Ola Sundvall

Blog

  • Web3 and all of my questions, #3

    Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

    There is obviously a dividing line between integrity and authenticity when we talk about creating value based on Web3 technology. I’ll see if I wind up my own tail in trying to elaborate on this (for me) quite unclear topic.

    Cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers, DApps etc. built on a blockchain has this quite odd property – they leave the users information wide open for all who look into the database of the blockchain. This is by design and quite inevitable as I have understood it, and it was revealed for quite some years ago as a part of research written about in Wired (it’s a really well-written long read, highly recommended for those looking for an introduction to the crypto world).

    This reveals a conflict between wanting to claim authenticity and wanting to have integrity. I visited a webinar a couple weeks ago where a Swedish web3 community had invited to a session around web3 application for corporates. I realized there and then that one of the first questions a buyer representative on an enterprise is going to ask is “how does your product/technology comply with GDPR*?” And I also realized that if you don’t have a clear answer to give instantly on that question, the buyer’s not gonna buy (or even consider to further think about it. Said and done, I thought I should be the smart one in the virtual room and ask about the lecturer’s view on this. And yes, it became clear for me that this isn’t an obvious thing to solve. You can of course build protection mechanisms in your overarching logic, but it isn’t necessarily an easy task, since this mechanism need to follow your info through the blockchains journey through the nodes.

    Another question to think about in this context is then – is it even desirable? Do we really want to hide our personal data that we have uploaded in the blockchain? Isn’t this one of the purposes with the cryptographic technology – to prove that we really are the one we claim to be? And could it even be that we need to redefine what personal data is, when web3 use gain a wider traction, or is it even like personal data is personal data covered by GDPR* in one application and not in another? Is maybe GDPR* not be applicable in certain future use case scenarios? In some use cases it might be more important for me to prove my authenticity than having my integrity secured, or?

    This leads me to an analogy regarding surveillance and me being the one saying “I don’t care ‘cuz I have nothing to hide”. Could it be really, really bad in a long term to claim authenticity through blockchain-ish footprint from a surveillance perspective, if the surveillance structures start to use my wide-spread, wide-open authenticity information against me?

    A possible branch on this topic is to analyze fraudster scenarios and how to block them, a topic possibly being another factor the buyer of web3 development will ask questions around. Having preparations for this in a product development startup quickly becomes a hygiene factor in order to build trust towards the corporate user.

    *)GDPR here taken as an example of an extensive and very adopted regulatory framework, with the awareness of many other frameworks existing globally.

  • If I told you that your documentation sucks, would you agree?

    Photo by Nathália Rosa on Unsplash

    The real challenge when discussing documentation quality is that it is a topic with so many layers, bottom and dimensions. But I can tell you the following: maintaining documentation is almost an impossible task, when talking about quality and conformity, if you don’t do it right.

    It’s also hard to sort out what one actually mean when talking about documentation. In my world, the most obvious type of documentation and actually where I should start a “sifting project” if I got the assignment to do it, is in what many often, quite nonchalantly calls the “operations management system” or maybe “business management system”.

    This is most commonly residing in a folder structure on an internal server and consists of a more or less large chunk of word and excel files. Some organizations are that bold so they actually buy a system or a service to use for this, but many, if not to say most, organizations rely heavily on an implementation of Sharepoint that someone purchased years ago, maybe a bit clueless about what to use it for.

    The really minor version of the business management system is the word file in the small company that the employees in an ideal world receives printed in their hand at their first day at work. In Sweden often called “företagshandbok” or “business handbook”. Here one should be able to take part of decisions made by the firm’s boss(es), that are general and not subject for change that often.

    But what happens when new or changed conditions arise, and new decisions are made that might make the printed statements obsolete and possibly even contradictory to what earlier has been communicated? This is a phenomenon valid for all and everybody, regardless of size of the organization or pace in information changes. I should say that in the very same moment that a new decision Is made, or a circumstance popped up making writings inaccurate, the risk for trust within the organization start to erode. It might not be a big issue at first, but if the maintainer och the information don’t swiftly inform everybody affected by the change that new information is available, the risk is that someone find out and take advantage of it. Within a shorter period of time one realize at first, the respect for what has been decided lessens, and so does the attitude towards personal responsibility and engagement as well. This will do daily management more cumbersome to perform and time for information maintenance will be taken for handling errors and corrective measures.

