How to Set Trends

IT is a very trendy industry. You might say we’re more or less slaves to fashion. The priorities which are set in company boardrooms and technology departments are quite driven by the set of 'must have' capability being hyped at any given time. We’ll forgo discussion as to whether this is a good thing or not for now and focus instead on the act of setting a trend rather than merely following one.

First of all, why would someone want to be a trendsetter in IT; well here are a few potential motivations:

1. Because inventing something is fun, exciting or at the very least represents a break from the typical routine. 
2. Because identifying a trend can result in benefits to the trendsetter. I’ll emphasize “can” here because living on the cutting edge often results in some blood loss. There are risks to being new, different or the first one out of the gate.
3. Because creating your hype is and always has been good business. Not everyone can pull it off, but many of the most successful technology companies were built (at least initially) on hype.

Now, it may sound like I’m trivializing the topic a bit or perhaps implying that there is little substance behind most trends – but I’m not really. There can be a marriage behind trend-setting and true innovation if that’s the way you wish to pursue it. Obviously, some trends involve a much higher investment threshold than others. For example, inventing the next commercial quantum computing platform is going to require a lot of capital up front to pull off. However, there are lot’s opportunities hidden with the mass of existing technologies that remain unexploited as well. For most of us, the easiest path towards that exploitation is through invention of new practices.

Who defines the road ahead?

So what does that mean exactly? Practice, any practice, is the day to day approach that a professional takes to do their job. In Medicine, practice is the application of diagnostic and prognostic algorithms (rulesets and techniques) based upon understanding of a much wider body of knowledge. Individual practice in Medicine can influence the holistic practice of medicine across an entire society (or the world) through the publication of these new techniques and insights. Those new techniques if grouped together can also be viewed as trends. Some examples from Medicine of recent trends include:

• Introduction of Electronic Healthcare Records 
• Reductions in the amount and frequency of antibiotics being prescribed
• Exploitation of genetic markers to predict, diagnose and treat a wide array of illnesses

Notice that in the above examples, two of the three trends listed were in fact technology-focused. This is an important consideration when thinking about becoming a trendsetter – nearly every industry now depends on IT to provide a significant amount of its innovation. This means that IT professionals have the opportunity to set trends not only for their own industry but every other one as well. This is exciting and extremely cool if you think about it. For the first time in perhaps forever – folks who weren't trained in specialized fields are helping to redefine those fields because of the technology being applied. It’s not uncommon for an IT consultant to move across industries from one project to the next – in each one learning the business enough to determine how best emerging technology might improve it.

Maybe the best way to describe how to become a trendsetter is through an example – so I’ll draw upon one from my own experience. In 2007, I was consulting for a firm that specialized in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. They asked me to determine if some of their solution offerings might be cobbled together into some sort of unified practice approach. I had worked with them before and seen their solution in action and had worked in that industry space quite a lot as well. So here’s what I did:

1. I identified all of their strengths and characterized them in depth.
2. I assessed the current practice approaches in industry (circa 2007) for BI and DW and identified a list of gaps.
3. I mapped the identified strengths of the company against the industry gaps and as I suspected there were several key areas of alignment. In other words, there were things that the company was doing that wasn't commonplace in industry yet – but really needed. 
4. I took that and expanded upon it; identifying a theme for a practice approach as well as a methodology and also identified areas where some technology gaps still existed (even within the new model). 
5. This then led to a standard solutions architecture and detailed process approach based upon the theme and high level methodology. 
6. I actualized this within the company buy presenting the findings and recommendations – many of which were focused on how to blend the new practice approach within the current business model.
7. I then launched an outreach effort – through existing customers and social media. 

The practice I created for them was coined “Agile BI.” At the time, the reception was mixed. Very few in the industry were viewing Business Intelligence or Data Warehousing as something that could be considered Agile. This was before the explosion of Big Data and NoSQL solutions. The main premise I was promoting though is very close to what the industry is defining as Agile BI now:

• That BI projects can be time-boxed into clearly defined increments (you don’t have to use Scrum per se). The key is that some capability is delivered within each increment. 
• The approach was less product-focused and more capability focused. In other words, in this practice a wider variety of tools and capabilities were considered mainly because of the recognition that most environments have a wide variety of data needs / solutions.  
• That BI and the underlying data structures needed to be engineered for performance from day 1.
• That BI and DW were not IT only efforts but required very close collaboration at all stages with key business stakeholders. 
• That new modeling or architecture techniques were needed (that extended beyond 3NF ERD) to help unify management of diverse data resources. 

