Moe's SOA & BPM Blog

With the festive season well underway and a distinct financial chill in the air, I thought that I would add to your seasonal cheer with some advice on buying on the cheap. Everyone seems to be looking for a bargain, either to meet their restricted budgets, or to be able to brag about the great deals they have found.

When it comes to business expenditure, there is undoubtedly a softening of prices from the IT vendors, and it would be tempting to push hard to get lower costs from the increasingly desperate suppliers. However, I would just like to sound a cautionary note for those tempted to get carried away here.

With confidence reducing, and budgets being cut, it is reasonable to share this pain around. Looking to reduce unnecessary or waste costs is always fashionable and will look even better right now. Your suppliers will naturally be more than willing to help you with this, no? However, I have noticed a curious set of behaviours in this dance that can have significant consequences for your future supply chain.

Your best suppliers are the ones who behave as partners - helping you plan effectively, and providing advice, guidance and other added-value services. They will undoubtedly be aware of your budgeting issues and will help you in creative ways to achieve more with less; quite often at their own expense. At the other end of the scale, there are those suppliers who are more a necessary evil - those on which you have a critical reliance or who monopolise the provision of some vital IT component or service. These parasites, sorry partners, will know the leverage they have over you and will laugh in your face at any request for a discount or a price reduction.

So what happens is that you push your true partners harder for discounts, because it is easier, which in turn causes them problems, and possibly puts them out of business. Even if they survive, their attitude to you will change and you will find that all the extras they did for you in the spirit of partnership become chargeable or are no longer offered. This will eventually lead to all your suppliers treating you as a chequebook not a partner. With no effective relationships with your key suppliers, life will become more difficult and more expensive for you.

Imagine a different scenario, where you work actively with your best suppliers to reduce costs, whilst ensuring they retain sufficient profit to stay in business, and put your efforts into removing your dependency on monopoly vendors (or setting up alternative options with your best suppliers). Removing this dependency will quickly reduce your costs and gain you more responsive suppliers, who can help you drive your business forward rapidly during the coming upturn.

So which Scrooge are you going to be? Mr Humbug, or the one who saves Tiny Tim?

Have a Merry Christmas!

John 'Ebeneezer' Moe

This week's article is brought to you by the letter P. This would usually mean me launching into my usual people and process rant, but today I would like to look at politics. No, don't click off! This is politics with a small "p", so no jokes like: Don't vote - it only encourages them. Except for that one.

Little politics is about how everyday life is fraught with colleagues jockeying for position and favours behind your back, while smiling to your face, or in some cases smiling with both their faces.

We have all come across the ambitious colleague (I use the term loosely), invariably described as young and thrusting. Their every conversation and action is calculated to advance their position and status in the organisation, preferably at your expense. Then there is your manager taking credit for your achievements, and blaming you for their mistakes.

For many people there are two main courses of action. The first is to get your own back by playing the game. If you are good at politics, you will eventually turn into the person you despise. If you are not, then you will be humiliated. We've all seen what happened to David Brent on the Office. The other course (known as the ostrich manoeuvre) is to haughtily ignore all this noise and just get on with your job. But, unless your colleague implodes and fails, you will probably end up working for them; with all the joy that will bring.

However, like all good politicians (patron saints, Mr Blair and Mr Obama), there is a third way, which I call anti-politics. The main principle of anti-politics is to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But, I hear you cry, I am an honest person; I don't fib (much), and anyway, even if I did, it would only be a white lie. But saying nothing when you know something to be at least a distortion is not the best strategy.

Anti-politics is about confronting half-truths, insinuations, unfair credit/blame, and other misinformation; usually conveyed in Parseltongue. Anti-politics has timing and completeness implications to make it work properly. You need to speak your mind (as long as you are in control of it) at the right time, to the right people. For the uninitiated this can be a terrifying prospect. Confrontation can seem daunting, but if you are clear in what you have to say, your statement undeniable, and you hold your nerve, you will be pleasantly surprised by how your so-called colleague will invariably back down. The timeliness element means that you have to do this as soon as you discover the misinformation. The completeness is to ensure that anyone who has been infected by the lie is told.

Once you get over the embarrassment of fingering a colleague or making a public statement, you will find that life changes for you. The bullying colleague will leave you out of their scheming, because they now know you can hurt them; or in fact allow them to hurt themselves. Your stress levels will miraculously decrease, as you find that you are now in better control of the chaos happening around you.

However, people will initially treat you as a bit odd, as this is not typical accepted behaviour for an office worker. Remember that they will, on the whole, be envious of you. You will start to be included in meaningful conversations with people seeking your opinion. Less poison arrows will come your way and you will be treated with respect. Doesn't that sound like a better life?

John "Call a Spade a Spade" Moe

At the risk of lowering the tone of this column, I would just like to say that the dance group Diversity deserved to win this year's Britain's Got Talent ahead of the now world famous Susan Boyle. Before you click off, let me explain this confessional opening.

When I started work (just after the Falklands War finished, but it wasn't my fault), I was interviewed by a Personnel Manager. She (they were all female in those days) sorted out my expenses and paperwork, and asked me inane, leading questions such as: "So what is your biggest achievement?" Although the boast of drinking eight pints without going to the loo sprang to mind, I managed to blurt out some anodyne academic achievement and was duly offered the job. Other than at annual appraisal time, I rarely came into contact with her, and the same was true at the other companies I worked for over the next fifteen years or so.

Over this time, Personnel Management turned into Human Resources, and us workers were labelled and treated in the same way as other company equipment (badly maintained and thrown on the scrapheap when we had outlived our usefulness - thanks to the Gordon Gecko Eighties leading to the recessionary Nineties).

