Information Governance: Thanks, IBM and it will take more than software to achieve a smarter planet

Waiting for an IBM briefing to start, I was captivated by a juicy quote on the front page of the Financial Times. Oswald Grubel, CEO of UBS for almost a year now (and formerly head of private banking at Credit Suisse) dourly remarked that:

“We should not underestimate the reputational damage we have engineered for ourselves and it takes some time to get over that.”

The financial services industry is an incredibly important clientele for IBM. It is one of Big Blue’s largest vertical industry segments, if not the largest. Not only are financial services firms major contributors to IBM’s top line, but they also serve as thought leaders behind many of IBM’s early-stage product initiatives.

IBM’s Information Governance Initiative is no exception. When IBM formed the Data Governance Council in 2005 to focus customer input on how best to put together a usable suite of offerings, financial services firms anchored the effort. Their experiences as leading-edge implementors have shaped today’s IBM products, such as the InfoSphere Content Assessment Bundle, and provided inspiration for IBM’s recent acquisitions of Guardium, Exeros, Lombardi and Initiate.

Superficially, this might sound like horrifying news. The financial services industry has blackened its public image with a heads-we-win/tails-the-public-bails-us-out attitude. According to the Bank of England, the total support offered to the financial systems of the UK and US amounted to 74% and 73% of gross domestic product, respectively.

So is IBM really asking the rest of its customers to emulate the buffoons in banking?

No, quite the reverse is true.

IBM’s GBS has studied the differences in information technology usage between the high and low-performing firms relative to industry peers. Not surprisingly, their information governance practices are markedly different. For example, an IBM study has shown that

• The top performers in an industry (1st quintile relative to peers) are 15 times more likely to predict and prepare for the future by evaluating trade-offs proactively compared to lower performers (the 4th and 5th quintiles relative to industry peers).
• Industry over-performers are eight times more likely to pursue information-led transformation at an enterprise level than under-performers.
• Top performers used “sophisticated” data governance systems three times more often than lower performers, while more than half of lower performers relied on “rudimentary” approaches.

Accordingly, IBM believes that information governance is the biggest differentiator between leaders and laggards in an industry.

Presumably, the laggard financial institutions will be taking more of an interest in emulating the information governance strategies of those who found themselves among the wreckage during the financial crisis. The more creatively IBM and its ilk can help beleaguered financial services firms pay as they generate business advantage, the stronger this interest will be.

Thought leaders in the financial services industry have recognized that the need for better information begins with the individual firm and extends industrywide.

First, there is a need for greater transparency in markets. Market insiders believe it would be helpful for Credit Default Swaps to be cleared transparently. Protesters were handing out leaflets in the streets of Davos demanding that banks put their derivatives business onto exchanges to make the financial system more transparent.

Second, there is a need for transparency in regulatory compliance. If the populist move to force the financial sector to pay for its own residual insurance (to finance its own future bail-outs), such transparency would be as welcome to the governed as it will be to the general public.

Third, there is an acknowledged problem of Garbage-In/Garbage-Out at the public policy level. The back-story on this one: The buzz from the World Economic Forum at Davos is that all the world’s leading economies are assuming that foreign demand for their exports will drive their recoveries from the global recession. (This is a variant of an oft-seen high-tech scenario in which 20 start-ups each assume they’ll get 10% of the same target market.)

At the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last year, world leaders agreed on a framework for strong, stable and balanced growth, which gave the International Monetary Fund the job of collecting national economic forecasts and checking that they were consistent with each other. IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has already warned, quelle surprise, that the sum of all the desired exports doesn’t match the sum of all anticipated imports.

I believe that the IMF is in the process of learning the first lesson of business forecasting: Absent facts, people will argue for their own opinions. And a forecast is just that, an opinion.

To be actionable at a policy level, a forecast must be shared. A shared forecast cannot be developed without a shared version of the truth. This shared version of the truth cannot be developed without clean data. And clean data cannot be developed without information governance.

I will be curious to see how IBM engages with the public sector around information governance, not only in financial services, but also in health care, environmental issues and public safety. Big Blue’s consultancy services are likely to be extremely important in helping businesses, NGOs and regulatory bodies organizations overcome the organizational hurdles to information governance. Information governance in the public interest could be one of Big Blue’s best opportunities to live up to the tagline, “Software for a Smarter Planet.”

Is Rupert Murdoch senile? Or are we bloggers ageist?

