Year: 2008

links for 2008-09-17

Learning from the failures of others; billion-dollar lessons for next to nothing

Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, Carroll, Paul B. and Chunka Mui

Progress in science and engineering proceeds from the dispassionate analysis of failure. We learn more when we screw up than when we succeed. However, since Waterman and Peters In Search of Excellence,

Knowledge work and micro-processes

[cross-posted at Fast Forward blog]

Recently, I sat through a presentation about a Sharepoint-based intranet project to improve processes within the HR group of a medium-sized organization. The process in question was one of collecting annual performance reviews throughout the organization. Using Sharepoint, the HR group and their consultants replaced Word documents, spreadsheets, and email with Infopath forms and programmatic workflows. The client was happy and the consultants had a nice demo they could show to their prospects. Nonetheless, I found myself dissatisfied.

For all the new technology deployed, this effort struck me as an example of what my old friend and mentor Benn Konsynski calls "speeding up the mess." This HR process is an instance of the micro-processes that comprise knowledge work activities in organizations.

Other examples might include:

  • Customizing an existing sales presentation for a meeting with a new prospect
  • Designing the agenda and preparing materials for an internal brainstorming meeting
  • Putting together the briefing materials for a quarterly business review meeting
  • Analyzing and making sense out of a competitor

Updating ‘be prepared’ for the 21st Century

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why, Ripley, Amanda

Amanda Ripley has taken an interesting premise and turned it into an excellent book. A writer for Time magazine, she’s turned her attention to the lessons to be had from the ordinary people who survive extraordinary situations; those who got out of the World Trade Center on 9/11, who survived the tsunami in 2004, who make it out of burning planes and burning buildings. In place of the “be afraid” messages conveyed by the nightly news and by too many of those in positions of authority, she digs into the psychological dimensions of “be prepared” for the range of risks, real and imagined, that confront today’s average citizen.

There are two overarching messages woven into her fascinating storytelling around disasters big and small. The first is a simple model of the psychology of response (and non-response) to the unexpected threat; an arc of denial, deliberation, and decision. Ripley touches on our generally poor abilities to assess risk, how the physiology of fear interferes with our ability to think, why some people are more likely to be resilient than others, and why panic happens far less often than we think. More importantly, she demonstrates how small doses of attention and both mental and physical rehearsal improve the chances that you will be able to do the right thing should the need arise.

The second theme is about the central importance of regular people who are prepared to act when the moment comes. Through all of Ripley’s stories, whether of the World Trade Center or an ordinary car accident, by the time that official “first responders” and the authorities arrive, it’s too late. When the unexpected occurs, what you have with you and who you are surrounded by are what you get to work with. More often than not, that’s also more than enough.

Of course, there is a website and a blog associated with the book. Both appear to be better than the norm for these sorts of thinks. In particular, I’ve found the Unthinkable Blog to be worth adding to my list of RSS subscriptions.

Review of Tom Davenport’s "Competing on Analytics"

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Davenport, Thomas H. and Jeanne G. Harris

 

Tom Davenport has turned his attention of late to the prospects for business intelligence and information analytics. Competing on Analytics offers a managerial introduction to the topic. It emphasizes why organizations ought to be interested in the topic, what kinds of payoffs they might expect, and how organizations will need to adapt to take advantage of robust analytics. Davenport and co-author Jeanne Harris of Accenture split the book into two major sections. The first deals with describing how analytics can be used as a competitive tool; the second with the organizational challenges of building analytical capabilities. Overall, it’s a relatively short book and is well-suited to its target audience. On the other hand, if you’re on the receiving end of a mandate to build an analytical capability after someone higher in the food chain has gotten excited about the topic, don’t expect quite as much in the way of detailed implementation advice.

Davenport and Harris set out a stage-model of analytical capabilities starting with "analytically impaired" and ending with "analytical competitors." Partly, this is to support an argument they make that there’s an advantage to managing analytics at an enterprise level. My cynical side suspects that this advantage lies primarily in providing a clear target for the likes of Accenture or SAS to sell to.

Given that every new capability benefits from senior executive attention and that everyone wants to get on the CEO’s calendar, are there, in fact, compelling reasons that analytics deserves to be on this short list? Two come to mind. One is that the expertise called for in effective analytics is scarce. Better to have that expertise directed at the targets of greatest opportunity by those best positioned to judge. Two, the competitive business opportunities that might yield to analytics are more likely to be found from the perspective of those with an integrative view of the enterprise.

The authors walk through major functions of the enterprise identifying opportunities and examples of how analytics have been successfully applied. There are clearly an abundance of opportunities to apply analytical tools and techniques to improving internal processes, optimizing supply chains, and leveraging marketing.

One problem with the focus on describing the business opportunities for analytics is that the variety of potentially applicable tools gets short shrift. All books have to make decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. Given the intended audience, I can understand the decision to focus on the business side of the equation rather than on the tools side. On the other hand, glossing over the complexities of the statistical tools and algorithms has its own risks. Organizations risk creating a new class of wizards whose dark arts must be taken on faith or they risk putting dangerous tools in the hands of amateurs who will be blind to both the limits and the dangers of the tools.

This brings us to the second part of the book and the challenges of building an analytical capability. I