From the expanding power and knowledge at the desktop, to mobile enablements, and to the self-train aspects of enterprise enablements, you can look for burdens that can be shifted out of the IT arena to the Business arena.  Are there information service endeavors going on in IT that can be shifted to your users?  Perhaps you can train administrators in each department to run regularized reports that are being handled by IT.  You can and should train users to craft and run ad hoc reports from your main business systems.

Particularly for small-to-medium business (SMB), you need to build a network of user support out amongst the users.  As we’ll see, a Users Support Group, led by a user, meeting on a regular schedule, can help users not only push through difficulties with common problems, it gives them the ability to maximize their use of office technologies.  At the same time, it can free your IT department for the more challenging problems and give them more space for researching a better future.

An Absence of Wasted Effort:  Revel in the glory of the absence of wasted effort.  Place effort where it belongs.  Do a regularized survey, for where new apps and systems are delivering more power to specific areas of business and people, and ensure that everyone maximizes their use of these tools, in support of your redistributions of burdens.  Watch for efficiencies to be had.  Your potent efforts now translate more directly into continuous improvement, increased quality, productivity, and delivered service.

We want our efforts to maximize the bottom line – to maximize success.  You’re not operating in “burn-out” mode – you have a store of energy for the challenges that spike.  Remove the tax on success invoked by wasted effort.  Remove the divide between effort and reward.  Make these contributions to business security, success, and the Weave.

This positions the original department to better tackle its emerging burdens, and clears work for which it was not optimally suited.  Many organizations shuffle burdens, resources and people during major reorganizations, and reorganizations are necessary from time-to-time.  But what we’re talking about here are things that can be achieved between departments, without a lot of research and analysis.  These are things that are large enough to be viewable through a common sense lens.

Often times organizations find that they’ve placed work, not according to where it is supposed to reside, but rather where the organization “found” someone willing or able to do it (perhaps forcing the issue).  Over time, these sorts of placements wobble out of balance as personnel change or move up in the organization – the original good-hearted person who took on the work, or perhaps had a natural talent for it, is no longer in the position.  That’s a problem.  These placements of work are not even prudent at the outset – placing work based on personalities, or a reason other than appropriate business discipline, is shortsighted and does not build a solid foundation.

We know there’s going to be a steady advance in the burden for maintaining business.  The general, collective, advancing burden in maintaining our Weave requires up-to-date knowledge; best, vetted, practice; and intelligently applied effort for maximum affect and return.

Let’s also take this opportunity to mention that we don’t mean to imply a negative connotation to “burden” here:  we’re talking about the weight, or load, of work – it is work we’re discussing, after all – so by all means let’s talk about burdens.  In the face of tight resources, possible reduction of resources, and expansion of need – what can we do regarding the non-stop advance of burdens?

We can be bold:  When we can offset a zooming consumption of resources in one area by virtually eliminating the consumption of resources in another, we can achieve an overall parity between the onset and offset burdens.  We can even get ahead of the game.  This is going to be very important in the coming years as you balance your ever-changing Business-Technology environment’s consumption of resources.    Consider this:  In most organizations, there is a natural resistance to change, coupled with inefficient change management and action.  There’s inertia.  This inertia exhibits itself in individuals, and in the organization at large.  Why does it exist?  Often, a “go-slow” (or even a “no-go”) approach is considered safe.  Frequently a go-slow approach is necessitated by ignorance:  no one is qualified to go at a better speed.  In these circumstances, the organization has created a self-fulfilling requirement for the go-slow approach.  How can you be bold when you’re ignorant?  How can you sustain confidence in a changing Weave?  You can’t.

The Divide between That Which You Must Do, and That Which You Can Do:  When you combine this go-slow situation with new requirements that constantly stream into the face of business/technology, you have a divide.  That is, the organization struggles to close the gap between what it is able to do, and the seemingly constant elevation of what it must do.  This is often because the organization finds itself performing relatively obsolete chores, or chores in a manner that deliver appropriate return for “yesterday.”  Concurrent with this inherent lag in the fixing or tuning of wasted, inefficient, or outdated efforts, is the forced assumption of new burdens.  In the absence of planning on your part, new burdens don’t bother to align with your condition of awareness or preparedness.  These new burdens may be necessary in the advance of business – or they may be necessary just to keep up.

