Solar + Home Energy Data: Now It Makes Sense

There’s a whole new class of products and services to guide how homeowners’ use energy with a goal to reduce how fast their electric meters spin. These solutions – Internet dashboards, glowing orbs, countertop displays, even online games – enable us to see and understand the patterns of our energy use. Lots of data and alternative approaches to visualizing that data.

Residential use makes up nearly forty percent of all electricity consumption in Massachusetts; lighting, appliances, computers and monitors, air conditioning, charging smart phones, all of it. At the same time, the cornerstone of Gov. Deval Patrick’s state energy policy is “Efficiency: Our First Fuel.” So, if homeowners can get effective guidance to reduce consumption by choosing the right electric-powered devices and making better decisions about how we use them, that’s a good thing.

It has surprised me, as a marketing professional in the clean energy sector, that I have never purchased any of these devices. Seeing and understanding my household’s energy use interested me as a concept, but never got me to an emotional purchase point. Apparently I’m not alone. One venture capitalist recently told an audience of software developers interested in clean energy applications, “The last thing we need is another home energy dashboard.”

Then our town won a spot as one of seventeen communities to participate in Solarize Massachusetts, a state-sponsored program with financial incentives to encourage adoption of small scale solar electric (photovoltaic or “PV”) projects. This gave us the wherewithal to put solar panels on our own roof at a reasonable cost with a short payback period.

In October, the first month that our 8.5 kilowatt array was on-line, our electric bill dropped to $47 from $153 in the same period a year ago. Now over two months, we cut our electric bill a total of $195 and reduced carbon emissions by over 1000 lbs. Not bad. (Note that these numbers didn’t figure in weather. This fall has been cloudy, so our system didn’t generate as much electricity as was possible.)

Something else changed. I got interested in exactly how much electricity the solar panels were producing in comparison to what our household was using at that moment. If our electricity production was more than we needed, did that mean it was a good time to run the dishwasher or dry some clothes? I was chomping at the bit to see the personal information web page that our solar provider makes available.

Ultimately I was disappointed in the type and display of information, and that it wasn’t tied to any realtime usage information. Better than nothing, but not a complete picture. So, now I’m researching the different options to pull it all together in a way that’s easy to get my head around.

Solar PV isn’t necessarily the most economic answer to residential electricity demand and reducing greenhouse gases. Government incentives are still important. But it is kind of cool and seems – at least to this clean energy wonk – to have the power to light a fire in peoples’ desire to know exactly what’s going on in their houses. Solar PV and efficiency improvements make good bedfellows.

Differentiate Your Clean Energy Company Through Marketing

Walk with me around the vendor exhibit floor of a major clean energy conference. If we’re alike, you want to see what’s new and compelling, and who the players are. Better energy efficient and renewable energy products are a critical avenue to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

I toured just such a trade show recently and came away frustrated. My time was limited, so I wanted to talk to the “best” companies; the ones that somehow differentiate themselves from their competition. Which of the dozen solar installers that I could speak to should I speak to? Of the firms that develop displays of home energy use, which should I investigate because their approach might motivate homeowners to change how they light, heat and cool their houses?

Passing each booth, I looked at each sign and display. Sometimes the company names conveyed some idea of what the firm did; too often they did not. I was looking for messages that grabbed me and the words the companies presented did not help.

Here’s a sampling of the actual “tag lines” from these companies:

Dedicated to Building a Sustainable Future
Go Green . . . Earn Green
Solutions for Sustainable Designs
A Passion for Green Power
Open Up Your World
Solar Products for the New Solar Paradigm
Innovation in Energy
Energy, Water, Environment
Building Community-Owned Sustainable Energy
Absolute Comfort
Control Systems
Energy Systems & Installation
No learning curve. No guesswork. No assumptions.
Gives You The Power To Choose
Build Around You
Smart Choices for a Sustainable Future
Learn Solar, Buy Solar, Solar Business Success, Solar Project Support, Solar Solutions
A Top-Down Approach to Building Efficiency
Green Built, Energy Efficient, Comfort Lifestyle
Solar Living Since 1978
Renewable energy from earth, sun, air and water
Simply the Best
The Revolution Has Begun
Climate of Innovation
We measure anything

Many of these marketing slogans came across as simplistic platitudes; others were so encompassing that they conveyed nothing. If I sound a bit piqued, it’s because I want clean tech companies to succeed. These tag lines, emblematic of a marketing approach – or lack of one – don’t help.

