Voice of the DBA

Tag: business

  • Acknowledging Success

    Today is the Redgate annual award event, and I’m honored to be hosting again. I’ve been asked a few times, and I used to look forward to the gathering in Cambridge followed by our annual Christmas party. Last year this was virtual, as it is this year, so I’m hosting again from my home office. Not what I had hoped would happen, but I’ll have some fun. Last year I had a number of shirt changes between my parts, and I may do that again.

    I know there are often annual sales awards in many companies, usually with some vacation or prize being given out, but not a lot outside of the sales department. In most of my jobs, we’ve usually had some sort of holiday party, but nothing else for most employees.

    As we approach the end of the year, I wonder if you find your organization doing any sort of recognition for your work this year? Or maybe highlighting those that have gone above and beyond what is expected? At Redgate, we have nominations in various categories. Some are sales-oriented, but we have an open award category as well as an ingeniously simple one. We’ve had people or groups from different parts of the company win that one.

    I think that recognition of effort and work accomplished is important for the morale and motivation of employees. When management recognizes people for their hard work and lets other employees have input into the process, you build a better team of people working together. Even when we aren’t the winners, we can appreciate the effort that others put into improving the organization.

    My view is that few too few in the management of organizations appreciate the value of employees, especially the knowledge workers. Replacing people is hard, and it is expensive. Unmotivated people do less work and do it less well. I hope that more organizations learn this and start to put effort into valuing those that contribute to everyone’s success.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Book Review: Lights Out

    I have always been interested in GE since I was a kid. My best friend in high school had a parent that worked for the company for a bit and liked it. The parent was successful and I had GE on a list of companies I’d like to work for as I went into college. I never followed through, but I’ve been alternately impressed and disappointed in the company for much of my life.

    I picked up Lights Out as a business related book that looks at the history of the company from Jack Welch as CEO to recent times. I had always wondered how would look back at Jack Welch over the years, after looking into the company and seeing how much of their success and profitability came from finance, not products. I knew this book might be slightly skeptical of the GE management philosophy, and I read it with that in mind.

    Early Days

    The book is a bit of a flashback. It starts briefly with the transition of the CEO role to John Flannery. It sets the stage that the company is struggling. From there it goes back to Jack Welch, his growth in the company and then the success through his reign.

    The book notes that a lot of the pressure he put on managers was to meet the external expectations of the public and investors. He expanded the role of GE Capital, their financial arm, using the tripe A rating of the industrial company to loan customers money and help finance purchases. This made GE a de facto bank, in addition to their industrial might, and helped stabilize poor performance in some sectors.

    It also allowed the high profits of banking to grow the company without the regulation and oversight banks have.

    Welch also added lots of companies, growing the breadth of GE’s business. At the same time, they turned out impressive managers who could run their businesses. While I always suspected that this wasn’t all true, this book talks about some of the pressures managers faced, the power of a conglomerate to help them hide some shortcomings from investors, while ensuring the overall success of GE continued. I think if I’d joined the company in 1990, I’ve have been at the tail end of a successful run. I also might have expected that dividend to continue through my career, which would have been a problem.

    Immelt

    Welch’s successor struggled. Not the least of which was after 9/11, but some of the success GE had before that was tempered with more regulation of the company as a pseudo-bank.

    I don’t quite know what to think of the GE of 2001-2017. As they tried to lesson their reliance on finance, grow into software, and continue to prove success to Wall Street. In some sense, I saw this as the slow decline of a company that struggled to reinvent itself and move away from some of the heavy industry and finance that had been it’s success story.

    I also think that the author misses some of the changing nature of the world. GE did learn to build better products that lasted longer. Even with the maintenance contracts, sustaining growth in power plants and jet engines would be hard. Certainly they haven’t been able to dominate in software, and it doesn’t seem that Immelt kept up managerial excellence.

    The book doesn’t quite dive deeply into the GE world, being more of a summary across time of what was published about the company and might be inferred.

    Overall

    I don’t know that I learned a lot about business here, other than what I’ve thought. It’s very messy, there isn’t a magic bullet, and you need a lot of resources to recover from the possible bad decisions and mistakes your management makes.

    GE is a success in some ways, but like one of the reviewer’s comments I read. It’s an American story, getting caught up in finance and money, not the basics of building a great product and selling it.

  • What’s Important to Your Organization

    I’ve had the chance to work in a number of organizations in my career. Every one of these places needed to run a network and software applications to support the business. Most of them also built some a portion of the software they used. No matter how much software they built, but there was always a need to manage a software lifecycle with new applications, patches, and the retirement of systems over time.

    While every organization recognized the value of software, some saw this as an expense, like salaries or buildings. The funds needed were the “cost of doing business.” In these organizations there was always a focus on controlling or reducing costs, doing what needed to be done, and being efficient with how computing was integrated into the business. These organizations seemed to be stodgy and traditional, with management focused more on the analog world than the digital one. Some were quite successful, which I often think is a combination of good management, good staff, and luck.

    These days, I think that view that software is an expense is less and less successful in many organizations. Over time, this will see a deterioration in the success for those businesses. It might be a slow decline over decades, or a more rapid one in a few years. I truly believe in software eating the world, and every company needs to be a technology company. They don’t all need to build software, but they do need to manage it, and more importantly, take advantage of software to better run their businesses.

    We see this in all kinds of industries. Perhaps it’s highly visible in the automotive industry, but in plenty of others, from finance to insurance to retail to manufacturing, the use of software as a strategic asset improves the competitiveness of business. Even in government, organizations are finding that making better use of software allows them to offer more services at a lower cost.

    I wonder how many of you see your employers treating software as a strategic part of their business model. Do they aim to increase profits or become more efficient or even innovate in their industry with the power of modern computing? Or is it just a tool that they depend on, and consider the cost of doing business? If your group isn’t seen as strategic, likely they don’t value your work as highly, don’t provide training, and don’t create opportunity or innovation that ensures your work is interesting. If those are things that matter to you, perhaps it is time to look around for other employment.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • What’s Important to Your Organization

    I’ve had the chance to work in a number of organizations in my career. Every one of these places needed to run a network and software applications to support the business. Most of them also built a portion of the software they used, with some applications being purchased. No matter how much software they built, whether it was a lot or a little, there was always a need to manage a software lifecycle. Whether you build or buy software, you will have new applications, patches for existing systems, and the retirement of others over time.

    While every organization recognized the value of software, some saw this as an expense, like salaries or buildings. The funds needed for computing the “cost of doing business.” In organizations that felt this way, there was always a focus on controlling or reducing costs, doing just what needed to be done, and being efficient with how computing was used. These organizations seemed to be stodgy and traditional, with management focused more on the analog world than the digital one. Some were quite successful, which I often think is a combination of good management, good staff, and luck.

    These days, I think that view the software is an expense is less and less successful in many industries. Over time, this view will see a deterioration in the success of those businesses compare to competitors that treat software differently. It might be a slow decline over decades or a more rapid one in a few years. I truly believe in software eating the world, and every company needs to be a technology company. They don’t all need to build software, but they do need to manage it, and more importantly, take advantage of software to better run their businesses.

    We see this in all kinds of industries. Perhaps it’s highly visible in the automotive industry these days, but in plenty of others, from finance to insurance to retail to manufacturing, the use of software as a strategic asset improves the competitiveness of business. Even in government, organizations are finding that making better use of software allows them to offer more services at a lower cost.

    I wonder how many of you see your employers treating software as a strategic part of their business model. Do they aim to increase profits or become more efficient or even innovate in their industry with the power of modern computing? Or is it just a tool that they depend on, and consider the cost of doing business? If your group isn’t seen as strategic, likely they don’t value your work as highly, don’t provide training, and don’t create opportunity or innovation that ensures your work is interesting. If those are things that matter to you, perhaps it is time to look around for other employment.

    Steve Jones