Stories by Michael Hugos

Columnist Michael Hugos offers clear directions for how CIOs can open the exit door from the techie trap.

Companies are starting to use the motivational techniques of video games -- such as points, leaderboards and levels -- to create more engaging business applications. It's called "gamification."

Business agility isn't just a good idea, it's the new normal. And the role of IT is to enable agility. Business happens in real time these days, driven by global e-commerce, social media networks and consumer IT. Companies have to be agile to keep up with what's going on, and that requires developing IT architectures that allow them to respond quickly as situations change.

The whole world is streaming real-time data. It used to just be stock markets that gushed high volumes of real-time data, but now your car, your smartphone and everything in your company-including your website and your CRM system-is spewing data like a firehose. What are we supposed to do with it?

A hundred years ago we saw the introduction of a new process for organizing and performing work (now we're looking for another one). That process employed the most powerful technology of that time - industrial technology - to deliver a significant increase in productivity that made possible the rise of the middle class in what we now call the developed world. That new way of working was called the assembly line. Manufacturing companies in the United States (led by Henry Ford) pioneered the introduction of the assembly line in their factories. Soon companies everywhere were using that new workflow process.

Do you even know what a TLA is? Exactly. That’s why we need to stop inventing more of them. Let’s try plain language and clear explanations of the value proposition instead. The only TLAs that were ever widely recognized are ERP and CRM. And now they are seen as somewhat suspect by a large segment of the business user community that has had to pay for, install, and figure out how to use those systems.

On landing at Shanghai Pudong airport we were told to remain in our seats as Chinese quarantine officers moved through the plane. Covered head to foot in white hazmat suites, four health workers checked passengers for signs of flu. I was told to lean forward in my seat and “please close eyes.” Using a hand held infra red heat sensor a health worker quickly took a temperature reading of my forehead; and finding my temperature normal, she moved on to the next passenger. Checking the entire plane took only a few minutes.

Innovative ideas are not popular; it takes hard times to open our minds to innovative ideas. When things are going well enough there is no need to be innovative because innovation means moving outside our comfort zone; so why would we? If you are an innovator now is the best of times. But you need to be tough because you will cause discomfort and you will not popular (at first).

“The credit crunch and liquidity crisis will make the invisible hand of economics the visible fist of innovation.” This comment from a thoughtful colleague brought several loosely related ideas into much clearer alignment. It comes from Michael Bogovich, an international program manager at Abbott Laboratories.

Since there are many possible forms that can be used to solve a given problem, how do we know which one is best? Are there some principles we can apply to analyze different designs and guide us to select the best?

What do companies get when people follow orders to the letter whether those orders make any sense or not? Situations change fast so orders and decisions from last week or last month may not be appropriate today, but common sense won’t help in times like these. People are afraid of getting fired and everybody is trying to avoid blame so they do as they were told even if it actually causes harm. That’s called malicious obedience.

Cisco and RIM (BlackBerry) have been working on a joint development project that is both freeing us to roam as we please and also tying us all together in ever stronger ways. I spoke with Cisco marketing director Alex Hadden-Boyd who described the project and showed me some of the results which were unveiled last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

What’s the only expense in business where if you invest in it you can lower all other expenses? The answer is obvious so you only get one guess (if you even have to guess). The biggest opportunity for companies right now is to reduce their total expenses through targeted IT investments that convert them to a variable cost operating model.

What gives an IT guy the right to offer advice to bigwig finance types on how to fix world financial networks? The answer is that networks are networks and they all behave the same regardless of whether they are data networks or finance networks (or even social networks). Any IT person with experience designing and operating data networks (LANs/WANs/VPNs/Clouds) has learned some lessons that finance people need to know about.

So the CEO and the CFO are telling you to cut IT expenses - tell them for the good of the company you can’t do that. Tell them you already run a lean operation and saving another 10 percent on the IT budget is small potatoes compared to using IT to save 10 percent on the operating expenses of the whole company or using IT to grow company revenue by 10 percent.