Pár napja egy barátom kitöltette velem a http://politoszkop.hu  kérdőívét. A kérdések az adórendszer, az egészségügy finanszírozása, a kereskedelem szabadsága, a munkanélküliség és a nyugdíjrendszer, az egyházak, az oktatás, a kisebbségek (ezen belül a romák) támogatása, a családon belüli erőszak, a szólásszabadság, a homoszexualitás elfogadása, az abortuszhoz és az eutanáziához való viszony stb.) témaköröket ölelték fel. 

 Fontosnak tartom a gyerekek politikai gondolkodásának fejlesztését, mivel frászt kapok az egységsugarú magyar állampolgártól, (aki pl. rendőrt hív egy színesbőrű turistára, mondván, hogy bizonyára „migráncs”) és azt szeretném, ha ennél kicsit szélesebb látókörük lenne.  Nota bene az egyik már választó, a másik egy éven belül az lesz, így gondoltam, megcsinálom a tesztet velük is. Az elvileg pár perc alatt kitölthető feladat órákig tartó beszélgetéssé alakult (kétszer), mivel sok esetben még a kérdés sem volt tiszta. (pl. a magyar középfokú oktatás  (és az osztrák állatorvosi egyetem) nem beszél a progresszív adózásról ill. a felosztó-kirovó és a magánnyugdíjrendszer különbségeiről.) Az ördög ügyvédjeként minden esetben példákat hoztam arra, hogy miért gondolhatja valaki támogatandónak - majd rögtön utána hogy miért gondolhatja elvetendőnek – ugyanazt az állítást. (pl. az USÁ-ban az 1963-as polgári jogi törvénytől elég volt 40 év egy kiemelkedően sikeres fekete vezérkari főnökig ill. 50 év egy fekete elnökig, aki köröket ver az egyébként fehér utódára, vs. ha azonos pontszám mellett nem téged, hanem egy roma srácot vesznek fel az egyetemre.) Nehezített a dolgon, hogy  Egyeske gyakran feltette a kérdést, hogy Ausztriára vagy Magyarországra vonatkozóan kell-e válaszolni (pl ÖBB vs. MÁV, ahol a különbségeket hetente megtapasztalhatja.) Ami ezután jött, az a meglepetések sora és egyben ennek a blog bejegyzésnek az apropója is.

1. Az értékeléskor kiderült, hogy a két csoportosítást (jobb - baloldali vs. konzervatív - liberális) a gyerekek egyetlen dimenzió két eltérő elnevezésének gondolták.
2. 2. Ennél rosszabb hír volt, hogy nem tudtam tisztességes módon meghatározni a közöttük lévő különbséget. A saját ill. a weben található magyar meghatározások félig kész zsizsiknek tűntek, így tovább túrtam.

 Némi keresgélés után ráakadtam a  http://politicalcompass.org -ra, ami a jobb-baloldali besorolást a gazdaság állami kontrolljának szintjével végzi el (kicsi leegyszerűsítve az újraelosztás mértékét vizsgálja), míg a másik tengelyen az egyén és az állam viszonyát ill. az egyén államon (közösségen) belüli  (illetve azzal szembeni) szabadságát vizsgálja, mint a liberalizmus vs. konzervatívizmus meghatározó elemét.  (A Politicalcompass a konzervatív szót az authoritarian-nal helyettesítette, amivel nem értek egyet teljes egészében, de a turkálás közben talált egyéb megközelítések, mint pl. a Nolan diagramm is a hatalomhoz való viszonyt vizsgálja, így megbékültem vele.)  Az alábbi ábrák a politoszkop.hu teszteredményeinek szűrése során keletkeztek, ami a minta nagysága és kitöltők érdeklődése okán torzít, de így is tartalmaz pár érdekességet.

A további észrevételek, egy-két esetben meglepetések:

• A Fidesz és a Jobbik baloldali konzervatív pártok (nem elírás) 
• A Fidesz logikusan jár el, amikor a Jobbikot igyekszik minden eszközzel ellehetetleníteni (lásd pl. ÁSZ bírság), mivel jelentősen átfed a megszólítható szavazói bázis.

• Az MSZP,  DK és a PM ugyanarra a választói csoportra lőnek, így jelenleg egymást gyengítik. (ezt persze enélkül a felmérés nélkül is tudják.)

• Ezen pártok számára rossz hír, hogy éppen ez a választói szegmens tervezi nem leadni a szavazatát, talán éppen azért, mert látják az egység hiányát.

•  Az enyhén liberális, középutas választók Magyarországon hoppon maradnak, ti. nincs olyan párt, ami ezt az értékrendet képviselné. (persze valaha volt, csak időközben saját hibái miatt elporlott.)
• Jobboldali konzervatívizmus gyakorlatilag nem létezik kis hazánkban.

 A feleségem a vállam fölött beleolvasott a piszkozatba és halkan megkérdezte: "Nem lesz neked ebből bajod?" Megint jelen van a félelem az országban, pedig csak 27 év telt el. A fenébe...

This blog post is actually not about Star Wars, I just needed an analogy for a disturbing piece of information: YOU ARE A SALES PERSON being in charge for selling yourself! I figured an average technologist would appreciate this message as much as young Skywalker liked the one in the title.

Why I provoke you? Think about it: this is late March and you are stuck at Heathrow because an inch of snow fell. Flights are cancelled, the crowd is getting enormous, ground personnel are as ugly as it gets and you still need to get your parents on THAT flight. OR: your true love has a problem with tremendous pain and the waiting room at the proctology is full to the brim, you want her to see the doctor BEFORE the dozens of those poor souls. I could go on for hours; you will encounter situations in your life when you have to close that deal. Selling yourself is one of those deals.

As usual this post was triggered by one of my colleagues. During a discussion I managed to push the “big red button” that resulted in an outburst of dissatisfaction about the fact that he would not get promoted this year. As the conversation went on a story unfolded that was more than just resentment about being treated unfairly, it showed a pattern I have seen before. The guy thought he deserved it; he was ready, while the committee thought he wasn’t. This post is about the root cause and a suggested remedy.

The way our educational system picks candidates for electrical engineering and IT/developer professions is fundamentally based on the students’ skills in mathematics. I still recall that only 60% of my class of electrical engineering would pass the math and theoretical electrical engineering final exams (the latter being applied math peppered with physics.) The thing is that even Rainman could have passed these exams if he had been good at math while Forrest Gump would have failed. (At that time I failed to take notice that Forrest was slightly more successful in monetary terms plus he got the woman he loved.) The whole system is geared towards folks with high IQ, being biased to facts over “fluffy things”, buying on face value and sometimes a bit weaker on EQ. The 17+ years one spends in the school system will make him/her believe that success depends mostly on his/her IQ and hard work while downplays the role of soft skills like empathy or communication. Then suddenly the rules of the game change and being smart does not cut it anymore. Houston, we have a problem! IQ alone is NOT enough (!@%$#), unfair, isn’t it? IQ is like the height of a professional basketball player, most of them are over 6 feet 4 inches (Magic Jordan was around 6 ft 6 in), but beyond this point height does not matter anymore, other traits like speed and passing skills do.

