I read an interesting article at Computerworld this morning: “Ready for 2020? Advice for every career stage.“
It discussed the differences between different ages of technology worker, and the different interests and abilities. I thought the article had an interesting conclusion: that different workers had different challenges to face. It went on and on about how recent graduates don’t have experience and certifications, and how cell phones are more important, etc. That is obvious. Another article I read recently in Think Big Be Big showed that mobile DATA traffic exceeded cell phone PHONE/VOICE transmission traffic every month in 2009.
It is a wired world and I recognize the differences in the newest texting generation, but I completely disagree with the conclusion of the article.
Since I started working with technology around 1982, there has been a constant drumbeat of change. Every piece of technology impacts business. Someone needs to communicate it. It changes constantly. The points where technology creates advantages moves instantly and frequently. Those change elements are constant.
The offshoot is that technology professionals have to keep a relevant skillset, develop skills for whatever is coming next, understand when, where, why and how “their” technology provides value, and understand how to communicate all of that. That means that with a common set of skills, technology professionals can be unemployment proof. These skills are the ones that provide value no matter what the flavor of the month is.
Here are 7 skills that will help unemployment-proof a technology professional:
1) A love of learning and willingness to learn.
2) An understanding of the impact that technology and business have on each other.
3) A willing acceptance of change in all its forms.
4) An ability to communicate and translate business and technology.
5) A professional willingness to do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done.
6) An ability to demonstrate and showcase your skills.
7) An ability to learn from mistakes and use that learning to prevent new ones.
If you have these, your personal professional competitive advantage will ensure you are constantly employable and constantly employed. I’m not saying that a short sighted company won’t downsize you. I’m just making the point that with this skillset, you will have other companies ready and eager to onboard you if that happens. You will provide value across the technology and business spectrum. That’s a formula for unemployment proofing.
Can you think of other things? Do you disagree? Let me know
August 23rd, 2010
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If you are working for someone else, anyone other than yourself, your job is temporary. It may last 30 years, but it is temporary because you are working for someone else. You may lose your job. You would need a functional crystal ball or a time machine to know when your job might end.
Given this challenging economy, and the fear that comes from having a temp job in a difficult time, you may ask yourself, what can you do? This is a complex question because it is really several questions:
- What can you do to keep your current job?
- What can you do to get your next job?
- What can you do to get a new job at your current employer?
- What can you do to have the most job security?
I don’t like asking questions without answers, so here are some answers to these 4 questions. Here are my 4 brief solutions:
What can you do to keep your current job? You can be so valuable that you your employer cannot do without you. You can become the best known, the best educated, the best qualified for your job, and as long as you are not the CEO of your company, you can become trained, certified, educated and experienced at doing your boss’ job, your co-workers’ jobs. But there is more to it than that. You need to help your managers and executives KNOW that you are the most well qualified, the smartest, the most creative, in short, you need to make sure that the people responsible for hiring and firing YOU, know that you are the very best at everything that you are the best at.
What can you do to get your next job? First, figure out what and where your next job will be. Figure out what you want to do, and who you want to work for. Find out what that person or company needs, and figure out what YOU can do to contribute to their success. When you are looking for a job, it is NOT about you, it is about what you can do for someone else. Know what that company needs and be the person who can do what is needed.
Hired!
What can you do to get a new job at your current employer? Here is an important thing to remember. The company that you already work for is likely to be the best place to find a new job. There are two great reasons for this. The first is that they know you. They know your performance. They know your skills, your abilities. They don’t have to figure out anything about hiring a new employee, adding a new person to their payroll, onboarding a new person. The second reason is that for you to get a job at a new employer, your package of knowledge, skills and abilities have to be so overwhelmingly positive that you are worth the risk. Look where you are at, talk to people. Find your opportunity!
Which brings us to my 4th solution.
