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Interview given in August 2005
with HP marketing for an internal communications magazine.
Storey's Gate Winston
Churchill's underground bunker, where he ran the war from 1940 to 1945.
In May 1940 Dunkirk was a
mitigated disaster as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) lost 90% of its
heavy equipment. The Allies got away with nothing but the shirts on their
backs.
In July 2005 Churchill's
Adaptive Enterprise was published.
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What is your Background
and Experience?
I joined HP as a Senior Business
Architect in January 2005 having spent most of my 22 year career in
professional services. I joined Tandem in '87 and then the Services Division
at it inception in '89. I
left in 2000 to join IBM Global Services, where I worked for 5 years before
coming to HP.
What Is Your Role?
I do a lot of business
discoveries with corporations, looking at and thinking about the complex
business problems they're trying to solve, and then suggesting solutions
through emerging technologies.
How Did You Get the Idea
for Your New Book?
I went to London to conduct a
discovery for a business intelligence project -- using information to
leapfrog the competition. I'm keen on learning from history so I visited
Storey's Gate, Winston Churchill's underground bunker, where he ran the war from
1940 to 1945. It was re-opened as a museum, after having been closed down
and preserved intact since 1945. When I walked into the bunker,
I was very surprised at how close the concepts of 1940 were to those today
related to decision making and business intelligence. I suppose an idea
started their for a white paper and eventually book in the “Lessons from History”
series. Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise was published in July 2005.
What is the Book About?
Leading up to the Second World War, Winston Churchill was swept into power
in May 1940. He came in as a last cast of the dice, during a period of
calamitous change. In the UK, you had Dunkirk--an absolute disaster, where
they managed to save the army but lost most of the equipment. Churchill
comes into power and is faced with this formidable enemy that has conquered
most of Europe.
So What Does Churchill Do?
The UK was not prepared for war, and
Churchill had to react to a disastrous situation and turn it around.
Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise is about how he faced change and, as a
leader, was able to grapple with his organization and, in several months,
turn the UK from a civilian economy into a military economy. He was able to
create a sense and respond system, which culminated in the Battle of
Britain. It was won through pilots, with a whole system behind them. The
pilots were vectored into precise positions in the sky through the clever
use of intelligence and information. Aircraft were replaced by a
just-in-time supply chain feeding on recycled planes and saucepans. This is
where the parallels come in. In today's world, companies may not be in a
dire position but they need to be able to react to and to offset
circumstances that impact them. They need to be able to use emerging
technologies to do that.
So How Do Emerging
Technologies Fit In?
The book weaves the two
stories together to compare how Churchill set up his organization to defeat
the invasion using the emerging technologies of his time, and how companies
today need to be able to offset challenges by creating what we call an
Adaptive Enterprise, using information technologies. Being there and seeing
the bunker exactly as Churchill had left it sixty years ago brought home how
little things had changed. Here's Winston Churchill in 1940, dealing with
the same kind of problems organizations are dealing with today. He was
trying to leverage information to better understand what was happening and
managing resources to defeat the enemy. The more I looked into it, the more
the parallels became very clear.
What Are Your Current Assignments?
Most
of my engagements are fairly short: I work from 4 to 6 weeks at the front
end of a project, so have completed hundreds of discoveries over last 15
years. I'd had a good
experience at Tandem and wanted to return to HP to take a leadership
position and help C&I grow.
What Do
You Actually Do?
I work with clients to develop a vision and strategy; and to determine
where emerging technologies can be applied. Which technology we select
depends on the client. I try to help people understand the impact of
emerging technology and how it can be adopted successfully within an
organization. If you can get a good definition of the problem and find a
reasonable solution then you can give the company a competitive advantage,
or even leapfrog the competition. Recent Projects I completed a
discovery/assessment for one of the clusters in the Ontario Public Sector.
The objective was to assess the current IT environment and, based on
business requirements, identify gaps and recommend enhancements and
improvements to it. The client’s infrastructure was hampering their ability
to meet the needs of the business. At the core of our recommendations was
the need for a greater level of agility.
How Do You See Technology Impacting
Today's World?
I'm keen on history, particularly when analyzing situations dealing with
calamitous change like during the World Wars of the 20th century. In today’s world companies have to deal with more changes
than ever before. Some have been able to adapt and harness information
technology so successfully that they have blown away their competition: Wal-mart
started to use Business Intelligence in the '90s. Every time they opened a
new store they were able to accurately predict customer demographics and
tailor products in the store accordingly, at the micro level. They
customized around patterns to succeed. For example, at one store, they
factored in a nearby senior center to cater to that customer segment.
Applying emerging technologies to specific problems gave Wal-mart a
leadership position in retail.
What Other Examples Do You See?
Other leaders who have broken the mold:
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Amazon.com changed the
way people buy books, search reviews, cross-link to related books and
create communities.
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Google came out from
nowhere and entered the language as a verb for finding any information
anywhere in the world.
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The BBC, a radio and
television broadcaster, has built an incredible portal that offers
access to their 60-70 year rich media history and is set to become a
leading content provider.
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The Ontario Public Sector
move to Government Online (GO). Once you enter the federated portal you
can complete transactions across multiple ministries from a single
point. When you see citizens from the perspective of a life time view,
from cradle to grave, you change the way you offer them services that
come from a unified long-term view.
How Does This Fit In With Your
Book?