So let’s have a look at what matters in success. The rest of this post is based on two sources, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Daniel Pink’s TED talk about motivation.  With a minute of thinking you will name several other types of intelligence, linguistic, kinesthetic, musical or interpersonal intelligence being the obvious ones, so chances are one or more of these are at play. Since no post can exist without a geometry based explanation of a psychology related problem – I came up with this one: success is proportional to the area of the triangle defined by 3 factors  - analytical intelligence (IQ), emotional intelligence (EQ) and drive (passion to become really good at the selected subject matter).

On a diagram it looks like this:

The problem is that God - in his infinite wisdom - usually does not grant the same quantity of these to the same guy. There are examples that IQ can be improved with surgery or drugs (for details see Flowers for Algernon or Awakenings) but the improvement is temporary and comes with serious risks. The good news is that the folks I work with have plenty of IQ, so this is not an issue.

 How about drive (motivation)?  Well, this is difficult to produce a sustained level of motivation with external means. 

As a practicing dad of 3 teenager girls I dare to say that this is more than difficult, this is impossible to maintain enthusiasm say about Hungarian grammar, if they just don’t care. Carrot (I buy you tickets to the Imagine Dragons concert if you get an A) and stick (I put your MAC address on a blacklist in the Wi-Fi router if you get a C) will work only for a short time right after being applied. If we accept the following cause - effect sequence: Passion -> Activity -> Mastery -> Success, then we have to live with the fact that it either comes from within (intrinsic motivation) without any external pressure or you should look for something else that you really care about. There is a simple test to find out if you found the real thing, just answer this question: would you do it for free?

Let’s have a look at the emotional (practical) intelligence or the lack of it. A few examples on both sides:

• In 1921 Lewis Terman, a Stanford University psychologist (and a pioneer of the IQ test) started tracking 1000+ elementary school students with very high IQ to prove his theory that success depended mostly on the IQ of the person. He failed to prove his point.
• As a doctor you are more likely to be sued for a malpractice due to poor communication than for an actual medical mistake. Simply put, patients do not sue doctors they like.
• Ferruccio Lamborghini would have stayed in the tractor manufacturing business if had not been insulted by Enzo Ferrari when he brought up his concerns about his Ferrari.
• Robert Oppenheimer attempted to poison (!) his tutor at Cambridge University – and could get away with it because he had impressive communication skills.

The good news: John Erving was a bad speller since he struggled with dyslexia, but still managed to win the National Book Award for Fiction with The world according to Garp. Rick Allen from Def Leppard is a fine drummer although has a single arm. That is: you can improve your communication skills and can beef up your practical intelligence by hmm… practicing.

The aim of this blogpost is not to teach communications, just to demystify IQ as the ultimate key to success and to raise awareness about the importance of communication skills. As a starter here are a few basic rules:

• Know your own personality type and its relationship to other personalities (DISC or Myers – Briggs, does not matter, just know who you are!) Know your stakeholders’ personality and what the hot buttons are of that personality. Some folks love numbers, some other charts while others care about the story (and large Excel sheets are a no-no for them.)
• Know whom you want to serve – know who your stakeholders are and know what matters to them. Know what you can give and once you determined what they need and what you can provide, just go for it.
• “Yeah-But” was a Maya goddess who ate ideas for breakfast and defecated objections… Do not wake her up by telling her name. Delete the “yeah, but” from your dictionary.
• Extroverts, repeat after me: successful sales let the client speak more. You can substitute EQ with hearing skills, people tend to take a breath before speaking up (you know vocal cords need air to function). When you hear this type of breath taking, pause and listen. Your client is about to say something. If this does not work for you, remember what a CSMA/CD network does when two nodes “speak” at the same time: they stop transmitting.
• Keep in mind: if there is one thing your boss does not have enough that is TIME. Be concise in your written communication. If it does not fit on a single screen without scrolling, it is too long! (Did I tell you that your manager is the gatekeeper for your promotion?)
• Hold your horses on judgement; you may not see the entire picture. (Particularly applicable to those poor souls with a “J” at the end in their MBTI.) Even if you do, address the act, not the actor. Always give feedback in private and appraisal is public. (cc-ing everybody and his mother on a feedback mail will surely miss the goal.)
• Developers: Come out from your comfort zone and learn about the problems of your client, eg. bit of ITIL to understand your ops counterparts. Clients do not give crap about the programming elegance; they care about the business process your code helps to automate and the ease of use of that code.
• Treat others with respect! Respect is free and when applied with a bit of humor it can break the ice. As one put it: everybody is stupid, except they are stupid in another way.
• Keep in mind: decision making is neither linear nor sequential; in most cases the verdict is finished earlier than the indictment and the whole process is to justify the already existing judgment.

The final word on this blog post: IQ alone will not bring you success. If analytical intelligence and hard work are present, but the promo does not come chances are you have a communication deficiency. The good news is that you can improve this. Should you have questions or a counter argument, please let me know.

Summary: some folks around me mix up project management with project administration and seriously undervalue project management compared to technical skills. They are dead wrong. The objective of this blog post is to prove that most IT projects do not fail due to technical reasons, ie. technical skills alone will not cut it. Mutual appreciation and a technically savvy PM with a mindful sponsor at the steering wheel are more likely to prevail.

A few days ago a colleague of mine lamented about “second class citizens” (that is PMs) versus engineers in case there were any layoffs on the horizon. I pointed out that first class project management is the key to the success of any major undertaking, and brought up examples from the Standish Group Chaos reports that a large portion of IT projects staffed with hundreds of great engineers go south every year or at least significantly miss deadlines and go over budget big time. The guy did not know that I murmured a spell while he was talking: he will have to build two houses in the next decade without any project management assistance. (Diabolic laughter) Since this spell is now planted in the mind of his (future) significant other, ie. it is impossible to reverse (and I am a nice guy - mostly) I decided to change his mind set before it is too late. The rest of this article is devoted to this goal.

Statement: Project management proficiency matters as much as technical skills and they are complementary traits.

Prove point #1 : A few well known projects that reached their goals  - due to stellar project management and great engineering.

These clients were hard to please and the PM could lose his job in case of any major hick-up. Did you recognize that history recorded the PM’s name along with their capable engineers?

Prove point #2: Despite of armies of good engineers 50+% of large IT projects fail or are seriously challenged every year. (if interested, have a look at the appendix.)

Definitions:

• Success: The project is completed on-time and on-budget, with all features and functions as initially specified.
• Challenged: The project is completed and operational but over-budget, over the time estimate, and offers fewer features and functions than originally specified.
• Failed: The project is cancelled at some point during the development cycle.

