Excellent speakers, great panel and fascinating insights. But the real surprise … everyone there I spoke to was either coming to BizCampBelfast or they wanted to. I even met some of my fellow speakers.

In the networking reception afterward there was genuine excitement and a real air of expectation for what would be presented at the conference on Monday. The few who had not heard about BizCamp were quickly surrounded by those that had and passionate advocacy for the event soon followed. It was thoroughly heart warming to hear the real sense of ownership and personal investment that people have in BizCamp and the pride they have being part of it.

It was really quite thrilling to be amongst such buzz. Can’t wait for Monday!

I asked everyone I met after attending a presentation in Philadelphia this last week. And the answers were fascinating but the best answer by far was …

Invention turns cash into ideas.
Innovation turns ideas into cash.

At BizCampBelfast this is going to be my theme for my presentation. I’d welcome any thoughts you have so that I can incorporate them into my talk and I encourage you to bring your ideas to the session to share with everyone there.

Days to go! I’m excited.

Delivered: but what if it is not

Let’s say you need to deliver a package halfway across the world and it absolutely has to get there on Monday. And it doesn’t arrive. And you want to know where it is.

What is the tracking number? This seems like a simple question. But it is not. The chances that you’ll know what the tracking number are pretty low, indeed close to zero, unless you have the paperwork with you.

So USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL and the rest … how about we get to choose our own tracking numbers? You can check to see if there are duplicates easily enough.

But do we need tracking numbers at all. I fill out a long form with my details as the sender and your details as the recipient. While this is not a unique identifier it will return a short list and when we add in the date, or the date range, that list will come down to a handful at most and then time of mailing, cost of postage, size, weight ought to narrow things down even if the matching has to be fuzzy.

All of this is data that is captured. So why isn’t it available to me to search for and track my package?

More importantly why isn’t available to the staff at the shipping companies?

So next time you insist on having your customer carry your number around for your convenience … consider this … you have all the data. Use it. Delight your customer. The Empowering Change we can make today is in the systems thinking that puts the computer system’s needs ahead of the computer users.

Don’t be a Prisoner to the System.

Inside Bucks - breakfast was under the Roy Rogers painting

Bucks is a Silicon Valley institution for breakfast. Located in Woodside just off the interstate I280 it is without doubt one of the most eclectic places for a meeting.

I’m sitting here waiting to meet my contact from InvestNI (INI) and debating the choice between Huevos Rancheros, Eggs Benedict and Eggs Florentine. I guess I am in the mood for eggs.

This week the UK Government announced cutting $135bn from the budget over the next 5 years resulting in about a 25% cut, across the board, in government funding. There is some ring fencing for Education and Health but it is expected that 500,000 civil servants will find themselves unemployed pretty soon.

And yesterday the government announced new regulations and a levy to be imposed on banks which will raise about $2.5bn in a full year. This levy is to provide the money needed to insulate the economy from dramatic changes in the market, as happened in October 2008, and to encourage banks to be slightly more risk averse.

So in two days the UK landscape has changed dramatically. UK government spending is going to all but disappear for everything except essential services and any bank operating in the UK (including foreign owned banks) are subject to new levies and regulations.

The question is what does this mean for InvestNI which is funded by the UK government? Will they see their ability to invest in new projects curtailed? Will they have to withdraw from the investments they are already making?

Given that 70% of the workforce in Northern Ireland are in some way funded by the taxpayer what is the impact going to be on employment in Ulster? Will the economic growth we have seen in the last couple of decades disappear? Will unemployment may return to 10% or more? And what will fill the vacuum?

We have to make a stand. Perhaps the UK government cannot afford to subsidize us any longer? We have to invest … in ourselves.

There are amazing entrepreneurial instincts here in Northern Ireland. I see it every day as I work with my business partners. The workforce is talented, motivated and well educated. It is an incredible place to live with such wonderful opportunities to create a great quality of life. Whatever these government budget changes may mean in the months ahead in practical terms we will find out soon enough. If ever there was a time to Empower Change and start that new business, turn that idea into a livelihood or live your dream it is now.

