When Organizational Silos Hurt Innovation

What's wrong with these two pictures?

a) A product manager is working on the latest strategic initiative. She's researching competition, finding opportunities in the marketplace, considering price points, sizing up the revenue potential and evaluating vendors. She may even narrow down the list of vendors to an optimal one or two, and if she's really dangerous, will determine exactly what's needed from the internal tech team to integrate the functionality. She might even have a full project plan with implementation costs. She now takes it to her boss to get the necessary backing to implement the project.

b) A technologist thinks he's found the killer new feature. He discusses it with some members of his team and they like the idea, but it's one of many good ones being discussed. The technologist isn't deterred and decides to do some prototyping, first largely in his "spare time" but as he becomes more engulfed in the implementation he devotes more time to it and loses interest in his assigned tasks. He takes his prototype as far as he can technically, then goes to his boss for the necessary backing to implement the project.

Sadly, these two individuals exist in many companies that implement customer facing technology solutions. Now there's plenty of managerial issues here - product managers evaluating vendors without gathering external input, technologists overextending their R&D efforts, etc.

But the real issue here - the root cause - is the lack of an organizational environment (including structure, process, and culture) to promote collaboration and innovation.

Lets consider a third scenario:

c) Senior leadership has identified a top level strategy and a product manager proposes to research a possible initiative. She's paired with a technologist and while she's finding opportunities in the marketplace, considering price points, and sizing up the revenue potential, the technologist is reviewing a select list of vendors. The technologist also identifies some areas where there's opportunity to innovate, our product manager agrees that solutions might provide a key value to customers, and the technologists looks to prototype. Our product manager and technologist have a good working relationship with the project management office and request assistance in developing a high level plan and cost model. These three individuals finalize a present together and present options to senior leadership.

This approach has many of the right ingredients including:
  • A clearly defined strategy that sets direction
  • Leadership asks for a multi-disciplinary team to consider options
  • A culture that encourages collaboration
  • Room for further innovation, collaboration, and iterative improvements once options are reviewed
If you think the third scenario is optimal, then ask yourself the question, why is it hard?
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Bloomberg Buys BusinessWeek - and its Innovative Digital Team

There have been many articles this week on Bloomberg's acquisition of BusinessWeek. Linked below are a couple of my favorite quotes; a small testament to an innovative digital team that has launched a unique social media product Business Exchange and has completed several forward thinking upgrades to BusinessWeek.com


Will BusinessWeek bring social media to Bloomberg?

That's because BusinessWeek, for all of its struggles, arguably embraced social media more than just about any other large magazine.... In my opinion, if Bloomberg is smart it will use the BusinessWeek acquisition as opportunity to learn more about social media.

With BusinessWeek, Bloomberg takes aim at Dow Jones

With some creativity, Bloomberg could do a lot better here with its skeleton web crew. BusinessWeek’s experience dealing with monetizing web presence could be invaluable here. I also like the networking capabilities BW has been developing in its Business Exchange.

BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange Under Scrutiny – Without the Hype

...there is a lot of potential for this service. The idea of bringing together BusinessWeek’s users, readers, writers and editors to “draw on their collective wisdom” is visionary ... I see Business Week’s BX as a true knowledge share base, where business owners from all industries can communicate, share links, opinions and advice. I see this site as a platform for journalists and PRs to communicate in a meaningful climate, generating personal relationships based on reciprocity and respect. If we talk about new media, BX has the potential to “break the traditional mold,” but not by becoming yet another news aggregator. I see the “exchange” here in its “act of giving something in return for something received” definition.
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Collaboration between Business and IT Leads to Innovation

I wanted to follow up my post on the Top 5 Reasons Why Agile Development Spurs Innovation with a little more detail.

We used to think of product development as one fundamental question; Build vs. Buy. Once a product was conceptualized, a search was conducted to find the most suitable software solutions and a feature point analysis was completed. An engineering team was only brought in to evaluate Buy scenarios and brought in when needed to consider enhancement or integration issues in Build scenarios.

An obvious simplification to the process. But even in a Build scenario, most of the requirements were written and sometimes even estimated before the engineering team had a chance to evaluate.

Now let's look at some facts (or at least trends)
  • The software world is faster today; Teams must deliver functionality faster in order to stay competitive.
  • Requirements are more complex covering concerns like security, business continuity, internationalization and many others. And applications typically have more complex integration needs.
  • Build vs. Buy are the extremes - the more likely scenario is that a solution requires assembling a number of parts; build, partner, third party api's, open source, etc.
  • Innovative solutions can come from different parts of the organization and leverage examples from other industries.
  • Given the scope/on-time/on-budget dependencies, many applications (and I would argue all customer facing applications) should optimize time and budget over scope. Scope can better be addressed by a series of follow on enhancements based on customer analytics and feedback.
How should an organization handle this brave new world? The solution lies in collaboration especially between senior technologists, product management, and customers (internal or external). It lies in developing basic business cases (business benefit, timing requirements, vision on core needs) before detailing product requirements. It means technologists knowing a field of solutions and having the credibility to make recommendations. It means these teams need to work together to define both requirements and solutions. And when you put all of this together internal collaboration leads to innovation.
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Twitter outage - and Why Consistent Performance on Social Networks is Hard

Keeping social networks up and running is no easy task. Today's casualty, Twitter is down again. I suspect that their engineers are in the "war room" thinking about what the root cause is and resolving it quickly. Perhaps it's another denial of service (DoS) attack.

Why are performance issues hard on social networking sites? A few reasons:

  • Content sites are easy to cache. Social networks have updates happening more frequently from many users in many different ways.
  • Managing relationships in databases is still a "hard" problem. Actions from one person affect many users in unique ways. I tweet, my 500 followers get updates in real time.
  • Performance is hard to monitor. Usage patters from a small subset of users can undermine performance for many users
  • Security is a battle. The more successful networks are prone to more complex attacks, but even smaller networks have a never ending battle with spamers.
  • Performance considerations are different depending on the type of user. How to scale millions of Twitter users with few updates/followers is a very different problem than making it perform well for the 1% of users with significant tweet'ing and followers.
Comment here if you want more insights on this subject.
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Ten Reasons Software Developers Need the Cloud

Developers need cloud development environments? Why? Bottom line, developers need more than one development environment, and they need cost-effective, agile ways to manage their development environments. Consider the following cases:

  1. You branch your source code and need multiple environments to validate changes
  2. You are in the middle of testing a software upgrade, configuration change, or architecture improvement and need to validate code against both new and older versions
  3. You are doing some R&D and need a separate testing environment
  4. A big project requires you to add several developers and testers to the staff temporarily
  5. You are testing builds for special use cases; different data sets, different customers
  6. You need to test with larger data sets that are hard to manage on "local" development environments
  7. You are developing multiple applications against a common code base and desire separate environments to validate changes
  8. You want to run an internal (or external) coding exercise, training, or contest and need to scale up environments for a short period of time
  9. Your development environments have fallen out of sync and migrating to the cloud simplifies establishing a single development configuration
  10. It might actually be cost-effective (probably, likely) to use the cloud rather than investing in desktop environments, shared servers, or virtual servers for development purposes.
Especially now that AWS EC2 supports the most common development environments (Lamp, Java, .Net, Ruby) and databases (Oracle, MS SQL, MySql) and has support for private clouds, many development organizations might benefit from leveraging the cloud for their development environments.
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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.