Informal Brain

Change management is a tricky subject and is something that has been on my mind for some months now. I have realized that being recognized as an effective change agent requires understanding the psychology of change and knowing where your audience is spread along the change transition curve at any given time.

The change transition curve, shown here:

… provides a way to think about where your audience lies along the curve. At the beginning of any change naturally folks quickly move to a place called “Endings”. At the endings point the audience for change begins to understand they need to give up the old way of doing things. This typically generates a great deal of discomfort and pushes them into the Pit of Despair or as it is also known “The Neutral Zone”. The goal of any change agent is to move the audience out of the Pit of Despair to a state of “New Beginnings” where they accept the change and integrate with the change.

It is important to understand that the audience can be analyzed in many discrete groups with the transition curve. You can analyze where the entire audience is at. You can break down your audience based on criticality for the change to succeed and even break down the audience to discrete members. At any given time these groups may be at many places along the curve.

For example at a macro level the entire change audience may be viewed as moving to “New Beginnings” but some members of the audience may still be in the Pit. Those outliers may be more damaging to the change success then is immediately realized. It is also important to recognize that the actions of an outlier or external forces can easily force the entire audience or certain members back into the Pit. The reinforcement phase of the ADKAR model serves to keep people at the New Beginnings point. It is important that the audience is hearing about the change requirements regularly and frequently post awareness and ability phases of any change.

So, in conclusion, think about the curve and where your audience is at. Think big picture and consider the individuals you are targeting. At the lowest level, everyone needs to be driven along the curve and receive reinforcement to the New Beginnings to drive successful change.

via Magic/Replace - Data Cleanup for Everyone from Dabble DB

Magic replace provides the set of tools you always wished Microsoft would build into Excel.  Have you ever wanted to easily split 100s of cells based on a common rule, or reformat values on the fly.  The problem is typically you end up concocting many LEFT() / RIGHT() / MID() combinations to get it right.  Typically with lots of debugging in-between.  

Magic Replace provides the easiest way to edit data I have ever seen.  Excel needs this tool badly…

When you are in a position of rolling out change to an IT environment the two most frustrating things you can hear are:

1. How come this is in stealth mode?

Typically what this means is you are running all over the place delivering the message right on target but somehow you have managed to miss the key target audience the person asking the question believes is critical to the success of the change.  Time to understand how to get out of stealth mode where it really matters!!

2. How long has it been since you have last seen this?

Arg, frequently the answer to this question is many shades of “too long”.  Rolling out change takes time, and lots of repeat performances of the same message over and over again.  Unfortunately with any change people naturally think the message has shifted during the last two weeks since they saw it last.  What they don’t understand is as a transition manager you are delivering the same message time and time again to different groups.  That three weeks has been spent delivering the same powerpoint 15 times, exactly the same way, with exactly the same message to 15 different groups.

Enterprise architects know how to connect with their customers. Unfortunately this relationship can become overwhelming when the architect suddenly becomes the single conduit to IT from the business. The architect / business relationship must not replace a strong service management framework with the IT delivery team. Infact, the architect should strive to drive work requests and incident resolution to the delivery team so they don’t die under the weight of a good relationship. Retain the relationship for healthy strategic dialog. Let the delivery organization become the customer for the tachtical work rather then the business.

Now that bailout 1.0 is behind us it is time to start thinking about the future:

Bailout 2.0: Healthcare

We need a healthcare solution in the US which is cost effective for end users, and is available to all citizens regardless of their preexisting conditions, or financial situation. Perhaps the government can bail out the healthcare system next?

Bailout 3.0: The Environment

The environment, needs a bailout plan. We need to infuse capital into technology which can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. This will help the US become a global leader in clean technology and will create new research and manufacturing jobs.

Sounds to me like these might be some great ways to spend our tax dollars? 1.2 Trillion to bail out the financial services industries. How much could bailout 2.0 and 3.0 cost?

There are two things Firefox can do that Safari can’t:

1. Set pipelining on. Although there is risk that the web servers can’t support pipelining it provides a nice speedup on a high-speed connection.

2. Allow tweaking of the Connections per server setting. This is technically against the recommendations of the w3c protocol but when you have lots of bandwidth you can really get a nice performance boost pulling down the attached images.

I wonder when Safari will support these settings? I wonder when the max connections per server will be increased by default?

Tonchidot: Visual Tagging for the iPhone | The iPhone Blog.

Like something from the future, you have to see this video. If Tonchidot can bring this to market it will revolutionize the way we use our mobile computers to interact with our surroundings. Truly astounding.

Just when you thought you got rid of that incriminating email on your iphone, or removed that suspect web site from your cache you might be surprised to hear that the iPhone captures an image of the application when the “home” button is pressed.

As widely reported, the iPhone takes a screenshot every time the home button is pressed so that the 3D “zoom” effect can be processed when the application zooms in and out, when suspending and resuming applications. These shots are stored, at least temporarily, on the device, presenting potential privacy issues.

[From Keeping Your iPhone From Spying on You - iPhone Atlas]

A forensic analyst can retrieve the images from the phone by mounting the disk and using data recovery tools to reconstruct the images as they are not actually removed from the disk, just the pointers to the files are removed. This continues to demonstrate that the iPhone cannot be treated as a secure device. The iPhone atlas site demonstrates a way to disable the image storage on a jail broken phone. For the average user, be aware that your iPhone is keeping a log of your activity.

I continue to make the argument for encryption. To make that a reality, with good performance, Apple may need to embed a dedicated encryption processor to the device.

Today Nancy Pelosi made a bold statement about the 700 billion dollars requested by the current administration to rescue the financial markets:

Democrats believe a responsible solution should include independent oversight, protections for homeowners and constraints on excessive executive compensation.

[From The Page - by Mark Halperin - TIME]

Unfortunately, I couldn’t agree less. Now is not the time to fix what is broken. What must be done immediately is put some liquid capital into the markets. Once that is done, I believe some additional regulation is needed, but protection for homeowners doesn’t make any sense. These people knew they were getting into a mortgage they couldn’t afford immediately or at some point in the future.

It has thus far been an amazing summer when it comes to browser performance.

We have seen 3 major advances in browser performance when it comes to Javascript specifically.

1. Firefox Tracemonkey

2. Google Chrome V8

3. Webkit SquirrelFish Extreme

Each one has been an exciting advancement in browser performance, leaping ahead quickly. I have been a long time Safari / Webkit nightly user on the Mac. I must admit that the release of tracemonkey moved me over to Firefox 3.1 for a few weeks. I longed for Google Chrome and V8 on my Macbook. But, I am happily back to Safari 4 / Webkit now that SquirrelFish Extreme has landed in the webkit nightly builds. It is blazingly fast, and Safari 4 is an excellent browser.

I am looking forward to further competition and code sharing in the open source space. Notice I didn’t say a thing about Internet Explorer 8. It is still lagging.