Owners / managers of clean tech firms are often engineers, scientists, contractors, installers and the like. People tend to stick to what they know and that leads these types of firms to focus on product performance and implementation processes. So, that’s where they spend their marginal dollar.

To succeed, though, they need to motivate the market and drive potential customers to action. That is a function of marketing, a discipline frequently foreign to the individuals who run young clean techs. Many clean energy and sustainability entrepreneurs have told me that marketing is the last place where they plan to spend.

That’s too bad and needs to change if clean techs are going to make it as businesses and have the kind of important environmental and economic impact we would like to see.

Open letter to Alan Mulalley, CEO of Ford Motor Company

Dear Alan,

When you made the jump to Ford after leading the Boeing Airplane Company out of the doldrums, I called our broker and asked her to buy some Ford stock. I figured that someone with a keen enough understanding of the market’s product needs, technology and manufacturing to create the 787 (despite problems that surfaced after your departure) was just the person to turn Ford around. The latest business reports suggest I may have been right. And yet I am deeply troubled by one of your signature initiatives there.

You created a striking product differentiator through Ford’s new Sync technology, the company’s in-car entertainment and communication system that visually and aurally integrates mobile calling, text messaging, navigation and business geo-location, news, sports and weather information, music, podcasts, and audio books. The dashboard displays and driver interface are impressive and sexy.

But, rather than yield to the competitive argument, “If we are not the frontrunner with web-enabled dashboards, other car makers will be,” lead the industry through a better understanding about how to deliver great driver utility and still make driving safer.

Alan, I implore you to change the direction Ford is taking with “Sync” before its cars start killing the people we love. I am terrified for my two children, one of whom has just started to drive.

Listen to the growing body of research that tells us that 60-mile-an-hour Internet cafés will be killers. Get in front of the growing body of laws designed to limit driving distractions: seven states have already enacted bans on hand-held devices, twenty prohibit texting, and more legislation is in the works (http://www.distraction.gov).

Studies show that cell phone use and texting – whether or not they are done hands free – distract drivers. The New York Times’ “Driven to Distraction” series points out that – based on a Harvard study – more than 2,600 traffic deaths and 570,000 injuries are caused each year by drivers just using cell phones. Multi-tasking between a panoply of business interactions, entertainment options, and driving enabled by Sync will make cars even more deadly.

From a January 6, 2010 Times piece: “This is irresponsible at best and pernicious at worst,” Nicholas A. Ashford, a professor of technology and policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of the new efforts to marry cars and computers. “Unfortunately and sadly, it is a continuation of the pursuit of profit over safety — for both drivers and pedestrians.”

My 17-year-old son – the one who just got his license — and I learned firsthand from a crash prevention driving course, the ONLY thing a driver should be doing is drive.

As a long-time flight instructor, I know that Boeing’s test pilots and Ford’s ground-based counterparts would agree. As an essential part of flight instruction, we introduce distractions to our students at critical times – during a bad-weather approach or while completing a pre-landing checklist – to drive home the dangerous consequences of even momentary distractions. Driving down a two lane road, where opposite direction traffic and telephone poles are only a few feet away, every instant is critical; the penalties just as dire.

Airplane companies have a deep understanding of human factors and safety. Please, translate the lessons from your former industry to your new one.

If Ford does not listen to objective research results and hides behind specious arguments that more technology will mitigate the dangers of car cockpit distractions, I will sell my stock. Further, I pray that I will not someday accuse Ford of callous negligence because a Sync-equipped car swerved for a split second into the oncoming lane and killed my loved one – or yours.

Sincerely,

Tom Witkin

Cutting Energy Use In Your Town

Now that your town or school system has pared every other cost to the bone, have they turned to cutting energy expenditures as a way to help balance the budget? Maybe because there are a lot of “green thinking” folks where I live, energy usage has become a hot topic among our volunteer school committee members and town administrators. And, we have three budgets – town, K-8 school system and regional high school – which makes things even more “interesting.”