    “But this is obvious!” say the initiated reader – “why even bother take time to write about such things that are always ongoing??”
    Well, maybe just because this is always ongoing, in far too many places. This also hampers the communication efforts and erodes the value of communication not seldom critical for the business in question. In a little bit longer turn it affects the profitability (or in a public service, level of value creation and effective use of taxpayers money.

    So, how should one do to get around this problem? I’m convinced that managers on all levels need to be continuously fostered in how to communicate. Because the communication culture is so firmly connected to the accuracy of what is communicated. I dare to say that if you manage to make everybody aware of the natural law of information, stating that:

    If one don’t have information, it is not possible to take responsibility,
    but if one have information, it is not possible to not take responsibility.

    Add to this that the information must be accurate, and you have a solid starting point for your work with communication planning.

    An additional bonus to this is that if you nurture a communication and information aware culture, overbody involved will be interested in and prone to put requirements on correct information to be correctly communicated.

    And this, is one of the most overlooked things in organizations. Now and everywhere.

    Technical documentation, often managed within some sort of Configuration Management Process, is partly a bit different though related. I will come back on that one in a future post. As well as the hurdles with how to actually get the organization informed for real. And that’s even one more future post.

  • The ‘start from a blank paper’ curse

    It aint what you might believe at first – a super-trendy writing about how to start blogging. It’s far more boring than that. This piece could also be headlined with something like “How to overcome the lingual glitch between IT and the rest” (though I realize I don’t have any clear answers, after reviewing this mess).

    This reasoning might seem a bit over-due, old school or even obsolete in the era of furious Product-Management-with-an-agile-foundation, but it will never stop being relevant. Why? Because old truths are boring but often more persistent than we actually want them to be.

    I will elaborate on one of the most overlooked phenomena that has existed even since human started to build things that in some way does human work for her – namely managing of requirements. I find it kinda strange that this discipline so often is regarded as a certain discipline, hosted outside a production workflow och outside a development project and populated by specialists that is regarded as a really special sort of nerds. The competence field QA is also often perceived as a bit self-generating and my experience is that it often is slipping around above or around the project or maintenance teams it is supposed to be integrated in*, similar to “the process team” that makes process management a work on its own merits, often regarded as self-generating as well.

    From time to time I have been involved in discussions with business representants and in the context of trying to understands the needs and what problem they want IT to solve. Many times we have been sitting with an existing solution that fits the needs ok but not fully, and trying to improve functionality already decided and designed by a third part, the vendor of a system, may it be a cots, may it be quite a specialized product (in earlier days often named service, but product is a more popular term nowadays, yet another thing to explore in a future post…).

    A repeating thing that has showed in these contexts is that the business side often have difficulties in formulating requirements so they are easy to digest for the IT people trying to technically solve the issues. Once we took it so far that we arranged educations for the business stakeholders, eg. mostly process leaders (might today be replaced by Product Owners), where we let our very dedicated and skilled requirements analyst teach requirements management to the participants. This turned out quite well for some time (not that long that we’d wished though), and lead to a little bit deeper understanding on the business side for the need of a common language when having the specifying dialogues.

    BUT – the error I think we made then was to assume the starting point too late than what we should have** – because we didn’t explore the need for the requirement to occur in the first place. Business needs is the focal point one should start looking into instead of starting a change or request journey with trying to state a requirement that might be quite intangible if the needs aren’t clarified. I have seen agile profiles in different feeds emphasizing the need discussion, but I have never seen it being more than a fragment in the never ending flood of talk-about-how-to-work platitudes. This should be a success factor in both easing the need for translation but also a possible lever for the business side to actually take more active part in the early phase of a change tickets journey in the code-crunching machinery. It has also the potential of easing the often (always) cumbersome with prioritizing a backlog, since it should be much more obvious how needs are weighed towards each other than bad formulated user stories or features with unclear business value. It also has the potential to give a clearer definition of done, if you originate from the need instead of a lingo-feature description.

    BUT – isn’t this already what all agile how to’s and agile descriptions always have told us in DoD and DoR’s explanations??

    OF COURSE – I’m not trying to come up with some new fresh ideas here, I’m just (as always) trying to point out what already exists.