What can you do to have the most job security? The answer to this question is simple. Work for the one person in the world who would NEVER fire you. WORK for YOURSELF. Find a passion, develop your abilities, learn something unique and valuable, start your own company. Provide something new, something great, something unique, something creative. Figure out what gives you your own unique and personal professional competitive advantage, and figure out a way to profit from it. Charge what you are happy receiving, work at what you are proud of and carve your own niche, whether it is microscopic, or enormous.
If you know what you CAN do – your next question is, what SHOULD you do? That is an answer for another day.
July 29th, 2010
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We track what we care about – We track metrics that matter in our lives. If we care about something, it is important to HAVE metrics that we can track – metrics that measure improvement or not.
I had a doctors appointment yesterday. For the most part I just wanted to get some renewed RX’s, but as part of every visit, my doctor’s office checks weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and temp. My BP was a bit high, probably because I worked past 3am the night before, and started at 7am yesterday – probably because I’ve got 3 dozen projects simultaneously in need of care and feeding – probably because I was stressed about trying to get to the doctor’s office on time. For the slightly elevated BP, I have rationalizations.
But I was also up 11 lbs since my last doctor’s visit, and that was only 3 months ago. 
I was shocked. For many years, I’ve made it a practice to check my weight daily. I’ve checked it in the morning, checked it in the evening, checked it randomly almost every day.
When I look at the results – the bare measurement – and the factors involved in reaching those results, I am left with 2 emprical findings:
1) I stopped measuring my weight
2) My weight went where I didn’t want it to go
These two things are connected. As a whole, in life and in technology, people measure what they care about. Everyone watches their 401k, their annual salary… Everyone watches metrics about things in their life that are important to them. The first big company website I managed increased its traffic over 500% in the first year that I managed it. I know that particular statistic because that metric was one that I cared about.
Over the last two months, I’ve sold a house, bought a house, moved from one house to another… I’ve painted 4 ceilings, 3 rooms, and climbed on the roof to blow leaves out of gutters 3 times. I’ve also started a new gig, gained several hundred twitter followers and gotten my latest business almost ready to launch. The weight metric has escaped my monitoring because everything in my life has overwhelmed my time-limited and adhd-rattled attention-span.
I treated my weight as if it was less important.
We track what we care about – We track metrics that matter in our lives. If we care about something, it is important to HAVE metrics that we can track – metrics that measure improvement or not.
My point is – when you care about something, when something is important to you, make sure you have some measure of it. Make sure you have some metric that you can measure and monitor to ensure the thing that you care about is going in the direction you want it to go. Monitoring that sort of measurement, that sort of metric is the best way to correct course when things aren’t going your way.
This morning, before I started work, I stepped on the scale.
What do you think? Do you have metrics for things that matter to you? Do you monitor and manage them?
December 9th, 2009
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I originally called this “Higher bars, Changing Times, and how BusinessWeek misses the point of the Big Shift.” I still think that BusinessWeek misses the point but I think the requirement for changing metrics is more important.
John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison wrote a wonderful paper: The Big Shift: Why it Matters. You can read it here. I highly recommend it. It is insightful analysis and clear original thought. That is too rare.
Late last night I read a brief description of the Big Shift paper on page 10 of the November 23, 2009 BusinessWeek. (although I could not find the article on BW’s site) I was struck by the conclusions drawn from the “Return on Assets” chart, which BusinessWeek pulled and perhaps distorted slightly from page 12 of the 24 page “bigshiftwhyitmatters.pdf” BusinessWeek suggested that the report, and in particular the findings on Return on Assets (ROA) “provides fodder for those, like BusinessWeek’s Michael Mandel, who argue that the woes of the US Economy extend(s) beyond the financial sector and began showing up well before the housing bubble”
That small chart is such a minor part of the report. (I reproduced it here from and with credit to their paper) – The paper is delightfully brilliant, but I immediately thought that the pessimistic BusinessWeek conclusion that I quoted above was mistaken, perhaps even backwards. I think that changing
Chart from "The Big Shift"
times, and inflation, when combined with the paper’s ROA chart, suggest that our economy is very strong – amazingly strong, and extraordinarily robust and resilient.
