Remaining Human in a Technology World

The AppsJack crew gathered to continue their discussions on causality.  This month, the topic was about humans and we talked about benefits.  Benefits accrue to entities whereas outcomes are higher level.  David talked about their being only two types of jobs: service jobs and design jobs.  Service jobs directly interface with customers and design jobs do not.  There seems to be quite a gray area between these distinctions and most jobs are probably a mix between service- and design-related tasks.

In the house we had Berry Zimmerman leading us, a new attendee named Louis Sweeny who was smart and awesome, Susan Stringer, Reba Haas, David Slight, Jean Bishop and AppsJack founder Eric Veal.

Reba recommended the Humans are Underrated book and was telling us about Amazon getting into the real estate market with a new set of services.

Someone made the claim that, "People are informed but don't care." ie they are often apathetic.

The group talked about the influence that marketing and other people's designs has on us on a daily and unconscious level.  People need to be aware and alert of their environment and recognize what kinds of messages they may be receiving from the designers of their environments. An example of this is our "feeds" online and how they may be curated and presented.  Clearly the tech services providers have a lot of power over our perceptions and what inputs we receive for processing.  We need to be conscious of what we are processing and mindful.

Louis mentioned some innovation that Uber is doing in helping its riders find drivers and vice versa.  They are releasing a flashing colored light called Beacon.  With Simbi.com, users can barter skills and services online.

Eric made the point that being 'humane' is far more easier to understand and think about than being 'human'.  Being human includes everything, whereas being humane is only a subset of the features we would value and want from an individual.

Berry shared several human-defining traits with us: choice, a belief of control, unique experiences, independent, social.  Berry also dropped big questions on us like, "What is the purpose of humanity?"  The group thought the question was perhaps a bit too broad but it definitely got them thinking.

Louis mentioned the 2016 feature film Arrival and others agreed it was a good one.  "Linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 locations around the world."  And he also shared that he likes the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

The movie The Perfect Human Diet was also cited as an interesting watch by Berry.  "Filmmaker C.J. Hunt searches for a solution to the obesity epidemic using dietary science, historical findings and ancestral native diets."

Also mentioned were Esther Perel's TED talks.  David is a fan of Jeremy Rifkin who stars in the 2017 film The Third Industrial Revolution and also really likes what he sees from organizations that follow the Holocracy practices of self-organization.  The group talked about Dunbar's Number which states that a human can't scale beyond 148 meaningful relationships.  Humans on BBC was recommended as was the Seattle Liberating Structures group and Crucial Conversations book.

Join us in May to contribute to the fun.

The Latest in e-Commerce Tools, Tech and Techniques from Pros in Seattle

We showed up at an e-Commerce Meetup in Seattle last night and learned a lot.  The group is called Seattle Profit Pirates Mastermind Group - Ecommerce & Amazon Entrepreneurs and was meeting at a coffee shop on Capitol Hill.  We got a lot of tool and tech recommendations and met some thought leaders in the field.  Here are some details for all you e-Commerce and digital marketing people out there.

Terapeak shows you what to sell online.  MerchantWords helps you find more buyers.  Google Adwords is a classic and key tool.  Many people use Facebook to create ads and funnels.  Text / SMS is another technique for capturing emails.  Shopify was considered to be the best e-Commerce tool.  James who runs Wooly Clothing and was telling us about Amazon's practice of  Brand and Category Gating.  Benjamin, who runs the group, was asking about Liquidation services.  He said he's tried FoxBox.  I mentioned Alternativeto.net as a method of finding technologies in a category to support a business process or function. 

We didn't talk about but I was reminded of Mautic, HubSpot and my buddy with Conversion Wizards.  Benjamin says it's important to consider Cost Per Email as a metric.  He also mentioned that MailChimp has an advanced, for pay, feature that provides additional metadata for email addresses to extend marketing.

James was asking about managing multiple channels and Benjamin swore by Skubana, a multi-channel inventory management system, which is $1,000/mo.  He says it's well worth it if you have the volume. 

