Over the past four years, Spider Strategies has been involved in some major collaborative performance management efforts. Our first effort was simply to provide the ability to convert a database on a public server into some kind of text files and then pass those text files through a filter so that they could cause the public database to be merged with a database on a classified server in such a way that all the public changes were replicated on the classified server. If you think, for a minute, about solving the problem of converting a large database deletion into a text file that would replicate that deletion on the classified side, you start to see the problem. Now, think for a minute about having thousands of daily changes taking place simultaneously on both sides of the filter. Do you see a problem coming? So did we. But solving that problem was what founded Spider Strategies.

The next problem was performance assessment auditing. There are situations where one implementation team cannot be replaced by another until the replacing team meets certain standards that are documented by metric analysis. One of those situations involved over 600 organization units and over 45,000 data points. Imagine trying to open a webmail client with 600 folders and 45,000 emails embedded in those folders. You know, from past experience, that your browser would not open. Spider solved that problem, too.

Today, we are involved with providing a collaborative platform for allowing multiple users organized into teams, departments or any kind of organization unit to keep their meetings online, to track their Action Plans and personal actions online as well as uploading and tracking edits to their performance documents. You might think that the workload has finally reached the point where we need to split off “modules” of this functionality and implement some kind of offline communication. It hasn’t.

Spider planned for where we are today. Today, Spider Strategies offers a scalable web solution that allows organizations to link, align and collaborate in ways that no one imagined just a few years ago. Right now we are looking at putting in place a central server that can connect thousands of organizations for the purpose of mandatory reporting to one of the cabinet agencies. It will allow security, cross functional communication and metric analysis from anywhere in the world.

A performance management web application is just a toy if it isn’t scalable.

There was an interesting article in the March 12, 2007 issue of Time magazine, The Oracle of Organization. It was interesting because it hits directly on an approach to “performance management” that isn’t often acknowledged or addressed in the methodologies that most performance management software packages are designed to address. It talks about the main task of each individuals daily corporate existence: Getting Things Done. In fact that is the title of the articles subject, David Allen’s, book “Getting Things Done”.

I liked the article because it ties into why Spider is in the business that we are in. On our website, it says “Spider Strategies is a software company” and “Everyone needs to know exactly how they’re performing and what areas need immediate attention. Spider Strategies is the first software company to address all of these needs with an easy to use, web-based software product.” I like the way that sounds, but it doesn’t really say why we are in a business to provide an “easy to use, web-based software product”. The reason is so that people can Get Things Done!

The vast majority of “performance management” software programs in the 90s and early 21st Century also came with daunting training programs. It wasn’t unusual for training to be 40% of the implementation costs of such programs. Worse yet, it wasn’t unusual for companies to spend more time figuring out WHAT they were trying to improve, than getting any improvement done.

We set out to write software that required minimal training because it worked like a) everyone’s browser and b) used the mouse like everyone’s desktop software. Our first attempt, a product called “Scoreboard”, was good but users had to learn not to use the browser back button and, like virtually all static html products, the right click button didn’t work. In other words, we were close but no golden ring.

Our latest product, The Corporate Management Suite, a direct upgrade from Scoreboard, nails the basic goal. The back button and other browser buttons work AND menus are accessed by right click just like desktop software. But does it help “Get Things Done”?

Ultimately, that question is going to be answered by our user community but the feedback has been good. The software doesn’t require the use of “scorecards” if all you need is a simple way for groups and teams to “make decisions about what needs to get done, and then fashion a plan for doing it”. On the other hand, the software does allow you to link to metrics that can be used to determine if you had an impact with what you got done.

The article also says “More than 60 software tools have been built specifically to supplement Allen’s system.” That is not a good thing. Just look at the number of software tools that have been built specifically for implementing “The Balanced Scorecard”. We also believe that when software is build “specifically to supplement” any single idea or methodology, it can get in the way of Getting Things Done because it may require people to get things done in a particular way.

That is why we have been so careful to make our software configurable so that the software can work the way the users normally work to get things done than making the users work the way the software needs them to. Today, our software is implemented for Balanced Scorecards, Management by Strategic Initiative, Process Management by Action Register, Management by Assessment, as well as classical KPI targeting. In other words, the software is configured so that people using those methodologies can more easily get things done the way those methodologies teach.

Finally, when we think about getting things done, we have to think about the time it takes to use tools. I did my first basement build out, framing up the walls with a hammer and nails and the job took a week. The last one I did, I rented a framing nailer and the job took a day.

Software tools need to have evolved and produce that same kind of efficiency. In our military work, we often hear a specification called “The Two Click Rule”: The user needs to be able to get from seeing a red flag condition to the data that explains the reason in no more than two clicks.

When you can get to the reason for the problem in two clicks and then create a corrective action with the third click, that is Getting Things Done. And that is why Spider got into the business that we are in.

I read an interesting blog the other day: The software business model is dead. May it rest in pieces.. Of course, I’ve been reading similar things for a number of years. However, this one caught my attention because it struck me as not simply about the software business model and also about the “performance management” business model.

According to the Wikipedia, “Corporate performance management (CPM) is a concept introduced by Gartner Research in 2001, which “all of the processes, methodologies, metrics and systems needed to measure and manage the performance of an organization. and that is the way that I used to think about it. I don’t think I’m the Lone Ranger in that respect. If you google “Corporate Performance Management” you’ll see all of the usual suspects competing in the Business Intelligence, Database Management, Data Warehousing world advertising their approach to CPM.

Today, I don’t think of it that way. After almost ten years of working with companies trying to improve performance through better project management, six sigma, quality circles, BSC, process management and more, I’ve come to appreciate that managing performance is, at its core, about people.

That is why this article struck me as succinct and to the point. Go back to the article Ray Lane: Good riddance, software business, and take note of some comments he makes about the software business in general:

• we’ll see fewer…and far more user-generated and user-driven applications.
• collaborative environments, and mobile capabilities are the types of applications a new generation of users expects
• Now, it’s about collaboration. We’ll use the power of individuals for the benefit of the enterprise.

The emphasis is not on the software, it is on what the software is supposed to do! It is supposed to empower people to work smarter, work more efficiently and “benefit the enterprise”. In other words, it is supposed to empower people and the enterprise they live in to positively affect performance.

When I read these posts, I can hear echos of lines from TS Eliot’sThe Journey of the Magi,”

“This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”

I remember back when I was writing code, before I moved into “management”. It was 1972 and I turned in my code in stacks of long brown boxes with each line on a single punch card. I also remember that day when the Wang guy stopped by the lab with this strange device that saved code on cassette tapes.

Each step along the way in the evolution of software is both a birth and a death, but not just for the software business model….

We started Spider Strategies to bring web technologies to the task of managing “performance” in organizations. However, if you search for “performance management” or “corporate performance management” on the internet, it doesn’t look like managing “performance” is an easy target! Managing “performance” covers corporate strategy, employee motivation, processes, documents, projects, planning, data, and on and on and on!

We recognized early on that targeting such a broad area would not be easy. We also thought that it shouldn’t really be hard. Robert Shiller wrote “The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence”. That is the key: bring intelligent focus to important things.

So what are the important things to an organization? That list could also go on and on and on! At Spider Strategies, we believe, however, that the important things can be grouped into three areas: People, Processes and Paper.

Therefore, our vision is to bring 21st century technology to improving an organizations ability to focus on the better performance of its people, its processes and the documentation that supports communication across the enterprise.

We’ll be using the Performance Management section of Spider Bytes to discuss what that means today and how that is evolving as we continue to interact with our users and add functionality to meet their specific needs.