The Lesson of the Holiday Roast

Have you ever heard the story of the holiday roast? Little six-year old Mary is watching Alison, her mom, carefully preparing the big holiday meal. There are appetizers, salads and all sorts of side dishes. But the centerpiece is always the wonderful holiday roast.

After spending time at the market to choose just the right one, Alison is now in her kitchen, ready to begin cooking it. It is unwrapped, placed in a huge roasting pan, seasoned, coated and finally, most importantly, carefully cut exactly in half. As she gently placed each half face down in the sauce little Mary asked why she had cut this beautiful roast in half. Alison had lots more to do and shrugged off the question.

After exactly two hours, Alison opened the oven, pulled the pan out, turned it around and put it back in. Little Mary, curious again, wanted to know why the roast had been cut in half, and why the pan had to be rotated. "Why?" Alison snapped back. "Well that is the way my mother, your grandmother, taught me to do it," she explained.

Still curious, the little girl asked her mother if they could call grandma and ask her these questions. When they got grandma on the phone, she said the same thing. It was just what she had been taught. Maybe cutting it open makes it juicier inside, and rotating the pan makes it cook more evenly, but I never really asked my mother. Fortunately, great grandma was still around in a nursing home. Little Mary's curiosity still unsatisfied, grandma thought perhaps great grandma could reveal the secret.

As IT professionals, we will often try to uncover the origin of a particular business process. Like little Mary, when we see how things are done, and it is not obvious why, we ask. Called upon to add, change or remove some element of a process, it goes beyond mere curiosity. It is important to know the real reason behind each step being taken, and to put this process into the context of the larger picture. While this can be irritating to the person making a seemingly simple request, this story illustrates why the relentless inquires are often justified.

You see, they got great grandma on the phone and little Mary suggested cutting the roast made it soak up the juice better or would somehow preserve tenderness. Great Granny laughed and explained that in her day the ovens were small and if you didn't cut the roast and lay it flat it wouldn't fit! The wood fueled oven was much hotter in the back than the front and so you had to rotate the pan to cook both halves the same. Of course, neither of these conditions existed today and the tradition was pointless.

And so often it turns out that a business process was invented to meet a need which was outside of the capabilities of systems in place at that time. The reporting oven could only bake so much data at one time leading to a need to slice the data in half. Clever people invent clever ways to achieve their goal by whatever means they know and it then becomes routine. As time passes and people hand off responsibilities, the approach becomes institutionalized and the rationale behind the design of the process is lost. It becomes tradition or, as we often hear, simply "the way we have always done it."

We all know the speed and capacity of systems today are far greater. The data "ovens" are larger and "heat" evenly all the way around. Moreover, software capabilities have expanded beyond our wildest imagination. If together we focus on the ultimate goal, deconstruct the current process and perhaps even trace its origin we are likely to find we can eliminate unnecessary steps and take advantage of newer, faster approaches. With less effort we quickly and consistently deliver the best holiday roasts.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

All Clouds Are Not Created Equal

Every CIO is constantly challenged by management's demand to control operating costs, maintain a high quality of service and yet support the ever growing needs of the business. Add to that the new pressures of transforming the company to compete effectively in the new digital economy.

We are all familiar with the triangle of price, quality and schedule. The conventional wisdom is you can have any two out of three -- but rarely can you achieve all three. If you want it fast and cheap, it isn't going to be very good. Add a strong desire for quality into the equation and keep the time frame short, and costs are likely to soar.

Enter the "Cloud." This is a latter day timesharing, service bureau or remote computing model (for those of us who have been around a while) with a bit of a twist. The platforms, tools and software systems available today truly enable computing power to be delivered as a utility to anyone, anywhere and at any time.

The cloud presents an opportunity to push routine or commodity services out the door, reducing the burden on internal resources, increasing agility, flexibility and predictability of costs. The cloud makes it easy to scale up and scale down as needed, and can free limited internal resources to focus on higher value projects.

But with these benefits come new concerns. The top of the list is always security. How can we be assured our data will be safe from theft or misuse when we put it in the hands of some outside data center operators? Clearing that hurdle brings us to other make or break decisions. Does the provider offer the platforms, API or software tools that are needed to run our applications and support the business? Can I meet all of my regulatory obligations?

Assuming we can identify a player or players that meet these and other necessary criteria we eventually turn our attention to cost.