About a year ago, I attended a K-8 school committee meeting at which energy use and its financial impact was discussed. The schools’ head of operations presented some pragmatic, rapid payback, steps he had already taken. Smart. The “low hanging fruit,” things like installing detectors in rooms to turn lights on and off when people entered and exited, were already saving the schools thousands of dollars annually. It makes sense to address straightforward conservation measures first.

Then we heard about the energy generation side; everything from photovoltaic and solar thermal arrays on school roofs to large wind turbines in back of the baseball fields to geothermal power to fuel cells. All this information was based on the conclusions of firms – consultants, manufacturers, installers – solicited to tell the schools about their particular area of specialization. Turned out there were no easy answers, nothing that addressed how the financially strapped school system would pay to implement the proposed solutions, and no good ways for lay people to sort out the operational and economic plusses and minuses of each energy-generating technology.

My take-away from that meeting, colored by experience in renewable energy consulting, was that a rifle-shot, siloed approach to resolving energy needs doesn’t work. A holistic methodology is needed.

A true systems approach, even for one part of a small municipality, isn’t easy. First, it requires understanding your energy demand (in this case, the schools’): how much of what type of energy is needed during which times of day. Then, the demand has to be mapped against the local available energy sources from the grid, solar insolation, wind, geothermal resources . . . the list goes on. Now, figure in the economics of each energy technology, and the financial and other decision criteria for the wide array of products available on the market that could deliver the energy. Don’t forget to consider the governmental incentives and tax implications – Federal, state and local – that attach to the different solutions.

Does your community have all the resources to make rational energy decisions?

So, how can towns and school systems do what’s best, or at least reasonable? A resident of one area town happens to chair an engineering department at a local university. He helped assemble a team of students to research and model parts of the problem. Their efforts didn’t produce a definitive answer, but did give the town better knowledge from which to work. In my town, an “Energy and Sustainability Green Ribbon Committee” has been formed to develop approaches to better energy use and ways to fund them. It’s composed of local volunteers with a sampling of energy know-how and understanding of municipal workings. That’s a good step. But, as one member of the group who’s on the K-8 school committee commented to me, “We still need all the help we can get.” From where?

Here’s my idea: create a for-profit entity, perhaps based within a university, composed of a cross-section of energy sector, engineering, business, and public policy experts. It would deliver to towns, cities and school systems the information, analysis, evaluation, and related services – including links to capital – needed to help them make and implement decisions about renewable energy alternatives.

Yes, I’m working on it.

–  Posted by Tom Witkin

“Destination Collaboration” – Stillborn?

Saw a thought-provoking YouTube video hypothesizing that people in organizations don’t collaborate because it’s just too hard. The post came from my friend and former colleague, Andy Fox, who was CTO of SiteScape when I was VP of Marketing there. The company, since acquired by Novell, made a terrific web and real-time collaboration application.

Andy’s message is spot on. “Destination collaboration,” a term I believe he coined, is too difficult and rarely embraced by the people who should be communicating and sharing knowledge. He suggests that messaging with “organizing tools” added in is the way to go and the future of collaboration.

But messaging was and is a dismal failure for collaboration. (The exception might be what I call “short burst issues:” matters that are narrow in scope and timeframe.) Witness the collapse of Kubi Software, which (in its original incarnation) was created to use messaging as the collaboration platform, supplemented by the kind of organizing structures I think Andy has in mind. The limitations of messaging are why destination collaboration tools were invented in the first place. This is a central theme in the marketing messages from developers of these applications.

Research from groups such as NetAge, as well as our experience at SiteScape, reveals that so much of the problem getting collaboration to work is a people / culture issue that organizations ignore like the plague (or perhaps the H1N1 virus). When stakeholders do pay attention to organization culture and people’s motivations, so-called destination collaboration can be highly effective. Witness the success of large-scale collaboration at Shell International and the US Centers for Disease Control, two enlightened users of these tools.

If you want to learn more about “destination collaboration” and Andy Fox’ point of view, watch his video, “Say Goodbye to destination collaboration.”

