I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Here are excerpts from Chapter 8 which focuses on being Efficient. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.
“It was the meeting where our IT council gave me the green light to proceed with a major global project to consolidate 80 different HR systems across the world. We had settled on our existing ERP vendor’s software,” says David Smoley, CIO of Flextronics, one of the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturers.
“I thanked them for approving such a large project and then I surprised them. I told them I may come back to them in the next month with a ‘better, faster, cheaper’ option.
“Mind you, this was after we had already spent months of evaluating options, systems integrators, building budgets and business cases. But we have a ‘fail faster’ culture here at Flextronics, so they were more intrigued with what I may come back with than surprised.”
In the month prior to the meeting described above, Smoley had been introduced to Workday, then a startup.
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What is remarkable is that Smoley had the courage to turn down a preapproved project and go with something far more efficient. Unfortunately, too much in technology gets funded year after year with “safe” choices. It becomes “entitlement spend.” The old adage used to be “No one got fired for buying from IBM.” Today, that saying has become a little broader—to include IBM, Verizon, SAP, Accenture, and other large vendors. Too many IT executives live in fear of one of their smaller vendors going out of business.
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Nestled between a Target and a Lowe’s in a Tampa, FL, shopping center is a much smaller nondescript office. During some hours, this office does more business than either of those two giant retailers. It is the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s branch office. It issues driver’s licenses, collects property taxes, issues fishing licenses, and does several more things. While there are separate queues for many of the services, the agency increasingly has employees who can handle multiple transactions in one session. Of course, for many of the transactions, you need not come in. You can do business with them by mail, phone, or on the web.
Doug Belden’s site says, “his goal as tax collector is simple: To save taxpayers money through consolidation and efficiency while improving service at the branch offices. His objective is to make the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s Office the most modern and efficient office in the state.”1
Walk into that branch, and there usually is a mass of humanity, and your ticket number may be in the 600s. Your heart sinks as you get ready to settle in for a few hours.
Twenty minutes later your number comes up. Five minutes after that the agent has scanned four pieces of personal documentation you have brought. In another five minutes you have a polycarbonate driver’s license with digitized photo, state holograph, two-dimensional bar code, and magnetic strip. In those five minutes, the system has been running validations against various state and federal databases. These are part of the checks under the Federal Real ID legislation requirements, and for that, licenses issued by the county are among the first in the country to carry a gold star, which shows compliance.
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Sukumar, on the other hand, is obsessed with what he calls “social design,” and his quest to deliver 500 percent productivity on Cognizant projects.
Think of avalanches. A snowball starts small, but then gathers mass and gradually turns into a massive avalanche. That is the basic inspiration behind Social Design. What we do individually should (positively) impact hundreds and thousands of others.
One of my favorite examples is CDDB (short for Compact Disc Database). When an individual ripped tunes from a CD, before CDDB you had to manually track names, artist, etc. Each user around the world did that and did in their own format with their own typos. CDDB started to track unique signatures of each tune on its servers and matching them to album, artist and other information. So when later users ripped the same tune, they could download that same information. Think of the massive productivity that delivered across millions of users.
It would be nice to move to a “productivity income statement” where we charge the IT department $1 for each data item users enter and in return we charge users $1 for each data item that the system prefills for them. Think how differently we would think about enterprise systems if we did that.
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