Forest, Tree, Raccoon

If you are flying over a state, you will be able to know if you’re over a town if you see rooftops, or if you are over a forest if you see treetops. Information systems should have a layer where you can only focus on the x-tops in order to know where you are or like some people call it a 30,000 ft view of where we are standing compare to where we should be or thought we were.

However if you build an information system that only focuses on the forest, it will be very difficult to do something and link it to a specific result or to really understand the problem. This is the reason that your information system should have a tree level, where you can tell a tree from the rest, if it is a redwood or a sequoia, if it is 50 years old or 100. It is at this level where you can start understanding the cause and effect of things or to differentiate an alarm from another.
At this point, if you want to have a very robust information system you will need a raccoon level, where you can come very close to the tree and see that the raccoon is at a very specific tree. This level of detail can help you make action plans, react to specific needs or even lower priorities of problems.
It is important that the information system allows information workers to go from forest to raccoon very quickly and vice versa.
Weak information systems either focus on forest or raccoon but do not give a vertical drill down capability in seconds from forest to tree to raccoon.
The question at hand, what kind of information system do you have? Or are you building?

Business and Personal Cadence

If you are in 6th grade and you participate in a speed competition using a bike and you win, is because you moved your feet faster than everyone else (high cadence). From that point on if you want to excel at riding a bike very fast, you will have to exercise and practice every day so that you can reach a level of synchronization between your feet, muscles, heart, lungs and brain that will allow for you to ride your bike faster than anyone else.
The same way, your productivity and efficiency will go faster if you reach high information cadence, this means that if you information sources, your collaboration and analysis skills and your execution capabilities are highly synchronize you will ride faster in the information age.
To illustrate, if you have two competitors and one has an information system that allows them to have business and personal performance information every week, and the other company has the same information every month. The one that has the information every week will make adjustments to its strategy 3 times before the other one gets a chance to analyze what adjustments need to be made.
If the first company makes a mistake it will find out next week, if the second one makes a mistake it will find out next month. If there is new business opportunity this week and is the first week of the month, the first company will be able to embrace it; the second one will probably never know it existed.
A second example would be woker A and worker B, worker A has a wide network of colleagues, industry experts and complementors. Worker B only interacts with people in his department. Worker A uses technology tools that help him collaborate with its network of friends, search for information or to find who has the information. Worker B is a very strong E-mail user. If their boss wants to know if there is market for a new product, Worker B sends an e-mail to its friends and colleagues. Worker A creates an on-line survey with 5 questions; it sends it to its network of friends, colleagues, industry experts and complementors. He gets the results on line and in graph form. It reports its result to his boss in two days while Worker B is still waiting for his friends to even read the e-mail that was sent.
The point that I am trying to make is that if your information system has low cadence you will have a competitive disadvantage to those that have a higher Information cadence.
So… Is your information cadence High?

The “If it is too hard you end up not doing it” Effect!!

There are several things in life that we are aware that we have to do or that it would be very good if we do it, however since it is very hard to do them; we end up not doing them. For example you may be lying in bed and suddenly you watch a program on cooking healthy food, so you start thinking about eating that healthy food tonight. Then you realize that you have to go to several supermarkets to get all the ingredients, that once you get home (after all the traffic) you will spend 1.5 hours cooking it and at the end you will have to clean all the dishes!!! You end up ordering pizza.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to make a presentation for a group of Information Workers about the problems that they face and the opportunities ahead of them. While thinking about the presentation it occur to me that asking them about how much time they spend using e-mail, if they knew what RSS and Blogs meant, etc. would be a good idea for the presentation. However the presentations were 2 days away so I used an on-line survey tool and sent them the questions. In 1 hour 20% of them had answered the questionnaire and after that the tendency of the results was the same and we reached a 40% completion. The day of the presentation I only presented the results and the audience was amaze to see their behavior on graphs. I looked good but without a tool like this It would have been too hard to get this information and I would have ended up not doing it.

If your organization decides to go on a Balanced Score Card Project that would have 3 levels: company, department and personal. Very soon you would have to start thinking about building thousands of scorecards every week. They should give you information that is not more than one week old. First you are very excited about the new initiative and you start working on manual scorecards, staffing the department to deliver them on time to every level. Soon enough your team will be exhausted and de-motivated. They will start delivering the scorecards late and their relevance to the different levels will start declining. Next thing you know the whole initiative will fall apart.
Whenever you start to do something that adds a lot of value to the organization, make sure that doing it requires more work than the value being added. Try always to start small and build up from there so that you can start creating the proper systems that will allow you to scale up your initiative.

I am running out of gas… Yesterday!!

If you are traveling with your family and your car indicates that you have ½ of a tank…


and suddenly you find a sign that reads “NO GAS 82 Miles”



Do you stop and fill the thank or not? Now imagine that your “Full/Empty” meter is actually telling you how full your car was yesterday at this time. (delay of a day) And that you gas status is actually…



Most likely you will end up …


Definitely that this situation could have been avoided. The fundamental problem that we are trying to address is that it is important to have information as long as it is opportune. If it is not on time (real time) we will be making decisions based on it, and most likely will be causing a greater problem or making a very bad decision.
If our car would not have a “full/empty” meter then the very cautious ones are going to be filling the tank every Hour. When we have a meter we assume two things: That the information is correct and that it is real time, in other words, that it reflects the reality at this very minute.

Now a day’s organizations are putting a lot of effort in having measurement tools and scoreboards; however we have to take into consideration that it must be correct and should reflect the reality of today and not yesterday´s. By not doing this the risk is higher since we will be making decisions and generating action plans based on information that we believe blindly.
I do not want to leave you with the impression that I am against measurements and managing using indicators, what I am trying to make clear is that once you decide to go this way you MUST make sure that the information is CORRECT and OPORTUNE (real time) because if it is not, we are better off without them.
“I am better off NOT knowing my reality, than being sure of an incorrect one”
We can conclude that if information has value, its highest value is when is generated and with time it loses its value until it reaches Zero or close to it.
It is my goal that from this point on when we say “I got that information” we actually mean “I got a system that can give me real time and accurate information, everyday”.

The Hamburger Effect

An Information Worker should have secure access from anywhere at any time to relevant and opportune information using a single intuitive system.
Every time I talk to information Workers they always argue that they “Have” the information they need. However, one of the biggest challenges that IW´s face today is what we call the Hamburger Effect.
If you taste the meat, then after you finish eating the meet you eat the bun and after that you eat the lettuce and tomato, finally you have a slice of cheese with ketchup and mayo. Your Brain will not register the taste of a Hamburger. Information is just like hamburgers, in order for your brain to register the meaning of information presented to you; it has to be presented all at once.

If you are building an Information System or already using one, make sure that you are not suffering from the “Hamburger Effect” and that you enjoy the full “Information Experience” so that you get the full picture before you make a decision. However your information system should allow you to take the “slice of cheese” out and analyze it on more detail if necessary.
Drill down on the information that is presented to you is something that you system should allow you to do in a very ease way.
So now the question remains: Are you suffering the Hamburger Effect.
system

Find the Ursa Major (Great Bear) on a Starred Night

If you have spent time on a farm away from the city lights and have had the opportunity to see a starred night you will find that this black and white landscape is second to none. However, you will find very hard to find de Ursa Major.
Now a day’s information workers live on a daily starred night where finding the information required among all the information available is not an easy task. This situation brings the following issues
• Very hard to find the most important information required to do your job.
• Distraction with interesting information however irrelevant or not important.
• Hard to define if the information means that we are doing fine or not.
• Very difficult to determine if the decision that we have made was the best alternative or if we have consider every possible alternative.

I am sure that most of us live on an environment as the one described above, if for these reasons that the information workers will have to develop the competency of creating information systems that will let relevant information to be received, analyzed and shared opportunely.
Is here where tools like Balanced Score Card, Business Intelligence, CRM and ERP will help you have the information you need (not more, no less) when you need it (not a minute late, not a minute early).

Typically these problems get solved internally in the organizations (if they do) but in our environment we need information from our vendors, our context (country, industry, region, etc.) and our customers. This is the reason we should look into a new set of enabling technologies like Feeds, RSS, Blogs, XML, etc.
From now on, when you look for information try to make sure that the only time you see a Starred night is when you are in the country far from the city.

Ok! so who is an Information Worker

An Information Worker is somebody that regardless of his or her position on the company makes decisions based on Information and not feeling.



It’s always seeking information about his or her industry, context (city, country, world), and identifies the relationship networks required to be successful in his job and engages in these networks.



An IW feels comfortable using Technology Tools, like e-mail, spreadsheets, pivot tables, internet, blackberry, etc. All IW use this tools but not everybody that uses this tools is an IW.



Another characteristic is that when information is presented to them they don just take it, they want to make sure it balances out, that it makes sense, they want to know where it came from and what other sources confirm it. They scrutinize the information like no others!!!



And last but not least, they know what information they need, why they need it and how to use it. Not because you have information it means that it is "The Information" you need.