More recently, this has morphed into Human Capital Management. (Boy! That makes me feel more wanted!) Finally, and this is where the first paragraph should make more sense, we have Talent Management.

The term Talent Management, first published in an article in 1998, was coined by David Watkins of Softscape, and is defined as: "the process of attracting and retaining profitable employees, as it is increasingly more competitive between firms and of strategic importance." So, over my working life I have gone from being seen as a person, a resource, some capital, and finally a mechanism to generate profit for my owners - sorry, bosses. I can't say that I am particularly impressed with the HR Professionals if they continue to treat me this way.

The ironic part of this is the increased emphasis on the "our people are our greatest asset" mantra; spouted by companies wanting to appear conscientious and moral. My experience is that companies that preach this are staffed by people who would like to shove this nonsense up the assets of their management. The best companies to work for are where the line managers spend time with their staff, encouraging and supporting them and building constructive team environments.

What you don't need is some flashy, jumped-up personnel executive wittering on about performance, potential and competencies. So, if you are inflicted with Talent Managers, put them on a coach and send them to Simon Cowell to sort out.

John "X-Factor" Moe

A few years ago you couldn't endure a PowerPoint presentation without the obligatory fuzzy, unreadable Dilbert comic cropping up, either to badly illustrate a point, or to inject some irrelevant humor, sorry humour, into a dull pitch from the unimaginative cretin in front of you. At times, reader, that cretin was me.

Having just about weaned myself off of this lazy habit, I thought I would steal one of Scott Adams' book titles instead for this diatribe, which is all about the leadership of change. Or at least it started out that way. It struck me that if you separate leadership of change from the day to day running of a business, then you're missing what change is all about. In fact if you're not leading change all the time, you're screwed. Why? Let me start with Peter Drucker's pat definition of the difference between a manager and a leader: a Manager "does the thing right" and a Leader "does the right thing". While a number of you may be stroking your beards and nodding sagely at this, let me just deconstruct this a little.

In traditional organisational structures, managers did indeed manage, and bosses did lead (or at least bossed). But this is no longer good enough for the current state of flux that most organisations are in now. It is difficult to do things right, if the thing frequently changes; careering from John Carpenter's The Thing, to the Addams Family's Thing. Even the leader will struggle to do the right thing, when there are no rules or clarity on what to do; we live in a grey spectrum, which has infinite gradations from right to wrong.

Leadership of change is now a full time job, but don't make the mistake of appointing Change Managers or Transformational Leaders as the owners of change. The only true leaders of change are the line managers, who need to deliver real business value to your customers through customer-focussed processes. They need to be mentally equipped to find that slightly whiter shade of pale, within the options that present themselves so fleetingly, and to grasp the opportunity and bring their team along with them, as they exploit the 'thing' for the short time it will be profitable. They will then need to be tough enough to stop doing the 'thing' and find the next chance, when the 'thing' has lost its value.

As Paul Weller snarled: "This is the modern world, we don't need no one to tell us what's right or wrong". Read the rest of the lyrics to this Jam song, as it provides a much better life guide than any number of management books could.

John "Say what you like 'cause I don't care" Moe

At a recent IBM-sponsored Impact Comes to You seminar, I presented a short introduction to Cloud Computing and what it's good for. The answer is not absolutely nothing, but it is certainly not mature. I was pleasantly surprised at the level of genuine interest, given the current low investment situation in which most companies find themselves. I sensed two main drivers here.

The first was that the current, hyped IT technologies (SOA and Web 2.0 in particular) had moved from interest, up to over-excitement, down to messy failure, and were entering the boredom zone, to paraphrase the big G's hype cycle. So, of course, the technorati, with the attention span of a micro-gnat, are keen to look at and play with new toys as they appear. Cloud Computing certainly fits this bill with the subtle promise of a 'paradigm shift'; i.e. IT will be asking for lots of money to replace perfectly performing systems with something untried and of unknown cost. It also looks like being this year's big thing in IT (other than massive redundancies and salary cuts, but I won't go there this time).

The other driver is that senior executives (who tend to learn most of their IT knowledge on the golf course, talking to other similarly IT-illiterate executives - I'll call them the ignorati) have cottoned on to the cost-saving possibilities of Cloud Computing, not only with cheaper processing power, but also (in their simple minds) fewer expensive technorati to run them.

This dual-pronged approach is likely to prove irresistible and I expect to see a number of Cloud Computing pilots taking place in the next few months. Note that I refrained from making a 'pilots in low visibility crashing' joke then. Anyway, I would advise the usual caution, pinch of salt, bromide in the tea, etc. This is not because Cloud Computing is pants; indeed it has the potential to be that rare good idea which is also practical, affordable and low risk. The other positive aspect of Cloud Computing is that it is relatively simple to try, provided you try to keep it relatively simple.

A time-boxed Proof of Concept approach, to test its viability and suitability for your organisation, will give you an idea of the business benefits, the technical challenges and the risk profile of the service. Even in these financially challenged times, I would recommend that you put your head in the clouds and have a look around. It is better than putting your head in the sand.

If you are interested in finding out more, drop me a note (John@jmoeassociates.com) and I can send you a copy of the Cloud Computing presentation. It covers good and bad applications of Cloud Computing, and an overview of IBM's spin on the topic.

Finally, and spookily coincidentally, the Cloud Appreciation Society (no, really) believe that they have spotted the first new cloud type for over fifty years, named undulatus asperatus, meaning "a very turbulent, violent, chaotic form of undulation". Be warned.

John "Little Black Rain Cloud" Moe