Is Rupert Murdoch an oligopolist signalling a play to his peers, or is he a simply an old man with funny ideas? For those who believe in the news media as the fourth branch of government in a civilized society, this is an important question. Hoping to find out, I wasted another perfectly good hour this morning listening to NPR.

When Tom Ashbrook took on the topic Google v. Murdoch this morning, the result was hardly On Point.

With mix of guests like Michael Wolff, Jeff Jarvis and Steven Brill, a fracas was perhaps inevitable. Michael Wolff was not content to talk over the his fellow panelists and the moderator. Callers could not even get their questions on the table uninterrupted. In the online comments, listeners howled with rage. Was it a food fight?” A train wreck? Bloviation? A barge-over shouting match a la Fox News. Hadn’t Michael Wolff’s mother taught him any better? Grrr… Grrr.. Grrr…

One online comment summed it up as follows:

“There were so many things wrong with this show it is difficult to know where to start.”

In short, today’s discussion on On Point was just like every debate you’ve ever heard on the “Demise of the Newspapers.” Feelings are strong on both sides. The fur always flies.

Check out the body language at this year's WSJ "All Things Digital" Conference between the Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Katherine Weymouth, Publisher of The Washington Post

Whether staged in forums grand or humble these debates boil down to the issue of the broken business model. The two sides draw their lines something like this:

• Citizen journalists point out that traditional news sources must change or die
• Traditional newspapers point out that citizen journalists must evolve or starve

Yes, what tabloid reporter Jimmy Stewart told society girl Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story back in 1940 remains true today: journalists need to eat and prefer to have a roof over their heads. (This is true of open source software developers, too, bye the bye. However noble the cause of the commons, it can’t exist for long without a sustaining business model.)

It’s useless to debate whether the Internet and Google have “happened” to the News. It’s more useful to consider how those on both sides of the ideological divide can evolve toward sustainability.

Robert X Cringely considered just that in his blog post a few weeks ago, News Corp to Give Plaid Stamps! Cringely considers the situation from several not-so-obvious angles and concludes that a News Corp boycott of Google won’t work. Right on!

That said, a News Corp boycott is not what Murdoch is trying to accomplish. If it were, he could have blocked Google’s crawlers long ago with a few lines of code.

Murdoch may be getting on, but let’s not be so ageist that we deny the man any vestige of the craftiness that got him where he is.

Murdoch is not an idealist tilting at windmills. He’s a pragmatist rallying the troops. I believe he sees the traditional news business as an oligopoly, and his recent statements can be interpreted by other oligopolists as “signalling.”

What he’s asking is this:

What if The Economist, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other respected news filters chose to go in with Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal and The Times (London’s) and boycott Google’s search engines all at the same time?

One could argue that the news industry is not a classic oligopoly, dominated by three or four firms. Ahh, but search is an oligopoly of the textbook variety, with Google primus inter pares.

Assemble the right group of news originators to boycott Google, and I believe Murdoch could provoke reactions by Yahoo and Bing that would catalyze a different online landscape. Or at least a very different business model.

Such an episode would be very illuminating for everyone involved.

It would set up a factual basis to imagine an online world without the contribution of traditional journalism in generating news and filtering opinion. These facts could lead to a breakthrough in the war of words.

Murdoch is signalling. Oligopolists, listen up!

Peace One Day: Entrepreneurship in Action

September 21 is the United Nations International Day of Peace. It provides an opportunity for individuals, organizations and nations to create practical acts of peace on a shared date. This is a day of voluntary ceasefire in many conflict areas.

The catalyst was an individual, Jeremy Gilley. As an independent documentary film-maker, he had a big idea in July, 1998. He would document his efforts to manifest a day of global ceasefire.

Entrepreneurs, take a moment to appreciate the scope of this dream, to manifest a day of global ceasefire. To change human behavior. Simultaneously, around the globe. Then take a moment to appreciate the resource constraints faced by an army of one.

Gilley himself was a little daunted by the dream. But if he failed to achieve the big dream, he’d have the fodder for a documentary that could shock the world to a higher level of consciousness. So some good was bound to come out of it.

Peace One Day, as the project came to be called, was slow to catch on. The Dalai Llama, as might have been expected, was one of the first to lend moral support. But only 114 people, mostly Gilley’s friends, attended the September 1999 launch at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

Thirteen months later, Gilley got a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York City. The United Nations had declared a Day of Peace back in 1982. But it had never been manifested.

