Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Uh, What Happened to Silicon Valley?

Look at all the suits!

Here's the story:
Monday was a day when Silicon Valley's heaviest hitters put aside their business plans and day-to-day worries and riffed on the future of technology, innovation and U.S. competitiveness. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt imagined a personalized iPod-like device, and Intel President Paul Otellini looked forward to the day when wireless technology will finally make high-speed Internet ubiquitous.
The occasion was an "innovation summit" organized by the technology industry's advocacy group, TechNet. Google hosted the event at its Mountain View campus, and PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose moderated the panels of valley chief executives and other luminaries.
Sorry, I just can't get past all the coats and ties.

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Optimizing Processes

Here's an interesting story:
Rosemary Baczewski, director of process and performance improvement at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of N. J., summed up what it's all about at the BPM Conference in San Francisco this week when she said her team had identified a health care claims process that usually took 7.6 days to complete. In an experiment, two managers hand-carrying the same claim managed to push it past the right parties in only 45 minutes.
"This was a wakeup call to the company. The employees can't necessarily work harder. The process has to work harder," she told a group of conference attendees in a session on using Six Sigma, an international methodology for eliminating defects and improving quality to improve business processes.
When I first read this story (via Phil Wainewright) I thought this was an amusing example of Occam's Razor: before you apply any sophisticated methodologies, just eyeball the problem first! But the punch line is in the second paragraph: the employees can't work harder. Process badly or not at all applied is the enemy of business; well applied it is your competitive advantage.
It's my belief that we in the software industry have largely failed in providing managers with great tools to improve how business works. This is evident from not only the anecdote above but in countless other tales of inefficiency, of the oft-cited "impedance mismatch" between the board room and IT, and horrific failures to adapt to a globalized, 24x7 economy. We have not yet built the software that treats the business as an organic whole.

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