Thinking about life and work and previous employers I came up with my quotable statement. Just to make sure you understand me correctly I will quote myself, I don't expect anybody else to think it is good enough, I tried to give it a Haiku twist though:
"Money isn't everything,
Cows like green grass"
donderdag 28 januari 2010
zondag 30 augustus 2009
Self Service is like borrowing too
With the current credit crunch and credability bankrupcy of the financial world it may be good to look at similar trents and look at the it credibility at the long run.
Having all the employees of a company booking their own trips and paying for them in advance is like borrowing too. When an advance payment is done the money is direct payed back, but with doing the own bookings of trips and courses etc the company is borrowing time of the employees.
The same is true for the customers of a bank do all the work in managing their account. Before there was service and know there is self service. Self serving self service is actually serving the service deliverer.
How is this borrowing? Before, the company by giving good service would earn credit with customer and the credit build up loyality. With self service that gradually goes away, especially when it is badly implemented. (Please press button 1 for the menue)
Loyalties that were easy to build with service will go by horse and can only be buildup again by food. Customers will quickly choose the provider that gives the most benefits against the least amount of hassle.
donderdag 30 oktober 2008
Quarterly driven credit crunch
The economic crisis is because of creed and the american way of sharehoulder value quarterly driven focus that could fuel the creed. Now is it seems creed is bad again, 20 years after Gordon Gekko.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaKkuJVy2YA
Just keeping the shareholder value in the picture has actually killed the golden goose. Now for many companies the shareholder value eroded.
Now we need regulation and checks and balances again. Combined wih the checks and balances that came from the previous creed eruption "Enron" from which no lesson is learned for other similar fields. To bad that "lesson" of only 5 year ago, couldn't be translated to other fields like finance.
Could these check result in the 200 VP's that Gordon Gekko talked about, just checking each other? Is possible because that bureaucracy resulted from the free kapatalism from the 19th century that in the end resulted in the creed of the 1920's and the resulting depression of that time.
But in the 21st century the checks and balances are going to be done by computers and the database where the information is stored into. The machine is going to check us, because authomation is the only way to manage this.
Danger there is that after a while the checks will be that complex that no person understands what is check for what reason. Similar to the banks selling and buying and insuring products that they don't really understand, but think they can make a profit on.
So all kinds of systems will be auditing and checking actions that are performed, without the interaction of humans.
There must be a lesson there, but I don't know which one yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaKkuJVy2YA
Just keeping the shareholder value in the picture has actually killed the golden goose. Now for many companies the shareholder value eroded.
Now we need regulation and checks and balances again. Combined wih the checks and balances that came from the previous creed eruption "Enron" from which no lesson is learned for other similar fields. To bad that "lesson" of only 5 year ago, couldn't be translated to other fields like finance.
Could these check result in the 200 VP's that Gordon Gekko talked about, just checking each other? Is possible because that bureaucracy resulted from the free kapatalism from the 19th century that in the end resulted in the creed of the 1920's and the resulting depression of that time.
But in the 21st century the checks and balances are going to be done by computers and the database where the information is stored into. The machine is going to check us, because authomation is the only way to manage this.
Danger there is that after a while the checks will be that complex that no person understands what is check for what reason. Similar to the banks selling and buying and insuring products that they don't really understand, but think they can make a profit on.
So all kinds of systems will be auditing and checking actions that are performed, without the interaction of humans.
There must be a lesson there, but I don't know which one yet.
woensdag 29 oktober 2008
Self Service of core competences ?
In the nineties retruning to core competenties was the management mantra. Only doning what you are good at. Outsourcing all work that isn't a core competence, but does take energy. General Electric (GE) under Jack Welch made its (en his) fortune with it. He even stated that you should only be in the business were a company is number one or number 2. Otherwise there was no business sense. Outsource became a business that was a core competentie for some. Cleaning, physical security, cantine, booking of trips work all got outsourced.
This was also for the employee. He/she should be doing what he/she was good at. Specialisation was the necessary.
Of the last couple of years self service became a business approach. In this approach an employee is able to do the travel booking, expense sheets, hour spend bookings self into the system. Some of these tasks can be quite complex and need expert knowledge. Still the employee is made responsible for realisation of these tasks. This way the costs of these tasks can be reduced. In fact the company is minimizing the cost of the ousourcing, by having the employee by self doing part of the task.
To get a overview of the real costs these self service tasks should be booked in the hour administration as genuine tasks. The the actual cost of this saving can be seen.
If that is not done and the employee doesn't book the hours, the company is borrowing time credit from the employee. Worse could be the company is borrowing into the quality of the work of the employee. Either way the time spend on self service should come from somewhere.
Shorterm not booking the hourse would give alot off benefits to the bottum line of the company. Longterm companies could loose there valued specialists, because they have to do to much other work on their own time.
Maybe now is the time for employer to think about credits in the longterm perspective.
General Electric is not doing well in the credit crunch fallout at the moment:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/09/news/companies/colvin_ge.fortune/index.htm
This was also for the employee. He/she should be doing what he/she was good at. Specialisation was the necessary.
