Keep it simple…

In yesterday’s WSJ, there was a quick article about how keeping it simple paid off for one champion programmer. In a nutshell, the story is this – TopCoder ran a component design competition where 9 finalists had 6 hours to produce a solution to a given problem. The winner’s secret? He spent the first hour interviewing the person who wrote the requirements, and then designed and coded a solution that met the written and unwritten requirements and did nothing else. Wow, what a boring and simple solution. What did our winner get? $25,000 for 6 hours of work…

Many tech projects fail / disappoint / underwhelm because they fail to meet the requirements. Many tech departments and IT service providers work in a mode where they code first, and ask questions later. Their goal is to get something out there to meet the need, and then clean-up the mess after. However, all to often, no one takes the time to actually clean-up the mess after…

The winner in this simple contest highlights something to me – fixed price engagements are critical in IT projects. By working on a fixed priced basis (again regardless of whether you use internal or external IT teams), the team putting the fixed price bid together is forced (if they want to manage project risk reasonably) to do significant up-front work nailing down the requirements, detailing the design, solidifying the plans, and establishing effective change control processes.

With modern project management / program management tools such as Daptiv, and collaboration tools such as wikis and blogs, projects can be managed more transparently than ever before. By combining transparent project management, open honest communication, fixed bids, and reasonable risk management, your IT department or IT service partner can dramatically increase its success rate on IT projects.

Personal blog

Okay, I’ve started a personal blog here in 2008. I will use this when I have something to talk about that has nothing to do with my work, or when I come across something I find a bit fun. My first two posts there are a bit of both of these themes.

YATP… Yet Another Twitter Post.

While vacationing in sunny Florida, I managed to see two interesting posts on Twitter. The first was a couple of days ago from Katie Tierney’s Confessions of a Recruiting Newbie blog – I’m twitdicted. In her post, she argues she’s addicted to Twitter, and finds is a powerful tool to find and disseminate information. She calls the state she’s reached on the Twitter Maturity Curve to be twitdiction. Then this morning I saw JP’s post on Twitter – Musing about things I can do with Twitter that I couldn’t easily do before Twitter. JP tells the story of how he was pointed toward an interesting article in the New Yorker from a good friend because of her tweet about it.

When I explain Twitter to people who have not used it, I clearly am doing a bad job because they just don’t get it. The don’t see the utility. They think I’m a bit crazy. What I learned from Katie and JP is that maybe my explanation is not all that bad after all… Maybe seeing the utility is something that comes in an “aha!” moment after using the tool for a bit. Maybe, just maybe, it comes after jumping in feet first, trying it out, and seeing the power of the completely disjointed conversation you are having with friends and co-workers who, in this day-and-age, might be nowhere near you and frankly you may have never met.

Yes, I’ve never met Katie or JP. Katie and I work together, and have seen each other on Skype and have spoken countless times. JP is someone I’ve come to respect through his blog. Today I follow Katie on Twitter, but more and more I think I’m going to look to people like JP and start following them too. I’m realizing more and more the useful information that I’m missing only following 13 people on Twitter. Intellectually I understand the value of weak ties, but Katie and JP put that power into words for me today.

So, added to my New Years Resolutions… Start following more people on Twitter… Okay, back to the beach.

What’s in it for me?

The first event started as a bit of fun and evolved into a deep conversation. The second was thought provoking – I had an aha moment. The third evoked a reaction, and I typed the first draft of this post. The fourth spurred me on until I pressed “Send to Weblog”… As each event happened, I kept thinking what’s in it for me? This question keeps coming at me from my friends at Financial Services firms as they look at Enterprise 2.0 tools and technologies and Social Media. They wonder if there is an ROI from weak ties (borrowing the term from “The Strength of Weak Ties” – the personal interconnectivity that is formed loosely in LinkedIn and Facebook are often “weak ties”, as you may not know the person particularly well). They wonder if all of this personal interconnectivity is helpful or harmful. While they can see the value for some of this in their personal lives, they wonder about it professionally. Is this a waste of time? What will their managers think of their use of these tools? Are they exposing themselves too much? Can FS firms allow these technologies? Can they stop them? Has the iPhone changed everything?