The concept of Adaptive
Enterprise is rooted in this above view. You take an organization and, rather than
deliver products and services piecemeal, you look across the organization
and deconstruct and reconstruct it in such a fashion that you provide
something completely new with far more value. This is what Churchill did
when he came into power and the Royal Navy, British Army, Royal Air Force
were all jockeying for resources. They all thought they could solve the
problem of defeating the enemy, but the solution lay with the Royal Air
Force fighters. Ships or troops are ineffective without adequate air cover.
Churchill had to break down the military and government silos within the UK
and reconstruct horizontal views to get these silos working together;
basically, transform the organization to meet new demands at a new level.
How Do You See the Use of
Technology In the Future?
We can get a glimpse in the way some companies are operating today. For
example, some companies are focusing on the customer experience: Coke targets the teenage
youth market---the most lucrative, discretionary income segment. They want to be a continual part of the
teenagers' day across many channels, from the minute they wake up, turn on
the computer, and download music from the Coke site; and maintain many
touch points during the day where teens get messages on their cell phone
with offers, perhaps be recognized by a Coke vending machine. Coke wants
to provide many interactions and opportunities for them to interact easily.
Financial institutions want to do the same thing: to be there at any point,
through any channel. Provide the opportunity for me to do banking while in
the office in meetings, or in a car or train coming home, offer meaningful
dialogue through the day in a way that makes it easy for me to interact.
So Technology
Could Improve the Customer Experience?
Yes multichannel integration is
the ability to recognize the value a client brings to his organization and
maintain a healthy dialogue over the course of a day through interactions.
This requires sensing client changes, and reacting to these changes to be
part of their clients' lifestyle. Multichannel integration is one of the
challenges an enterprise must meet to become truly adaptive. These are all
leaders who have broken the mold in their ability to asses and apply
emerging technologies to gain maximum advantage. Often they have taken a
problem solution from one industry, recognized the characteristics and
translated these across to a new industry to bring about a new way of
thinking. Case in point: financial institutions were the first to recognize
the customer life cycle: the need to view customers from the day they're
born to the day they die. This view suggested identifying these life events
and interacting with customers at specific points -- when they want to buy a
house, for instance, to maximize the provider's value to the customer. That
can also apply to government. These are best practices that arrive in one
industry and can be applied to other industries with a twist and a spin.
This is the way I would approach any client: Look at their current problems,
try to characterize those problems from a higher level, and bring them
examples of where other companies, cross industry, have solved them.
Tell Us More About the
Overall Series you Are Creating?
I've worked on a series
called “Lessons from History,” both books and a web site. The first in the
series is the Titanic story, Avoiding Project Disaster: Titanic Lessons for
IT Executives. Financial institutions were struggling with
providing electronic services to customers, which led me to describe an
analogy in investing, where the emerging technology had failed to deliver.
Why were there 53 millionaires on board the Titanic? How did they convince
the world's elite to sign up for this ultimate customer experience, crossing
the Atlantic? But customer experience was the downfall. White Star did a
brilliant marketing job, but they compromised the nonfunctional
requirements. The disaster was rooted in mistakes made early on in the
project. The director of the shipping line, the executive sponsor, wanted to
provide the ultimate customer experience for his passengers. Spared no
expense on looks, yet the safety features – the nonfunctional requirements
-- were compromised because they started to compete with the functional
requirements. They had originally planned to stow 48 lifeboats on the
passenger deck, triple stacked at 16 stations, outside the state cabins on
the promenade deck. The last thing they'd want the millionaires, who'd paid
$4,000, to do is to open their shutters and see an eyesore, not the ocean
vista. So they compromised the safety features of the ship to preserve the
customer experience. This happened across a number of features, and this led
to the downfall of the ship. The book focuses on the construction project
and the journey, and compares it to projects today. The key point is, it’s
not just an IT project; it's business. It's important that our clients fully
understand the significance and repercussions of decisions made throughout a
project. The lesson is in project management and the mitigation of risks as
you proceed.
Personal Interests
I'm passionate about history, and spend a lot of time reading about it.
History affects the way you look at things and has a wealth of information
to bring to our daily lives. I see parallels in the way emerging
technologies have been used in the past and I’m interested in what we can
learn from them. I think it's important to get involved, to give back to the
community. I've been active in a community soccer club in the Greater
Toronto area, run by volunteers, and have learned quite a lot from being
president of the soccer club.
Advice to New Consultants
I think there used to be more opportunities for individualism; less so
now. There is pressure to conform to group thinking and less time to think
things through, mull over or analyze to come up with the best possible
solution. You need to be a nonconformist to keep pushing the boundaries of
your own thinking and client thinking. In any relationship there's a balance
between pain and pleasure: the consultant and the insultant. It's an
important prerogative to be honest with clients, to be able to show them
both sides of the fence. Don’t shy away from the downside. This builds a
more serious long-term relationship.
KM Tools/Resources You Use
I see a problem with KM that most organizations have, that's rooted more
in our incentives to deposit knowledge rather than technology. You must look
at the root cause. Why don't we share information? Because knowledge is
power and people are worried about abuse of power. Knowledge is the most
important to Services people: the root of what we deliver to clients remains
within the Services organization or it could fall into the wrong hands.
There must be a sense of security, by creating communities of trust and
determining at different points, degrees of access.
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