My three points:
1) The rate of inflation is not trivial given a chart that goes back to 1965, and economy of scale has fundamentally shifted due to technology, and the rest of our ever-changing world.
Adjusting for the rate of inflation wouldn’t necessarily make the Return on Assets chart look more flat – but considering an actual company, its asset value and returns, AND its changing requirements might lead to a different conclusion.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator: http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm shows that over the time of that
chart, $1000 of 1965 dollars equates to something like $6835.02 of 2008 dollars. Excluding the recessionary pops in the tech bubble in 01-02 and the pop in the housing bubble in 08-09… ROA looks like it is gone from just under 5% to about 2%. Regardless of the consumer price index or the perhaps more appropriate producer price index, a percentage is a percentage – but consider a fictitious company that is making 5% ROA in 1965 with $1,000,000,000 of assets. Thats a return of $50,000,000. Adjusting for inflation using the consumer price index suggests a company with $6,835,020,000 in assets in 2008. That company would have a return of $341,751,000 with a 5% ROA – but only a return of $136,700,400. Is that a decline from 5% ROA? Is it a decline from $50m to $136m? (when adjusted for inflation)
2) Given the advances and changes in regulations and particularly in technology – which are CLEARLY covered in the Big Shift paper – the bar is simply set higher, everywhere. Any company has higher requirements to earn sales – to get returns – to exist. Enormous Seismic changes in business have emerged and been adopted across the entire economy. These changes initially provide competitive advantages to companies, but many are now essentially baseline requirements for doing business. These changes don’t happen without extraordinary increases in total assets.
Take any company from 1965 – say a bank. In 1965, a bank had costs for buildings, technology, people, marketing, and processes. All of those fixed costs are now an enormous order of magnitude larger than they would have been in 1965. That bank has to be equipped, staffed, and technologically able to meet customer’s expectations in 1965 and today, but those expectations and regulatory requirements and competitive forces are orders of magnitude both greater and more complex. In 1965, for example, checks written on the account of one bank, cashed at another bank might ordinarily take 5- 10 days to clear. Today the float is almost always less than 24 hours, and in some cases, can be only seconds. In 1965, there were no ATM’s, online banking, online bill payment, online monthly statements. There was no Sarbanes Oxley. There were very different legal and practical considerations for interstate and truly national banks. A bank with $6b in assets, today, has vastly different requirements – and it must staff to meet those requirements. So – if you look at that bank today, and say that it only has a 2% return on assets, that suggests a return of $136,700,400, in a world in which they have legal requirements that may include, say, keeping 7 years of electronic statements that can be accessed online instantly by their customers – and customer expectations that require them to have a thousand ATM’s, an online banking platform that is secure, scalable, and approaches or exceeds 99.99% availability.
This comparison extends across industries – I picked banking because I know it more intimately. (disclaimer: Since leaving Deloitte in 1999 as the Corporate Internet Technology Manager I’ve worked on Internet, Intranet and online banking elements for 3 banks via merger and acquisition.) Pick any other industry or business concern – and change has been enormous. In medicine, for example, in 1965, there was no HIPAA, no mail order pharmacies, no HMO’s, no outsourcing, no offshoring, etc. Hollywood didn’t have digital piracy, digital movie transmission, Redbox, and a cluster of cable companies waiting to first run their movies. The music industry had payola but no MP3′s or internet. Every industry has global competitive forces, global competition for talent and complete shifts. Pick almost any industry, and there are simply higher bars and different bars that companies must clear to succeed. Those higher requirements have resulted in larger asset requirements, but meeting those requirements, to me doesn’t really equate to lower efficiency. It is a maintenance of Return on Assets regardless of changes.
That’s critically important.
Rather than the gloomy BusinessWeek (Michael Mandel) type-suggestion that your chart reflects underlying woes that exist in our economy – I would argue that given the changes in the economy, in customer expectations, and in government regulations, it is amazing that companies manage to meet those expectations and requirements and yet have only declined from 5% ROA to 2%. From the other perspective – the 2% ROA is delivered while meeting significantly larger competitive, organizational, regulatory requirements in essentially every business that still exists.