Flexport, a freight forwarding method, and Keepa, an Amazon price tracker, were also mentioned as useful tools. 

Thanks to all attendees.  Great event and lots to learn.  A whole new domain and area to explore.

The Plan for 2017 and 2018

By David Slight

We'll Talk About Causality and Business Dependency Networks. For a YEAR!

Given our mission to talk about business and technology and learn from diverse perspectives of the group members, we are suggesting and going forth with this self-organizing charter for the coming year. For each of the six BDN perspectives, we will look first at the technology followed by the human perspective. So our calendar for the year looks like the following:

The WHY

November: 

Drivers Tech: what is coming for robotics, automation and futurism

December: 

Drivers Humans: how to evangelize the humanist and people perspectives

Drivers explain why an investment is being made. These are the reasons that senior managers believe will have an impact on the business in a given time frame, yet they are outside the direct control of the organization. A driver requires responses from the business. Drivers can be external (listed first), something in the larger market environment, or internal, an improvement initiative or mandate generated within the organization by senior management.

January: 

Outcomes Tech: What technology and automation do we want to adopt? How far are we willing to let the robots go?

February: 

Outcomes Humans: Define the outcomes we as humans want to achieve.

The outcomes define the end point, or the state at which an investment is aimed.  They are the agreed-upon achievement targets  that help address the drivers. Outcomes are derived from the envisioned changes indicated by the drivers, and help define the benefits that are to be expected.

March: 

Benefits Tech: What benefits can automation and technology provide? How do we measure the benefits?

April:

Humans: Benefits: Who should get the benefits? Large tech corporations or everyone? The developer or sales?

Benefits describe what will happen in the business to help achieve the outcomes. These are advantages to an organization’s stakeholders that can be realized by business changes. Every benefit stream must have an owner who is part of the analysis process. The expected benefits types must be determined, along with how they will be measured. The organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) are a good source of measures. Inclusion of quantitative measures is preferred, if a reliable number can be obtained from the customer.

The WHAT

May: 

Changes Tech: Where is the tipping point when AI starts to think for itself?

June: 

Changes Humans: Can people change, can culture change?

Business changes are new and permanent ways of working within the organization to realize benefits.  The changes come in three forms: 1) Doing new things, 2) doing things better, and 3) stopping counterproductive things.  These can be shown at a high level in several ways, depending on the organization’s preference: as a business process to be changed, a description of the changes to be made, or as organizational capabilities or functional units.

The HOW

July: 

Capabilities Tech:  What capabilities can we rely on from technology?

September: 

Capabilities Humans: What are the essential human capabilities that should be retained and nurtured?

Capabilities are that must be at the required level of maturity in order to support the desired business changes. Multiple capabilities may be required to change an individual process, and some changes may affect more than one process. Training, implementations of new standards, policies, and procedures, or acquisitions and reorganizations are included in this category.

October: 

Enablers Tech: Which technologies are ready for prime time?

November: 

Enablers Humans: What can technology still not enable?  

Enabling technologies  provide the lowest level answers to the question of how  business changes will be achieved.  The items in this column are the IT systems, projects, or product features that will support needed changes. They can support changes in a business process, as well as the introduction of new technology or the work required in a project .

WRAP UP

December: Discuss our charter for 2019

Managing Information Technology Meetup - Kirkland, WA - 6/20/2017 - Recap Notes and Podcast Prep

In attendance were: Richard Schurman (Attorney), Mark Mitchell (CFO), Eric Veal (Technologist), Richard Webb (Technologist), Dominic Wong (Management Exec), Steve Kubacki (Psychologist and Inventor), Kifaya Dawud (Marketer)

RW talked about “Business Stacks”.

RW talked about how good the Amazon TPM (Technical Program Manager) role is:

They own the architecture, PM role and tech

They have clear scope

They are organized to work together

They are measured objectively and fairly: difference between TPM doing poorly themselves (as a leader/worker) and the thing they are producing failing

Example TPM role: there is a person who is responsible for running “events” for Amazon (like father’s day).  Mark: Walmart did this as well with stores in Texas with stuff like Cinco de Mayo.

