Transparency Overhead

The federal government's Open Government Initiative is actually moving along, which surprises me. A lot of people who have tried to get government information know the runaround: endless phone calls, letters, and emails if you're lucky. At last, the threat of a FOIA request was usually enough to shake a document loose months later. Some agencies have been proactive in publishing their plan to meet the initiative, and a few are behind. The Sunlight Labs Open Watcher page at http://sunlightlabs.com/open/ is an easy way to track some of the bigger departments and how well they have complied with OMB's directive. As you can see, most of the departments on the list haven't published three high-value datasets or created the "Open" page on their department website. For those departments in compliance, I have a followup question: what do you have besides datasets?

There are millions of pages of documents that do not exist in electronic format in the federal government, and the Open Government Initiative needs to address them. I was at a government trade show this week, and one of the attendees explained how her agency was trying to get college kids to sit in a room and scan paper all summer. That doesn't sound like a serious commitment to me; it sounds like a recipe for failure. As outlined in the OMB document, departments and independent agencies must first identify documents with high value to the public. Next comes the conversion, which can be handled many ways. My recommendation is to find a contractor who can take those documents away, scan and OCR them, then destroy the documents if appropriate. Specialists with high-speed scanners can do ten times the work and cost less compared to a 19-year-old with an old hand-feed scanner, and specialists have their own office offsite. In addition, a professional document management company can provide quality assurance and help with taxonomy.

There are other good reasons to scan. Agencies have whole rooms full of old paper, creating wasteful spending on real estate plus a fire hazard and a huge information risk to manage. In addition, with many civilian baby boomers leaving government over the next few years, no one will know what's in those file cabinets anymore. The paper may as well be blank when those boomers retire.

Will the Open Government Initiative help people understand and participate in the federal government better? Information is not knowledge, but you can't gain knowledge without it. It should be easier to find waste and ineffective programs, and the press can help spotlight problem areas.

How committed is the government to this? The biggest indicator will be what happens when some of these agencies don't meet the deadline. It's coming up very soon, and there should be consequences for failure. Watch this blog for an update.

Feel free to comment on this blog. Please note that comments are moderated, and inappropriate posts like sales pitches, unprofessional language, and flames won't be up for long.

So What?

Chances are good that your team knows what it's doing. Your team is working on a project, and that project has a specific outcome. That outcome is tied to specific objectives. Those objectives meet a particular goal, and the goal is clearly defined. Hooray, you are way ahead of the game. Most organizations aren't where you are, but you're not quite where you should be.

What's missing? The "so what" factor. What are you getting out of it? What is your organization getting out of it? Often the answer is obvious, but not always. Goals should mean something -- provide a benefit. It's pretty easy to think of reasons to do something, but those are usually objectives, not goals. A goal is the overall "thing to be accomplished." The benefit is what you get out of it. In an organization, goalsetting is a little easier because most workplaces have an overall goal, only they call it a mission to give it more urgency. In the achievement hierarchy, the goal is subordinate to the benefit. Achieving the benefit is possible without achieving the goal, which is still success. Achieving the goal and not getting the benefit is still failure.

Once you have determined a goal to achieve the desired benefit, it's time to plan objectives. Any goal worth achieving takes a certain amount of time and effort. These smaller goals you achieve on the way to the larger one can be a real goal-killer, especially if they're not really aligned with the goal. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the objectives we don't even care about the goal anymore. Care about the objectives, but reserve your real passion for the goal and its benefit. Besides, your objectives may change along the way as circumstances change. They're supposed to have agility, just like the goal needs stamina. Don't change the goal to fit the objectives. Along the way, measure how much closer you are to the goal and benefit, just as you are measuring the objectives. If you do these simple things, people with think you're brilliant, which is a popular goal. Now you just have to figure out the benefit....

Chasing the Competency Gap

What happens when people don't have the skills to do their jobs? In the old century, they would probably be fired, and new talent would take over. Now, the new talent isn't any more likely to do a better job than the old hand. It seems that shifting organizational strategies and new technology have combined to create a permanent competency gap. Workers are constantly trying to catch up but haven't been able to attain all the necessary skills. Even new graduates are struggling to master the "working world" skills that aren't being taught in academia. The hiring organization has to pick up the slack, or fail in its mission. That situation has been status quo for a while, but things are about to get much worse.

