Treading (with agility) on eggshells
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on February 24, 2012
People and relationships largely determine the outcomes of projects and programmes
Why is so much hope pinned on Agile as a software development method? Perhaps because the track record of IT projects is so poor? Project failure rate can be one in five and many end up either being “challenged”, “failed”, over budget, behind schedule or simply not delivering what was expected.
The blame for failure has often been put down to moving milestones, with changing requirements making project progress so slow. However, some specialists argue that often the source of project dysfunction is people i.e. the project manager. That’s because too often engineers, IT professionals and technical staff are made project managers under the mistaken belief that if they have good technical skills, they’ll make a good project manager. Actually, what they really need is the ability to handle people, embrace conflicts – and even thrive on them – whilst navigating their way out of the organisation’s political maze and successfully treading on eggshells.
This “people” aspect of building software is at the heart of Agile development, which emphasises communication, collaboration, rapid production of code and frequent ‘probe, sense, respond’ feedback. It requires a more flexible approach to development instead of the traditional ‘waterfall’ approach, which demands getting all the requirements upfront and then moving through the development process one phase after another, until finally you typically find that the project fails to deliver what was originally envisaged and has changed out of all recognition.
On building or engineering projects, you’ll rarely hear of a plan to build a 20,000 square foot shoe store somehow ballooning into a project to build a 10-acre shopping centre! But that’s what usually happens with software projects, especially if an organisation starts off with one worthy objective in mind but the project gets side-tracked by misaligned stakeholders and heads towards a different “destination” to that originally envisaged. In some scenarios this can turn into a ‘boiling the ocean’ project. Just like any attempt to boil an ocean will only expend plenty of energy without changing the state of the sea, so attempting to deliver an extensive wish list of software features will add cost without necessarily delivering any value to the business at all.
Is Agile the way forward? Possibly. But at DAV we would argue that adopting an Agile approach is not in itself a guarantee of success. Just like any other methodology, we believe it is the “people factor” that determines whether you get what you want.
The reality is that a good project manager does not try to attack all problems with the same tool or methodology and cannot adopt a blanket-Agile approach. Instead, an effective project manager will analyse the situation, figure out what problems should be dealt with at all, prioritises them and then choose the appropriate tools to get the job done.
Perhaps more importantly, a successful project manager will take these steps in cooperation with the sponsor and other stakeholders, as well as the senior project delivery team members. If you don’t get buy-in from the stakeholders, sponsors, or team, then whatever approach you adopt is just not going to work. The key skills here are collaboration, communication, negotiation, an ability to walk on eggshells and perhaps most importantly of all, leadership.
2012 IT and Business Resolutions
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on January 27, 2012
Embracing developing technology trends can make the difference between success and failure
A quick glance out of the office window recently revealed an army of joggers, as people with a cast iron resolve to maintain their New Year’s resolutions – become healthier, break bad habits and embrace new things – pounded past.
It’s an approach that should also be adopted in business, as 2012 promises to be a crucial year – when taking maximum advantage of rapidly developing technology trends could mean the difference between success and failure. There has never been a more important time to harness technology to help your business evolve and grow and a proactive attitude towards technology from directors themselves will be key to saving time and money, boosting business performance and unlocking new opportunities.
But the world we live in is both volatile and uncertain and the first resolution for any business leader coming into 2012 must have been to become change-friendly. Whatever the sector, organisations of all shapes and sizes are likely to experience some kind of change within the next year. And in order to survive whatever the economy or competition may throw at them, businesses must ensure that they are open to change and have the structures in place to make it happen.
A New Year often means a clean slate and an opportunity to make improvements. With this in mind, here are five technology trends organisations might want to think about embracing to keep their business nimble, resilient and competitive.
Cloud is no longer a technology for someone else – or just the early adopters
Cloud computing – the access of services and the storage of data via platforms on the Internet is undoubtedly the trend to watch in 2012. In fact growth in Cloud spend is outpacing on-premise as companies realise the efficiencies of scale of developing private clouds. Pundits predict that the Cloud will play a significant part in the UK’s recovery. Today even the smallest businesses can benefit from the best technology in the marketplace as the Cloud connects vision with capability. There are stories of new businesses being started up in bedrooms using cloud computing. In particular using the Cloud to test new ideas is a great way to start, businesses can put an idea together using the Cloud in a couple of weeks and just see if it works.