Is this how we see the customer?

I have experienced a number of interesting stories about customer service in the last few days and I am fast coming to the conclusion we may need to fundamentally rethink our approach.

Recently a friend went into get a free phone upgrade. She couldn’t be given the phone because the accounting system wasn’t able to deal with €0.00 transaction. My friend pointed out, from her years of accounting, that a €0.00 transaction doesn’t affect an accounting system! Alas too logical. After some back and forth she decided that O2′s logic could only be modified with a sit-in. The threat was enough, O2 gave her her upgrade and she is now the proud owner of a new iPhone.

End of story. Alas no.

She then tried to connect her email which runs in SmarterMail. Yes, this blog post is going to shame the shameful, which she easily connected to her BlackBerry (kudos to RIM). After she struggled to connect her iPhone to SmarterMail (which out to be smarter!) I tried to do it and, three hours later, managed to make the connection. That was after failing to get any help from (more shame coming) Apple, Google, Yahoo, Bing and SmarterMail. All they had to offer was information from 2008. Finally trial and error and 30-years of tech experience solved the problem.

Can we agree on some things people?

Why do we enshrine the most detailed and complex set of business rules into multiple layers of technology and completely eliminate common sense and dis-empower the people operating these systems from overriding the stupidity and doing the right thing for the customer?

As Seth Godin said in his blog this morning. “What makes a celebrity special? … It’s exciting to shake hands or get an autograph from a famous person … you’re getting a slice of attention from someone who has other options. … Your customers too. They’re famous now. Time to start treating them that way.”

Time also to rethink the blind logic, strict adherence to policy, practice, procedure, process and all those other pesky, pissy details that get in the way of common sense.

Why is it that, as a supposed engineering discipline, we think the word “standard” is a plural. Can we agree that somethings will be standardized. Cell-phone chargers do not need to come in 50 varieties. Apple computers need to have a VGA output. And connecting to email servers should require email address, password and URL and the systems should work out everything else. The only Port Number I care about is the year it was bottled!

So, are we all agreed? If you bring out new stuff you need to pass the following tests:

1. Does it make my life easier?
2. Does it work (without me doing anything) with ALL my existing stuff?
3. Can I download it, install it, configure it, use it without studying computer science, without calling a friendly geek, without answering silly (or incomprehensible questions) and without losing hours of my life that I will never get back? … and … and this is the biggy
4. Will I GAIN hours of improved lifestyle because of it?

If the answer to any of those questions is no – don’t release it – it is Beta and you should never practice on the paying public.

Empower Change in the way you treat the customer – put them first – make every interaction a delight – not a disappointment.

We will have the run of the entire place for the whole day. And what an amazing place it is. The exhibits are fascinating covering local, national and international themes. It is one of the finest museums I have ever been into and I wish I could have stayed longer. I spent way too much in the gift shop but did manage to complete almost all of my holiday shopping there!

The rooms for the presentations are modern, have character and will be great for the presenters and the audience alike. The space for our sponsors and for networking is very cool. The museum staff will be there too to answer any questions about the exhibits.

I’m suddenly really excited about the event and can’t wait to be back in Belfast. BizCampBelfast is going to set a new standard for conferences in the city. See you there.

Founders gourmet meal

Last night I attended a really interesting Cocktails and Conversations event at Kicklabs, an incubator where tech startups get to hang out, in a very cool space right in the heart of San Francisco.

There was a panel discussion about how founders and early investors can turn some of their sweat equity into liquid equity. One comment struck me as have the most important piece of information in the whole evening … “we expect founders to realize some of their equity early”.

Now this might seem counter-intuitive. One would think that a founder, who has just received an injection of cash from an Angel or VC, would want to show their commitment to the enterprise by not diluting their stake any further. And one would expect the VC’s to think the same thing. But it turns out that the VC’s do want founders and principal shareholders to liquidate some of their holdings if they need to.