FYI: the bigger the project gets the less likely it will succeed. The commercial sector is not immune to this problem, ie. not only governmental projects fail. Source: Chaos summary - 2010

Prove point #3: Even a rather technology oriented firm (IBM) acknowledges that the common root cause behind major IT project failures IS NOT technology. Source: Seven Reasons IT Projects Fail

List of top seven reasons why IT projects fail

1. Poor project planning and direction
2. Insufficient communication
3. Lack of change, risk, financial, and performance management
4. Failure to align with constituents and stakeholders
5. Ineffective involvement of executive management
6. Lack of Soft Skills or the Ability to Adapt
7. Poor or missing methodology and tools

It is a myth – presumably kept alive by technical folks – that the lack of technical competencies of the project team is main cause of IT Project failures. Over 50 percent of IT project failures can be attributed to project management, whereas only 3 percent are attributed to technical challenges. There is another myth around – presumably spread by PMs – that a Project Manager without domain knowledge can manage IT projects. (I don’t think so.)

Prove point #4: Code design and development is only one third of the whole thing. In any IT project beyond 6 man months or 200k USD cost a PM is a must. (if you want to make some margin on it: the rule of thumb is to assign a shared PM to any fixed fee assignment beyond 50k USD and to assign a dedicated PM to any fixed fee project above 750k.)

 Summary: My intention is not to dethrone technologists but to elevate project management to the place it truly deserves, right next to technology. I used to run a for profit services unit for a decade where I risked the whole team’s bonus and eventually my job if we didn’t make at least 17% margin on our assignments. My best PMs were ex engineers/developers with the scars and bruises from previous projects. FYI: they earned the most – you know: combo skillset rules.

Guys, this is not EITHER - OR, this is AND. As always I am interested in your comments and feedback.

Appendix: References

CHAOS Summary 2009 The 10 Laws of CHAOS

Chaos Summary for 2010

The Year of the Executive Sponsor - Chaos Manifesto 2012

Think Big, Act Small - Chaos Manifesto 2013

The Crisis in Software: The Wrong Process Produces the Wrong Results

The Story Behind the High Failure Rates in the IT Sector

IT's biggest project failures -- and what we can learn from them

California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Cancels IT Modernization Project Contract

 The failure of the License Application Mitigation Project (LAMP)

FOXMEYER CASE: A failure of a large ERP Implementation

Apple's Copeland OS

“Titanic Lessons for IT Projects" - IT Projects from Hell

Six types of IT project failure

Seven Reasons Why Information Technology Projects Fail

IT projects - A Challenge for Project Management

Summary: in any economy where supply of skilled workforce cannot keep up with the growing demand (and IT skills in Eastern Europe fall into this category) employer branding will become a key success factor. Building a great employer brand requires sustained effort and sustained funding. Employers who neglect this fact will face serious talent shortage as Generation Y is becoming the majority in their workforce.

 My PR and Marketing teacher once opened her class with the following question: What is the difference between a squirrel and a rat? The answer: Absolutely nothing, only the squirrel has better PR.

This blog post is an attempt to prove that not even ACME Inc. (my favorite hypothetical firm, renowned manufacturer of exploding tennis balls - tagline: “Surprise your opponent!”) can ignore this fact.

Observations (my perception is my realityJ)

1. Supply will not catch up with demand (for IT folks) in the next 5 years.
2. The coming generations (Gen Y and Z) have a different approach to work vs. Generation X. The “You should be happy that you can work for us” mantra no longer cuts it, they have a choice and they know it.
3. The workforce of a geographic location compares ACME to another company IN THE SAME location; PR efforts at the ACME HQ thousands of miles away are insufficient, employee branding has to have a local component. (This applies to employee satisfaction surveys as well.)
4. Gen Y (let alone Gen Y developers) relies on social media, they do not give a crap about printed media and mostly ignore last century electronic communication means like e-mail.
5. They can and will find out the real thing about any firm, so any communication has to be genuine.
6. The most effective (and unavoidable) PR comes through the word of mouth of the employees and the alumni. Your brand ambassadors are your own people.
7. One has to maintain an end to end + long term view on talent management: ignoring employer branding will result in more expensive workforce acquisition.
8. Rats want to look like a squirrel, so they started to spend on employee branding as well.

Proof points and suggested actions (I swore to the seven Gods to fit this post in two pages, so I give you the links to the sources instead showing it, happy readingJ.)

1. Supply will not catch up with demand any soon – there are some 20k (not a typo) IT jobs unfilled in Hungary while the output in computer science graduates dropped 30% in the last 10 years. The European Union is not in a better shape. (see ref. #1 and #2.)
2. A different approach to work: Within 4 years the portion of employees who think they would find another place within a few months grew from 23% to 49%. Most companies do every attempt to predict customer behavior and offer customized services to them. Now it is time to do the same with the employees. (see ref. #3 and #4)
3. The importance of acting at the geographic location: In an open economy one has two choices: A: to pick the optimal choice within his/her geography OR B: to move where the better opportunities are. There is no competition between London (or for that matter Zürich) and Budapest, the 3X compensation wins. (aka. London as the 3^rd largest Hungarian settlement before BREXIT). Those with an adventurous spirit (ie. who stay in Hungary) compare local firms, so ACME needs to position itself vs. other LOCAL employers.
4. Gen Y relies on social media – an example: my kids (14,15 and 18 years old) answer any FB Messenger or Viber message within 5 minutes. I bought them ESTA for a trip. They received a clarifying question from the embassy in e-mail. They realized it 2 months later… They do not read e-mail. (print media is out of the question) (see ref. #5 and #6)
5. The real thing about any firm: If you spend an hour on Glassdoor, LinkedIn and Facebook, plus you read the last two 10k reports of any major company (let alone ZDNet, TechTarget, InformationWeek if you are in IT), you will have a decent idea about its status. Press releases do not really matter…
6. The power of the word of mouth: when one intercepts contradicting information (eg. the tone of the speaker suggests the opposite to what he says) it is normal human behavior is to give credit the meta-communication over the written words. The same applies if the company’s PR says one thing while its employees say another to their buddies and family. (see ref. #7 and #8)
7. The need for an end to end view: The better the brand, the more likely a candidate will pick it vs. another one he/she has an offer from, ie. the declined offer rate goes down. Considering that the cost of a declined offer is identical to an accepted one AND one needs to pay premium if the perception about his/her firm is not good let alone non-existent it makes business sense to improve employer branding.
8. Rats want to look like a squirrel: even the incumbent local telco has a decent entry in this area. (see ref #9).

Bottom line: this is time to put together a multiyear local employer branding plan at ACME HUN, to assign resources and funding and to execute it. Should you have questions, comments or a counter argument, please let me know.

