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Optimization for Innovation Conference – Call for Participation

I’m working with the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) on a new Optimization for Innovation Conference series.  The inaugural conference is “Optimization for Innovation: Reset; Joint Business & Technology Actions for the New Normal”:

As the world economy emerges from a painful recession, organizations are confronted with the challenge of retaining bottom-line diligence, while pursuing market sustaining and gaining innovation, in an environment riddled with uncertainty, increased regulation, consumer reluctance and tighter credit. This is the “new normal.” To execute in the “new normal,” organizations are seeking new ideas and techniques to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

At the inaugural Optimization for Innovation conference, executives, senior-level practitioners, experts and thought leaders will share real-world experiences and pragmatic 90-day action items to harvest savings and trapped value from existing processes, resources and capabilities. The conference will consist of a combination of invited guest speakers, keynotes, case studies, presentations and tutorials.

By attending this conference, direct reports and senior staff of the COO, CFO and CIO will learn:

• How leading organizations are optimizing for innovation
• Business Optimization Techniques and Practices
• Business & Technology Partnership Models
• Business Performance Analysis and Measurement Practices
• Business Risk Identification & Mitigation in a Connected World
• Business-Technology Enablers

The conference is December 6 – 8, 2010, in Santa Clara, CA USA.  December 6 is tutorials.  December 7 & 8 are full conference days. 

This morning, we issued a call for participation.  We are seeking proposals for presentations including (but not limited to) the following topics:

Program Topics

• Optimization for Innovation Success Stories
• Business-Technology Reset: Optimization for Innovation
• Governance Models for the New Normal
• Business Analytics as Optimization Foundation
• New Normal Linchpins: Business-Tech Savvy Professionals
• Business-IT Alignment is a Dead-End
• Business Optimization Techniques

Tutorials Topics

• Instituting a Business Performance Measurement Framework
• Cyber Risk Analysis: Assessment, Policy, & Economics
• Business Process Modeling and Business Instrumentation
• Lean / Six Sigma in the New Normal

Presentations and tutorials proposed should be geared toward an audience comprising direct reports and senior staff of the COO, CFO and CIO. All presentations and tutorials  must include a 90-day action plan for attendees to pursue post-conference.

The submission deadline is August 13, 2010. Please note, submissions that are direct pitches for product or services will not be considered. Submissions should be prepared in English, containing the following information:

• Presenter name, title and affiliation
• Presenter Bio
• Session Title
• 2 - 3 paragraph description of proposed session
• 3 - 5 bullets on what attendees will learn
• Target audience characteristics: role, skill and industry
• 90-day action plan items

Submit abstracts as described above to Program Chair Brenda M. Michelson (me) via e-mail.

[Disclosure: The Business Ecology Initiative is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Dean Kamen’s FIRST: Celebrating & Inspiring Science and Technology

Last Wednesday at IBM’s Innovate Conference, I had the opportunity to catch Dean Kamen’s inspirational keynote on the life changing (and saving) inventions he has pioneered at DEKA, as well as his mission to inspire future generations of engineers, scientists and technologists via his FIRST program.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Sciences and Technology) is an annual robotics competition for students of all ages, starting with Lego Leagues for elementary school students and progressing in materials, skills and complexity from middle school to collegiate levels.

Kamen shared that his purpose in speaking at Innovate was self-serving.  He is seeking mentors and support for the FIRST program.  An article on Kamen, entitled Mr. Segway’s Difficult Path, is featured in the Economist’s current Technology Quarterly:

“Their answer, Mr Kamen hopes, will name-check FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a glitzy robotics competition that he started in 1989 and which now attracts over 200,000 entrants annually from schools in 56 countries. Working in teams supervised by a professional scientist or engineer, children construct and control robots in a series of competitive challenges, egged on by cheerleaders, screaming parents and the prospect of scholarships worth $12.2m in 2010 alone.