Burden Management:  Burden management can be an umbrella concept for the modern organization:  it entails the review of work, resources, and returns.  The essence of burden management goes on to some degree everywhere, by various names and reviews, in various formal and informal manners.  Those things should continue – but burden management here is an aggressive, but responsible, effort to identify and stamp out foolishness.  Just as there are false solutions to problems, there are “false burdens.”

The False Burden:  False burdens present real burden – but they are false in the sense that they are falsely assigned and falsely borne.  They are false in the sense that they have no merit – they don’t deliver, or protect, or advance anything.  Many of us have discovered thick reports that are generated on a regularized basis, delivered to some location, and thrown away without any sort of attention.  Many organizations conduct mandated training that is poorly attended, or which delivers little in the way of real knowledge.  Cloaked criticism – that which is delivered as valid or justified criticism, is more of the ‘busy-work’ variety, and its attendant destruct of efficiency yields a false burden.  And of course we have probably all experienced the wasted effort of projects that go nowhere, and even of implementing the burdens delivered of the False Solution (a “solution” that does not solve or serve).

When we become practiced at making objective, successful, arguments for doing away with wasted work, we find that we can maintain headroom to tackle unforeseen changes with aplomb and efficiency.  Zeroing and reducing burdens provides a yield:  It means that we can fill any new “slack” in resources with support to the emerging demands of the Weave.  It also should grant time for research into those things necessary for a better business-technology future.

Use the zeroing of burdens principle to grant space to your efforts so that you can make more fully informed and therefore more intelligent, more accurate, forecasts and planning.  Seek to size burdens appropriately (new and old), to seize and implement best practices as soon as possible in order to resize (reduce) burdens, and to even eliminate (zero) burdens as we can.  The result will be more accurate implementations and supports to the Business-Technology Weave.

Next:  Zeroing and managing burdens the right way.

NP:  Bix Beiderbecke – streaming audio.

Discovery of new possibilities is paramount. New collaborations involving departments and personnel is a possibility. Use creativity to examine new products, new thinking, new disciplines – and embrace prudent change in delivering the venerable “business solution.”

Examine the entire expanse of the organization and its concerns when considering how technology might solve business’ challenges. Examine the economy’s impact to the organization, and adjust as possible and where necessary long-range technology initiatives and plans. Include too hiring, staffing, training & development, and capital budgets as well as projects.

The savvy IT leader will seek, and motivate others to seek, cost efficiencies. Leverage all resources that can be leveraged.

Be willing to listen to fresh ideas and encourage all to contribute.

August 31^st: On this day in 1895, the first pro football game was held (Quarterback John Brallier was paid $10 and won, 12-0)

It’s important in these days of fiscal conservancy for IT leaders to participate in large decisions – that is, “business” decisions.  Particularly with the downturn in the economy, there is fresh opportunity for the IT leader to partner with senior business counterparts, to shine in examining business directions and goals, and in matching right-sized, cost-effective and successful ideas and solutions in support of robust and better business.

It helps if the IT department itself is firing on all cylinders, of course.  The IT leader must be fully successful in that realm, in partnering with the senior executive class elsewhere… in addition to boards and outside partners or authorities.

Aside from the obvious necessities of systemic requirements:  uptimes, performance, recoveries, solutions, etc., there is the necessary standardization (and therefore efficiency) of roles in IT (with appropriate overlap and backup), a ready handling of politics (oh yes), and the dealing with changing expectations for IT – often demands by business that are extreme and even unreasonable.  Perhaps handling the “unreasonable” with dispatch is key to ultimate success.

Once IT is successfully incorporated into the “business decision” realm, it is seen less as a pure cost center (and an ever growing one, at that), and more as part of the forward momentum, the drive, of solutions.  That is to say, solutions for better, and more profitable, business.

For the IT leader, and any person working in IT, consider your language when engaging your business counterparts:  Speak to them in their language, to their level of understanding.  When stretching their comprehension and knowledge, do it without breakage – and monitor that they’re “getting it.”

Build trust, show results, and bring ideas to the table for better business that exceeds the envelope of pure IT – be sure to illuminate the whole view – and be sure to understand it yourself! 

Stand, and deliver.

August 31^st:  On this day in 1887, Thomas A. Edison patents the Kinetoscope (which produces moving pictures)