Amazon TPM rollup structure:

TPM

Regional TPM

Top TPM – meets with Bezos

Same role with widening scope that aggregates

Communication flows up and down this TPM chain

Tools for organizing management:

- Mark: adaQuest has a way to communicate strategy throughout the org

- Also ManageHub - Eric and Mark to further look into ManageHub for organizational uses for process improvement with Doug Hall

CRM Systems

Are they important?  Eric says they are central but there is an issue of adoption and data capture, data quality and people playing games with their data like hiding it strategically.

Examples of modern integration frameworks: Zapier, IFTTT, etc. for integration vs. old tools and people that integrated systems.  "We don't do it like we used to.  It's all as a service now." - EV

RW coined that these types of integration utilities are “(Hardware and Printer) Drivers at a different level”.  Totally agree, very interesting.

Drivers are hard to write because they break if either end changes, which prevent scale.

RW had some funny commentary about SOAP and REST and why one didn't work and other did: "SOAP didn’t work because programmers are dirty.  REST worked because programmers are lazy."  Microservices architecture becoming a big deal.

Eric had a recent VR experience with HTC Valve simulating “in the office” where he made coffee, 3D printed things and ate a donut.  Very amazing stuff.  Changes your mind and belief of what's possible.

Current “dialogs” and programs are too linear in their current form and are too project/product-oriented (developers need to finish and can't guild the lily, just want the basics to get done). 

Eric's vision of the world of the web now (as different from APQC + Process Triggers 10+ years ago):  There are "Listeners" (the people gathering the data with instrumentation and telemetry) + they provide or sell WebHooks to others who + People that write services that hand off of the events.

EV had a question, “Can we teach computers how to HARD SELL and effectively CLOSE a person on a big transaction while the person knows it is happening?”

We seemed to agree that we could and that it was actively happening now.

RS said that it depended on how the information is presented and when.

Richard gave examples of Blue Apron knowing if he read an email from them or not (by tracking a pixel).

Mark said that Google know if you walked into Nordstrom (location services on).  This is clearly very powerful for very many marketing-related things.

Companies every day are designing and running campaigns that work against (with/for) people’s weaknesses, predilections and interests.  Insidious from one perspective, genius, smart, intelligent and useful from another.

Excellent sales processes happen all the time in games (in app purchases), etc.

This can get into some edge / unethical realms if there is blackmail, for example. Open issue/question:  What's a person's recourse against these systems?

Richard talked about how Americans respond best to English and Australian accents, so they are used a lot in advertising to us.

We talked about humans training computers (other-learning) vs. computers training themselves (self-learning).  Humans can also train humans and computers can train humans and humans can train themselves.  Lots of vicious loops and cycles here.

We wondered, "What are the limitations of IT today?"

Richard said, "We have to get rid of the I.T. and make it “we” (make it work for us)

Eric and Richard talked about Enterprise Architecture, strategy and a recent HBR article on data strategy which talked about Offensive and Defensive uses for data.

Steve Kubacki showed up and was entertaining as usual.  Steve, “How many project managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  It depends on the location of the lightbulb?”  Har-de-har-har but also fairly insightful and true in my opinion; everyone is or should be a PM.

SK when talking about Virtual Reality applications and Andrew Sengul's work with Scenario Tech, "You want people to come forward with their own imagery."

LISP.  Andrew Sengul and Ben Sidelinger are both working on modern applications using the LISP language now.  What's up with that?  List of JavaScript LISP implementations.

We had a discussion about the design/experience of video games being way too open or way too closed/structured and cited examples.

Eric talked about a future computer design where there is immediate feedback between the writing of code and the existence of the application (run time and design time).  "Real time run time."  You heard it here, folks!

SK had many great quotes:

“The Theory of Totality”.  Everything is incomplete.  Goedel. 

SK: Can a corporation have empathy?

