Why do we hate compliance requirements?

Wikipedia’s definition of compliance describes it as being (mechanical science) as inverse of stiffness (my favorite), than there are words like adherence, measure and regulation. The first reaction is oooopfh with a slight groan. It is a natural reaction. Information tecnology leaders today have to deal with HIPPA, PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), and many others depending on your industry and whether you are a public or privately held company.

So, after the oooopfh, what to do next. Well, let’s look a the first definition listed by first, inverse of stiffness. Compliant, pliable, flexible – hmmm, those almost sound like being agile. Hold there cowboy (oh by the way Go Giants), are you soft in the head thinking that having to achieve compliance makes you agile. When SOX came out, article after article of the impact on technology projects, never mind negative impact on profitability for the company as a whole. Just after the Y2K focus for 2 years, now just a mere 3 years after that IT organizations had to scrape plans for many other key growth/profit driven projects to take on the SOX compliance initiative.

“The first and most obvious benefit of PCI compliance is a simple matter of trust.”

It seemed a bit to easy for IT organizations to make that leap when the panicked senior management from the CEO to the CFO seemed to have simply nodded acknowledgements when IT said they need to focus on this and this will be a good amount of IT’s budget for two years or more. Okay, I am judging here – which is worse, as I was not in a public company at that time.

The point is not to treat a compliance activity as a negative. IT has to be agile due to customer demands, market changes, economic conditions (or have you forgotten), new emerging markets and so on. What is so different from a new compliance requirement? Let’s compare it to a new customer demand. Customer A calls up and tells your VP of Sales that they now want to receive hourly updates via instant messenger on changes to their order status. Why you ask, well your competitor is doing it and if you want our business you have to do it too.

After looking at our VP of Sales in disbelief and asking exactly how much does this customer contribute to revenue over that past three years and reply a number that makes you go Okidoki, you will either first start thinking of how you can accomplish it or what will be pushed back to get this done. After you start digging into it you should find yourself starting to consider other possibilities, ways to replace other parts of the CRM process with this communication and what else this IM’ing communication could be used for to expand the customer potential.

“One can think of SOX as perhaps the largest quality improvement initiative ever undertaken by corporate America.”

Let’s look at compliance in the same thought process. A new regulation is passed and your business needs to gain compliance or face fines, possible even have to shutdown. So, the compliance requires IT to develop a new system or modify an existing system to automate the process of achieving compliance.

Seems simpler than a customer demand or competitive game changing scenario. The opportunity here is to look at the compliance as chance to look at those processes that are causing the non-compliance for process improvement impacting your bottom line in a positive manner and/or developing a process and system that improve your company’s marketability.

Compliance is the inverse of stiffness. If your company and your technology is compliant (aka flexible aka agile) than handling a customer demand, a competitive pressure or a compliance challenge is the same thing.

Anywhere, everywhere – anytime, all the time data in motion

I look at the Mac vs. PC commercials, the iPhone vs. Blackberry, laptop vs. netbook and so on and so on and I smile and shake my head. These geeky debates are an equivalent to the music industry debating over CD vs. DVD, when iTunes is on the horizon. This point in computer history where this device I am typing on (previously dis-closed that I use a MacBook Pro predominately), has some importance due to that fact that it is from one company, runs one type of OS and is using a specific company’s app set is coming quickly to an end. The device that will supplant all desktops, laptops, netbooks or what every you use is currently that thing in your pocket, holster or purse that occasional rings, but does so so much more.

Not to get too much into the debate about this from a hardware standpoint, let’s jump right into what will enable this next evolution. It will not be Apple, Microsoft, Open Source or any other name you can think of today. It will be the next Google or Facebook. It will be the company or open source community that delivers full on the promise of ubiquitous computing.

Wikipedia describes Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) as a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities.

Also, check out what Marcia Riley says on the matter at - http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/cs6751_97_fall/projects/say-cheese/marcia/mfinal.html

and Arun Kumar Tripathi here describe it simply as –

Not just laptops
24-hour access to Computer and Internet Infrastructure
Mobility: “any place/any time”
Personal Human/Computer relationship
Comprehensive e-services
Access to quality support

Hmmm, the issue there is what is an ‘everyday object’ that is not just a laptop. I can conceive my toothbrush sending information to my dentist about how many times I brush, how well and also daily data about my teeth health. But, what everyday object will tell me about how well the Help Desk is delivering support services, the trend analysis on my storage utilization or which projects are on time and which are being challenged?

That device is your ’smartphone’, though we will have to rename it hopefully. Regardless, of what you call it that device you carry around will very quickly be the only device you need to access the various applications and data that you need to both manage your business as well as your life. Really the device is less import than the mobile profile you will create and manage that will move from device to device, please by a biometric method so I do not have to worry about passwords.

Let me make this short. If you are looking at your IT strategy and wondering what balance of desktops to laptops you should be purchasing you need to stop yourself and think about this.

1. How much of your apps will be in the cloud in 2 years? 3? 5?

2. How much of your staff will benefit from working remote next year? 3 years? 5?

3. Are there any data files that your staff creates (including draft mode) that you should not be capturing for shared use?

4. How much of your data files are easily shared today?

5. Finally, how much longer do you think your ’smartphone’ will be the ‘other’ device you use for email and applications?

Think long and hard about your answers to your questions and my recommendation would be to start planning now for when the device becomes less important as the network it runs on increasing more important. Those applications that your are paying 15 to 20% maintenance contracts, will they be ready to be run predominately on mobile devices?

Start asking those questions of those big paycheck ERP and associated key module vendors today.

This slow economy has delayed the speed of this change, but not stopped it. Once we get back on our collective feet, this speed of change will increase exponentially.

Our you and your business ready for the type of change like the Internet caused by the mobility push, but in ½ the time?

Core Competencies

Let me warn you ahead of time that this entry will be less than stellar as I am writing it directly into the post, but I missed last week and don’t want to go another week.  Kind of like playing in a foursome and walking up to the first tee box and telling everyone you don’t think you will play well today.  Well, let’s hope I can send this one about 275 yards just down the right of the fairway with no warm up at the range.

In IT and in business you hear the discussion regarding core competencies.  If you are a process manufacturer a core competencies have to be forecasting, planning, inventory control along with the ability implement highly effective manufacturing technologies.  Distributors, service oriented business’s and so on all need to define and than measure their level of competency in the core skills to impact their growth and profitability.

In IT the ’standard’ core competencies have been IT operations, help desk, software development and project management.  I put standard in quotes because what the hell is standard in IT any longer.  With open source, social media and the need for faster and faster speed to market, standards are in the wind.

In place of standards, an IT organization going forward needs passionate people who can adapt to new roles not on a 5 to 10 year cycle, but in a 3 year cycle.  The skills that are most important today, will be decreasingly less important next year and not a core competency in 3 years.  If you do not like this thought, considering becoming a baker, because IT is no longer about that group that calls itself IT.  IT is about everyone else in the company who uses a Blackberry, iPhone, Gmail, WebEx, Twitter, Skype and so on.

Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream hires “Ice Cream Flavor Comer-Upper-Wither’s”, not R&D engineers and than uses social media and other tools to get new flavor ideas from everywhere and everyone.  In the world of IT today, information is currency and information must be in motion.  To manage this currency that must continuously flow, we must get the new/best ideas from everywhere and everyone.

With the ideas coming from everywhere, the core competencies will be driven by these ideas from your business.  Sure the web and mobility will be big, but what about business process improvement, business intelligence, telecommunications, business continuity, security and so on.  Listen to your business and they will tell you.

Can’t hear them, well you must tap in to where they are talking.  Be it Twitter, Facebook, or just walk by their desks and see what type of phone they are using.  Survey them asking what are their most popular websites (or grab them off your firewall logs).  Develop a program to constantly update how you can listen to your business people.

For if you do not listen close or hard enough, you may find that your core competencies of IT are what WAS needed, not what IS needed.

Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, not fun

Here I am with a need to select a web platform, a possible new ERP, a long term strategic IT plan to develop and oh yeah, that bloody Microsoft EA expiring this December.  While part of the IT strategy will be what will be the future desktop, server, mail, and collaboration platforms which the EA could be a part of the cost efficiency that the strategy can deliver.  But, EA complexity has given birth to a consulting industry.  Managing the EA is not effective.

MS as listed here goes on and on about ‘More choices, more value’.  Really, I doubt it.  As for simplifying my license management get out of here.  For us mid-size companies we are pinched by not being big enough to get the value of 1,000 plus licensing, but too big to just ignore the EA.

Open Value

Open Value Subscription

Select Plus

Enterprise Agreement

Which one to choose, which one to choose?  Are you going to grow over the next few years?  Will you be committing to MS solutions primarily during the same time span?  Will you upgrade to 2010 and Windows 7?  What is the value of those two upgrades – know one knows for sure?

The questions go on and on and the variables are — well too damn many. 

 You have the stories about the ‘looming Windows 7 disaster’  from IBM and the similar looming story from Infoworld.  So what are my choices?  Stay with MS and spend weeks trying to ensure you make the right decision.  Than worse than that time spent, you have to explain it to your Finance group so they understand it. 

Or as this blog entry about moving away from MS by Nari Kannan is it time to plan that move away from the MS operating system.  Gartner talks about

‘Windows is Broken’ and I have been wondering for a few years about whether the reason for Windows is maintaining the majority  it enjoys simply because of a combination of complacency by both IT and business along

with a fear of failing with something new. 

Is it time to take a long, long look at moving to a Linux based OS with using Open Office?  There is that mail problem that is not quite fully solved by the available clients.  Ah, but that is for another blog entry.  What about just giving up on the homogeneous desktop and server platform and accept that you will need to take on the additional support staffing to offset the lower cost of OS and open source applications.  And than there is Google Chrome. 

 Again, more on this in a future entry.

The focus here is the ineffective licensing process that Microsoft has put in place. What other vendor do you work with that you continue to stay with that makes your IT group less effective.  The only good thing is it is every few years versus every year.  We won’t go into the non-effective activities every Tuesday getting the latest patches from MS.  Because to be fair, if Linux or Apple had MS’s install base, the bored hacking community would be focused on them instead. 

From my perspective, if I give MS another 6 figure check for my next EA agreement.  I am buying the right to decide 12 to 18 months from now whether I want to upgrade to Windows 7 and other products.  Somehow the MS EA seems anti-nimble.  The solution is simple, but time consuming.  Do the homework to do a full evaluation of leaving MS.  That is just as Gartner puts it, the only way to get MS to start acting in the best interest of their customers, not just their shareholders.

I have the little writers block thingy

You know the thing where you start thinking about your weekly entry and to capture your perspective on something and you either have nothing at all or in my case I am all over the place.  I have IT as a growth/profit versus cost center.  Too many companies struggle to get their head around that one unless they sell their IT directly.  Than there is ERP best in class versus fully integrated, but that has been done to death – though all the others have not seemed to have solve much.  What about mobility and the need to have everything accessible from any device?  I don’t have any specific perspective on the need for everything accessible accept – yeah.

Jump into the Windows 7 debate than.  Simple – too expensive, too much more hardware needed, new stuff but not revolutionary.  Microsoft stop evolving, I don’t have that much time to wait.  The global economic woes continuing and the impact on IT spending.  Sputtering economy has some thinking long term and most holding onto their cash still and no looking to let it go for anything.  Than we have the long range impact of China’s IT power versus the rest of the world.  Well, that took a hit due to the economy, but still something to worry about.

Okay, let’s get serious here – I have to write something.  Not that I get hundreds of views a week, but for my sake.  Green tech, there is always something to write about green tech.  Nope – just the same lower power consumption equipment, evolving software that connects to more devices so you know how many flushes a day per bathroom and the latest hybrid car.  Well, Ford is taking the approach of once again getting more miles per gallon from just gas with ‘boost’ power versus hybrid tech.  Think if they had taking that marketing/engineering leap 4 years ago they would still be begging for bailouts.  Nice to be innovative after you fail gloriously.  But, who am I to talk – I normally look much better after a spectacular failure.  Lowering that bar and everything.

