The Technology Economy

Posted on November 3, 2012 by Jeff Block

The Technology Economy, by Jeff Block

Economists are now commonly referring to our modern post-industrial economy as the “information economy”. I suppose I understand that. But I’m not sure it’s the best possible label for what is (or should be) going on in the post-industrial modern world. And I don’t mean just America, but Western Europe, much of Asia, and key parts of the rest of the world as well.

I think the reason economists are hung up on information is that, in their estimation, “information” has become and will increasingly continue to be the currency of trade between nations and corporations and people. Thus, they feel it drives the economy. In many ways, they’re probably right. But to me, an economy isn’t named by what it trades or produces, it should be named by what drives the economy forward, causes it to grow, makes it successful, etc.

The agricultural economy of the 19th century was driven by agriculture. Yes, we traded fruits and vegetables, cows and chickens as the currency of the day (even after gold, silver, and paper bills became common), but the economic time was labeled “agricultural” for the powerful influence hunting, gathering, and farming had over the growth of the economy. The key roles were the farmer (production) and the eater (consumption).

The industrial economy of the 20th century was driven by industry. We were builders of things you can see and touch and feel. Once built, we sold them, and that produced money, which we moved around in huge quantities to represent “value”, because it was impractical to trade cows and chickens any longer. Smart people created marketing, which in turn created “consumerism” to tap into the insatiable desire of the human heart to have. So we bought and produced and bought and produced. The key roles here were the manufacturer (or engineer) and the shopper.

The modern economy – which will shape our thinking and our wallets well into the 21st century – is an economy driven by technology. Information technology, computer technology, mobile technology, cloud technology. Medical advances, social networking, and other factors will play huge roles as well, but they will all be driven into existence (or not) by technology.

People seem to be creating a philosophy about this new economy that implies the key role is the CEO. And sometimes it feels like everyone else will either work at Starbucks (so the CEO can get his coffee in the morning) or be on welfare (because the CEO replaced all their jobs with A) robots or B) outsourcing). I understand how people have come to this conclusion, and like you, I feel the Orwellian theme music playing in the background when it’s given voice, but I fundamentally reject this view of the future as a necessary answer to “what’s next?”.

It’s up to us to make the world something totally different. Not with bigger government or more programs that somehow try to even things out, but with innovation. Rather than invest in shuffling around what exists, let’s make more for everyone.

How? Well, I submit that the engineer is still the key role. But it’s a different kind of engineer. The engineer of the 20th century was industrial or mechanical or electrical. They built buildings and roads, plastic moldings and bridges, assembly lines and monuments – ever striving for bigger and more visible. The engineer of the 21st century are the computer scientists and ECE’s (electrical and computer engineers) – the guys making everything smaller and writing invisible software to run on it. These are the artists of the social, cloud, and mobile movements. They’re the guys who figure out how to slam together Google maps, the iPhone, and GPS technology so that my wife knows when I leave work and can get dinner started. These engineers are tackling the challenge of Big Data so that companies can manage reputation on line and governments can add cyber divisions to their anti-terrorism units. It’s these advances that will lead to nanotechnology and cars that drive themselves, augmented reality glasses and evensmarterphones.

But I also submit that it isn’t these science-soon-to-be-non-fiction cases that are the most interesting. Perhaps the most impactful to the modern economy is the potential of information, mobile, cloud and other technologies to move your existing businesses forward. For example, if you’re a $50-100M business in America today and cloud, mobile and social haven’t made what you do cheaper and created opportunity to do things you couldn’t do 5 years ago, then you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Right now, today, technology holds the power to increase your revenue, reduce your costs, lower your risk, improve your employees, expand your reach, and much more. And at cost models that are shrinking on the same curve as the cost of your favorite TV at your favorite big box store.

How? If it’s so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, it’s not “easy”, but it is “straightforward”. It’s a matter of right placement of the investment. It’s a matter of understanding business and the technology, and knowing how to make technology work for you. Like you trust a financial planner to make your money work for you or a tax attorney to make the tax code work for you, so should you invest in the right resources to make technology work for you. That guy isn’t the easiest person to find, but I submit, you’ll know him when you see him.

