In the spirit of my Vegan Thanksgiving post, here are my thoughts about the holidays. I believe that a greater focus on people, experiences, and the world around us truly embodies the spirit of the holidays. When it comes to material goods, less is more.
As Americans, we're taught about the American Dream - a home, two cars in the garage, and an endless lawn for mowing on Saturday afternoons. That's reasonable, but every year the definition of "must have" is expanding. In just my lifetime, the American Dream vision has grown to a McMansion, a television in every room/home theater, appliances suitable for a major restaurant, and trendy designer furnishings. Watching television ads, it's clear that the must have holidays gifts this year include a Nintendo Wii, diamond jewelry, and expensive fragrances.
Malls become chaos, shopping becomes a contact sport, and traffic rules are tossed out the window. By the time the holidays are finished, we're so exhausted by the process that we need a vacation.
This year, I'm trying something different. My family and I are reducing our "stuff" by 30%. We're going through every closet, the garage, the attic, and the basement, analyzing their contents. Sealed boxes from our last move go straight to charity. If we have not touched an item in a couple of years, it goes into one of three piles - eBay, charitable donation or recycling.
We're regaining a knowledge of what we have, and why we have it. The end result will be a simpler lifestyle for all of us. We'll have an inventory that looks like:
For me, my black business wardrobe, my outdoor hiking/climbing gear, my Japanese flute, my Ubuntu laptop and my Toyota Prius hybrid.
For my wife, her New England crafted linen clothing that lasts a decade, her art supplies, and her MacBook.
For my daughter, her personally stylish but non-designer clothing, her iMac and her books.
In common, the early 1900's mission oak furniture that we've gathered for 20 years.
No massive caches of collectibles, no designer products, no need for a rented storage facility for keeping endless amounts of stuff. We'll be able to get the car in the garage, have more spacious rooms, and be able to find anything we need without searching for it.
But most importantly, we'll have the gift of time. With every purchase you make, there are are two costs - the cost of buying it and the time cost of maintaining it. Without having to polish the silver, buy containers to neatly store collections of clutter, and run around the malls to ensure we have the latest designer products, we have time for each other.
We'll have time to talk, to think, to read, and to recuperate from all the increased project workload at the office that the end of the year always brings.
Thus, for the first time, our gifts to each other will not be influenced by advertising, peer pressure, or the next door neighbors. We'll have a net reduction in the material, giving us the time we need to focus on people, experiences and the world around us.
How far can this go? Just as the journey from supersized obesity to healthy vegan was phased and incremental, I expect my efforts at living simpler will be incremental. Here's an article from the UK which describes a vision for the future. I'll report back how it goes!
Senin, 10 Desember 2007
Minggu, 09 Desember 2007
Managing Personnel Transitions
As a followup to my Leading Change post, one of the most challenging kinds of change to manage is personnel transitions. There are two major kinds of transitions - those which are done to you and those which are done by you.
Regarding changes done to you, the most important role of the CIO is to foster stability while embracing the change the follows a major transition in leadership. Over the course of tenure as CIO there have been many changes to senior management around me which directly impacted IT. I've experienced the transitions of 3 COOs, 3 CFO's and 3 CEOs. Each time there is a change in senior leadership, the anxiety in the entire organization is palpable. Everyone wants to know what the change will mean to them. Will their project be canceled or their job eliminated? There is generally a frenzy of activity as many folks in the organization jockey for power or try to resurrect projects that were put on hold by the former administration. The largest transition done to me was 10 years ago today when I became the new CIO of CareGroup/Beth Israel Deaconess. Although I was an inexperienced leader at that time, I think my basic beliefs about fostering stability were already in place. One of my staff recently sent me a copy of the broadcast email I sent a few hours after taking the job:
--------
From: John D. Halamka MD
12/10/97 01:01 PM
To: IS Employees
Subject: All is well
Folks:
You may have heard that a change is taking place in Information Systems leadership.
I realize that many of you may be feeling anxiety and are wondering what the future holds.
Over the next several weeks, I will get to know each of you, understand your projects and identify your challenges. My role will be to create an environment that empowers each of you. I will begin each conversation with "How can I help you?"
Working together, we can make Information Systems an even better place. We have a great deal of talent in the organization and I look forward to serving, learning and growing with each one of you.
John
--------
Regarding changes done by you, I've personally led several transtions in IT, ensuring that the organization is always optimally structured to support the strategy of the company. Every time I do any reorganization, I've found that communication is key. Communicating often and transparently, engaging all those affected in the reorganization process really helps. Some organizations do reorganizations behind closed doors and even hire security staff to escort separated employees to their cars. I've never done reorganizations that way. I have treated people with dignity and respect, working hard to ensure their transitions are as painless as possible. There are 3 ways to transition people:
1. Work together on a separation over several weeks giving the affected staff the opportunity to move on to a new position outside the organization. This is by far the best approach, since it often leads to new opportunities for the separated employee and can be a win/win for everyone involved.
2. Work with Human Resources and the affected staff via oral/written warnings, counseling, and progressive discipline. Whenver I work through a termination via this approach, I follow all HR recommendations to the letter.
3. Termination for cause done precipitously. I am lucky that I have never had to do such a transition. It's very challenging to transition an IT professional abruptly because of the lack of time for knowledge transfer.
Although managing personnel transitions is not one of the more pleasurable aspects of being a CIO, it is one of the most essential. Ensuring that no one on the IT team impedes the work of others improves morale, accelerates projects, and minimizes human single points of failure in the organization.
Regarding changes done to you, the most important role of the CIO is to foster stability while embracing the change the follows a major transition in leadership. Over the course of tenure as CIO there have been many changes to senior management around me which directly impacted IT. I've experienced the transitions of 3 COOs, 3 CFO's and 3 CEOs. Each time there is a change in senior leadership, the anxiety in the entire organization is palpable. Everyone wants to know what the change will mean to them. Will their project be canceled or their job eliminated? There is generally a frenzy of activity as many folks in the organization jockey for power or try to resurrect projects that were put on hold by the former administration. The largest transition done to me was 10 years ago today when I became the new CIO of CareGroup/Beth Israel Deaconess. Although I was an inexperienced leader at that time, I think my basic beliefs about fostering stability were already in place. One of my staff recently sent me a copy of the broadcast email I sent a few hours after taking the job:
--------
From: John D. Halamka MD
12/10/97 01:01 PM
To: IS Employees
Subject: All is well
Folks:
You may have heard that a change is taking place in Information Systems leadership.
I realize that many of you may be feeling anxiety and are wondering what the future holds.
Over the next several weeks, I will get to know each of you, understand your projects and identify your challenges. My role will be to create an environment that empowers each of you. I will begin each conversation with "How can I help you?"
Working together, we can make Information Systems an even better place. We have a great deal of talent in the organization and I look forward to serving, learning and growing with each one of you.
John
--------
Regarding changes done by you, I've personally led several transtions in IT, ensuring that the organization is always optimally structured to support the strategy of the company. Every time I do any reorganization, I've found that communication is key. Communicating often and transparently, engaging all those affected in the reorganization process really helps. Some organizations do reorganizations behind closed doors and even hire security staff to escort separated employees to their cars. I've never done reorganizations that way. I have treated people with dignity and respect, working hard to ensure their transitions are as painless as possible. There are 3 ways to transition people:
1. Work together on a separation over several weeks giving the affected staff the opportunity to move on to a new position outside the organization. This is by far the best approach, since it often leads to new opportunities for the separated employee and can be a win/win for everyone involved.
2. Work with Human Resources and the affected staff via oral/written warnings, counseling, and progressive discipline. Whenver I work through a termination via this approach, I follow all HR recommendations to the letter.
3. Termination for cause done precipitously. I am lucky that I have never had to do such a transition. It's very challenging to transition an IT professional abruptly because of the lack of time for knowledge transfer.
Although managing personnel transitions is not one of the more pleasurable aspects of being a CIO, it is one of the most essential. Ensuring that no one on the IT team impedes the work of others improves morale, accelerates projects, and minimizes human single points of failure in the organization.
Kamis, 06 Desember 2007
Cool Technology of the Week
In several of my previous posts have I described the increasing burden of triaging email
I've described the need to filter out Spam , block Industry related advertising , and prioritize the high volume of email we all receive.
New products are now being introduced to automate personal email management. The Wall Street Journal presented an overview of these recently.
Clear Context is an application that works with Outlook to automatically score email based on relevance - the sender (in your personal contacts or not?), the topic, and the history of your personal email response behavior. This seems to be the first product to implement my Top 10 Rules for Email Triage. As our email burden continues to grow and consume more than 50% of our work time, we will need intelligent agents like Clear Context to automate email management.
Another cool technology with seasonal relevance is ElfYourself . Give it a try and put yourself in the Holiday Spirit!
Rabu, 05 Desember 2007
Leading Change
Ten years ago this week, I became CIO of CareGroup. On that day, I learned an important lesson about leading change.
Just hours after getting the job I decided that we'd embrace a service oriented architecture (SOA), standardize all desktop/server/storage infrastructure, and implement centrally managed applications. At 8am the next morning, I was scheduled to meet with my 300 staff members and share with them my vision for the future.
Luckily, experienced leaders counseled me on that first day. I discussed my vision with three Board members - Warren McFarlan (Professor at Harvard Business School), John Keane Sr. (CEO of Keane Inc.) and Sam Fleming (CEO of DRI/McGraw Hill). They told me that announcing a strategic plan without engaging all the stakeholders in the process would lead to mixed support and adoption.
Instead of arriving at the 8am meeting with all the answers, I arrived with questions. I explained to the staff that we wanted to improve customer service, encourage innovation, and ensure our work was aligned with the needs of our stakeholders. I challenged them to tell me what they thought we should do. In the first 30 days of my CIO tenure, I met with every staff member in IS as well as every senior manager in CareGroup to gather their priority lists, synthesize their input, and ensure they had a voice in the future. The result was a new IS operating plan focused on getting the basics done right. We clearly communicated the work to be done, the organizational structure which supported that work and the right people to staff the structure. The next step was to implement the changes.
I've long been a fan of John Kotter and his work on leading change in organizations. His broad recommendations to effect change include:
a. Defrost the status quo
b. Take actions that bring about change
c. Anchor the changes in the corporate culture
The planning meetings described above defrosted the status quo. The actions I took to bring about change included:
Create a Vision for Change - the community came together with a vision of a web-centric organization and I broadly communicated it.
Establish a Sense of Urgency - everyone recognized that IT innovation was essential to coordinate clinical care, improve safety and enhance our competitiveness, especially after the merger of Beth Israel and Deaconess
Elicit Executive and Peer Sponsorship - The CEO declared that medication safety, personal health records, and enhanced communication to all levels of the organization were the strategic goals of the entire organization for that year
Communicate Vision to Implement Change - we established steering committees, project charters, project plans, and communication plans
Empower Employees to Implement Change - we aligned responsibility, accountability and authority throughout the IT organization so that managers had the resources and authority they needed to support our improvement efforts. We created a Special Projects team to coordinate the improvement projects without disrupting day to day operations.
Establish Short-term Goals - we created the first web application in healthcare to share data (with patient consent) among multiple organizations. We created the first web-based provider order entry system, and we created the first personal health record to share all hospital data with patients
Encourage Additional Changes - we created a non-punitive culture in which everyone was encouraged to identify mistakes and opportunities for process improvement
Reinforce Changes Made as Permanent - we built standard processes to deliver service, prioritize new projects, and communicate our multi-year plans to the community
That first year, we implemented strong project management methodologies, eliminated unnecessary work, and focused on getting basic services like email, networks, storage, and electronic result reporting rolled out to everyone in the community. Managing this work required resources, vision, and communication. All the pieces were in place to effect change.
Occasionally, I try to execute a change management project more quickly than usual, bypassing these steps. Whenever I do that I find that adoption of the new technology is delayed, budgets are at risk of overrun, and frustration escalates.
My decade of experience executing change suggests that Kotter was right. Building a guiding coalition, broadly communicating the vision, and celebrating a series of short term successes really works. I've watched projects without vision, resources or communication cause pain and anxiety throughout the organization. The good news is that we now know how to execute change and it is the role of senior management to enforce Kotter's principles in every change project.