SK: “A corporation “has a” sociopath.” (as a property) pretty funny

SK: “We are fundamentally social creatures.  Self-interest is directed by the social interests.”

SK: “Brownian motion” how things aggregate

Eric made the point to Steve at some point about different types of grouping: Aggregation (requires a common interface of the members) vs. Composition groupings (no commonality required, they are simple assembled and joined...but could be very well designed to work together systematically like a car has many parts).

Steve made some great points about how we need to intentionally design and implement systems that decentralize.  Such a great point and such an interesting area.

Someone said that IT Development has been declining over the last 20.  I guess this was something Eric Schmidt of Google has said.

Steve says that we are seeing an increase of democratization within the workplace which sounds like a really good thing to me.

Eric made the point that "ownership" (of the work ie things were fully delegated) was previously delegated to the VPs (for example, the APQC model would probably recommend that someone owns each area and are responsible for throughput and continuous improvement of it) and is now delegated to actual and real units of business (products and projects).  This is the TPM role and how this power has shifted/is shifting from functions and processes to products, which is generally great for innovation, for example.

Steve shared more ideas about how different the culture will be on Mars: it is an un-earth-based culture.  Totally different than anything we have ever known?

Richard Schurman talked about some book tech and mentioned Scrivner, 

Kifaya showed up, too.  Thanks for coming, Kifaya!

Developing and Managing Human Capital - Notes from the May 23, 2017 AppsJack Business Services Meetup in Kirkland, WA

"Human Capital" was the topic to be discussed.  It was a sunny late-May afternoon and I headed down to Big Fish Grill to have the discussion with about 10 others who had gathered.  Unlike the normal gathering, we were given a smaller table, which in the end wound up being a little better: cozier and easier to hear people.  We never broke into smaller groups and had a good dialog with a big group.

At first it was just me, leadership coach Alan Andersen and coach Susan Stringer.  I had never met Susan before and was immediately impressed by her grace, experience and knowledge.  She has a great present and is a very fun conversationalist.  Eventually, more arrived and we kicked off the discussion about "Developing and Managing Human Capital", the first support process in APQC's process classification framework.  The first thing that was made clear is we all agreed that the CAPITAL word in human capital is evil, wrong, etc.  Richard Webb suggested that thinking of people as money is no worst than thinking of them as slaves.  There was agreement on this point.

In search of a starting point, I rattled off the APQC's subtopics:

• Develop and manage HR planning, policies and strategies
• Recruit, source and select employees
• Develop and counsel employees
• Reward and retain employees
• Redeploy and retire employees
• Manage employee information

I told people that I was personally most interested in the "Manage Employee Information" area, where I had the most experience.  It's subtopics are as follows: Manage reporting processes (who reports to whom), Manage employee inquiry process (how management gets info from employees), Manage and maintain employee data, Manage human resource information systems (HRIS), Develop and manage employee metrics, Develop and manage time and attendance systems (we agreed this was an optional step for some places), Manage employee communication.

No one seemed to bite on the above high-level concepts so I started rattling off the discussion topics that we'd covered over the last year: good books we'd read about HR and people-management, alternatives to the resume and is the resume dead, how to get a great job, how to get maximum wages sustainably, what are the current trends and issues, problems in HR management, what does the modern worker like, what do they expect and need, what is the future of employment, what will technology do to HR and management with tools like LinkedIn and CrystalKnows?  Before I could get too far down the list, people locked on the resume topic and we were off on our first big topic.

The resume, truth, recruiting and qualification

Susan gave us some great and interesting facts about millennials in the workforce: that 50% of the workforce will be millennials by 2020 and 75% of the workforce by 2025.  Incredible statistics.  Susan is doing a presentation soon on millennials in the workforce that I will plan to attend.  She is a student of the topic.  I raised issues about complexity dealing with individuals vs. working with people in populations.  Working with 'classes' and things in groups is far easier than but as humans we seem very reluctant to exclusively deal with things in groups and need to give the attention that people and organizations need at an individual level.  