Of the last couple of years self service became a business approach. In this approach an employee is able to do the travel booking, expense sheets, hour spend bookings self into the system. Some of these tasks can be quite complex and need expert knowledge. Still the employee is made responsible for realisation of these tasks. This way the costs of these tasks can be reduced. In fact the company is minimizing the cost of the ousourcing, by having the employee by self doing part of the task.
To get a overview of the real costs these self service tasks should be booked in the hour administration as genuine tasks. The the actual cost of this saving can be seen.
If that is not done and the employee doesn't book the hours, the company is borrowing time credit from the employee. Worse could be the company is borrowing into the quality of the work of the employee. Either way the time spend on self service should come from somewhere.
Shorterm not booking the hourse would give alot off benefits to the bottum line of the company. Longterm companies could loose there valued specialists, because they have to do to much other work on their own time.
Maybe now is the time for employer to think about credits in the longterm perspective.
General Electric is not doing well in the credit crunch fallout at the moment:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/09/news/companies/colvin_ge.fortune/index.htm
dinsdag 28 oktober 2008
Yeh but why are you a Guru?
I'm not offcourse, but just following the trends and predicting what may come makes one a Guru. And this blog gives me the opportunity to do predictions I might refer to in 2028. Google and the low costs of storage are important too for my predictions. The word the last couple of years has been that storage doesn't costs must, so why save on it. 20 years ago it was important to be economical with starage up to a bit level. Savings on staorage was one of the reasons of the Y2K problem. But lately that didn't seem that so important anymore.
But 10 years ago money was abundend too. Even only a few years ago people didn't know what to do with their money and how to make money out of this money. So they went for all kinds of constructions in which they even lent money to make money. Food was cheap too and in some countries like Holland the farmers stopped making food, because it wasn't economical.
Now food prices are rising and farming might be interesting again.
Will that happen to storage too? Yes, but in analogy to the internet and standards development that followed the actual disks will be cheap, but the way the storage is managed in a standard way will be the added value and will have the costs.
So what am I saying ? Google will start charging for blogging or for reading the blog ? Let hope not. Otherwise in 20 years time you or I have to pay to check if I was right and who knows if we have money when that time comes ?
(Maybe it depends on the stockmarket casino. Just to spread my risks I think I have to start betting on the dogs too.)
But 10 years ago money was abundend too. Even only a few years ago people didn't know what to do with their money and how to make money out of this money. So they went for all kinds of constructions in which they even lent money to make money. Food was cheap too and in some countries like Holland the farmers stopped making food, because it wasn't economical.
Now food prices are rising and farming might be interesting again.
Will that happen to storage too? Yes, but in analogy to the internet and standards development that followed the actual disks will be cheap, but the way the storage is managed in a standard way will be the added value and will have the costs.
So what am I saying ? Google will start charging for blogging or for reading the blog ? Let hope not. Otherwise in 20 years time you or I have to pay to check if I was right and who knows if we have money when that time comes ?
(Maybe it depends on the stockmarket casino. Just to spread my risks I think I have to start betting on the dogs too.)
Me Guru Too ?
When you have worked for the past twenty years you have seen multiple management trends pass.
In the information technology we had the mainframes that working fine, but to expensive in the operational, cpu , new development costs and they and the people operating them were not flexible. That needed to be distributed with client/server , because that was more flexible and the cpu costs were lower. The user interfaces improved too. But after a while the operational costs spiralled and the Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL's) were all over the PC places. So that needed to be changed in more on the server and less on the client. Seperation of the tiers with Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach made the client tier smaller and the server tier bigger. Now Larry Ellison announced Oracle is going into hardware. A machines is delivered tunes for the data warehouse. So the mainframe is back. Just in a 20 year cycle.
Would you believe I told you so, twenty years ago ?
It is hard to check if that is true, since blogs didn't exists yet at that time and the scriblings Ithen made on this subject are lost. So somethings have changed instead of the mainframes with the each supplier having it own network flavour, we all use tcp/ip, http etc. So defacto standards are gained too over twenty years. So this was all necessary in a path to using standards. Standards that were asked for at the time and even already existed.
The path to all these standards just needs to be alone the side roads in which different angles are tried.
In the information technology we had the mainframes that working fine, but to expensive in the operational, cpu , new development costs and they and the people operating them were not flexible. That needed to be distributed with client/server , because that was more flexible and the cpu costs were lower. The user interfaces improved too. But after a while the operational costs spiralled and the Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL's) were all over the PC places. So that needed to be changed in more on the server and less on the client. Seperation of the tiers with Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach made the client tier smaller and the server tier bigger. Now Larry Ellison announced Oracle is going into hardware. A machines is delivered tunes for the data warehouse. So the mainframe is back. Just in a 20 year cycle.
Would you believe I told you so, twenty years ago ?
It is hard to check if that is true, since blogs didn't exists yet at that time and the scriblings Ithen made on this subject are lost. So somethings have changed instead of the mainframes with the each supplier having it own network flavour, we all use tcp/ip, http etc. So defacto standards are gained too over twenty years. So this was all necessary in a path to using standards. Standards that were asked for at the time and even already existed.
The path to all these standards just needs to be alone the side roads in which different angles are tried.
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