The renewable energy ventures I work with need good ways to collaborate. Andy, I’ll be interested to hear your next step.

– Posted by Tom Witkin

Changing habits for renewables success

One of the most active cleantech investors, Vinod Khosla, made an interesting statement last Fall quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Anything that requires people to change their habits has a low probability of success.” A pretty cynical, discouraging view when you think about our energy needs, priorities and what has to change.

Now, think about whether elasticity of demand related to energy prices affects buying behavior beyond reducing energy consumption directly. For example, in addition to reducing the number of miles people drove, higher gas prices rapidly tipped buying behavior toward higher mileage cars. A secondary effect, or cross elasticity. If so, does that contradict Khosla’s view? The director of the Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency noted in Stanford Business, November 2008, that “The oil market has only small elasticity of demand.” Their research shows that a 10% increase in oil price lowers demand by just 1%. A small reaction to a large change in price makes it a little hard to believe that fundamental buying habits are going to be affected.

When gasoline hit $4.00 a gallon, we saw demand for gas guzzling SUVs drop off precipitously in favor of smaller, more fuel efficient cars. Why, if elasticity is so low (inelastic)? Soaring gasoline prices produced a visceral reaction – sticker shock – at fill-up time. That immediate behavioral change points up the difference between short-term and long-term elasticity. So, my conjecture is that – in the SUV case – behavior tracked a short-term effect that was much more elastic than cited by the Precourt Institute. Now that gasoline and other energy prices tied to oil have dropped, people don’t seem to care as much about efficiency. While oil prices may continue to creep upward, most don’t expect the volatility that recently got us north of $4.00 a gallon gas.

If energy prices move up slowly, the 0.10 elasticity number – long-term inelasticity – seems more reasonable. Vinod Khosla’s assertion about changing habits may be correct if people resist those changes when the forces are so incremental, even insidious, that they don’t cause sticker shock. The fall-off in SUV sales that came from a fast, large almost discontinuous shift in the game is, perhaps, the exception that proves the rule.

How will we as a nation help achieve Obama’s goal to embrace renewable energy alternatives if we don’t experience energy price movements big enough to affect our habits in ways that produce strong reactions that counter Khosla’s view?

The founder of an energy firm told me that “Marketing guys will be the last to get hired in this economy.” (Many would take his belief further: marketing should be the first thing being cut in the downturn.) I argued in a previous blog post that tough economic times may be the best time to use marketing to prime the pump. Maybe marketing is at least part of the answer to two issues: how we change habits and ensure those changes have positive outcomes.

It takes real effort to drive adoption of new ideas and approaches in any sector. In my previous life in the enterprise software world, I rarely saw vendors implement well designed “change management” programs – typically requires a large marketing component inside the user organization – alongside their technical implementations. As a result, there were more failures of information technology initiatives due to organizational and cultural resistance than to technical problems. Renewable energy faces the same risks. Just as in software firms, technical considerations dominate and marketing lags well behind.

If we want renewable energy initiatives to take hold broadly, marketing needs to become a key weapon in the fight – right now. Otherwise, Khosla’s “rule” will be proven correct and the goals of renewable energy and cleantech are less likely to succeed.

At a presentation yesterday, Ed White from National Grid, an international energy transmission and distribution company, talked about the photovoltaic project they’re building alongside a gaudily painted natural gas tank that everyone in Boston knows well. He took great pains to point out that commuters will be able to see the fields of PV arrays while they’re driving (likely stuck in traffic). That’s a marketing message. And it’s critical to the future of renewable energy.

– Posted by Tom Witkin

Cleaner cars . . . too late?

Yesterday was a good day for the environment. Tomorrow may not be.

NY Times, 1/26/09: “President Obama directed federal regulators . . . to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict limits on greenhouse gases from cars and trucks. He also ordered the Transportation Department to begin drawing up rules imposing higher fuel-economy standards on cars and light trucks.”

The Bush administration stonewalled California’s efforts since 2002 to further limit pollution and they failed to create regulations to implement a 2007 Department of Transportation law requiring a 40 percent improvement in gas mileage for autos and light trucks by 2020. At last a change.

