"Enterprise IT has plenty of room for improvement..."

"Rogue IT" is about to wreak havoc at work" is Fortune's headline.  Not a moment too soon, I might add. 
From the article:

"Rogue IT is the name given to the informal, ad hoc software and devices brought by employees into the workplace. If you've ever taken your own iPad to work or used cloud-based software like Evernote or Dropbox in the office, you may well be an offender. And you're not alone. Some 43% of businesses report that their employees are using cloud services independently of the IT department, according to a recent survey of 500 IT decision makers.

"In the past, these enterprise software and hardware decisions were often the exclusive domain of a company's chief information officer or CIO, the senior executive in charge of information technology and computer systems. "Sitting in his high chair in a grey suit barking orders, [the CIO would make] product decisions for big companies with even larger user bases," explains Peter Fenton of tech investors Benchmark Capital. Rogue IT turns that model on its head, effectively crowdsourcing IT choices to employees. So where does this leave the venerable CIO? And what does it mean for the future of IT at the world's largest enterprises?

"The good news is that enterprise IT has plenty of room for improvement. "[Traditional IT] carries connotations of interminable rollouts, bewildering interfaces, obscure functionality and high prices," writes CIO.com's Bernard Golden. Security, compliance and back-end compatibility have traditionally topped CIO wish lists, not usability. As a result, employees have sometimes been left with programs that are anything but intuitive. This exacted a heavy toll in terms of time, money and organizational well-being.

[...]

"Bloated, enterprise software no longer cuts it. Seduced by Facebook (FB) and similarly intuitive platforms at home, millennials balk at staring down monster spreadsheets or decoding web 1.0 UIs at work, writes Fast Company contributor Marcia Conner. Increasingly, they expect their work suites and software to be just as user-friendly as the apps they know and love in their personal lives, a trend known as the consumerization of IT. And they're willing to go outside company walls to find products that work best for them."

So do we still need a CIO?  Apparently we do, but with employees and customers doing the heavy lifting, voting with their feet (to mix a bunch of metaphors,) the CIO will finally have time for the big, important, profitable stuff.  OK.

But if you think it's just your employees (and maybe a few physicians) going rogue, well, your customers went over that wall a long time ago.  You probably didn't notice or care until that first iPad appeared in your waiting room.


Read the whole thing, here.

And, here, from HootSource, HootSuite's blog.

6:58 AM

Health Systems Have Been Slow To Innovate...

And Canada's 'My Healthcare Innovation' hopes to bend the innovation curve upward.

"My Healthcare Innovation is a spin-off of the Innovation Cell, a non-profit think tank at the University of Toronto. Incubated since 2009, MHI is a private and secure global platform configured specifically for healthcare workers to more effectively collaborate and share timely, locally relevant solutions. "

[...]

"Health systems have been very slow to innovate and we under-realize our return from our investment in medical research and human resources. What we need is a health system that can distill and articulate its high priority problems, share them to the innovation community (internally and externally), reward innovators and facilitate rapid implementation of "disruptive" technologies. HTX is interested in My Healthcare Innovation as a way of creating and interconnecting communities of interest to share problems and best practices, while maintaining a safe and secure environment for frank discussion," said John Soloninka, CEO of the Health Technology Exchange.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/480752#ixzz1dDb9P7CH

7:52 AM

The HBR List of Audacious Ideas

I'm wasn't sure 2011's waning days needed yet another list of some kind, but Harvard Business Review's list of audacious ideas is pretty good.  Why audacious ideas?

"(Because) even though (businesses are) sitting on $2 trillion in cash, they’re risk-averse, strategically incremental, and notably lacking in fresh ideas.

"We think this stinks. The world needs invention and daring now more than ever.  Now is the time for audacity, not austerity. "

So here's HBR's list (the full article requires registration.)