Just hours after getting the job I decided that we'd embrace a service oriented architecture (SOA), standardize all desktop/server/storage infrastructure, and implement centrally managed applications. At 8am the next morning, I was scheduled to meet with my 300 staff members and share with them my vision for the future.
Luckily, experienced leaders counseled me on that first day. I discussed my vision with three Board members - Warren McFarlan (Professor at Harvard Business School), John Keane Sr. (CEO of Keane Inc.) and Sam Fleming (CEO of DRI/McGraw Hill). They told me that announcing a strategic plan without engaging all the stakeholders in the process would lead to mixed support and adoption.
Instead of arriving at the 8am meeting with all the answers, I arrived with questions. I explained to the staff that we wanted to improve customer service, encourage innovation, and ensure our work was aligned with the needs of our stakeholders. I challenged them to tell me what they thought we should do. In the first 30 days of my CIO tenure, I met with every staff member in IS as well as every senior manager in CareGroup to gather their priority lists, synthesize their input, and ensure they had a voice in the future. The result was a new IS operating plan focused on getting the basics done right. We clearly communicated the work to be done, the organizational structure which supported that work and the right people to staff the structure. The next step was to implement the changes.
I've long been a fan of John Kotter and his work on leading change in organizations. His broad recommendations to effect change include:
a. Defrost the status quo
b. Take actions that bring about change
c. Anchor the changes in the corporate culture
The planning meetings described above defrosted the status quo. The actions I took to bring about change included:
Create a Vision for Change - the community came together with a vision of a web-centric organization and I broadly communicated it.
Establish a Sense of Urgency - everyone recognized that IT innovation was essential to coordinate clinical care, improve safety and enhance our competitiveness, especially after the merger of Beth Israel and Deaconess
Elicit Executive and Peer Sponsorship - The CEO declared that medication safety, personal health records, and enhanced communication to all levels of the organization were the strategic goals of the entire organization for that year
Communicate Vision to Implement Change - we established steering committees, project charters, project plans, and communication plans
Empower Employees to Implement Change - we aligned responsibility, accountability and authority throughout the IT organization so that managers had the resources and authority they needed to support our improvement efforts. We created a Special Projects team to coordinate the improvement projects without disrupting day to day operations.
Establish Short-term Goals - we created the first web application in healthcare to share data (with patient consent) among multiple organizations. We created the first web-based provider order entry system, and we created the first personal health record to share all hospital data with patients
Encourage Additional Changes - we created a non-punitive culture in which everyone was encouraged to identify mistakes and opportunities for process improvement
Reinforce Changes Made as Permanent - we built standard processes to deliver service, prioritize new projects, and communicate our multi-year plans to the community
That first year, we implemented strong project management methodologies, eliminated unnecessary work, and focused on getting basic services like email, networks, storage, and electronic result reporting rolled out to everyone in the community. Managing this work required resources, vision, and communication. All the pieces were in place to effect change.
Occasionally, I try to execute a change management project more quickly than usual, bypassing these steps. Whenever I do that I find that adoption of the new technology is delayed, budgets are at risk of overrun, and frustration escalates.
My decade of experience executing change suggests that Kotter was right. Building a guiding coalition, broadly communicating the vision, and celebrating a series of short term successes really works. I've watched projects without vision, resources or communication cause pain and anxiety throughout the organization. The good news is that we now know how to execute change and it is the role of senior management to enforce Kotter's principles in every change project.
Selasa, 04 Desember 2007
Time, Scope, and Resources
Over the past few weeks, the number of new infrastructure project requests has peaked to unprecedented levels. The usual triage mechanisms described in my previous blog entry work well for applications, but infrastructure is different. Adding a new network port, a new telephone, or a new desktop is viewed a service business that can be ordered on demand, making it very challenging to say 'no'.
The sudden surge in requests re-emphasized to me the basic law of all IT projects - timeline, scope and resources are inter-related. If scope increases, timeline or resources must increase. If timeline is shortened, scope must be decreased or resources increased. Increasing scope, shortening timeline while leaving resources constant is not possible.
