Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Behold the Power of Social Media: Old School Meets Web 2.0

This weekend, I joined some friends for a couple of beverages at a venerable bar in Philadelphia.  McGillin's Olde Ale House is the oldest continually operating tavern in Philadelphia, established in 1860.

We ran into some minor, annoying issues with the service, surly attitudes from the bartender and waitstaff.  Nothing acute, a lot of what you'd expect at a crowded bar in an urban setting (especially in Philadelphia, where pugnacity is an art form), but it aggravated me enough to Tweet about it:

 

I was positively dumbstruck when I received an e-mail today, not 24 hours later (on a Sunday, no less!) from McGillin's decidedly non-surly publicist offering to buy me a beer by way of apology.  It appears that McGillin's created a Twitter account last week, has 47 followers already who've signed up for information about McGillin's news, events, giveaways, etc. , and most importantly, actively monitors their "channel" for feedback from their customers.

The cycle between a customer's experience with a business, feedback, and corrective action being taken or not has gotten amazingly short and direct.  Kudos to a decidedly "old school" business for investing in and effectively using this "new school," social media tool to improve a customer's experience.

How Do We Get the Resources to Transform the Business?

In the January 19, 2009 issue of InformationWeek magazine, there is a brief interview with Ram Charan, author of a new book, "Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty." In it, Charan discusses a model of how CIOs can re-assess their priorities give the budget pressure many are under. He divides up IT "spend" into the following categories, and makes recommendations about each:

• Utility expenses -- the costs of "keeping the lights on." Find ways to more efficiently keep your core systems running, at service levels appropriate for the your organization.
• Compliance expenses-- the costs of maintaining compliance with regulatory agencies (e.g., FDA, SEC, ISO, FERC). Expect increased regulation, and manage these (non-negotiable) costs of doing business by benchmarking costs of compliance and standardizing on tools for meeting these needs.
• Discretionary (short-term) or Transformative (long-term) projects -- draw a clear and thick line between these  expenses and their ROI, or better yet, effect on cash flow:  How will this project help us to free up cash?

In discussions with our firm's clients, we see a lot of opportunity for firms to use tools they already own (and in many cases have standardized on) to drive down their cost of compliance.  I expect the leverage of SharePoint technologies' use as a Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) tool to be a big part of many organizations' "sophomore year" of SharePoint, especially as savvy CIOs determine that they can reduce costs and free up cash by taking advantage of tools they already own.

To me, the most resounding and memorable point from Charan was this: 

"What criteria you were using in the fall of 2008 to call something transformational may have become irrelevant."

Inaugural Word Clouds: Bush vs Obama

Mike Volpe from HubSpot (thanks, Drew Smith [twitter:  @smith_drew] for the tip!), has a terrific blog if you're a marketer, or just interested in how people use language in marketing and interact with and consume social media.  He just posted a great blog article about comparing word clouds of the Bush 2000 inauguration speech and the Obama 2008 inauguration speech.  For those readers not familiar with the concept (i.e., if you missed this previous post, a word cloud or tag cloud is defined as:

"...a visualization of word frequencies. [A] tag cloud enables you to see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers.  The size of the word corresponds to the quantity associated with that word."
[source:  ManyEyes blog from IBM,  http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Tag_Cloud.html]

The comparison of speeches like these is a use case I've heard for a qualitative, visual analysis tool, and I'm pleased to see it actually used in a timely and topical way.  I have no desire for a political discussion here, so take a look for yourself, and see how the speeches compare when held up against one another. 

CEO to CIO: Reduce Costs, or You're Out!

[ed. note:  I have been absent from blogging for quite a while. As suggested in a previous post, my Dad's health declined badly in 2008, and his journey ended on 17 December 2008.  We firmly believe as a family that he's in a better place, and are grateful for the outpouring of thoughts and prayers from friends and loved ones.  So, 2009 represents "the new normal" and hopeful (re-)dedication on my part to this medium, in addition to the breezier style of Twitter (@mikegil).]

I recently read a series of articles in InformationWeek magazine that fascinated me.  My firm's target customer is usually a CIO or a line-of-business leader, and the first article presented this viewpoint in an unusually personal and powerful way, in the form of an annual review letter/ultimatum from a CEO to a CIO, with the stakes being the CIO's job:

"...but you failed to cut maintenance from 80% of IT spending to 60% so I'm not sure you're the right person for this job. Prove me wrong by May, or I'll have to let you go."

The ensuing details in the article, and the accompanying discussion thread, provided fascinating looks into critical issues facing CIOs all around the world today.

The second article, a response from the CIO to the CEO in the form of a ten-point plan, gives the reader an excellent glimpse into the pressures and constraints under which today's CIOs work. Technology issues aside, items like Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, lack of organizational alignment, cultural issues where local drift has occurred, and geo-political issues related to outsourcing are all part of a complex set of forces chipping away at IT effectiveness. Most interestingly, many appear (from the CIO's point of view, at least, in this article) to be outside the CIO's control.

I hope the dialogue continues, look forward to the opinions about who is right, who is wrong, and what ought to be done.  I can't wait to see the next chapter in the saga!