Richard said that the age of authenticity is what's next and was seeking a term for millennials.  I suggested that they were Generation M to keep it simple then we laughed about sequence issues.

We talked about predictive analytics and the power of organizations like Facebook and LinkedIn to predict events from data such as divorce with very high confidence.  Data is a very powerful thing.  

  

I suggested that the resume is just one signal in the collection (stack) of things necessary to understand and work with a person professionally.  Other signals include online profiles like LinkedIn, social media presence, reference checks and the interview.  We didn't believe that the resume would be going away and generrally believed that i was a gateway and door-opener to other aspects of the person.

Susan impressed us with some of her experiences doing hiring at the executive level and gave examples of people she had vetted by requesting 12 references from them: 3 supervisors, 3 peers, 3 suppliers and 3 others.  This sounded very rigorous to me but I could appreciate just how important getting this information really is for some high-risk, high-reward opportunities.

Susan shared that she asks these questions to the candidate, "How would your former managers describe you?" and to the former managers, "How would you describe your former employee?"  They are very open questions and she would listen for incongruity between the stories.  She said she had been referred to by some in the past as "the female version of Columbo", the TV show detective.  What an amazing skill to go this deeply into someone's background not make sure they are who they say they are.

Talent

We got off on a discussion about the quality of leaders and the leadership and it was stated that only A players can hire A players.  Richard told us stories about the Drugstore.com days (joint-venture between Microsoft, Walmart, and some India companies) and how complex and different those cultures were and how they used a 'bus' to communicate effectively.  Another aspect of that collaboration that worked well was to pass information through a key resource they called the seamstress (it was a man) who would bridge the gap and coordinate between the three different teams.  

Books

We talked a little about books here and there and Andrew Sengul regaled us with stories from Aaron Hurst and The Purpose Economy.  The book says that people can be broken up into three categories: those motivated by money, prestige/fame or a deep personal commitment.  The book suggests to only hire the people with deep personal commitment.  Andrew cited quite a few examples of how it is hard to manage and create organizations of these kinds of individuals.

Alan and Susan both highly recommended the book Leadership and Self-Deception.  Alan believes that everyone is a leader (at least sometimes) and they have to start by leading themselves.  

Corruption

Richard is obsessed with the idea that things and people are corrupt.  He believes and here was agreement in the group that one thing we are trying to do with all of these systems and controls in businesses is to weed out corruption, corrupt people and takers.  Richard says that there is a worthy goal to "instrument corruption" (develop systems that can measure and detect corruption at all levels).  Andrew jumped in and offered that experts at corruption really are good at it: that low-grade corruption is easy to detect and that some people really are grade A snakes.  

Steve Kubacki showed up a bit late (but I had already referenced a couple of his ideas) and we talked more about his idea of random firings to weed out corruption and sick cultures.  

Steve says that more of this needs to happen at the top of the organization than the bottom.  Susan said that, "A good leader assesses the talent and weeds out the tenured people."  So her theory is that this can be done by good people but I agree with Steve in some ways that this needs to be done by policy and not just by people (heroes).  We went into a discussion about CEO and he Board and how those two things should work together for control and regulation of the organization.  

Richard wanted to know how to test for integrity.  Everyone agreed that business and corporations really was a battle or war and that more people need to understand that situation.  We went into a discussion about the role of the HR department (few liked it) and Susan gave us examples of HR departments that provided coaching through the "HR Business Partner" who coached the manager of the group.  I have personally witnessed limitations of this model, especially when the management is not ready for coaching.  

"Balancing the bottom line and people" is a big topic that Susan thinks is a key challenge for organizations.  

We went off on a long rabbit trail tangent about sociopaths and predators (evil people) who are ladder climbers.  We tried to separate between those who are sick, ambitious and charismatic.  There is a desire by people to detect and weed these people out.

We talked about the authoritarian personality and how many people are okay with it (even seek it out) and like to live inside of authoritarian structures because they are given something from daddy.  

Conclusions and Next Steps

We had a great turnout.  It was me, leadership coach Alan Andersen, executive coach Susan Stringer, technology architect Richard Webb, professional services pro Lee Carter, delivery operations pro Dena Carter, operations manager Dominic Wong, business owner Thomas Mercer, business leader Thomas Mercer, software product developer Andrew Sengul and creative psychologist Steve Kubacki.

Please join us soon for Episode 8 of the AppsJack Capable Communities Podcast on the HR/Human Capital topic which will feature consulting business owner Aftab Farooqi, coach Rachel Alexandria, psychologist Steven Kubacki, executive and consultant Joe OKonek and professional services sales director Lee Carter.  We will record on Saturday 6/10 and the conversations will be dripped to the major podcast outlets each Sunday morning during June and early July. 

Our next topic for the meetup and podcast will be managing information technology, a topic near and dear to my heart and another key enabler to business.

AppsJack Capable Communities Meetup – March 2017 – Delivering Product & Services Discussion

Tuesday, March 28, 2017 4 PM
Kirkland, WA

A few business associates and I gathered last Tuesday to talk about challenges relating to delivering products & services.  Delivering products and services is the fourth element in the APQC model.  I showed up at about 3:30 and struck up a conversation with Alan Andersen who was already there.  Alan is a leadership coach and consultant.

I’ve been fortunate to get to know Alan better over the last couple of months and it’s been a good experience for me.  Alan is well read and has so many experiences working with leaders and teams from which he can draw experiences and stories.  We sat and chatted and then a few more people showed up at our table, the Captain's Table.

Richard Webb, always a powerful and interesting force, showed up and we started to get into the meat of the delivery topic.  James Tuff, an entertaining and vivacious technology sales executive and entrepreneur, showed up and sat at the head of the table.  After long we had eight at the table including clinical psychologist and writer Steve Kubacki, an intelligent, insightful, opinionated professional and mountaineer.  Steve is great at these events in that he helps us stayed grounded, balanced and on point.  Steve regularly shares perspectives that help us see things from a more human, less business, perspective.  Tonight was no exception.

My new friend, Thomas Mercer, was sitting to my right.  I was drinking iced tea in copious amounts; I had been sick with a fever earlier in the week but was starting to spring back to life.  Spring was upon us indeed.  12 years prior, Thomas and I had finished the same master’s program at the University of Washington Foster Business School: information systems where we learned about the internet, networks, business.  And when things like Facebook were brand new.  Thomas previously ran a medical practice business that helped people with irritable bowel syndrome with diagnosis and treatment.  He explained to us his time working on that project and ho it related to the challenges of delivery.

Lee Carter, sitting to my left, is a business development manager for Ciber, a technology consulting firm with some major clients in the area, recently relocated to the Seattle area from Dallas, TX.  We were also graced by Bruce Follansbee’s presence.  Bruce is always good for conversation, putting people at ease, and book references.

One of the first things I asked about was blockchain and its relationship to delivery.  Per wikipedia:

blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records called blocks. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block.[6] By design, blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the data — once recorded, the data in a block cannot be altered retroactively. Through the use of a peer-to-peer network and a distributed timestamping server, a blockchain database is managed autonomously. Blockchains are "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically."

Richard and Thomas seemed to know quite a bit on the subject and shared what they knew with us.  There was discussion about whether the blockchains should be open or closed, transparent or not.  Issues related to security and privacy were major pivot points for our discussion.  Richard suggested that we loop in Ellen Mooney into the conversation; I guess she is an expert on the topic of digital democracy.

We were pretty much all over the map in the beginning of the discussion, going from micro levels of delivery (firm or product perspectives) up to the macro levels (global supply chains, politics and economics).  Richard talked about Amazon’s CIDC pipelines and brought up the term “logistics engine”.  Many at the table agreed that Amazon is doing very amazing things these days and that their ability to delivery and run supply chains is amazing.  For many years, Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue in the world, has been known for its logistics and methods like “cross-docking” but it seems that Amazon, between its online presence and many innovative new products and services has begun to eat into that area of innovation.  Much is happening with Amazon.