References – sources used

1. http://ivsz.hu/projektek/kutatas-az-informatikus-munkaerohianyrol/
2. http://eskills-monitor2013.eu/fileadmin/monitor2013/documents/MONITOR_Final_Report.pdf
3. Most Desired Employers of 2014 - White Paper
4. Consumerized Employee Services - the next evolution is shared services
5. http://aonhewitt.hu/download/575/file/lmf_2014_trendek_es_tanulsagok.pdf
6. http://www.hwsw.hu/kepek/hirek/2014/12/hwsw_microsoft_fejlesztoi_kutatas_osszefoglalo.pdf
7. https://www.randstad.co.uk/employers/randstad-award/talent_2015_key_insights_from_the_randstad_award_2015.pdf
8. http://www.randstad.hu/Award-2014
9. http://www.legyelteisinformatikus.hu/

Summary: One has all kinds of communication methods to choose from: low tech like smoke signals to high tech like Skype video conferencing, let alone FaceTime or Viber. And there is one that rules them all: e-mail. There is a serious misuse of e-mail going on at ACME. The objective of this blog post is to prove that one needs to choose a communication platform with the normal SLA in mind, considering the circumstances of the other party, rather than picking the method most convenient to the sender. I wrote it in the belief that this problem falls into the second category in this prayer. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”* 

“We are in conference room 7H, are you coming?” This question is perfectly legitimate when shouted from an elevator as the doors are closing or in a phone conversation or perhaps as a text message on your mobile phone. The problem is that at ACME this kind of message is mostly sent as e-mail. During a business trip to London my manager sent me a mail from the conveyor belt at Heathrow letting me know where he was in the baggage reclaim area. A colleague at a local commercial bank sent a notification to the ALL EMPLOYEES alias about her coming vacation and put a request for a read receipt on her mail. Some recipients pushed “reply all” to this mail, suggesting that they did not want to receive this kind of message. Something is fundamentally wrong with how we use e-mail.

Friar Lawrence’s mistake

The chart below depicts several communication methods and their respective expected SLAs.

Paper based letters are the granddaddy of asynchronous communication where the SLA was dictated by the speed of the transport layer. In case of letters you just assume but do not know for sure when your message was read and if/when the recipient would respond. Substantiation: The most famous case for this asynchrony is the letter from Friar Lawrence to Romeo. If the friar had known in time that his letter did not reach Romeo, Romeo and Juliet would still be alive. On the other hand in case of a synchronous human communication the expected SLA to respond is minimal. Substantiation: During my own wedding I delayed the answer to the “Do you want to marry her?” question. It was a bet to hold it for 30 seconds. After 12 seconds the crowd was frozen and I could not resist mumbling a “yes”. (I lost a bunch of booze let alone the feedback from my mother.)

Innovation in the last 100+ years, beside bridging continents and bringing down the cost (of communication) it also reduced these SLAs and offered options between the two extremes. In most cases the first iteration of any innovation imitates the main stream it is about to replace. (Just have a look at the first car or Gottlieb Daimler). E-mail was no exception: the original use case was to distribute memos to departments. This means that the SLA to respond to an e-mail is supposed to be in the range of hours, regardless how fast it hits your mailbox. (You would not run out to check your physical mail box in every 5 minutes, would you?)

My point is that you should start with the WHY: what do you want to achieve with the given piece of information you are about to send. Depending on the answer you can consider the estimated SLA to respond to your message and then you can choose the appropriate transport layer. Not necessarily e-mail, Guys, mobile phone, SMS are a better alternative in many cases.

The human factor - the source

There is a hidden agenda in excessive mail usage beyond laziness to choose the right platform: that is to keep the ball in the other party’s court ie. to pass the responsibility to the recipient. I suspect this urge “to get rid of the hot potato” is behind a significant portion of the mail traffic that hits your inbox every day. These are the mail threads that – if printed – would span the void between the rims of the Grand Canyon and that keep everybody and his mother on the cc line. The problem is that these mail threads usually do not solve the problem being discussed, let alone require great effort to read them.  I suggest an alternative method instead:

• Pick the one person who is really needed to find a resolution to the problem.
• Find a mini timeslot (max. 8-10 minutes) by using presence sensing and an IM inquiry if the person is really available. Do not send a formal invite.
• Agree on the resolution (or at least on the next steps)
• Document it in an e-mail and distribute it to key stakeholders.

Lost in translation – the receiver

When I showed this post to a colleague he pointed out another weakness of mail as a communication platform: its limited capacity to convey complex problems opens the Pandora’s box for (mis)interpretation. This means that even if the encoded message is exactly the same as the intended message was (depending on language skills, mental state etc. of the sender) there is a good chance that it gets distorted during the decoding process, ie. when the receiver interprets the message. (Let’s assume that there is no noise added by the channel.)

The next problem lies in the inherent asynchrony of mail; that is the lack of immediate feedback on our intended message. A mail is like a cannon ball vs. the guided missile of verbal communication. One should make sure (s)he aims with this cannon precisely, using mail only for yes/no type questions or asking for a short timeslot to talk and then to document.

I hope that these suggestions (if implemented) will help to reduce the guano in your mail box. As always I will be happy to take your feedback on this post.

PS: Kilgore Trout was an imaginary writer created by my favorite writer Kurt Vonnegut. Just to get the essence here is a quote from Slaughterhouse Five*:  “Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

Summary

A new year always comes with a resolution. In case of a colleague of mine this was to take on board the preaching from me regarding SMART goals and regular checkpoints. So, he wrote a mail to his skip level manager, asking for these well-defined goals. He was emotionally hurt when he got no response from this person. The objective of this article to enumerate the steps that – hopefully – will help him (and perhaps you) achieving this goal.

Your real value to your manager

During the construction of my house a plumber claimed that his job was done (ie. he wanted his money) when the pipes were indeed built in, but the fittings, the furnace, the gas utility paperwork were all missing. I pointed out that I did not want pipes, I wanted hot (and cold) running water in the house, that is he should come back when this goal was achieved. In order to be valuable you need to understand what your manager cares about and need to deliver a solution, not just a part of it.

Understand your manager’s objective

In large organizations, it is necessary to understand the objectives of your skip level manager, potentially the whole department. Say your job is to tighten screws on a cogwheel. You are better off if you know what this cogwheel - or even better – what the whole engine does. You need to understand what really matters to the head of the engine room and he needs to understand what a loose screw on that cogwheel can cause to his machine. Chances are the only thing the captain on the bridge wants to hear is the remote humming of this engine powering his ship, but we don’t look that far yet.

Define the deliverables

Once you know what your skip level manager needs, the next step is to define a deliverable that helps her/him to achieve this.

The problem is if A: your deliverable is poorly defined or misunderstood or B: flat irrelevant. (C: when you do not deliver in time or in quality, but that is not a topic for today.) Your manager will not “spoon feed” you, ie. (s)he will not define your goals, this is your job: you need to do all the leg work. A good draft will trigger more conversation than a mail asking for it. Treat your manager as if (s)he was your client: find out his/her top 3 pain points and make material impact in fixing one of them.

Timing is key, starting the discussion in April means that you already wasted a quarter to achieve anything. Get to this agreement early and stick to a written confirmation, treat it like a contract.

