A month ends, a chapter ends, a chapter starts

I have been quiet in the blog for a bit too long for my taste, and as April ends here in NYC (and it is a beautiful day here, BTW) I am sitting at my desk reflecting on a lot of things. That led me back to my blog editor, MarsEdit and this post.

A chapter is ending today for me and my team. BSG Alliance has become nGenera in the past week, and around the change in name is a refocusing of my team’s work and some changes to our staffing. Friends and partners of mine are going in different directions. Some are staying with nGenera and are dedicated to taking the nGenera message to financial services. Others are moving on, and I hold out the hope and belief that we will continue to work together, but now as external collaborators instead of as internal partners. These changes have brought on this melancholy, and I’m sure the recent rains in NY (while much needed) did not help.

However, as I look forward to May I am very excited and energized about nGenera. The BSG Alliance I joined almost a year ago has transformed itself in more than just name. As nGenera we are truly something unique and new. We are no longer primarily a services company but rather a product company which collaborates with our customers to co-create their platform for business innovation. We have deep thoughtful research, and an incredible team led by Don Tapscott. We have strong capabilities in our nGen Talent, nGen Customer, and nGen Leadership product sets. We offer expertise on demand for our customers through our network of internal and external collaborators and partners. We have a collaboration platform that we leverage for foster innovation with our customers. We have specific industry focus for financial services, energy, and utilities. Finally, we have partners who bring their software to our customers through SaaS delivery via our innovation platform.

While as a blogger, I have no true idea who has interest in what I put out there, I have decided to rename and rededicate this blog today. I have changed the name from “Tom Steinthal’s Financial Services IT Blog” to “Innovation and Collaboration in Financial Services”. Further, I will use this forum to discuss issues related to nGen’s in Financial Services. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

SOA on Wall Street

Wall Street and Technology magazine posted this article regarding the Future of SOA on Wall Street. Penny and I talked in January, and she did a nice job of quoting me in this article. The only problem is calling BSG Alliance as simply an IT Consultancy. BSG Alliance is a platform firm that help firms become next generation enterprises on demand…

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.

New Paradigm for Financial Services

Today I’m very proud to be a member of the BSG Alliance as we have acquired New Paradigm. I have talked about Wikinomics and blogged about it since I finished the book in June. I’m still in a bit a shock that I’m part of the same team as Don and his world class team.

My clients have asked me about what differentiates a firm like BSG Alliance from other firms that might be talking with them. Quite simply, the leadership of BSG Alliance has the foresight to partner with a firm like New Paradigm and with people like Don Tapscott. We are not a consulting firm per se, but we are a platform company. We offer a path to outcomes that are specific for each client that leverage our applications, our research, our people, and our eduction capabilities. So, what does this mean for how my team and I approach our customers, Financial Services firms? We had a strong story, and now have an unparalleled story.

Our platform combines:
* Pre-eminent thought leadership from the likes of Don, Tammy Erickson, Frank Capek, Andy Shimberg, Vaughn Merlyn, Brian Magierski, Susan Scrupski, Esteban Herrera, and others…
* Business simulation and visualization technologies of BSG’s newly acquired Industrial Science
* Custom application development, project management, and business analysis from our team of FS professionals
* A SaaS platform on which you can collaborate, use to connect with our applications and third party partner applications, and use to build your own applications
* A custom research and training team that have been at it for 20 years
* Workshops focused for Financial Services professionals

It it hard with a blog (and I don’t have Seesmic yet…) to express how exciting a time this is for us at BSG Alliance and New Paradigm.

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 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.

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.

“Fact-Free Planning”

Michael Krigsman’s Rearranging the Deck Chairs: IT Project Failures has a interesting article on Fact-Free Planning. Michael references a recent article published by MIT Sloan Management Review on why Silence Fails for projects and what you can do about it.

Wiki and RSS for Requirements Management

Within my team, we are using a wiki and RSS for requirements management. Why? Several reasons:

1. Open transparent documentation visible by and editable by all stakeholders.
2. Documentation can be hyperlinked naturally and easily making it easier to navigate
3. Revision history comes for free
4. Interested parties get updates as they are made via RSS
5. All are encouraged to participate in the production and validation of the requirements
6. Search engines can be used to find data in wiki documentation suite

We are using these tools in our work at BSG Alliance and strongly recommend them to our clients.

Then today I came across this post, and the authors make nice argument for the use of a wiki for requirements management.