We talked about hypothetical scenarios where Amazon could, for example, run dentist offices and use 3d printing for delivery of replacement teeth.  It didn’t seem very far-fetched.  Richard mentioned and recommended the movie Elysium which has some interesting and futuristic elements to it where people get scanned with lasers and good things happen.

I realized at some point in the bubbling conversation that the differences between delivering services and delivering products really are stark.  APQC has even recognized this issue by breaking them out into different L1 elements, making the model 13 items, no longer 12.  I think it’s important to pick one or the other for the sake of focus, clarity and conversation.  Delivering products seems a bit easier in that they are tangible and “real”, whereas delivering services seems a bit more human and ambiguous and challenging, at least to me.  Richard doesn't believe that the distinction is all that different.  Similarities between delivering services and managing customer service (the next area in the AQPC model) seem obvious and will be the target of future exploration.

We got into a pretty detailed conversation about banking, the flow of money, financial systems and corruption.  Richard is very passionate about the many issues of corruption and it helps to have Steve there for his thoughts on humanity as well.  Richard gave examples of Visa being able to run all transactions in the world on its system alone.  Steve made some interesting points about capitalism, such as:

“Capitalism is about wiping out the competition as much as possible so you can waste as much as you want.”  

Steve’s a funny guy and I don’t disagree with the point.  I know some people who definitely act that way.  For these people I know, the goal is to get really rich and make a lot of money now so they can chill out, retire and do very little later.  They aren’t trying to create economies or markets or anything, they are trying to dominate existing ones.  In a word: take.  Not my kind of verb.

Someone mentioned the book by Chris Anderson “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” and cited that it was interesting.  James Tuff shared about a new business idea he is working on in the transportation and informatics areas and we all found it interesting helping him think about how he could deliver that set of products and services.  We had a lengthy and fruitful conversation with Reba about her challenges and ideas for competing and delivering value in the very rapidly changing real estate industry.

Business is highly complex and so is delivery.  Delivery is where the rubber meets the road.  Analyzing any business from the perspective of delivery is difficult because of the natural complexity.

Stay tuned for the upcoming podcast episode on delivery when I will sit down with Josh Bosworth and Steve Kubacki to bat the topic around.

Managing IT in Context: Recap of July 2016 AppsJack Business Share Meetup, Seattle, WA

Well, the monthly fourth Tuesday AppsJack Business Share meet was held in Bellevue at Big Fish Grill on Tuesday, July 26th from 4 to 7 PM and went off without a hitch.  The event was well attended by new, familiar and awesome faces.  Thanks to Ruben Simpson for showing up, a new connection from Issaquah who is running an agency.

The new faces (first time attendees) at the event were Ruben Simpson, Ted Clark, and Karen Carnahan.  There was quite a bit of iced tea going around and the beer and wine seemed to flow fluidly as well.  I saw fish and chips.  "Regulars" included Eric Veal, Dominic Wong, David Slight, Joe Pham, James Tuff, Chris Ingrao, Andrew Sengul and Richard Webb.

The topic for the evening was MANAGING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: Are you doing it right? and there was a star-studded cast of industry experts to debate it.  The topics under discussion were all hot in 2016: IoT, Cloud Computing, the industry, relative strengths and positions of cities, Smart Machines, Robots and Drones, AI, Context-Rich, Intelligent Learning Systems and Bots, Visual Analytics, BI and Tableau, 3D and 4D Printing, modern IT practices.  Below are the major points, lessons, areas of interest and takeaways we covered.