Of course, we can all work harder. There are 168 hours in a week, vacations can be postponed and nights/weekends filled. This works in the short term, but is not sustainable. "Lean" and "mean" organizations pushed too hard become "bony" and "angry" organizations.
New FTEs are not typically the short term answer. Getting new positions raises expectations of delivery capacity but hiring and training new staff take resources from existing capacity, so paradoxically getting new positions actually reduces capacity for a few months.
This means there is only one short term answer for unplanned, unbudgeted, unscheduled infrastructure requests - the scope of these requests needs to be reduced/phased or the time to do them increased.
For my requests this week, I've done the following
a. Assigned my staff to develop a standard worksheet which outlines the major time limiting steps (i.e. network connections take 90 days to provision) and thus specifies the minimum lead time for building IS support for a new location
b. Negotiated a change in scope with phasing - the initial request for a high bandwidth connection and new telephone system was morphed into a low bandwidth connection and use of the existing telephone system for now.
c. Reordered priorities - previous request were placed on hold in order to service the new 'once in a lifetime' opportunities
d. Asked for new staff - with the caveat that they will not add to capacity/throughput for 6 months
e. Requested governance changes - to ensure a central committee triages and communicates infrastructure requests for new offsite locations
There is one other strategy that I could employ if this surge in requests becomes chronic. In the past, I've staffed to average work load, not peak workload. This means that staff can put in extra hours for short term urgent increases in demand. However, I may have to staff to peak so that excess capacity is always available for the continuous infrastructure tyranny of the urgent I'm a frugal guy, doing a great deal on a limited budget , so I've never built in excess capacity.
As I work through these issues, I'll keep you updated on my progress.
The sudden surge in requests re-emphasized to me the basic law of all IT projects - timeline, scope and resources are inter-related. If scope increases, timeline or resources must increase. If timeline is shortened, scope must be decreased or resources increased. Increasing scope, shortening timeline while leaving resources constant is not possible.
Of course, we can all work harder. There are 168 hours in a week, vacations can be postponed and nights/weekends filled. This works in the short term, but is not sustainable. "Lean" and "mean" organizations pushed too hard become "bony" and "angry" organizations.
New FTEs are not typically the short term answer. Getting new positions raises expectations of delivery capacity but hiring and training new staff take resources from existing capacity, so paradoxically getting new positions actually reduces capacity for a few months.
This means there is only one short term answer for unplanned, unbudgeted, unscheduled infrastructure requests - the scope of these requests needs to be reduced/phased or the time to do them increased.
For my requests this week, I've done the following
a. Assigned my staff to develop a standard worksheet which outlines the major time limiting steps (i.e. network connections take 90 days to provision) and thus specifies the minimum lead time for building IS support for a new location
b. Negotiated a change in scope with phasing - the initial request for a high bandwidth connection and new telephone system was morphed into a low bandwidth connection and use of the existing telephone system for now.
c. Reordered priorities - previous request were placed on hold in order to service the new 'once in a lifetime' opportunities
d. Asked for new staff - with the caveat that they will not add to capacity/throughput for 6 months
e. Requested governance changes - to ensure a central committee triages and communicates infrastructure requests for new offsite locations
There is one other strategy that I could employ if this surge in requests becomes chronic. In the past, I've staffed to average work load, not peak workload. This means that staff can put in extra hours for short term urgent increases in demand. However, I may have to staff to peak so that excess capacity is always available for the continuous infrastructure tyranny of the urgent I'm a frugal guy, doing a great deal on a limited budget , so I've never built in excess capacity.
As I work through these issues, I'll keep you updated on my progress.
Senin, 03 Desember 2007
It's time to take back the internet
Today, I've received over 250 unsolicited email advertisements for IT related products, services and seminars. This is not the usual egregious SPAM (Viagra ads, Nigerian businessmen, or phoney eBay phishing emails) which are already filtered out (see my previous post). These are legitimate emails that I do not want to receive from real companies. At the bottom of these emails are the words "This is not SPAM because you have opted in to receive these emails from us or our partners". I have never opted in to receive any such emails from anyone.