Posted in Business and Finance, Science, Engineering and Technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Secret Necessary First Ingredient of BI

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Jeff Block

Discipline

Business Intelligence isn’t “reporting” or “technology”.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard business and IT leaders alike give those misconceptions voice. I suppose it’s possible to purchase an amazing new reporting tool, but it’s absolutely not possible to purchase a box of business intelligence. More mature companies think that if they get some processes in place, learn some best practices, add some responsibilities to a couple of their staff, and THEN maybe buy a new tool … then they’ll have BI, which translates to wrapping their data in their new beautiful reporting or dashboarding infrastructure. That’s closer.

Still more mature … If we do all these things AND we have a data warehouse in place that implements at least the basics of good dimension modeling, surely then we’ll be golden … right?

Well, I’d still have to say: no. This is all good stuff. Really good. Necessary. But my concern is that all of it focuses on what boils down to effects rather than cause, tools rather than the root driver of value to the business. The bottom line is that BI is not about reporting or technology or data or processes or even people by themselves, it’s about discipline.

The purpose of Business Intelligence is to put in place the discipline (what turns “good intentions” into “intentionality” … and “vision” into “reality” … and “investment” into “return”) to convert an organization’s unique data into vital knowledge assets by which the leaders of that organization can make better decisions. What you build when you build BI is this discipline, not some reporting infrastructure … no matter how advanced. Physically, technology and tools are a set of lenses – reports, dashboards, scorecards, applications, widgets, portals, etc – through which you can make better decisions to advance the mission / goals of your business. But before those lenses can be of value – certainly before their value is maximized – you need people and processes of the right ilk. The people need to have vision, a plan, and the discipline to carry it out. The processes need to empower them not entangle or encumber them. And the technology is their toolkit. But understanding where you’re going (vision), stating goals, staffing appropriately, right-sizing processes, exposing data, and generally thinking through why to do what when with whom … no technology can give you any of it, no matter how expensive or sophisticated or well-marketed.

So, a large, well-placed financial investment may buy you a tool or hire you a smart guy or roll out a new process, but the return on that investment will never be what it could be without investing in the plan and … here’s the key … *committing* to the discipline to carry it out.

Posted in Business and Finance | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Your Very Own iBatUtilityBelt

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Jeff Block

Batman

I woke up yesterday morning to an update notification on my iPhone (5 – yes, I love it) for my flashlight application (and a couple others). I clicked “Update All”, and moved on to get ready for the day without thinking much of it. Shower. Ready. In the car. And on my way to the office, it hit me…  “Why the heck do I need to update the flashlight application?”

It’s kinda weird to *have* a flashlight application in the first place, but it makes sense if you think about it. So does the “mirror” application, and the “compass” app (don’t actually have one of those, because my flashlight has a compass built into it), and countless other “basic utilities”. Calculator, weather, camera, map, etc.

But my favorite is my Starbucks card. This app and the flashlight deal have something in common… they’re the wave of the future. The goal: to eliminate the need for having much on your person other than your phone … to allow me to collapse my entire bat utility belt into a single device. Well, for men that is. I’m skeptical that the “lipstick” app will ever take off. But I digress.

The credit cards are working on apps like these too. Why have a plastic card (or cash) in your wallet, when you can just scan your phone? And 30 seconds later, you’ll be scanning the phone to buy a soda from a vending machine, or ride in a cab, or buy a TV, and so on. And if you doubt it, then you may remember having said to yourself, “Who would ever write a flashlight application?”

Once the credit cards and cash aren’t in your wallet anymore, what’s left? Photos? Nope, they’re on the phone. Receipts? I hope the go the way of the credit card (how easy would that be!?). And that pretty much leaves the driver’s license. Ok, that one will be “hard”. (Read: will take another couple years). But we’re getting closer to the day when the biggest question left will be, “How do I secure this device that now has every imaginable element of my life on it?” That is the question of the next 5 years.