Dependencies

Chances are your deliverable will depend on somebody else’s stuff and almost certain that you will not control this group/individual. The minimum is to know these dependencies, but this won’t cut it, know them early enough and know the people behind them. In this case, you have a fair chance to do risk management, that is to avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept this risk. If your deliverable is indeed important, you can count on your manager, (s)he will help you if (s)he got the alert in time. There is a subtle difference between a surgeon and a pathologist. It’s ham & eggs: in this meal the chicken is involved, the pig is committed.  The bad news: you are the pig; the external folks are the chicken. They ARE NOT committed. They won’t get hurt if your project goes south, you will.

Living in the matrix

Yup, you have at least two bosses and their priorities are different. (BTW: this is exactly why they created the matrix, that is to manage complexity and to maintain the balance between colliding priorities.) The key is to highlight these situations to all stakeholders, to propose a compromise and to maintain neutrality.

The Pareto principle vs. when priorities change

I think this is the big deal in anybody’s professional life, how to handle competing priorities without burning (too many) bridges. Two things are for sure:

• Human multitasking is a self-deception, at least for males. The penalty of context switching is too big, so you end up with several unfinished (and poor quality) deliverables, rather than scoring on those few you are really measured upon.
• If everything has a priority, then nothing has a priority. Your manager should know this. If you have an agreed goal sheet (this is the contract we talked about) then a significant new item should be treated like a project change request, ie. it is fair to ask your boss what should be dropped from your agreed deliverables list. If the new request comes from another entity, divert it to your manager, pointing out that you are ready to reshuffle your priorities based upon input from him/her. Keep in mind that you might become the requesting party soon when you need somebody to do you a favor. Keep the balance.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-12-21

A word on your capacity planning: Log your time to know where you REALLY spend your time. Do not cheat, put in the casual browsing of the news, the chat at the coffee machine and when you went out to get your car fixed.

Communication preferences

A retiring senior executive closed her farewell message with the following: “Technology is easy, people are difficult.” Imagine how difficult it can be if the other party is thousands of miles away. You need to understand your manager’s communication style. The rule of thumb is that the higher the person is in the chain of command the more precious time will become to her/him. Don’t waste it. Let her/him speak more than you, keep your mails short and send them after you agreed on something, not before.

Building trust

There is a fair chance that your first assignments will be minor, in fact carrying little risk to the manager in case of a royal screw-up. This is normal, (s)he places his/her bets on folks with a proven track record since the bigger the job, the bigger the risk for her/him in case of a failure. Relax, (s)he will have new assignments, ie. must give it to someone. If (s)he keeps giving them to the wrong guy, you will have a new manager soon. If you delivered, (s)he will know it.

What if you cannot be relevant in your current job (to your current manager)?

Despite of all the suggestions above, there will be cases where it just does not work for you. If you don’t like what you do, it shows in your performance, your next assignment is even more mundane, you are even less enthusiastic, a negative spiral is ahead. One colleague complained about the end of life product he had to maintain on an end of life technology. For the record: the scarcity of the resource defines its price, it might be the case where you navigated into a well-paying niche. The key is to know how long that niche will last and to build expertise for the next niche.

If you cannot live with this anymore or the lack of chemistry becomes unbearable, then find another manager or perhaps another company.

Keep in mind, building trust will take time wherever you go and will carry some of risk. The person you really responsible is YOU. You can walk away from any manager, but you cannot escape from yourself.

As always, I appreciate any feedback on this post.

PS: The pictures are from Dilbert.com and from the “Far Side”, a cartoon series by Garry Larson.

A recently promoted colleague brought up a problem about her changed relationship with her team.  Something has changed, while she still treated herself as “one of them.” Well, not really. Leadership comes at a price, and this is not a new thing. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” (Shakespeare - Henry IV. Part II, 1597) One might argue that a vice president is not an executive (yet), but the underlying problem is similar: you are NOT just one of them.

Let’s have a look at the definition of a leader. You are a leader if you are followed by people at will, in some cases against their own basic instinct to flee, eg. when you lead a march through the Edmund Pettus bridge despite the imminent danger of a police riot (Martin Luther King). Although “crossing rivers as a symbol of leadership” would serve well as the subject of a blog post (eg. Caesar – crossing the Rubicon or Bonaparte – battle of Arcole) the topic today is to stay emotionally connected to your troops while finding equilibrium in the field of force. With a bit of hesitation – after all marrying psychology to geometry is a bit unorthodox - I sketched this:

The point I tried to illustrate was that maintaining the same “distance” from your team, your manager and your peers is vital in becoming successful in your new function.

What happens if you maintain a small D1 at the expense of a too big D2

The classic problem of leaders emerging from the mass of individual contributors is the desire to stay close to the team they come from; not recognizing that it hurts their ability to serve their people right and it will inhibit their rise further in the chain of command. The driver is clear: as Elliot Aronson puts it, people are social animals who want to belong to the community and often confuse being liked with being trusted and respected.  If you are too close, you will soften much needed feedback; will suggest your friend for promotion instead of the right one and eventually will end up with a weaker team. FYI: a leader is measured on the performance of the team… If you are reluctant to discipline an ex buddy because you fear that it would harm the relationship (you bet it would) then your tie to this guy will prevent you from doing the right thing. Maintaining an impartial view on performance over being a buddy will help you build respect from the entire team and your management.

Maintaining a too small D1 leads to tension with your manager as well. You are likely to find yourself making judgement calls on your management chain without understanding the whole picture. For example this is acceptable from an associate – notwithstanding clearly shows lack of maturity – to criticize the management for withdrawing access to a pizza delivery site, while this is truly a mistake to brag about it in your team if you are an officer. (My favorite is an “essay” penned by a colleague about the “pizza- tree” (you know this is where pizza grows) that ended up in a mail thread with 3 MDs on it, one of them being the tower head for the guy – visibility is granted for sure.) Doing so you show evidence that you are careless about the firm’s ultimate desire to avoid reputational damage by leaking confidential data of its clients. (like Sony, Home Depot or JP Morgan did by falling victim of a hacker). Giving fact based feedback to your manager about the drop in work effectiveness and emotional commitment to the firm this unforeseen and poorly communicated action stirred among your troops plus making suggestions on how to fix the problem AND to stay protected is a legitimate action. A side note: managers are human beings who might not appreciate being criticized behind their backs. Chances are your gossip will get back to the subject - potentially tweaked enough and stripped away from context that it would damage the relationship.

Keeping a too small D1 at the expense of a large D3 is also a regular problem, although less harmful than the previous one. You can get away with it but you are likely to confine yourself as middle management. Being a plant manager at BMW in Freising (Bavaria) you might air your opinion about your peers at Rosslyn/Pretoria (South Africa) – after all they assemble only 3 series sedans with small engines  , but once you made it to the headquarters in Munich all you should care about is the quality, quantity (plant capacity) and unit cost of cars made at each plant.