The logic goes like this: for the past 3 to 5 years the founders have been living off pot-noodles to get their business going. Now they have an injection of cash and the support of outside investors. Those investors want the enterprise to succeed and for significant returns to accrue eventually. If the founder is feeling constrained personally and/or financially that is going to detract from their ability to innovate and lead. So releasing some equity, getting some liquidity, being able to address the life events (baby, braces, down payment on a house) that are causing the entrepreneur to be torn between work and life, is in the VC’s and the business’ interest.

The question is though, how much equity is reasonable to release. The VC’s last night seemed to agree that 10% of the founders’ stake was the maximum.

So if you are eating pot noodles and your partner is worried about having somewhere to live think about speaking to your investors about liberating some of your holdings. If they believe in you they may well buy the shares themselves and take a stronger position in your company. And then talk to your broker and your attorney and get their ideas on how to turn your equity into something more diverse and practical.

Your investors want you to succeed. You need to feel free to innovate if you are going to succeed. This is what it means to Empower Change. When you do something for yourself it has the effect of doing something for the business. This makes the investors happy and helps you to succeed. Your success will lead to you being able to do more for yourself, your partners and your investors. This becomes a pattern for growth and success.

Silicon Valley Innovation Institute in Palo Alto

The SVII gets together every month. This month there was a panel discussion on broadband. It was interesting to see the direction broadband was taking  but even more interesting to see and hear how people were reacting to the idea of unlimited bandwidth.

But first some numbers from the panelists:

• 4G will deliver better than wired broadband speeds eventually but the infrastructure isn’t there
• 120 million people in the US have access to 4G
• There are 4 billion cell phones world wide and 1.5 billion personal computers in the world today
• It is estimated that there will be 20 billion mobile devices by 2015
• It took 125 years to get to 1 billion land-line phone users, 20 years to get to 1 billion cell phone users and took only 3 more years to get to 2 billion cell phone users

Two main themes emerged from this panel. Firstly the effect that unlimited broadband would have on our society and second the different perspective of digital-natives from digital-migrants (to be explained shortly).

One speaker, Ray Abrishami from the WiMax Forum, was convinced that always-on, unlimited broadband was a bad idea. He suggested that language would suffer (lol), social interaction would cease, culture would collapse and economies would fail as increasing numbers of the population saw their device as their companion and they eschewed human contact. This nightmare scenario was increasingly likely, he said, as we lose the ability to manufacture wealth from goods and services and try, instead, to create wealth from ephemera such as games and social media which have no intrinsic value.

Not surprisingly, from a tech crowd like this, he was pretty much alone in his opinion. Indeed one person in the audience pointed out that they would use all the bandwidth they could get their hands on for streaming HD movies and music. Another person commented that without online gaming, online gambling and online porn we would not have made the investment in the infrastructure we have today and we would not all be benefiting from the huge amount of bandwidth we already have.

The economist and digital historian on the panel, Professor Alexander J. Field from Santa Clara University, took a more sanguine approach. He pointed out that it is our children who were born into the digital world, the digital-natives, who are adapting the technology to address world issues that had been previously intractable. While the evidence is clear that we are much less productive when we allow interrupts from email, chat, texts and even phone calls while we are working, the digital-natives take it all in their stride and are still productive. This is because they are harnessing the technology and exploiting it making them more productive than someone who is more reticent in its use. Indeed his main point was that technology brings productivity booms though there is often a lag between the inventing and the exploiting.

And for those of us who are digital-migrants, those of us who have learned to let go of analog technologies (vinyl records, wired-phones and over-the-air broadcasts), we are benefiting from the from the digital-natives embrace of all things new and shiny. If not in the productivity and wealth they are creating but also in what they are teaching us to do with technology. It is not uncommon for our children to give us “hand-me-ups” of their old (12 to 18 months) phones, PC’s and MP3 players as they move to the next cool gadget.