If that all sounds suspiciously similar to American high-school sports, it is no accident. “I want kids to realise that engineering and problem solving are every bit as fun and rewarding as bounce, bounce, bounce, throw,” says Mr Kamen. “I want FIRST to compete with the Superbowl, the World Series and the Olympics. The next generation of real wealth is going to be produced in fields like proteomics, genomics and nanotechnology. For that you need world-class technology people, and if kids don’t get on the train very early, it’s left the station.””

The article concludes with Kamen’s vision of his robotics competitors:

“Which brings him back to FIRST, the invention of which Mr Kamen is most proud. “It really is an invention because it was a different way to attack a fundamental social problem,” he says. “For any one product I worked on, if I didn’t do it, someone else would have. Maybe they would have done it a little later, or a little differently, but they would have done it. But when I look out in the stands at tens of thousands of kids each year during FIRST, I see all the scientists that are going to work on the really exciting stuff that’s going to happen over the next 15 years. They will be making materials that have no resistance and can carry millions of amps, creating materials that can make, store and transform energy, understanding how to build at a molecular level to synthesise proteins and fix health problems, literally by engineering life.””

If you have an engineering, science or technology background, or curious children, consider getting involved in FIRST. 

For more on Kamen’s work, check out his visits to the Steven Colbert Show.

100-day Cloud Watch: Cloud Connect – Keynotes, Cloudonomics, & Adoption Models

As I mentioned on Monday, I spent a couple of days this week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara for some upfront cloud watching.  The conference was spilling over with the clouderati -- those visionaries, strategists, technologists and analysts at the forefront of cloud computing. 

It was literally, the cloud computing twitter stream come to life.  As such, much of the conference conversation is captured in twitter, under the  #ccevent tag.

I did blog from a few sessions, links to those posts follow:

• @ Cloud Connect: Tuesday Morning 10 Minute Keynotes
• @ Cloud Connect: The Surprising Economics of the Cloud
• @ Cloud Connect: Public, Private, or Hybrid: Where’s the Value Today and Where’s It Going?

Mostly though, I took the opportunity to absorb the ideas presented and engage in conversation with fellow attendees. 

I’ll do a summary of my observations soon, but wanted to pass along these links now.  Cloud Connect is “the” cloud computing conference.  I look forward to future editions.

I also had a chance to attend a special session of the San Francisco Cloud Club, which focused on PaaS platforms.  The decision considerations presented by Engine Yard and Heroku really make you appreciate the difficulty of the work that PaaS providers do on behalf of adopters. 

These are definitely interesting times, and not in the curse sort of way.

Express Scripts GlowCap: The absence of an event (pill taking) is an event

While an event is defined as “something that happens”, a common event processing scenario is detecting when something fails to happen.  In this scenario, a failure event is generated based on the absence of “thing happened” events. 

For us geeks, a common usage is the systems heartbeat.  A system is designed to emit heartbeat events at a specific interval.  If the event processor doesn’t receive the heartbeat event in the specified interval, a failure event is generated.  The failure event is then processed, which typically includes notification actions.

This week’s Wall Street Journal has an article entitled Beep! It’s Your Medicine Nagging You.  The article highlights pharmaceutical advances, in packaging and ingestible chips, that monitor pill taking, and absence of pill taking, events.  The majority of the piece is dedicated to Express Scripts’ new GlowCap:

“Express Scripts Inc., the big St. Louis pharmacy-benefit manager, is about to test an electronic pill container that issues a series of increasingly insistent reminders, in a national study among patient members.

The container—actually a high-tech top for a standard pill bottle called a "GlowCap"—is equipped with a wireless transmitter that plugs into the wall. When it is time for a dose of medicine, the GlowCap emits a pulsing orange light; after an hour, the gadget starts beeping every five minutes, in arpeggios that become more complicated and insistent. After that, the device can set off an automated telephone or text message reminder to patients who fail to take their pills. It also can generate email or letters reporting to a family member or doctor how often the medication is taken.