Event 1… I have immersed myself in e2.0, the tools, the thinking, etc… I’ve jumped in feet first, to the point that a friend of mine (a younger single friend of mine…) put on my Facebook wall on Monday that I am “more wired than the 20 somethings [he] typically date[s]..”. Okay, my pithy reply to his wall post could have been the end of it, but we started an e-mail exchange… Here’s some of what he sent me:

you’ve got plaxo, linked in, facebook, twitter, aim, and so on.. more than me.. and you’re using them more than the college kids I know.. seems a bit over the top perhaps.. I’m actually dropping nearly everything in favor of facebook.. and that’s only for real people i’ve met/know to see.. and while i might check it somewhat regularly, i’m personally lowering my networkedness.. it’s all too much.. too many things to manage, too many e-mail addresses to check, too many notifications of change.. gmail, my facebook, and my cell number.. that’s it for me now.. i’m not the only one feeling this way.. even seeing some retaliation from 25 year olds, who pretty much grew up in a post AIM world.. just saying.. and don’t forget… every time you change something in one of your networks, a message goes out to others telling them as such.. it’s fun at first, but after a while people might think you’re spending all your time on twitter and not enough on things that actually matter..

In my reply, I talked about the value of experimentation with these tools in order to understand the utility of them. However, it did get me thinking that I might be broadcasting too much information about what I am doing, and broadcasting it too widely.

Event 2… Tuesday, I was talking with a buddy of mine as we commuted into NY after a nice game of squash. He is a trader on a desk at a major Wall Street firm. He was asking me how with all of the regulations around electronic communications could firms allow iPhones on trading desks. People now have a good web browser, their personal e-mail, and the ability to IM friends in their hand – none of which run through the corporate compliance server or corporate firewall. I can imagine the headache this causes firms. As part of the settlement between the SEC, NY Attorney General, NASD, NASSA, NYSE, and State Regulators with Wall Street firms, firms are required to abide by the following:

The insulation of research analysts from investment banking pressure. Firms will be required to sever the links between research and investment banking, including analyst compensation for equity research, and the practice of analysts accompanying investment banking personnel on pitches and road shows. This will help ensure that stock recommendations are not tainted by efforts to obtain investment banking fees.

In practice this agreement and other like regulations require communications between various parties at investment banks to be monitored to ensure compliance with this agreement. The iPhone adds a serious challenge to the monitoring of the communications between various parts of the investment bank.

Event 3… Yesterday, a colleague of mine, Steve Douty, posted this post On Collaboration. He starts his message with this:

“Collaboration” is one of those vague, multivalent terms – like “Web 2.0” – that can mean many things, and also nothing at all. Because of this, it’s hard to get people to do it: “Why can’t you all just collaborate?!” It’s also hard to sell just on its own merits.

He proceeds to discuss the value of collaboration, and explores why Friendster has fizzled while Flickr and Wikipedia have flourished. He discusses 7 characteristics that make Flickr and Wikipedia different; these are: Vision, Purpose or outcome, Topicality, Running start, Continuous flow, Refresh, Logical end. While the discussion he started it excellent and thought provoking, I could not help thinking a lot of the adoption of platforms comes back to the utility of the platform in general, and what’s in it for me.

Event 4… The last night, another colleague of mine, Brian Magierski, posted this post on Social Media and the value of weak ties. Brian discusses the value of Weak Ties, and references the work of Andrew McAfee and Mark Granovetter (and like Brian, I’m not going to repeat it here). He then goes on to discuss his personal use of Facebook at Twitter:

I find that Facebook and Twitter in part do the job of keeping me aware in short snippets of downtime each day as to what my extended network of mostly ‘weak ties’ are doing (both small things and major life/career shifts). The job these SNS services are doing for me in part is to keep me connected and informed of the whereabouts and whatabouts of a substantially larger number people than I have ever been able to remain connected to in the past. These snippets get burned into my brain and my searchable SNS services for recall in an On Demand manner when required. Yes, it’s also entertaining.