Harnessing intelligence
While the combination of Internet, email and mobile devices keeps us in contact with our colleagues and the wider world ever more comprehensively, experts warn that a failure to embrace ways of dealing with the resulting information barrage could seriously hamper efficiency. In fact, recent research released in October 2011 by the NationalField, the business social network operator, claimed that 20 percent of UK office workers receive an average of 50 emails a day from colleagues alone, so finding ways to quickly organise, analyse and present all this data ought to be a major priority for 2012. The cynical ones amongst us will no doubt add the word ‘delete’ to this list.
Creating an agile environment
As if dealing with the bombardment of correspondence wasn’t enough, the signs are that the immediacy of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is creating a consumer who expects a faster response time than ever before from businesses hoping for their custom. Younger people in particular are likely to make purchasing decisions based on an organisations response rate, indeed recent research indicates that one third of 16 – 24 year olds expect a response to an email within one hour. So adapting your infrastructure and processes to enable a quick response is a must in the year ahead.
Consumerisation of IT
There are now three times as many smartphones in the world as there are PCs and this is creating another effect on the workplace known as consumerisation. As Generation Y (typically regarded as those people born in the 1980s and early 1990s) joins the workforce, they are increasingly used to having smart IT and communication technology at home and the expectation is that they will get this at work. A recent survey by Six Degrees, a managed data service, found that 78 percent of employees believe their own devices are superior to those supplied by their employer. But although experts agree that there are security issues for businesses to consider before allowing employees to use their own devices, there is also an opportunity to harness Generation Y’s knowledge of emerging technologies and provide useful insights to directors on their future use by the business. Talking to individuals to potentially open up to new ideas, having the ability to harness these to make the business more agile and more cost effective, can only be a good thing.
Security concerns
Whilst there are advantages to be gained from using the Cloud or embracing more mobile technologies and social platforms, there is understandable concern regarding the security of these technologies. In November 2011, the government held its London Conference on Cyberspace and key statistics that came out of this included the fact that cybercrime costs the UK an estimated £27bn a year, and globally it is as much as $1trn. Additionally, more than six million types of new malware were detected by industry in the first three months of 2011 alone. So, it is not about allowing a free-for-all and letting any employee bring any device into the workplace, there must be policies and procedures in place to manage this. It is about implementing security solutions that are agile and user friendly, backed up by good policies and procedures.
So in conclusion
Back in the 1980s I first came across the now familiar quotation by Heraclitus, “nothing is permanent except change”. As hackneyed as this quote has now become it is still very true and the pace at which it applies to technology can be alarming for most businesses. Clearly not all of the initiatives referred to above can be embraced at once but it is essential that business leaders recognize that alignment of business and IT is no longer just a goal, it is the norm and getting started with a plan to adopt new technology may well mean the difference between being there to set business resolutions for 2013 – or not.
Why social media didn’t have a quiet Christmas
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on January 17, 2012
Assertive customer action, fuelled by social media, is an unpleasant prospect for any business
Social media was often cited in 2011 as a catalyst behind both the spread of the Arab Spring revolutions and the UK riots - arguably the stories of the year.
Even over the Christmas period, when most people were enjoying a couple of weeks of downtime, social media was again behind another revolt. GoDaddy, a US Web hosting and domain name specialist, found itself on the receiving end of a social media campaign throughout Christmas over its support for an anti-online piracy Act. The action followed because GoDaddy was supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a proposed bill which would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.
GoDaddy had first announced its support in late October 2011, but once details of the company’s pro-SOPA stance appeared on the social news website Reddit on December 22, the story went viral.
Demonstrating the power of social media in driving customer direct action, within a few days customers had moved over 72,000 Internet domains off GoDaddy’s hosting service and onto alternatives, in protest at its support for the legislation. There was no let up as the New Year approached, with the protesters declaring 29th December, “Move Your Domain Away From GoDaddy Day.”
Although GoDaddy eventually rescinded its support for the proposed SOPA legislation, the consensus is that the protest may have damaged GoDaddy’s brand, even if it didn’t markedly affect its customer base.
The revolt is likely to become a celebrated case study of Internet assertive action fuelled by social media, with GoDaddy struggling to fend off the collective sentiment of its customers, just as Middle East regimes were unable to resist the will of their citizens.
The GoDaddy example raises questions about how organisations should go about trying to avoid a social-media led customer revolt. There are some clear risk factors to be aware of. It helps if you can recognise where fires may start, perhaps those sparked by an organisation’s actions that ultimately frustrate or annoy a significant proportion of its customer base. Avoiding this unhappy scenario means understanding your customers well enough to predict which decisions might be controversial and incendiary.