There is no doubt that with always-on, unlimited bandwidth the digital-natives will make full use of the capacity and will do extraordinary things with it. They will shape the future. We should encourage them to do so and accept their leadership. In our society, the Empowering Change we must facilitate is one where success is rewarded, failure is stigma-free and new is embraced.

How would you solve this problem?

The point here is that there is an awful lot of preparation, planning, research and design that goes into solving any business problem. Time that has to be spent but not time involved in building the solution.

Time-to-market is the strongest driver in business today. Many of my clients are the largest banks and insurance companies in the world. When a competitor comes out with a new product or service many of my clients have days at best, and weeks at worst, to come up with a competitive response fully supported with a technological solution.

The problem with traditional IT projects is that they require a minimum of set up time before anything gets done. And there is a lot of post-development activity too. All of this fixed overhead delays getting the solution into the hands of the business. I call this minimum overhead a business’s I2Q. Let’s look at this picture.

Everything we have done over the past 3 decades has been about reducing the time from the Idea (“I1″) to the Implementation (“I2″). If we think about some of the things we’ve done they include:

• Off-shoring – 5 developers in India for the price of one at home giving 5-times the productivity … or so the theory goes
• Packages – every possible piece of functionality you could possibly ever want – just turn off the parts you don’t use … a task that is nearly as long and expensive as writing from scratch
• CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools – paint your application and let the “smarts” write the code … great for simple order entry systems but anything more is just as complicated to write as cutting custom code and you have to learn a new language and environment and the final implementation is not very efficient
• SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) – write the basic building blocks of code that represent the business functionality and allow them to be combined and re-combined over time as the business problem changes … except that the reuse promise is not being delivered and these services often end up being one-use custom code

So what is your I2Q? How can you calculate it? There is a formula:

• Q = 100 / (1 + It + Iw)

Where:

• Q is the quotient
• It is the AVERAGE implementation time a project takes – what is the goal time length of ICT projects
• Iw is the AVERAGE waiting time before a project can be started – you can calculate this by taking the length of the backlog in years and divide by 2.

So a company with an average project time of 6 months and an average project waiting time of 18 months would have:

• Q = 100 / (1 + .5 + 1.5) = 100 / 3 = 33.3%

And a company with an average project time of 4 weeks and an average wait time of 4 weeks would have:

• Q = 100 / (1 + .08 + .08) = 100 / 1.16 = 86%

So the drive towards 100% is the goal. What can we do to get there?

5 Strategies for improving your I2Q?

Clearly we can either shorten the project time-frames and/or the time projects languish in the queue. But how can we do this without adding significantly to the cost structure?

1. Make projects smaller – smaller projects are less complex, require little or no setup time, can be tracked more accurately, add less retraining overhead and can get solutions in the hands of the business quicker
2. Let Pareto rule: 80% of what you need in 20% of the time – focus on the main theme of the requirement, do not worry about corner cases, use this as an opportunity to eliminate exception processes, put the effort into the most likely path through the process
3. Develop solutions with co-located teams – communication from desk-to-desk not email, chat and conference calls: close proximity accelerates projects – empower the team to solve the problem the way they see fit – just hold their feet to the fire on delivering
4. Empower business to develop their own solutions – train the business to use modern technologies for rapid application development that require no programming like the new category of BPM (Business Process Management) tools that are as easy to use as MS Excel and MS Visio
5. Don’t use technology when process, organizational or cultural solutions might solve the problem just as well – software is not always the answer

And which solution solved the problem with the slow lifts? The last team to present had the cheapest, quickest to implement and most foolproof solution. They put mirrors on the lift doors. When you’re looking at yourself time passes quickly. Sometimes technology is not the answer.

The Empowering Change that comes from thinking about the overheads in delivering software is that we learn to treat ourselves as we treat the business: as a place where we can eliminate waste from our processes.