    BUT – try, just try to give a business representative the explanation of DoD found here of even DoR found here, and you will get this “do I dare to question this mumbo-jumbo without being classified as an idiot” face in return. We really do need to be able to talk about needs (and in second-hand requirements) with the business side with being so centric about the IT-side lingo which is held so dearly by too many.

    Tying the ropes:
    Regarding the headline of this post: I somehow feel that I need to get back to this in order to tie this story together. One of the most common and I guess classic mistakes organizations do when it comes to management of requirements is the silly “You just can start from a blank paper” prompt, given by IT to business. It is often ditched quite quickly, since everybody knows that they need some kind of facilitation or guiding, because the present state is needed as input value, as well as different conditions and constraints that limits what actually is possible to describe if the user story is supposed to be meaningful and valuable.

    For reference:
    The explanation of what a user story is supposed to be is actually more or less good, but often overlooked and not fully embraced (or understood, or correct interpreted) by all in the processes, making it necessary to reflect over when uncertainties are spotted.

    To be continued:
    *) The QA experts should have more of a more tangible, facilitating role in the organizations they serve than they have, since their traces most often is a trove of hard-to-answer questions in the WoW-section of the endless Confluence library – for every team to invent and solve independently.

    **) This urges me to write about the real life cycle of a change or new-feature ticket in a teams workflow. Will do this as soon as possible.

  • Web3 and all of my questions, #2

    Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

    So I challenged myself to understand web3 a bit more in depth, described in the former post. I also felt a need to ponder a bit around the financial and/or business model parts. Please enjoy.

    Money or currency, in the meaning of being a representative for a certain value, is based on trust. If not trust for the actual currency can be reached, the value [of the currency] can’t be persistent. There is a reason that currency in the form we know and have defined it, is centralistic by nature since it is mostly structures in the form of regimes (nation states and central administrations) that has been (able to) guaranteeing the currency’s value by promising law and order, personal security and much more.

    We do have plenty of reasons to dive into history to see if there are traces of not centrally guaranteed currencies and to see what has been their trust attributes. Maybe I put this up on my todo list, but it feel like research best made by somebody with better knowledge in this

    What you need to manage in order to get DAO/Dapp adaption to broaden, stay and become a new norm
    Our current economic paradigm that is driving towards eternal growth, has also paved the way for centralistic and linear value creation for a very long time. The model of legal entities with limited liability as ownership model has the centralistic approach as a foundation: a possibly scattered association of owners put the entire responsibility for growth (=success) on one single role: the CEO, or Chief Executive Officer, if everything is done correctly according to the model. The owners are only to put requirements on return of the investment made.

    The limitation of liability in turn has its own limitations: the requirements are unavoidably to be formulated by the board, which is populated by the owners of the biggest shares of the company. This makes the owning more of a passive expectation (and belief or hope) on returns for the owners of small shares = less attractive from an impact possibility perspective. With all trust for success put on one role – the CEO – the risk for failure is bigger. On the other hand, with the right CEO in charge, the capability to achieve success increases largely.

    The conclusion is obvious: the centralistic nature och the Ltd company is unbalanced, which is its biggest strength as well as its weakness since the economic paradigm we have made the norm for centuries is based on growth of invested capital being the only thing that matters in the end.

    This is as I see it the biggest challenge for a DAO, at least as long as the DAO need to exist and justify its existence in a paradigm based on returns of investments.
    A fully decentralized DAO is also risking to be slowed down by the need for consensus, especially if the decisions to be made that are put in the ledger are on a very detailed and operative level. Here it is super important to find a decent balance between deciding and doing, so that momentum always is assured.

    Ways to keep DAO’s secured from intervention from big web2 enterprises is another area to explore since the web2 traditional entities have no interest in DAO’s if they don’t add on to capitalization of the web2 company in question. Ways to prevent web2 companies hijacking of DAO’s and Dapp’s and other web3 artefacts are essential as this is already ongoing.
    Reaching a critical mass of real web3 adoption in the real world is the only way to get things to happen and the ultimate questions to ask are:

    1. How should the incentives look like in order to get people to invest in web3 so that perseverance is reached as well as real competition to the traditional growth modell?
    2. How should web3 applications survive on their own means as long as the traditional growth model is the norm?
    3. How should an alternative economic model look like that can act as an alternative so attractive, that it in long term outperforms the traditional growth model, so the traditional growth model becomes obsolete? I have seen numbers around 70 years for a new economic model to replace an existent.