If social media fires do start, then they must be dampened down and extinguished through decisive action, not left to burn and spread further. The Christmas period probably didn’t help, but by the time GoDaddy had acknowledged its customers’ complaints in a series of statements, the damage was done and the “GoDaddy Exodus” was already being promoted through social media, with some key customers quickly announcing plans to transfer their domains elsewhere.
The outcome shows that in today’s digital, 24x7x365 always-on world, if your customers are unhappy about something, they’ll quickly let you (and potentially millions of others) know about it. Social media services like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have the power to damage a brand’s credibility – and potentially, its customer base – within days, even hours.
Perhaps more easily said than done, but the most obvious way of preventing a social media-led revolt is to know your customers so well that you avoid any risk of taking action that alienates them. You can only do that by putting in place effective communication mechanisms that enable you to not only listen to what your customers are saying, but hear what their concerns and desires are and then promptly act on them.
Skilled labour – Why project managers and Project Management Offices are taking on a more strategic role
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on January 3, 2012
Business and IT need to be more than just aligned
In any business change project, it is critical that all parties are working to an agreed goal that everyone believes in and is committed to achieving. It also helps if everyone understands each other, which is why it’s important to have a common language, not only in projects but in IT in general.
As IT gets more complex and pervasive, there is an ever-growing need to clearly define, recruit and grow the skilled resources that you need as a business. Last month saw the publication of an updated UK framework for IT and business change skills that is designed to help organisations recruit, develop and retain their staff more effectively.
SFIA – the Skills Framework for the Information Age - provides this essential common language of IT that is the foundation for consistent, unambiguous and clear definitions of IT skills. By necessity it integrates with an organisation’s way of working, to improve capability and resource planning, resource deployment and performance management.
Why is this important? Because a key aim of organisations is to manage capability so that the right skilled people are in the right place at the right time to achieve reduced risk to projects and services; reduced need for expensive externally provided resources; and gain greater control over recruitment costs by reducing attrition and attracting the right candidates.
The latest update of the SFIA skills framework to version 5 is not a radical one. The seven existing ‘levels’ – ‘follow’, ‘assist’, ‘apply’, ‘enable’, ‘ensure/advise’, ‘initiate/influence’, ‘set strategy/inspire/mobilise’ – remain largely unchanged, but notably there are some changes to governance and information management, with the Portfolio, Programme and Project Support skill being incorporated within a category covering Business Change implementation.
These skills definitions are going to take on an even greater significance, because, as a recent Forrester blog detailed, IT is still facing an uphill struggle to align itself with the business. In fact, aligning itself with the business is just par for the course. But just as in golf, par won’t get you wins. Aligning with the business only makes you an ‘also-ran’ - although for some, that’s still a significant challenge in itself. For IT groups with a track record of success, the challenge is how to move beyond alignment.
Forrester believes that there is a key role here for project management offices (PMOs). Leading-edge PMOs, it says, are evolving to a more strategic role, focused on portfolio management of business investment rather than just IT projects or programmes.
Good PMOs are now focusing their efforts on everything from guiding business leaders through building a business case for the investments they want to make, to facilitating decision-makers through selection from the portfolio of investment proposals, to tracking benefits realisation and ROI.
The reality is that in some organisations, this will pit PMOs against Enterprise Architects that have previously owned the strategic planning and business architecture process. In such cases, it’s down to the CIO to own strategy and to execute it through the combined efforts of business-facing professionals, including the PMO and Enterprise Architects.
The key point here is that just as the SFIA skills framework has evolved to represent new IT skills – such as animation development, a key forte of the fast-growing games industry – all areas of the IT industry, including project managers and those heading up PMOs are now having to up their game and their skills to be more innovative, flexible and beyond-business-aligned.
Agility, it would seem is no longer the goal, but has become the norm.
Meet the New World
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on December 22, 2011
Work backwards from the outcome and take action now to eliminate risk
I read with interest a recent article written by Professor Eddie Obeng in the October edition of Project Magazine ahead of his keynote presentation at the Association of Project Management conference. Most of the points raised in this article really resonate with DAV’s thinking and approach to programme management, especially in today’s fast paced, financially strapped new world.