I recall presenting this all in Chicago in 2007 at an industry conference and receiving a lot of blank stares. This of course is where the risk comes in; it takes years and some serious marketing to go from a kernel approach to widespread industry adoption. In this particular example – that actually has occurred - ( see The TDWI Agile BI Portal ). The company I introduced the practice to did not have the resources to wholeheartedly pursue the approach and stuck to their old business model and I moved on, but not before posting several presentations online and creating a blog that may have helped contribute to the general mindshare behind the industry premise. Granted – it was an obvious and logical progression that would have likely occurred anyway - but my contributions proved to be a worthwhile exercise none-the-less.  

One of the side benefits though of helping to shape industry-wide expectations of how technology practice ought to look like is that eventually you find yourself in projects that have adopted the trend you helped to set – which in itself is fairly satisfying – especially if you really did help to promote a better way of getting things done instead of just generating more hype.

Read More

Outsourcing Innovation

With the recent focus on H1B reform; this is a good time to step back and consider the implications of current policy on our nation’s future. Anyone working in IT today cannot help but notice the flood of foreign workers that now populate every IT department and company in the US. Over the past 10 years the internal demographics of the typical IT group has changed radically; and this doesn't necessarily reflect the offshore workforce either. Taken together, it is probably safe to assume that many companies now source half of their IT workforce from talent who aren't US citizens. This demographic shift has been occurring at the same time that career opportunities and income growth have been shrinking across the US economy. Somewhere between 400,000 to 500,000 work visas were handed out during the Great Recession – yet remarkably lawmakers bought into the myth perpetrated by a handful a major IT companies that there was a shortage of skilled technology workers.

http://news.dice.com/2013/05/14/the-facts-behind-the-h-1b-debate/

Will these graduate have a future in the IT job market?

This situation is not only disingenuous and unfair though, it is dangerous and threatens the future of our economy and standing in the world. The reason for the flood of foreign workers is clear – larger employers are trying to commoditize IT labor to drive costs down as much as possible. The easiest way to do that is to either outsource work internationally or import international workers and pay them far less than American citizens. For the record, there is no shortage of skilled IT workers in the US and never has been. The current policies have driven thousands and perhaps millions of Americans out of work or at least out of the IT industry.

So why does this matter? Is it is any different than Manufacturers shipping their factories to China or other industries sending their customer support overseas?

Yes, it is different. And it matters because Information Technology is where most of this country’s emerging industry is or at least is dependent upon. Our leaders will talk endlessly about innovation and how it drives economic growth – but what happens when we outsource the most critical portions of innovation? Here are some of the more obvious implications:

1. Our current model places intellectual property at extreme risk and more or less ensures that key innovations will be released globally before the US has a chance to fully exploit new capability developed / invented here.
2. We will more or less permanently hamstring our internal ability to support all aspects of our own R&D. Unrealistically low labor cost expectations will make us dependent on cheaper and cheaper labor and will drive talented people out of IT and into other emerging fields.
3. We will kill the emerging STEM focus in secondary and post-secondary education and seriously damage the value proposition for pursuing any advanced education as it becomes clearer and clearer that American Citizens will be discriminated against when it comes to IT hiring.
4. The talent who truly drive innovation will leave this country and head to Europe and elsewhere where labor commoditization doesn't drive IT hiring. The focus and centers of innovation will move to places where talent rather than cost is valued.

We are setting ourselves up for a crisis that doesn't need to occur. The net result of that crisis will be a continuing slide of the standard of living of most Americans as technology leadership migrates elsewhere. The short term greed of a handful of major employers is reshaping our entire economic landscape for the next 50 years. It’s time we recognized that risk and built a policy that encourages development of the American IT workforce rather than its replacement. This country was built on the promise of opportunity – instead we've developed a new and semi-feudalistic labor class system for the most important segment of our workforce. Any foreign labor that we do allow in should be brought in with Green Cards and paid the prevailing rates rather than artificially low ones, and the numbers of those visas approved should be pegged to unemployment rather than to claims of phantom shortages. American Innovation is built on the foundation of a fair, just and open society; those principles should not be outsourced. If Americans can no longer be trusted to manage our own innovation – what is there for us do in our economy – what future can we truly call our own?

Read More