But for now, I welcome the one-device utility belt. Having upgraded my flashlight, anyone else have tips for great “tool apps” you consider a necessity?

Posted in News, Politics and Culture, Science, Engineering and Technology | Tagged , | 2 Comments

“Open Access” vs “Self-Service” Data

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Jeff Block

Self-Service BI

What is “Open Access to Data”?

Open access does NOT mean that everyone has access to everything, or that necessarily any one person has access to everything (from a business user perspective). Here’s a definition that will make some of you squirm.

Open access: All users in an organization are granted access to all data in the organization through a defined, intentional, repeatable process, in accordance to their individual role and prioritized need for that data.

So, it’s not giving everyone access to everything, it’s giving everyone access to the RIGHT things to improve their job over time. And remember that this is more evolutionary than revolutionary in healthy organizations. Those who target a big bang frequently end up with a bum fizzle. The early-and-continual delivery of value is far preferable, in both the short and long terms.

What is “Self-Service Data”?

Industry pundits hopped up on the buzz of business intelligence throw around the term self-service with impunity, hoping that BI will deliver to them some magic universe in which every conceivable reporting or analytic requirement can be accounted for by a “self-service portal” front end to the wonder of the data warehouse. The truth is that no such indefinite and infinite vision to the horizon is possible. Even in the most ideal world, you will never experience a 100% self-service environment.

Here’s what BI can do for you in this realm …

There are too many people in your organization devoting too many hours to manually massaging and manipulating data in response to totally unpredictable (seemingly random) requests for aggregated, cross-referenced, or other newly-contextualized data sets. BI does promise that over time, these manual efforts will be replaced with a uniform data model, capable of fielding ever-broadening, increasingly complex requests for knowledge from the data. This will free up your data/statistical research experts to be more strategic and attend to a higher-order of complexity, but the demand for them will not go away. Success means making these resources more strategic over time, not eliminating them.

What BI will not do for you …

Alchemy, card tricks, cold fusion, or other magic reliant on some illusive silver bullet. BI is more about discipline and intentionality than any form of magic. No overnight miraculous change of any kind will occur.

Summary

Don’t deal in all-or-nothing scenarios! Companies expecting it to take 3 months (or even 3 years) to go from 100% manual ad-hoc request management to 100% total automation of all reporting are going to learn to live with disappointment … the hard way. Ask yourself, “What would you give to gain 20% automation per year at the cost of creating 10% new demand for higher-order higher-complexity higher-value ad-hoc requests (which drive more manual request management and therefore drive new requirements of the BI environment)?”

This is a far more realistic scenario. The phrase that pays is, “Progress, not perfection”.

Posted in Business and Finance | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Out with the Long-Term Strategic Plan

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Jeff Block

Business Intelligence is about Balance

… unless it’s continually balanced with demonstrating short-term value.

Balance. Much of life is about balance. Not only in BI, but on a dozen fronts. You’re going to have a hard time being successful until you learn the art of balancing long-term and short-term gain. In both our business and personal lives, it’s a basic human tendency to forgo delayed gratification for immediate, hear-and-now returns. Forget saving, just buy on credit. Forget the long-term vision, we’ve gotta deliver on this quarter’s numbers. Or how about this on (we’ve all experienced it)… Forget the long-term customer relationship, we need 2% greater margin on this deal to turn that cell in the spreadsheet to green. When said here, it’s shocking to think that anyone would sacrifice the potential referrals, turn the brand impact negative, and jeopardize repeat/annuity business to avoid only achieving 90% of the target margin goal for a single project … but it happens every single day.

I view these philosophies as imbalanced to the near-term and subsequently dangerous. But in building the Business Intelligence program in most organizations (or in the failed attempt thereto), I routinely notice the opposite trend …  Plans and roadmaps that are long on strategy but very short on immediate return.