My email address appears in the masthead of many of the columns I write for print and web-based media. This has led to my inclusion in just about every IT mailing list on the internet.
I've tried opting out. Removing myself from 250 mailing lists each day can take an hour, so that's clearly not a sustainable part of my schedule. Also, some unsubscribe links just do not work. What are our options?
Short term, I advocate that CIOs start blacklisting the email domains that pummel us with unsolicited IT advertising. I'm a kind and gentle soul, so I'm willing to give companies a chance to redeem themselves. This month, I'm responding to these companies with a polite request to never send me emails again. If they continue to fill my inbox, I will blacklist their domain on my local email servers, preventing delivery of their advertising throughout my enterprise.
Thus far, I have received courteous responses from my first few companies i.e.
"Thank you for your response. Receiving 250 business solicitations each day is too much of a burden. I will happily remove your name. Your feedback is appreciated"
Long term, I'd recommend a national "do not call list" for email just as we use to discourage telemarketers from making unsolicited calls to households which have opted out on the national list. I would happily submit my name to a national email opt out list.
Other long term alternatives - we could create local whitelists of companies we do business with, but maintaining such a whitelist is challenging for companies and individuals. Other possibilities include expansion of Spam legislation and enforcement which provides sanctions for violators of unsolicited email rules.
I'm ok with "pull" advertising on websites that is customized to me, but is easy to ignore. However, I consider "push" unsolicited email contact an invasion of a personal communication vehicle.
Thus, for companies that send out endless unsolicited emails, watch for my responses begging you to stop sending me email advertising! The only recourse I have left is to block your domain if you continue.
My email address appears in the masthead of many of the columns I write for print and web-based media. This has led to my inclusion in just about every IT mailing list on the internet.
I've tried opting out. Removing myself from 250 mailing lists each day can take an hour, so that's clearly not a sustainable part of my schedule. Also, some unsubscribe links just do not work. What are our options?
Short term, I advocate that CIOs start blacklisting the email domains that pummel us with unsolicited IT advertising. I'm a kind and gentle soul, so I'm willing to give companies a chance to redeem themselves. This month, I'm responding to these companies with a polite request to never send me emails again. If they continue to fill my inbox, I will blacklist their domain on my local email servers, preventing delivery of their advertising throughout my enterprise.
Thus far, I have received courteous responses from my first few companies i.e.
"Thank you for your response. Receiving 250 business solicitations each day is too much of a burden. I will happily remove your name. Your feedback is appreciated"
Long term, I'd recommend a national "do not call list" for email just as we use to discourage telemarketers from making unsolicited calls to households which have opted out on the national list. I would happily submit my name to a national email opt out list.
Other long term alternatives - we could create local whitelists of companies we do business with, but maintaining such a whitelist is challenging for companies and individuals. Other possibilities include expansion of Spam legislation and enforcement which provides sanctions for violators of unsolicited email rules.
I'm ok with "pull" advertising on websites that is customized to me, but is easy to ignore. However, I consider "push" unsolicited email contact an invasion of a personal communication vehicle.
Thus, for companies that send out endless unsolicited emails, watch for my responses begging you to stop sending me email advertising! The only recourse I have left is to block your domain if you continue.
Minggu, 02 Desember 2007
Safe Driver Discounts for Technology
Automobile insurers have long seen the sense of giving drivers an incentive, in the form of safe-driver discounts, to avoid taking risks when they’re behind the wheel. In health care, more and more payers are rewarding doctors for the quality of care they deliver and not the quantity. Aligning incentives with outcomes makes good sense.
Vendors of technology should follow those examples and revise their pricing models for yearly hardware and software maintenance contracts. If they rewarded customers who adhere to best practices, they would essentially pay customers for their performance.
As a CIO of multiple companies, I have to sign off on a lot of maintenance contracts every year. These contracts have a list price, and there’s usually a discount that the manufacturer passes along to the value-added reseller (VAR). The VAR decides how much of the discount to pass along to customers. No extra consideration is given to customers who abide by the vendor's best practices for the implementation and management of its products.