I agree these two tools specifically are entertaining. As a social tool Facebook is great. As a work tool, I’m not convinced, but I see the potential. The mix between social and work people on my Facebook friends is a challenge or me – I don’t want my social friends and work friends to see the same info… This fact alone forces me to limit my use of Facebook artificially. I like having Twitter update my status there. I like the RSS feed out of it. Plaxo Pulse allows you to differentiate between professional, social, and family relationships. I think having that in Facebook would make Facebook more useful for me. Twitter has been a fantastic way for my co-workers and I to get stay in touch. My direct team is spread the northeast at our clients, and my extended team is spread around the US and Europe. Twitter is an easy and definitely entertaining way to stay in touch in 140 character so less…

Social networks, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, etc… are all tools. They are the hammer and wrenches of this electronic era. These tools help us in our personal lives and they help us in our professional lives. As with any tool, you want to choose a tool that helps you with accomplishing something. You can’t drive a nail with a Phillips head screwdriver. Once you have the tools, it all comes back to a simple question of “what’s in it for me?”. I have tried all of the social networks, e2.0 tools, web 2.0 tools, etc… If there is no utility in the tool for me, I drop it, and drop it fast – I don’t have the time to linger. Yes, a friend occasionally asks me to take a second look at something, but that is the rare event. More often then not, the tool isn’t useful enough for me so it follows the usage trajectory that Steve discussed in his post.

While it is true that I have tried more tools that I care to admit, but I only use a couple daily, and I have set my browser (currently Flock) to open each of the following each morning:

* Google Reader – for reading my RSS feeds,
* Facebook – for fun and reconnecting with old friends, and strengthening ties with new ones,
* LinkedIn – for business networking,
* Plaxo – for address book sync’ing (but not yet for Plaxo Pulse as I don’t feel utility there yet),
* Twitter – for fostering teamwork within my co-workers,
* WordPress – for my blogging,
* SocialText – for our wiki work,
* Ning – for our firm’s private social network (note: I tried to create a social network within my family and there was no interest, so we dropped it – fast), and
* Kalivo – for collaboration with co-workers and clients.

All of these are useful for one or more specific things for me. Yes, some of the utility comes from the collaboration and conversation. Some of it comes from the weak ties it helps maintain. However, in all cases there is a utility for me…

What does this have to do with Financial Services and IT? Frankly, everything! My friends at the FS firms are struggling with the question of “What’s in it for me?” as they look at these tools. The IT leadership is struggling with the ROI of some of these tools. They are driven by short-term budget realities, and don’t have the funding to invest in Weak Ties. I’ll argue that this is short sighted, but it is the reality of their lives. The Legal & Compliance departments are struggling how to control the activities on such ubiquitous and disparate platforms. Using LinkedIn is commonly thought to be a sign that you are leaving the firm. People are starting to use it for business networking given the richness of the data there. Facebook is blocked by some firms’ firewalls as being not work related. However, our friends at Apple and Research in Motion have put tools in our hands that are more powerful then the desktop machines we had a few years ago, and these tools can’t be controlled in the traditional ways. Their use is going to only increase. FS management needs to decide how to respond. Are they going to be a NGE?

Creating an exchange at the Exchange – Part III

Here are links to the other bloggers from the Wf360 event at the NYSE that I blogged about here and here: Don Dodge, Howard Greenstein, Tom Guarriello, Dorian Benkoil, Christina Kerley, Francois Gossieaux, Russ Nelson, and Isabel Walcott Hilborn.

Creating an exchange at the Exchange – Part II

Last night, I made the following post.

I spent some time today reflecting on last night’s event. I discussed the event and my post on the event with some fellow bloggers. I then exchanged some e-mails with Susan Bird, the hostess of the event, and at the end of our exchange, she said “Would love you thoughts, sometime, on how we could build on all of this…collectively.”

Then it dawned on me what I was missed in last night’s post.

By having us bloggers at the event, we took the conversations that started over dinner, and moved them to a new forum. Most dinner conversations end, and nothing becomes of it. By allowing last night’s dinner conversations to continue, in the blogosphere, we are keeping the conversations alive. We are providing the platform on which we can build on all of this.

The trick is now to get the rest of the dinner participants to come to our blogs, and to start a conversation in these spaces. The conversation is now public. It is searchable, and therefore finable. Some new people can find our conversations and enrich them some more.