The Peace One Day project gained the full support of Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the UN. But a resolution must be sponsored by two countries before it can be put to a vote at the UN General Assembly and resolved. He approached Costa Rica, which had already implemented a national Day of Peace, and his home country, Great Britain. Hundreds of meetings and thousands of letters later, he gained their support to introduce the resolution.

In 2001, the United Nations unanimously adopted a resolution declaring September 21 the International Day of Peace.

The UN International Day of Peace was to have been announced on September 11, 2001. Before Kofi Annan could mount the podium at the UN Headquarters in New York City, let alone ring the peace bell, two planes hit the World Trade Center. The press conference was canceled. And the first International Day of Peace went largely unnoticed.

The UN International day of peace was celebrated by individuals but was not observed in areas of conflict. Gilley realized that the only way to silence the cynics was to show a cease-fire being observed. Because the UN wasn’t in a position to enforce the resolution, and the Peace One Day organization had no budget for marketing, the situation looked about as bleak as it could be.

Through friends at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Gilley met Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie, who agreed to co-sponsor an event on September 20, 2005, the night before Peace Day. Once the world’s most famous inner beauty got involved, the UN International Day of Peace began to get some traction in the news — four years after the first aborted press conference.

But Gilley was still at a crossroads. His goal was not met. He had been boot-strapping the project since 1998. He was out of money.

Then, he began to meet marketing and business people. If you are interested in social marketing, you can see its first glimmers by watching the video. If you type A business people don’t think you have time, start at 25:50 to convince yourselves that this is indeed a story of entrepreneurship and marketing innovation.

Robbie Campbell of McKann Erikson had the idea that support of Peace One Day might somehow be aligned with the interests of his client, Coca Cola, the company that has always wanted to “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” McKann Eriksen tested the concept of putting Peace One Day information on Coca Cola cans, but consumers were skeptical. It would have to be done carefully. Moreover, Gilley wrestled with the ethics of taking money from the soft-drink giant.

For advice, he turned to an award winning entrepreneur, Ray Anderson, who turned his billion-dollar corporation, Interface, from a major polluter to one that was 100% sustainable. “Get surpport from the business community?” asked Gilley. “WHY NOT!” said Anderson. “The institution of business is the most influential institution on earth.” Eventually, after the type of protracted approval cycle global businesses need to engage their vast gears, Coca Cola green-lighted a sponsorship.

Meanwhile, a breakthrough came in March of 2007, when Roshan Khadivi of UNICEF Afghanistan came up with what marketers will recognize as a “benefits-oriented unique selling proposition.” Her big idea: to coordinate the organization’s efforts to immunize children against tuberculosis with a cease-fire by the Taliban on September 21, the International Day of Peace, in one of the most violent places on earth, Afghanistan. Actor Jude Law put his butt in the line of fire, literally, to accompany Gilley to Afghanistan to precipitate action by local agencies such as the Red Crescent to open negotiations with the warring parties.

This catalyzed another big idea. The World Health Organization requested security assistance from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Taliban Movement to ensure the safety of UNICEF personnel administering the vaccinations. The Taliban leader wrote a letter of assent, enabling 10,000 vaccinators to immunize 1.4 million Afghani children against both tuberculosis and polio. All told, there were 82 Peace Day initiatives by more than 30 organizations in Afghanistan — UN agencies, government departments, radio stations and civil society organizations — on September 21, 2007. (Watch starting at 110:03 to see more of what was achieved.)

After nine years of moral courage, tireless effort, and serendipitous connections, Jeremy Gilley had achieved the goal of proving that one day of peace was possible in a hot war zone. In 20007, he reckoned that September 21 was marked by 100 million people in 100 countries.

PeaceOneDay encourages individuals to take action by:

• Creating a personal statement — such as MovieMom’s blog post on BeliefNet, or my own post on Sunset Moment
• Organizing a One Day One Goal football match — soccer, to us Yanks
• Hosting a private screening of the documentary film, The Day After Peace.
  

The film is amazing.  Hundreds of people helped over the years.  Gilley and the team visited 54 countries.  He spoke to 33,000 young people, recording 417 hours of footage from this activity alone.  Altogether, the film is culled from 1,700 hours of material.  It is a gem.

In addition to his contribution as a humanitarian, Gilley is showing entrepreneurs a new way of using art and technology to influence global audiences.  More on this in a future post

Meanwhile, I encourage you to make plans to observe Peace Day next year.