Professor Obeng suggests that the environment that we live in today is so complex and that projects move so fast it is becoming near on impossible to manage them. In Obeng’s view the old way of doing things in a slow and stable environment doesn’t hold true anymore and we are certainly seeing this in the clients for whom we work.
Obeng points out there is a real imperative to recognise and drive change at executive level. Today, every organisation is actively seeking change and their CEOs are being swallowed up by it. CEOs in FTSE companies last an average 2.5 years, whereas their strategic plans take three to five years to come to fruition. So if companies are going to achieve anything, they need to move fast.
Professor Obeng highlights a clear dilemma here, that even though the pace of projects has accelerated and project managers have adopted a more agile and flexible approach, projects have not become more successful. He goes on to say that the pace of change often outstrips our ability to learn and the organisation’s ability to change. All too frequently this means that many of the projects initiated lack complete clarity on what the end result will, or should, be and how best to achieve this. Often there is such a desire to just get the job done, especially as stakeholders push for early results, that many projects lack the ability to realise the anticipated business outcomes.
According to a multitude of recent reports and surveys such as the Standish Group’s Chaos report, the Bull report, and the KPMG survey, only about 25 percent of projects get executed successfully, the remainder either failing completely, running over time and/or over budget, or simply not delivering the expected results and this research concludes that the reasons for failure are poor specifications and systems. For example, Obeng points out that the Olympic Stadium was built in record time. But were more resources used than needed to complete the job? As an aside, I suspect it’s no coincidence that construction projects don’t seem to suffer the same level of failure as their IT counterparts (although when they do go wrong it can be on a grand scale).
So how will project managers need to adapt in the new world? Obeng states that we need new thinking and that to deliver successful outcomes in this new world then planning often needs to be done in reverse. He states that project managers need to plan backwards from the outcome and take actions now to eliminate risk and get people to really engage and commit so that the project stays on track. He acknowledges that the days of the old world are gone. Traditionally structured and methodical ‘painting-by-numbers’ projects, where both the project manager and the stakeholders knew what to do and how to do it, are now decidedly a thing of the past. Obeng states that good project managers need to learn how to use their skills differently. Today, breakthrough performance depends upon strong leadership capability, communicating effectively with all stakeholders and building relationships based on mutual trust and respect – people and perspective will matter more than scheduling and reporting. At DAV we have always recognised how important stakeholder communication is and making sure that expectations are set and managed correctly. A good dose of structured common sense is also essential and there is still no substitute for experience.
Obeng’s view on the human factors is also consistent with DAV’s thinking. Successful project managers must have the ability to form three distinct sets of relationships. The first with the project team itself but here he feels it should have more of a leadership bias than a management one. Secondly and, for me, rather crucially, they need to build relationships with the business stakeholders and directors outside of the project team. And these must start before the project and continue after the project, so that project managers are ready for the next one. Thirdly they need to be well plugged into the project community or network in order to continue to learn and share and be challenged with better ways of working.
From our perspective we are seeing more global projects and the need for us to inject more innovation and creativity into our approach in order to make the most of scarce resources and it was refreshing to see how closely our thinking aligns to that of Professor Eddie Obeng. The world has changed and our collective thinking and approach needs to reflect this if, as a project and programme management community, we are going to deliver successful project outcomes to our clients.
It’s That Time Of The Year Again…
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on December 14, 2011
Cloud adoption looks set to accelerate in 2012
It seems not five minutes since we were speculating on what would be the big technologies for 2011, but we’ve once more reached that point in the year when the Gartner Research Group identifies the top 10 technologies and trends that it believes will be strategic for organisations in the forthcoming year. Gartner defines a strategic technology as “one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years” and encourages businesses to include these 10 technologies in their strategic planning process and think about how they will fit into the organisation moving forward.
Gartner highlights the key trends in this way to provide organisations with knowledge and advice, so that they can explore the underlying technologies and determine how they might be deployed to help their business deliver more value. Carl Claunch, Vice President and distinguished analyst at Gartner, encourages organisations and CEO’s in particular, to heed Gartner’s advice and subsequently “kick off a search for combinations of information sources, including social sites and unstructured data that may be mined for insights” and help them make the most of the technologies available.
Gartner’s predicted Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012 are:
- Media Tablets and Beyond
- Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces
- Contextual and Social User Experience
- The Internet of Things
- App Stores and Marketplaces
- Next-Generation Analytics
- Big Data
- In-Memory Computing
- Extreme Low-Energy Servers
- Cloud Computing
From a DAV perspective, we’ll be looking out for the technologies that enable businesses to transform the way they work, helping them to become more flexible, agile and resilient in the face of ongoing economic and business uncertainty. And in this, Cloud adoption looks set to remain a serious consideration.
