November 1st, 2009

Amplifying 'weak signals' for IT success

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 3:29 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Collective intelligence, Cultural issues, Enterprise 2.0, Governance, IT issues, Project strategy, Risk, Tools

Tags: Technique, Information Technology, Organization, Asuret, Productivity, Michael Krigsman

Every seasoned executive knows that gaining detailed and accurate information about his or her organization’s activities is a challenging and ongoing struggle. Disconnects between operational data and management decision-making lead to inefficiency, waste, and ultimately to extreme failures of the type described in this blog.

Usually, some members of an organization do possess accurate early warning information regarding potential problems. However, as we have seen in situations ranging from Enron to financial industry practices that kicked off the current recession, surfacing that information can be difficult.

I asked top auditing services analyst and former BearingPoint managing director, Francine McKenna, to place this issue in context. Francine told me:

It’s a classic problem rooted in human nature. Information in large, complex, and geographically dispersed organizations tends to become diluted and distorted as it flows up the chain. Even worse, some individuals redesign information flowing through their hands based on personal goals and objectives.

The best organizations recognize this state of affairs and create standardized policies, procedures, and governance monitoring activities to overcome it. Despite these efforts, however, the problem remains a very real challenge.

Detecting and amplifying “weak signals.” Techniques that reveal hidden vulnerabilities are a valuable weapon in the fight against project failure.

My recent post, Learning from the weak signals of failure, discussed the importance of methods that detect and amplify these weak signals:

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October 26th, 2009

Learning from the weak signals of failure

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:13 am

Categories: CIO issues, Collective intelligence, Governance, IT issues

Tags: Project, Dilbert, Chris, Leadership, Blogging, Management, Internet, Michael Krigsman

Many so-called “victims” of failed projects claim they were blindsided by problems that arose suddenly out of nowhere. In reality, the entire notion that failures spontaneously arise without warning is nonsense.

Still, this experience is sufficiently widespread that it appears in a Dilbert cartoon. Wally asks Dilbert, “How’s your project coming along?” Dilbert replies, “It’s a steaming pile of failure. It’s like fifteen drunken monkeys with a jigsaw puzzle.” When the boss asks, “How’s your project coming along?” Dilbert responds sardonically, “Fine.”

This Dilbert interchange expresses a fundamental truth for understanding failed projects: in most cases, someone associated with the project knew in advance about impending difficulty. For example, an engineering manager might realize early in the project that his team will not be able to achieve certain milestones on time.

Similarly, consider the game of project failure chicken. Management sets an unrealistic product ship date, which the Engineering and Design groups, for example, each know is impossible to meet. Since neither group wants to appear weak, they both tell management the schedule is workable, each hoping the other will admit defeat first. In project failure chicken, neither group wants to yield to the other, leading to the worst possible outcome for management.

In these examples, accurate knowledge about the true state of the project is present inside the organization, yet remains hidden from management because it is diffuse and unfocused.

If denial is the handmaiden of failure, then acknowledgment can be a strong harbinger of success. But what, precisely, should we acknowledge?

• Related: Denial: The secret IT killer

Respected CIO leadership expert, Chris Curran, addresses this question in a blog post about the concept of finding weak signals:

[M]aybe we are ignoring some fundamental, but less obvious signs that our projects are not positioned for success. These signs, or weak signals, require different mindsets and toolsets to gather, track and act upon.

Chris’ comments responded to an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review titled, How to Make Sense of Weak Signals, which offers this definition of weak signals:

A seemingly random or disconnected piece of information that at first appears to be background noise but can be recognized as part of a significant pattern by viewing it through a different frame or connecting it with other pieces of information.

The article goes on to summarize the key challenge:

There is a major difference between taking in signals and realizing what they mean. Managers as well as organizations tend to see the world in a certain way and confuse their mental maps with he territory. Weak signals that don’t fit are often ignored, distorted or dismissed, leaving the company exposed.

An upcoming blog post will explore this issue further and describe the efforts of several firms to address the problem.

[Photo from Wikipedia Commons.]

September 27th, 2009

Video: Harness 'wise crowds' to prevent failure

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 5:26 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues

Tags: Knowledge, Wisdom, Video, Corporate Communications, Strategy, Marketing, Management, Michael Krigsman

The wisdom of crowds concept is based on the premise that a group’s collective knowledge can be pooled to make better decisions than any individual could make alone. A fine line separates the wisdom of crowds from random group behavior or mob rule.

