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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

I once wanted to invent an exercise machine that plugs into a standard video game port. The idea was to transform the fundamentally boring process of working out into utter absorption: When Pacman won’t move unless you’re pedal, it’s exercycle or be eaten.

Sadly, the Patent Office has already awarded a patent for this idea. Meanwhile, the intranet has recently rendered the only other invention I’ve ever wanted to build … the PrinterShredder! … obsolete.

The PrinterShredder!, like most brilliant concepts, is obvious once stated: Since most printouts are recycled without anyone ever looking at them, businesses could save a lot of money by eliminating the wasted steps, immediately recycling the output as soon as it is created. (Not to mention the PrinterShredder!’s impact on security — valuable company secrets would never leave the data center.)

But now we have the ability to publish print jobs as HTML directly onto our intranets, where everyone can ignore them at the speed of electricity (about 33% of the speed of light … but I digress).

It has been common practice for budget-driven data center managers to turn off suspect print jobs periodically, turning them back on only if someone complains. Often, this is the only way to find out if a job is needed. But as storage drops below a penny per megabyte, it is now less trouble to just dump everything out there.

This is the same thinking that lead to the Lincoln Navigator. When any resource is overly plentiful, we get sloppy in how we use it, whether it’s gasoline leading to over-sized, inefficient cars, the immensity of the sky leading to atmospheric pollution, or cheap processor cycles and storage leading to “kitchen sink” intranets and Web sites.

When we get sloppy we face unintended consequences. Fuel-inefficient cars increase demand for fuel so gas prices rise … but we still own the Navigator. Atmospheric pollution leads to global warming, ozone depletion, and pulmonary disorders … but our whole economy rests on the processes that generate pollution. And when you just dump reports onto your intranet, you make it that much harder to find anything useful, because you’ve made the signal-to-noise ratio worse … and you probably create new jobs for analysts to sort through the muck.

The problem is that cheap storage is the wrong focal point for our attention. We should be taking advantage of our intranets’ real-time processing and highly visual nature to create “dashboard reports”.

As with so many user-interface issues, your daily driving experience tells you most of what you need to know to understand dashboard reporting. What, after all, does your dashboard display? Exactly what you need to know to drive safely without damaging your car. It isn’t just exceptions, nor is it only summary data. It’s neither entirely graphical nor entirely textual. Nor is it uniform: Some dashboards are designed for more sophisticated drivers than others, presenting both more and more detailed information.

But it’s always what the driver needs to know, while driving, designed for easy interpretation at a glance.

Which leads us to the tough part. Over a span of nearly a century we’ve learned what drivers need to know at a glance, filtered by what we can build into automotive dashboard displays. No such consensus exists for a business dashboard, so you get to figure it out.

Next week’s column will give you some help.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

New York City recently pulled the plug on its psychic training program.

While the program has successfully trained welfare recipients in the arcane craft of psychic hot-linery, officials apparently wanted to avoid criticism such as that leveled by “legitimate” psychics such as the manager of Abracadabra Productions Ltd, who described the program as “…totally a scam.”

Satire shrivels in the face of such reality.

The popular image of welfare recipients as lazy feeders off the public trough fades in the face of such clear evidence of willingness to work, and one presumes these same individuals, having mastered the art of prognostication, will easily follow the logical career progression from ordinary psychic predictor to Wall Street analyst.

Preconceptions are hard to let go, whether about psychics, welfare recipients, or end-users. Nonetheless, one of our most cherished preconceptions about end-users … that they obstinately reject new technology, tenaciously clinging to old ways of doing things, thwarting IT-driven progress … has to go.

If this image of the typical end-user ever was true, it is no longer, at least according to a recent study which polled 1,000 end-users and found that about 750 of them figured technology generally translates to personal benefit. Reinforcing this finding is a second recently-published study which reported that on the average, most employees use computers more than an hour a day.

Employees no longer fear information technology. That, apparently, is a fact, and it’s one that shouldn’t surprise us. Most adult Americans master the art of driving at an early age, prefer ATMs to live bank tellers, and hook up VCRs and DVD players without fear or hesitation. We live in a world in which information technology is as ubiquitous as oxygen. Ubiquity and fear rarely coexist for any length of time.

If we recognize that the age of computer-phobia is largely behind us, what should we do differently?

For one thing, we need to facilitate change differently.

Increasingly, IS recognizes that the job isn’t done when the software runs without crashing. Until the business puts new technology to use, preferably in the way originally envisioned, the entire effort is irrelevant.

Part of the process of making sure technology gets used is facilitating change. Many practitioners of this art start with two false assumptions, though: (1) Resistance to change is the province of end-user employees whose jobs will be directly affected; and (2) the major cause of change resistance is instinctual — people “naturally resist change”.

But it turns out end-users like new technology — they like change, or at least some forms of it. This challenges the basic assumptions many change management pundits use as a starting point for their process, usually described as “managing resistance to change”.

Here’s my experience: The biggest change resistors reside in the executive suite. In general, they have the biggest stake in the way things are now, have the least to gain, and have the most to lose when the company changes how it does business. Worse, many executive compensation systems reward exactly the wrong behaviors.

As to employee resistance to change … it’s very common, but it isn’t instinctual, in part because nothing about human behavior is purely instinctual — everything is a complex interplay between genes and environment.

Employees resist change for the simplest of reasons — in the absence of communication, they assume the worst and yell “BOHICA” because in their real-world experience, “corporate change” means layoffs or longer hours for them while executives receive the bonuses and accolades.

When employees resist change it’s because the information they have tells them they ought to.

What this means, then, is that facilitating change is easier than most of us thought. All you gotta do is to: (a) Make sure the average employee will benefit from it; (b) communicate a lot, so they understand how they’ll benefit; (c) involve them throughout the change so they can make sure they benefit from it; and (d) keep those change-resisting executives where they can’t sabotage the effort.

Nothing to it.

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