Archive for the ‘creativity’ Category

How Seeing The Future Helped NCR’s IT Leaders Do More

Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Image Credit Turns Out You Don’t Need A Fortune Teller To See The Future

Turns Out You Don’t Need A Fortune Teller To See The Future

“Think outside of the box” is what IT Leaders seem to be hearing more and more every day. Well that’s great advice, but how do you actually go about doing it? It turns out that IT managers over at NCR seem to have come up with a way to do this. Maybe we should all take a moment and listen to what they have to say…

The World Of Information Processing Systems

NCR (once upon a time known as National Cash Register) is a company that these days makes all sorts of electronic devices: ATM machines, data kiosks, software to run data warehouses, etc. It turns out that they are very, very successful.
Samuel Greengard had a chance to sit down with some NCR IT managers and find out what makes them tick. They’ve actually run into a bit of a problem: they’ve almost been too successful.
When you can count 19 of the top 20 banks as customers for your ATM machines, you clearly have a lot of electronic products out in the field. NCR’s issue is that with that many devices out there, a reactive approach to handling repair and maintenance (you call, we come) just wasn’t cutting it anymore. The company needed a new approach.

Out Of The Box Thinking

The IT managers who work for NCR were aware of all of the data that they had on hand. They connect to each of their products out in the field and get a steady stream of monitoring data sent back to NCR’s data centers all the time. This would explain why they have a 24PB data warehouse.
The NCR IT managers realized that they probably had enough data on hand to start to try to predict the future. For example, if a particular type of ATM machine had a historical record of failing after 100,000 operations, then as this type of machine started to approach 100,000 operations, they knew that a failure was coming up.
It’s really no breakthrough thought to realize that with this kind of knowledge, NCR now sends its repair teams out to service equipment in the field before they break – sorta like seeing the future.

Fortune Telling Equipment

Although the concept might be simple, it takes teams of dedicated IT staffers to make it happen. Specifically, although NCR has reams of data on their deployed equipment, turning this sea of information into usable knowledge requires some serious IT horsepower.
Very large storage systems, ultra fast servers, and complex algorithms are required to make sense of it all. However, the value that the IT teams are bringing to the table doesn’t stop there. NCR field technicians now carry Blackberrys that are used to tell them where to go next. The NCR IT managers have just about automated the whole process.

What This Means For You

Just making sure that servers stay up and that the company’s email system is available is no longer enough for an IT team to do. Innovative thinking is required in order to find ways for the IT department to help the rest of the company compete in the global marketplace.
Over at NCR their IT managers have found ways to leverage their IT systems and data in order to boost customer satisfaction. By mining data collected from customer equipment and running it through IT systems, NCR’s IT managers have been able to predict when equipment will need service so that outages can be prevented.
Novel thinking is nothing new in IT teams. However, applying that thinking to finding ways that the company can move faster and do more is what IT Leaders need to be doing these days.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Knowledge

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT Leader it can be all to easy to become focused on just what your immediate team is working on in terms of projects and goals. The problem with this is that doing this allows you to take your eyes off of what’s really important: the success of the company. There’s got to be a way for you to do your IT job while still helping the overall company move forward…

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Is An IT Manager Really An Artist?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
IT Leaders Are In Charge Of A Bunch Of Artists - Can We Get Them To Create Great Art?

IT Leaders Are In Charge Of A Bunch Of Artists - Can We Get Them To Create Great Art?

Here’s an interesting question that I like to whip out every so often and run through my mind: is IT a science or an art? For that matter, are we all engineers or are we really artists? If you think about it, our jobs consist of taking basic elements (colors) combining them (painting) and creating networks, servers, and applications (works of art). Is one among us the next IT Michelangelo?

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed how Pixar deals with the mix of art and technology that they use to create their films. His thoughts hold some interesting points for us IT Leaders.

One of the first points that Catamull makes is that Disney and Pixar are not just about great artists (Walt Disney being one of them). Rather, what makes them stand out is that they have learned to take technology and bend it in such a way as to help their artists do more. Sure seems like what an IT department is supposed to be doing!

At Pixar they have a saying “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology”. No matter what market your business operates in, this saying should apply to you also.

At Pixar they have developed several principles that they use to capture this saying and implement it in how they do work. Because every team in the department is not created equal, Pixar has implemented the following principles to guide their teams:

  1. Communication Is Key And Unrestricted: In order to ensure that silos of information don’t develop, they have separated the decision making hierarchy from the communications hierarchy. There needs to be no such thing as going through “proper channels” to get information. This means that Leaders have to get comfortable with the fact that they won’t know everything and others may know more than they do.
  2. New Ideas Must Be Safe: Nothing can kill innovation like an environment in which new ideas are laughed at or shot down. Everyone needs to get two-sided feedback: tell them what you liked and tell them what you didn’t like.
  3. Good Ideas Start In School: Oh the arrogance of those of us who have been out of school for many years. We forget where the next generation of workers will come from and where new ideas often spring from. We need to encourage our workers to publish their results, challenges, and solutions. Yes, you may end up giving away some competitive advantage but you’ll get so much more back in reader feedback and attracting new talent that it will all be worth it.

