If you think you're facing a skills shortage now...

THURSDAY, 27 DECEMBER 2012

If you think  the recruitment industry is facing challenging times sourcing best-fit talent in in 2012, according to McKinsey the global skills shortage is about to take a turn for the worse.

New research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) suggests that by 2020, the world could have 40 million too few college-educated workers and that developing economies may face a shortfall of 45 million workers with secondary-school educations and vocational training. In advanced economies, up to 95 million workers could lack the skills needed for employment.

Read the full report here:

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Talent_tensions_ahead_A_CEO_briefing_3033

Customer experience management technologies shape business strategies

Customer experience management technologies shape business strategies:

This is one of those articles that you read and it gets you thinking...  What other industries could benefit from paying more attention to customer experience options and providing more customer tailoring of their products.  Already companies like BMW Mini enable people to pick thousands of style choices.  Could you EVEN BE a major industry supplier 10 years from now and not provide rich customer self-service configuration and an option pallet as long as the phone book?

I.

The Importance of Adaptability For Competitive Advantage

The ability of businesses to adapt to change faster than their competitive peers is the fundamental step-change that caused me to write my first book 'Agilization' - that describes the process of change from a 20th century organizational design to a more agile model.

In this report published in 2011, Boston Consulting Group partners Martin Reeves and Mike Deimler provide some excellent insights in the need to adapt organization designs to something new.

I.

HBR Adaptability Report

10 Items For Your 2013 Stategic Plan | Business 2 Community

10 Items For Your 2013 Stategic Plan | Business 2 Community:

This is a good list of 'thoughts' on Social Media and how to turn it into value for businesses. I like the idea of a Social Audit. I also think companies need to think more about how they can use Social Media as a tool for sharing business insights and underpinning their brand ideology across their business.

I.

At last! Someone else championing the cause for 'hard factors' of change

For some time now I've been concerned that the change management industry has adopted a myopic focus on the softer sides of organizational change - people, culture, learning - and has all but dismissed the harder factors - like systems, processes, structures and the contribution of strategic relationships and key assets - that are easier to measure and play a fundamental building block role in my view to the outcome of a change programme.

This article by the Harvard Business Review re-sets this balance (not suggesting that the softer issues are not important you understand, just that they're not the ONLY things managers should think about!

I.

The hard side of change management

Six Areas of Focus for Executing Strategy and Ensuring Strong Performance - Forbes

This is an interesting article from Forbes that places a focus on six key areas of strategy.  I do think the last item is one that many managers and leaders probably don't think enough about!

I.

Six Areas of Focus for Executing Strategy and Ensuring Strong Performance - Forbes:

'via Blog this'

Bruce Hodes, Seven rules of strategic guessing

I really enjoyed this article by Bruce Hodes.  His experience of a lack of strategic planning within business managers and leaders is one that resonates with most of us engaged in organisational design and improvement.

His article includes a great many good lessons to think about on how to start planning for 2013.  It's well worth a read if you have 5-minutes!

Talking to customers and getting an honest perspective on the 'true reality' of your business value is I think one of the most important starting points.  It's not true that customers 'always know best' but they certainly provide a smarter sounding board than internalized opinions that come from people that never speak with the people that buy your products and services.

Thoughts?

I.

Seven rules of strategic guessing

More opportunities to write about agility!

I seem to spend much of my business life these days sharing ideas, tools and methods with businesses on the subject of business agility  - having the means to adapt to change and be first-to-market AT LEAST better than competitors. I was therefore delighted to be invited by USTech Solutions Inc. to setup two new blogs on the subjects of TalentAgility (talentagility.blogspot.com) and ITAgility (ITagility.blogspot.com) to act as a knowledge pool for subject-matter.

The new sites are up and running and I'll be posting specific news feeds and content to them (as will others) over the coming weeks.

I.

Poor Knowledge Worker Productivity Should Come As No Surprise To Bosses

How productive are knowledge workers?

It's a topic that's been on and off the agenda of management teams since the late 1950's when people started to realize that a large percentage of employees would one day be part of this group.