Already, back to the subject at hand of a subject.  I am watching the ceiling fan, listening to Diana Krall singing ‘Cry a River over You’ and my L-mode (see Pragmatic Programmer – Refactor Your Wetware) is not accessible.  I could write another book review.  Nope, re-reading Refactor Your Wetware as Hunt recommends SQ3R.  I did buy two new books, but will save them for a later entry.

I could complain that Coke Zero or Pepsi Max is not offered in most vending or fountain machines.  What is with that Coke and Pepsi?  Feed my addiction.  My fav Pepsi commercial – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPZImMrAkV0

Alright, I give up.  This is what you get folks.  I will wait until Monday to post it in case I wake up in the middle of the night with a spurt of brilliance.  But, it has been 45 years and outside of when I was 9 and I woke up with the best idea of how to maximum pool time between the 4 pools we had between my friends (we could not swim unless a adult was around), I am still waiting for another one.

ERP Evaluations – features/functions vs. answering questions

I am working with my current employer to evaluate a new ERP solution.  The current solution is end of life and an extensive RFP was developed, issued and returned.  The RFP’s pages of tables listing specific features and functions covering from does CRM, have User Defined Reason Codes for Rejected Quotes to Sales Order Management Customer Specific Invoice Formats.  There is also the general requirements, expectations, and system requirements and so on.

If you have read one ERP RFP, none of these wonderful detailed responses would any exciting new reading.  But, they are not meant to, are they?  They are meant to take the apples, oranges, and lemons of ERP solutions and make them look and smell as similar as possible for ease of evaluation.  All this is part of the process that I not only have been apart of several times, but believe is necessary.  Evaluating what will not just become part of a business’s life, but impact speed to market, customer satisfaction and as several failures of ERP implementations document a year or more of a business’s bottom line.

However, yes there is a however, a but, a hold on there fella.  Why else write the darn blog entry?

However, when I in the past have spoken to the sponsors, champions and process owners who would request, beg or threaten me regarding the selection of an ERP vendor.  Rarely would they describe what they needed from the ERP as a list of features or functions.  The focus would be on questions they needed answers and the timeliness of getting those answers.  In other words, business intelligence.  Not just the sexy dashboards with colored charts and live updates.  But the simply yes or no answers to business questions.

Did the latest marketing campaign have any other impact that we did not predict?

Is the potential of a customer’s buying power greater than what they order from us?

Or requiring some more verbiage -

How do I know what influenced a customer to contact us?

These questions are often left off the RFP and more so only come up during the final phase (if at all formally) of demonstrations.  More than once I have been caught short when a question seemingly out of the blue to me gets tossed to the ERP presenter that is quickly recognized by sponsors, champions and process owners as critical to the ERP solution’s requirements.

And they are absolutely right it is critical, bless their little persnickety souls.

The questions that your current ERP solution answers are just as important as the one’s it does not answer.  Documenting this is not always the easiest thing.  Think of asking someone to describe the decisions they make upon waking up this morning until they walked in the door of the office.  Most will get a bit testy after the start brushing my teeth from the bottom or top decision and towel on the floor or the hamper.  We make tens of thousands of decisions all day long.  Trying to pick the hundreds of business decisions out to determine why or more importantly how we came to the decision is both one of the most difficult parts of designing systems as well as the most important.

Unless, your business is willing to completely adapt every process to the new system plain vanilla out of the box and stay that way for 3 years (time my experience says it takes for a business to completely adapt to new habits of the new ERP).  Than you need to make some effort to gather these questions.  These are less about making custom changes to the software and more about matching the data collected, stored and distributed.  After all, most ERP solutions have less than 40% of their licensed users who access the system to input and process data.  Most use the system for inquiry and reporting.  Therefore, the 60% or more require more from the data than processing features and functions.  Look back to the matrix of an RFP.  Are there just as many data related rows as processing related rows?

Ask the questions about the questions that your business needs answered to get the right ERP?

Just Rants

Rant 1. Twitter and Iranian election – if we did not have tweets about the election, would we have gotten better or worse news coverage.  One thing I know is that cable news ‘reporters’ would have had to work harder.   http://iran.twazzup.com/

Rant 2. I don’t mind being a PC (Microsoft’s new marketing campaign), as long as you won’t change my license agreement during the life of ‘my PC’ and explain why Windows 7 costs more than Vista? Developing software should focus on lowering the cost like hardware manufacturers have been able to?

Rant 3. There is no longer a separation between personal and work life for knowledge workers.  I myself have talked about disconnecting, but I am a  knowledge worker and I do not have enough control over my thoughts to disconnect my mind from resolving problems.  So if there is no separation of our thoughts, than the systems we use for personal and work life are equally difficult to separate.  As such, IT groups must recognize this fact and development methods to deal with the merging of personal and work in how people use their systems.  I have a Macbook and a Blackberry that I use equally for personal and work related email, surfing, on-line reading, listening to both iTunes music and technology podcasts.  I bought the Macbook and the Blackberry on my own dime.  Companies supplying work computers for work only are sending conflicting messages.  You have a company phone and are allowed to use it for personal calls, even though you the company may charge back those calls.  The same for company cars, credit cards and so on.  But not company computers.  IT and business consider how long this policy can stand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker

Rant 4. I go to the Fast Company website and their top technology story is on Playstation 3.  Really, just really.  Arrrgh.  Http://www.fastcompany.com/topics/technology

Rant 5. Gartner, then Forrester states that IT spending will be down, but coming up by the end of 2009.  Realize this that it will be a long time before we ever see IT spending like the 90’s.  IT is not special.  IT wanted to be integrated into the business with full business alignment.  Well, thanks to the recession you either got IT pushed back to the mail room and asked just to keep the lights on stuff going or IT was pulled into the business and told to deliver bottom line impacting solutions and integrate itself into strategic and tactical operations at all levels.  No more dabbling with new business services or letting the Dell’s, Amazon’s and Wal-Mart’s of the world be the only examples.  If your business truly believes in IT you have to have an ROI for most of everything, outside of some (yes, just some) compliance activities.  So, step up or sit down and stop whining about business not understanding IT.

They don’t want to understand the history of SOA or the psychology of crowd sourcing.  They want results.

Rant 6.  Hospitals found that the top ROI for going paperless was the reduction of bacteria caused by the paper files being shuttled from floor to floor.  Therefore, reducing the costs of sanitizing maintenance and issues around staph infections.  Most ROI for paperless is not the cost of the paper (though the space to file it often is), the printing or the speed improvement of instant sharing.  The ROI’s tend to be the impact the paper process has on other business processes.  Realize that by pushing paperless you will uncover those hidden processes that are causing profit loss.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126173721.htm
End of rants.

Un-learn to Re-learn

I just did not feel like writing for my little blog this week, as my thoughts are focused both on my company, Geiger (www.geiger.com promo) and the interesting and fun components of the Promotional Products industry that I am gleaming from the great people here.  So, external inputs had little input into my world this week.

To put it into a visual, think of a room filled with flip charts of drawings, text, snapshot pictures of people, applications, hardware, department and division names, roles and processes.  That is what my head is filled with and yes, several pages of flip charts, because big thoughts must be on big paper.

So, what do I write this week that would provide something worthwhile and also have my perspective – rule #1 of a good blog.  Well, without getting into too much trouble, it is that these first 45 days at a new company provide you a unique vision of people, processes and relationships between those two things.  Why could we not capture this vision more than once, when we start with a new organization?  There is a way I am learning, it is called un-learning and re-learning.

The book by Stephen M. Covey (son of Stephen R. Covey) called The Speed of Trust discusses the importance of un-learning.  The first time you learn something, like I am doing now, you are exposed with very little bias to limit your learning.  However, once you learn enough to get started (regardless of what it is), the rest of the training is slanted based on your initial biases which are difficult to avoid due to the manner in which our brain captures and interprets information.

Another book Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt discusses in detail using the Dreyfus model how the brain learns.  Mr. Hunt offers a way to train your mind; he calls it refactoring your wetware, to recreate these first 45 days of unique vision.  I will let the few readers of this blog to explore those writers and their works for their own impressions.

But let me impress upon you this perspective of un-learning and re-learning on an annual basis.  For us in the technology realm, it is critical for us to un-learn and re-learn so that we can provide the proper judgments of emerging technologies and their impact on our businesses.  I know I have in the past become enamored with the technologies that took the team of people I worked with, months, if not years to design and implement.  When new technologies emerged that could replace it, the review process compared the old technology versus the new technology instead of comparing what the business people and processes do versus what the new technology does.

Comparing it anew as if the old technology did not exist was not part of the process.  But, it should have been.  Because we continuous change the people and the processes adapting (evolving) the old technology to these change whole new ways of doing things are often not part of the process.  Old technology evolves, it does not revolutionize as a new technology could possibly do.

The example of companies changing their marketing firms every 8 to 10 years comes to mind.  Often the issue is not that the old marketing firm is performing poorly, just the customer company knows that a new perspective could bring better marketing results.  The customer company un-learns by hiring a new firm so they can re-learn.

So a business can hire a new firm every few years to un-learn and re-learn, which results in us getting the benefits from this process spread out over far to many years and also ending close relationships that have served us well.  Or, develop the process of internal un-learning and re-learning, along with a utilizing a new firm strategically to perform certain functions tactically that create a new perspectives and thus new options.

I strongly recommend The Speed of Trust (The One Thing That Changes Everything) and Pragmatic Thinking & Learning (Refactor Your Wetware) to help you understand more in depth these processes.  For me, I am re-learning those parts of technology that I have experienced before by asking those around me to teach me anew, from their perspective.

Business App vendors need to wake up in regards to marketing

SAP, Oracle, Infor, Ariba, ACCPAC, IBS, Microsoft, NetSuite and many others – listen up folks.  You all need to find a way to get to not those people who use your product to do their jobs excited about your products.  The drug companies got it.  They just do not market to doctors (for you that is the C-level types), but also directly to the patients.  Turn on the TV after 9pm and see how many drug commercials are targeting their prospective patients (end-users to you all).

As I was considering what topic to write about this week, I traversed through my feeds from Twitter, to LinkedIn to a variety of other blogs (most more interesting than mine) seeking some inspiration.   Not finding anything, I went through my favorite news sites and something started to form an idea in the back of my mind.  It has been there for several weeks now but it formed a more solid thought as I looked through Business Week, New York Times Technology, and CIO.com.  Where the heck is the news about business applications?

I admit I am not the king of RSS feed aggregation, but the only story I came across was on CIO.com about Infor buying SoftBrands (owners of Fourth Shift and some other products).  Wahoo — NO more like blah blah, accept if I am a Fourth Shift customer than I would feel like acting like Yosemite Sam (for those under 35 click here – http://tinyurl.com/zzae3) .

No stories for weeks on end about what wonderful things business software like ERP, CRM, EDI or even CAD can now do to help a business grow, have greater profitability or let their associates become super efficient and effective.  Not a one.  Missing the boat folks, big time!

All the top stories are about consumer or desktop apps – iPhone, Office 2007, Bing, Facebook and Twitter.  So, not one to just tell people what they are doing wrong I have some suggestions and an offer of direct help.

There is a company called Kinaxis that has a great marketing idea, just has not gotten it promoted well enough (need to hit mainstream TV or Hulu.com Kinaxis people).  Check out http://www.kinaxis.com/supplychaincomedy to seek Kinaxis’s skits regarding supply chain organization and software utilization.  There are only a few, but they hit the mark.

Come on Microsoft go ahead and steal Apple’s commercial concept and do the same thing but you are in the Apple role against SAP or Oracle who would be ah, well you in the Apple commercials.  In the ERP space, you are the cooler company.  Yes, hard to believe but trust me out of SAP, Oracle, Infor and the others – you are cool, well cooler.  Create a skit of a accounts payable clerk getting frustrated by the problems processing a payment from multiple vendor invoices with the SAP guy spouting off about their ‘best practices’ in the background.

