Category: Four pillars

There was a time when I was happy with enterprise budgeting processes and their underlying technology support. That time was thirty years ago, before I ever worked for an enterprise. [And that’s probably why I have so much time for Sig and Thingamy. Disclosure: I have no stock in Thingamy. Or any other company for that matter, save the ones I have worked for or am working for.]

So many places have nothing that approximates to project accounting yet they try and account for projects. So many places have nothing that approximates to multi-year planning, yet they try and account for multiple years and across year boundaries. So many places operate in multiple timezones and jurisdictions with multiple accounting standards and conventions, even if they claim to be using the same one. So many places have a habit of nesting cost centre charges, creating this monstrous concept called allocation cycles. So many places have people arguing till the cows come home about the allocation process, allocation keys, the amount allocated….. while all the time being completely unable to isolate the costs being allocated.

Sometimes I think that many people avoid getting into any form of management in order to avoid becoming spreadsheet jockeys; spreadsheet jockeys riding blindfolded through treacle while mounted on imaginary horses. I can’t blame them.

I’m no accountant, I want to keep things simple. Tell me how much money I can spend, as if it’s a credit limit on a card. Let me spend it on the people, things and processes I need, in order that I can keep the promises I make. At the end of each month, send me a statement of expenditure for that “card”. If I run more than one cost centre, then give me more than one “card”. If I run a P/L, then let me receive money into that “card” account as well. If I have the right to an overdraft, then let me know how much, and by when I need to pay it off. What’s frontloaded, what’s not. What the early termination penalties are.

And don’t let me charge one card account with another. No smoke. No mirrors. No nesting of allocations.

And all cash. No mumbo jumbo. No enterprise kiting.

That’s what I’ve always wanted. That’s what I’ve never had.

So, when I saw justgiving as an application on Facebook, it made me think. Shouldn’t that be how budgets work in an enterprise? Let the P/L holder “justgive” money to the “causes” he or she wants to support. Constrained by their available balance. Let the “causeholder” run the cause, equivalent to a project at a time. When multiple P/Ls want to support a particular enterprise “cause”, they can.

Sure we have to solve for other problems, like how to deal with overheads. In fact we need to go further, we need to understand far more about how we fund shared infrastructure, shared within an enterprise and shared beyond the enterprise as well.

But we need to start somewhere, and one place that needs attention is the way projects get funded and accounted for.

Following a recent post, Stephen questioned:

how much power we have, as all-too-human individuals, to SET norms. (On the other hand I suspect we have all encountered bosses who felt they could, and should, set norms!) Finally, I continue to hold that the norms of the workplace do not always align with the norms of our leisure time

Sean riposted:

This is probably true with respect to the babyboom generation, and probably wrong with respect to the digital generation (or generation ‘Y’). I’m gen X so basically my norms are unclear!

And it made me think, what are the norms of my generation? And at least one emerged:
Norm Peterson.

Shahidul Alam is a fine photojournalist, just take a look at his recent works on his blog. The photo-essay on the recent flooding in Bangladesh is particularly powerful.

My thanks to Rageboy for the tip-off. Apparently Shahidul got in touch with Chris about something or the other; which makes me wonder, is Chris Locke really Kevin Bacon in disguise? Scratch that, I don’t think I know anyone who is six degrees separated from Chris, it feels like everyone is closer to 2 degrees. Anyone else feel that way?

There’s been a lot written recently about the interaction between real and virtual worlds, by people far more knowledgeable about the subject than I could ever be. Yet, something that happened to me over the past couple of days made me think harder about the days to come.

What happened was almost trivial. Some of you know I had had a heart attack last Christmas, and that I wear a pacemaker. (An Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator, to be precise). This wee tim’rous beastie they call an ICD has a little built-in alarm. And said little built-in alarm went off in the early hours of Monday morning.

It was an unusual feeling, having an alarm go off inside you. A small part of me went into immediate panic mode, while the rest of me looked at the “facts” as I could see them; I reasoned that I’d never felt better, I was working out every day, I was learning to swim, the weather was hot and gruelling, my recovery rates were good, I was eating well and sleeping well, God was in His heaven and all was well with the world.

And so I carried on through Monday, determining to check things out after I returned to London. There were little voices whispering irritating things to do with having to have another operation, but I wasn’t listening.

Then the same thing happened Tuesday morning. This time I could not let it be, so I woke up early and called my cardiologist. Waited for his call back, resigned myself to not exercising or swimming until I knew better. He called back, and the answer was what I had hoped for.

