The OxyMorons - S1E7 - George Warner
My newest OxyMoron is George Warner. George has 30 years’ experience in the public sector — 20 as the ECM Director for New York State, where he led an initiated the largest ECM practice in state government. He led a true shared services strategy for ECM, building from one ECM in a single agency to over 50 across multiple agencies. The NY ECM program is now home to over 5 billion pages of content, ingests 1.6 million pages of content per night (128 file cabinets) and generates $100 million in ECM benefits.
But all of that is not enough to make you an OxyMoron. One of the things that I’ve always admired about George is the fact that he brings bit of “crankiness” to discussions about content and information management. When I raised this with George, he said, “Are you saying that I may not be the embodiment of patience and diplomacy?” — which gave me a good laugh. But I think that’s right on point — a bit of healthy and constructive impatience is the mark of a true OxyMoron.
Lightning round warm-up questions:
Favorite COVID TV binge watch - The most current one is Captain Marleau. It's a French murder mystery. It's very odd, with very eclectic. personalities.
Most surprising song on your “frequently played” list - Things have changed. It's now mostly podcast land for me, so not much interesting when it comes to music playlists.
Favorite book over the past 12 months - For the technical side, it would be Digital Transformation by Lindsay Herbert. A more eye opening one would be the book about the Spanish Flu influenza by John Barry.
1 - As you built a true shared services approach in NY, where did your best ideas come from? How did you maintain a creative edge?
All the best ideas came from simply looking at how people do their work, and how most work consists of just schlepping paper from person to person. We had an idea of what you could do and did time and motion studies to understand what was being lost and how we could turn people into true knowledge workers. Interestingly, employees didn’t usually find this threatening -- after all, we were looking at how they did their jobs -- but management sometimes would find it threatening because they didn’t have a vision of what could be done. In the early years, imaging was something that happened at banks, and nobody was really doing it in the public sector. So, it took a lot of lift and push to get things moving.
2 - One of the challenges many content management professionals is getting individual departments to give up their own turf in exchange for the collective benefits of a strategic approach. How did you convince people to do this?
For the first project, we documented very carefully the effort and time involved in getting the job done before the change, what it took to get the job done before the change, and then carefully documented what the work looked like after we implemented a new system. At that point, our shared services approach became critical. Because a typical single ECM implementation in a department was a couple of million dollars, which not many departments could afford. But if we made ECM a shared service on an existing platform, the incremental cost might drop to a tenth of that.
3 - As you built the NY State strategic ECM capability, who or what pissed you off?
It's like anything; you see an opportunity, you build the business plan, you make it solid, you make it a worthwhile investment, and you just must wait your turn in the queue. Sometimes it's longer than you want it to be. When that happens, you just keep negotiating, and you keep delivering in the areas where you have a system in place. After you prove your reliability, additional program areas start talking to each other. We had cases where a program director would show up saying they wanted to do something, and they had their checkbook open. Build the reputation that you will deliver what you say you're going to do.
4 - Did you worry about failing?
When Governor Cuomo came into office, he chartered something called the Sage Commission, which was tasked with looking for opportunities for savings within the state. One of the things they elected to do was to pull all the back-office IT operations out of individual agencies -- because these weren’t really a core competency within any agency -- and pulled all these functions into a single new agency. When they started talking about invoice processing, it was clear that it was something that all 57 agencies needed to do. But some of the approaches were manual, some were just glorified Excel spreadsheets, and some were applications that had to be rebooted two or three times a day during prime time. They needed a solution common to all the agencies, and we were given the opportunity to deliver one in a ridiculously little amount of time. So, we did it.
Paraphrasing the Art of War, my adage has always been that you win a project before you start. You win the project when you make the business case. I’m very excited about how process mining changes this equation. I can't even tell you the amount of times and months of my life that has been spent in rooms, with people with sticky notes trying to figure out their processes. The staff says, “This is how it works.” And the manager says, “No, that's not how it works. This is how it works.” With process mining you can figure all of this out so much more quickly; you can almost build a wind tunnel to test how you want your process to ideally work before moving forward. You can potentially succeed with a project before you even start because you will have figured out the business process, the future opportunities, and how much risk you want to take out of the gate.
5 - What would your peers consider to be your secret sauce?
It always comes down to the team. I look for people who care, know they need to deliver every day, and are relentless in solving problems.
Previous episodes of The OxyMorons: