Candid Interview With Will Weider On Consulting (From A Customer Point Of View)

This past week, I had the opportunity to speak with Will Weider, CIO of Ministry Health Care and Affinity Health System, about using consultants. His perspectives are interesting because they are from a customer’s vantage point – not from a consultant’s viewpoint. Will Weider is author of the one of the earliest CIO blogs on the Internet, the famed “Candid CIO” blog.

Steve: Will, thanks for talking with me. As a management consultant myself, I’ve approached you for a “candid” view on using consultants. I am interested in constantly improving the practice of consulting and management. Hopefully this interview will shed light for both consultants to improve their practices and peer organizations of yours to improve their selection and use of consultants. To that end, when do you look to consultants, and what do you look for in consultants?

Will: There has to be a specific reason for using a consultant, and my philosophy is to use consultants as little as possible. A couple of thoughts immediately come to mind. The first is that consultant costs can give me heartburn (e.g., when comparing loaded hourly rates of internal staff against the consultant). Now as context, it is infrequent that my organization does not have the skillset to either get a project done or solve a particular problem.  A second perspective is that I have had some disappointing consulting engagements where the results have fallen short of my expectations. Part of the blame may fall on the consulting firm which may oversell themselves in order to get a deal done. Some of the missed expectations may be in part that the buyer has elevated expectations when using a consultant.

Steve: Do you have any thoughts on aligning an organization and its expectations when using consultants?

Will: I’ve found that the worst time to use consultants is when my organization is saturated. A client organization needs capacity to bring the consultant on board, ramp them up, manage them, provide feedback, etc. As an example, if I have estimated a project at requiring 100 hours to do internally, then I may need to allocate 125 hours when accounting for budget and overhead of managing the consultant. As far as aligning expectations, I have mostly seen consultants provide incremental value as opposed to exponential value and miraculous benefits as marketed. Consultants can get oversold on their value proposition too easily. I also wanted to note that some consultant agreements have unacceptable terms, rivaling those of my software vendors.  These include such terms as up-front payment, termination clauses and advance notice requirements, etc. Where these terms go in the new environment we are in is still to be determined, but they have to be more client-favorable.

Steve: What kind of advice can you provide on using consultants?

Will: For me, the best time to use a consultant is when you need a 3rd party advisor. For example, suppose there is a big, multimillion dollar project going off course. A consultant with the right background can provide an independent project audit. Our needs are aligned when using the consultant in this manner. We need a specific skillset (perhaps not a scarce resource), we don’t have time (e.g., because we have 60-70 projects going on), we need a fresh look, and we need an independent view. This is the perfect type of situation for a consultant because the scope is well-defined, the scope is narrow and the timetable is short.

Steve: Great insights, thank you. Changing gears bit, I think readers may be interested in your views on the federal stimulus package and its impacts on consultants.

Will: The package has clear intent, but everyone is still waiting for the clinical IT requirements to be defined on both the medical group and hospital/ambulatory side. Less than 2% of hospitals have real Computer Physician Order Entry (CPOE), so once the requirements are defined, there may be a flood of work for implementation consultants with CPOE and specific Hospital Information Systems (HIS) expertise. I’ve estimated tens of millions of dollars of eligibility for our provider organizations (medical groups and hospitals). We are working with a number of vendors and suppliers to plan for various scenarios so we qualify for these funds and deliver on the President’s vision for a more efficient and effective health care system. It’s all a new process – I’m not sure that anyone has an “inside track” as to how to get these funds.

Steve: Terrific info. Let’s change gears again and cover social media. How have things changed since 2005 when we first met via the blogging world?

Will: These days I use both Twitter and blogging, although there has been some shift towards using Twitter. I will say that consultants that I use have connected with me via social media. Some of these consultants demonstrate their expertise to me for free before I use them. These consultants may be those that are helping me with technology, preparing for swine flu impacts on my organization, or other dynamic areas. Consultants that are confident in their abilities to provide value are not afraid to pursue either risk-free or non-traditional models for engaging me.

Steve: Will, this has been a great dialogue, and I appreciate your candor for the benefit of the business community. Thanks for your time.

Will: Steve, thanks for the opportunity to be interviewed.

Will Weider is CIO of Ministry Health Care and Affinity Health System, and his blog is at the Candid CIO at http://candidcio.com.

Steve Shu is a management consultant focusing on organizations that use technology, and his blog is at http://steveshu.typepad.com.

Managing Lifestyle: Time-Shifting Using Blogs

I’m a little late to contribute to Seth Godin’s call for National Tell-A-Friend-About-Blogs Week, but I thought I’d post something based on a discussion I had with a friend last week.

The basic problem my friend is having is this (a very common problem): How can one better manage or create a fast-track, dual-career family with kids?

No easy answers here I’m afraid. The problem is exacerbated if either one of the parents wants to stay home with the kids during a good portion of the day.

A neat thing about blogging, however, is that one can take advantage of time-shifting one’s day … blog whenever you want (e.g., when the kids are asleep, after your normal workday, when you can’t sleep during the night), and you can get some networking, marketing, and communicating done too. Sure, online networking isn’t the same as pressing the flesh during local community events, but it’s not always possible for those with families to head out to those 7:00pm drinking fests during the week.

Online networking (e.g., through blogs) has advanced quite a bit. May want to give it a shot. It takes time, but the having the ability to allocate your time more flexibly may be golden. If anything, perhaps there’s additional hope for managing our lives better.

Some Thoughts On Hugh Hewitt’s Book, “Blog”

I finally got around to completing Hugh Hewitt’s book,
“Blog”
. I can’t say that I recommend this book for people looking to understand
business blogging or blogging at a practitioner-level. That said, Hugh does a very nice job of both
highlighting the legitimization of the blog in the context of specific
political events and detailing specific blog and mainstream media events around
the “fall” of Senator Trent Lott, stumblings of presidential candidate John
Kerry, and flurry surrounding the Dan Rather/CBS/Bush National Guard forged
documents.