Cloud Computing was number one in last year’s ranking and it is certainly a phenomenon that we have seen rise throughout the year. 2011 has witnessed organisations such as Centrica and Comic Relief undertake significant programmes of change to migrate their systems to the Cloud and slowly the mist around this technology has begun to lift. This year enterprises have been on a journey of discovery of what Cloud means to them, both from a private and public perspective and we have seen them slowly move from thinking about the Cloud to making decisions about implementing it, based on what makes sense for the business. Gartner predicts that next year cloud computing will be number 10 on the list for organisations and that we will see “the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build Cloud environments and deliver Cloud services.”
However, adopting a Cloud based architecture does present a significant and often unrecognised challenge for any organisation. Despite its strong technology overtones, for a Cloud solution to deliver the kind of benefits most organisations are seeking then its adoption must be regarded and approached as a full scale business change programme – with all the attendant cultural, process and organisational implications being considered.
Getting the approach right is crucial and the rewards for enabling the business to think and act in a different way are enormous. The flexibility, agility and resilience that a Cloud platform and technology can deliver to organisations is very compelling and in the past couple of years we have been very heavily involved in helping one of our clients in the financial services market transition its global data centres to Cloud technology. The operational gains and cost savings they have achieved have been quite phenomenal and look set to continue.
I think in 2012 we shall start to see more of these use cases coming through and more demand from our clients to help them shape and deliver programmes that will fundamentally change their businesses as they look to adopt Cloud technology.
In today’s Trust Economy, relationships matter, and influence is king
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on December 9, 2011
There's no 'fast forward' button for trust
They say we’re now living in a Trust Economy again. What does that mean? It harks back to times when commerce was localised and the people you did business with lived in your local community. I know the Internet has made the world smaller and you can now do business with anyone – in theory – but bear with me.
In those days of local trade, there was less focus on advertising, marketing and brands because you did business with the people you knew. It was a Trust Economy because your business success was based on mutual trust. And in a Trust Economy, your market is your community or network, trust is mandatory and influence is king.
If you want to understand how to create trust and affect individuals authentically, imagine yourself, as one blog put it, moving into a new neighbourhood. How do you meet people? Not by knocking on people’s doors (though saying hello to the next door neighbours might help.) The reality is that over time, as your community gets to know you, your trust and reputation grows. Taking this into a business context, a couple of points to consider here are:
- You can’t fake a relationship.
- Relationships come before sales.
Leveraging your relationships will help increase awareness of your product or service, but first of all, you have to nurture your network before you can tap into the potential it offers. There never has been a fast forward button for trust.
Of course, we’re not living in a localised economy now. The advent of the Net and social media means our local marketplace is now a global one. But relationships still count, and influence matters. When it comes to social media, the influence of an individual is not a function of wealth or celebrity, but of the individual’s – or possibly the organisation’s – credibility and contribution in the community of ideas. Just like in those old localised days, influence is authentic and cannot be coerced. And any return on your influence accrues on the value of (your) contribution.
With a growing focus on metrics in social media, can you truly measure this return? From the conversation on metrics generated by a recent post and its comments on the Harvard Business Review – no, you can’t. Influence is hard to define, and without an agreed definition, difficult to measure.
But whether or not you can measure influence, the fact is that relationships are back, and the more you give, the more you get in return. Lasting business relationships are based not on creativity or connectivity, but on trust. And as a DAV article on social media, A Social Dilemma explains, in the business to business (B2B) world, existing relationships often drive sales.
Today’s organisations need to squeeze every ounce of value out of their relationships. The more we collaborate and have dialogue with colleagues, clients and partners, the better we will understand their needs and perspectives, and the more influential and effective we will become.
This is especially true in our business where large scale business and technology change programmes have a direct impact on significant numbers of people. Faced with this scenario, DAV’s clients would never engage us without having first gone through a ‘courtship’ process, from which comes the all-important understanding of the client’s business and the challenges they are facing. This allows DAV and the client to ‘get to know each other’ and so lay the foundations for a solid, long lasting relationship based on mutual trust, confidence and, ultimately, influence.
Remember: in today’s Trust Economy, relationships matter. And influence follows.
NHS IT: Small wins equal big victories
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on November 25, 2011
Learning the lessons from Trafford
I read a recent report by Oxford University and McKinsey which found that one in six big IT projects goes over-budget by an average of 200%.
And the harsh reality is that too often those projects have been in government, with the Whitehall landscape littered by failed projects. The latest, the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), an ambitious £11.4 billion programme of investment designed to reform how the NHS in England uses information to improve services and patient care, has been under fire from the National Audit Office. Arguably, NPfIT, a ‘grand design’ for NHS IT, has sapped the confidence of those reliant on it, left suppliers and government wrangling over contracts and trusts picking up the pieces.
A central part of the Programme set out to create a fully integrated electronic care records system, with the objective of ensuring that every NHS patient had an individual electronic care record which could be rapidly transmitted between different parts of the NHS, in order to make accurate patient records available to NHS staff.
But as the NAO reported, this intention proved beyond the capacity of the Department of Health to deliver and the department is no longer providing a universal system. The NAO concluded that the £2.7 billion spent to date on care records systems does not represent value for money. And, based on performance so far, the NAO says it has no grounds for confidence that the remaining planned spending of £4.3 billion on care records systems will be any different.
So what do trusts do now?
One of those trusts that has had to come to terms with the implications of the National Programme, and from which other trusts could learn, is Trafford General Hospital in Manchester. Trafford bought its main systems outside the National Programme for IT and is one of the most technologically-advanced in the UK.
Trafford’s method has been step by step progress over 10 years: implementing systems, learning from what went well and not so well, and integrating hardware and software from a range of suppliers. That approach could help to explain why the clinical staff at Trafford hold the small IM&T team there in high regard. At Trafford it’s the doctors and nurses who say what they want. Systems are not imposed on them and the technologists are in the background
So, what project and programme management lessons could we infer from Trafford’s implementation of IT and the fallout from the wider National Programme? Five immediately come to mind:
- Look at the big picture and what you are trying to achieve, from an IT perspective, with a long term plan and strategy so that you know what you are implementing is in line with your strategy
- Be in control of your IT suppliers. Too often in government and in the wider public sector, it’s the other way round. Make sure you are working with a trusted supplier that has a strong track record and, above all, make sure that your commercial and relationship management approach drives behaviour that will deliver the outcomes you want.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to and always avoid developing a new IT solution from scratch when something off the shelf will do the job. Using standard products reduces complexity, as does breaking IT projects into manageable chunks, using modular or agile approaches to IT project management - the Department for Work and Pensions’ Universal Credit system, due to go live in 2013, is a case in point here. Step-by-step progress, implementing systems, learning from what went well and not so well, relishing small wins and integrating hardware and software in a staged way, is a more likely route to success than a Big Bang approach. Remember also that most COTS solutions are delivered with standard processes and procedures built in. Use these wherever possible as they are developed from a base of good industry practice and help you avoid getting into the minefield of software modifications and misguided business process changes.
- Don’t impose change. Always have the push for change come from business users – which in Trafford’s case means the clinicians – who understand what technology can do for them. They will become your champions and help to drive change from within.
- Keep IT in the background – not centre stage. Grand designs rarely herald great success.
Taking heed of these simple guidelines will pay dividends in the long run and help to avoid being part of the failure statistic headlined above.
Learning the social media lessons of the Arab Spring and the UK riots
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on November 15, 2011
Authorities need to embrace social media rather than try to control it
In the wake of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, with uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and unrest in Syria, much has been made of the role of social media in facilitating the revolutions.
Although there is a perception that the Internet was central to ‘casting’ information that ‘the demo will take place at 3.30 on Tuesday afternoon’, there was actually much more to the role of social media in generating the mindset for revolution. In the Arab Spring, thousands of bloggers and through them millions of their fellow citizens, were able to express their thoughts about the regimes they were living under, creating the desire to act with one voice.
Social media also came under the spotlight here after the riots in August, with Home Secretary Theresa May meeting with representatives of Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion, but later making it clear that the government was not considering shutting down social media in times of crisis.
Although from the government’s – and the police’s – perspective, there were frustrations that BlackBerry Messenger enabled rioters to send encrypted messages and keep one step ahead of the authorities, the reality is that social media is simply a tool and with any tool comes a desired degree of control and social responsibility in respect of its use.
As one commenter to a Harvard Business Review blog on the riots pointed out, a knife is a useful tool, but treated irresponsibly it is a dangerous weapon. Similarly, international money markets are both a useful tool for making money, and a disastrous way of creating a £90bn hole in the public pocket which has yet to be mended.
