Schwerpunkt – A German Contribution to IT Agility

The email said, “I am trying to find out if the world, and in our case especially Germany, is ready for the real-time enterprise and agile IT infrastructure.”  This began a conversation with a company that produces IT conferences in Germany. A year ago they told me my ideas of agility were not so well received when presented to potential conference attendees, but last fall they asked again and got a different response.

The conference producer told me attendees still didn’t necessarily agree with my ideas, but they were interested to have me come and speak. I got an invitation to be the “Keynote aus der USA”, and address their annual IT Operations and Datacenter Congress (IT-Betrieb & RZ Forum 2008). Germans too are looking for ways to respond more quickly to the changes being brought on by the global economy.

In preparing my talk I consulted with my cousin Carolyn who is a cross-cultural trainer; she speaks German and knows the culture. She said, “You’d better know your material and be prepared to back up your statements with lots of facts.” She said Germans like to have frank conversations and are not shy about stating their own opinions. They also work to very high standards of excellence and prize an orderly and disciplined approach to problems; agility might seem rather chaotic.

The congress was held Monday and Tuesday this week in the city of Offenbach across the river from Frankfurt. On Monday morning I presented some of my ideas such as those outlined in several of my recent posts. And we found common ground in the concepts of “elegant simplicity”, and the notion that agility is about doing simple things well, not doing complex things fast.

This is similar to a German concept called “Schwerpunkt”. Schwerpunkt means you don’t try to do everything; instead, you study a situation and pick the most import things to do. Then you focus your time and resources on doing only those things; you do them well without being distracted by anything else. This delivers both high levels of excellence and it limits project scope so things get done quickly.

I addressed the audience in English. Everyone spoke English well enough to follow me and ask questions afterwards and converse with me during breaks and at the evening reception. But otherwise, German was the language of the conference.

I learned something from this too. I could actually understand some of what they were saying. German is absorbing a lot of English words and the speakers used plenty of English phrases such as: “early adopters”; “time to market”; “information management”; “simplify your life”; “lessons learned”; and “quick wins”.

They told me this blending of the two languages is referred to as “Denglish” (Deutsch + English). Sometimes a presenter’s entire slide deck was in English even though they delivered their talk in German. Other times their slides were a mixture of English and German.

It was easiest when a presenter’s slides were all in English. I could match up words on the slides with the presenter’s spoken words in German and follow along. Slides that were a mix of English and German were more of a challenge and where the slides were all in German, I just concentrated on matching the printed words on the slides with the spoken words from the presenter. I started listening to the accents and inflections that give this language its distinctive sound and rhythms.

I repeated

Continue Reading