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Alternate Reality Games: Games That CIOs Know How To Play

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
Alternate Reality Games Offer IT Leaders A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

Alternate Reality Games Offer CIOs A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

As a CIO, you’ve got some challenges facing you. You’re managing a diverse and potentially distributed work force of highly skilled and talented IT professionals. You need to find a way to keep them challenged, and yet at the same time enable them to find ways to work together. Have you considered Alternate Reality Games?

Leave The Real World – Visit An Alternate Reality

CIOs have been taught that most problems can be solved with the application of some math and a whole bunch of data. However, they quickly have learned that the real world is much more complex than that – there are a number of IT problems that can’t be solved this way.

Jane McGonigal has been looking at big problems like this and she’s got a solution for us: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). ARGs are immersive games that provide a massively multi-player experience. What makes them unique (outside of their size) is that the game-play unfolds in the course of their players lives over time spans that can range from days, weeks, or even months. This isn’t your father’s Wii.

Tools Of The (Alternate Reality) Trade

Ok, I can hear you saying, so just how do you play one of these ARGs? Well, it turns out that you don’t really play it – it plays you! You already probably have some hard-core gamers working in your IT department, so why not? The folks running the ARG show, known affectionately as “puppet masters” are in charge of distributing potentially thousands of pieces of information that contribute to telling the story of the ARG. These pieces for the puzzle can be distributed via websites set up for the game, email, cell phone text messages, online audio podcasts and videos, etc.

The players in the game don’t play by themselves – there is no way that they could solve the puzzle if they did that. Instead, they need to collaborate in order to share and gain information. They do this by using social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), wikis, chat rooms, and blogs to talk about what clues they have and what they might mean. This interaction forms the narrative of the game.

Sounds Like An Effort – Why Bother?

Welcome to the 21st Century. McGonigal points out that ARGs are an excellent way for companies (and IT teams) to master those difficult collaboration skills that CEOs (and CIOs) want them to learn. Two of the skills that can be developed that she points out are cooperation radar – the ability to identify who can best help you, and protovation - the ability to prototype and test solutions quickly.

Oh, and by the way: ARGs are a lot of fun for everyone that is involved. Although they may be working through a simulation of a business problem that your firm is facing, it doesn’t seem that way – it feels like a game.

Final Thoughts

When a CIOs firm  is faced with a BIG challenge that doesn’t have an obvious solution, playing an ARG may be just what the CEO ordered. Although they are not easy to set up, an ARG may offer the best way to quickly test out different scenarios in real world circumstances.

Above and beyond the business benefits that ARGs offer, by using this innovative way to stimulate and engage your department you will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

Questions For You

Have you ever used any form of game playing to help your department sort through difficult IT problems? Do any of your department members play massive online games like “World Of Warcraft”? Would your business environment support part of the IT department playing a game to solve a business problem? Do you think that your IT department members get along well enough to work together in order to solve a complex puzzle? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. CIOs have been slow to take advantage of all that the Web 2.0 had to offer, will they lag behind again when the Web 3.0 shows up?

For More Information

  • Check out the “World Without Oil” simulation that used an ARG to simulate a complex problem with no easy solutions.

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Posted in business alignment | 3 Comments »

What CIOs Need To Know About Performance Management

Monday, April 13th, 2009
Companies Don't Need Business Intelligence Without Performance Management

Companies Don't Need Business Intelligence Without Performance Management

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past couple of years, you’ve probably had a chance to read about the Business Intelligence (BI) fad that seem to have taken over the IT market.

The basic idea is pretty simple: use an application to crunch all of that complicated data that you’ve been gathering and present a simple dashboard to the CEO or whomever is making decisions. If the light on the dashboard is green, then the business is doing well. If its red, then he / she needs to make some changes. As with all such things in life, cool tools often turn out to have a downside.

It turns out that BI tools and the reports that they generate are IT centric. This means that the rest of the company agrees that they look cool, but they don’t find them as useful as we would like them to. It turns out that what they’d really like to have is performance management (PM) tools.

Performance management is defined by business needs and it provides the business’ decision makers with the data that they require in order to make the right moves in order to execute the business’ strategy.

PM shows up in a bunch of different places inside of the company. You’ll see it in the budgeting & financial processes (there it’s called “corporate” or “financial” PM). You can also find it on the operational side of the house. This is where BI is used to get more insights into supply chains, sales, customer service, etc.

I guess the easiest way to communicate the difference is to point out that BI is often about dashboards and scorecards. BI has been based on things that can be collected and measured. Where PM differs, is that it’s based on where the company WANTS to go.