Marketing the Enterprise 2.0? Get Ready for Social Media

Now that we’re talking about the Enterprise 2.0, we need to recognize that social media has changed the face of marketing itself.

Last Thursday I participated in a marketing experiment perpetrated by some valued clients who must remain nameless (VCWMRN).

Folks, I’m empathetic to the process of experimenting with social media. It’s an evolving medium. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We learn through doing.

But as your strategic advisor, I must point out that your slip is showing. Social media has already changed your marketing landscape. Think about this:

1. Everything you do is visible, as is what is said about it
2. The same old rifle-shot marketing, it ain’t

I want all of you at the Mother Ship to be aware of what’s happening to you out there on social media like Twitter. If you are still thinking, “On the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog,” think again! Nowadays, there’s a new saying: “On Twitter, everyone can see what kind of dog you are.” Openly visible and searchable social communication is circulating about your company whether you like it or not. You can’t beat it.

Yes, VCWMRN, everything you do on Twitter and Facebook is visible and searchable. It’s all out there for everyone to see: How many followers or friends you have; who notices you and tweets or comments; what they say about you; and who re-tweets or piles on. If you flop, you flop on the world’s stage. If you’re experimenting, or just blundering, remember: you’re not doing it in secret, you’re doing it in a fish bowl. For example, if all the tweets are about logistics of the event and nobody is moved to comment on the content, you’re not a thought leader. Similarly, if employees are patting each other on the back and no-one is chiming in, it looks like you’re breathing your own exhaust.

Ergo, don’t overlook marketing basics when you’re planning social media events. Your fearless leader would surely agree with me that metrics are one of the marketing basics. This is not difficult. If you give out a twitter hash code for your events, it will be a convenience to your audience, who won’t have to search and guess, and it will be easier for you to monitor and improve. Of course not everyone is going to use the hash code, but most people will, and it will save everyone trouble.

And while we’re at it, we can have our own Twitter hash tag, #vcwmrn. Look for this on Twitter and you will know it’s me talking to you, my valued clients who must remain nameless. I won’t mention the company. Neither should you.

Now let’s discuss the second new and unfamiliar thing about social media, the death of rifle-shot marketing.

When we worked together on marketing Enterprise 1.0, we knew our targets. We knew what to say to our business and IT audiences, we understood who influenced them, and we invested a lot in cultivating the influencers. In the olden days, we knew how the system worked, and how to work the system.

VCWMRN, social marketing is not the familiar, rifle-shot approach that we in industrial markets grew up with. Social media enables you to reach people you don’t know through the network effect. It is more like consumer word of mouth communication – remember the hair shampoo commercial, where friends tell friends, and so on – than anything you’re familiar with in the realm of industrial marketing. Except in the world of online social media, there are different kinds of friends with different kinds of influence.

If you have difficulty imagining what a communication network looks like, look at this link to PhysOrg.com. Enlarge the image in the top left of the screen.

In the Enterprise 2.0 world, social media influencers have three primary roles:

1. Domain Experts, who take the time to deeply analyze the relevance of emerging trends and provide detailed commentary for customers to consider
2. Pollinators, who connect their audiences with a broad array of interesting, relevant and useful facts and opinions
3. Uber Networkers, who disseminate a large quantity and variety of information to very large networks of followers

These are three different skill sets. I’ve seen folks combine two roles. Some domain experts, for example, are also good pollinators on Twitter. Check out @TheRightBlue (no, not Big Blue!), as an example of some folks who are both content experts and powerful pollinators. That said, the only people who seem to be able to combine all three at once are, fittingly, social media experts.

VCWMRN, you no doubt recognize leading-edge implementors at customer organizations, the Enterprise 1.0 analysts, and your best bloggers as Domain Experts.

What you learned last week is what happens on Twitter without pollinators. Nothing.

Identifying and looping in key pollinators is your next step.

A powerful pollinator is a special kind of personality. The personality of a powerful pollinator has four qualities:

• Totally plugged into the social media flow ← “not checking in” periodically
• Mentally connected to your target market ← acts as an intelligent filter
• Sparkles in soundbytes ← writes witty, re-tweetable tweets and headlines
• Popular with powerful friends ← gets amplified by Uber-Networkers’ megaphones

In other words, a powerful pollinator is an online Personality with a capital P.