3) Companies have invested in knowledge assets that cannot be tracked on balance sheets. This is nothing new, but knowledge assets are a larger percentage of total
Growing Knowledge Assets
assets – and perhaps that means that ultimately ROA percentages have dropped even more than suggested. The Big Shift addresses this knowledge requirement (see chart) but more importantly than mentioning it is – how can we quantify it?
Those steeper requirements – higher bars – greater requirements – are not a symptom of an economy in woes – they are merely a reflection of changing times. Across the economy, companies meet those requirements, grow, expand, and produce, and continue to return on assets…amazingly. Distilling it to Return on Assets can be justified, but conclusions from that distillation can’t assume “other things being equal” because the current return is based on the higher bars that changing times require.
To quote The Big Shift
“The answer is not to find ways to squeeze creative talent and customers in a zero sum battle to capture more of the existing pie, but rather, as we will see, to discover new ways of organizing and operating to more effectively create and capture new value.”
Michael Mandel writes in BusinessWeek (link here) that he “told Hagel that he didn’t want to write about his “big shift” until (he) saw industry data, so (he) could understand which industries were driving the corporate performance decline”
Does Mr. Mandel start with the premise that there is a corporate performance decline – wanting only evidence to support that premise? I can’t tell. If declining ROA equates to declining corporate performance, he is right. I think the world has changed too much since 1965
Perhaps the big shift is also a big shift in the way that we should evaluate corporate performance metrics, and in how we define success. Should we have more capable methods for tracking knowledge assets? That will be frightening for some executives because it might entail that a company that has significantly outsourced and offshored has significantly less assets (essentially that it has lost significant assets) when compared with a similar company that has outsourced less or not at all…
What metrics could be developed to track the value of knowledge assets? should those assets be monitored, and valued in ways similar to other business assets?
To me, it is obvious that there are higher bars and changing times. The Big Shift that John Seely Brown, Lang Davison, and John Hagel III write about – is a shift that may require changing metrics – at the very least. This Big Shift brings Big Questions… and I believe the answers will be essential because the shift reflects a clear paradigm shift.
What do you think? Am I right? Am I missing the point?
November 18th, 2009
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I’ve been reading Jason Kerchner’s blog more and more. On the 16th, he posted a great article on Procrastination, subtitled “Sprinting through things you don’t want to do.” His techniques involve defining changes as you want to define them.
I really enjoyed his article and as a person prone to procrastination, I recognized his systematic elimination of that efficiency sapping trait. An overview of his article’s methods for dealing with procrastination is to:
- Think about the task
- Pick an amount of time you are willing to devote to it
- Accept devotion of that amount of time and you as a resource to working on that task
- Set a timer for that amount of time
- Prepare before starting the timer
- Take a deep breath and then begin
- When the timer goes off, stop
That approach would work well with small tasks and large tasks. I wish that, as a country, the US had adopted that strategic overview and approach to the wars we are now embroiled in. Imagine if we had said – We will devote 4 years and 9 months to the tasks in Iraq – or any other reasonable but arbitrary time. We would probably have already ended the conflicts. We needed to set a limit, an exit strategy that would have pre-defined the change that we wanted to make happen, and when we wanted to make it.
I am drawn to this military analogy because it reminded me my experiences at Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island. 
There was a saying that – “They couldn’t stop the clock.” When I was there – undergoing the misery – we collectively knew that it as long as we stayed on track, it could only last for 13 weeks. Marine Corps Recruits learn that with every day that passes, one day less remains. No matter how many sand fleas crawl in your ear canal while you are standing motionless in a formation at Parris Island, no matter how much yelling goes on at 4am, no matter how many times you shine boots, run through sand … no matter how itchy, sore, hot, cold, wet, miserable and exhausted you find yourself, you understand that the difficult stuff is going to come to an end. As a recruit, you know that your exposure to all of that has a time limit, and you know every day passing is one less day remaining. Sometimes when you are miserable in more ways than you knew possible, that thought of a finite remaining time can give you strength. Sometimes knowing that change is coming can help a person with almost any current issue.