The start of a lifetime business partnership or just a one deal?

When customers come to visit us I am always interested to know why they choose our venue over theirs. Usually they just want to get out of the office and today is Friday after all. Today’s visitors were here for an altogether different reason. They wanted to see how “real” we were.

You can tell a lot by being in someone’s office. You see how busy they are, how they interact with team members, bosses, employees. You get an impression of how they organize themselves and what their organizational status is relative to others. And we learn all of this, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out, in a the “Blink” of an eye.

During our 3 hour meeting a very interesting topic came up. We were discussing our corporate philosophy of “never let a customer fail”, which was handed down to us from a former CEO Michael Capellas, and we were describing how we view our customers as business partners. As an organization we strive to develop an intimate relationship with our customers and learn, in detail, about their business operations so we can better support them with our products and services over a long period of time. We do this because customers are hard to get and easy to lose; but most of all because, in our business model, 80% of the revenue we get comes in the years after the initial sale.

Our visitors thanked us for trying to be better business partners but asked us not to try too hard!

Their practice, they told us, is to engage with vendors in short 1, 2 or 3 years bursts. They do this because their own corporate strategy changes dramatically and regularly and any period of time over a couple of years is utterly unpredictable. Any products and services they may be using today may no longer be relevant 1, 2 or 3 years down the line.

They also know that their suppliers’ strategies will evolve over time and may not necessarily meet their needs in the future. Competing solutions will come along that will streamline how they do business and they want to be agile enough to be able to abandon one set of technologies in favor of another. And they want to be able to do this without feeling tied to a vendor out of some misplaced sense of loyalty.

“It is”, as they put it “just business”.

Now this is a remarkable corporate philosophy. Normally we try to control our suppliers and force them to meet our prices and specifications and time-frames in exchange for long term contracts and guaranteed annual revenues. But here this client is saying, we will pay whatever you ask that is reasonable, we will exploit your technology as long as we think it suits our purpose and when it doesn’t we will pick something else.

What is in it for the client? Well it means that know something better is going to come along eventually and they run their business on the basis that when it does they will not hesitate to embrace it. They are immune to ROI (Return On Investment) calculations that extend out to 10 years because they can barely see beyond 10 months. If you want to sell something to them you better have a pretty great case for delivering value fast: out-of-the-box in fact! And they know their business competitors are likely to stick with older technologies because it is very hard to sell replacing something your implemented less than 24-months earlier. This gives them a very significant competitive advantage.

To have all of this ingrained into the corporate culture is nothing short of remarkable.

And what about the vendors? We all need to understand that if we get kicked out and replaced by the latest technology or product or service, it wasn’t anything personal. When we’re negotiating we can ask for reasonable prices for our stuff and we do not have to discount in the hope of getting the revenue back in the long term: because there will likely not be a long term. We also know that if we are the incumbent supplier for more than a couple of years our competitors are still behind us technologically: and we also know if we get replaced we need to bring our stuff up to date fast as the competitors passed us!

How would you deal with this kind of customer? Would you have the confidence to say “if I lose this customer it is because the market changed and I didn’t – and I better do something about that quick”? How many of these kinds of customers do you have today and you don’t know it?

Could you be this kind of customer? Are you able to have an emotionless relationship with the people who provide you with goods and services so that you can say to them “what you provide is what I need today and when I find something better I will move to it”? How many of your suppliers do you keep because they are personal friends, how many suppliers do you ignore because they simply compete with your friends?

If you are in business to make a living you have to choose what is right for the business, not what is right for your friends and family. Next time you choose a business partner, a customer or a supplier ask yourself “am I attached to the value they bring or the am I attached to them?”

After my visitors left today I was ready to Empower Change in my organization and liberate our own thinking about what it is to be a customer and what it is to be a supplier. I am revisiting all of the partners I work with and asking “are you doing the best for my business?” It is going to be very interesting.