Catmull took the time to point out a few additional things that Pixar has done to keep their workers communicating with each other:

  • The Pixar building has been designed with the cafeteria, mailboxes, meeting rooms, and bathrooms are located in a common atrium. This was done to maximize chance encounters between coworkers. It goes without saying that this is how breakthroughs and solutions just “happen”.
  • When a company is successful, the ability to create a way to systematically ward off complacency while at the same time finding ways to uncover problems are probably the two most difficult issues facing a Leader.
  • Postmortems are the key to your company’s long term success. Nobody likes to do them, but everyone learns from them. Catmull suggests changing the format of the postmortem meeting so that people don’t become complacent. He also suggests that you ask each group involved in the postmortem to create a list of the 5 things that they would do again and the 5 things that they would not do again. This creates a safer environment.

I guess at the end of the day, just like the teams at Pixar, we are all artists down deep. The tools that we use and the artwork that we create may be different from what we traditionally think of artists creating, but isn’t that what art is all about?

Do you think of yourself as an artist or as an engineer? Do you think that the most creative IT folks do the best work? Is your work environment a safe place to offer new ideas? Do you do postmortems and are they valuable? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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3 IT Manager Secrets From The Folks At Pixar

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Pixar Makes Great Movies And Has A Lot To Teach IT About Manging Creativity

Pixar Makes Great Movies And Has A Lot To Teach IT About Manging Creativity

Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, Wall-E – who hasn’t been amazed at the movies that Pixar has created over the past few years? I think that we can all agree that clearly Pixar has found a way to foster and grow creativity within their organization. What if IT Leaders could find out how to do the same for our departments and teams…

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed just what makes Pixar work so well.

Catmull make the point that he was once talking with a studio executive who lamented the fact that his biggest problem was not finding good people, but rather finding good ideas.

Catmull flat out disagrees with this thinking – he thinks that it reflects a misunderstanding of creativity. He also thinks that it places way too much importance on the initial idea in creating a new product.

Since the release of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar has released eight other films which have all been blockbusters. The real interesting point is that Pixar has never bought a script or movie idea from the outside. The ingredients that make their movies magic, the stories, the characters, and the worlds in which they live, have all been created internally by Pixar employees.

Here’s where the real learning for IT Leaders comes:

Catmull believes that Pixar’s adherence to a basic set of principles and ways of managing creative talent and risk is done responsibly. At Pixar, the job of management is NOT to prevent risk but rather to build in the capability to recover when failures occur (and, of course, they do occur).

In order for this type of environment to exist, it must be safe to tell the truth. In order for the organization to grow and improve, it must constantly challenge all of its assumptions and be searching for any flaws that could ultimately search for any flaws that could destroy the organization.

IT Leaders, just like Pixar management, need to find a way to resist our built-in tendencies to try to either avoid or at least minimize risks. I realize that this is easy to say, and very hard to do.

If an IT Leader can’t overcome his/her desire to avoid risk, then each project that they are in charge of will be an imperfect copy of a previous project that they worked on. This will result in many copies of what was never a perfect process with no hope of achieving a break through.

To have a break through in how a project is done, IT Leaders need to be able to find a way to live with uncertainty. This of course means that you also need to make sure that your department or team has the built-in ability to recover when you’ve taken a big risk and it ends up failing.

The key to being able to recover lies in the people that you have on your team, but we’ll have to talk about how you do that next time…

What’s your favorite Pixar movie? Why? Do you feel that your IT department manages creativity well? Do you have a plan for how to recover if you take a risk and it ends up failing? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Work + Personal Life = Super Creativity On Projects

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Tap into IT employee outside interests to boost workplace creativity

Amazingly enough, everyone on our teams has a world outside of work. If you can find a way to leverage the skills and talents that your team have developed “out there” then you just may have found a gusher of creativity that will propel your team to success and improve employee morale and boost retention.

Simona Covel over at the Wall Street Journal ran a story this week about Chris Wallace at SuperGroup Creative Omnimedia Inc. (try saying that three times real fast). What’s interesting about the Web site design company that Chris has set up is that in the early days he didn’t always have enough customer work to keep his staff busy. Chris did something unusual: he allowed his staff to work on their own projects, on the clock, during downtime. His initial motivation was that he didn’t want to lose his staff just because there was nothing for them to work on right then. The unexpected side benefit was that the personal photography, video, music, etc. skills of his employees spilled over into the ideas that they pitched to their customers. Chris reports that some presentations to customers contained upwards of 40% of work created by his employees during their downtime.

Now we don’t all have the luxury of working for a cutting edge media company like Chris’. I don’t know about your company; however, many of the companies that I’ve worked for would have a hard time paying for their employees to do non customer (internal or external) work. However, perhaps there is a middle ground here. Simply being aware of your teammates outside interests is the first step in being able to tap into their unknown skills. If you know what they can do, then you are well situated to be able to turn to them when the need arises and ask them if they can contribute a solution.

IT is not known for its need for artistic creativity on the job (media companies aside). However, we do have IT parties, we do create documentation, and our apps do have splash screens and use sounds. All of these open the door to taping into home grown creativity. The biggest payoff is that the more that your team is able to put of themselves into the product that they are working on, the greater their job satisfaction will be and the higher your overall retention will remain.

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Posted in creativity, downtime, morale, personal, retention | 1 Comment »