There were many lessons to learn at Parris Island. I think one of the most valuable is that concept of “They cannot stop the clock.” It gives every Marine a way to use the power of an ever-changing world – the power of change. Knowing that painful things often have arbitrary time limits helps a great deal in dealing with those difficulties.
You can use that too – and you don’t even have to give plasma donations to mosquitos in South Carolina swampland. You just have to think about it accept the power of change.
The knowledge that change is inevitable enables and can empower a person to survive their personal trials and ordeals. There is a popular book that looks at ways of dealing with and surviving change in terms of “Who Moved My Cheese.” 
To me, that approach seems somewhat backwards. Change is often painted as a disruptive force. To me, Change can be extremely powerful because beyond someone moving your cheese. You probably wouldn’t ask “who moved my obstacles?” You wouldn’t ask, “Who moved my difficulties?” You wouldn’t ask, “Who ended the misery?” But change can do that. Change will do that. Change has extraordinary power and anyone can use that.
Think about any personal, physical, emotional, business, or mental situation that you personally find difficult. With the exception of things like death that are final, change generally evaporates difficulties. The power of change applies to almost everything. If you are having a difficult time in a college course, remember that the course has a finite limit and it will end. Difficult project? It won’t last forever. Difficult boss? You won’t work for that boss forever. Difficult merger? Difficult business decisions? Difficult climate? No matter how painful, uncomfortable, and unhappy these things can make you, they are almost always finite. They will end. The sun will come up tomorrow. Things WILL change. Knowing that things change can give anyone strength, because change helps anyone overcome the most difficult things.
When the very worst difficulties weigh you down, when you have to meet life’s occasional troubling and terrible situations, when you have relationships that make you feel like crying – That is your opportunity to think positively about how those difficulties will pass. It is an opportunity to use the power of change. Those positive thoughts can be extraordinarily powerful. Change as a positive force can give anyone the strength to overcome, sustain, and survive extraordinary difficulties.
Know that change is inevitable. That means that even the most difficult things will invariably become less difficult.
October 21st, 2009
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I really love Mark Cuban’s thoughts on Financial Engineering vs. Investing. I wish he would take his core ideas and turn them into a book. He makes great points about investors, financial engineers, and the danger they pose to the economy of the future. I like to use metaphors to describe things – and his descriptions of the problems in the economy remind me of driving – so I’m going to use that.
Our economy is a car and we drive it. It takes a bit of effort to put on a seat belt. It takes a bit if effort to drive safe. Bad drivers in other cars are a danger to everyone on the road and the weather can only be semi-predicted in the future. At some point in time, we are going to hit ice, with bad drivers around us, and we just don’t want to take the time to minimize risk by putting our seat belts on. We don’t want the added expense of buying cars with lots of air bags everywhere. If we drive slower, it is safer, but we can’t make everyone else drive slower, and driving slower will make us late sometimes. We want to go fast, we want to be risky, and we want the rewards that come from being even more risky. Some people are too risky, and we can’t stop them all from driving. Mark Cuban says that at some point, they are going to cause crashes.
He is right.
I really enjoy his ideas when he advocates building an “oh shit we missed it fund” to protect against the inevitable crashes that will come from future financial engineering and bubbles. His other thoughtful suggestions are great, but the best part is that he realizes and points out that nobody can predict the future well enough to prevent all possible scenarios.
He suggests a failsafe fund. To quote Mr. Cuban, the mechanics of that fund would be “levy a fee of anywhere from 1c to 10c on every transaction of stocks or bonds which would go into a general fund, that I will call the “Oh Shit We Missed It Fund”. It will be there to fund the inevitable situation where someone figures out how to work around whatever regulations and tax code that is created.”
This is a simple and wonderful idea which is unfortunately (but ultimately) doomed to failure.