• Tackling the World Economy
• Give People Shares of GDP, by Robert J. Shiller
• Double Down on Start-ups, by Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery
• Partner with China in Afghanistan, by Wayne Porter
• Enroll the World in For-Profit Universities, by Parag Khanna and Karan Khemka
• Tackling Science Challenges
• Give NASA a Real Mission, by Gregg Easterbrook
• Declare 20% of the Ocean Off-Limits, by Enric Sala
• Electrify the Bottom of the Pyramid, by Arun Majumdar
• Tackling Social Problems
• Die the Way You Want To, by Ellen Goodman
• Pay Businesses to Keep People Out of Prison, by Eric Schmidt
• Grow More Apples and Less Corn, by Ellen Gustafson
• Tackling Business Problems
• Stop Tying Pay to Performance, by Bruno S. Frey and Margit Osterloh
• Crowdsource Management Reviews, by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback
• Stop Collecting Customer Data, by Doc Searls

Were it up to me, there's about 10 ideas on the list that beg for immediate implementation.  Or, at a minimum, pointed questions of each Presidential candidate (including the incumbent.)

Let the arguing and ox-goring begin.

3:30 PM

Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning

Not very organized today, so you'll have to put up with a few random things catching my eye...

1.  Distrusting their government's message on nuclear safety, Tokyo residents self-organize and go looking for radioactive hot spots.  Guess what they find?

Watch this "self-organization" trend.  It's coming to a health care neighborhood near you.  Maybe they'll self-organize into a booster club for your current business model...though I wouldn't bet on it.

2.  The Regenstrief Institute (IN) launches an initiative to encourage innovation, naming John Duke, M.D., the Institute's first Innovation Officer.

"We are encouraging everyone associated with the Institute to come forth with ideas. Traditionally researchers develop ideas and then pursue funding. Learning from successful organizations such as Google, Facebook and Netflix, we are both accelerating and democratizing the idea process. We are encouraging everyone, from established researchers to fellows-in-training to software developers to research assistants to affiliated clinicians to let us know what they think has potential," said Dr. Duke, an internist and informatics specialist.

Democratizing the idea process.  I like that, having once worked with a hospital CEO whose idea of innovation was "I think big thoughts.  You do what I tell you."

3.  And Dr. Westby Fisher asks what would a doctor's version of Occupy Wall Street look like?

"Must doctors accept the pervasiveness and intrusiveness of the inside game in health care? If they didn’t, I wonder what doctors’ placards might say?"

Whatever they say, I'll bet the spelling improves (though not the handwriting.)

4.  Mother Jones' Kevin Drum  says the future is brighter than you think.  (Thanks for the heads-up to LongForm.org's "weekend reads for wonks.")

6:21 AM

“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,”

NY Times:  "As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe."

Political and financial institutions are seen as clueless at best, venal at worst.  A new generation vents their frustration through self-organizing, decentralized coalitions.  

Many health care strategists will read this article with a sense of detachment.  That's a mistake because, above all, successful strategists are trend-aware.  

So be aware of this:  

A trend driven by economic frustration and doubt about the future may start in the political arena, but that's seldom where it stops.

From the article:

"Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.


"In that sense, the protest movements in democracies are not altogether unlike those that have rocked authoritarian governments this year, toppling longtime leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Protesters have created their own political space online that is chilly, sometimes openly hostile, toward traditional institutions of the elite.


"The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.


“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,” said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”

What are health care's "dominant ways of doing things" and what happens when they aren't any more?  Do we adjust only when the bonds of trust are irrevocably gone and our customers are fed up with our crap?  For now, we in healthcare are seen as the good guys - expensive, but good.  For now...

UPDATE: In all the media coverage of Steve Jobs' passing, there's this from the NY Times: "What Steve Jobs Understood That Our Politicians Don't."

"After all, if you wanted to really get a picture of how the national culture has evolved in the last few decades, particularly in the urban areas that drive economic growth, you could do a lot worse than to study Apple’s string of innovations. (Steve) Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era’s large institutions and centralized decision-making, that technology would free them from traditional workplaces and the limits of a physical marketplace."

[...]

"And no politician wants to really innovate without focus groups, to make a sustained argument for any solution that might entail risk or imagination. Our parties are less like Apple and more like General Motors, churning out this year’s streamlined model of the same cars it was asking you to buy 20 years ago. Even the circuitry of the democracy remains essentially unchanged; a nation of voters who can find their cars and pay their mortgages online still can’t envision the day when they can cast their votes from an iPad."

Politicians aren't the only ones "not gettin' it."

8:29 AM