13. supporting HEROes with technology innovation

Gerald Shields is an insatiably curious chief information officer; he reads fifty books a year. He’s always looking for the next big idea, the new important thing around the next corner. That curiosity has paid off for Gerald’s employer, Aflac.

Aflac is a supplemental insurance company, memorable for its talking duck and the wise words of spokesperson Yogi Berra. A lot of people interact with Aflac. Eighty thousand licensed agents sell its products to employers. The company works with four hundred thousand payroll and benefits administrators who serve 50 million individual policyholders.

In 2008, Gerald decided that what was around the next corner was social technology and communities.

Most CIOs don’t think about stuff like this. Gerald’s day job is to manage six hundred IT professionals and a $135 million budget. His people operate the systems that keep Aflac’s transactions flowing and the networks that bind the company together. They are responsible for keeping Aflac safe from bad-guy attacks on customer data and in compliance with regulations. And he’s good at it; he was on CIO Magazine’s Top 100 CIOs list in 2006 and 2008.

But in addition to running these systems, Gerald feels it’s his job to show other executives the power that technology has to serve customers, starting with social technologies. Here’s how he did it.

First he educated his direct reports and Paul Amos, Aflac’s North American president and the grandson of the company’s founder. Having convinced Paul, he began to work with the new CMO, Jeff Charney. Paul convened managers from all over the company for a workshop on social technologies. Cross-functional groups developed plans, which went through a rigorous review.

Out of those reviews, Jeff and Gerald selected the two most promising ideas and built communities with technology from community vendor Lithium. The first was a community site for the independent sales associates called The Buzz. With eighty thousand field people selling thousands of deals per month, it’s important to give these independent agents a way to connect to each other and to their sales, service, and marketing support teams. On The Buzz, they can get and share information and help, exchange views and experiences, and interact with Aflac executives, including the head of customer service and Gerald. Each month, twenty-eight hundred associates visit or make a contribution.

The second community, called Duck Pond, serves Aflac’s two hundred thousand online billing and payroll administrator customers in the United States. Payroll administrators are a group that needs friends, since they typically slave away in human resources or finance with few internal peers. Duck Pond helps these professionals connect and share their experiences and concerns, Aflac-related or not. For Aflac, Duck Pond is a great way to serve these customers while building loyalty. In Gerald’s words, “We don’t want you to think of Aflac as just a supplemental insurance company. We want you to say, ‘Wait a minute. I’m on Duck Pond all the time.’”

Gerald’s teams still have their hands full running the systems that keep Aflac’s transactions flowing and operations humming, keeping the company out of court and in compliance with regulations, and running a big technology operation. But Gerald has made Aflac better by supporting technology innovation throughout the company.

If you’re in IT, you could spend all your time running the core systems, locking down networks, and focusing on cutting costs just to return money to the bottom line. Or, like Gerald, you could do those things while keeping an eye on new technology and how it might be used to solve customer problems. You could become a key partner and advisor to customer-facing business functions. You could bring professional technology guidance to the HEROes throughout your company and watch innovation grow.

IT professionals and HERO employees share responsibility for business technology

HEROes build technology solutions, often on their own. So who needs IT?

The whole business does. Because while IT won’t necessarily own the technology, it certainly can help make it better.

We’ve already seen how IT is keeping HEROes and the business safe by managing risk at Kodak and Intel. We saw how IT is helping businesspeople connect with social collaboration tools at United Business Media and IBM. And we learned how IT is supporting business innovation efforts at Chubb and Deloitte Australia.

IT also helps make HERO projects better. At PTC and Thomson Reuters, the projects moved forward more effectively with IT’s help. And IT helped develop mobile applications that empower salespeople and customers, as we saw at Sunbelt Rentals and E*TRADE.

Building and operating business-grade technology, particularly in a company with more than a few hundred employees, requires specialized tools and specialty skills. Groundswell technology doesn’t change that. Making a HERO solution work at business scale takes an IT organization. You wouldn’t ask a HERO to manage the servers or run the compliance system or worry about the network bandwidth needs. That’s IT’s job.

While HEROes’ technology ideas are customer focused, they aren’t always business ready. IT’s technology ideas are business ready but not always customer focused. But HEROes and IT working together can create business technology solutions that are customer focused and business ready. It takes a partnership between IT and HEROes to do it. That’s the HERO Compact.

To see how this works, we’ll take another look at Twelpforce, Best Buy’s Twitter support system from chapter 1, to see how a technology staffer helped turn a HERO’s idea into a success.

CASE STUDY

the technology story behind Best Buy’s Twelpforce

As we described in chapter 1, it took a team to get Twelpforce off the ground, including CMO Barry Judge, Blue Shirt Nation cobuilder Gary Koelling, and marketing staffer John Bernier. But the technology worked because of an idea from Best Buy Web strategist/architect Ben Hedrington. These four employees are a living, breathing example of the Hero Compact—managers, marketers, and IT working together. Here’s the technology back story of Twelpforce.

Behind Twelpforce, Best Buy’s official Twitter customer service handle, are twenty-five hundred Best Buy retail staff employees plus a handful of customer service professionals. Each of these employees is empowered to tweet answers to customer questions, just as they do in person thousands of times a day in the retail stores. These tweets are tracked and redistributed through the Twelpforce Twitter handle.

Behind the Twitter handle was Ben’s technology idea.

Ben’s idea was building an experimental Twitter aggregation service called ConnectTweet.¹ This service, which runs silently and efficiently on Google’s App Engine cloud servers, does a simple job. It uses Twitter’s APIs (application programming interfaces) to continually search for Twitter posts with a defined hashtag (“Twelpforce,” for example) and then repost them through a common Twitter ID.

Ben built ConnectTweet on his own time, as he put it, “after 5 p.m. every day for a week.” The key ingredients were his own programming skills and a credit card to cover the cost of renting Google’s servers. He coded directly on the Google cloud. Ben proved that it could work and opened it up, eventually, to several hundred kindred HEROes in other companies.

When Barry Judge, Gary Koelling, John Bernier, and Ben Hedrington decided to make this part of Best Buy’s business, it took a month and some contract developers with Python programming skills to create a business-ready version of ConnectTweet, still running on the Google App Engine cloud.

With the trust embodied in the HERO Compact as the guiding principle, it wasn’t hard to do. Previous experience with Blue Shirt Nation had laid the groundwork so Barry Judge and IT could see what kinds of things were possible. So they opened up the corporate directory to Google’s App Engine cloud and turned Twelpforce into a business-ready customer solution.

The key lesson here is that when a HERO wants to move, IT must be ready to move quickly to help. But how? By getting much closer to HEROes and the technology they need to solve customer problems.

IT professionals have a new job: growing the business by supporting HEROes

At Forrester, we work with IT professionals who are supporting HERO projects all the time. Based on these conversations, we have identified four initiatives that CIOs and the IT organization can take to support HEROes:

create a cross-functional council to manage groundswell technologies

To manage the do-it-yourself technology that employees are using, IT should charter a new team of IT, business managers, and HEROes as a cross-function groundswell technology council. This team tracks and recommends technologies that employees are harnessing for work.

More than one third of employees are using do-it-yourself groundswell technologies. We’ve been analyzing this “consumerization of IT” since 2008.² In chapter 7, we explained why IT departments shouldn’t block it when HEROes adopt groundswell technologies they learn about from their experience as consumers. But IT needs to go further, not just by getting out of the way, but by leading—educating and helping people in business functions to find these new technologies, helping them to see what’s possible, and supporting what they come up with.

In chapter 9, we described how councils of people using similar technologies were effective in spreading best practices at Dell. The solution here is similar. IT should organize a new cross-functional advisory group with IT, HEROes, and managers. We call this a groundswell technology council.

The purpose of the council is to track and recommend groundswell technologies that the company can support and HEROes can adopt (see table 13-1). Manish Mehta’s social strategy council at Dell, Michiel Boreel’s TeamPark collaboration platform at Sogeti, and United Business Media’s collaboration program are all instances of this idea. We’ve seen customers in the defense, consumer products, insurance, and life sciences industries use councils to analyze and select mobile and social technologies based on employee demand. The council basically helps the company and the workers to see where the promising technologies are, and how to support them.

For example, Dave Diedrich is vice president of technology, security, and workplace services and a twenty-five-year veteran at Kraft Foods. Dave started down the path to create a groundswell technology council when he decided to give employees a choice of smartphones and PDAs.³ In his words, “We set out to see how we as an IT group could help Kraft Foods change the culture and contemporize the brand for employees.”

The focus for Dave and his team was to get corporate email and collaboration capabilities on iPhones, which at the time were just gearing up to be viable in the business world. Dave got Kraft Foods into Apple’s iPhone beta process for enterprise email support in 2008. Based on this experience, Dave was able to support iPhone use at the company, allowing employees to choose the iPhone as their personal device with access to work email and corporate applications beginning in the summer of 2008. The payoff has been big. In the words of one happy employee, “Thank you. You made me cool with my kids again.” Another said, “I had everybody at the table jealous that my company lets me use an iPhone.”

TABLE 13-1

The groundswell technology council is a new cross-functional advisory group

By working closely with employees and providing the security and business-ready capabilities that IT is good at, Dave and his team support, rather than block, grateful employees. Dave hopes to extend this initiative to cover other employee-provisioned technology as well.

manage collaboration programs as part of the Information Workplace

In chapter 11, we heard from Fernando Summers at BBVA about using collaboration technology to improve the flow of information and pace of teamwork. Collaboration is a business strategy—a way to improve the productivity of people and teams and accelerate the flow of information throughout the company. Because collaboration tools are technology deployed across every business and to every employee, IT should own the collaboration program.⁴ IT will have to do two things to manage it.