Making the leap from random behavior to harnessing group knowledge requires structure and coordination. The first few minutes of this video describe four conditions that create “wise crowds” [this quote is not an exact transcript]:

Taking a bunch of people and putting them in a room does not make them smart by definition. Four elements create wise crowds:

1. Diversity of opinion (large, diverse groups help avoid group think)
2. Independence (each contributor making his or her own choices)
3. Decentralization (no one person or authority is in charge)
4. Aggregation (to take all that noisy data and turn it into something smart)

In summary, achieving wisdom of crowds involves giving small, simple tasks to a large diverse group, helping them understand selfish reasons for participating, and then aggregating the results.

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds represents a primary means to interrupt the cycle of IT failure present in many organizations.

Failures often emerge as a surprise to management; however, in reality, it’s usually the case that some people inside the organization know in advance about impending problems. Of course, the big question is how to surface that knowledge, which is something I blog about in upcoming posts.

September 27th, 2009

Video: Collective intelligence simplified

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:20 am

Categories: Collective intelligence, Cultural issues, Enterprise 2.0

Tags: Video, Collective Intelligence, Michael Krigsman

It’s easy to overlook the “obvious” evolutionary process through which groups refine ideas and improve outcomes. Collective intelligence is a concept that seeks to harness this process to solve real problems.

Collective intelligence has an important role to play in improving the success of business transformation projects. I’ll talk more about that in the future, but for now please enjoy this video.

September 26th, 2009

Video: Wisdom of crowds basics

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:57 am

Categories: Collective intelligence

Tags: Wisdom, Video, Corporate Communications, Blogging, Marketing, Internet, Michael Krigsman

The “wisdom of crowds” concept is simple: the aggregate intelligence of a group of people is higher than that of a single individual.

While the implications of this concept are profound, practical applications are harder to come by. In future blog posts, I will explain how the wisdom of crowds can be leveraged to reduce project failures.

This video describes an historical experiment that demonstrated the power of wisdom of crowds.

September 23rd, 2009

'Cultures of participation' and IT success

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:02 am

Categories: CIO issues, Collective intelligence, Cultural issues, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues

Tags: Human Resources Inc., HRM, Human Resource Management (HRM), Collaboration, Organizational Structure, Groupware, Human Resources, Enterprise Software, Software, Michael Krigsman

Many important business ideas and trends, including Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM, are rooted in social networking technologies that help individuals come together spontaneously to form collaborative, ad hoc affinity groups.

These new technologies, such as wikis and wisdom of crowds tools, remind us of the essential link between culture and collaboration in creating successful projects.

Given the significance of collaborative groups, I read with interest one particular slide in an SAP-sponsored academic research paper on peer support in enterprise software. This slide portrays the historical relative impact of various technologies on collaboration and information sharing:

Projects succeed or fail based on collaboration. Therefore, improving an organization’s project success rate requires attention to cultural dimensions. For example, many companies find that communication between business and technical groups is challenging. This communication gap leads to information silos that directly impede project success.

I asked HR technology and service delivery expert, Naomi Bloom, to comment:

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September 15th, 2009

'How I tweeted my way out of spinal surgery'

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:00 am

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Collective intelligence, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, Financial impact, IT issues, Politics, Project failures

Tags: Patient, Hospital, Twitter Inc., Health Care, Surgery, Sarah Cortes, Packer Hospital, Transparency, Healthcare, E-mail

The post describes a failure that is significant in light of the ongoing national debate surrounding health care reform and economics. Beyond health care, the role of social networking makes this failure a valuable case study for the enterprise.

Technology consultant and blogger, Sarah Cortes, went by ambulance to Robert Packer Hospital, a facility located in rural Pennsylvania, after she suffered a serious spinal fracture. The story takes an unusual turn because Cortes says Twitter helped her escape from the clutches of hospital staff whom, she claims, tried to intimidate and coerce her into accepting unnecessary spinal surgery.

On her blog, Cortes writes that Packer, “tried numerous maneuvers over 48 hours to hold me there against my will.” She continues [bullet formatting added]:

[The] tactics included:

• Threats that my insurance would not pay any expenses if I did not accept their treatment. My bill was already in the many thousands of dollars, they informed me.
• Intimidation that if I did not stop resisting their treatment I could be paralyzed
• Impeding my communication with Boston doctors by needlessly limiting my phone access. Thank God for Twitter and iphones.

Cortes believes Packer wanted to perform the surgery to help boost its accreditation statistics. From Cortes’ blog:

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