What happens if you maintain a minimum D2 at the expense of too big D1

The problem of becoming a sycophant after being promoted is more likely to occur in state owned firms. Minions are likeable from the managers’ viewpoint, since they pose little risk for going after their jobs, while the culture that nurtures them will guarantee mediocrity in the long run. The thing is that a leadership that supports mediocrity is likely to sink with the ship itself, hence less common in the commercial sector. (Okay, if the ship is a governmental institution in Hungary, then completely different forces will be at play where loyalty beyond doubt would be more valued that proficiency in the job.)

A few suggestions how to handle the transition from a peer to the manager

• Remember where you come from – treat your team members with respect and do not change your behavior toward them just because you got promoted. Avoid gossiping or taking sides in disputes. Keep in mind: friendships outlast reporting relationships, so this is perfectly fine to maintain a friendship but you need to strictly separate the two. For the record: during a 40 years professional life you are likely to have less true friends than bosses, so take good care of these few.
• Be modest but believe in yourself – if you got your laurels based on non-disputed performance, keep calm and carry on, you do not need to look for excuses why you made it and some of your ex peers did not. If you radiate doubt, your team members will sense it and will amplify it, a self-fulfilling prophecy for failure. If you become arrogant after being promoted, you will lose the trust and support of your team that is essential for delivery, again a doom loop.

The final word on this blog post: maintain the balance in whatever you do and stay true to the values that helped you to get promoted in the first place. Should you have questions or a counter argument, please let me know.

Summary: IF Performance = Ability x Motivation x Opportunity to perform THEN let intrinsic motivation do its job. With words: if you want a good harvest you need great seeds, but you also need a good soil. You can increase the yield by going for the best possible seeds (scarce and expensive) or by providing a good soil for the seeds. The same applies to people. The extra efficiency we are looking for is in front of us, we just have to unleash it.

ROE (Return on Equity) is investor speak for more bang for the buck. It translates to “Do more with less” in management speak and it is increase of CPU speed, bandwidth etc. in engineer speak.

In case of humans performance is a function of Ability, Motivation and the Opportunity to perform.  P = f(M x A x O). I take ability for granted in this post and will focus on the other two factors, the soil.

“A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” /Matthew 13:8/ We have proof from a canonical source that the soil matters, so let us have a look at the “Motivation” and the “Opportunity to perform” parts.

 Motivation

Traditional management uses two means to increase motivation: the carrot and the stick.

• About the carrot: According to the Herzberg two factor theory salary (beyond a certain point) is not a motivator but a hygiene factor.
• About the stick: Even a strong threat (losing the job) could not trigger a lasting response, the increased performance soon drops and turns into apathy. For details see the stress theory from Janos Selye.

Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation

Do you know who Samuel Pierpont Langley was? I did not know either until I came across a TED Talk titled “Start with the why”. (Check it out!) The point Sinek makes is that the extrinsic motivation of Langley (that is getting rich and famous) could not prevail against the intrinsic motivation of the Wright brothers (changing the World by creating the manned flying machine).

Okay, we need intrinsic motivation. The Self Determination Theory is centered on the belief that human beings show persistent effort and commitment in their lives that the theory calls "inherent growth tendencies." People also have essential psychological needs that are the basis for self-motivation to function. These innate needs are Competence, Relatedness and Autonomy.

• Competence - Seek to control the outcome and experience mastery.^.
• Relatedness - Is the hunger to interact, be connected to, and experience caring for others.
• Autonomy - Is the universal urge to be causal agents of one's own life.

Dan Pink uses a similar argument in his book titled Drive. He makes a point that long lasting motivation is built upon 3 elements.

• Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters
• Purpose – the desire to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
• Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives

I do not cover mastery in this post; I think our recruitment engine is a painstakingly sufficient filter to let in only those with great skills. (For the record: these skills in the IT sector have a very short half-life, so regular training – with a fancy name lifelong learning - is a must.)

Let us have a look at the diagram again, but this time with a few suggestions:

Purpose – Insist on understanding the bigger picture! If you know how the cogwheel you are working on will be used, you will do a better job. Even more important: know the goals of your manager. There is nothing bad in asking for the goal sheet of your boss.

Autonomy - if the total fully loaded cost of the executives involved in a decision making is greater than the value of the topic being discussed then it looks like a candidate for delegation. Trust your own employees, expecting more is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So is the lack of it.

Clarity of goals - I came across folks in the organization who went on without an agreed set of goals for the better half of the year. How can one make a judgement call on the performance of these guys? Folks, insist on SMART goals at the beginning of the year! To illustrate it let’s pick an example from JFK:

• Specific - land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth
• Measurable - we would know if a man had landed on the moon (leave me alone with the related conteos)and could certainly tell if he returned safely to earth
• Action-oriented - JFK called for innovation and for a bunch of money for the NASA.
• Realistic - “I believe we have all the resources and talent necessary.” 
• Time constrained - accomplish this goal by the end of the decade

Regular feedback - Managers with passion for technology: imagine a control system without a feedback loop. This would mean no error signal, ie. no chance for correction in case of any divergence from the target. Folks: insist on regular, meaningful feedback on your progress vs. your goals! Logistics: if you hear the other party (your boss) typing during the call you can bet (s)he is not writing the meeting minutes for you. If (s)he does not respond in time that means (s)he was on mute and was doing something else. Go for a video call whenever it is possible.

Time – although none of the theories mention it I bring it up: we are literally killing ourselves with meetings. The good news is that we are not the first victims; the book called Death by meeting was a must read 10 years ago at the CEEHQ of MSFTJ. After reading it you will insist on having a predefined agenda with an expected outcome, a last meeting follow up and someone assigned to take notes. This is okay to ask the question at the beginning what the objective of this meeting is and at the end if we reached this objective. BTW: Reciprocity is at work here, the bigger the number of participants is, the less likely to reach any decision. And yes, you do need a bio break between meetings. Really…

Pebble in the shoe - “It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe.” /Muhammad Ali/. Some units are very creative at defining rules that, when put into practice create deadlocks with other rules and make you crawl. Attention: Pointing out that other party’s brain is like an 8 bit CPU running at 800 kHz (vs. your 8 core i7 running at 3.5 GHz) will not help, they are also humans. The first rule is to understand where they are coming from. For example the more I learn about the potential ways of being hacked the more paranoid I become, ie. I hardly ever argue about security restrictions. (For the record, we are not the only paranoids: 20 years ago the CIO of the National Savings Bank told me that the best firewall was a 4 cm air gap. He meant it; Nat Savings went with two computers for every employee who was allowed to access the internet at all.)

On a positive note I encountered cases where treating the other party with respect and applying some negotiation basics did yield results. And yes, on a dark night I (almost) plugged my iPhone charger into the corp. power net.

The final word

“Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed when they're gone.” /Seth Godin/ Help them reaching their goal and you will get what you are after: higher performance at a lower cost.

In the last two years I had the chance to talk to a fair number of people in my team about their careers.  After a while I recognized some patterns in these discussions and figured it would make sense to create a blog post from the relevant ones. Most of the stuff I am about to share is not my own, I read it somewhere and tried it in practice. Wherever I can I will make a reference to the source hoping that some folks might take the time to actually read the whole book.

