Just an Average Voter

We made it through the mid-terms. Great turnout in Ohio, even if I did feel disappointed about the final outcomes. This disappointment felt different than two years ago.  Two years of thinking about elections, candidates and civic engagement. That is definitely more focus than I have ever had on politics, even if I have had some observations and commentary on it. Had some girlfriends over and we ended the night watching Schoolhouse Rock as we expressed our frustration at watching initial results fade to the results that we expected if we were being honest. (As a side note, I was shocked at how quickly my results viewing party of sophisticated ladies devolved to #RHoBH watching Nancy Pelosi acceptance speech. Blame the wine or blame the two sets of eyebrows on 80" screen or blame the robot at 5:55 here.)


Monday I was listening to Freakonomics and the topic was America's Duopoly. Let me just say that it offered me an escape from the 

WHAT CAN I DO AS AN AVERAGE VOTER 

conundrum. Why? Because it related the current situation of choosing and electing candidates to exactly the issues I had intuitively felt but couldn't define. The paper, written by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, doesn't just point out what we already know: gerrymandering, elitist, media bias, etc. It offers insights into root cause and suggestions for removing some of the barriers to participation and increasing engagement.  Reading and annotating has lifted my sense of purpose as I search for a way to contribute to the fixing of the system. Not going to be simple folks, but it provides a rational framework that addresses the problem as a broken market and thought American's are not known as the most effective market fixers, it is still a base to build on.

A first read through here resulted in a confirmation of what I believed in 2016 elections: An independent or third-party candidate needs to represent the AVERAGE voter. The two parties are NOT representing me in healthcare or education. C'mon Kasich, I am holding to what you shared with Trevor this week! 

"I'm an America before I'm a Republican or Democrat ." @JohnKasich does a damn fine job giving some of us hope. https://t.co/yeEX1SMyn4

— Shelly Bramer (@shellybramer) November 9, 2018

Education is the Way

Columbia University

Education is a key issue for me when it comes to government and politics. Education, along with Healthcare and Equal Rights, form the core of what inspires and motivates me personally when it comes to evaluating our local and national efforts to govern and the services our government should provide. Touring with Natalie to see Columbia University, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins was eye opening for me as while I've read and heard about the current challenges in seeking higher education, this first look at a school selection brought reality to my door. I understand supply and demand and demand for the types of private education we looked at indicates high demand. However, it reawakened the passion to understand why education in this country is not as obvious to everyone as a solution to so many travails in this nation.  We want people to WORK for social benefits, but we don't want to take on the effort to ensure they have SKILLS and EDUCATION to do work that actually contributes to our nation.

Reading through this opinion piece this morning gives an interesting perspective that wrapped up several concepts related to our education systems. If we don't provide an equally effective educational opportunity to everyone, then we should not be shocked that not everyone is able to pull themselves up to values that education brings: awareness of systemic inequality in our systems, readiness to learn by ensuring social determinants are addressed, establishing a foundational experience in elementary school that is positive and functional. Equality drive by education based on a healthy mental and physical well-being. Nicely wrapped up. 

How to refactor application APIs into containerized microservices

Getting some geek on. These tools, which sound complicated but aren't, are changing the way we build solutions. Build in what works best for your solution and then use the deployment tools to manage it. The need to "standardize" has changed. What the Cloud really means for IT executives? A completely different approach. We have all been talking about the cloud and DevOps but I guarantee you that not many truly understand. We are building our solutions in a "greenfield" where everything is Azure-based, Microservices, PaaS where we can. Why I think we don't really understand is that this architectural approach is changing how we identify business services, how we process map, how we build our application strategies. In other words, it is evolving the business of IT alignment and business value. More on this over the next few months. For now, back to the build...

Where are the facts for spending on a WALL?

In the pursuit of providing sources of information that can be used as an alternative to consumption of news and opinion sources, here is a great site to better understand the data associated with migration. The Mexican Migration Project is a significant set of facts and data around the issue / opportunity of migration.  Found this after listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History this week. Learned from that podcast that the wall is actually keeping migrants here. (also learned that there are no published biographies of General Leonard Chapman which was disappointing.) Just spend 30 minutes looking at the results. My takeaway: over the last 8-10 years we have more than doubled the cost of a border crossing and reduced the probability of an undocumented Mexican crossing the border for the first time by 0.0135. That seems like an unwise investment.

Twitter Skew

I have never been a big fan of Twitter. I am sure that the assessment of my account would classify me as "not popular enough to have an opinion" but as usual I do. And pretty sure this post will turn into a bit of rant about the popularity of the platform in the news media versus the reality of my tribe who are simply re-tweeters of other content. Don't get me wrong. I use a "list" of sources to run through content announcements from a few who produce content that I read [Lynn Vos, Gartner, Taylor Griffin to name a few]. The tweets help me know that new content exists. And I might use that tweet to re-tweet that content AFTER I DETERMINE IT IS SHAREABLE. Oh, and I am aware of the IRONY that my blog gets shared via IFTTT automatically to Twitter.

