Brenda Michelson

• Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients : The New Yorker

  Excellent article on using data to provide an unusual window into healthcare, and how to improve it.

  “Besides looking at assault patterns, he began studying patterns in the way patients flowed into and out of Camden’s hospitals. “I’d just sit there and play with the data for hours,” he says, and the more he played the more he found. For instance, he ran the data on the locations where ambulances picked up patients with fall injuries, and discovered that a single building in central Camden sent more people to the hospital with serious falls—fifty-seven elderly in two years—than any other in the city, resulting in almost three million dollars in health-care bills. “It was just this amazing window into the health-care delivery system,” he says.”

  tags: healthcare datascience newyorker

• Solving the Wanamaker problem for health care – O’Reilly Radar

  Good article by Tim O’Reilly, et al. Broad coverage of healthcare issues and opportunities with data science.
   
  “How is data science transforming health care? There are many ways in which health care is changing, and needs to change. We’re focusing on one particular issue: the problem Wanamaker described when talking about his advertising. How do you make sure you’re spending money effectively? Is it possible to know what will work in advance?”

  tags: healthcare datascience O’Reilly

• Why IT Fumbles Analytics – Harvard Business Review

  This is an excellent article. Calls out the different thinking and actions required for analytics success. Despite the title, this is not an IT bashing article.

  “In their quest to extract insights from the massive amounts of data now available from internal and external sources, many companies are spending heavily on IT tools and hiring data scientists. Yet most are struggling to achieve a worthwhile return. That’s because they treat their big data and analytics projects the same way they treat all IT projects, not realizing that the two are completely different animals”.

  tags: hbr analytics bigdata

• Disruptions: Design Is Driving Technology Forward – NYTimes.com

  “We’re on the tail end of technology being special,” says John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “The automobile was a weird alien technology when it first debuted, then, after a while, it evolved and designers stepped in to add value to it.”

  …“We have this exciting next step for design,” he said. “Now that we have enough technology to do anything, design can now begin to be better than the technology itself.”

  tags: technology design maeda

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• Six Paradoxes Women Leaders Face in 2013 – Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt – Harvard Business Review

  “Easing into the New Year, one big hope we have for 2013 is that women continue to bridge the gender gap in terms of pay equality and access to leadership positions. So much of the news was good last year: women were better educated than ever, we continued to claim coveted CEO roles at companies such as IBM and Yahoo, and one study even reported that women were the primary breadwinners in a majority of households in the US. That sounds like progress.

  Yet, in order to clear a path for greater advancement and parity in 2013, we need to address the difficult paradoxes that women leaders continue to face — these are the mixed messages and uncomfortable realities that complicate an arguably positive picture of progress.”

  tags: hbr leadership women

• Brown Down: UPS Drivers Vs. The UPS Algorithm | Fast Company

  ““A lot of times, I feel like an explorer,” says Jack Levis, UPS’s director of process management. “Often I’m telling the company: Just because we’ve done it this way for the past 50 years doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  Levis, who manages a team of mathematicians who build the algorithms that help UPS shave millions of miles off delivery routes, is paid to tell the company things it may not want to hear. One of his major projects in the last decade has been rolling out a system called ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation), a kind of algorithmic overmind that knows better than any human how drivers ought to plan their routes.”

  tags: ups algorithm STEM data

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• The Rise of the Attention Economy by Esther Dyson – Project Syndicate

  “This is not the familiar question of whether our machines will put us all out of work. In fact, the question is whether we will start doing more and more intellectual work for free or for barter, becoming more like our ancestors. Instead of producing food or housing for ourselves or for barter, we will be producing content and amusement for one another, without engaging in explicit (taxable) financial exchange. Yes, there is a so-called gift economy, but there is also an attention market that may not be fungible or priced – a distributed, many-to-many economy that harks back to the old days.”

  tags: dyson attention

• What entrepreneurs can learn from artists – Fortune Management

  Finally, my youthful art escapades are validated:

  “Indeed, the “art” of business has become more important as the “science” grows ubiquitous. As Big Data and sophisticated analytical tools allow us to make our processes more efficient, intuition and creativity are fast becoming the only differentiating factors among competitors. Like any “soft asset,” these qualities cannot be exploited, only explored. And like artists, innovators must cultivate creative habits to see the world afresh and create something new.
  How do artists think and behave? Here are 12 traits”

  tags: entrepreneurs artists leadership

• Everything You Need To Know About the Economy in 2012, in 34 Charts – Matthew O’Brien – The Atlantic

  “We asked some of our favorite professors and writers to chip in, and here are their 34 favorite economic charts of 2012. Ross Perot has nothing on us.”

  tags: economy charts data atlantic

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• Jon Kamen: STEM to STEAM: Art Is Key to Building a Strong Economy

  Makes sense. How is STEM visualized/appreciated? Via design principles, graphics and such.

  “Artists and designers bring STEM to life: As we all know, STEM is so important — but on its own, sadly it’s not working. Despite all of the resources being invested in it, the word is exactly what’s wrong with the concept. It doesn’t inspire, energize or engage the youth whom it is ultimately intended to benefit; hence our nation is falling desperately behind.”

  tags: STEAM STEM

• The New MakerBot Replicator Might Just Change Your World | Wired Design | Wired.com

  Good article on 3-D printing and MakerBot’s quest to bring 3-D printing/printers to the masses.

  “But nothing MakerBot has ever built looks like the new printer these workers are currently constructing. The Replicator 2 isn’t a kit; it doesn’t require a weekend of wrestling with software that makes Linux look easy. Instead, it’s driven by a simple desktop application, and it will allow you to turn CAD files into physical things as easily as printing a photo.”

  tags: 3dprinting makerbot wired

• A robot that can help your grandma (or you) avoid the nursing home — Tech News and Analysis

  Good to know: “Two major trends could open the door to robotic care givers that help senior citizens stay in their homes longer. First, robots are getting more people friendly. And second: people are getting more robot friendly.”

  tags: robot nursing

• 7 tips to safely kill zombie projects | ZDNet

  Michael shared this during a conversation we were having on zombie projects. We’ve all seen ’em…

  “Walking-dead IT projects, also known as zombies, should be killed off — putting these suckers out of their misery is the right thing to do. Of course, various techniques exist to repair failing projects, such as restart methodologies and live-goat sacrifice, which was pioneered by Nepal Airlines. Nonetheless, there are times when the zombies must die.”

  tags: zombie projects mkrigsman

• Amazon Web Services launches Redshift, datawarehousing as a service | ZDNet

  Amazon Web Services will launch data warehousing as a service in a move to cut hardware, software and administration costs. AWS is now previewing Amazon Redshift, a datawarehousing service.

  tags: amazon aws datawarehouse

• Walmart’s Evolution From Big Box Giant To E-Commerce Innovator | Fast Company

  Good example of digital strategy, role of CTO, and technology-driven innovation.

  “…The next thing King knew, Walmart arranged for him to join a videoconference with CEO Mike Duke. “It was the strangest thing,” King says. “Mike’s office in Bentonville is the original one that Sam Walton had, complete with 1970s wood paneling. I was looking at this video, thinking, Where is this place?”

  Over the next 45 minutes, though, Duke made what King calls an irresistible pitch. After years of seeing his company lag online, Duke swore that digital was now a priority for Walmart. Duke had restructured the company, placing e-commerce on equal footing with Walmart’s other, much larger divisions. He had made serious investments in high-tech talent, acquiring several startups. One, a 65-person social media firm called Kosmix with expertise in search and analytics, was the impetus for Walmart rechristening its Valley operations “@WalmartLabs.” Duke was looking for people who would revive the company’s sites and services, and energize its entire culture. He hoped to turn a company famous for rigid, coldly effective business processes into one that’s flexible, experimental, and entrepreneurial. In other words, Duke wanted to inject a bit of Silicon Valley into Bentonville, Arkansas.”

  tags: walmart innovation digital

• Want to Build Resilience? Kill the Complexity – Andrew Zolli – Harvard Business Review

  “We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole. Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.

  This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct: Is that flashing alert signaling a genuine emergency? Is it a false alarm? Or is it the result of some complex interaction nobody has ever seen before? Imagine facing a dozen such alerts simultaneously, and having to decide what’s true and false about all of them at the same time. Imagine further that, if you choose incorrectly, you will push the system into an unrecoverable catastrophe. Now, give yourself just a few seconds to make the right choice. How much should you be blamed if you make the wrong one?

  CalTech system scientist John Doyle has coined a term for such systems: he calls them Robust-Yet-Fragile — and one of their hallmark features is that they are good at dealing with anticipated threats, but terrible at dealing with unanticipated ones. As the complexity of these systems grow, both the sources and severity of possible disruptions increases, even as the size required for potential ‘triggering events’ decreases — it can take only a tiny event, at the wrong place or at the wrong time, to spark a calamity.”

  tags: Complexity systems Resilience hbr

• Is Technology Making You More (or Less) of a Jerk? – Michael Schrage – Harvard Business Review

  Love this: “mean time to meddling”… “Instant access and cloud has compressed the “mean time to meddling” to milliseconds for micromanagers.”

  “Every manager needs to review their last 100 network communications — text, email, SharePoint, LinkedIn, etc. — and ask themselves: What’s the mix between messages that might be interpreted as management, micromanagement and mentoring? Am I giving in to temptations that will corrode trust? Or am I using these technologies in a way that brings out my better managerial self?”

  tags: technology management schrage hbr

• Big Data, Complex Systems and Quantum Mechanics – The CIO Report – WSJ

  The world, and the data within, is messy. Good piece by Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

  “In discipline after discipline, we are beginning to learn how to deal with the very messy world of big data and complex systems, and how to best apply our learning to make good decisions and good predictions. One of the hardest parts of that learning is the need to let go of our preconceived notions of scientific determinism and get used to living in a world of probabilities, uncertainties and subjective realities.”

  No WSJ account? Cross-posted to his blog: http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2012/12/big-data-complex-systems-and-quantum-mechanics.html

  tags: complex systems data quantum wsj irvingwb

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• Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets

  “Dremel is a scalable, interactive ad-hoc query system for analysis of read-only nested data. By combining multi-level execution trees and columnar data layout, it is capable of running aggregation queries over trillion-row tables in seconds. The system scales to thousands of CPUs and petabytes of data, and has thousands of users at Google. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of Dremel, and explain how it complements MapReduce-based computing.”

  tags: dremel google hadoop realtime impala

• Cloudera Impala: Real-Time Queries in Apache Hadoop, For Real | Apache Hadoop for the Enterprise | Cloudera

  “After a long period of intense engineering effort and user feedback, we are very pleased, and proud, to announce the Cloudera Impala project. This technology is a revolutionary one for Hadoop users, and we do not take that claim lightly.

  When Google published its Dremel paper in 2010, we were as inspired as the rest of the community by the technical vision to bring real-time, ad hoc query capability to Apache Hadoop, complementing traditional MapReduce batch processing. Today, we are announcing a fully functional, open-sourced codebase that delivers on that vision – and, we believe, a bit more – which we call Cloudera Impala.”

  tags: hadoop Cloudera impala

• Obama Wins: How Chicago’s Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed | TIME.com

  “On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared. What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

  tags: obama datamining bigdata campaigns

• Accelerating Insights in the New World of Data – The Official Microsoft Blog – Site Home – TechNet Blogs

  In-memory DB tech from Microsoft — Hekaton:

  “In-memory computing is a core element of Microsoft’s strategy to deliver a data platform that enables customers to analyze all types of data while also accelerating time to insight. Our approach to in-memory computing is to provide a complete portfolio for all application patterns, built into our existing products that enable rapid insights on any data, structured or unstructured. We’ve been delivering advanced in-memory technologies as part of SQL Server since 2010. Since then, we have shipped more than 1.5 million units to customers, making it the most pervasive data platform of its kind with in-memory technologies built in.

  Furthering Microsoft’s commitment to deliver in-memory solutions as part of our data platform, today we are introducing Project codenamed “Hekaton,” available in the next major release of SQL Server. Currently in private technology preview with a small set of customers, “Hekaton” will complete Microsoft’s portfolio of in-memory capabilities across analytics and transactional scenarios. It will provide breakthrough performance gains of up to 50 times, and because it will be built into SQL Server, customers won’t need to buy specialized hardware or software and will be able to easily migrate existing applications to benefit from the dramatic gains in performance.”

  tags: microsoft in-memory dbms

• Answer three ‘why’ questions: Abstract thinking can make you more politically moderate

  “The researchers used techniques known to induce an abstract mindset in people, Preston said. Previous studies had shown that asking people to think broadly about a subject (with “why” rather than “how” questions, for example) makes it easier for them to look at an issue from different perspectives.
  ” ‘Why’ questions make people think more in terms of the big picture, more in terms of intentions and goals, whereas more concrete ‘how’ questions are focused on something very specific, something right in front of you, basically,” Preston said.
  Previous research showed that abstract thinking enhances creativity and open-mindedness, but this is the first study to test its power to moderate political beliefs, Preston said.”

  tags: thinking

• Nate Silver-Led Statistics Men Crush Pundits in Election – Bloomberg

  “Silver, the computer expert who gave Obama a 90 percent chance of winning re-election, predicted on his blog, FiveThirtyEight (for the number of seats in the Electoral College), that the president would receive 51 percent of the popular vote as he called each of the 50 states, including all nine battlegrounds.”

  tags: natesilver statistics prediction elections

• The Night A Computer Predicted The Next President : All Tech Considered : NPR

  “Some milestone moments in journalism converged 60 years ago on election night in the run between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democratic Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson. It was the first coast-to-coast television broadcast of a presidential election. Walter Cronkite anchored his first election night broadcast for CBS.

  And it was the first time computers were brought in to help predict the outcome. That event in 1952 helped usher in the computer age, but it wasn’t exactly love at first sight…”

  tags: elections prediction technology

• Data is the new coal — abundant, dirty and diffic

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• Metamarkets open sources Druid, its in-memory database — Data | GigaOM

  Open source alternative to SAP Hana and Oracle TImes Ten:

  “Metamarkets is open sourcing its in-memory database technology called Druid. The rationale for open sourcing a key piece of its technology platform is both altruistic (better all!) and a savvy recognition that if the startup doesn’t do it, someone else will build it.”

  tags: database real-time in-memory druid metamarkets

• Cloudera makes SQL a first-class citizen in Hadoop — Data | GigaOM

  Good article on the trend of adding SQL engines to Hadoop environments, in the context of Cloudera:

  “veteran big data startup Cloudera is fundamentally changing the face of its flagship Hadoop distribution into something much more appealing. The company has developed a real-time SQL query engine called Impala that will sit aside MapReduce as a native processing option within Cloudera’s version of Hadoop. Cloudera is biggest and most well-known Hadoop vendor around, so opening its platform up to the wide world of SQL-trained data analysts is a really big deal — even if Cloudera is a bit late to the SQL party.”

  tags: hadoop sql cloudera

• Debates, Politics, and Predictions: Separate the Signal From the Noise | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

  Less data can be more:

  “WIRED: How do we avoid spinning a narrative out of noise?

  Silver: If you’re prone to overreact to new data, you should stick to basic models. Without a good framework for weighing information, having more can backfire.”

  tags: data prediction

• A Bandwidth Breakthrough – Technology Review

  “Academic researchers have improved wireless bandwidth by an order of magnitude—not by adding base stations, tapping more spectrum, or cranking up transmitter wattage, but by using algebra to banish the network-clogging task of resending dropped packets.

  By providing new ways for mobile devices to solve for missing data, the technology not only eliminates this wasteful process but also can seamlessly weave data streams from Wi-Fi and LTE—a leap forward from other approaches that toggle back and forth. “Any IP network will benefit from this technology,” says Sheau Ng, vice president for research and development at NBC Universal.”

  tags: bandwidth stem MIT

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• Some advice from Jeff Bezos by Jason Fried of 37signals

  “[Bezos] said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

  He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

  What trait signified someone who was wrong a lot of the time? Someone obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.”

  tags: bezos strategy

• The Future, as Imagined by Google – NYTimes.com

  “Eventually technology just disappears,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s the ultimate achievement. No more ports and prompts and plug-ins.”

  tags: google future

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• The Architect Says: A Compendium of Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom from Iconic Architects | Brain Pickings

  Those “other” architects…

  “There’s something inescapably alluring about pocket-sized compendiums of quotes by great architects and designers — take, for instance, those of Charles Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright. Fittingly, The Architect Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom (public library) gathers timeless wisdom on design and architecture from more than 100 of history’s most vocal — and often dissenting — minds. What emerges, besides the fascinating tapas bar of ideas about the art and science of building, is the subtle but essential reminder that what lies at the heart of creative legacy aren’t universal formulas and unrelenting tents but perspective, conviction, and personality.”

  tags: architects

• Three Ways The President Can Create Digital Jobs Now – Forbes

  Data as raw material for growth, I like that.

  “In this new technological world, data is the raw material for growth. We are likely to see economic and societal changes that will dwarf what we have seen so far from the Internet, driven by gathering, analyzing, and acting upon data. The new data-driven industries and their jobs will run on the infrastructure of the Internet just as the growth industries of the industrial revolution used railroads, highways and the telephone.

  Those with access to data will get the rewards. Most of that data is held by companies and quite a lot by the government. While companies need to benefit from their creations, we need to find ways to put more data directly into the hands of ordinary Americans so they can gain economically from big data too…”

  tags: data economy forbes

• Making the case for STEM skills – for everyone | SmartPlanet

  “A person has STEM literacy if she can understand the world around her in a logical way guided by the principals of scientific thought. A STEM-literate person can think for herself. She asks critical questions.  She can form hypotheses and seek data to confirm or deny them. She sees the beauty and complexity in nature and seeks to understand. She sees the modern world that mankind has created and hopes to use her STEM-related skills and knowledge to improve it.”

  tags: stem

• Howard Rubin Says Traditional IT Budgets Falling While As Corporate Tech Spending Rises – The CIO Report – WSJ

  IT versus Digitization: “The study determined that major companies, across all sectors, now spend about $8.60 on “non-IT” technology for every dollar that they spend on traditional forms of IT infrastructure, such as servers, storage, networking, mainframe MIPS, application development and maintenance. That’s up from $5.10 in 2006 and $3.20 in 2000.  All told, about 79% of technology spending at those same companies is “non IT,” up from 69% in 2006 and 34% in 2000, Rubin said. Rubin defines non-IT expense as any technology related expense other than processing platforms and applications. It includes robotics, process automation, embedded chips/processors, and data analytics typically done outside the company, such as text analytic and sentiment analysis or automated sampling.”

  tags: it budget digitization

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• The Corporate Executive Board Says IT budgets will rise only 1.8%, leave little room for new projects – The CIO Report – WSJ

  CIOs need to get creative… optimize to fund innovation:

  “Corporate Executive Board collected 2013 IT budget projections from almost 200 companies globally, which expect to spend a total of more than $50 billion on IT. Based on this benchmark data, we expect IT budgets to rise 1.8% on average, with operating expenditures rising 2.5%. Following large increases in capital expenditures from 2011 to 2012 (9.7%), CIOs are expecting to hold capex relatively flat. Two-thirds of CIOs expect to see increases in operating expenditures in 2013, while one-fifth plan to reduce them. Despite economic woes, European organizations are expecting a 2% increase in IT budgets as they cautiously embark on a search for corporate growth.

  Compounding the woes of sub-inflation budget growth, more than two-thirds of the IT budget is already spoken for before a single new business project can be launched.

  Despite CIOs’ efforts to reduce maintenance and mandatory spending, those areas continue to represent nearly 70% of the budget.  By contrast, innovation accounts for only 7% of the total…”

  tags: cio it budget

• Google reveals Spanner, the database tech that can span the planet | ZDNet

  “With the aid of atomic clocks, GPS receivers and some of the most esteemed figures in computer science, Google has crafted a planet-spanning distributed database.

  Google published information about the database, named Spanner, over the weekend in a wide-ranging research paper. The paper (PDF) describes Spanner as “the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions”.