Let’s face it, you’re never going to get the opportunity to deliver on your long-term, three-year strategic vision unless you justify / demonstrate some serious returns long before that. The fact is that nobody is going to fund an initiative for that long (if at all) that is packed with theory and promise, but doesn’t return on the investment. It simply does not matter how amazing the new world is and how much value exists there to capitalize if you starve to death on the ship trying to reach it.

If BI is to be successful, we have to knock out quick wins along the way to continue to justify the existence and perpetuation (read: funding) of the initiative. So, here’s my tip of the day:

For every year in your strategic BI roadmap, define and execute three short-term wins with the following characteristics:

  1. Choose tasks that can be implemented in 30 days or less with no complex dependencies
  2. Establish clear, quantitative ROI expectations for these tasks which can be measured / demonstrated 30 days after implementation
  3. Target tasks at the pain of key players in your organization who are skeptical about BI’s capacity to help them

In so doing, you’ll take a huge step forward in justifying your initiative, proving its value in the short-run, and winning detractors to your cause. Trust me when I tell you that all three  vital stepping stones toward your no-doubt awe-inspiring vision for BI.

Posted in Business and Finance | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Missing Love

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Jeff Block
Do you love God?

Do you love God?

Last time I wrote, I talked about being consumed by … or obsessed with … God. My post (and my thinking) was inspired by the song, “You will be my Song” by Matt McCoy. A couple of days ago, in reading back through that post, I realized that I missed a critical component of the meaning of Matt’s song … to actually love God.  

We’ve all heard that love is not a feeling. Love is a choice — a decision to put you before me. Love is “do[ing] nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider[ing] others better than yourselves.” (Philippians 2:3)  

Love is sacrifice. If I love you, I will serve you. If I love you, I will take the time and energy to determine your needs and invest in them even if mine are not being met in return. Loving you means reaching out to you even if you don’t reach out to me.  

That’s hard. Frankly, I suck at it. There was a time when I thought pretty highly of myself in this arena, but I’ve really had that wind knocked out of me lately. As it turns out, I’m pretty seriously consumed with wanting to be loved … to feel loved, but not all that great at actually loving others … now that I’ve learned a little more about what love actually is. And this is especially true with regard to my loving God.  

Listen to how God has loved me … and you …  

[Jesus], being in very nature God,
      did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
But made himself nothing,
      taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
      he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!     

— Philippians 2:5-8      

Or, how about this…     

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.     

— 1 John 4:9-10     

I have no idea how this works, but God really loves me. These passages (and a hundred others) demonstrate that fairly clearly — the heights and depths of God’s love for me (see Romans 8:38-39). For a really long time, I glazed over it … accepting a somewhat impersonal “God loves everyone” interpretation of passages like these. And that’s true. God does love everyone. But it’s not the main point Paul and John (who wrote these verses) were making. I think their focus was (and mine needs to be) on God’s profound, immense, personal love for me. Like a Father loves his son or a Bridegroom loves his bride. God’s love is both passionate and paternal. God truly knows me, and He loves me anyway.     

So it’s easy to see that God loves me. The question is, “Do I love God?” Matt (McCoy) proclaims in his song, “God I’ll always love you.” I’ve sung words like that a lot in my life, but lately as I’ve stepped back to really ponder songs like these and Scripture that says things like John 14:15 (“If you love me, you will obey what I command”), I’ve come to question my love for God. Loving another person (my wife, my friends, God) isn’t mental, it’s heart. It’s actions. It’s attitude. It’s can be mushy romantic feelings (the soul), but it is also an act of th will (the heart). It’s commitment. Not mental ascent about what I should do or that the other party is pretty cool and therefore probably worthy of love on some abstract level. It’s diving in. Fully being there. Setting hope on. Placing before myself. Being devoted to. Etc.    

This is a challenging time in my life. To be really honest, I’ve come to realize that I’m not sure what I believe and at times I feel pretty alone in wrestling through my thoughts and fears and feelings. Some have been quick to tell me what to do — things that feel like Christian platitudes — in response to my fears and feelings. And it definitely seems like there are a lot of “should’s” floating around, especially when it comes to relating to, trusting, believing, knowing, following God. Even loving God.    