The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) just released their new "Bridging the Competency Gap" white paper, and it painted a grim picture. The report says that, in the next few years, the Baby Boom generation will begin to exit the workforce in large numbers, and over a quarter of all organizations in America haven't prepared for the loss in workers. Two-thirds of all employers have no strategy to keep these late-career employees, who are usually the keepers of institutional knowledge. Half of the hiring organizations must train new hires before putting them to work, especially in leadership and basic business skills.

So if we have to train people, how can we train the greatest number of people in the least amount of time for the least cost? You guessed it: e-learning to the rescue! Once created, courses can be used over and over for new hires and poor performers alike. A talent assessment will help determine where the greatest training needs are, and good metrics will show where the improvements are. Coupled with follow-up live training and mentoring programs, organizations can push productivity and quality out of the red and back into the green.

E-learning is especially crucial to government agencies. It's famously difficult to fire government workers, therefore they must be trained, because they get paid regardless of their value. Otherwise the cube farm will be full of weeds, sucking up valuable resources while providing no benefits.

If Results Don't Matter, Neither Do You

I am always envious of the failed CEOs, general managers, and chairs of the big corporations. Over the past ten years, I watched the dot-com guys turn to vapor, real estate magnets go under water, and profitable banks turn on a dime. My wish is always the same, "Please give me that job! I could ruin your company for 10% of what the last guy made!" At the highest levels, it might be OK to pay a bloated salary for terrible performance, but for the rest of us, results matter.

So when I look at SharePoint, I see something similar. Some big-name company is getting paid huge amounts of cash to do a SharePoint implementation. That part I don't mind; what gets me is how poorly SharePoint performs for its user base. Somebody got a big paycheck, but where are the results? I could do a terrible job on that implementation for a fraction of the cost.

The biggest challenge is goals. SharePoint is designed to do certain things very well, but it has no purpose of its own. The organization has to give it a purpose. The goal is not to use SharePoint; the goal should be to increase productivity, decrease costs, improve quality, that sort of thing. Then it's time to explain how SharePoint can help the organization get there -- those are the strategic objectives. Every site, every feature, every web part needs to align with those objectives in some way. Otherwise, the launch will be a mess of frustration and fingerpointing.

The other big challenge is metrics. They should be concrete and actually measureable. Want to reduce the average size of email? Measure it before the implementation and set a goal number, like 20% less. Reduce production time for a document? Find out how long it takes now; set a goal number. Whatever the improvement is, compare before and after, and three months out, and six months out, etc. Not everyone will jump into SharePoint at once, and it's a good idea to check metrics over time, anyway.

An unrelated point about implementations. Don't let IT circumvent the core functionality of SharePoint. If you have security or policy that bars some core functions, please use something else. It is very frustrating to be denied a basic feature that comes out of the box, like multiple file upload to a library.

SharePoint in a Crisis

There will always be surprises. While some are pleasant, others can be downright nasty, and it can take a group effort to handle them. Managing a crisis effectively entails internal and external communication, sound policy, group support, and an easy-to-use communication platform that can reach everyone.

Hey, guess what? I recommend SharePoint. I've gone on and on about certain features before, but this time I want to bring them together for a particular purpose. Here's a recipe for emergency management with SharePoint. First, there's a lot of prep work. Your organization should already have an emergency website with policies, procedures, internal contact info, friendly media contacts, first responder information, etc. Of course, you are already subscribed to the RSS feed for any important changes. What? You don't have this? Hmmm... OK, there's your first step.

Set up a site template for a discrete crisis. Make sure you have the features you want and everything is placed in line with your users' expectations. When a crisis occurs, launch a new site under your emergency site using the crisis template. Then you can assign a crisis manager and assistants, fill out forms, collaborate on press statements, make internal announcements, all within SharePoint. For the thumb-typers out there, SharePoint has a mobile version so people in the field can get the same info. Just append "/m" to the URL.

When the crisis is resolved, archive the site. If a new one occurs, launch another one. SharePoint may not save a life or a building, but if you provide good communication on a reliable platform, you just might.

P.S. Put your SharePoint server in the cloud so a location threat doesn't knock out a valuable piece of your global communications.

