IT and Texas Hold'em

IT, meaning information technology, is a funny thing. Over the last number of years many saw it as the source of massive productivity increases and the way to make their businesses more competitive. While this was the case generally, any specific situation could vary to a huge extent.

Traditionally IT projects all worked the same way. Step one was to decide that you wanted to do something, followed by investigation into the rough cost, getting dollars budgeted, putting out an RFP to figure out what solutions might be available, whittling down the alternatives, trialing a couple, selecting the final, getting the hardware that it will run on, piloting it in your company, figuring out how to get it to everyone, and then supporting it. That was one heck of a sentence!

What all of this translates into is that IT projects involve spending the vast majority of the money BEFORE ANY benefit is realized. And the reality is that some work and some don't. At one point there was statistic floating around that up to 70% of all large software deployments were abandoned before completion!

While many in the industry talk about ROI (Return on Investment) the way a manufacturer purchasing a new stamping device would, there really isn't that clear of connection for me. The problem with IT is that the critical factor is US, you and me. Will we like it, use it, etc. It strikes me that with the wild swing is return, and with zero being a reasonable outcome, IT spending is more like Texas Hold em then like typical corporate investments.

If this is indeed the case, then it would have a significant impact on the type of person you'd want in the role. Often IT people are not know for their social or people skills. As such they think about the technically RIGHT way, and not the way that will work based on the tells of the other players.

It is with this position that I offer a radical idea. Turn IT spending into a poker game with the returns directly impacting the CIO and the team, and make sure the CIO is a decent gambler. If he had limited confidence in a given situation and wasn't getting a good read on the other players, he'd lighten the bet. And where there was greater certainty he might go all in. I suspect if one set a model up like this that the ROI would be far better overall, and holiday parties would undoubtedly be improved with these new sensibilities.

Hershey and a design breakthrough

As someone who designs software I spend a great deal of time thinking about how things work. While there are the truly great things like the iPod, there are a huge number of things in this world that don't work well. Last year at my 40th birthday party I was outed! While I love the finer food and flavors, it came out that my standby is PB&J and the requisit chocolate milk. Over the years I've been frustrated by the Hershey syrup spout. It was invariably dirty, and with my children being the other users it was usually gross (not that it slowed me down much). With that background I want to thank Hershey engineers for addressing this issue with their fabulous new top! If my calculations are correct and the typical mom/dad spent 10 seconds a day wiping the top clean this design change will save over 100 years of time per year. I guess it is the little things in life that make a difference.

Time, Friends and Facebook

As I use Facebook more and more different aspects strike me. The one that came to light was that fact that none of us have any time.

This last weekend I was lucky enough to get to spend it with my best childhood friends is Austin Texas. While fun was had by all, this fun was 20 years in the making. Each of us, there were three, have our lives, schedules and logistics that have conspired to make this nearly a quarter century in the making. This is not a good or acceptable interval. It got me thinking about time and friendships.

While we all have our lives packed in such a way that we have very few spare weeks, weekends, days or even hours. We do dozens of things in a given day, where our grandparents or Europeans would only have a handful. The absence of these big blocks of time make maintaining the relationships beyond the immediate very difficult. Even a leisurely phone call is challenging because we'll be leaving in a few minutes...

While our time is so short what I notice with my own time is that I have lots of free seconds. 30, 60 maybe 180 seconds littered throughout my day. What do I do with mine? Mostly nothing! Look up the game, the most recent tech announcement, etc. The value of these seconds is not great.

So to recap, lots of wasted seconds and friends that I'd really like to keep up with. How might these two things be married....Facebook!

I've found that since I've been on Facebook, with an iPhone in my pocket I've grown closer to 20 folks and communicated with them more, and on more topics then I've done in my life, and it's only been a couple months.

Facebook on the iPhone have made my life better by making my friends more available and allowing me to use spare seconds in a radically more valuable way. If you believe, as I do, that from human communication come ideas, insights and goodness we should be in for something truly exciting.

Facebook is a customized reality show

I'd had an flux capacitor moment (I'd just taken the '80s movie quiz on Facebook) that lead to my Facebook status on Friday, " Facebook is like a custom reality show staring all your friends, but without the stupid competitive plot line...come to think of it it makes Seinfelds plot look meaningful.". After a handful of comments I wanted to play out the idea a bit further.

It struck me that I was watching Facebook like a TV show. There was a cast of characters, some primary and others supporting. There were plots that were evolving amongst the characters. But what made it so compelling was that the cast was so varied, and the plot unpredictable. In reallife time has grown so short that lifes contacts have been sanitized of so much of the interesting tidbits and asides, but on Facebook you have this richness. In our real lives we often don't have time for more then work, family and a close core of friends. While this intimate group provides us with much joy, its characters are often so well known as to limit the drama. On Facebook the technology allows us to have more friends, increase diversity and add drama because it requires so little of our time.

Over the course of recent weeks I've seen relationships spark and fade, puppies born, the euphoria and opposite of the election, and friends go through hard times. Facebook is amazing for it's ability to see the drama of life, our lives. TV is simply not this compelling.