j e s r u s h . c o m

CIO.com has a good interview with IBM’s CIO Mark Hennessy, “Inside the New Big Blue.” Hennessy talks about global consolidation, virtualization, and web 2.0. However, my favorite part was this tidbit which Hennessy offered when asked how IBM’s new internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration tools:

CIO.com: What are you doing to help optimize the value of the social networking tools you’re using?

HENNESSY: I find it very important to try and understand the value of each of these different tools, and I do that in a number of ways. How many ideas are created by a particular tool? How many get sponsored by somebody that has a budget? How many are collaborated on? How many actually make it to market? What revenue is generated by those ideas? I have a set of tools now that I use to track the ideas and the innovations that come out of the different tools so that I can better align my investments to the tools that are driving the better and more innovative ideas. That’s something that I spend a lot of time with other CIOs around the world talking about — the ROI of social networking.

This is excellent stuff. I love hearing about a CIO who is A) Actively experimenting with edgy social networking tools in a traditional\conservative organization and B) Objectively trying to track the value of these things.

Janet Rae-Dupree has a good article over at the NY Times about the problems of modern health care and the promise of integrated technology. She writes:

Two main causes of the system’s ills are century-old business models, for the general hospital and the physician’s practice, both of which are based on treating illness, not promoting wellness. Hospitals and doctors are paid by insurers and the government for the health care equivalent of piecework: hospitals profit from full beds and doctors profit from repeat visits. There is no financial incentive to keep patients healthy.

But technology is changing that.

Some health care suppliers have set up fixed-fee integrated systems, and accept monthly payments from members in exchange for a promise of cradle-to-grave health care. Each usually also charges a small co-payment for treatment. Routine cases are handled through lower-cost facilities, leaving more complicated cases to higher-cost hospitals and specialists. Such systems include Kaiser Permanente, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, the Mayo Clinic, the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania and the Veterans Health Administration.

By creating a continuum of care that follows patients wherever they go within an integrated system, says the Princeton University economist Uwe Reinhardt, care providers can stay on top of what preventive measures and therapies are most effective. Tests aren’t needlessly duplicated, competing medications aren’t prescribed by different doctors, and everyone knows what therapies a patient has received. As a result, integrated systems like Kaiser’s provide 22 percent greater cost efficiency than competing systems, according to a 2007 study by Hewitt Associates.

Beautiful. The bones of KP’s system is Epic.

Project managers are usually thought of as analytical types and as people who execute things.  In their analytical moments, they survey a field of options, risks, and opportunities, determining the optimum path through the landscape.  When they execute, they move mountains to get things done.

But there is a third archetype which ought to describe the project manager.  Project managers ought to be creative.  Not creative in the sense of managing their projects (e.g. finding a better way to crash a schedule), but rather creative in the sense of  strategic product and service innovation.  Let me explain.

In today’s cutthroat business world, organizations must constantly improve.  They are in  an endless cycle of cost cutting, value adding, and creating new products. No matter how well your business is doing now, it is just a matter of time until a competitor catches up and duplicates–or even improves on–your success.  Your profits shrink.  As Robert Reich has explained, at the end of the day there are essentially three strategies to stay in the game:

1) You can figure out how to cut your costs and offer your X for less than competitor’s Y.
2) You can figure out how to produce a much better X for the same cost.
3) You can use whatever expertise gained along the way to be first out with entirely new product Z.

What does this have to do with project managers?  Simply put: Everything.  Project managers are in the incredibly unique position of having one foot in their supplying organization, and one foot in the customer’s organization.  They can gather customer needs and match those up to the supplier’s offerings.  But more than that they can  identify unstated customer needs and find innovative solutions which haven’t even been built yet (but which the supplier has the capability to build).

The key of course is creative thinking and relentless focus on the three strategies.  When is the last time you asked yourself and your project team, “How can we cut costs?” “How can we add more value?”  “Is there an opportunity for a new product here?”

COMING SOON:  Part 2 — Tools for Creative Product Innovation