Charles A. Araujo, Jr.

The Maslow Adoption Model for ITIL

There appears to be a bit of 'Maslow Mania' taking root in the business press these days.  I've been a fan of his straight forward approach to understanding human psychology since I was introduced to his concept of the "hierarchy of human needs" by my dad as a kid.  But I really hadn't thought much about it or him until recently.

Over the past few weeks, I've been reading "Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow" by Chip Conley, the CEO of Joie De Vivre hotels.  As you might guess, he has used Maslow's theory as the basis for both his book and for how we runs his chain of hotels.

Then a couple of days ago, I read a great article from Baseline Magazine entitled, "Multiple Online Personas: The Choice of a New Generation."  In it, it discusses how marketers must start a new type of conversation if they are going to break through with what Gartner is dubbing "Generation V" - for Virtual.  The gist of it is that Generation V is not defined by age or geography, but by their desire for belonging, esteem and self-actualization, realized in online communities - the top three layers of Maslow's "needs pyramid."

So how can stories about a chain of hotels and retail marketers selling to an online generation and how they are using a 50+ year old psychology theory apply to the world of IT?

Applied to business, Maslow's theory is really about understanding a customer's needs. And let's face it, this is something that has not always been IT's strong suit.  But perhaps the most important thing that it can do is to frame an ITIL adoption effort.  One of the greatest challenges that an IT organization must overcome to succeed with an ITIL adoption program is to answer the question why?  Why is this project being undertaken?  Why is the investment of human and capital resources worthwhile?

These questions can only be answered by understanding the needs of IT's customers.  And Maslow's theory can help frame those needs.  Maslow basically said that humans (and therefore your customers) need five layers of needs to be met (paraphrasing a little): Physical, Safety, Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization.  Chip Conley in PEAK boiled this down further into his Customer Relationship Model and identified three distinct stages in the relationship with your customer: Meets Expectations, Meets Desires and Meets Unrecognized Needs.

At it's core, ITIL is really about understanding and meeting a customer's base set of expectations and needs.  According to Maslow, until we've satisfactorily met that need, we cannot have a meaningful conversation with our customer about meeting any of their other needs.  So, why should you adopt ITIL?  First, because it is a key way in which you will help your IT organization meet the core, underlying needs of your customer.  Second, until you do that, you will be unable to move up the pyramid and find success with your customer at any higher level.

At the same time, when you begin an ITIL adoption it's also important to realize that adopting ITIL is also not enough.  While meeting their base set of needs is the first step, it's not what the customer really desires.  They are looking for solutions that will drive business value and help them succeed (personally and professionally).  The goal must be to enable IT to meet the "customer's desires" by enabling transformative uses of technology and ultimately identifying innovative ways that technology can provide competitive and differentiating advantage to the business ("unrecognized needs").

But none of this can happen until their basic, operational needs are met first.  So Maslow provides an incredibly useful framework for ITIL adoption: use it to meet the base needs of your customer, but only in the context of achieving a larger goal of business transformation that leverages technology for the betterment of the enterprise.  Not bad for a 50 year old theory.

Burn the Boats

In 1519,   Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba to Mexico to capture Mayan gold and the interior of Mexico for Spain.  As he landed, he famously ordered his men to "burn the boats", signifying that there was no turning back.  It's a tactic that was in use at least as far back as the Greeks and it vividly symbolizes the ultimate commitment to your mission.

Not many of us face that kind of mission any more.  Rarely are our goals that specific, our mission that direct.  Or at least we choose not to make them so.  I know that's been the case for me.  Since I left The Access Group, I've been metaphorically wandering in the wilderness - unsure of what path I should follow.   I am blessed and cursed by the fact that I have many talents and a wide ranging base of experience...and I've been somewhat burdened by an intense desire to maintain a certain lifestyle.  This mix of options and pressure to make things happen fast has ironically been spinning me in circles as I flit from one thing to the next in the hope that the next thing will be the one that will get me back on track and make it all work again.

Then a funny thing happened.  Over the course of about two weeks, I had a series of introductions and meetings with some people who look at IT and the ITSM/IT Transformation space the same way I do.  I had several potential (though not necessarily immediate) opportunities surface.  And I attended an itSMF LIG meeting for the first time in a long time.  All of these combined to really hit me square in the forehead.  This is where I belong.  This is what I love.  This is what I am passionate about.  This is what I need to be doing.

So, it's time to burn the boats.

I've decided that I need to let go of my lifestyle burdens and simply focus on what I love to do and where I want to go.  That means that I am going to move away from any work that is not focused on helping IT organizations transform themselves.  It means that I will be retooling CastlePointe with a relentless commitment to working with and through other technology providers to deliver services in this space.  And it means that I'm going to focus intensely on new ways and new partnerships that will help me accomplish this mission.

My experiences over the last few weeks have also shown me that in my own personal wilderness, I wasn't nearly as alone as I thought.  There are a lot of other people who "get it" like I do and share my views, attitudes, approaches and (most importantly) desire to make things better in the world of IT.  So, I will continue to seek them out and build relationships so that we can help each other on this journey.

In the end, I don't really know if I will be able to maintain the lifestyle I desire.  But I know that I will be doing what I love and affecting change in IT - and by any definition that really matters, that will be success.

An Emerging Form of Capitalism?

Howard Rheingold, who wrote the book SmartMobs, gave a presentation at TED 2005 that was recently posted.   In it, he discusses the concepts of collaboration and collective action.  Interestingly, he associates these concepts with an evolving concept of cooperative capitalism in which people and organizations are simultaneously working in their self interest and in a cooperative manner.

This ties back to my concepts around Market Driven IT organizations and provides additional insights into how IT might act and react to become more strategic and drive business value.  How might IT apply some of these ideas - not so much from a technology perspective (creating social technologies for the workplace), but from a business perspective?  How might these concepts be applied to help IT develop cooperative approaches to delivering services and value to the business that simply cannot be provided independently.

This 20 minute presentation is very thought provoking and is sure to stimulate some new ideas.  It's well worth the time.
 

An Altered View of IT

Two recent articles, talking about IT from two very different perspectives, paint an altered view of IT that I believe is compelling. 

InfoWorld published an article on April 2nd entitled, "IT heresy revisited: Let users manage their own PCs."  The article poses a simple, yet radical idea - why not let the increasingly tech savvy workforce choose and manage their own workplace environments?  Having started on the infrastructure and ops side of the house, I'm well armored with all of the canned responses: non-standard environments increase support costs, user managed desktops create an unmanageable security risk, etc., etc.  These are surely valid concerns, but I believe that in the end we will find that they are outweighed by the benefits to be realized by empowering users to employ the tools best suited to their jobs and by simultaneously relieving IT of a high resource, low value responsibility.  The article discusses the first steps that companies like Google and BP are taking in this direction and what they are finding.

In truth, I believe that most of the canned resistance you hear on this and related topics is driven more by a sense of fear and job security than anything else.  The thinking goes, if the users are handling this by themselves, then what will we do?  The irony is that the significant amount of resources, energy and attention that IT has paid to these "lights on" operational duties is the very thing that inhibits IT's ability to truly leverage technology to drive value for the business.

Another article in Baseline Magazine entitled, "IT Really Does Drive Business Value" reports on the findings of a study to be release on Monday (April 7th) by the Hackett Group.  It finds that those organizations that best manage IT business value significantly "outperform their competition across a wide range of financial and profitability measures."  It's common sense, really.  Focus your IT investments in those areas that are going to drive business value and create competitive advantage - and the results will follow. 

The article identifies four key practices that are key to maximizing the business value of an organization's IT investments:

• Investment allocation:  Top performers reallocate investment from infrastructure and utilities to innovation and improvement.
• Project pipeline: Top performers weed out questionable project proposals early, minimizing the project backlog.
• Delivery performance:  Leading IT BVM companies deliver far more projects on budget and realize projected benefits more often than peers.
• Application portfolio management:  Top performers actively manage their application portfolio to drive out complexity.

But while this sounds perfectly reasonable, putting it into action within an IT organization can be very difficult.  Which leads us back to the first article.

The real challenge is that IT needs to create a new self image.  It needs to be willing to step away from those areas that no longer provide strategic value to the enterprise and focus its energy in those areas that will.  It means that IT needs to get over the idea that anything to do with "technology" must fall within their domain and identify those areas where they can provide significant differentiation.  According to the Baseline article, doing so is a key indication that you're moving in the right direction:

Companies that are leaders in IT management also spend a substantially smaller fraction of their capital expense on infrastructure and utilities, leaving more investment for improvement and innovation. While the largest part of the peer groups’ IT investment is earmarked for infrastructure refresh, the top group invests the majority of its capital on “innovation and improvement,” most often in the form of discretionary projects.

This transformation is not easy.  Moving away from the day-to-day tasks that have been the staple of IT operations (infrastructure and applications) is tough because it takes people out of their comfort zone and into uncharted waters.  But the rewards are real and substantial - both for IT professionals and for their organizations.  It just takes a willingness to alter your view of IT.

Geek Humor

I know it's geeky, but it's fun.  Check out Google's latest effort to be at the center of our lives!  Happy April Fools!

Caretakers or Innovation Leaders?

Following the theme of my last post, Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners has recently made some comments about the types of companies his firm is funding today.  In it, he says that his VC firm is making investments in companies who are skipping IT and selling technology directly to workers.  Most important is his statement that he believes that this is how most software will enter the enterprise in the future.

I'm not sure if I completely agree, but it is certainly a sign of where things are going.  I believe that we will always have a need for a central IT organization that oversees standards and enterprise integrations.  But the question is really whether or not IT will become mere caretakers of the plumbing or innovation leaders.

I believe that the harder IT holds on to rigid standards and a big project approach to software implementations, the more that innovation will be driven from outside the organization and by the business itself.  We will see the emergence of two distinct classes of IT organization: maintenance organizations, with their bureaucracy and rigid approach to IT - and what I call Market Driven IT organizations - innovators who break down barriers, create highly flexible and adaptive IT architectures and are constantly looking for ways to drive revenue growth, employee productivity, competitive advantage and market share through technology.