It is one of the high-tech ways companies are grappling with medicine noncompliance. Only about half of patients who are prescribed a medication for a chronic condition are still taking the drug regularly after a year, says Daniel Touchette, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”

…

“In about a month, Express Scripts will start a small test of the GlowCap, made by Vitality Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of high-tech health packaging. Express plans a larger trial focused on drugs for cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure this summer.

Bob Nease, Express Scripts' chief scientist, says the goal is to see if the gadget improves pill-taking, and also to use detailed information that the device beams wirelessly to learn more about how and why patients take—or fail to take—medication. "It is an outstanding instrument" for tracking such information, he says.

Patients using the GlowCap get reminder calls only if they opt to do so. They can opt out of having doctors and family members receive email updates. One issue the study will address is whether the device raises patients' privacy concerns, Dr. Nease says. Dr. Nease declined to comment on the study's cost or size. Participants won't have to pay for the devices, which sell online for around $100.”

Of course, just like when that on-call pager beeps, not everyone is thrilled with the prospect of chirping, and tattling, pill bottles:

“Some patients won't welcome the idea of having their daily medication monitored. Vera Karger, a retired Monroe, Conn., speech pathologist, says she wouldn't mind the lights and noises, but emails to her doctor or family would "make me feel inept, or like I was being regarded as a child."”

However, for patients who don’t, or can’t remember their pill taking, this real-world application of event processing sounds like a good idea.

Counterintuitive: Creative Agency + ISO 9000 = Creativity Increase

The Van Halen brown M&M anecdote wasn’t the only interesting piece in the March issue of Fast Company.  I also found a good example of "optimization for innovation”, which I first wrote about on the Business Ecology Initiative blog.  The article, entitled Partners in Time, describes how Partners & Napier, a Rochester, NY based creative agency, streamlined its processes at the request of Kodak, resulting in increased productivity, billings and creative time for the agency, as well as cost savings for its clients. 

How did they do this?  By mapping out processes, to identify and remove wasteful steps and interactions.  According to the article, Partners went “all in, applying for and earning certification in ISO 9000, a quality-management system akin to Six Sigma that's normally used by manufacturing companies.”

Initially, the idea of applying process rigor to a creative business was met with skepticism:

"A creative embracing quality management may be unusual, but it also may be the model for how to handle clients' increasingly stringent ROI demands.  When Kodak first asked us to do this, people worried that no one understood how long it takes to get to a great idea," concedes Partners' CEO Sharon Napier. Chief creative officer Jeff Gabel says the opposite has happened. More often than not, Gabel says, creative work resembles a "giant hair ball." And that's fine with him. "You don't want to straighten it out," he says. "It's nonlinear, illogical, and often occurs at unpredictable hours." But, he says, if the time allotted to a project could be rejiggered so more time went to creating great ideas -- and less against the job's ancillary grunt work -- then he was game to try.”

The certification process and initial results:

“The certification process took six months and required each step of an assignment, from developing a brief to reviewing final work with the client, to be documented. It cost roughly $20,000 out of Partners' pocket, but it revealed some surprising inefficiencies, including a lot of time wasted in back-and-forths for approvals of briefs, concepts, ideas, and directors. Partners was able to trim the time on a job from eight weeks to three, save the client approximately 40%, and boost productivity by 3.5%.”

The on-going impact:

“…its creative output seems to have blossomed as a result, as the agency is increasingly turning out higher-quality work, it says, in significantly less time.”

“Partners has been so happy with the results that it now uses the same approach with other clients. It's winning more business because it can jump on opportunities once dismissed due to time constraints. Its billings have grown 300% in the past five years.

Still, the process is not without its flaws. All that hyper-efficiency can be exhausting, Gabel admits: "You've removed your slop factor."”

As you consider optimization opportunities in your organization, don’t limit yourself to traditional operational areas and boundaries.  Nor, fall victim to the “optimization = automation trap”.  Think about your creative types, strategists, and knowledge workers.  How can their work time be “rejiggered” to focus on value creation activities?

 

[Disclosure: Cross-posted from the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) blog.  The BEI is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]