What mattered most was how I felt. The alarms could have been caused by a number of factors, the key issue was how I felt. And I felt fine.

The incident made me think about the intersection between real and virtual worlds, and how more and more we live in that hybrid world. With hybrid signals. Lots of signals.

The signals need interpreting. Which means we have an increased reliance on people who can do the interpreting, although in most cases the final call will be personal.

This reliance on people doing the interpreting is what concerned me. It requires people to give honest open professional advice, making themselves extremely vulnerable. We need the “valuable but vulnerable” professional advice that Michael Power spoke so eloquently about in The Risk Management of Everything. Yet all the signs are that we are moving into a more and more litigious society, with (as Professor Power intimated) the small print outweighing the valuable advice.

Trust is going to mean something else as the real and virtual worlds collide, and as the sources and devices for signals and alarms increase exponentially. Trust is going to mean vulnerability on both sides, both trusted and trusting. That vulnerability is going to require covenant relationships in order to do away with the garbage-net of litigation.

Unless we do this, unless we move to covenant relationships between professional parties and the public at large, we are going to be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the noises we hear rather than the signals we should be listening to. Not waving but drowning.

I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but years ago I heard a story about tulips. With advances in transportation and in technology, there were people interested in time-shifting tulip production. So they tried various methods associated with making tulips believe it was spring already, placing them in hothouses, keeping the surroundings springlike, and so on. The bulbs refused to budge and the experiments were gigantic failures.

Until someone figured out, maybe it’s not worth conning the bulb into thinking it’s spring. Maybe the bulb needed to know that winter was over. So they tried to keep the bulbs in artificial cold, and bingo the tulips had been time-shifted.

I felt the same way when I made the decision, some years ago, to open up my mailbox to my direct reports. My intention was to let them see precisely what I did by showing them what I faced, the incoming mail. That they could somehow vicariously gain the experience of sitting where I sat, doing what I did, thinking what I thought, by seeing what I saw.

And then I observed what they did. Boy was I wrong. Most of them were far more interested in my “sent mail”. They felt they could learn more by watching my outgoing rather than my incoming, they felt they could get “into my head” faster by focusing on my responses rather than on the stimuli.

I am no expert in knowledge management; I just like watching people and learning from them; I like teaching and mentoring people as well; and I try and do all this with an open and “sharing” management style. More trust and less verify until the need for verification keeps presenting itself, so to say.

What I saw with the opening up of my mailbox  confirmed a number of prior suspicions, suspicions that I had held ever since I’d seen early versions of Autonomy and Verity, suspicions enhanced as I got used to Copernic and Momma and Google.

People learn best by watching what you do. Not what you say.

And it is with this perspective that I am fascinated by the potential provided by Facebook and its ilk.

For example, one of the Story Types available in Facebook goes something like this:

John Smith used Blog Friends to read 24 Hours Left to Apply to Join Tulsa. John surfed from his own profile. The post was written by Fred Jones.

I think this is very powerful. Let me explain why.

I believe there are three primary reasons why an enterprise would want to “manage its knowledge”:

One, to share learning, so that the same mistake is not made multiple times.

Two, to share learning, so that activities get sped up.

Three, to share learning, so that people are motivated to learn and to teach.

To share learning.

Knowledge management is not really about the content, it is about creating an environment where learning takes place. Maybe we spend too much time trying to create an environment where teaching takes place, rather than focus on the learning.

Since people want to learn by watching others, what we need to do is to improve the toolsets and the environment that allows people to watch others. It could be as simple as: What does my boss do? Whom does she talk to? What are her surfing habits like? Whom does she treat as high priority in terms of communications received? What applications does she use? Which ones does she not use? When she has a particular Ghost to deal with, which particular Ghostbuster does she call?

What makes her tick. That’s what they want to understand, that’s what they want to learn from.

This type of learning is not just about subordinate-to-boss and succession-plan related, it is also about newbie-to-old-hand, mentored-to-mentor. A picture of the activities and relationships and paths followed, a “let me show you” session, is worth a thousand “let me tell you” sessions.

More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.

That’s how we are going to create the right learning environments. I think Facebook has the tools to capture much of this in the nonintrusive time-shifted place-shifted shareable way. Let the patterns emerge. Share the patterns. Get inside people’s heads. More to follow, let me see how the comments flow from this Starter-For-Ten.