Here is where it becomes really interesting because costs are not always that predictable. For Software as a Service (SaaS) we can apply the rates per user per month and have a reasonable estimate of the cost. However, this is not as simple in other types of cloud services such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where costs will depend heavily on the actual resources consumed by our application.

We can estimate resource consumption and, using published rate charts, try to predict the cost. But it turns out this may not be a fair basis for comparison. Research shows not all clouds are created equal. A series of benchmarks run by Krystallize Technologies demonstrated the same workload run on identical machines provisioned at different cloud service providers will yield different performance levels. This would suggest we will can expect different levels of performance for our application depending on its characteristics and the provider we choose.

That was not too surprising given different providers will have different equipment, architectures and design. What was very surprising was the performance varied within provider. The representative work load executed on several identically provisioned machines at the same provider also yielded different performance levels.  Moreover, these performance levels varied significantly over time. Keep in mind these cloud service providers operate data centers that are in a constant state of change.


While there are plenty of tools to simulate workloads, monitor the performance of an application or the network, and monitor costs, Krystallize CloudQoS™ provides the kind of visibility into the cloud that no other monitor delivers. You will be able to detect when the "sand" under the platform has shifted.

Whether you are first choosing a cloud service provider, managing an existing provider or just trying to maintain a quality of service, having the ability to measure the true performance of the platform supporting your application will be essential.

With the proper visibility, you may be able to rest easy knowing your cloud service will remain as fast and cost effective, and will continue to provide the same high quality service throughout the life of your application.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Many Happy Returns

Last weekend, like many US citizens, I spend a good deal of time completing and submitting my tax returns. I use a very popular software product and it does a terrific job of telling me how much I have to pay at the end of the year.

But this is not about tax preparation software, or a complaint that I owe a bunch of money. In fact, I  carefully structure my taxes each year to ensure that I do owe money at the end of the year. Not so much that I will have to pay a penalty, but enough so I get the use of some cash all year instead of lending it, interest free, to the government.

No, this is about understanding the totality of a problem and not focusing exclusively on one piece or part. Its about thinking in context and not in a vacuum. Don't miss the forest for the trees.  Make sure you see the big picture.

Okay, enough platitudes.  What the heck am I talking about?

Every year at this time we hear lots of discussions about tax returns.  People carry on about how much money they got back or gripe about the ridiculous amount they had to pay. Friends, neighbors, coworkers and family members all compare notes.  There is glee in the voices of those who expect to receive a check. They revel in the victory of getting money back, while "losers" like me, who must write a check,  are supposed to feel bad. They hang their head in shame and disgust.

But the only thing that really matters is how much tax did you pay in total. What was your effective tax rate. Everyone knows you have taxes  taken out of your pay and held throughout the year. Depending on how well these have been estimated, you may have too much or too little taken out, resulting in a difference between what you owe and what was withheld for the whole year.

Oh, I understand that some people see the refund as a forced savings program, and it can be a pretty effective one. Others, like me, prefer to retain the use of the cash until we are forced to hand it over to Uncle Sam.

But there are those who fail to see that only your total income and tax liability should be used as a basis for comparison.  Two people making about the same amount of money but having very different tax situations might pay very different amounts.  How much they get back or pay in April is irrelevant, merely a function of how much was withheld. The question should be how much did you pay in total.

The ability to put things into context, and to grasp the larger picture is important in every situation. All too often, business and technology professionals will focus on one aspect of a problem and lose sight of how that fits into the whole enterprise. The customer satisfaction scores become the goal instead of satisfied customers. Adding more fields to the data base becomes the solution, instead of understanding the data and calculations needed to answer the real question.

As senior management, we see all aspects of the business, both inside and outside of the company. It is incumbent on us to keep an eye out for the people in our organizations who are only comparing the size of their refunds and miss the larger issues.

It is up to us to  make sure they have a better, more complete view from the bridge.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Covey, tea or milk?

Quite often system projects are launched with a lengthy discussion of some data set that is needed, or a set of exciting new tools or techniques that could be used for reporting. There is debate over how and where to store specific fields of data, record layouts and structures. Sometimes there is a plan for who will gather and maintain these data.  But all of this without any clarity on the ultimate purpose for the exercise. What problem are we solving? What question are we answering?

The great author Steven Covey, in his Seven Habits, had us embrace the notion to start with the end in mind.  Know what the goal is before you set out to achieve it. It is often said when you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

In system design the objective is not to have a cool system design but rather to meet a specific need or answer a specific question. Before we can identify the information or calculations we need we must fully understand the problem being addressed.

This morning I read a request for assistance with a technology to locate trailers. The parameters of the problem were well articulated. The trailers are stored at several hundred locations and can be at rest for long periods of time. Facts like battery life and fuel efficiency were included. Several popular location technologies such as  RFID and GPS were mentioned and discounted for various reasons.  The author asked for help with a solution.

But after reading this, it struck me, we still don't know the problem being solved.  Surely the company wants to know where the trailers are for a reason. There is a problem being solved and it is not merely knowing where the trailers are.  Are we trying to optimize the size and locations of storage yards or monitor fuel use or equipment life? Perhaps it is an attempt to optimize the schedule by locating the closest available trailer.

In any event, unless we know the question we may spend considerable time finding or creating some new methodology for locating the trailers without ever solving the actual problem.

My favorite tactic is to disrupt any meeting by magically producing with pencil and paper the system output exactly as requested and pushing it across the table to the requester. Once they have it I ask what they will do with it. Their response will lead to more refinement of the report or analysis, or will answer their question and, importantly, should  lead to some action.

If they cannot answer the question, there is no point in going any further.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

The Customer Experience Race Is Out of the Blocks

My good friend Andrew Spanyi has been a faithful and supportive reader and asked if he could share some of his "views" from the bridge. He permitted me to reprint the following column for your review and reaction. Andrew is a senior consultant at the Cutter Consortium.

The title of a recent article in The Economist reads, " Companies Hope That "Chief Customer Officers" Will Provide Better Service. Yeah, Right." The article reports not only that some firms have started appointing chief customer officers (CCOs) to serve the customer more attentively, but that some of these CCOs have many assistants, such as a "vice president of customers-for-life" (Salesforce.com), or a "vice president of customer advocacy"(NetApp), and even a "director of customer listening" (Cisco). Add this to the slate of "vice presidents, customer experience" at companies such as Fidelity, Intuit, Healthy Directions, and others. It's pretty clear that the race is on.

While such appointments of key executives to take charge of assessing customer experience are certainly a step in the right direction, there are grounds for a healthy dose of skepticism. Even though the idea that the primary purpose of business is to create and retain customers goes all the way back to Peter Drucker's 1954 book The Practice of Management , many organizations have struggled in shifting management attention from traditional financial metrics to the critical few measures that really matter to customers. And it's not just about metrics; fundamental changes in culture are also needed for optimum results. So, action has lagged rhetoric.

The first step in viewing the business from the customer's point of view involves measuring and monitoring the firm's performance in terms of delivering what customers really want. What customers really want are the following:

1. On-time delivery (ideally when customers asked for it, or at least when it was promised to be delivered)
2. Accuracy (the exact items/services they ordered)
3. Completeness (no back orders or call backs)
4. Responsiveness to inquiries (first time right)
5. An accurate invoice
6. Value for money
7. Flawless service/support (both during and after product/service delivery)

A tight collaboration between business and IT is needed to make any progress in automating the collection of critical-to-customer metrics. That's easier said than done. A surprising number of companies continue to monitor metrics such as when orders are shipped as opposed to when these are received, the average time needed to respond to a customer inquiry as opposed to the frequency with which customer inquiries are resolved correctly the first time, and so on. Even when the right metrics are monitored, they often don't make it to the scoreboard that the senior leadership team (SLT) monitors and are buried deep in the bowels of an analytical group. Further, an end-to-end process-based view is needed to find the root cause when performance dips below a certain level and this view of business is frequently missing, or at least not transparent, at the SLT level.

While some progress has been made in the area of customer-centric measurement, largely due to an increasing emphasis on Big Data and process analytics, it is not yet clear whether this will have sufficient impact to shift management attention to a more customer-centric and systemic view of business. Organizational culture is sometimes tagged as the culprit. Yet, culture is dependent on what the organization measures, manages, and rewards. To shift culture requires not only attention to customer-focused metrics, but also on models, governance, and reward systems, as summarized below:

• Model: The use of simple, visually compelling schematics of a high-level process-based view of the business and a one-page schematic for at least each customer-touching process is needed to maintain a focus on performing for customers and the need for cross-departmental collaboration.
• Governance: Given the development of the right models and metrics, establishing a process-based governance framework to emphasize value creation is necessary to embed a new way of "how we do things around here."
• Reward systems: This involves aligning reward and recognition systems to acknowledge the efforts of individuals and teams that enable performance for customers.

How is your organization doing in these areas? I welcome your comments about this Advisor and encourage you to send your insights to me at aspanyi@cutter.com. 



Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Press 1 To Be Totally Frustrated For A While

IVR is that technology that you encounter when you call customer service and a prerecorded voice provides instructions on how to proceed. You are told to enter a number for a particular service using the phone keypad or sometimes voice responses.

IVR stands for interactive voice response and, if done right, will improve customer service. To be honest, I have not encountered very many that have been done right. But I have run into many that were done badly.

Ideally, you select your function such as making an inquiry, a purchase, a payment, or requesting help. The system asks for certain information. You enter your account or phone number. Perhaps you have to enter a PIN to authenticate. You are presented with more choices and you merrily punch your way through the whole transaction. Sometimes you reach a dead end and, presto, a human appears on the phone. At this point the human has all the information needed and can satisfy your request or solve your problem. Right.

That is how it is supposed to go. I'm willing to bet, though, that has not been the majority of your experience and it certainly has not been mine.

The most common problem is the lack of integration. You dutifully punch in your 10 digit phone number and PIN or your 15 digit account number and move on to select the service needed. Press 1 for this and 2 for that and so on. What happens next is a person comes on the line and asks for your name. Then asks you to provide the very same information you punched in not one minute ago. Again you are asked to describe your issue. Invariably this results in a polite but unavoidable, "please hold on while I transfer you to the right department."

You enjoy someone else's favorite genre of music, punctuated by commercials suggesting you take advantage of additional services, upgrades or new products. With any luck, before the line goes dead, another person picks up. I say that because you will be transferred several times and invariably once or twice the call will simply drop. Then, like chutes and ladders, you slide back to the first interaction and start all over again.

The reason each person has to ask you to provide all the same information and validate your identity is due to a lack of connection among the systems used to provide customer service. As you are transferred around the organization from sales to customer service to billing and back to sales, the people at the other end of the phone line do not get the data collected by the person before them. So they have to ask again.

They also work from a script which leaves little room for independent or creative thinking. They have a series of questions to ask and depending on your answers they have an indicated next action. Since callers are unpredictable (and to be honest, unreliable) the conversation often goes off script. When this happens the default action is to hand it off to another person who might be the right one with the right script to bring the issue to closure. No one person has responsibility for your problem.

Finally, the metrics by which these people are judged usually involve the volume of calls they can handle and closure rates. Closure does not mean your problem is solved. It means they have done everything they can and you are no longer their issue. This motivates them to quickly dispatch every call. More calls means better performance and if I can shuffle you off to another person I get to close the call out and move on.

With poor systems design, lack of integration, tightly controlled customer interactions and the wrong performance metrics at play it is easy to see why these systems leave most people highly frustrated in the end.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Big Data Is A Big Deal

When I began writing this column there were key trends in business and technology such as cloud computing, mobile devices and social media which provided a wealth of opportunities for discussion. Many of the columns over the last few months have included information, observations and my perspectives on these topics. Another major trend which has not occupied much space here on the bridge is so-called "big data."

This is a term, like the cloud, which can mean a lot of different things to different people. Let me see if I can shed some light on what we mean by big data and how it will, sooner or later, impact you and your business.

IT professionals have been collecting and finding ways of organizing data to help run companies since the dawn of data processing. Database technologies were devised and perfected through the years to capture ever more efficiently all of the transaction level data needed to adequately operate and control the business. Until fairly recently, the drive has always been to construct the "one truth" or central source for data which was collected from all parts of the company and rationalized, adjusted, corrected and published back for analysis and reporting.

When the central database became to large or unwieldy, the data mart was born. These extracts from the mother ship provided smaller, more focused data sets. Specific deprtments such as sales, marketing or finance would filter out only those data elements needed for a particular analysis or report. This also removed significant burden from underlying systems sensitive to the time needed to process transactions.

The advent of the internet, connected devices and social networking have lead to a data explosion. For a while, efforts were made to consolidate these external sources into the central database in the same manner as internal financial, production and other types of data. Faster database engines, new software and appliances have come along, but the data growth continues to outpace them.

The sheer amount of data can often be more than traditional database technologies can handle. For example, an oil rig may generate 25,000 operational  data points per minute. Trying to store and process this in conventional ways is nearly impossible.

Moreover, the preponderance of data extracted from social networks and other external sources is unstructured and, by its very nature, incapable of being handled by conventional database technologies.

Big data is the effort under way for companies to get their arms around these new sources of information and to try, using new technologies and innovative techniques, to derive some value from it.

We'll talk more about some specific examples of companies listening the the "voice of their customers" by monitoring social networks, and how they can shift from being reactive to proactive in the process.

Think about the new sources of data that may be important to your business and ask yourself are you ready to deal with it?

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Guess Who Is Watching You

For years people have argued about the right to privacy in the work place. In particular, the debate was often whether email was subject to privacy laws or belonged to the company. The view in this country has generally made it acceptable for companies to monitor email content while other countries have taken a different view.

With the advent of so many new electronic channels of communication from text to twitter and all the social and business networks, this debate is going to broaden.

According to a recent HBR article, the responsibility to police all of this digital activity is increasingly falling on the CIO. When concerns are raised by management, the CIO is often the person they engage to scan employee messaging, Twitter accounts, blogs or on-line community chat boards. Using readily available tools and techniques, the CIO can assemble a picture of how employees are portraying their company, coworkers, management and perhaps even customers.

The CIO will generally have the knowledge and ability to collect, analyze and present findings for management. However, approval for these actions should be sought from both Legal and Human Resource professionals before putting yourself and the company at risk. What is permissible can be especially complicated in a multinational environment where legality may depend on where the data lies or the employee resides or both.

My advice is to be proactive. The company must be clear about what is and is not acceptable behavior on the part of an employee. It should publish these guidelines in an employee handbook as well as conduct periodic training sessions. Once the rules have been clearly defined and communicated, employees are on notice the company will take action if violations are discovered. Knowing where you draw the line will make people less likely to cross it.

The company should further state they will respect individual freedom of expression and right to privacy, but retain the right to investigate any and all digital content generated using the resources owned or provided by the company. Moreover, the consequences for any violation should be commensurate with the offense and must be applied quickly and evenly.

This cuts both ways. Employees should think long and hard before posting content in any public forum that might be construed by the company as insulting, derogatory, defamatory or otherwise socially unacceptable or even unlawful. Whether the company has the right to search and find this content or not is less important than what may happen if it is discovered. It could turn out to be a career limiting move.

This is truly a case where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and one should definitely look before you leap.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Are We Flush With Research

You've all heard the old joke 63.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot. It usually takes a few moments for it to sink in and then you get it. Way back in college we used a textbook by Phillip Kotler that began each chapter with a short quotation. Among may favorites was "Statistics is the art of torturing the data until it says what you want." Whenever reading any reports, findings or conclusions based on numerical data analysis these are usually among the first things that pop into my head.

The social nets are terrific at highlighting stories and odd bits of information. Monitoring Twittter feeds can alert you to news stories as they are breaking (like the rebels victory in Libya or the earthquake on the east coast) while Facebook lets you see what all of your friends think is worth sharing. Google Plus also has a broad spectrum of postings from politics (Ron Paul forgets Rick Perry's name) to pot (weed DNA sequenced) depending on who you have placed in your circles.

Watching my various social nets can provide good information and often inspires or plays a key role in my daily column. For example, some weeks back a close FB connection (my son) shared Spotify with me which lead to some experimentation and a brief report on first impressions. There is so much good content its difficult to choose which links to follow. Music, news, videos, art, science and humor. You're entertained or educated.

The results of so many studies are made available. Smart phone share of market, smart phone user frustrations, social software relevance in business, and the list goes on and on almost endlessly. Most are interesting, important, relevant or at least useful. Many very well done.

Then this story with a pretty catchy headline was shared with me. It read: 35% of Tablet owners use device in the bathroom. and a different thought crossed my mind. Beyond my usual questioning of the validity of the numbers (called in to question by the extremely small size of the sample) this story begs the question; have we gone too far in our efforts to understand our own behavior? Did these subjects actually volunteer this response or was it a choice the researcher put on the  questionnaire? Do we really need to know if you people are using a computer (or any other electronic device) in the bathroom?

I'm all for understanding consumer behavior, technology usage patterns and the never ending quest for knowledge in general. But we should draw the line at the bathroom door.

Let me know what you think. Make sure you wash your hands. You don't know where that keyboard has been.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC