It's the Content, Stupid.

Norman Lear (writer/creator of most of the prime time situation comedies of the seventies and eighties, like All in the Family, Maude, Golden Girls among MANY) said something interesting on Morning Joe this morning.

When asked what he watches on TV these days he mentioned the shows South Park and Curb Your Enthusiasm, to which Joe Scarboro noted "those aren't network shows".

"I don't know. I don't have time to watch TV. My Tivo goes out and finds the content." (not an exact quote, but close enough).

I imagine that the network brand managers at NBC, ABC and CBS are now on suicide watch.

And it got me thinking. I know the names of the three major networks (four if you include FOX) and have watched them for years, but for the life of me I could not describe their "brand".

To add to the woes of the network brand managers, in my house the networks are known as channels 4, 5, 6 and 12.

Yet in some sort of attempt to "network brand" each show, they superimpose that translucent logo in the lower right hand corner of the screen. In an age of 200 channels, DVRs and Tivo, what exactly is this supposed to accomplish?

Are there really people out there who channel surf, looking for the CBS "eye" or the NBC "peacock"?

I don't think so.

And add to the mix, all the specialty channels for DIY shows, Outdoor, Explorer, Discovery, National Geographic, Sports, Business, Shopping, News and the traditional broadcast network brands mean even less.

Sorry folks. Take the network logo off my screen and focus on improving the content and I'll watch. For me, it doesn't work the other way around.

Insourcing Strategies

Is outsourcing a potential threat to your I.T. staff? In June of 2006, InformationWeek conducted a study of the business drivers for outsourcing Information Technology.

Seems to me that if your department is nervous, this list provides a blueprint for anyone serious about maintaining or positioning I.T. as an internal core competency.

Not surprisingly, the major driver for outsourcing consideration is anticipated cost savings.

Outsourced contracts are generally based upon measurable SLAs (service level agreements). You pay for a certain level of service.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do we currently have published SLAs for our most routine tasks?

2. Do we monitor our performance against these SLAs and publish them within the company?

3. What are the consequences of missing an SLA? Do we simply "write them off as bad experiences" or do we figure out how to better address the situation the next time. How do your processes get refined, improved? Do you communicate proposed improvements to the affected customer?

4. Are our processes cost effective? Do we have the opportunity to centralize tasks (i.e. network management and monitoring, security, backup and recovery strategies, data center management)?

5. Can we consolidate overlapping or duplicate technologies or applications?

6. Do we survey our internal customer satisfaction? If so, how do we respond to concerns and criticisms?

Strategy #1: In short - start acting like an outsourcing company, paying attention to costs and documented service levels. Be able to conduct a fact based discussion about your internal service levels and their associated costs. It might be beneficial to speak to several outsourcing companies to help benchmark how competitive you really are.

Next, figure out what you're really good at and where you aren't. Have an honest discussion with your team about your overall skill levels. Identify any critical tasks for which you simply aren't well suited. For example, network security is something that while many I.T. departments CAN do, it's something many times left for the experts. Do you really want to be looking through hundreds of pages of packet logs and alerts each day? Is this a competency you will need longer term or is it best left to outsiders?

Strategy #2: Divide and Conquer. Give up the stuff you're bad at, unqualified to perform or simply don't want to do and get really great at the tasks that are important to your company.

Strategy #3: Grow your expertise "two deep". If you're serious about delivering top quality service levels, invest in training for both a primary and a backup person for each critical function. Transition your team from generalists to specialists and increase their scope of responsibility. A bright network engineer at site A should also be able to manage the networks at Sites B and C. This will improve system reliability (fewer cooks in the kitchen), #4 on our list and also improve operational expertise (#6 on our list).

Strategy #4: Prioritize. Make one of those 2x2 Consulting matrices. On one axis the categories are URGENT and NOT URGENT. On the other axis is IMPORTANT and NOT IMPORTANT. Focus on the URGENT and IMPORTANT tasks first. Then forget the rest.

Strategy #5: Network with other (non competing) I.T. departments and resources and share ideas. Too often we all get hung up in trying to reinvent the wheel. What a colossal waste of time! See what works. Adapt practices that are better than yours and make them your own.

Clearly these strategies cannot guarantee anyone a job. But they will go a long way toward improving your internal performance and suppressing that knee jerk reaction to outsource I.T. whenever the CFO's laptop locks up.

Smart Companies are Listening

On my other blog (Dave's Blog) I recently wrote about our family trip to Canada, where we rediscovered Poutine, a delicious concoction of french fries, beef gravy and cheese curds. I speculated out loud that it would be a great new side dish for Culvers to add to its menu.

Less than 3 hours later, I had a response to my idea from Jim Doak, Culver's Director of R&D and Executive Chef!

Now that's impressive.

And it begs the question. How responsive is your company?

Are you monitoring Internet news sources, blogs and social networking sites for the mention of your company name, or products? Do you have a process in place to disseminate ideas, complaints, suggestions for internal action?

In the past, the traditional methods for gleaning this information would have been through focus groups, customer surveys or news clipping services. Or perhaps your company would be lucky enough to receive a letter, directed to the correct person, with a suggestion.

Expensive, clunky and time consuming.

Today you can easily setup a Google gadget to scour the web (sites, newsreaders, blogs) for specific mentions of company name, products or services and have the results sent to your desktop automatically. Free and immediate.

Really smart companies realize that ideas can come from anywhere.

And they're "listening".

And they're acting.

Are you?

Technogripe

Erin Bell of PCWORLD.ca nails the Ten Worst Consumer Tech Trends in her recent article.

For those of you too lazy to read the entire article....

10. Closed source technology.
9. Over promising and under delivering.
8. Fanboys (and Fangirls).
7. Region Encoding.
6. Licensing Fees.
5. Format Wars.
4. Proprietary file formats.
3. Web ads.
2. Expensive wireless data plans.
1. DRM

Are there any she missed?

Paging Dr. Godin.........

I know Seth Godin writes books about permission marketing and leveraging the voices of passionate customers to spread the word about your remarkable product, your remarkable service or your remarkable brand.

He speaks to prestigious companies like Yahoo and Google. He's also an web entrepreneur with involvement in the likes of squidoo.com and ever.com.

The question is: Has he ever conducted a "intervention"?

Clearly one is called for. Recently it's been reported that Prince has his legal eagles threatening to sue fan websites. This may be a brilliant new marketing strategy (after all, Brittney Spears is currently at the top of the charts after all her public (and pubic) misadventures.)

Prince's spokespeople claim that its a dispute between his record label and three "unauthorized" fanclub websites who use his pictures, likeness and music lyrics without express permission. Hmmm.

I think the website fanclubs should solicit donations from their membership and buy Seth Godin a ticket to Minneapolis. If they get enough money, perhaps they could send along Guy Kawasaki and Tim O'Reilly as well.

Either we're at the dawn of a brilliant new web marketing strategy or the dusk of a music career.

Either way, I trust Seth Godin to figure it out and give us the answer.

Be Like the Internet

[via O'Reilly Radar]

Thanks to Dave Orbin's Blog, which contains liveblogging from BerlinBlase, a Web2.0 conference being held as I write.

First up is a presentation by Scott Hirsch of the Management Information Group.

View Upload your own

Fascinating stuff. If any of this information is startling to you, take your web team to lunch and have them explain - or better yet, send someone to the conference next year.

A Generation of Cyber-MacGyvers

I don't know how many of you remember the TV show MacGyver.

(From Wikipedia)

"The series revolved around Angus MacGyver (known to his friends as MacGyver or "Mac") who favoured brain over brawn in order to solve desperate problems.

Angus MacGyver's main asset is his practical application of scientific knowledge and inventive use of common items—along with his ever-present Swiss Army knife and duct tape and the usual coincidence of being locked up in a room full of useful materials. The clever solutions MacGyver implemented to seemingly intractable problems—often in life-or-death situations requiring him to improvise complex devices in a matter of minutes..."

Well, hold on ladies and gentlemen, because the next generation of kids to enter the workforce are cyber-MacGyvers.

To find an example, I needed to look no further than the room upstairs that my son occupies.

A friend of mine wanted to upgrade a very old (circa 2001) iMac and dropped it off to have my son look into it. It had 256k memory, a decent (600mhz) processor and a slot load CD drive, but it was running an old OS and had an outdated browser.

Since newer software comes delivered on DVDs, (and no CD versions of the OS could be located) we decided to order a DVD slot drive for the iMac.

Within just a few minutes my son had located the appropriate memory on the web and had sourced a slot loading DVD drive for the iMac.

My friend purchased the parts and had them shipped to my house.

Once the memory arrived, it took just a few seconds to learn how to crack the case and install the memory (done in 60 seconds). We couldn't install a newer OS because the DVD reader hadn't yet arrived.

Then somewhere in the back of his mind, my son remembered (he still doesn't know where he learned it) that you could boot an iMac as a "target" of another Mac. A quick trip to Google validated his recollection and provided the "how to" instructions. We connected the two systems via Firewire. Then using his Mac Mini DVD reader, he began loading my friend's OS X (Tiger) onto the iMac.

About 90 minutes later, the whole process was completed.

Lesson learned? Its not what you know. Its how quickly you can source the answer. Growing up in an internet world is equipping our sons and daughters to compete on speed - leveraging the knowledge of others.

This changes the rules.

No longer will knowing the answer count. Sourcing the information and leveraging it will matter most. And beng confident in your abilities doesn't hurt either.

We're raising a nation of cyber-MacGyvers. And that's a good thing.

Are You Shooting for Sheboygan?

Now that Standard time is upon us, I started thinking about time and how we use it (and abuse it).

I've always had an internal clock that ran fast. I always wanted to get tasks accomplished so I could get onto the next one. I guess you could call it a heightened sense of urgency. I can't explain it. Its just there. My business associates would say that I don't let the execution details get in the way!

Don't get me wrong. For some jobs, I can procrastinate with the best of them. But generally, when a task needs doing. It needs to be done.

I can relate to the story of Lee Iacocca (former President and CEO of Chrysler) , who had asked his engineers to come up with a convertible version of a popular model (back in the days when there were popular Chrysler cars). Faced with an estimated timeline of many months of engineering and modelling, in frustration, he allegedly shouted "Just cut the damn top off!"

As any student can relate, the time when term papers are usually started is the night before they're due. Tasks always seem to take the allotted (or expected) time. Give them a month. It'll take a month. Give them a week. You'll have the papers in a week.

In many cases, more time does not guarantee more effort or necessarily better results.

It's important that from time to time, you test this theory. If you have a project that should take an average person three weeks to accomplish, assign it to someone with a deadline of two weeks. The artificial constraints sometimes yield surprising results. Assumptions are challenged. Priorities are acted upon.

No one could break the four minute mile, until Roger Bannister did it. Benchmarking accomplishments helps drive improved performance.

And once someone has "broken the four minute mile", expectations are raised. And once expectations are raised, accomplishments can follow. Current mile record? 3:43.3 (by Hicham El Guerrouj) - more than 16 seconds faster than Roger Bannister!

I've worked for a big company who took ten days to close the books each quarter. Why? Because they'd always taken ten days. No one within the accounting department had looked outside our industry to see what other (larger) companies were doing. Some large companies could close their books in two days. We took five times longer than best practices for a routine task. No one challenged the timeframe. No one challenged the process. So we wasted eight days each quarter.

Our I.T. department took ten days to deliver a new laptop. Why? Because we purchased laptops one at a time, whenever a new employee started. We waited for about ten days to receive the laptop from our supplier, loaded the company's software image, then physically shipped it to the employee. No one had ever challenged the process.

The big constraint in this process was the wait time until we received the laptop. The obvious solution? Keep a small inventory on hand. But no one within I.T. could envision the answer because "we didn't have the budget for it." A small inventory would have allowed us to deliver new laptops (locally) the same day they were requested and the inventory carrying cost would have been more than offset by our (tenfold) reduced purchasing costs.

My neighbor's Dad was a very successful entrepreneur, located in a small lakeside Wisconsin town northeast of us, called Port Washington. At night, looking northward you can easily see the lights of Sheboygan, WI.

His favorite saying was; "You can't hit the Moon, shooting for Sheboygan!"

His sights were always set higher.

Are yours?