One source of constant bemusement to me is the habit of intelligent people to pee in the industry market research bathwater, and then to pay handsomely to drink a hybrid mix of the result collected across their peers.

Perhaps betrayed by an early experience of one research company coming in to present to the management of the vendor I was working at, and finding in the rehearsal their conjecture that sales of specific machine sizes had badly dipped in the preceding quarter. Except they hadn’t; we’d had the biggest growth in sales of the highlighted machines in our history in that timeframe. When I mentioned my concern, the appropriate slides were corrected in short order, and no doubt the receiving audience impressed with the skill in their analysis that built a forecast starting with an amazingly accurate, perceptive (and otherwise publicly unreported) recent history.

I’ve been doubly nervous ever since – always relating back to the old “Deep Throat” hints given in “All the Presidents Men” – that of, in every case, “to follow the money”.

Earlier today, I was having some banter on one of the boards of “The Motley Fool” which referenced the ways certain institutions were imposing measures on staff – well away from a useful business use that positively supported better results for their customers. Well, except of providing sound bites to politicians. I can sense that in Education, in some elements of Health provision, and rather fundamentally in the Police service. I’ve even done a drains-up some time ago that reflected on the way UK Police are measured, and tried trace the rationale back to source – which was a senior politician imploring them to reduce crime; blog post here. The subtlety of this was rather lost; the only control placed in their hands was that of compiling the associated statistics, and to make their behaviours on the ground align supporting that data collection, rather than going back to core principles of why they were there, and what their customers wanted of them.

Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) has the right idea; everything they do aligns with the ultimate end customer, and everything else works back from there. Competition is something to be conscious of, but only to the extent of understanding how you can serve your own customers better. Something that’s also the central model that W. Edwards Deming used to help transform Japanese Industry, and in being disciplined to methodically improve “the system” without unnecessary distractions. Distractions which are extremely apparent to anyone who’s been subjected to his “Red Beads” experiment. But the central task is always “To start with the end in mind”.

With that, I saw a post by Simon Wardley today where Gartner released the results of a survey on “Top 10 Challenges for I&O Leaders”, which I guess is some analogue of what used to be referred to as “CIOs”. Most of which felt to me like a herd mentality – and divorced from the sort of issues i’d have expected to be present. In fact a complete reenactment of this sort of dialogue Simon had mentioned before.

Simon then cited the first 5 things he thought they should be focussed on (around Corrective Action), leaving the remainder “Positive Action” points to be mapped based on that appeared upon that foundation. This in the assumption that those actions would likely be unique to each organisation performing the initial framing exercise.

Simon’s excellent blog post is: My list vs Gartner, shortly followed by On Capabilities. I think it’s a great read. My only regret is that, while I understand his model (I think!), i’ve not had to work on the final piece between his final strategic map (for any business i’m active in) and articulating a pithy & prioritised list of actions based on the diagram created. And I wish he’d get the bandwidth to turn his Wardley Maps into a Book.

Until then, I recommend his Bits & Pieces Blog; it’s a quality read that deserves good prominence on every IT Manager’s (and IT vendors!) RSS feed.