Tuesday 26 February 2008

Firefox & Mitchell Baker

The soon-to-be-released V3.0
of the Firefox open-source browser will make mobile working easier.

What's more interesting is the useful lessons to be learned from The Firefox Way - of doing business.

It is, after all, a consumer product facing tough competition. In fact the company is a giant-killer - with Microsoft & Internet Explorer being the giant.

Starting with one employee in 2002, the company now has 150 - not counting the thousands of volunteers around the world.

The first lesson to be learned from Firefox is that achieving competitive advantage with IT can just as easily come from the bottom as from the top.

When Mozilla 1.0 came out it was a suite of Internet applications that included a browser. It was a flop, and it could have been the end. But two developers, Blake Ross and David Hyatt, had been working on a lean & secure version of the browser module. They were (a) motivated and (b) empowered. As a result, this bottom-up initiative became Firefox business strategy.

This leads to the second lesson; self-organising teams. You don't need layer upon layer of managers, giving a tall pyramid, which does not make for effective organisation in today's rapid-change environment. What you need is motivated and empowered people who, being guided and coached by their managers, with simple rules to keep them in sync with business aims, can do the business themselves.

Firefox has pushed the boundaries on this one, enabling and facilitating its thousands of volunteer programmers around the world to self-organise themselves into such teams.

The third lesson to be learned is that you don't need to be a Computer Science graduate - to succeed with IT. CEO Mitchell Baker (see photo) studied Asian Studies @ undergraduate, then went to Law School and practised as as a corporate lawer. She worked for Netscape then AOL, got fired in a round of layoffs, got involved in the Open Source Applications Foundation, and then started up the Mozilla Foundation.

She is also a skilled trapeze artist, flying several times a week, speaks Mandarin Chinese, and is married with one son. Now that's a well-rounded life!

The fourth lesson: CEO Mitchell has a simple yet powerful Vision for Firefox: safe & simple browsing. As it says in the book of Proverbs, Where there is no vision, we perish (29: 18). With Vision, Mitchell has the direction, ability and passion to lead and motivate others in the Firefox story. So Leadership & Vision is another lesson we can learn.

The fifth lesson is collaborative management style. It's quite evident that Mitchell is a Theory Y Manager. See also the Mozilla School of Management Simple Secrets of Successful Management.

In fact, a lesson in itself is that Mitchell uses a blog site, which gives output on what she's thinking and gets input on what others think.

It's not a bad idea; using blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies to optimise communication, collaboration, meeting of minds and team-working.

The sixth lesson is that concerning motivation @ work. What motivates people? How does Mozilla motivate its thousands of volunteers around the globe? How might this apply to the more conventional working environment?

The simple answer is treat people like volunteers, who work because they want to, who are motivated not so much by money or position but by (a) the work itself, and the satisfaction that comes from doing a good job, (b) mutual recognition & respect from working colleagues, and (c) the camaraderie that comes from team-working with others in a shared vision.

Senior Management Guidance & Suport - is the seventh and final lesson. Mozilla has a Steering Committee which undertakes the top-management role of proactively carrying out the following:

  • Overall guidance.
  • Empowering people
  • Setting & monitoring progress for business goals
  • Tracking overall progress
  • Allocation & provision of resources
  • Overall co-ordination of activities
  • Spotting opportunities
  • Addressing strategic problem areas
  • Providing Leadership
  • Seeing the big picture
As Mitchell Baker says, senior management's job is to guide and support, then get out of the way and enable people to do theirs.


P.S.
CJB had occasion to visit the main hospital in Oxford recently, the John Radcliffe, and had a look at the application icons on the nurse's computer screens. The browser they were using was Mozilla Firefox.

Thursday 21 February 2008

Information Governance: I

The big fuss in parliament over the lost DNA disc is about the risk to the UK public, as a result of vital information on criminal activities having been ignored.

It's the latest episode in a series of lost information catastrophes in government departments.

And there is a blame-game going on that may or may not get to the root of the problem: the need for effective Information Governance.

In this latest case, last year the Dutch Police sent a disc with 2,000 DNA profiles from crime scenes to the Crown Prosecution Service, to be checked against the UK's database. But the checks did not start until this month - and so far 15 matches have already been found. The Police are now urgently looking for the matching individuals suspected of serious and violent crimes.

What was the systemic reason for the failure? Is it true that the information was left in the desk of an official away on sick leave?

There is a parallel here with lost information in Financial Services, resulting in heavy fines and/or significant financial risk - and also financial losses for the UK public.

Even though every case involves Information Systems & Technology (IST), this is not about IST as such. It's about the overall system, the organisation, and the management of information; in fact it's about Information Governance.

Unfortunately, Information Governance in current parlance has a restricted meaning, in referring to the security & compliance issues. But this is only a sub-set (albeit a critical one), of a deeper need - the management of Information Itself in business organisations (as opposed to the library setting). This is what real Information Governance in business organisations is about!

It's similar to COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology), being wrongly described as IT Governance. It's not. Or at least, it's a restricted, security & compliance view of IT Governance (for a book on real IT Governance see Peter Weill & Jeanne Ross).