My firm, BSG Alliance, espouses this belief in open dialog. Our executives and thought leaders blog on the topics that matter to them. We cover topics such as: what is an Next Generation Enterprise (NGE), outsourcing and off-shoring, project failures, customer experience, generation Y, recruiting, and financial services and IT. We encourage our co-workers, customers, and friends to join the conversation, further a dialog, and ultimately find a better solution to the original question. The whole foundation of the next generation web is predicated on a collective sharing of information in a peer-to-peer type fashion that recognizes few barriers and hierarchies, except maybe one of expertise or insight.

In the Financial Services markets, in particular, the idea of being so “open” is anathema to our culture. Much money is made on Wall Street, and on he NYSE by knowing how to play your poker hand better than the next guy. I applaud Susan and the folks from Wf360 who had the foresight to invite bloggers to this clubby institution we call home here on Wall Street. By introducing these folks to these rich new social media tools such as blogging, tagging, linking, and RSS, we can exponentially add new voices and new insights and increase our understanding of the markets we’re charged to help track for our clients.

I have confidence that Susan will bring the participants from last night’s event into the blogosphere. Once there, they can start commenting on what the dozen or so of us bloggers began here. They can push the conversation to new depths. They can draw in new thought leaders. The virtuous cycle will then continue.

Again, thank you Susan for triggering the conversation. And, I hope you don’t mind that I took it out of the 1.0 forum of e-mail and brought it into the open in a 2.0 blog.

Creating an exchange at the Exchange

Tonight I attended a very interesting event, The 360 Summit at the NYSE run by Wf360, LLC. I arrived to work the event, but frankly I really did not know what I had signed up for…

Our host, Susan Willett Bird explained the night quite simply. She wanted to provide a forum for senior executives which fostered deep, powerful, and potentially world changing conversations. She challenged the group to think about the last dinner conversation we had that really mattered, that caused us to think, that caused us to change the direction of our life… She wanted to create that tonight at the 360 Summit. The title of this blog post is a quote from Susan as she hoped to “create an exchange at the Exchange”, an exchange of ideas and viewpoints.

It did not hurt that cocktails were in the Main Room at the NYSE. The mere location provokes conversation on change and transformation. The NYSE is going through a tremendous amount of changes (see a previous post), and these changes were detailed by the keynote speaker of the night, Catherine Kinney, COO of NYSE Euronext. More on that later…

During cocktails, I met a few people. Very few knew each other (and I knew no one), so all of the conversations were a bit forced. What does your firm do? What do you do? We were all gazing at name tags… It helped me that I was standing a few feet from the Credit Suisse and JPMorgan SuperBooths below the podium where they ring the opening bell. This was my home turf, and I was able to explain to a few people about how the NYSE works, and even that Freddie Mac is traded right where we were standing.

It also did not hurt that dinner for the 400+ of us was upstairs at the NYSE in a fabulous banquet room with a large fireplace. Each table for 10 had three constituents:

(1) eight of the people were business and thought leaders – CEO’s, COO’s, CIO’s, Group EVP’s, General Councils, HR heads. The leaders were primarily women, and they spanned all industries. Our table had six women and one man. They came to us from a major global bank’s corporate finance arm, a commodities trading group, a major resort group, a catalog publisher, a boutique consulting firm, two think tanks, and unfortunately, we had one empty chair. Looking around the room, I’d guess the room was 90% women.

(2) one of the people at each table was a young Arab business leader who is working in the US on a business version of a high school exchange program. At our table was a young woman from Egypt who works in the jewelry business.

(3) one blogger who was invited to come and not just listen and take notes, but to reflect and muse on what they heard. (this would be me…)

On each table were thought provoking question cards if there was a lull in the conversation, but at our table there was no need for these, and given the general din in the room, I doubt these cards were more than decoration. The tables were not numbered, but were named things like “Garrulous Gurus” and “Socratic Sages”… Susan’s tag line is “Start The Conversation!”