First, the successful collaboration programs that we’ve seen have a unique leader behind them: a business executive with technology skills or a technology executive with business skills. Bill McCollam, vice president of digital strategy in the financial services company Sun Life, is a good example of this profile. He understands the technology so he can lead the charge, but he also understands what managers and employees in various departments worldwide need from a collaboration toolkit. By linking the technology with the business needs, he can tailor the program to the business.

Second, a collaboration program requires knitting together varied collaboration tools, information resources, and work and productivity applications and delivering them to an employee as a simple but comprehensive tool that we call the Information Workplace (see figure 13-1). The Information Workplace is valuable to employees because it ties together the tools each employee needs. Result: it’s easy to move from email to wiki to instant message to Web conference to social network without having to switch tools or lose the context of what you’re working on. Information Workplaces make people and teams more productive.

A fully formed Information Workplace is still a ways off for most companies because it’s not yet possible to buy one from a single vendor. Even if it were, IT would have to stitch it into existing resources and deploy it globally. But over the past two years, companies including Verizon and Cisco have begun piecing the parts together to deliver a first-generation Information Workplace within their companies.

Some big vendors, including Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, see this as a big opportunity to sell more solutions, so each is working hard to put the pieces together into a collaboration platform that can deliver an Information Workplace experience to every employee. While we expect advances in these platforms, don’t hold your breath: it’s better to get started helping employees to collaborate and get access to the best information now.

FIGURE 13-1

The Information Workplace is an integrated toolkit for employees

research and implement technologies that anchor HERO solutions

HERO projects require a new set of core technologies that many IT shops have yet to master. We have identified five anchor technologies that power many HERO projects⁵ (see table 13-2).

TABLE 13-2

New core technologies anchor HERO projects

build a portfolio of cloud services to accelerate HERO projects

Cloud computing services put technology power directly into the hands of HEROes and developers. Facebook and Twitter are cloud services. So is Google App Engine, the tool that Ben Hedrington harnessed at Best Buy to build Twelpforce. So is Salesforce.com, the tool that Ross Inglis at Thomson Reuters used to launch the independent advisor product.

IT needs to know two things about cloud services. First, they are here to stay. The economic drivers of cloud computing—running at massive scale using highly automated systems—means lower costs and faster deployments. It’s cheaper for entrepreneurs and developers to build new applications as (and on) a cloud computing service than as installed software.

Second, developers and HEROes will always look for the easiest way to get something done. And that means using a cloud service. There are three categories of cloud services: software, platform, and infrastructure. Each has its own place in the computing stack and solves different problems (see figure 13-2). In all three categories, it’s easier to get started with a cloud service immediately than to write a business plan with a three-year breakeven just to get in line for funding.

FIGURE 13-2

Cloud computing service categories

IT groups should implement a strategy for cloud computing that makes it easier for HEROes and developers to use cloud services that IT can support. The goal is to avoid service redundancy and risky service providers. That strategy has four parts.

First, keep an eye on the cloud computing services that your employees and developers are using. Use a Web monitoring tool like WebSense or McAfee/Secure Computing to keep track of new cloud services being used by employees.¹¹ Establish a regular cadence of analyzing that data and maintaining an ever-growing list of cloud services to evaluate.

Second, identify a core set of services to support.¹² Create an evaluation process to assess the services and its competitors. Be sure to consider the complications of relying on some other company to run your core application. In Ben Hedrington’s words, “Google App Engine is good for Twelpforce because if it goes down for an hour, our business will keep running.” That may be true for Twelpforce, but it’s certainly not true for BestBuy.com. When IT sourcing and vendor management teams assess cloud services, they need to understand the different needs of different classes of HERO projects and business-critical applications.

Third, implement the security and data integration needed. This can be hard, but it’s where your IT enterprise architects, application developers, and infrastructure and operations professionals can help.

Fourth, get the word out to people in the business on the cloud services that you support. Here’s a chance to use that collaboration system to make potential HEROes aware of what services are available and get feedback on how they’re using it.

from corporate to personal

Now you know what IT needs to do to make HEROes successful. It’s a transformation in IT roles, from operating isolated technology systems to supporting ubiquitous business technology—a completely new way of looking at technology in the corporate world.

At this point you may be wondering—what does a company that has done all this look like? How do I know where my company is on this transformative voyage? And what can I, personally, do to advance the ideals of a HERO-powered business in a corporation that hasn’t yet adopted these changes?

We describe all of that in chapter 14, our last word on the subject of living in a HERO-powered business.