  In simple terms, Google has managed to design an information store that spans its fleet of datacentres around the world and lets applications read (and, to a lesser extent write) data without being crushed by huge latencies. Software using the system can replicate data across countries and continents, while having extremely fast read times.”

  tags: google database

• When IT Tries To Do Too Much – Chuck’s Blog

  “My days are now full of IT transformational discussions.  Dozens of conversations have become literally hundreds, and — better yet — more of our partners are seriously interested.  All good.

  More data points means — of course — more patterns observed: inherent mindsets and behaviors that inhibit any sort of serious IT transformation. 

  When I find them, I share them: realizing you have a problem is always part of the answer.

  One aspect of the problem?  IT people have an inherent engineering bent.  They try to fix the entire problem — all aspects — as if IT production and consumption was a self-contained, optimally-designed system with full access to all the components and knobs…”

  tags: IT entrenchment

• Shadow IT Is Out of the Closet – Jill Dyche – Harvard Business Review

  “Five years ago, “shadow IT” efforts were the dirty little secret of organizations. An impatient marketing or finance manager would, on the sly, secure some extra budget money and hire a contractor to build a little database that tracked mailing addresses or top-line financials. Slowly but surely, as the little database grew bigger and bigger, the manager would wedge the cost into her operating budget. Other managers might take notice and started building their own databases. Then came the cloud, which only heightened frustration with IT’s lack of velocity in delivery, and managers flocked to outside vendors to automate various business processes, from customer relationship management to supply chain reporting to social media analytics.

  Now Shadow IT has burst out of the closet and is waltzing around the corporation, leaving IT departments rushing to do damage control.”

  tags: hbr shadowIT

• 5 ideas to help everyone make the most of big data — Data | GigaOM

  “Big data is going mainstream, but there are still plenty of lessons to be learned from Silicon Valley data scientists whose businesses depend on data to survive. Although their use cases don’t always align with what more-traditional businesses are doing, they know enough about the science and technology to save big-data newcomers a lot of frustration.”

  tags: bigdata

• Experimentation Is The New Planning | Fast Company

  “Technology is a bitch. It affects every industry, often in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to anticipate. There’s always the possibility that a Napster or a Netflix or a Wikipedia will arrive to completely disrupt your business or industry.

  So it makes sense to have some kind of system that allows you to continually develop options and explore possibilities, so that when the day of disruption does arrive, it finds you ready with a few alternatives in hand. The time to seek those alternatives is now–not later, after a crisis has already arrived.”

  tags: strategy innovation experimentation change-friendly

• The Power of Defining the Problem – Dwayne Spradlin – Harvard Business Review

  Why it is my job to ask questions, rather than proclaim answers:

  “Well-defined problems lead to breakthrough solutions. When developing new products, processes, or even businesses, most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important. Without that rigor, organizations miss opportunities, waste resources, and end up pursuing innovation initiatives that aren’t aligned with their strategies. How many times have you seen a project go down one path only to realize in hindsight that it should have gone down another? How many times have you seen an innovation program deliver a seemingly breakthrough result only to find that it can’t be implemented or it addresses the wrong problem? Many organizations need to become better at asking the right questions so that they tackle the right problems.”

  tags: problem-solving hbr analysis

• Dear Customer: The Truth About IT Projects | Agile

  Good post. Agree with author, Allan Kelly, there is a need to “reset” expectations and relationships.

  “Dear Customer,

  I think it’s time we in the IT industry come clean about how we charge you, why our bills are sometimes a bit higher than you might expect, and why so many IT projects result in disappointment. The truth is that when we start an IT project, we don’t know how much time and effort it will take to complete. Consequently, we don’t know how much it will cost. This may not be a message you like to hear, particularly since you are absolutely certain you know what you want.

  Herein lies another truth, which I’ll try to put as politely as I can. You are, after all, a customer, and, really, I shouldn’t offend you. You know the saying “The customer is always right”? The thing is, you don’t know what you want. You may know in general terms, but the devil is in the details—and the more details you try to give us beforehand, the more likely your desires are to change. Each time you give us more detail, you are offering more hostages to fortune…”

  tags: IT projects failure governance change

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