But why not? Why not give technology buyers the equivalent of a safe-driver discount? If customers were given incentives to hire highly competent internal staff, follow all the vendor-recommended configurations and install all the latest upgrades, life would be better for both the vendor and the customer. The vendor would receive fewer support calls and requests for emergency priority service. The customer would get higher reliability, better performance and lower maintenance costs.
Five years ago this month, we experienced a devastating network outage that led me to change a lot of our practices. Before the outage, my only incentive to adopt best practices was fear of downtime. The cost of support was certainly not a factor. We could make hundreds of support calls and send out an SOS during numerous high-priority emergencies, and the cost would be the same as it would be with a spotless performance record. The outage led me to replace much of our infrastructure, enhance my support team and ensure that our engineering practices are world class. We now place an extremely low burden on our vendors, but our maintenance discounts for all the technology we operate today don’t reflect that.
Here’s my idea. Vendors would give each customer a yearly technology safety rating, starting at, say, 100 points. If you miss an upgrade, 10 points would be deducted. Deviate significantly from a recommended configuration and you lose another 10 points. Make a support call that’s due to your lack of appropriate IT staffing and more points are taken away.
Discounts would no longer be arbitrary. Instead, they would be a direct function of the yearly safety rating. The harder a customer worked to avoid calls for help, the less the maintenance would cost. The best customer of the year could even be rewarded with completely free maintenance.
Of course, there are potential problems. Vendors could abuse the system by defining best practices as the elimination of all competing products, or they could take away points if customers didn’t buy all the optional add-on software they recommend. But such tactics would defeat the spirit of this proposal. Any vendor that adopted them could expect a good deal of pushback from customers; hopefully, they would see that such transparently cynical ploys have no real value.
So let me publicly ask my good friends at Cisco, EMC, Dell, HP and IBM, What do you think? You'll find that my driving record is exemplary.
Vendors of technology should follow those examples and revise their pricing models for yearly hardware and software maintenance contracts. If they rewarded customers who adhere to best practices, they would essentially pay customers for their performance.
As a CIO of multiple companies, I have to sign off on a lot of maintenance contracts every year. These contracts have a list price, and there’s usually a discount that the manufacturer passes along to the value-added reseller (VAR). The VAR decides how much of the discount to pass along to customers. No extra consideration is given to customers who abide by the vendor's best practices for the implementation and management of its products.
But why not? Why not give technology buyers the equivalent of a safe-driver discount? If customers were given incentives to hire highly competent internal staff, follow all the vendor-recommended configurations and install all the latest upgrades, life would be better for both the vendor and the customer. The vendor would receive fewer support calls and requests for emergency priority service. The customer would get higher reliability, better performance and lower maintenance costs.
Five years ago this month, we experienced a devastating network outage that led me to change a lot of our practices. Before the outage, my only incentive to adopt best practices was fear of downtime. The cost of support was certainly not a factor. We could make hundreds of support calls and send out an SOS during numerous high-priority emergencies, and the cost would be the same as it would be with a spotless performance record. The outage led me to replace much of our infrastructure, enhance my support team and ensure that our engineering practices are world class. We now place an extremely low burden on our vendors, but our maintenance discounts for all the technology we operate today don’t reflect that.
Here’s my idea. Vendors would give each customer a yearly technology safety rating, starting at, say, 100 points. If you miss an upgrade, 10 points would be deducted. Deviate significantly from a recommended configuration and you lose another 10 points. Make a support call that’s due to your lack of appropriate IT staffing and more points are taken away.
Discounts would no longer be arbitrary. Instead, they would be a direct function of the yearly safety rating. The harder a customer worked to avoid calls for help, the less the maintenance would cost. The best customer of the year could even be rewarded with completely free maintenance.
Of course, there are potential problems. Vendors could abuse the system by defining best practices as the elimination of all competing products, or they could take away points if customers didn’t buy all the optional add-on software they recommend. But such tactics would defeat the spirit of this proposal. Any vendor that adopted them could expect a good deal of pushback from customers; hopefully, they would see that such transparently cynical ploys have no real value.
So let me publicly ask my good friends at Cisco, EMC, Dell, HP and IBM, What do you think? You'll find that my driving record is exemplary.
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