Blog – Stephen Shu, PhD

June 3, 2009

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 3^rd 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.

January 30, 2009

Personal Account of 1 Year of Blog Atrophy

It's been over a year since my last post. At the beginning of 2008, I basically burned out on blogging. My hands hurt, I developed other interests, there were too many blogs out there, and I needed to spend more time with my family. None of that has changed for me, but outside of those areas there are some things that have changed that are making me reconsider blogging again on a more regular basis:

Need to stay up-to-date with the times on a professional basis: In 2005, I noted that blogging as a corporate skillset was in its infancy. In 2009, I got feedback that I should have included my blog address on my CV/resume. In 2009, I also ran into a marketing and sales situation where expertise with social networking tools was a key differentiating need.
Need to feed my support structure and network on a passive basis: By suspending my blog, I lost some touch with my larger family, relatives, and friends. Now as context, I don't just keep in touch with these people via computer technologies. That said, content on my blog helped to keep my network passively in touch. It also helped to serve as a conversation piece when we got to talk live.
Need to stay up-to-date with technology on an active basis: When I was blogging, I was much more in the know about social networking tools and their real implications (social and economic). Now, my knowledge has become a little stale on things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I'm sure that refreshing my knowledge will be like riding a bike, in that it all comes back to you, but having been away for one year, I have been feeling more disconnected with the power and pulse of the Internet community.

Each year I have reconsidered my motivations for blogging and the angle that I would take. Do others have observations about their own experiences in the past year?

Bonus link: For readers interested in consulting, there's a new management consulting blog by ex-McKinseyite Kevin Gao at http://managementconsulted.com. Looks like a very unique stopping point on the web in the consulting space.

April 19, 2005

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:

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]).
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.

March 2, 2005

Credit Wars, Juice Wars, Corporate Blog Book Wars, Hype, and Talking Over One Another

The back and forth between John Robb, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and Shel Israel continues. John hints that the deal he was not party to included a massive advance of money. Scoble hints that John is looking to do a separate book deal. Who knows what is fact, but this we can be sure of. There will be a book or books on corporate blogging hitting the market by the end of 2005 or begining of 2006. It indicates a trend that while there may be a ton of information on the Internet on the subject, there is still a gap of bridging blogosphere knowledge to those on the outside. The value of bridging that gap (to all parties) is likely tremendous.

Regardless of what each party argues, I cannot begin to imagine how high the emotions must be. I hope that they can work this out. Perhaps a subcontracting, side agreement, or value-added arrangement can be made, but this seems far off from where the parties are currently at.

Update (3/2/05): Robert Scoble posts "The emotions aren’t high on my side of things. Sorry if it came across that way."

February 26, 2005

Big Brother’s Watching Your Email and Blogs

Some of the same filtering technologies that block SPAM from getting to you will now be applied to keeping your ~~trap~~ mouth shut. (Hey, we’ve trained the SPAM technologies so well they will be getting used against us!) Blog readers of Jeff Nolan saw first hand reporting of these types of company products at the annual Demo conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. With respect to this particular subject, you can look here, here, and here on Jeff’s blog.

Ephraim Schwartz has an article just yesterday portraying his impressions of the growing trend underlying these products. Schwartz writes,

"This year’s show heightened my awareness to one trend in particular: high anxiety over what employees can publish in both
e-mail and blogs. There was a slew of products that monitor employee communications in one way or another, mapping them to
corporate policy on everything from offensive language and sexual harassment to outright prohibition of personal e-mail."

So if companies can’t get comfortable with their corporate policies on blogging, soon there will be no need to express the rules. Just encode the rules explicitly in monitoring software or train the devices using language processing and Bayesian rules like some SPAM filters. Based on Schwartz’s article, imagine:

pop-up windows appearing on employees’ screens telling them to reconsider what they are typing at any given moment,
managers getting scorecards of how many email and blog infractions an employee has, or
the legal department being automatically tied in the loop to approve what people write.

Blogging is big, but Big Brother is not too far off.

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group