured I’d step back and write up my thoughts on What Just Happened, a collection of his technology essays from 1990 – 2001.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Gleick, he’s a fantastic science and technology writer, best known for his biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman…although when you’re a polymath like Gleick, “best known for” oversimplifies the breadth of your accomplishments.

During the nineties, he was at the forefront of those who understood just how profound the changes taking place to the information landscape were. He may not have been right 100% of the time (more on that in a minute), but he was always willing to see past the immediate wow factor of any given technological innovation to get at the larger implications for us as individuals, for our culture, and for society as a whole.

As you might expect, he covers a lot of ground in WJH, from the joys and frustrations of being a WinWord power user, to the radical transformation of telcos, the growth of Microsoft, the Internet and politics, the death of money, Y2K, and even the state of Internet porn circa 1995.

All the essays are excellent here, although some are more substantial than others. And while Gleick is always well-informed on his subject matter, you can definitely tell which topics he’s engaged with more deeply (especially the history of telephony, which is the starting point for The Information).

Mostly right

What was most striking to me, his modesty in the preface notwithstanding, is how often Gleick gets it right here. Even in the dim first light of the Internet age, he saw with surprising clarity just what this new thing would mean for us.

We definitely laugh when he pokes fun at the Bell Labs employees running around with their buzzing, beeping devices getting plain-text stock quotes or news items and forwarded answering machine messages from their voice mail. But he also steps back from this near-sighted perspective to give us his real thoughts on the matter: these science experiments and toy gadgets will fundamentally alter how we live our lives–and had already started to do so, even way back when he was writing these essays.

And when he does step back, you almost suspect him of having revised the essays in light of what was to come…except in the case of porn (“This is Sex?”), which he doesn’t see as all that suited to the online world. A small misstep in an otherwise eerily prescient collection of essays.

A state of wonder

Beyond how right Gleick is about most of this stuff, there’s also a real sense of wonderment here, a slack-jawed stare at the changes going on that asks could this really come to pass during my lifetime?

It’s like looking at one of of those “Home of the Future” spreads in a 50s issue of Popular Mechanics, where computers cook meals and robots put your slippers on, except that in hindsight we know that Gleick was right–the amazing gadgets and technologies he previews have become an expected, even routine part of our everyday lives. It makes me wonder which of the futuristic capabilities that we marvel at today will be ho-hum in ten year’s time.

Getting used to it

Finally, I was amazed throughout the book at how rapidly we’ve adapted to all these seismic changes to the way we live our lives. From how we communicate with family, friends, and colleagues, to how we pay for goods and services, consume news and entertainment, do business, and participate in politics, things have changed radically since 1990. And as Gleick points out, we struggled with them deeply, and in retrospect, almost comically so, as they were emerging.

But from this side of the shift, it’s hard to remember in any tangible way what it was like before debit cards, cell phones, Microsoft Word, and seamless e-commerce. Reading Gleick’s first-hand account from the front lines of these shifts is a reminder both of just how difficult and how short-lived such transitions are these days.

The final word

All in all, this is a great book–required reading for anyone interested in technology and its impact on society, both looking forward and looking back.

And while I turn now plow through The Information, I’d love to hear from folks out there who’ve read WJH: what’d you all think? Love it? Hate it? Did I miss anything in my assessment? Jump in, and let’s get the conversation started!

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

• From the larger organizational context
• From the work being done on the ground
• From wider communities of practice
• From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the third, insulation from wider communities of practice.

Something’s got to give

We all have enough to do for our jobs without taking on additional work. Most days it seems like just keeping on top of the currently burning fires is all we do.

Given this, it’s all too easy to lose touch with the wider world out there, i.e., the community of practitioners in your discipline. These are the folks who are doing the same job you are but at different organizations, are involved in standards boards and working groups, speak at conferences, write expert blogs, or publish articles and books.

You may know some of them…heck, you may have been one of them once upon a time before your regular job sapped all your professional energies.

My hero

Whatever the case may be, you likely envy them a bit–who hasn’t wondered how they manage to keep up with their day job and be a thought leader (and maybe daydreamed a bit about what it would be like to be them for a day or two)? Or maybe you think participating in the wider community of practice is a distraction, a nice to have, a way to put feathers in your cap that has little to do with getting the job done.

Just do it

The reality is that participation in the wider community of practice is vital to being an effective leader for a number of reasons.