    There is an obvious risk that web3 becomes a vision entrapped in the large-scale enterprises of tech companies that harbor blockchain architecture in their cloud service infrastructure – would this then become a “real” decentralized architecture, or is it just web3 running on web2, and is this even a problem? I would say it can be.

    Maybe an alternative, decentralized-native infrastructure is the future. (One of) the big question(s) is how this will be payed for, and who would take the challenge, and risk, to invest in it?

  • Web3 and all of my questions

    Photo by GuerrillaBuzz on Unsplash

    I tried to dive in to the web3 universe, as I for quite a long time have heard that web3 is the future, that it can change how we live and work and that it is important for everyone to learn more about this. Until now I have bought this wholeheartedly, but also been wondering a bit why this doesn’t seem to lift off. Here in this first pondering I try to sort a bunch of reflections and questions from the more technical point of view.

    I can’t refrain from comparing the web3 ideas with a concept that maybe became more rebellious than it deserved – but it was founded on an idea of true decentralization – namely the BitTorrent protocol. Some of you might think that I’m totally out in the wild, but I’m fully aware of that BitTorrent is a file transfer protocol, and that web3 is more of a way to verify transactions that represent different purposes and has the potential to serve an infinite number of applications, it’s only the imagination that sets limits for what you actually can use web3 for. My comparison is around the decentralization idea and the absence of a centralized ownership and with that the following of one-sided determination of terms (the one who takes the (financial) risks is also the one who owns the terms).

    When individuals started to share big files with the BitTorrent protocol, nodes were growing like fungi out of the internet soil – it grew rapidly to a pirate-ish life style where the most credited were the one who hoarded hard disks and seeded like crazy, and the famous site Pirate Bay acted like a hub for a big part of this traffic – though there were a lot of sites doing the same, some with more specialized themes regarding content. I’m targeting the nodes in this comparison, since they were truly decentralized and also anonymous, since it was the indexing site, acting as a central hub and search spot collecting torrent files and in this architecture being the lever for increased and continued sharing. Nowadays torrent sharing is still active, but maybe more in the open source community where operating systems and large program files can be distributed in a way that optimizes net load and utilization.

    A weakness in this model was that not so popular files could take ages to download due to too few seeders, maybe also with too poor upload speeds. This revealed a lack of robustness – what happens when too many nodes shut down for whatever reasons and the seeders numbers decline? The availability of the asset is suddenly jeopardized, and there is no one who grants availability – what to do then? In the pirating context it was law enforcers that chased down the model to decline in parallell with the development of streaming services, making the decentralized model more centralized and more web2-ish, but the reasoning about robustness could and should be applied on the web3 idea as well in order to reflect over success factor that need to be in place somehow.

    Decentralized infrastructure – how to reach a sufficient level of perseverance, so a sufficient level of trust can be reached? What criteria do a currency need to fulfill in order to be regarded as perseverant and trustworthy?
    Which fundamental criteria is possible to set aside if one tries to imagine an existence beyond our present economic model* that postulates eternal growth, with return on investment as norm for success?

    Blockchain technology on a node published on the internet isn’t as easy to set up for a private person as a BitTorrent seed, It requires a database and some code that can do the work blockchain nodes do (where verifying transaction data is core business). Therefore we shouldn’t expect everyone who has a computer on an internet connection to be an enthusiast in hosting Blockchain nodes. This instead leads to an emergence of startups, offering robust and reliable blockchain support as a service. And this in turn, leads me to turn the page to the next post, pondering on the economical and business model aspects of web3.

    *) I imagine our present economic model as having two pillars, where one is exchanging time and effort with currencies or money, the other is investing in ideas in order to make the value of the investment grow. More about this in a coming post

  • I posted on Apples user forum for the first time – and got refused

    Photo by Kamil S on Unsplash

    Now this is a cry baby post – this is the feedback and my post text down below. I don’t think it was that bad

    Hi MrArne, 

    Thanks for participating in the Apple Support Community.