This means that PM tools have to be created by consolidating  disparate data that is often stored in planning / budgeting spreadsheets. Then these planning activities and strategies then need to be transformed by both the business and IT into scorecards and key performance indicators (KPI).

The thing that sets PM apart from BI is that the information that IT collects to support a PM process is tied to a model or a framework for measuring performance. In finance, this model is the company’s budget. However, once you move outside of finance then IT and the business need to work together to create a budget that they can both live with.

Does your company currently use BI tools? Are they useful or are they just a set of pretty dashboards that sit around? Do you make use of performance management? Does your IT department work with the business to create performance management processes? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Getting & Keeping IT Top Management’s Attention

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Getting Senior Management To Stay Involved In A Project Can Be Hard To Do

Getting Senior Management To Stay Involved In A Project Can Be Hard To Do

In my humble opinion, one of the key contributors to why so many IT projects fail is because of simple neglect. I guess the best analogy is if you were starting to drive down a highway road. When you started driving, you’d keep your hands on the steering wheel and make sure that the car was going in the correct direction and that it stayed on the road. However, if later on you took both of your hands off of the wheel, then the car would start to drift and would eventually plunge off of the road.

IT projects seem to follow this same path: when they are kicked off, everyone, including senior IT management, seems to have their hands on the steering wheel. However, as the days, weeks, months go on it sure seems like nobody is holding on to the wheel any more and the project tends to start to drift. All too often, more people are then thrown at the project or, worse yet, the schedule is reduced which causes the project to speed up. This just makes the eventual crash all that more spectacular.

So none of this discussion is news to us IT folks – we’ve seen it over and over again. What we need to find is a way to stop this from happening. Jesper Simonsen is a European professor who has spent some time studying this problem. He’s come up with some suggestions as to how we can go about fixing it.

Simonsen believes that the key to getting senior IT management involved in a project is to use participatory design so that they feel that they have contributed to the solution. The specific technique that he believes can be used to make this happen is called “problem mapping“.

Too many IT staffers solve problems by sitting in their cubes and dreaming up new ways to deal with old problems. Participatory design requires IT staffers to deal with a problem directly. They share their views on the problem and then they offer their suggestions as to how IT can be used to solve the problem.

In order to engage senior IT management, they need to be involved in this development of an answer to why IT needs to be involved in solving the problem. This is where problem mapping comes in.

Problem mapping is designed to allow the argument regarding if and how IT should be used to solve a problem to be evaluated. It provides a means by which the argument can be visualized and helps in seeing the structure of the argument.

When you use problem mapping, you create a table that has four columns with the following headers:

  • Problem / Need
  • Causes
  • Consequences
  • Solutions

The real power of using a problem map is that it will force all involved to talk about what they see as being the real problem. The link between what they are proposing as a solution and the original problem is very clearly shown.

The key point to make here is that by making the whole problem solving process so visible, you will actively engage the top management in the process. They will be given an opportunity to sit back and challenge, make changes to, and review the solution that is being created before their very eyes.

Once you’ve achieved this level of participation at the start of a project, the senior IT management will remain involved during the entire project because they will better understand what is being done and they will feel as though they have contributed to the solution.

Do you have problems keeping your senior management involved in projects after they get started? What have you tried to improve their involvement? Was it successful? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Can We Make IT Any More Complex Than It Is?

Thursday, February 5th, 2009
The World Has Become More Complex, But Has IT Become Too Complex?

The World Has Become More Complex, But Has IT Become Too Complex?

One of the reasons that the rest of the company doesn’t seem to really like those of us in the IT department is because we seem to make everything so much more complex when we get involved. First it was our networking issues (Frame Relay, ATM, Ethernet), then it was our server issues (multicore, Intel vs. AMD, caching), and lately it seems to be software design (SaaS, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0). When will this ever end?

Have we screwed things up? Is the CFO and the rest of the financial side of the business correct when they accuse us of buying the latest technology just to play around with it? It turns out, that everyone is probably just a little bit correct this time around.

So here’s the scoop: yes, information technology IS becoming more complex. Sorry about that. The reason that IT is becoming more complex is because the world in which we work is becoming more complex. I mean think about it, everyone is going global, expanding (yes,even now), and developing new technologies. What’s an IT’er to do?

The so-called “traditional” ways of managing IT no longer work. Now to be fair to us, we have made a lot of progress in simplifying the stuff that we already have. We’ve been hard at work standardizing and consolidating IT infrastructure and it’s starting to show results. But then there’s that SOA thing…

Server and storage virtualization has definitely been a double edged sword. It has reduced the number of boxes that we mange, but how we manage the ones that we’ve got has become more complex. The same can be said for all of the new-fangled software architectures that we’ve been dreaming up: SaaS, SoA, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, etc. These new approaches to assembling software components help us to meet regulatory needs and better ensure data security; however, they sure seem to use an unnecessary number of acronyms to get the job done!

When you introduce mobility into the mix, you’ve just about sealed the deal. Trying to support a wide range of devices that were never designed to work together, getting legacy apps to talk to mobile devices, and keeping everything secure makes life even more complex.

Great, so the world is becoming more complex, IT is becoming more complex, and everyone thinks that we’re just sitting around playing with hi-tech toys. How can we possibly stay on top of all of this complexity? Here are five suggestions on how a hard working IT person can actively keep complexity to a minimum in your life:

  1. Standardize: Simplify your life by standardizing everything that you can get your hands on. Once you’ve done this, start to consolidate as much as you can.
  2. Get More Bang For Your Buck: make sure that you are spending your IT time and money where it’s going to produce the greatest return. Too much time spent on the wrong things will just make life that much more complex.
  3. Prune – Don’t Cut: There will always be times when the IT budget needs to be cut back. When these times arrive, don’t do wholesale across the board cuts, instead trim projects as needed. You may even boost budgets of critical projects.
  4. Use What You’ve Got: Make sure that the rest of the company has access to the IT assets that you already have. Putting information online and providing access to enhanced analytical tools can go a long way in showing IT’s value to the rest of the organization.
  5. Outsource Only When Necessary: Outsourcing does not simplify things, rather it creates more management complexity.  If you are too quick to outsource work, then you’ll find yourself sitting on top of a management nightmare.

Do you feel that your IT shop has become more complex in the past few years? Do you think that the rest of the business thinks that it’s harder to do business with IT because of increased IT complexity? What steps are you taking to simplify your operations? Are they working? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in business alignment | 8 Comments »

We’re In A Recession, What’s An IT Department To Do?

Thursday, January 1st, 2009
It's Not A Depression (yet), But IT Departments Need To Make Changes To Deal With The Recession

It's Not A Depression (yet), But IT Departments Need To Make Changes To Deal With The Recession

Remember what happened to the IT industry back in 2001? When the dot.com bubble burst, pretty much the sky started falling and IT spending hit the proverbial brick wall. If you’ve been reading the newspapers or watching TV lately, then you’ve probably noticed that the global economic downturn sure looks like what we saw back in 2001. Should an IT department be worried?

The good folks over at Forester Research have just released a forecast for 2009. When they looked into their crystal balls, they saw that in 2009 IT spending will grow at its lowest rate in the past six years.

IT spending will actually still increase just a wee bit – it will grow to be 1.6% more than they spent in 2008. This will be a change from the past two years because IT budgets had grown by 4.1% and 7% in 2007 and 2008.

The reason that IT budgets will still grow just a bit in 2009 even though the rest of the world is shrinking is because the world has changed – businesses have grown so dependent on IT that they can’t help but spend as much or more than they did the year before.

For those of us who remember the dot.com crash (myself included), we shouldn’t be too worried about IT spending taking the long lasting nose dive that it did back in 2001.

The reason that things are different this time is because back in the dot.com days firms had overinvested in IT systems and staff. The thinking is that this time around IT departments have been running a much leaner shop for the past few years and so they won’t have to cut as deep as other departments may have to.

So what’s an IT department to do in this down cycle? Focusing on helping the firm to cut costs is one way that IT can help now and build good will for use later on.

A relatively simple project to consider is switching your corporate email system from an in-house system to an external on-line provider. Yes, email is a critical business application; however, it’s not unique to your business. Having your expensive IT teams spending time on keeping the email system up and running is taking away from other business specific work that they could be doing.

If your business is the creation and selling of software products, then you should be cautious going forward. Forrester’s study found that software revenue is predicted to grow at only 3.4% in 2009. Additionally, most of this growth will be coming not from new product sales but rather from support fees from previous purchases of software.

What everyone needs to realize is that right now nobody is spending any time planning for the future. This is a luxury that IT departments cannot aford to take. When the global economy snaps back, IT is once again going to be expected to start driving company profits!

What steps are you taking to prepare your IT department for the recession? Have you identified any cost cutting changes that you could make that would yield big savings? Have you considered having an external firm handle your email? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in business alignment | 2 Comments »

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