Market your products to those who go home each night begging for a better way to get their work done then using the dumb, old, not set up for our business and so on software they use today.

Yes, ERP is not sexy.  Nether is CRM or EDI.  But, it is necessary, so make fun of yourselves and your competition and talk about how effective your products.  Call me if you need any ideas, where I work now I am surrounded by smart, creative people who appear to know how to make fun of themselves – geiger gets it (just a little self promotion for my new diggs).

What’s your problem?

As the song What’s your problem by the Zutons demonstrates this simple question invokes strong defense responses and often is used as an aggressive attack.  I won’t go into how culturally one of the most important questions people should ask each other became a verbal assault.

I have been both good and lucky enough to be joining a great organization as their CIO within the next few days.  As I prepped for this new challenge I gave some deep thought to my approach to problem solving.   I have read books, been through training seminars – Six Sigma Plan Do Check Act, Lean and ITIL problem solving approaches.  Each has helped form my problem solving ability.  However, for me it comes down simply to not what is the right solution, but what are the right questions.

As humans we develop bias’s very quickly which become experiences and therefore translate into our assumptions.  It is one of the main reasons we are at the top of the food chain.  In today’s economic world, you will not live long basing your solutions on your assumptions of the past.  To get to the right questions you need to constantly challenge your own biases and assumptions. This is easier said than done.

I prepare by taking an approach towards continuous learning and exposure to different situations, experiences, approaches.  Along with when I discuss how someone resolved a similar problem that I have, I seek to understand how they came upon the solution.  Was it trial and error, shotgun, machine gun or using something like the wisdom of crowds (see book recommendation below).  As I said, for me I focus on the questions and using the old axiom ‘ask the right questions and the solution will present itself’.

Turning the problem over or on its side is a great way to have fun with even a difficult problem.  In the book Jump The Curve a hotel manager asked his employees for solutions to customer complaints about waiting for elevators.  The hotel had installed the latest fastest elevators available, yet the complaints continued.  An employee turned the question around and asked how to make people want to wait longer for an elevator.  As it happens, this problem came up in my own life when I was discussing with my wife a problem she had with a Habitat for Humanity charity event and the long line guests had to wait to pay for their silent auction items. Her thought was to add another credit card machine to speed the efficiency of the process.

I asked her when has she waited in a line and did not realize the time it was taking.  She did not notice the wait time when she was otherwise engaged in some activity that took her attention away from watching the line move slowly.  For the hotel, the solution was to install mirrors on the elevator outer doors.  It allowed people to inconspicuously devote time to their own vanity.  Complaints went down immediately.  For the charity payment line, I suggested that board members approach those in line to discuss the items they won, add a story about who donated it and engage them in conversation about Habitat.  Asking the right question reduced complaints and can impact the bottom line by avoiding unnecessary expenses.

When NASA recently announced that the retirement of the shuttle fleet and that they were going to return to the use of a rocket launch platform to go to space, I heard many who commented that NASA was taking several steps backwards.  Yes, there were cost implications that drove the decision, but also there is the fact that rocket technology has now advanced both in lower cost, reliability and safety that it is the right solution.  The question was not what the next shuttle should be.   The question NASA asked is what the best way to get to space is.

The statement ‘that when you are a hammer everything looks like a nail’ is appropriate here.  I will be faced with a large number of problems (challenges, opportunities, issues, call them what you will) without a doubt over the next several months and my foreseeable future over the next several years.  I commit to not being a hammer, unless my problem is a nail.

Recommendations from me on problem solving:

• Jack’s Notebook: A business novel about creative problem solving – by Gregg Fraley
• Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking by D.Q. McInerny
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
• Jump The Curve by Jack Uldrich
• Any book or reading material that is new or counter to your current thinking
• Learn a new language
• Toys – puzzles, LEGOs, Mega Magz, and blocks