The problem isn’t the idea, which would essentially invest in advance in protection against future corporate and investment failures. The problem is in the political design of a government program to predict, prevent, and address the problem. Let’s say we call this the OSWMI Fund. It is a simple and powerful idea, and should be implemented. The problem is that no amount of legal lock-box creation could protect the OSWMI fund from politicians. They would raid it from every direction, every chance they got. Even if the people writing the new laws were the same congress members and senators who held their noses voting for $700 billion of Tarp funding – they would still write as many loopholes as were written into the social security code. (Which itself could be thought of as somewhat of a personal “oh shit I missed it fund.”
I think it is safe to say the social security “lockbox” has been opened so often, it has become a bit of a federally-mandated ponzi scheme where new money paid in goes out immediately for existing benefit recipients – instead of going in for the future withdrawals that will be made by the people who are paying it in. if we cannot keep a personal fund for rainy days when planning doesn’t work, with the lobbying power of the AARP pushing for an untouchable, perpetually protected fund – it would never, ever be possible to keep such a fund for corporate, investment, and financial engineering issues.
So, Houston, we have a problem. I don’t think there is a solution. Guess we better make sure that the right mechanics and medicine are available for the next financial wreck.
October 13th, 2009
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I found a useful contact via twitter. I read her blog. She was a self-styled (and certified) expert in resume-writing. She had so many examples, suggestions, ideas, guidance, recommendations and thoughts. I enjoyed her style of writing and her posts seemed to be sharp and insightful. I signed up for her email list and the first thing I got from her included a discount on her book. I feel like I’m writing a recommendation letter, but there is a point when you’re watching a horror movie, you just know. You KNOW that when someone goes into the dark cellar and the light goes out – something bad is going to happen. You just know it. When you start reading this, since the title is Social Media Mistakes – you just know it has to go bad. It is like a horror movie where the kill is a huge social media mistake.
Convinced that her thoughts might help me write a smarter resume, I dropped her a brief email. I was considering hiring her to help me rewrite my resume. I was going to ask her thoughts, but figured that before I would take her time, I wanted to look at her book. It wasn’t too much. Her how-to resume book was an instant purchase, and a downloadable text and PDFs. It was about $20, with the cool discount that I thought I scored in the email. The email response to my note was a bit off-center. I felt like she was talking to me but I started to notice issues. It was kind of like in the horror movie where you start hearing the theme music. If you’re skinny dipping on a dark beach, you know that music means that something is about to take a nibble and its going to go bad. I saw things like – quotes from her that I have seen elsewhere. I dropped her a brief question in an email, and got a fairly instant response. I opened the response and realized it was a form email. I recognized it as an email blast. I was disappointed, but thought that perhaps it was pre-scheduled. Since her website is her personal name – you know, like www.JaneDoe.com. I thought that nobody would use their name and send out impersonal email blasts, auto-replies, and never actually set eyes on the incoming email. I sent another email, and the following day I got another email. At this point, it was really obvious that her emails were form-emails, and completely unrelated to the emails that I sent her.
I also realized that she wasn’t reading her incoming email. She might not even know that ANYONE was trying to contact her. I was frustrated and certain that I have been taken in the amount of $20. My lesson has been learned. What other lessons are there?
If she had been on her game, she probably could have sold me $500 worth of resume rewrite services. To monetize that thought, if she looked at her email she could have increased her revenue 2500%, from a single customer with a single transaction. So where are the SOCIAL MEDIA lessons?
1) Social media is social – it is people-contacting-people. Forget that at your peril.
2) Some of the best future customers are past customers, but they must feel well-treated.
3) Take the time to read incoming email, messages, tweets, etc. Extra points if you respond.
4) Design campaigns from the customer’s perspective.
5) Design products and services from the customer’s perspective.
6) Try to avoid comparisons with the Shark in Jaws. He didn’t get return business.
7) Time = Money. Trust = Money. Communication = Money. Service = Money.