    We’ve removed your post How I solved MacOS Sonoma and the photos library sync dilemma because it contained either feedback or a feature request that was not constructive.

    To read our terms and conditions for using the Community site, see this page:  Apple Support Community  – Terms of Use

    We hope you’ll keep using our Support Community. You can find more information about participating here:  Apple Support Community – How To Articles

    If you have comments about any of our products, we welcome your feedback:  Apple – Feedback

    We’ve included a copy of your original post below.

    Thanks,

    Apple Support Community Staff

    My post text start here:

    N.B – this is not a question, it’s a proposition – not likable by all, but who am I to judge?

    To begin with – this should actually been written down here already, but my search attempts don’t find anything similar.

    I’m on a MBP M1 Max from mid -21.

    I started this computer fresh, no TM backup installed, since I endured the Catalina Hell on my old intel machine and solved these problems in the same way as now, with full success – like now.

    To clarify my prerequisites: I’m nowadays a blind optimist, relying on cloud storage instead of local storage and Time Machine backups, so I store all my files in a somewhat ordered (?) manner on iCloud (with a grotesquely big iCloud photo Library), OneDrive and Google workspace (paid version). Oops, forgot a small portion of Box.com and some residuals on Dropbox…

    So – the only thing to actually backup is the system. I have always been a proponent of backups, but I also realize that this is so much more complicated in order to really achieve a high and reliable quality level. Those of you who think I’m a moron may do so, I simply don’t care (until I need to realize that you were right anyway, by some obvious reason you are pointing out…).

    So, to the point:

    I copied all files I found too valuable and that was stored locally manually on an external disk. I then read in Apples support pages about how to perform a fresh (re-)install of Sonoma, which is much more easy now that it was before – nowadays a little more iOS-like 😬 – you reach it from the settings menu

    After the fresh install I logged in on the computer, with my iCloud-account and all the iCloud-stuff was slowly synced to the computer. Now I have a fully functioning Photo Library – and I need to repeat these steps on my wife’s MBA M1…

    I know that this is quite crappy by Apple from a quality perspective, but it is what it is… at least there is a solution on this very annoying problem, and as so many times before I guess it’s all about file access issues, but who knows where?

    This is a send-only account. Replies received at this address are automatically deleted.

    Of course, I had some badly hidden critique against the quality of the software, but was it so bad? I will never waste my time on posting my findings there, and at least that is somewhat benficial experience.

    It is also interesting because for me it is a sign of the functional dumbness that most enterprises get more or less trapped in.

  • Everything is production, really

    Photo by Arseny Togulev on Unsplash

    If I should summarize my work life so far, the common denominator for everything I have been in, made, or contributed to is

    Production

    How can that be?

    It might sound far fetched, but I can (actually) argue for this. If we look at value creation which could be another term to compete with production, I see that the process (or processes) that we draw to describe flow of value are similar – so similar so it’s more of a matter of self-identification that make you feel what sort of work you do – though I would say that you produce something in any case, because production without creation of value is non-existent (though some organizations surely do it, unfortunately).

    I will put up some theses to prove my point:

    1. Input and output (or outcome if you prefer to look at the bigger picture simultaneously)

    When we produce stuff, for instance in different industries, we need to put in raw material, instructions for how to treat these, and specifications for how we want the end result to look like.

    Value creation is more geared towards input of for instance customer needs, which isn’t necessarily tangible as some sort of hardware items – it could be totally immaterial. But there is an uncountable amount of needs through history that is fulfilled with some sort of tangible item.

    2. Resource assessment

    Both value creation and “pure production” can’t be performed without resources. The resources can be human’s time and skills, an AI prompt, machines and tools along a production line, software tools and platforms, code languages and so forth.
    Regardless of what you are about to accomplish, you need to assess what resources you need, how many you need (if the resource type is limited in it’s output per resource) and what pace you can expect from the setup you are planning.

    The exact same type of preparation is fundamental for creating value (though you rather shy for these dry and boring realities in the value creation context because value creation is something totally different and much more coomplicateed…)

    3. Manage and control (or orchestration and follow-up if you prefer)

    For production in the industry there is a lot of different and established, often branch-specific frameworks that is implemented quite well and also well taken care of, since product certifications, branch standards, CE markings and regulations require this.

    In the value creation realm things can be much less specified, depending on what type of business you’re in. It can of course be weighed down by really tough regulations and branch-specific requirements, whereas the value creation becomes constrained due to the circumstances and hopefully evaluated with that in mind.

    Finally

    To conclude this we can quite clearly see that value creation and production is just about same thing, different name.

    BUT – the value creation as a term always contains production, since folks working with production too often just see their own discipline as the almighty thing to do, where the need for customer focus, understanding and orientation etc, is overlooked.
    In these cases, there are a number of process owners and managers and so forth who constantly run around the production team and maintain customer focus for the ones refusing to adapt customer focus themselves. To defend the staff, many hardware work steps can be quite abstract to directly connect to a customer value, though they are unavoidably interconnected with an end result, which also is – an outcome.

    In for instance software businesses or IT-organizations on the other hand, we tend to push customer awareness and the need for creating customer values, not only outputs, onto the teams and resources directly. This is of course necessary and in fact fundamental in times of fierce competition and ever-evolving rapid development.
    The problem is that there are so many tasks necessary to perform, which are more of output nature and doesn’t fit in the outcome bubble since they are just secondary and more of enabling characteristics than direct wo-ho effects for the end user.
    Yet a lot, if not the most, in the immaterial producing business is about the same repetitive tasks that need to be performed, over and over again, without deviations – just like in any sort of industry… at least when we are looking at operations, which most often is overlooked since development is so much more fun to discuss.

    Meta-reflections:

    If we regard production as a subordinated process residing within a value creation – value, framework, wrapping, don’t really know what to call this entity – then marketing and sales also are subordinated processes residing alongside the production process. These are kind of production processes as well, where marketing’s output should be an irresistible urge to buy, and sales refines interested, so called prospects or leads, into buying customers.

    And existing or won customers are in turn refined to come into retention state – room for another production process… is this maybe called CRM…?

  • If this is my major differentiator, I’m getting depressed…

    As years goes by you recognise different patterns in your life, given that you take your time and/or have the ability to reflect over which impact your behaviour have on the surroundings, and what this give you in some form of a “brand” or which expectations people might have on you.

    Your impact on others is usually composed by a number of subtle and more or less small elements that might be hard to wash out or even recognise in the daily clutter and distraction-filled existence called life – or maybe the part limited to living, weekday, whatever. Some people also define parts of these patterns as reputation, as for example Per Frykman in his unremitting propagation for the importance of your professional reputation, which I support wholeheartedly.

    A couple of years ago I actually ordered an analysis of my Professional Rep by this guy, and it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done in my life. This scariness told me quite a lot about my self confidence. I was quite affected by the feedback people gave. My fears when starting the survey was pendulating somewhere between getting really bad reviews and a compact silence in return, but I got an overwhelmingly positive picture of my reputation as a professional peer and have since then had that message in my tag line everywhere that i can possibly imagine.

    Now is a time when I really find it necessary to take command over my business and really try to deal with my own value proposition and this isn’t so easy as one can believe, but it sure is a healthy clarifying process to go through.

    And when I grind this in my mind, I find one of the possibly not-so-wished elements that makes me ME… people often ask me for advice about this and that (I know I SHOULD bill more for this, but…) and I often find myself passing their wonderings on to the information Behemoth Of All Time – I Google. And I mean Google as a verb you know, not the sub-company of Alphabet.

    Almost as often as I Google on behalf of others I wonder why people isn’t capable of googling themselves? I’m thinking about adding a title to my list of skills – “professional Googler”. It has been like this for many years and I consider myself quite nerdy when coming to digital adoption and this whole pack of modern attributes. The somewhat strange thing is that I’m totally illiterate when it comes to for instance asking SQL-questions into a database, though I have somewhat figured out how to suck out information of systems when real need has arisen and no one has been nearby to ask for support.

    One of the things I don’t understand about this is why people never learn how to get real benefit from their gadgets. Everyone of us can go bananas over some more or less stupid writings on the internet, but to actually fact-check (or find a tutorial of some sort, or to, digitally supported, solve their own daily issues) seem to be totally out of reach for many. How can that be?

    Meanwhile I sit here and wonder if my key differentiator is that I’m a really skilled googler – therefore considered a nice, wise guy that people go to with their questions… is my true title maybe “Google broker” then? Or should I call myself “Search Engine(er)”…? Or maybe I should study to become a priest?

    How du you differentiate yourself in order to succeed in business?

  • En vanlig morgon i tjänstesamhället

    Tisdag morgon, på väg till bussen. Kommer på att jag glömde köpa månadskort igår kväll, på sista dagen för det gamla färdbeviset – slarver.

    Jaja, kanske tobaksaffären (eller kallas en sån Spel & Godis nuförtiden?) är öppen, annars får man satsa en slant på en SMS-biljett. Affären-som-tillhandahåller-färdbevis är naturligtvis stängd, mot busshållplatsen. Jag köper min biljett i god tid så jag slipper stå med skammens rodnad och fippla under bussfärden. Får ett SMS i retur – hmm:

    “Köpet misslyckades. Kontrollera dina kortuppgifter på ditt sms-konto på https://sl.klarna.se, byt till faktura eller registrera ett annat kort. Vänliga hälsningar, Klarna.”

    Visst faen, jag har ju bytt ut kortet som är kopplat till mitt SL-konto. Klickar på länken i SMS-et, går in på kontot, följer instruktionerna. Går ej att radera kortet i och med att valet “fakturabetalning” som man måste falla tillbaka på, “inte är tillgängligt för närvarande”.

    Vad gör jag nu? Kallt om fingrarna, måste fly in i värmen, ringer SL Center. Inser plötsligt vad det är som genererar hatet i samhället – det måste vara alla käcka autosvar som man får i örat och robotar som man ska prata med för att beskriva sin fråga, samt förvarningen om att jag kan komma att bli uppringd av deras automatiska kundundersökning…

    Mitt ärende ligger utanför SL’s kompetens- och ansvarsområde, så jag blir vidarekopplad till Klarnas Servicedesk, ånyo med tillhörande käcka bonding-fraser från roboten. Här sitter en mer tekniskt bevandrad handläggare som faktiskt verkar ha behörigheter att göra något. Under den relativt långa tid som åtgärden tar bekantar jag mig med appen jag inte velat använda – SL’s egen app för biljettköp m.m. Här ser jag att det finns en inbyggd logik för kortbyte – men varför har jag inte börjat använda den appen…?? Jag vågar inte göra något då Klarna är och rotar i back end bland mina parametrar.

    SÅ PLÖTSLIGT – är det någon som hojtar till: “Nu har jag tagit bort ditt kort, det händer direkt, nu kan lägga in ett nytt”. Tack för det, samtalet avslutas. Noterar i kontoinställningarna att mitt telefonnummer tagits bort från SL-kontot, inte kortnumret. Knappar in mitt nummer och se där, kort- och telefonnummer är fortfarande sammankopplat.

    Jag går då in i SL-appen, tar bort mitt gamla kort och lägger in det nya. Köper biljett i SL-appen, åker till stan, cirka 25 min senare än planerat.

    Var kan man dra för lärdomar av detta? Jo, till exempel att

    • många till synes triviala tjänster i vissa ögonblick är väldigt viktiga för att tillvaron ska fungera.
    • t.o.m. en sån som jag, som alltid förespråkar tillämpning av ny teknik och gärna testar allt som går att testa gällande nya tjänster, har fixa idéer om att hänga kvar vid det gamla.

    Min slutsats är klar: om det kommer ett nytt sätt att göra något på, PROVA. Den nya designen är faktiskt avsedd att underlätta mer än den gamla! Håll inte fast vid det gamla bara för att du inte vill prova nytt. GLÖM INTE BORT DET NU!

  • Vad menar vi med digital transformation och vem angår det?

    Eller – Digitalisering för nybörjare

    Härom dagen flimrade det förbi ett informationsfragment om digital transformation (igen) som jag inte kunde låta bli att glutta lite närmare på (igen). Det var en delning av en promotion för Internetdagarna.se, där Telias VD förklarade vad begreppet står för. Jag kan absolut instämma i det hon säger, men det finns en hel del mer i det här som rätt många tenderar att missa. Det här kan bero på att det jag vill uppmärksamma inte är så glamoröst och lättsmält, det reser en mångfald av ytterligare frågor och kan ofta lämna den det drabbar ensam med sina funderingar och utan underlag för väl avvägda beslut. Vidare tycker jag ofta att den här typen av budskap ofta drabbas av att korten blandas ihop i det man vill förmedla. Men vem är jag att påstå det och vad är det egentligen jag menar?

    Jo så här då:
    Telia pratar å ena sidan om sin förändringsresa i en strävan att skapa en mer kundorienterad organisation, här boostad med införandet av begreppet “kundbesatthet”… (Jag blir lite illa till mods av tanken på att ha en leverantör som är besatt av mig som kund måste jag säga. Det räcker gott om de är tydliga, transparenta och motsvarar, eller ännu bättre överträffar mina förväntningar. Jag vill faktiskt bara ha tjänster som passar mina behov, är tillgängliga och prisvärda.) För att komma dit behöver de genomföra ett förändringsarbete, gott så, inte helt ovanligt i stora och mogna organisationer. Vidare pratas det om ett nytt sätt att tänka när det gäller att driva sin affär och möta sina kunder. Jag hoppas de prototypar flitigt och omarbetar det som inte fungerar, ety Telia torde fortfarande ha en hel hög med gamla kunder som bara vill kunna ringa 90 200 och få svar på sina frågor – för så har en ju alltid gjort, eller hur? Sen ordas det en del om att de ändrat sitt förhållningssätt till sociala medier. Det är ju faktiskt helt nödvändigt idag och där kan jag nog tycka att de lyckats ganska väl även om inledningen var trevande och snubblande för ett par år sedan.

    Till sist nämner Telia sitt sannolikt smärtsamma och omfattande arbete med att stöpa om kundtjänstarbetet parallellt med systembyten, både för kunder och internt stöd.

    Sammanfattningsvis är det intressant att se hur en betydande aktör på den digitala tjänstearenan ser på arbetet med digital transformation – alla delar omfattas och hela organisationen berörs, ingen nämnd och ingen glömd. Men är det så för alla?

    Jag dristar mig till att påstå att arbete med förbättring av kundorientering inte nödvändigtvis är en del av digitalt transformationsarbete, det borde vara ett obligatoriskt grundelement i att leda verksamhet som ska leverera värde till sina ägare. Att jobba med sitt tjänsteutbud för att skapa nya värden för nya och befintliga kunder kan innefattas av digital transformation – men det måste inte alltid gälla. Att exempelvis bygga hus och meka cyklar är fortfarande något som har betydande analogt inslag, däremot kan hur vi kommunicerar vår förmåga att göra det och hur vi når våra kunder (även kallat marknadsföring resp. hantering av försäljningskanaler) understödjas och förstärkas med digitala stödtjänster, liksom naturligtvis automatisering av genomförandet.

    Vad jag vill komma till är att för dig som ansvarar för att leverera mervärde till ägare gäller samma sak som alltid har gällt och alltid kommer att gälla, d.v.s. att noga tänka igenom varför en förändring är nödvändig och vem som tjänar på förändringen som planeras. Det är sällan man löser en vikande efterfrågan eller en utebliven tillväxt om man inte jobbar med själva värdeerbjudandet och förändrar eller vidareutvecklar det i första hand. Att ständigt bedöma affärsmodellens relevans borde alltid vara nr 1 för alla. Digitalisering utan tydlig vinsthemtagning ska helt enkelt inte beslutas, oavsett om det handlar om automatisering av egna arbetsflöden eller nya sätt att driva sin affär på, eller att skapa helt nya affärer.

    Däremot skulle fler kunna tänka i banor av att “göra helt annorlunda” för att skapa nya möjligheter för värdeskapande. Det har fortfarande inte nödvändigtvis alltid med digitalisering att göra, men den är en allt viktigare möjliggörare för värdeskapande som tidigare inte ens funnits.

    Exemplet Telia ovan är en leverantör som verkar på en marknad i extremt snabb utveckling. Många andra gör det också, men långt ifrån alla. Hos “alla de andra” finns det minst lika mycket stora och spännande utmaningar när det gäller innovation, digitalisering och förändring. Men de kan vara svårare att identifiera i det brus som råder, och lätta att förväxla med “gammaldags” lednings- och förbättringsarbete.