Walk into most offices these days and you'll see people working on spreadsheets, Word docs and Powerpoint presentations - home-made applications that 'fill in gaps' to support information analysis and data management needs where the larger process centric business apps don't offer any support.  Over the past few years this 'long-tail' of applications demand has grown ever longer.  The number of requirements for new apps driven by mobile computing, social networking and the expectations of users for self-service computing has multiplied beyond recognition.

When you have knowledge workers mashing and sharing data on these desktop home-made systems, how can you measure their productivity?  Are you PRODUCTIVE if you produce a spreadsheet?  I would argue no.  Productivity suggests that you contribute towards or produce an outcome, not just do stuff.

Could you imagine manufacturing plants ever being so lax in the way they use their labour force?

If we're going to start making the office environment as productive as the factory floor, managers are going to  have to start measuring knowledge worker productivity - and I believe the only way they're going to achieve this is by drawing a line between workforce effort and those defined actions that lead to desired outcomes.

Back in writing mode

Well we're into autumn now and as the leaves start to turn from green to brown I'm back into writing mode.  My next book is coming along nicely.  After spending 18-months planning it and writing methods statements I'm now into the throws of writing 'Organization By Design' - my new book on OBD methods.

As usual when starting a new book I feel I'm at the base of a large mountain with no idea how long it will take to get to the top - or what route I will eventually have to take in order to reach the summit!

Well the good news is that for this book at least I've already done most of the hard work in researching the content before I start, so it hopefully will go swimmingly  (guess I'll have to wait and see).

More details of the topic areas of OBD to follow but it will come as no surprise that most of the topics will be familiar to organizational design experts - with one or to surprises thrown in.

Stay tuned!

I.

Information Worker Productivity Definition

Over the past 3-weeks I've been writing a White Paper on Information Worker Productivity for the Australian public sector.  It's been quite fascinating to take another look at this topic considering that the first time I examined the subject was 2002 - and a lot of things have changed since then.

What has surprised me is the lack of clarity over how Information Worker Productivity should be measured.
Here I've pulled out an excerpt that attempts to re-define how productivity of Information Workers should be measured.
A productive Information Worker in the 21^st century is someone who contributes more to stated organisational outcomes in less time.

This perspective on IWP is a departure from assessments of productivity focused on numbers of documents produced or the numbers of transactions processed. To MEASURE productivity in these terms requires an understanding of what the outcomes are and an appreciation of the linkage between Information Worker ‘effort’ and the ‘contribution’ it produces to serve the outcome.

The White Paper will be available online in the next few days.  Welcome your thoughts and perspectives.

I.

I’ve just completed a paper on Services Oriented Architecture to provide an overview for business and IT leaders of the ‘must-do-wells’ and critical success factors of implementation.

The key topics I cover are:

DEFINITION

ARCHITECTURAL LAYERS

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

BUILDING BLOCKS

FOCUSING ON ‘IT DESIGN’ WITHOUT ‘ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN’

STATES OF SOA IMPLEMENTATION

THE JOURNEY

OBSERVATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While I’ve been researching SOA, there are definitely two schools of thought emerging:

1. The IT purist’s view that sees SOA in its technology-centric view

2. The business architect’s view that sees services-oriented computing as a technology enabler to business transformation towards a more agile structure.

Here’s a taster…

In the face of near-constant changes to market conditions, the design of the enterprise is itself changing. Today, business agility - the ability to adapt to market conditions - is recognized as an important competitive differentiator. But hampering business agility, and therefore growth, is the ability of information systems to adapt in line with organizational information demands.

Enterprise information management systems represent huge investments by companies to optimize their business processes and leverage their corporate information assets. They take a long time to get right, and they’re not so easy to change.

For business managers, exploiting the knowledge they’re already acquired is hampered by the complexity of IT systems architectures made up of many discrete and isolated data repositories originally designed to serve operating silos and peculiar business processes.

And responding to knowledge worker requests for new applications in response to the business situations facing the enterprise is inhibited not just by corporate capacity but by the high cost of change and the need to repeatedly invest in new software or fund high-risk development projects.

The consequence on businesses is that talented managers lack the insights and optimized processes they need to adapt and respond to new market situations, opportunities and competitive threats.

An approach to creating so-called AGILE IT is to adopt a ‘services-oriented’ information management architecture.

The underlying ethos of this approach is to enable ‘information consumers’ to serve themselves with the new views of information and new applications they demand through composite applications that are able to harvest pre-structured data feeds from disparate back-office systems and public sources. The holy grail is to completely remove the frictional cost of transforming IT systems and one of the major ingredients to make this possible is to remove the complexity (and therefore IT skills) required of today’s IT business analysts and software applications developers.

In its purest sense, Services Oriented Architecture describes the use of services to support business requirements. As such SOA utilizes a combination of existing and new enabling technologies.  A “service” may encapsulate an entire business process, or embody one or more aspects of an existing business process.  XML-based Web Services are a popular way to expose these services within and across enterprises, but are by no means the only way to realize an SOA vision. 

Thought leaders of SOA see it not as yet another technology hype-curve, but as a fundamental shift in the persona of enterprise information management architecture away from a state where all data is ‘owned’ by the enterprise and IT professionals are responsible for the security, provisioning and management of all data consumed by the enterprise, to a state where information workers, as consumers of ‘information services’, are provided with the tools and competencies to serve themselves with the information that matters most to them through systems shaped by themselves for their own purposes operating within a regimented corporate computing environment protecting the best interests of the enterprise.

Seen through this broader definition, SOA is not a move from one enterprise computing architecture to another, but the definitive technology enabler to transition organizational design from an inflexible top-down command and control system to something more agile and innovative. For this reason, SOA is progressively reaching into the boardroom as a key competitive differentiator; pulling through in its wake new innovations in IT that include cloud computing, business social networking, enterprise mashups, business intelligence and master data management.

To download a full version of the paper follow the link.

Free Customer Mapping Software. Map Customers from Outlook to GIS Maps

Free customer mapping software has been on my list of wants for some time so I was delighted to find the Squork Mapping site gives you a free 14-day trial.  It's plenty of time to pin-up all of your customers and work out how you could get more from your sales and marketing activities.  I've been using Squork Mapping this week to publish the locations of all of my customers for free from my Outlook Address book.

Preparing my data.
1. This is pretty easy to do.  I first downloaded the CSV template from the site that opens up in Excel.  There are a number of different templates depending on which regions you are looking to map to.  As mine was UK it wasn't any trouble because the UK template comes with postcode referencing.
2. Then I exported my data from Outlook into a CSV format too.
3. The next (and trickiest task)  was to populate the CSV templace with my Outlook data.  I did this by opening both spreadsheets - the Squork Mapping CSV template and my Outlook export as a CSV - in Excel while dual-screening so that I could simply cut and paste a column at a time.
4. Next, I changed the names of the column headings in the spreadsheet so that Squork Mapping would pick up this detail and use it as field labels (cool!).

Now to the upload!
5. I logged into my Squork Mapping account and clicked on the Manage Data area, chose the Upload data screen.
6. I then walked through the Upload Data wizard that appears, selected my file and gave it a name (etc.)  All really easy!

...And that was it!


I've since gone back to the data and segmented it by the opportunity potential of accounts so that I can be more focused on the larger opportunities.  It's quite remarkable to see your own customers on a map.  It sets you thinking about all the things you SHOULD be doing to improve your marketing effectiveness!

I.

Map of UK WiFi Access Points

I've been playing around with Squork Mapping this week.  Squork is a digital mapping solution intended to enable business professionals to plot, upload and manage their own data securely on high quality digital maps.  Unlike Googlemaps and similar solutions, Squork Mapping is more like a fully functioning GIS system that's provided online and made really easy to use.  The app provides account holders with controls to design and personalise their map area, upload and manage data (without you having to be a computer whizz) and then view and share the maps you've produced.

This example (link to it from the title of this article) shows all of the published WiFi spots across the UK by carrier.  It's likely to be pretty useful if you ever need to get onto the Web in a hurry with your iPAD ;-)

You're able to add your own logo, title - even choose your own pin, tag or dot styles for the maps you publish.

There are a number of example maps that Squork have already published in their gallery to example the uses of the mapping site - and the quality of the results.  I'd have to say, so far, the accuracy of the maps looks excellent!

I'm going to spend a bit more time with Squork Mapping this month.  I'll hope to show you some of my results!