From the customer’s perspective, it is understood that some things are going to go bad. When a potential customer determines that a business is intentionally withholding time, not deserving of trust, lacking in communication and inadequate in service – that is a customer that is going to find another business to patronize.
September 21st, 2009
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I was reading Joe Waters’ intelligent blog earlier today. He has a post titled “How My NonProfit plans to use social media” His post was very interesting because it talked about strategy without numbers.
His thoughts on strategy were really good – but numbers can convert people to a strategy that otherwise might not make sense. I think social media provides benefits that cannot be gotten elsewhere, at a minimal cost that is extremely hard to equal with other. The difficult question is “How does that get quantified?”
I’ve thought back to points that I made more than a dozen years ago for “what a website could do for a company.” Some of the most powerful numbers I used back then to support my strategy points were from Dell. Here are some:
1) Things you put on a website – are there 24/7/365 so essentially, they provide billable services that far exceed the time put into them.
2) By mid 1998- Dell’s internet sales exceeded $6 million per day.
3) By 2000, online sales had topped $50 million per day and 840 million page requests per quarter.
How does that relate to social media? There are parallels between those early internet days, and social media as it sits today. Because of the open API and available tools, its pretty easy to show twitter growth for some companies. Here are some numbers:
1) In December 2008, DellOutlet attributed $1m of sales DIRECTLY to their Twitter presence.
2) As of June, 2009, DellOutlet attributed $3m of sales DIRECTLY to their Twitter presence.
3) In February 2009, Dell had 15,000 followers.
4) As of September 15th, they have more than 1.1 million followers.
5) From opening the DellOutlet account in 2007 to September 15th, they’ve made 685 updates.
Why are those powerful numbers? That averages less than one update every day. Each of those updates are 140 characters or less and likely took less than 10 minutes to make. (not counting the custom URLs and coupon codes that were made to track sales)
Here is an equation that gives numbers to support social media strategy:
6850 minutes of employee time (app 114 hours) + website costs
=
$3m in directly tracked revenue + goodwill + customer responsiveness + voice of the customer input + 1.1m followers/fans/potential customers + 1.1m instant viewers of any advertisement posted for the Dell Outlet. (as of 9/15/09)
That is 1.1 million people who are likely receptive to products, services, and Dells message because Dell connected with them in a method of their choosing. $3m of revenue and 1.1m customers is most certainly an extremely small percentage of sales for Dell, but it is significant that they built that micro-blogging micro-channel with such micro-efforts.
Do you know of other numbers to drive social media strategy?
September 15th, 2009
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Eweek has an interesting article titled “How Offshoring May Be Hurting US Technology Employees.”
Eweek’s article mainly talks about the offshoring pain in a single context. Their claim is that, although offshoring is sold as a process that moves lower paid positions overseas, in fact higher paid positions are also moving. They discuss IBM’s offshoring of personnel increase, from 6000 in 2003 to 90,000 in 2009. They also briefly mention HP’s offshoring of perhaps 12,000 former EDS jobs after their acquisition of that company. The bulk of Eweek’s article is taken from an article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. That comes from Ron Hira, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Rochester Institute of Technology Professor Hira’s point is that the interests that drive offshoring have nowhere else to go and no other rational course of action. He points out that CEO’s must ultimately be concerned with profits, costs, delivering value to customers and maximizing shareholder returns. He points out that politicians are responsive to lobbyists, but that “There’s no group that represents the national interest in any way in Washington to counterbalance this. Which is why you see no action in Washington to address these issues. Who represents American workers in this debate? Who represents accountants? Who represents engineers? No one.”
So – the Eweek article leads to another and experts quote each other while none seem to any real ideas. The main point, and it is fairly obvious – is that the drain to the US comes because of outsourcing, and outsourcing moves jobs elsewhere. This is not a new concept. The idea that outsourcing moves high-paying jobs elsewhere is also not a new concept.
Here are two new ideas.