VUI is and is gonna be YOOOOGE! Voice user interface (VUI) is and will be a huge area for the industry in computing.  Successes from Siri, Amazon Echo, Kinect and the like are driving this and solutions from companies like Twilio.  Microsoft offers Speech APIs on Azure.  For users, rather than needing to look directly at a computer and be attached to it 1:1, the user simply speaks and has it respond in interesting or necessary ways.  The voice interfaces will become better and better and their responses will be delivered to us through connected user interfaces like Google Glass, Hololens, etc.  This is immersive computing.  Richard Webb and Eric met at a Six Hour Startup in Seattle in 2009 where we used Twilio and RunMyProcess.com (now a Fujitsu company) to automate workflows.  The technology has been around and will get broader and deeper.  The ability now for the machine to respond to voice input is and will be a phase shift.

Use the right Strategic Frameworks.  We spoke of Red and Blue Ocean strategies, their applications and differences.  David Slight taught us about the differences in approach and the example of Cirque de Soleil was brought up as blue ocean strategy.  David and Richard Webb expressed the importance of the very simple VSE framework: Vision, Strategy, Execution.  Vision and strategy alone are useless and require execution; otherwise they are just ideas.  (Unrealized potential).

David and Richard carried on about the future of IT and told Eric that the BOST and BAIT (Business Aligned IT) frameworks were relevant and powerful areas to study. Surprisingly, ITIL was not mentioned though I saw it rise around 2007.

Richard joined us about 90 minutes into the evening and impressed everyone with his knowledge and opinions of the industry based on many years of experience and his current work with major clients making IT more modern and higher quality.  We talked about automation, policies and humans vs. machines including their associated ethics in this context.

The Future is near:  Governance and Regulation.  We started getting pretty futuristic.  Andrew brought up Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.  And mentioned that there is also a fourth (also referred to as the zeroth) law.  The laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
4. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Mr. Slight and Mr. Webb talked about ISA, the International Society of Automation, and David's work building a 3D virtual reality room, like Minority Report, for working on business models like his BDN framework (Drivers, Objectives, Benefits, Changes, Capabilities, Enablers).  He is writing code as we speak for Hololens to realize this vision.

Webb griped about the pace of technology's advancement and the complexity of keeping up with all of the tools.  Eric shared that one of his visions is to be able to keep up with the tools and tech indeed and use that (which we already do as a computing substrate).  We need better linkage between our tools and our business processes.  Companies like Alternativeto.net are doing wonderful work in this area and will probably soon expose APIs that make model driven architecture in a tool-agnostic approach like has been taught at the UW Foster School of Business for years more of a reality.  Companies like Microsoft are extremely strong with their use of workflow frameworks and things like Entity Framework to make modeling and business automation a reality.  Salesforce is in that race, too.  And Microsoft has the goal to take on SAP.

New technologies abound. Cucumber.io (collaboration around running automated tests in software) and Pickle (in Python, pickle is the standard mechanism for object serialization) recently came up in Richard's work.  Neo4j, the World's Leading Graph Database, was brought up in conversation as critical technology.  I believe Andrew is using it for some of his interesting projects.  Here is a listing of comparable technologies to neo4j. 

The book The Art of the Possible: Create an Organization with No Limits was brought up and Richard had a wonderful quote, "You are differentiating yourself by not being a prick."

Luminaries.  Richard talked about Grant Holland, a Senior Java Architect with Sun Microsystems, who is a close relation to the "Gang of Four" (GoF), Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, who wrote the book on Design Patterns in software development.  Here are more resources on Grant's work.  Joe, who is running a startup about insurance reform to benefit the end users talk about the benefits of Founders.org and their Advisor Template in particular.

Conclusion.  IT is a great topic but there were suggestions that "Digital" is a better word to describe it anymore.  David has strong beliefs that IT is going away as a function and that the capabilities of this function really.  This basically supports the idea of the AppsJack vision: the best tools for every practice.

Next AppsJack Share event: Managing Financial Resources.  AppsJack looks forward to the next meetup, which will be in Bellevue.  The topic will be Managing Financial Resources.  And the following month, the topic will be Managing Assets (they things that were attained with the money).  AppsJack looks forward to seeing you at an event soon and hearing about your ideas of the future, industry and what's possible.  Join the discussion today! RSVP for the August Managing Financial Resources event.