The topics I would like to cover span from the basics of communication (eg. if this post ends up too long, nobody is going to read itJ) to deeper topic like one can drift to the perimeter without even noticing it. The first post is about the hedgehog concept as described in a book called From good to great by Jim Collins. The only tweak is that I applied it to individuals instead of companies. So here we go.

The Hedgehog Concept is based on an ancient Greek tale around the following observation: The fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows only one big thing and still the hedgehog prevails. In the allegory, the fox uses a variety of strategies to try to catch the hedgehog. It sneaks, pounces, runs, but all in vain. At the end of the day it walks away defeated, with a nose full of spines. The fox is good at many things while the hedgehog is great at one thing: self-defense and the later wins. Why am I talking about a small unfriendly rodent in a career conversation? Let us have a look at the 3 circles of one’s professional life:

What are you deeply passionate about? – Some people argue that the first attribute should the “what you can be the best in the world at”, while I think if you listen to your instinct and devote your energies to your favorite area it will improve your chance to become the best. Passion is easy to measure, if you are passionate about something, time flies and you tend to reject interrupts (like your spouse yelling about supper).

What can you be best in the world at? This article cannot cover the nuances between “the best” vs. “the best in a given location” vs. “relative expert” vs. “best according to someone’s taste”. We can settle for an uglier term: marketability. What combination of skills can you bring to the (job) market that is sought after by entities that can actually pay for it? An example could be developer skills: a person who is considered to be a decent developer might be overqualified for a devops job at a countryside municipality while would be rejected after the phone screening at an investment bank. This example also raises two topics that could deserve an entire post. The first is the differentiation between natural talent and a polished skill. Unless you are born with skills like W.A. Mozart you probably need to spend a number of years to become “the best”. The other thing is the fact of half-life: ie. being the best today at something does not necessarily guarantee that you will remain the best a few years from now. Three things will change: the subject matter, you yourself and your competition.

What drives your economic engine? The expression originally relates to companies that we could translate to “sustainable compensation”. It is important to keep in mind that the scarcity of the resource will determine its price. Napoleon III was rumored to have used aluminum plates while his guests had to eat from ones made of gold.  Tableware made of aluminum is the synonym of cheap today. The same applies to skills: when demand is significantly beyond supply prices go up, while this drives the buyers nuts so they will do everything possible to find alternatives. When they succeed, demand starts dropping, so do the prices. Translating it to IT: when you go for a niche, you will hit the jackpot for a while, then you will have to look for another niche. Commonplace but true: if you possess a set of interrelated skills peppered with communication skills, your marketability gets higher than the sum of the individual skills would dictate. One more aspect: depending on which chapter of your life you are your cash flow sensitivity ie. your appetite for risk will vary, hence the word “sustainable”. 

After this long intro section we reached the real thing: how one should decide on the steps of his/her career. The obvious optimum is the intersection of the three circles, when you are passionate about the stuff you are working on, you are a true expert on it and this subject-skill combo is marketable. Happily ever after…

• The job - If you manage yourself into the intersection of being good at something and being well paid (a job), but your heart is not in it, you will drop the keyboard at 6PM and you will ignore new developments in your area. This will either lead to burn-out and surely will make you fall behind others who love their trade. Either way, your employment will suffer in the long term.
• The hobby – I run the risk that this post ends up in the hands of a translator of ancient Greek poems, currently being employed at a local McDonalds, so I use my own example instead: 26 years ago my passion and skills gravitated to physics so I was offered an assistant professor job at the department of electron physics at the Budapest University of Technology (BME) with the whopping gross compensation of 6400 HUF per month while my mortgage was 4600 HUF. This meant the end of my career in science.
• The dream –check out the Monty Python scene about the man who applied for the role of Tarzan titled One leg too few and you will get the point.

 The final word on this blog post: know where you are in the three circles and be there at you own will rather than drifting into it. Should you have questions or a counter argument, please let me know.

A few weeks back I got a question from an intern about where IT was going and how she could find a good place in it. This was the 4^th time in a row that I got this ultimate question about the meaning of life (of an IT guy). I could have cracked it by asking Deep Thought (my liquid cooled custom built PC), but I figured - since these folks do not have a few million years to wait for the answer - that I would summarize my guesswork in a blog post and then ask others what they think. So here we go.

If history is any guide (what I think I know)

IT comes in waves: in every 15-20 years comes a technology that questions the fundamentals of the previous age of computing. The PC, the graphical UI, the World Wide Web, the smartphone or cloud computing are examples of these tectonic moves. One is lucky if (s)he can exploit one of these, exceptionally lucky ones might capture two.

Commoditization - when a product or service becomes indistinguishable from similar products - has tarnished HW already and will render the OS irrelevant soon: margins become single digit and only a few survive this cutthroat race (Tallgrass, Compaq, Gateway, Everex to name a few now defunct PC manufactures). A prime example is IBM, the inventor of the personal computer who sold its PC business to Lenovo when realized it can no longer produce enough profit in this area.

Commoditization is the prelude for consolidation (this happened to CPU architectures: Zilog, PA-RISC, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, Itanium, SGI from the age of the CPU architecture wars, later to the operating systems: SCO, Banyan VINES, Novell Netware, Minix, BSD just to name a few from the OS graveyard, AIX and Solaris soon to join them.) Have you ever thought how many manufacturers produce airbags or watch calibres in quantities?

Scarcity of a resource dictates its price, ie. if your knowledge domain places you in the commodity bucket, you will become cheaper.

There is a correlation between the expected return and the volatility (risk) of this return – expressed in less chic way: your bonus will be less in a back-office function than in sales. One way to fight this is by picking a good niche for yourself.

Software rearranges the borders between realms – eg. voice and data is already merged and voice no longer belongs to the telco guys by birth right.

Combo skillsets win over single-track skills: “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Technologists regularly make the mistake of attacking any problem with a technology solution. If you want to be successful, you need to keep in mind processes and people as well.

The half-life of any given technology is under 5 years, while your capability to absorb something new will decline as you get older: look for something with a longer life span if you are over 45. BTW: do not count on state pension (at least not in Hungary), you either have become rich by this time or you will (have to) work longer than your retirement age.

Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, right? Someone told me that IT certs are worthless, since he interviewed people with certs who knew less than him. While not all certs are equal, there are a few with serious respect. Once I offered a bet: “If you are so damned smart, why don’t you take all the 6 exams needed for an MCSD in a single week? If you do so, I throw in the exam fees for all.” My best folks did it, the rest stopped criticizing MCSD.

An IT screw up can be devastating – just ask the CEO of British Airways… As Pink Floyd once put it: Careful with that (outsourcing) axe Eugen!