Over salad we listened to a very interesting talk by Catherine Kinney about the massive changes at the NYSE Euronext Group. Catherine flew in from her new home in Paris to deliver today’s address. She covered three topics:

(1) The transformation going on at the NYSE

(2) The global transformation of NYSE Euronext

(3) The US regulatory environment and some progress she is seeing in this area

There was nothing new per se in her talk, but she did summarize the changes and the issues succinctly. Some bullets from her speech:

* The NYSE is committed to the Floor. She sees the specialist adding value for certain segments of the market.

* The NYSE believes in technology as an enabler.

* The NYSE wants to believe they give the the investor trust and confidence in the markets, and technology plays an integral role in this.

* There are fewer people on the floor, there is more technology, the markets are more efficient, and the cost of trading is going down.

* Derivatives are growing faster that cash trading. Euronext’s capabilities in trading derivatives is a key part of the merger between NYSE and Euronext.

* Investment Banks globalized in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Exchanges are just getting around to it. One quote, “Countries all have a flag, an army, and an exchange.”.

* Asia is the next place for the NYSE Euronext to look to grow globally.

* She talked about wanted to be more involved in India, Japan, Korea, and China.

* All but one of the eligible tech IPO’s listed on the NYSE this year (this fact got a round of applause).

* ArcaEx is attracting more listings, and new tech listing is about to be announced for ArcaEx.

* While the NYSE Euronext has a global footprint, its listings are concentrated in the US and France. There is more work to do re: globalization.

* She is not optimistic that the US litigation environment will be improved soon.

* She is optimistic that the SEC will shepherd real reform in Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 compliance.

After Catherine completed her remarks, and answered a few questions, Susan asked us to consider some topics: the changing global markets, the US presidential elections, the environment, the sub-prime crisis, and the changing demographics (on this one, specifically the fact that soon it will be routine for 4 generations to be alive at once – what does that mean for families, for firms, for healthcare, and for governments?). As the dinner conversation at home usually revolves around Hannah Montana and SpongeBob, this had the potential to be an interesting evening. It was.

I promised my dinner partners not to quote them or name names. To be fair, as there was three or four conversations happening at once at our table, it would be next to impossible to quote people anyway. The conversations varied among the deep topics that Susan looked to see us discuss, discussions about our work, and animated discussions of the jewelry our young Egyptian friend was wearing. As the evening moved on, cards were exchanged, phone numbers were shared, and I really think some new friendships were made. I am confident that tonight Susan accomplished one of her goals. Some meaningful conversations were started tonight, and I believe they will continue… Thanks Susan.

Building an Enterprise 2.0 System Employees Will Actually Use

I recently spoke at the Financial Markets World’s Web 2.0 in the Capital Markets Industry conference. The Global Human Capital Journal posted a summary of the presentation, and drew some thoughtful conclusions which the author then linked the points from the presentation to some of their previous posts. For reference, here are the slides I used in this presentation.

Nice week for Enterprise 2.0 & WSJ – Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs

The WSJ certainly has been busy this week talking about social networks and blogs. First there was an article on Twitter which I commented on yesterday. Then there was a great video by Jared Sandberg about Facebook. The topper was the fantastic story that broke yesterday and is all over the press today about the CEO of a certain food services company and his rather interesting practice of posting comments about his firm and his competitors in stock messages boards – anonymously.

Blogging is something that I feel senior managers should be doing regularly. It is a powerful tool to connect with their staff, their stakeholders, and their customers. When I started blogging I asked advise from some smart bloggers I know, and the advice was simple:

(1) Have a point of view, and be comfortable expressing it.  In other words, write about your passion passionately.  Thanks to Susan for her timely post on the subject.

(2) Remember that once you publish it is there forever. Be proud of what you write.

(3) Understand this – only if you are relevant will people actually care.  Don’t be afraid to take the first step though…

What was never spoken about but was tacitly understood in this was that I would post USING MY OWN NAME. Don’t put unsigned stuff out into the blogosphere!  Don’t try to mislead the faithful reader.

Was I naive to think there would not be people trying to use Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools for personal profits using unethical or at times illegal means? Of course not. People have been doing stupid things for all of recorded time. The benefit of these tools is that they are so public and collaborative in there nature that the risks someone like the poster rahodeb takes increases. Thanks rahodeb for reminding us to remember the simple rules around posting.