But the Bible says that it’s God’s kindness that leads to repentance (Romans 2:4), not the law … not the should’s. I’m really trying to turn my attention from what I think I know or what I think I should do … away from those things (which cannot bring life – see Galations 3:21) toward God’s love for me (which is Living Water, what Jesus describes in John 4:1-26). I want to be like the tree David talks about in Psalm 1, which thrives and flourishes because it’s planted by “streams of living water”.    

There are churches everywhere that believe and teach that God will love me if I’m good enough … if I do the right things. This is, in effect, the anti-gospel, and might be the saddest horrificly-flawed interpretation of the Bible out there. But even the churches that have (by God’s grace) seen beyond this lie to realize that we work hard and do the right thing because God loves us … many still seem to focus on the actions of obedience (a list of things to do and not to do), not a living relationship with God.    

God is wooing me. Calling me. Asking me to marry Him. God wants us to be together. Complete, eternal, unhindered devotion. Before I clean up my act or believe the right things or do spiritual stuff … there needs to be a decision to turn from my independence (being ruled by my sinful nature … maybe I’ll call it “the single life”) and decide to give that up for the Bridegroom, who has asked that I spend the rest of my (eternal) life with Him. This is no less than being born again.    

But it is not the mental ascent to ideas or the effective negotiation of a list of do’s and dont’s that seals a marriage covenant with Jesus, the Bridegroom. It’s the absolute abandonment of the independence of the single life and the giving of myself completely to married life instead. Just like in an earthly marriage. You just can’t maintain independence and achieve oneness. There’s no going halfway. The Bible talks about this in terms like “dying to self” (Romans 6:1-14) and losing my life to find it (Matthew 10:39), purchasing a pearl of infinite worth (Matthew 13:44-45), and so on. In all the language and stories in the Bible, what life is really about is about marrying up … a relationship with the Bridegroom that allows us to trade a sad lonely life of my way and my self-gratification for the glory of a life together with Him.        

Donald Miller, in his book “Searching for God Knows What”, puts it this way…    

[The Bible is] attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbing relational history man has had since then and, furthermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace in order to have relational intimacy with God once again, thus healing himself of all the crap he gets into while looking for a relationship that makes him feel whole. Maybe the gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas. And perhaps our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense that they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense that they blind us to the necessary relationship that must begin between ourselves and God for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps [and lists of do’s and dont’s] steal the sincerity with which we might engage God.    

Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. [Successfully baking cookies requires following a recipe – a simple set of steps.] Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that in order for a person to know Jesus they must get a kind of crush on Him. But what I am suggesting is that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He [actually] exists, that He is God, that He is in authority, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on and so on, all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me because if God made us, wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction than would be required by following a kind of recipe.    

I realize it all sounds terribly sentimental, but imagine the other ideas popular today that we sometimes hold up as credible: We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centering her inner self; and some of us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture [think “the Romans Road” and other examples], though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themselves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are Americans…. I think it is more safe and more beautiful and more true to believe that when a person dies he will go and be with God because, on earth, he had come to know Him, that he had a relational encounter with God not unlike meeting a friend or a lover or having a father or taking a bride, and that in order to engage God he gave up everything, repented and changed his life, as this sort of extreme sacrifice is what is required if true love is to grow. We would expect nothing less in a marriage; why should we accept anything less in becoming unified with God.    

In fact, I have to tell you, I believe the Bible is screaming this idea and is completely silent on any other, including our formulas and bullet points. It seems, rather, that Christ’s parables … were designed to bypass the memorization of ideas and cause us to wrestle with a certain need to cling to Him.   

At just the right time, while I was yet a sinner, Christ [called me to be His] (Romans 5:6-8, paraphrased). Not perfect, not totally free of my rebellious nature and my selfish desire to have things my way, but His. That’s how much He loves me. And the more I allow that to sink into my soul, the more it’s melting my heart.

Posted in Psalms, Music and Worship, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment