We are painting the house this week which means I probably will not have time to make a full entry. However I do want to offer you one piece of content to perhaps inspire you and your creativity. In case you don't know what TED is, imagine a place for lots of smart people get together and share their ideas. These ideas are not just the obvious but offer new perspectives on a lot of different subjects. They have started releasing presentations made for TED online, and many of them are quite powerful.

One of the things that comes up in tech transfer and in IT all the time is whether something is a good idea or whether it is truly innovative. A podcast I listen to is called "Killer Innovations" from Phil McKinney, and his podcast focuses on an innovation process he has developed over the years. One of the steps in the process he uses involves asking a lot of tough questions about the idea on the table. He has created a set of questions that he uses at HP, and I think the same thing can be done for IT. If an idea does not seem to hold up under the questions, then obviously it needs more work. With a little brainstorming, I came up with these questions.

1. What user complaint or obstacle does this idea address?
2. What are the obvious benefits to users who adopt this idea?
3. What pain that users don't know about will this idea address?
4. What benefits does this option offer over other solutions?
5. What changes will this solution require in user behavior to be considered successful?
6. What impact does this solution have on other systems?
7. How will this solution increase revenue or decrease costs?
8. What organizational goal is this solution going to help accomplish?

These are just a few when you are trying to examine innovative ideas for internal IT services. Thinking about your ideas with these questions will help you understand the real benefits and issues that may face your solution. If you think about these things before you start talking to others in your organization about the idea, you will have the answers to questions that they are likely to ask.

We're in the process of interviewing candidates for a few technology licensing manager positions, and the method of interviewing always comes up. After this year's Super Bowl, one of the first things I think of when I start preparing to do an interview is this Tide coffee stain commercial:

While we might open with a question for a candidate to tell us about themselves, most of our candidates are asked better questions than in the commercial. However, it can be a real challenge to figure out whether a person would fit well into the organization. For most positions, a candidate will spend an entire day or more with us in interviews with the entire staff and other stakeholders in our department. In the course of that much time, usually you find out what a person is like. The person who talked about skinny dipping in his backyard? Yeah, probably would not have come out in a half-day interview, but it did come out over dinner conversation.

By having these extended interviews, we are usually able to get at the real personality of a person and how they might fit into our department. But maybe there are better phone interview questions that can be asked to try to weed out these poor behaviors before they get in front of the entire group. The best method for this is called behavioral interviewing. The idea behind behavioral interviewing is that past performance and past actions are the best predictors of future performance. In traditional interviewing, the interviewee actually has a lot of control as the questions most interviewers ask are pretty open-ended and move from subject to subject. Behavioral interviewing has the interviewer asking an open-ended question and then more probing questions to get at the details of the answer in order to learn something about the interview subject.

Here is an example of how a set of questions might go in a behavioral interview:

Tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone else in the office.
How did you approach the person to resolve the issue?
What was the discussion about the resolution like?
Whose advice did you seek in evaluating the situation?
What was the atmosphere like between the two of you after the issue was resolved?

Can you imagine how a candidate might answer differently if they were given the first statement and then the interview moved to another subject? The goal of the follow-up questions is to really probe into the behavior of the person you are interviewing. By using this probing style of questioning, you can find out multiple things. You can better judge whether they gave a fully honest answer. You can find out how they really dealt with the given situation. You can maybe get some insight into their personality.

This interview style can even be carried over into technical areas. Here is an example of how you can use behavioral interviewing with technical subjects.

Tell me about a time you had equipment go down that impacted the organization's operations.
What did you say to the server vendor to explain the problem?
What did you tell the non-IT staff about the problem?
How did you decide on a solution?
How long did you think the repair would take?
How did you communicate that to the rest of the organization?
How long was the equipment down and impacting the organization?

Asking these questions will not only tell you a bit about their technical abilities, but they will also tell you how they deal with others during a crisis. The IT field is beyond the days of being a bunch of basement-dwelling, antisocial jerks, and that means it is even more important to know exactly how a new hire will react when you have an emergency or handle day-to-day operations. If someone is just good enough to get through a traditional interview, you might find out too late that they are a really bad fit for your organization.

Jawed Karim, cofounder of YouTube, has started an early-stage investment group called Youniversity Ventures. While I would not normally cover this story here, it definitely merits my attention. You see, Karim is an alum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has decided that this investment group should focus on mentoring, advising, networking, and investing in consumer internet companies started by students and other alums from Stanford and the U of I. According to this story over at The Industry Standard, they plan to invest between $50,000 and $300,000 in companies that they find personally interesting. More investment dollars for University technologies is a good thing.

For the last few weeks, I have been working on my FY09 budget that runs from July of this year through June of next year. It can be quite the challenge to predict the needs of the future year especially when you try to take an entrepreneurial approach to IT. There are the obvious items like end user computer upgrades, upgrades to the server backup infrastructure, and annual software licensing costs. There are also things that you know you are going to do but are hard to budget due to not being 100% defined. For FY09, that project is going to be a CRM for the two tech transfer offices. I know some of the features, but I am still trying to decide between using an incremental and iterative process to build the application internally or buying something off the shelf. The last part of the budgeting unknown are the things that I cannot currently predict or foresee. That's where the innovation budget will come in.

Each year I build a small portion of the budget for the incidental expenses like replacing broken hardware or small one-off software purchases. This year though I am going to add a special line item called the innovation budget. A little inspired by Google in how they give their employees time to work on whatever projects they want to do, the idea of the innovation budget is to give people in IT a funding source for being creative to solve real business problems or capitalize on business opportunities. While the line item will not be enough to do large projects, it will be big enough to try out at least a couple prototypes for a couple thousand dollars each. In order to access the funds in the innovation fund, an IT person will have to present a business case for the expenditure and get at least one non-IT person to sign-off on being willing to work with IT to try it out. Part of the business case will also need to include at least one metric of success and thoughts on whether it could be deployed to the whole organization. If I think the case is legitimate and the funding enough, then I'll sign off on the project going forward.

The most important aspect of the outcome though will be that failure is completely acceptable. Even if a prototype is never achieved or fails to meet any measure of success, it will still teach us something about IT and our organization. By making failure an acceptable outcome, I am hoping that IT and others in the organization will be willing to take a chance on making a significant breakthrough on how we do our work. A similar concept seems to have worked at Google at least.

While we do not sell products or services in a traditional sense, my departments still need to be able to manage contacts and lead information to go from marketing a technology to licensing it. While having a customer relationship management (CRM) tool gives a broad sense of a solution, figuring out the details of what to implement is a challenge. A lot of our data is very simple in a sense that records have a number of fields specific to them and then a number of relationships to other objects within the database. Technologies relate to patents. Patents relate to agreements. Agreement relate to companies. You get the idea. When I add in the idea of managing the licensing process, it becomes clear that seeing these relationships in a broader sense could be useful.

There is a lot of research going on at the University of Illinois in the computer science field, and so I started to do some research into relational data visualization tools that might help us with at least this aspect of the project. The Automated Learning Group (ALG) at NCSA has at least a couple different tools for business intelligence. The Text to Knowledge (T2K) toolset is probably the most interesting and may be able to do exactly one of the things I am thinking.

Since finishing up my summer course on data warehousing and data mining, I have been working on my thesis proposal. If things keep progressing, I will be done with the literature review in the next few days and can begin working on the parts that are more my own ideas as opposed to just describing the ideas and concepts of other people. In the course of my research into IT leadership, I have been working on some other activites that tie in neatly with it.

Fall 2007 CCSP Conference
I am on the program committee for the CCSP semiannual conference at the University of Illinois. CCSP is the Computer Consultant Support Program which is the group of IT workers and managers on campus, and the conferences have always had good sessions on the technical work but have often been somewhat short on the "soft" side of IT. There have been requests for sessions focused on IT leadership issues. After meeting with the program committee last week, I was put in charge of organizing a session on IT leadership, communicating with organizational leaders, and dealing with the non-technical aspects of IT management.

2008 AUTM Annual Meeting
In addition, I will be moderating a panel at the 2008 meeting of AUTM, the Association of University Technology Managers, in San Diego next February. In the panel, I plan to give a few different perspectives and approaches on how to manage and implement IT in technology transfer organizations. This panel is a follow-up to the mailing list I formed in the spring for IT professionals to share ideas and issues in their tech transfer organizations.

One of my technology transfer departments recently went through a day-long session where we discussed our current status and our future goals while examining how we work together as a team. It was a rather interesting view on the office, and so I wanted to talk a bit about the method that was used and its results. There is definitely something useful for everyone. The meat of our activity was centered around a personality test using the DISC assessment system. The letters of DISC stand for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance. Most people have a large variation among the personality traits, and usually one of them is dominant over the others.

In the previous entry, I talked about information being the food that IT serves to the rest of the organization. One way to present information in a more timely and useful manner is through what I have dubbed contextual enterprise search. Enterprise searching is using search engine technology within an organization's documents, databases, and e-mail. For example, if an individual is working on a licensing agreement with Acme Corporation, that person can find all information within the organization that discusses Acme Corporation in a manner that is similar to searching for Acme Corporation on Google.

As you can imagine, in the traditional web searching sense of using enterprise search, the user has to make an active effort to find information. The user is forced to open a browser window or start an application and then must perform the search based on whatever keywords they want to use. In contextual search, the search results are presented to the user based on whatever document or information they are editing or viewing.

In 1980, the US government passed the Bayh-Dole Act which gave universities and other institutions receiving government research funding the right to own the inventions that arose from their federally-funded research. This law is viewed as a catalyst to getting scientific research funded by the US government into products that help society or reach consumers. Once a researcher has a new invention, a university typically assesses it to determine its potential value and patentability. After a patent has been filed, the university can begin its efforts to license the rights covered by the patent to companies which then make products based on that patented invention. In this way, a lot of people benefit - consumers get new products, industry makes more money to create jobs, universities get more money to fund more research, and inventors get to benefit financially from their ingenuity.

In my current position, I work for a couple different technology transfer offices. Technology transfer offices at a university are an interesting environment that combines the non-profit aspects of higher education with the big business aspects of trying to sell a product, ie. the university's patents. While we deal with millions of dollars each year and try to maximize licensing revenue, we do not have direct competitors like an auto manufacturer or an online retailing giant does. Obviously we compete with other licensing offices for the attention and licensing budgets of businesses, but we don't compete in any traditional sense. This dual profit and non-profit style leads to some interesting benefits.

There's a relatively steady and stable support system of the university that keeps the department in operation and makes it possible to not completely focus on the bottom line. In business, every time IT asks for budget, it can be difficult to demonstrate how a cost is needed or what benefit might be gained. In most university departments, people have the same issue except creating something that can positively impact the bottom line is very difficult. There are no IT improvements that will bring more sales into an academic university department, mainly just improvements that improve the quality of life for faculty and students. However, having customers in the form of licensees, we can do IT projects that improve customer relations and perhaps generate more licensing opportunities.

Not being in direct competition with our peer institutions, it makes it possible to network with other IT professionals at tech transfer offices without worrying about giving away information or knowledge that could be seen as competitive advantage. The Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) is a society that links together tech transfer organizations around the world, primarily discussing issues and operations of tech transfer in general. In the last couple months, I have begun to build a network of tech transfer IT people to share ideas and maybe even share some solutions.

If you're involved with IT management or implementation in a tech transfer office, feel free to contact me about getting on board networking with other tech transfer IT professionals.