Don’t feel bad for the US auto industry. “They knew this was coming,” pointed out Ray LaHood, the new Secretary of Transportation and former Republican congressman from Illinois. And, autos manufactured by these same companies for the European market can already do much of the job.

So much for the good news. According to an NPR report based on a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Turning off the carbon dioxide emissions won’t stop global warming . . . Climate change is essentially irreversible . . . The global thermostat can’t be turned down quickly once it’s been turned up . . .” We’re talking thousands of years. Now I’m really depressed.

What should be done? Susan Solomon, one of the study’s authors, suggests that if the problem is irreversible, that gives us more reason to act now, just as the new administration is doing.

But, why do we need to wait until 2020 for the 40 percent fuel economy gain? So much of the needed technology has been in development since I started working on renewable energy in the early 80’s. Step on the accelerator.

– Posted by Tom Witkin

Inelasticity, SUVs and Idling

We moved to our Boston suburb in large part because of the quality of the schools, lots of woods, and location. As you can probably guess, there are a lot of well-healed families here (though perhaps disproportionately fewer now, given the number who work in the financial sector). But, there are some things that disturb me – increasingly so – about where we live. First is that this affluent community expects town services – especially education – to maintain a high level; but these same people are unwilling to pay the relatively small marginal cost (because of our tax situation) that is required. Recent municipal votes announced this loudly.

That leads directly to my next gripe: If you look at any parking lot in town, you could believe that we’re actually a giant, upscale SUV dealership. By now you should know my view of these gas guzzlers from a sustainability standpoint.

But I’m seeing something more onerous than the mere existence of these vehicles. At the town’s several schools, legions of these Abrams Tank wannabes line up each day as much as twenty minutes before dismissal so they can be near the head of the line. And, many sit there with the engine running for the duration. Just imagine their carbon footprint; the greenhouse gases emitted for no good reason. Add that to the waste of fuel. And, no, this behavior, from what I observed, didn’t abate when gasoline topped $4.00 a gallon. We are an inelastic town.

The aphorism “think globally, act locally” applies here. Yes, it’s cold outside in New England. Folks, your electrically heated seats and steering wheels will work off the battery, without the engine running. If not, try dressing more warmly, as you would if you walked your dog in the cold.

But, there may be a partial solution to both this budget and environmental problem: Massachusetts has an “Anti-Idling” law. Vehicles are not allowed to idle for more than five minutes except for specific reasons (waiting on line for your child isn’t one of them). Fines can be levied up to $100 for the first offense and up to $500 for each succeeding offense. Enforce it.

Now let’s see how inelastic you are.

– Posted by Tom Witkin

It’s hard driving green

We just bought a new car. It was a frustrating experience, but not for the usual reasons. We got a good deal, the color wasn’t an issue, and the salesperson seemed a decent guy. The car is a manual Hyundai Sonata sedan with an EPA rating of 22 City / 32 highway. It’s highly rated and appears to be a good buy, but it isn’t nearly as green as I would have liked.

Here was our problem: small cars like the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic (hybrid or not) and Hyundai Elantra get excellent mileage, but just don’t have enough rear seat leg room for our two growing teenagers. So, not an option. The car that really fits my needs (and more visceral wants) is the VW Jetta TDI, a turbocharged diesel that gets terrific mileage. Yes, diesel fuel is expensive at the moment compared to gasoline, but great fuel economy offsets part of that. And, when gas prices go up, diesel gets more attractive. As someone who cares about sustainability, I am willing to pay somewhat more for fuel if I can generate less carbon dioxide.

Ultimately, what knocked the Jetta out of the box was price; about $8,000 more than the Sonata, even taking into account the $1300 Federal tax credit for clean-burning diesels. There weren’t viable alternatives: VW, BMW and Mercedes produce the only diesel cars available today in the US. And, the Toyota Camry hybrid is also relatively expensive and doesn’t get mileage that much better than its conventional sibling.