Oh, Bother

I just did the math. During the workday, I get an email every 10 minutes that matters to me. Those emails are links to news articles, file attachments, tasks, questions, reminders, alerts, and read receipts. I get calendar invitations to meetings, conference calls, webinars, lunches. I also get phone calls, voice messages, walk-ins, and snail mail. Every time I turn around, somebody wants me to do something or read something, so I've stopped turning around. In the old days, it was common for powerful executives like myself to have an assistant. That person would be the gatekeeper: he or she would open the mail, take the phone call, write the letter I would sign, handle my schedule, etc. Now, all but the top echelons in the biggest organizations must manage their own communication and schedule. The PDA or "virtual assistant" is more a nag than a help. It can be difficult to focus on the task at hand with all of these paralyzing distractions. As a result, I think more than a few of us are suffering from overload.

So we're missing that buffer layer that used to separate a manager from employers, employees, and customers. Short of paying a fat salary and sacrificing office space for a professional administrative assistant, what can we do about it? Here's where a combination of psychology, trust, email management, and SharePoint come into play.

First, the psychology. I understand that managers like to seem on top of things. Is getting an email that a file was uploaded really their job? The daily minutiae of a project should be handled by team members, not the manager. That includes acting as interpreter between the customer and the team. Managers should et them communicate directly and wait for the regular report. The team is reporting their activity, right?

That brings us to trust. If team members have to be watched all the time, it's time to get a different team. Managers should support the team, which includes giving them opportunities for both success and failure. OK, no one likes failure, but I've learned more from my failures than my successes. The trick is to fail in small ways and have a backup plan.

There are hundreds of experts on email management, and this blog is not supposed to be book-length, despite my best efforts. All I will say is that project emails are usually better off as content in a collaboration system. Discussion groups, wikis, blogs, lists, project calendars, and other features are often better containers of project information than email because different types of data are handled different ways. Email just puts stuff in the inbox, no matter what it is.

Last, but not least, is SharePoint. Chances are that most folks reading this blog already have it or something like it. Managers should show the project team how to use it specifically for collaboration and communication on the project before them. This could mean using announcements for team updates, a blog for reporting, and a project wiki to pool decisions made or lessons learned. Then it's time for the manager to set alerts. No phone calls, no emails, no endless conference calls. For long-term projects, I set my alerts to get a weekly email summary of activity. Shorter term, I like a daily summary. I don't want to see the 10 emails it took to decide on a background color; I just want to know if the client is happy. As a project nears completion, I will reset my alerts to "immediate" to make sure the rollout is going smoothly.

The key to combating information overload is getting only the information I need. Through a combination of back-to-basics management and SharePoint technology, I think I've tamed the beast for now.

The App Heard 'Round the World

Email is pretty easy. With a few clicks and a little typing, I can communicate with anyone around the world. Email is also pretty fast. In a few seconds, the email I send is waiting in the other person's inbox for viewing. Email is pretty convenient; I can attach files, include hyperlinks, and contact many people at once. In the communication toolbox, email is as handy and necessary as a screwdriver. In the global collaboration toolbox, however, email is more like a sledgehammer -- good for specific tasks, but destructive if overused.

For example, think of eight people in different offices around the globe working on a project plan. They don't know each other, but a senior manager has put them together for this task. Naturally, each person has different expertise and opinions. They work on the plan and send out emails to the team. Draft after draft is distributed, copied, edited, split, and recombined. In the end, the team spends as much time piecing the final plan together as they spent drafting it in the first place.

Next time, they could use an actual collaboration tool, rather than a messaging tool. My preferred tool is SharePoint, though there are a few of them out there. SharePoint provides the necessary architecture out of the box, and there are a number of qualified independent vendors who can to build it to spec. With a little training, workers can take advantage of features like personal profiles and social networking features so they can get to know their teammates on the other side of the world or down the hall.

There are plenty of task-specific features as well. Document workspaces leverage check in/check out and versioning functionality so the team never has to wonder about the latest changes or accidentally editing an old version. Alerts via email or RSS feed automatically notify the team when new drafts are available for review. Personally, one of the features I like the most is threaded discussion groups. My team can keep track of ideas this way, and it really saves on the conference calls and note-taking. Another huge advantage of SharePoint is having a platform to keep senior management informed by giving them read-only rights to the collaboration site.

I know today's entry reads like a sell sheet, but whatever tool your organization chooses, I hope they make a sincere effort to transition out of email. It's just not the right tool.