Outsourcing also hurts technology nationally because it eliminates career paths within US technology. Until a very recent merger, my company had a brilliant CIO who was once an IT director, formerly an IT manager, formerly a project manager, and started more than 20 years earler as a software/code developer. Given offshoring patterns, there is not a current new-hire developer who can likely follow that path. At some point, the US will pay in terms of seasoned and experienced technology leaders. That is very bad, but unlikely to sway anyone in Washington DC.
The federal government is essentially money-driven. The fastest and most significant impact comes from refining a monetary reason to limit offshoring. Money can drive changes in government.
Here’s a suggested framework, based on the information presented in the article. IBM has 90,000 employees in India, up from 6,000 in 2003. Conservatively speaking, that perhaps represents an offshoring of 58,000 positions. It might be seen as an increase of 84,000 positions, but that would discount the possibility of offshore growth in the form of new-job creation. HP, via EDS offshored 12,000 positions. Together, two firms offshored at least 70,000 positions. If you assume the average technical worker in the US averages $60,000 annual income – and based on any standard, that is also a very conservative estimate – we have an offshoring of $4,200,000,000.00 in annual income. At a 28% rate, which again is conservative, that is an offshoring of $1,176,000,000.00 in income taxes that Washington DC is losing out on. 2 companies efforts have removed $1.1b from the tax stream. They have also removed more than $3b from churning through the monetary and economic system as spending, savings, and other consumption. Those numbers come from very conservative estimates of people, wages and taxes. To go the other direction, there may have been 96,000 positions offshored – with an average US income of $75,000, which would remove $7,200,000,000.00 from the US economy. Assuming an income tax rate of 34% suggests more than $2.44 billion dollars of tax revenue was lost. In Washington DC terms, changing the behavior of 2 companies (albeit large companies) would have funded more than half of the recent ‘cash for clunkers’ initiave.
The interesting questions – that MUST to be quantified and acted on by politicians in Washington DC are: What if that standard was applied to the top 1000 companies that offshore? Here’s my follow up question: What could the US government do to make it economically advantageous to companies to “inshore”? When can we start? In an economy where unemployment is currently 9.7%, our nation is in debt, and deficit spending increases our debt every day, these are the sorts of important questions that should be asked in Washington, DC.
September 9th, 2009
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I again commend Paul Venezia on his thorough, accurate, timely and thoughtful coverage of the Terry Childs Case. Here is Paul’s latest on the case.
Paul points out that the legal precedent used to dismiss 3 of the 4 charges against Terry Childs should have also applied to the 4th charge. He points out that this could “harm password security” because the 4th charge remains.
If the remaining charge is convictable, then computer administrators will be much more likely to divulge passwords. Nobody wants to be jailed for denying access. Beyond the ordinary social engineering types of password requests, there might be a new level of social engineering demands. The phrase might be ”You don’t want to be jailed so give me the passwords or I will call the police.” comes to mind. That wouldn’t work everywhere, but if in the course of your job erring on the wrong side of security and access could get you jailed, you might be much more likely to err on the side of access.
That adds risk. To manage that risk and ensure security, additional Processes, policies and procedures will be needed. If Childs is convicted, those additional steps, the additional piles of policies, processes and procedures will cost everyone because it will touch every information management facet. Even if you don’t work in networking or security, you probably have online banking access, you may pay bills online, you probably access email, utility bills, magazines, and many other resources. Even if you don’t do those sorts of things online, the companies that you deal with do.
Consider the cost in the same way you might consider weight – Information Technology is ingrained in and flows through business like blood cells in blood vessels in the body. If you add an additional fraction of an ounce to every blood cell, or even every 5th blood cell, you would weigh more. Every step would require moving that additional weight. Given the parameters of the Terry Childs case, at this point, whether he is convicted or not, ALL information technology resources will likely have additional levels of inefficiency added to protect security while simultaneously protecting the people who provide the security. Maybe an additional $1 fee here or there won’t add up when you pay it – but across businesses that touch everyone’s live, this is going to be very, very expensive.
September 5th, 2009
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