Why don’t we have more choices? According to a Forbes article in the fall, “Between now and 2011, Acura, Nissan, Hyundai and Kia all plan to launch clean-diesel cars of their own.” Does it have to take that long? Estimates from auto experts are that 50-60% of new cars sold in Europe are diesels. I believe it; every car I’ve rented there over the past six years has been a diesel, many of them Fords, GMs and Toyotas. The engineering changes needed to accommodate minor differences in US-produced ultra low sulfur diesel can’t be that daunting.

The issue of high-priced diesel fuel in the US remains an issue, but one that should resolve. If gas prices do go back up, the economy advantage of a diesel will skew the cost delta back toward the diesel. As people start to buy and drive more diesels, the oil companies will certainly increase supply, helping to drive down prices, at least from that side of the supply and demand equation. And, today, a relatively low percentage of “gas stations,” at least where I live in the northeast, offer diesel, so there’s little price competition between outlets. Diesel drivers, I suspect, are just happy to find their fuel. That should change, too, as the number of diesel-powered vehicles goes up.

We’re seeing an emerging market thirst for cars with better mileage. Part of GM, Ford and Chrysler’s travails stem from their years of ramping up production of gas guzzlers. Giving US consumers access to what’s been available in Europe for years would be one expedient answer to the problems of the US auto industry. Maybe that should be a condition of any bailout package.

– Posted by Tom Witkin

Marketing and renewable energy start-ups

A smart venture capitalist I’ve known for some time introduced me to one of her clean energy portfolio companies. As I transition from the enterprise software / Web 2.0 world to renewable energy, she has been incredibly helpful.

Then I heard back from the founder of that energy firm: “Marketing guys will be the last to get hired in this economy.” Maybe that seems true, even obvious, to many. But, let’s think about this.

There’s a problem I see among renewables start-ups; in fact, many early-stage companies dominated by scientists and engineers. Their scarce financial resources (getting scarcer by the day) are allocated predominately to on-going research and product development. Why? They are comfortable with R&D as opposed to the black magic (I could use two different words) world of marketing. And, there’s the perception that you can’t move forward unless your product or service is fully baked.

A client and founder of a company with a really compelling, web-based business-to-business service continued to fund software engineering with limited seed capital and just one small paying pilot customer. My perspective is summed up in my dissenting assessment of his path: “You are going to have the best web platform in the world for [XYZ] when you close the doors.” Their precipice is perilously close.

It’s never too early to sell the story. A tough economy may be the best time to prime the pump. In this period of bleeding cash and non-existent credit, organizations aren’t likely to buy today or tomorrow. But, if your offering is top-of-mind when things loosen up, you’ll be in great shape. People will be willing to pilot your not-quite ready primetime stuff because you’ve had them chomping at the bit.

The choice is simple: the perceived great product that will be available soon or the completed widget they’ve never heard of?  In all of high tech, the choices are myriad. Similarly, the alternatives for customers’ energy portfolios are getting broader and broader.

Tell your story now. Do some marketing.

— posted by Tom Witkin

Is there a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal for Collaboration?

At a recent collaboration conference in Boston, I listened to various users, vendors and consultants talk about implementing enterprise collaboration systems. A lot of the focus was on how technology tools can improve the flow of business processes; simple HR workflows to Six Sigma and ISO 9000 stuff.

The conference discussions got me thinking about whether collaborative processes are subject to some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle; a business version. (Though I figured out by the end of freshman year in college that I wasn’t meant to be a physicist, I’ve long kept an interest in the subject.)

For those who haven’t dabbled in physics, Heisenberg’s is an often quoted principle that’s a highly specialized case of what’s known as the “observer effect:” the measurement of any parameter in a physical system changes one or more other parameters in that same system. In other words, the act of measuring touches and affects the system in some way. The application of technology to business processes isn’t a perfect analog, but I hope you’ll grant me a little license.

Wikipedia talks about the observer effect as it applies to information technology: “In Information Technology, the observer effect refers to potential impact of the act of observing a process output while the process is running. For example . . . observing the performance of a CPU by running the observing program on the same CPU . . . will lead to inaccurate results.”

For a system built on information technology to be successful, you have to get a bunch of things right (call them “essentials”) that have nothing to do with the technology: strategy, processes, content, roles and responsibilities, change management. At least, that’s been SiteScape’s experience with team collaboration initiatives. I suspect IBM agrees. Dan Carroll, a biz school classmate of mine and long-time IBMer told a class gathering that IBM now considers itself first and foremost a consulting firm, not a hardware or software vendor. Consulting implies a focus on these same essentials.

What does this have to do with Professor Heisenberg or the observer effect? When we set out to help a customer collaborate better, we examine and codify the “essentials” to form a snapshot of how things are getting done today. Then we think about how they should be done if those things are going to improve. Without that understanding, we don’t know where and how to apply our marvelous technology. But, when all the essentials are overlaid with technology, don’t the essentials themselves change? My collaboration version of the observer effect.

Except in a pure self-service model, IT professionals become involved when software technology is applied to a business issue or process. By construction, the roles and responsibilities component of the essentials has now changed. New people, influences, reporting relationships, activities have been inserted into the collaborative process. An analog to one of Heisenberg’s physical systems?

If our notional implementation involves a shift from a predominately paper system to one built on software, the content changes. Paper folders can hold different kinds of stuff from software folders. Invariably, people do put different kinds of objects into those software folders.

There are lots of degrees here, to be sure. The steps to get a vacation request approved are not going to change much because you automated the system. But, in a complex business process made up of hundreds, even thousands of “states,” (Six Sigma and ISO 9000 come to mind) subtle shifts accumulate. The underlying business processes that we so carefully evaluated at the start of the project are changed as a result of our attempts to optimize them.

We’re now saddled with a moving target. As we use technology and the other essentials to optimize how different parts of an organization work together, what we need to optimize shifts.

The implication for organizations of all types and sizes is that improving collaboration and related workflow processes needs to be iterative. It can’t be one giant leap. To work, it needs to be a series – often a constant, on-going series – of steps, adjustments, reworks, additions and deletions. It’s a consultative process of listening and observing, applying lessons learned, then listening and observing some more.

At the beginning of any project or initiative, it’s critical to put in place the people and mechanisms you need for this iterative, consultative approach. Hmm, doing that kind of changes things, too.

—-posted by Tom Witkin

Let ‘em Play (not all change has to do with technology)

Major League Baseball recently prohibited a pitcher’s fake throw to third, followed by a pickoff attempt at first. It’s now a balk.

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball,” noted character Terence Mann in the movie Field of Dreams. So, leave the rules alone. Speed up the game — an aim of the new ruling — through other measures that don’t affect how the game is played.

Baseball pundits claim as the basis for outlawing balks is their attempt to “deceive” a player on the team at bat.

But isn’t deception part of the game? Is a particular “balk” any less deceiving than throwing a change-up or an outfielder’s bluff that he can catch a ball well over his head in an attempt to hold a runner? In a first and third steal attempt, how about an apparent throw to second that’s cut off in an attempt to nail the lead runner? Should baseball outlaw the rarely-used (but always exciting and ethically controversial) ‘hidden ball trick?’

I say, let ‘em play.

Give the new Secretary of Energy a chance

Tom Friedman’s Sunday Op-Ed posited that “If you want to guarantee that America becomes a mediocre nation, then just keep vilifying every public figure struggling to find a way out of this crisis who stumbles once — like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner or A.I.G.’s $1-a-year fill-in C.E.O., Ed Liddy — and you’ll ensure that no capable person enlists in government.” Spot-on.

 

I see the same phenomenon in our local town politics where volunteer, elected school committee members are vilified – via anonymous comments to articles in the local newspaper – for working tirelessly to preserve educational excellence in our underfunded public schools.

 

At least we know it was John McCain who went after Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, in a recent Senate hearing. But, note that Chu has been in the job for only nine weeks.

 

As reported in a New York Times article today, Energy Secretary Serves Under a Microscope. “Dan Leistikow, the Energy Department’s director of public affairs, said that Dr. Chu was a scientist, not a politician, and should be given a little time to adjust . . . ‘A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration,  Mr. Leistikow said.”

 

Let’s give Secretary Chu a chance. I know he can pronounce “photovoltaics” as well as “nuclear.”

 

– Posted by Tom Witkin