This is a fundamental problem with IST - too many misnomers!
It's a bit like Humpty Dumpty, who said "When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean". But getting back to Information Governance:

  • Is Information Itself a strategic resource?
  • Does it need to be managed as a strategic resource?
  • Would this make a difference to the type of losses mentioned?
  • What are the principles of Genuine Information Governance?
And so , in this first article on the subject, let's try to put down some Principles of Genuine Information Governance:
  1. Information is a strategic resource - and it needs to be managed as such.
  2. There needs to be a specific responsibility for managing Information Itself.
  3. The responsibility for managing Information Itself must include that of managing Information Overload - InfoLoad - and its consequence of vital information lost & buried.
  4. Information relevance is the paramount need for managers and organisations - and the primary goal in all information.
  5. Information quality is dependent on the data from which it is formed - data quality.
  6. Data quality - and security - is largely dependent, first, on the business process (has it been mapped collaboratively end-to-end to make it rapid & reliable?), and second, on the IST that supports the process.
  7. Effective business process has seamless linkages both internally and externally to the organisation.
  8. Optimising Information Net-Value (the value of information less its real & total cost), is the basic aim, in conjunction with information relevance, of Information Governance.
  9. An Information Architecture, defining & describing (a) the main elements or entities of information, (b) their linkages across the organisation, (c) where the information elements reside and where used, and (d) the external interfaces, is mapped out and managed.
  10. Security-sensitive and critical information needs to be tagged as such, in some form.
However, Genuine Information Governance is not about technology, as such. It's about governance, i.e. the overall management of Information Itself. So it might, for example, concern itself with collaboratively developing principles & policies concerning email practices, but not the detailed technology of alternatives such as wikis and blogs.

And it might be concerned with Information Lifecycle Management, Business Process Management and Customer Relationship Management in terms of principles & policies, but not the detailed technology or practice. Again it's governance, rather than management.

Any comments?



Sunday 17 February 2008

Senior Management Education

The photo is about the Lloyds TSB card scheme at the 2012 Olympics. It was the lead story in the 14 Feb. Computing.

A letter from CJB was also printed about management education, in response to an article which had the key phrase:

There are no longer IT decisions; only business decisions.

In other words, IT is normal management. For example, HR and Finance are specialised functions, but every manager is still responsible for people and money - and IT. It can't be a separate hand-off. IT is normal business.

Getting back to the letter, it was interesting that the letter printed was quite different from the letter submitted - not that there would be much disagreement with the letter as printed - here it is:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Tom Young's article Business must see IT as everyday task, is highly relevant to a core problem in Business with Information Systems & Technology (IST).

The initial issue is that people too often lack relevant information, have limited opportunity for knowledge sharing, are kept in pigeon-holes, are penalised for initiative, and are greatly under-used.

Secondly, IST is itself, also, greatly under-used.

Consequently, there is limited synergy between people & IST.

The place to start in addressing the core problem could well be to follow the philosophy presented in the editorial:

- Start with appropriate education for senior management people.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

What was omitted from the letter as submitted was that, if there are no longer IT decisions only business decisions, then every single manager needs to be Business-IT savvy.

This does not mean the point-and-click skills that Bill Gates talks about. What it means is - - that kind of wisdom which comes from a big-picture, integrated view of Business & IT.

And how would this savvy & wisdom come about? Well for starters, and what could make all the difference, would be the right kind of Business-IT education for senior management people!

However, and notwithstanding the omission, the editor of Computing came up with a better letter!

Any comments?
What do you think?



Monday 4 February 2008

Information Overload Help: II

It was recently announced that Intel has produced a microprocessor, that can contain two billion transistors; so Moore's Law continues.

Moore's Law says the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years.

So far, so good, for the computer scientists at Intel. But what are the implications for Information Overload and the users of business information?

Last month's first article on Information Overload, or InfoLoad, identified the main causes of the Information Tsunami breaking over the shores of business organisations, and into the Read & Do Baskets of already-overloaded business information users.

Now, with Intel's announcement and the implication that it will soon be more feasible to increase the deluge of information coming at us, seems a good time to address the second part of the InfoLoad issue - namely the Effects & Business Consequences of InfoLoad:

  1. InfoLoad can have a hyper-stress effect on the InfoUser.
    The sense of the stress is captured in Richard Wurman's book Information Anxiety. Literally & physically, InfoLoad can make you ill, impair your performance, (for example in decision-making and in reaction time), and shorten your life.

  2. If there is one thing that we cannot waste today, it is time. In fact it can be a source of competitive advantage - or disadvantage. But that's what InfoLoad leads to; wasted time, because there is so much filtering, sorting and reading to do, and much of the InfoLoad is marginally useful information.

  3. And Bacon's Law: bad information drives out good. That is, the really relevant and critical information gets buried and lost. You're in a meeting and have to acknowledge you weren't aware of a key piece of information - it got lost in the pile. Or that vital information needed for complying with regulatory requirements - it somehow got lost in the shuffle.

  4. It makes us lose focus and stray from what's important.
    We get mesmerised and, in trying to stay abreast and catch up with the pile of information, we lose sight of key goals & objectives.

  5. Lastly, InfoLoad wastes money. January's article on InfoLoad made the point that one of the causes is the assumption that information is a free good. But it isn't!

    One of the latest trends in computer operations is virtualisation of servers and memory which, through clever software sitting above the operating system, frees up a lot of the space currently used. But this, and any other technology, is only putting off the day of reckoning, because storage volume requirements are at least doubling every three years.

    There is so much information clogging up hardware resources that organisations are running out of space and money to store all this information, having to buy more and more hardware.

    And yet, hardware is only the tip of the ice berg. The real waste is in the waste of human resouces in producing and maintaining the less-than-useful information that makes up much of the InfoLoad Mountain.

Next month we'll start looking at key remedies
for addressing InfoLoad.


In the meantime, do you have any war stories concerning Information Overload, or do you have ideas that might possibly help?