• Inspiration - you can’t sustain your engagement with your job–to say nothing of your career–by simply putting out fires. At a certain point, you have to find a way to step back and focus on what you need to do to push yourself and evolve beyond your current skills.
• Networking - participating in the wider community of practice is a great way to build your network, which doesn’t just help you in your current position (by giving you fresh perspectives on the work you do) but also in your career path.
• Brand - lets face it, career advancement has changed in the last few years. Resumes on 24 lb bond paper and a killer cover letter have given way to robust LinkedIn profiles and social media footprints. True, knowing the right person is still essential, but there are all sorts of new ways to get to know the right person, and participating in the wider community of practice is one of them…and has never been easier.

The final word

No surprise: I think everyone should make the effort to participate in the wider communities of practice that are relevant for them…what do you all think? Are you currently an active participant? How do you stay involved and balance your responsibilities to your “real” job? Of if you think participating in the wider community of practice is a nice to have, tell us why.

I’d love to hear what folks out there think about all this…so jump in and let’s get the conversation started!

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

• From the larger organizational context
• From the work being done on the ground
• From wider communities of practice
• From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the second, insulation from the work being done on the ground.

It’s good to be the king?

Insulation from the work being done on the ground tends to be more acute and pervasive the higher you move in the organization. After all, as you move up the food chain, you naturally get more and more abstracted from day-to-day work–what you do becomes more about enabling others to do that work…or enabling others to enable others to enable others to do that work (and so on).

But it can also be a problem for those line managers just one step removed from the work being done in the trenches. I know I’ve seen my fair share of newly-minted managers, fresh from the front lines, who all of a sudden have no clue what their team is doing. it seems that some leaders simply have a tendency to get out of touch with what their directs are doing, no matter that they’re sitting across the aisle from them day in and day out.

Here’s what I don’t mean

Before I dig in, however, I want to clarify what I do and don’t mean by being in touch with the work on the ground. I don’t mean that the leader should be doing the work side by side with their teams or even that they should be able to do it (or even know how it’s done).

Rather, a leader who’s in touch with the work being done on the ground understands the tasks their team is working on at any given time, the constraints on these tasks, the reasons why the work is being done, and the organizational stakeholders counting in it. They “get” what their teams are doing and can articulate it crisply to outsiders (their boss, peers, and others outside their group) and also discuss it intelligently with their teams.

Consequences

I think we’ve all seen what happens when a leader is disconnected from the work being done on the ground (and most of us at one time or another have probably fallen into this trap):

• They manage at the wrong level. They vacillate between leaving their teams high and dry (which they would call delegating) and micromanaging in an attempt to regain control…usually because they’ve been called out by senior leadership for not knowing what’s going on in their shops.
• They’re fueled by fear and uncertainty. Because they have to operate second- or third-hand from the work they’re responsible for and because they’re out of touch with it, they can never really be certain whether they’ll be a success or failure, whether they’re being called to the boss’ office to get congratulated or shown the door.
• They don’t adequately develop the individuals on their teams. And how could they? They don’t know what these folks do, let alone what these aspire to do or how they could help them get there.
• Their teams get less visibility than they should. How can these leaders act as advocates for their team when they don’t fully understand what they do? They can’t, and so their teams sit by and watch other groups get accolades and recognition while they labor in obscurity.
• They are almost universally disliked by their teams. They get paid more, but they don’t actually do any of the “real” work, nor do they add value as leaders–what’s to like?

Enough about me, what do YOU think about me

So much for what’s wrong—how can leaders reconnect with the work on the ground if they find themselves disconnected? They need to do three things…

• Learn how to effectively delegate. There’s a big difference between delegating and ignoring. Delegation is a way to deliberately shift work to others, not only to get the work accomplished more successfully, but also to stretch and professionally develop those you delegate to. It’s not letting things randomly drop off because you’re too busy, harried, or stressed.
• Recognize that you are not the center of the universe. Yes, as a leader, you have stresses and responsibilities that your team does not. But remember that it goes both ways: your team is responsible for things you are not, and just because you may have been responsible for this things in the past, doesn’t diminish the challenges they currently face.
• Make the time to stay in touch with your team. You can easily get caught up in the hustle and flow of being a leader and forget that one of your most important tasks is supporting your team–leaders are those who get work done through others–so removing obstacles, clearing administrative brush, and singing their praises is, if not Job One, then it’s Two or Three. Don’t leave it up to chance.

The final word

That’s what I have to say about being insulated from the work on the ground. In the next post, we’ll turn outwards and look at a kind of insulation that cuts leaders off from the wider world: insulation from wider communities of practice.

But while I’m cooking that up, I’d love to hear from those of you out there who have your own thoughts on how leaders can better align with the day-to-day work of the organization: give me criticism and feedback, ask a question of the group, share your own experiences or thoughts…jump in and let’s get the conversation started!