I have been a user of all social media platforms from a long time because it impacts the technology areas I make a living with And it has provided a different lens for watching my daughter grow into an adult via preferred tools like SnapChat. But that approach, less emotional perspective for looking at the tech rather than the "likes", always left me with the opinion that Twitter fell short in several areas. From the beginning, there was a tilt towards short bursts of random opinions when you got beyond the use of the tool to share real content. The majority of early tweets, at least on my feed, were journalists and media writers. The tone of the writing, with the limit of characters, meant that the tweet contained a distilled version of a message. Concentrated. Over thought. Highly marketed to appeal. Opinions were incorporated into that distillation. It was clear that content being touted used this method to grab attention and push messaging. This has been true from the beginning. But as with all platforms, the messaging tone you picked up was overwhelmingly positive. Just not applicable to an un-curated reality. My news feed quickly filled up with self-promoting tweets driving to those individuals personal biases. So few of the users I was following provided any content that I could use to further my knowledge of Healthcare, Strategy and Models,  that I quickly figured out that it was just an advertising platform for most and a great place for comedians to try out one liners. And don't even get me going on the concept of commenting on tweets. Determined early that I got not time for that and so my personal usage of Twitter has waned over the years.

Twitter has always been skewed towards tweets that encapsulate and simplify. That has not changed. But it is a just a platform? When did the media decide that the platform represented reality? Twitter does not.  It never really has for many of us. And for sure the comments that are put out there do no represent anything that mean anything. Except maybe hate. Clearly it did to those journalists, reporters, media folk who were using it to promote their views opinions news. Now I cannot find any information (I hesitate to call it news though I have done that in this post several times) about world happenings that does not include some reference to a tweet that someone involved with the story threw out into the world.

Now we are fed news stories that actually allow for a Presentation tweet to be news?  And then a small part of our US population waits for those tweets so they comment the same extreme love/hate. How did that happen? When did we as a nation, heck a world, determine that Twitter Tweets were worthy of being actual news? It just seems silly. I will assume that any real journalist who uses a reference source of a 140 character tweet in a article has to feel some twinge of wrongness, right? Just because individuals can easily espouse an opinion about Russian hacking while standing in line at Whole Foods waiting to pay for their overpriced organic Chicken Nuggets doesn't mean we should read it or like it or for goodness sake retweet it. But tagging is real news content? A source of content? What the heck??? Ok, that was a bit of a rant.

What if we, the collective we encompassing ALL true journalists and reporters and readers of that news, decided a Tweet was not news, but just a damn Tweet? Because that is ALL IT IS!

KPI's - Ushering in the year of ANALYSIS

Welcome to 2018! I have been collaborating on an opportunity to reassess the current state of technology and that has led me to declare that 2018 will be the year of ANALYSIS.  This topic came up when I was reading The Hutchins Center Explains: The framework for monetary policy this morning. The article talks extensively about the 2% target rate set by the Fed and the idea that in today's economic reality, it might be out of date and needs to be replaced by a different model, especially with the talk in economic circles about the natural rate of inflation which I believe perfectly represents, economically, the behaviors that Gen Z is driving into our culture of spending and saving. But that's another post for another day.  Evaluating the Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) and identifying when the underlying data is driving you to a different measure is a real problem beyond monetary control policies. It impacts every industry, every business function, every dashboard, human interactions. Analysis of data is woven into the fabric used to design the structure of business and entire economies. 

In reading the entire article though, it seemed as if it was all about setting the right target and what target is the right one. But there were no points targeted at understanding the tools needed to do that and about what is needed to change the underlying behaviors that are driving the controls. In other words, there were a lot of great points about what and how to change the measure, but no explanation or exploration as to whether or not the underlying process for earning (employment) and spending align to the current method of controlling monetary policy (which is what the central banks do) while governments control fiscal policy. Fiscal policy has a lot more opportunity to be politically driven and may be at odds with the current tools used to control the inflation rates. We know economists understand the impact of behavioral economics, just read this speech given by Janet Yellen in 2007 but it is not yet driving the context for discussion. And that just seems like an inefficient use of really smart economic analysts by not focusing on the whole opportunity.

The real point is that the discourse relates to challenges with my current role in driving process and system improvements for a small medical device manufacturing company.  There has been significant opportunity discovery due to many facilitated work sessions to document the company's "AS IS" and "TO BE" ERP processes. This in itself is a great advancement! However, the discussions related to the development and use of  KPI's to drive performance did not go nearly as well. Many of the identified KPI's measure results in a process being performed outside of the desired process or functional area because we are still defining our functional process models and aligning them appropriately. However, this identified a great opportunity to drive data and analytics on the processes that they have defined into their hands so that they can see for themselves  that there is a real need for the business managers to modify the execution behaviors driving the processes and results before we can really define KPI's that will support scaling to the next level.

The model here simply shows a deployment model for KPI's that can be explored later, but want to point out that it requires KPI's to be examined for complexity and sources. This really understates the analysis that occurs. This is a great topic to visit in 2018 as IT begins to use the tools to deliver data-based solutions to our business partners.

I challenge you to identify at least one area in 2018 that can be transformed by defining the data and analyzing it to define differentiating KPI's that help your business in ways that 2017 seemed impossible!  Welcome to 2018!!!