A couple of interesting things the book touches on:

  1. Hugh draws a very interesting analogy between the invention of movable type printing press and the reformation surrounding the Catholic church and distribution of the Bible. Note that movable typesetting brought down the cost of books more than 400 times, thus enabling knowledge to be dispersed through sub-communities very rapidly. Aside from Hugh’s book, I find it interesting to think about the name of Six Apart’s non-hosted blogging software, “Movable Type” and the how cost of content management software, traditionally thought of as enterprise software, has come down (arguably tens to hundreds of times, where some of the mid-range content management products are in the tens of thousands of dollars range versus blogging at hundreds of dollars [clearly not comparing apples to apples though]).
  2. Using the uber reach of Hugh Hewitt, Hugh writes something to the effect of how he plans to highlight the blogs of up-and-coming and young Republican bloggers to ensure that the next generation of Republicans to defeat the Democrats is in place. He highlights the talent gap on the side of the Democrats, especially given that most of the uber political blogs are all Republican. Interesting tactics to say the least given the Democrat lean of mainstream media, and the recent announcement of Fox News to supporting blogging.

To be frank, I don’t follow political blogs that closely,
and I haven’t followed the rise of talk radio. Perhaps as a consequence, I
don’t follow Hugh Hewitt that closely. I am not sure if Hugh is center right or
far right. He characterizes himself as center right. That said, some of the
accounts in his book strike me as a bit one-sided. Perhaps not nauseating
one-sideness like Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11, but you may need to look past some of Hugh’s zeal to get through
this book if you are not a Republican.

BlogKits – Advertising Matchmaking for Blogs

Found BlogKits via Anita Campbell at her Small Business Trends blog. According to the BlogKits site:

The BlogKits BlogMatchTM Network is an opportunity for anyone who owns a blog to be matched with businesses, marketers and/or advertisers looking to partner with niche-filled, content specific, quality blogs.

Have little clue what the deal structure with BlogKits is like. Perhaps I will explore.

Regarding advertising, I’ve personally stayed away from Google AdSense on my personal blog because I imagined it would be hard for me to control what would pop up in front of users (note BlogKits would provide an alternative option). When I first started blogging, my initial objections were that I might have competitive management consulting firms popping up on my site. That concern has since diffused because as an independent consultant, I find I rarely cross paths with the larger firms except when dealing with the $200 million+ revenue firms. I also look to establish longer-term trust relationships that would tend to steer me clear of competitive kinds of situations. Even then, I have held the belief that my flavor of consulting is unique – I appeal to types looking for a versatile right-hand man and trusted mercenary (for lack of better words).

Anyhow, I ended up writing a bit of a long-winded post when I simply wanted to introduce a new option for folks that are trying to monetize their readership. If people have thoughts, I’d be happy to hear them.

Steve Shu

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Exponential Growth in Blogs But More Linear Growth in Page Views?

Dave Sifry has got a great post on the state of the blogosphere. Very noteworthy is an interesting discussion on the emergence of spam blogs.

What is not shocking to me is the exponential-type growth of the number of blogs, where the number of blogs appears to double every five months. Some in the blogosphere have noted potential artifacts in the measurement process. Perhaps so. Probably so. But hey, I’m not sure where one can get better data at this stage of the game.

What is more perplexing to me is the closer to linear daily page view growth that I see via Alexa for TypePad (one of the blog platform market leaders). Would be interesting to normalize # of page views by # of active blogs.

I am looking forward to Dave’s upcoming post on posting volume for blogs. Although this is separate from page view growth, maybe this will help me to reconcile in my mind where the overall blogging market is going and who is going to get squeezed.

Update (3/15/05): Dave has new post on posting volume. Posting volume looks closer to linear to me. Whew!

Steve Shu

Continue reading “Exponential Growth in Blogs But More Linear Growth in Page Views?”

Affirmative Action for Bloggers?

Link to a friend in need. But do we know what we are talking about here in terms of demographics?

And I thought tea leaf reading was hard. Anyway, since metablogging is not cool anymore … that’s all.

(*) Some people cited in this MSNBC article talk about highlighting minorities in
need of having their voices better heard. Given that blogging is turning out to be a new communications medium, I suppose the concerns are valid, but it does feel a little weird on first blush.

Blogads Survey Results

Steve Rubel points me to results of the recent Blogads survey, which surveyed more than 30,000 readers of blogs. Steve points out some good items that caught his interest. Some different items that jump out at me include:

  • question #14 regarding why people read blogs … 75.3% responded that it was for "News I can’t find elsewhere",
  • question #11 indicated that the median number of blogs read daily is five, and
  • question #12 indicated that in an average week the median hours spent reading a blog was 10 hours per week.

I’m sure there’s some measurement error here, but putting on my propeller head nevertheless, that’s 2 hours per week per blog. On the surface, a lot of eyeball time and a lot of unmet needs being met by some blogs.

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group

Corporate Blogging Book Deal Probably Dead

A book publisher approached me earlier this year to write a book on business and emerging technologies. Never thought of myself as being an author, but the opportunity showed up at the right time – my "spider-sense" told me that it was something that I should pursue further.

Things had been going well through final steps, but recently went South. Trying to do some legwork to see where things are at, but I suspect the deal is probably dead because of a combination of the market space and other factors (how’s that for leaving myself an open door!). More details to come for those following the blogging area. If you want to be included on an email list for updates of this thread, feel free to send me email at sshu@s4management.com (or you can just stay tuned).   😉

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group