An old advertisement for a beer used to say, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ So rather than fight technologies such as social media, the authorities must embrace them. For example, if a call for joining a riot goes out on a social network, the police can use communities like FaceBook and Twitter to send out warnings or messages exhorting people not to join the riots; as happened in cities like Sheffield, where members of the community used FaceBook to urge their fellow citizens not to take to the streets. There is also a clear role for cognitive research methods in tapping into any brewing unrest before it explodes. Perhaps the police should already be doing that.
Social media is all-pervasive – and no matter what the government thinks of its role in riots, it can’t be turned off. We also need to avoid double-standards here. There’s a widespread view that social media being at the heart of Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions was a good thing. But social media as a recruiting sergeant for riots that spread up England like a rash understandably makes the majority of law-abiding citizens feel profoundly uncomfortable. Squaring that particular circle isn’t easy from a social media perspective.
There is a serious point here that applies to business as well as law and order. A company cannot simply turn off social media comment on its products or services because it thinks the comments are unfair. It has to understand, learn and embrace that comment, and then influence it by its actions and participation on an on-going basis. That is why companies that are actively monitoring the blogosphere for comment about their products and services are more likely to provide better customer service than those that don’t.
There is a battle going on for hearts and minds, both for the citizen and for the consumer and the battleground is social media. Those who understand the social media bandwagon and would jump aboard it have a better prospect of influencing its direction than those who would derail it.
Why traditional research won’t provide the real insight required into the causes of the riots
Posted by Andrew Moore in General on November 9, 2011
Researchers must focus on ‘disposition’ and ‘catalyst’ rather than ‘cause’ to learn lessons from the August riots
A September blog post by the London School of Economics (LSE) argued that there is a pressing need for ‘credible research’ into the causes and the consequences of the August riots in the UK. The blog also announced the creation of a joint study between the LSE and the Guardian with the goal of reporting within three months.
The LSE, in this explanation, admits that the ‘Reading the Riots’ study will not be able to answer all the big questions. But it hoped to begin the process of filling parts of the current information gap and make a positive contribution to public and political debate.
Interestingly, its approach will be conducted by a partnership of journalists and academics and based on a methodology adopted following the riots in Detroit in the US in 1967.
As I wrote in a recent guest blog for the Campaign4Change, while such research initiatives launched by those with an interest in understanding and curing society’s ills are well-meaning and based on credible empirical evidence, the results themselves may still ultimately turn out to be incomplete and not provide the hoped-for insight into the riots, especially if they focus on ‘cause’ rather than the prevailing states of mind of the communities affected and the catalytic interactions that accelerated events leading up to the riots.
And it’s not just the riots. There is a currently a great deal of interest within government circles to determine how best to engage with various stakeholders in different, more effective (and understandably less expensive) ways. Those engagements include the Big Society, the long running debate about the future of the NHS and other groups, such as offenders for whom the government is seeking ways to improve rehabilitation, reduce re-offending and become much more effective at identifying those most susceptible to radicalisation, extremism or self-harm.
The problem for strategists and policy and decision makers is that the environment in which they are operating is hugely complex; there are many small causes interacting with each other, but no one cause is dominant. The whole environment is continually adapting and changing and you can’t measure it at a point in time – it’s constantly evolving and outcomes are difficult to predict.
So a different research approach is required, one that enables you to see things that you hadn’t expected or that blows away commonly held perceptions; and also enables you to detect early opportunities to take action on a particular initiative to maximise the benefits downstream or damp down a threat before it was even recognised as such.
Advances in cognitive based solutions, using micro-narratives (snippets, stories, reports and other qualitative data) captured from samples of your target ‘population’ and self-indexed by them to provide meaning from which incisive action can be taken, are already turning these scenarios into reality.
I wish the LSE/Guardian research well in its study. My concern is that if a traditional research approach tries to make sense of what was and still is essentially a complex situation, then such initiatives risk revealing only those things that are readily recognisable and support preconceived hypotheses. They are likely to miss the opportunity to discern unexpected findings arising directly from the contribution of the people affected by (and involved in) the riots and fail to detect the early signals of situations developing in those communities, which can either be encouraged for the wider good or discouraged before causing further unrest. Addressing these issues by adopting a cognitive based approach would arguably provide a much more effective feed into future policy decisions and social interventions.
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Andrew Moore