VCWMRN, you may discover that key pollinators are following you and your analysts on Twitter right now. If not, you can rectify this.

But it is not enough that Pollinators follow you. They have to be paying attention. Just like in the olden days, you have to engage them in a conversation and get things started.

Next time you line up customers of your IT services to appear on your behalf, treat them – at minimum – with the social media consideration that an ordinary garden gnome would expect when he is trotted out to represent a travel services vendor!

In the next post, I’ll outline what Travelocity did right for the Roaming Gnome’s Summer of Possibilities tour. I think you will recognize the some of the marketing basics you’re good at, applied in the new media context.

The Power of Paradigms

The sun sets on an era

The G20 summit seems oddly familiar. I’m no politico, but I knew I had written this story once before. What we are seeing now on the world stage is the last act in a paradigm shift, where even the world leader from the last chapter accepts a new order for the next.

To see what I mean, consider this excerpt from the first issue of the Open Systems Advisor newsletter, published in April, 1989. Back then, I was talking about the events that led up to dominant vendor IBM’s embracing open systems by joining X/Open and co-founding The Open Software Foundation, instantly moving open systems from fringe to center stage. Today, you can read the same piece and think about the circumstances leading up to US President Obama’s joining the G20′s declaration of an open world economy.

“If you remember Nicholas Copernicus, you know why paradigms are important. Round about the year A.D. 140, the Greco-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy first systematized the then-centuries-old theory that the universe was revolving around a stationary earth at its center. Some 13 centuries later, Ptolemy’s Almagest was still holding its own even though developments in mathematics and clock-making had enabled repeated demonstrations of its fundamental inaccuracy. Before Copernicus, Ptolemy’s followers had focused on adjusting his formulas to match the newest observations.

When Copernicus proposed dethroning the earth as the center of the universe, he scandalized the scientific and religious communities in equal proportions. Martin Luther called Copernicus a fool and a heretic; one heliocentrist was burned at the stake. The theory was such a theological hot potato that the leading observational astronomer of the 16th century, Thcho Brahe, would not have anything to do with it. Heliocentrism received serious consideration only after new telescopes permitted Galileo to observe that Venus had moon-like phases that proved its sun-centered orbit. With that, the comforting idea of a centrally located earth was doomed. However, the Copernican paradigm began to dominate only after Johannes Kepler used Brahe’s data to frame the basic laws of what we now know as the solar system. By then, Copernicus had been dead for almost 100 years.

In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn examines the community structure of intellectual endeavor and portrays scientific development as a series of tradition-bound periods punctuated by step-wise breaks. Although most of the book’s examples are taken from science, Kuhn’s theses are drawn from the observation of politics, music and other fields characterized by revolutionary breaks in style and institutional structure.

Kuhn uses the word “paradigm” to describe the entire constellation of beliefs, values and techniques that are shared by, and which define, the members of a community. In addition to this sociological meaning, the word paradigm extends also to exemplary past achievements, and by implication, to the template or set of rules that led to those past achievements. While the first part of Kuhn’s definition is the one that lends itself most readily to being bandied about, the second part is the more profoundly important to understanding what is happening today — a community making the transition from yesterday’s rules to tomorrow’s.

How Paradigms Change

Kuhn Outlines the sequence of events leading to paradigm change as: anomaly, crisis, revolution. He describes this cycle as a self-correcting mechanism that helps science and industry to advance.

“So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, sciences moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of these tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture, so in science — retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for tooling has arrived. (Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, c. 1960, 1970, University of Chicago Press, page 76.)

When a surprise discovery or persistent anomaly just cannot be forced into the existing frame of reference, a paradigm may have outlived its usefulness. When common awareness that something important cannot be squared with established wisdom, a sense of crisis leads the community to loosen its stereotyped thinking. Thereby, it may uncover (or reinterpret) critical evidence that supports a new view of the world.

Back in 1989, I lived two doors down the street from Thomas Kuhn, and had the opportunity to gain his insight on the then-amazing amazing developments in the enterprise systems industry.

Kuhn observed that concepts that evolve into a new paradigm frequently emerge (at least in embryo) well before a general sense of crisis leads “the most eminent people in the field” to begin questioning what they always took for granted. He also notes that the transition to a new paradigm can take a long time. By the standards of the paradigm shift to Copernican astronomy, the seemingly drawn-out conflict over open enterprise systems took place very quickly indeed.