The Tao Of Getting Information Technology (IT) Deployments To Stick

Biren recently posed a question to me about how to get technology initiatives to stick based on my experience as a management consultant, user, and technology manager.

Although I always believe that from an execution perspective one should strive for the keep it simple stupid (KISS) principle, describing the Tao (i.e., mastery required) to reach the nirvana state of "IT acceptance" in an organization requires some foundation.

An organization achieves IT acceptance when a habit or addiction with respect to both process and technology has been reached. A habit is created when an organization knows what to do, wants to do something, and knows how to do it. Commitment is frequently started off by getting the organization to collaboratively develop the requirements for the IT initiative as opposed to having an IT project handed down to them.

For IT projects, more often than not, a primary challenge is addressing the want aspect of the habit formation process. Plain an simple. If the system does not serve or incent the end user in some way, there is a high probability that the technology will not take. People have to get some benefit by using the system. Too often I have heard operating managers talk about black hole systems where they feed data in, and mysteriously, headquarters is the only one that cares and uses the data. Big warning flags going up in my book.

To address the want aspect of things you must create movement. Here I find the pecking order of the carrot, the stick, the Chinese professor, and the Jedi mind trick to be key. Two of these techniques are often referred to in change management consulting – I added the other two as off-center techniques:

  • The Carrot – This is using a positive incentive system. Show people the end goal and lead them toward victory. "If we can all get on this system, we can outflank the competition."
  • The Stick – This is using a negative incentive system. Scare them. "If we don’t do this, we’ll all likely lose our jobs."
  • The Chinese Professor – My Mandarin professor was a first generation Chinese. When I didn’t practice enough in the language laboratory, he’d look at me sternly and say, "Why have you disappointed me Xu Bing Hou". There would be long silence for effect, and the guilt would drive me to excel the next time around.
  • The Jedi mind trick – Here’s a bit of a catch-all for framing techniques that stem from organizational behavior and psychology. A bit too detailed to go into here (although I will point to a recent post of mine that draws from broader field of organizational behavior). Suffice it to say, while I do not like to correlate these methods with the notion of using tricks or being manipulative, I will say that if you better understand how yourself and other people process information, all that all one is really trying to do is to engage people the way they want to be engaged.

Carrots tend to work best in my book, but others probably have different experiences.

The final aspect beyond getting a habit and creating movement is tracking initial movement. This is a crucial subdomain of the project management discipline and not taught enough in the field. Since this post is getting long, I will say there a three elements here that are particularly relevant. These are:

  1. Having a project kickoff meeting
  2. Driving and piloting a program (and hand picking winners early on)
  3. Monitoring results regularly and more frequently early on.

Anyway, that’s my Tao.

Steve Shu

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Giving Executive Roundtable Talk On Organizational Blogging For Social Entrepreneurs And Non-Profits

This post has been reproduced from my 21Publish blog.

I’ve been invited to give an executive roundtable talk (30 minutes plus 10 for Q&A) at the Crescent in Dallas about organizational blogging and blogging communities for social entrepreneurs and non-profits. I may eventually leverage some of this stuff for a more extensive mini-course or seminar in business school settings. The audience is unlikely to know much about blogging.  Here’s my rough thoughts on title and outline so far:

  • Title – "An Introduction to Organizational Blogging and Blogging Communities for Social Entrepreneurs and Non-Profits"
  • Outline
    1. What’s the opportunity?
    2. What’s the technology and medium about?
      • Blogs
      • Blog communities
      • Pertinent technologies surrounding blogs (pseudo-stack)
      • Macroeconomic dynamics
    3. Musings on challenges in social entrepreneurship and non-profit settings
    4. How real social entrepreneurs are using blogging
    5. How barriers can be overcome using blogging
    6. Q&A, open discussion, & potential opportunities

Thoughts and feedback? Note that I eventually plan to post this presentation for others to benefit from.

Good Post(s) On Blog Visibility … Will Revisit My Link Policy

Ethan Johnson has a good set of posts on visibility in the blogosphere. Here’s the one the grabbed my attention (you can trackback to the others from his blog). Although I tend not to focus on visibility of new eyeballs for this blog, Ethan’s post made me think about the link policy for this blog, and I realize that my link policy is out-of-date because it doesn’t do much for the majority of people. I don’t know when I’ll update my link policy, but I just wanted to let people know.

The CIO Weblog Has A New Look

The CIO Weblog has a new design look these days as does the rest of the entire Creative Weblogging network of blogs. Thanks to Prashanth Rai (background here, blog here) who has been doing a terrific job as a co-author of The CIO Weblog out of India. As of recent, Prashanth has been taking the lead, and I look forward to continuing to write together with him.

When 1+1 Doesn’t Equal 2 And Bundling Versus Unbundling Good And Bad News

Although there are many folks who would argue that finance and quant courses are the only big value lessons that one learns in business school, I personally have a large place in my heart for organizational behavior courses taught in the business schools.

One of the most valuable lessons and core theories in this vein is a theory known as prospect theory (developed by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky).

I remember the essence of this theory via the saying "losses loom larger than gains".

Some things that fall out directly from this (note that the aspects of bundling and unbundling potentially should be attributed to my wife’s PhD advisor, Richard Thaler):

  • A $2 loss hurts more than a $2 gain feels good (loss aversion)
  • Bundling losses together reduces pain
  • Unbundling gains increases good feelings.

Some areas where I have used this concept in managerial and entrepreneurial settings:

  1. If I want to rub salt in the wound of a supplier who has let me down (perhaps for me to make a point), I may break out the failings into multiple parts and multiple sessions. Unbundling "losses" in effect increases the pain. (Steve, you sick-o.)
  2. If I want to reward salespeople or reps with bonuses, I may break an $X bonus into two parts (say 50% each) and deliver one part on contract signing and the other on project start. The bonus feels like more than $X dollars.
  3. If I need to deliver bad news to my own team (e.g., letting people go), I try to do this all in one sitting (and depending on the type of news, sometimes on a Friday where the bad feeling does not linger in the office).
  4. In non-profit settings where budgets may be tight and membership assessments or fee assessments need to be made mid-fiscal year, try to get them all in one fell swoop as opposed to nickel and diming the community. Each nickel and dime hurts more as an individual hit than in aggregate.

A notable one that has been used on me:

  • An imploding sign-on bonus – You get $X if you accept the offer now, but the bonus shrinks by $Y every month that you delay.

While I’m no PhD in the subject matter, although the term, "theory" in "prospect theory" makes the concept sound far out there in terms of practical use, the phenomena has experimentally been demonstrated to hold true in many different settings. Settings go beyond finance (and mental accounting concepts) and even extend to physical sensation experiments. It’s worthwhile to try to apply the concepts surrounding prospect theory in real life.

Revisiting The Dutch Uncle And My First Blog Post Ever

At my old blog last year, I recounted a story about losing a management consulting deal. Some key snips setting the context for the Dutch Uncle (emphasis added):

  • Today I lost a freelance consulting deal to another consultant. Of course I’m disappointed, but once a deal is lost, it is lost
  • I think the most important things to do after a lost deal are to
    identify learnings
    with respect to your company’s product offering and
    sales processes and to preserve prospect relationships
  • Now I am not going to go into all of my learnings here, however, I
    think it is useful to consider a concept I learned in Ford Harding’s
    book, "Rain Making: The Professional’s Guide to Attracting New
    Clients". You need to ask as many people as possible (client prospects
    included) to be straight-up with you. No silverlining. Why did I lose
    the deal? This is the concept of getting the prospect to talk to you
    like a Dutch uncle.
    To quote a passage from Harding’s book, "The person
    who talks to you like a Dutch uncle does it for your own good … At
    its worst … [problems are] like a cheating spouse; friends know but
    don’t tell you about it. "

Well, as it turns out, I actually won the deal. The client prospect came back. That’s the happy story for Friday.

To change gears a bit, I actually started blogging probably back in 2003. I had one post up there for about a year on a Blogger account which I eventually deleted. I like to think that I won the deal above in part because what was embodied in my first blog post ever. The essence of what was there was (to my recollection):

  • my personal mission statement as a business development professional
  • my utmost goal to help people and not to sell to them
  • my commitment to safeguard one’s confidential and competitive information as a business partner
  • my goal to even help you find an alternative source for your problem if my company’s solution was not a good fit.

It probably went on and on for a bit, but you get the idea.

Blogging Companies Beginning To Specialize – 24H Laundry

Interesting development in the blogging world (hat tip to Om). New venture (by Marc Andressen, co-founder of Netscape) in the video blogging space called 24H Laundry (answering the question whether bloggers do work in their underwear). At this time of night, I should be. The name reminds me of White Pajama, the venture for virtual call centers (that is, providing technology where people could work from home in the their white pajamas).

College Student Near Southern Methodist University (SMU) Needed For Part-Time Marketing and Sales Work

I am going to need some contract telemarketing, marketing list generation, and related support for maybe 1-2 days per week for a person near Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I’ll have more details later, but here are some thoughts off-the-cuff on skills needed:

Continue reading “College Student Near Southern Methodist University (SMU) Needed For Part-Time Marketing and Sales Work”