I had another "connect the dots" experience the other day.
Two data points got connected for me that made me go "aha!", at least in my own little world.
It started with Mark Lewis' humorous post on process innovation.
And then a bit on how Dell was directly engaging with their audience.
Aha!
Mark's post is a good read, but he made a serious point that stuck:
Process innovation is just as important as technology innovation. And we as IT vendors should take notice.
Many of the processes we use to run our business seem to be remnants of IT server vendor models that were created in the 1980s. Market requirements. Product feasability. Engineering checkpoints. Field readiness.
It's a long, linear process, to be sure.
And anyone who's engaged with making new stuff at big companies had better double down on their patience and persistence pills for the long slog between The Big Idea and The Thing Finally Shipped.
What's worse, these long, linear processes are aiming at moving targets. Maybe you had the right idea when you started a project or program, but along the way, something changed. Customers had new requirements. Competitors made moves. Something happened that kind of put the whole thing up for grabs again.
There's got to be room for process innovation here, right?
And then Mike O'Malley sent me the Jeff Jarvis blog entry that decribed his none-too-friendly relationship with Dell, how a user community was formed, and how Dell used this community to make some pretty important decisions.
Wonderful story, to be sure. But I was impressed on several levels.
First, the question of "what does Dell do with Linux" had to have been a thorny strategic problem at Dell. Everyone was probably weighing in from different directions, and it would have taken a lot of time to reach some sort of consensus.
I loved the way they engaged the user community to get real-time feedback on what distros were preferred, how they viewed various support options, and so on.
I saw 6-12 months of corporate grinding short-circuited in a few-week process.
And it was probably hi-fidelity input: un-spun by analysts, marketing functions, and other folks who provide a level of masking. You got the real deal in raw form from the people who care -- your customers.
Now, if you've ever sat through product or planning meetings in larger companies, they're not much fun. One of the reasons that they're not fun is that there's not much data to look at, and what data there might be is either old, inaccurate, off-target or heavily spun.
Hard to make decisions on that sort of stuff.
Now, compare that with a one-week-old on-line poll from your paying customers (complete with color commentary) around specific decisions you have to make. The planning meeting is more about action than interpreting the dusty runes of recycled pie charts.
The other part I really liked is that they had their target market locked in. The people who took the time to engage with Dell on the whole Linux question were probably their first and best customers. And reaching those key customers with your first offerings now got shrunk down to a matter of weeks, and not quarters.
Another expensive and cumbersome part of the process short-circuited.
I suppose it's cliche to say that the internet -- and on-line communities -- changes everything.
But this example struck me as an in-your-face example of on-line communities triggering an order-of-magnitude process innovation change at Dell.
Customers win, Dell wins. Huge.
The other interesting angle is also how a somewhat resentful user community had formed around Dell, and how Dell built a bridge into this community to achieve a productive outcome. Now, it would have been nice to not take that little detour, and go directly to customer engagement, but the outcome was positive.
I only hope that EMC and the rest of us can figure this out half as well.
Not to share dirty laundry here, but a few months ago one of the storage bloggers (Ruptured Monkey) made the point that we should open up EMC's portal (PowerLink) and its forums to all interested parties.
I thought "great", got some initial agreement, and it then seemed to disappear into the forest.
I guess we need process innovation for process innovation ;-)
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