What great minds think - two opinions from the opposite ends

On the one hand Nick Carr in his seminal article (“IT doesn’t matter”) drew the analogy between electricity and IT, pointing out that when electricity was not widely available, it was a source of competitive advantage, but later, when the output of power plants (via the national power grid) became widely accessible, reliable and cheap, it became a commodity no one could create competitive advantage on. Economies of scale and the higher utilization by serving multiple customers brought down the prices, rendering in house dynamos a burden, no longer an asset. He argued if every firm has access to the same (commodity) IT infrastructure, then none of them can gain an edge over the rest by using it, ie. it (IT) should be the focus of disciplined cost management. In hindsight Carr defined the public cloud in 2003.

Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins provides a treasure trove to those who care to read her 350+ slides every year. Slide 181 in her 2017 Internet Trends slide deck claims that the slice of the global IT infrastructure pie spent on traditional data centre spend shrunk from 76% to 63% in 4 years (2013 - 2016). So it seems Carr was right.

On the other hand, Marc Andreessen (one of the founders of Netscape) claims that software is about to eat the World as we know it. Perhaps Tom Friedman captured this phenomenon best when he wrote, “In 2004, Facebook didn’t exist, 4G was a parking space, an app was something you sent off to college, LinkedIn was a prison, Tweet was a sound a bird made, and Skype was a typo.” Things changed. Andreessen (and others) bring up amazing examples where IT reshaped entire industries (in less euphemistic terms: wiped out once invincible incumbents) in the last 15 years: LinkedIn – recruitment, Skype – telecom, Pixar – animated movies, Netflix – home movies, Spotify – music, Airbnb -  hotels, Amazon – retail, Google – marketing, PayPal – payments, Kindle – books, AWS – computing power.

Mary Meeker in her Internet Trends 2012 dedicated an entire section of her presentation to “RE-IMAGINATION OF NEARLY EVERYTHING” (from slide 20 to slide 57). Her assessment is in sync with Andreessen, something unprecedented is about to happen, mostly driven by IT. So it seems Andreessen is right, therefore Carr must be wrong, or what?

How can we bridge the chasm between these two statements?

William Forrest from McKinsey resolved this contradiction by splitting IT into two areas:

Old IT – increases the efficiency of individuals while leaves the processes and workflows largely intact.  With the term coined by Clayton Christensen, old IT brings sustaining innovation.

New IT - focuses on new (digital) products or services, on team productivity and business model transformation. New IT focuses on disruptive innovation.

My reading is that IT matters more than ever and will transform entire industries, rather than (just) make existing business models more efficient as its primary goal. On the other hand, IT infrastructure (especially for small/mid-sized companies, or anybody without a multi decade investment in on-premises IT will gravitate towards public cloud offerings for the agility and the ability to scale up (or down) as the business demands. I believe this is not about the cost.

Where I would place my bet

Security could change the course of WWII (Alan Turing vs. the Enigma), can delay a major Middle East power’s quest to own an atomic bomb (Stuxnet), can give a blow to the Healthcare System of a country (WannaCry) or can cost the job of a senior executive eg. at Sony Pictures. Major companies, (and nation states) will pay serious money to protect (or to get) information. A never-ending story. FYI: you need to be good at it to score.

Integrating on-premise DCs with public cloud providers –Let’s put Carr’s analogy one step further (details in the appendix) Based upon this cca. 16% of computing will remain on premises for the next 20 years due to regulatory, security and (sunken) cost reasons. Lovely: one will have to connect the on-premise IT with the part provided by public cloud providers. Complex, relevant, cool, what else would you ask for?

Containerization (and microservices) – provisioning an on-premise physical server can take up to 3 months (from the request), you can spin up a VM in 10 minutes, while you can start up a container in seconds. But wait, there is a problem: your provisioning, access control, monitoring etc. is incompatible! An opportunity to integrate it with the existing environment. I put microservices in here: I believe that most of your existing stuff will not run on it either, so you will need to rewrite the whole thing to mostly stateless (except the DB layer). Chances are it means a total overhaul, not just small modifications.

Machine learning: imagine that the scenario in WestWorld became true. Imagine that a robot (essentially a computer with a human like body and peripheries) could modify its code based upon its experiences. A bit frightening, but certainly cool.

UX design – Gen Y End users will demand Consumer-Quality product experiences. This means that old school mantra (“it does not matter how ugly my stuff is as long as it does the job”) will no longer cut it. The designer to developer ratio is on the rise. (KP Internet trends 2017 – slide 188) Cool, beautiful, one who can design AND write the business logic will be king.

Augmented and virtual reality – 5 years ago we created an app that combined 3D Bing Maps with Kinect and a PC (no XBOX) and let people fly over the Grand Canyon just like a bird. I don’t quite know how one can monetize it, but it was so cool that I would do it again, any time.

Healthcare diagnostics – the population of the US (and of Europe) is aging while governments struggle to contain healthcare costs. IBM’s Watson AI Recommends Same Treatment as Doctors in 99% of cancer cases. Wearable gizmos transmitting vital signs with computing capacity in the backend can make the difference between life and death. Absolutely key for us mortal dudes, therefore a good business.

The Internet of Things – imagine that a large number of vacuum cleaners would combine their computing power to work on the SETI problem Or imagine that you could monitor the status of a car (eg. the oil level, or tyre pressure), perhaps your mother’s car who often forgets about these things. The bandwidth, security, privacy related will remain unsolved areas for years. An opportunity for you.

I gathered a few ideas, now it’s your turn to let me know what missed or got wrong. I will be happy to share your feedback with the people who raised the original question. Best regards Laszlo

References:

IT Doesn’t Matter  by Nick Carr

Nick Carr's 'IT Doesn't Matter' still matters by Ann Bednarz

The end of corporate computing by Nick Carr

Why Software Is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen

A McKinsey View On Whether Information Technology Matters by Joe Weinman

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy - a report by McKinsey

Cloud as IT Disrupter; SDN as a New Virtual Network Infrastructure

Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity

Internet Trends 2012 (Mary Meeker) Section: RE-IMAGINATION OF NEARLY EVERYTHING (from slide 20 to slide 57)

Internet Trends 2017  - (Mary Meeker)

IT Doesn't Matter: What every IT pro needs to know to survive in the cloud era By Art Fewell

Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2012 and Beyond

Joseph Schumpeter: Creative Destruction

Don’t Get SMACked: How Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Technologies are Reshaping the Enterprise  By Malcolm Frank

Are You Ready for the Second Wave of the Digital Revolution?

The Unintended Consequences of Outsourcing

15 Top-Paying Certifications for 2017by Global Knowledge

The 9 worst cyberattacks of 2015 on Business Insider

Electricity in the United States

What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?  US. EIA. What portion of electrical energy produced in the US is generated by private companies for themselves? I speculate that private generators run on either natural gas or on diesel oil since nuclear, coal or water generate larger capacities but require deeper pockets, while a natural gas-powered plant can be small. Petroleum powered plants are under 1 %, coal and nuclear are around 50%, renewable around 15%,   I figure that one half of the natural gas based power comes from private companies. That is 16%.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES by Janakiram MSV

IBM’s Watson AI Recommends Same Treatment as Doctors in 99% of Cancer Cases