Archived Quotes of the Day
No doubt about it, social media provides the disgruntled customer, blogger, or activist group with unprecedented capabilities for carrying out an attack on the reputation of an organization, corporate officer, product, or what have you. Many attacks stall and go nowhere, but others can go viral or resonate broadly.
There are five things that everyone better do over the next 12-18 months.
Cloud computing holds the promise of further freeing up organizational resources since all the organizational needs for underlying technologies and systems can be provided as a utility through the cloud. All the noncore activities and competencies of an organization can be shifted to the cloud, leaving the organization lean and agile.
The challenge facing many organizations today is that enterprise strategies and executive mandates rarely align to funded initiatives and project deployments. Fragmented, redundant, or even conflicting projects often take organizations in directions that fall far short of strategic goals and executive mandates, in spite of the millions of dollars spent on these efforts.
Organizational risks have never been greater and more diverse, yet organizations themselves seem unable to bring themselves to manage them with an enterprise-wide approach.
Despite the hype, cloud or utility computing is not a new concept. It involves organizing and providing a wide range of computing-related services in much the same way as public utilities deliver services like electricity, water, and gas.
"Cloud Computing: A CIO's Perspective," Business Intelligence Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 24, No. 7
The proper etiquette for recruiting via social media has not been established yet. Company fan pages on Facebook often seem faked. Similarly, people who tweet once a day how great their company is mostly lead the people they first attracted to soon press the "unfollow" button.
One of the often underestimated roots of agile is systems dynamics. The books of Peter Senge ( The Fifth Discipline , among them) belonged to the top literature ranks among early agilists.
"Pitfalls of Agile XV: Size Does Matter," Agile Product & Project Management Advisors, 21 July 2011
Whether it is an end user, worker bee, team member, C-level executive, marketer, or customer hat, adopting different perspectives is a powerful way to reevaluate the decisions you make on a daily basis.
"Decision Making Under a Different 'Hat,'" Business-IT Strategies Executive Update, 20 July 2011
While some organizations, particularly retail, have chosen simultaneously to develop mobile apps for Apple, Android, and Windows, others have understandably decided to take a more structured and patient approach by focusing development on just one of the three platforms.
In today's world, is it really possible (or even desirable) to "own" a customer anymore? How is our present use of IT aiding our relationships with our customers?
When discussing why executives should leverage business architecture to facilitate strategic planning and transformation, it is useful to examine the challenges facing organizations making large-scale, multiyear IT investments. Planning teams often find it difficult to operationalize high-level policy statements, strategic plans, and new business models across highly segregated businesses.
My personal and very subjective believe is that if the companies could get away with it, they wouldn't disclose any data breaches at all. In 2009, a study by insurance underwriter Hiscox found that 38% of Fortune 500 companies surveyed do not explicitly mention privacy/data breach in the Risk Factors section of their SEC 10-K filing.
"Secrets and Cyber Security," Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Advisor, 16 June 2011
In the span of just a few months, the verb "socialize" has crept into more and more presentations and discussions. When people say, "You get better results if you socialize CRM," they generally mean that adding a person-to-person aspect to the connection between a company and its customers improves communication and inspires more loyalty.
"KM Boundaries Disappear," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, 6 July 2011
IT shops are getting better at achieving their operational goals, frequently through successful implementations of service process workflows. Valuable experience in automating process is gained when capturing the workflow required in tracking, administering, and monitoring change within the IT infrastructure.
"Achieving Immediate BSM Success," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, 6 July 2011
There has been a lot of talk lately about Hadoop and MapReduce in the role of analyzing "big data." Our research shows, however, that use of Hadoop and MapReduce in traditional enterprises (i.e., non-Internet-based companies) remains quite limited compared to other technologies such as high-performance analytic databases and analytic appliances.
"Interest High, But Hadoop Still Has a Ways to Go," Business Intelligence Advisor, 5 July 2011
The Federal Government's current Information Technology (IT) environment is characterized by low asset utilization, a fragmented demand for resources, duplicative systems, environments which are difficult to manage, and long procurement lead times. These inefficiencies negatively impact the Federal Government's ability to serve the American public.
Digital data genesis represents the notion that organizations must, in order to stay competitive in the future, develop the ability to embed digital computing equipment and IT in organizational processes to serve goals other than transaction processing, thus creating data in digital form and capturing it at its inception.
Google's introduction of the Chromebook has serious implications for cloud computing and IT -- and threatens to shake up enterprise computing. Google is hoping that companies will find Chromebook's reduced maintenance and lower cost of ownership too good to resist. But Google does not expect companies to embrace Chromebook overnight.
"Chromebooks Will Shake Up Enterprise Computing," Enterprise Architecture Advisor, 18 May 2011
All companies are targets for hackers, and all are vulnerable. No one is immune: even Google got hacked. Every company will have some disgruntled employees. And most organizations are largely defenseless. Sooner or later, every company is someone's target.
Since the beginning of the millennium, if not earlier, we found that we could no longer take for granted that businesspeople would authorize and fund IT projects. This was in part because they had seen too many projects that failed to provide value for the money; in part because they had seen too many large projects fail, period; and often because the proposals were not expressed in ways the business could easily understand.
At first Kanban is not a process -- not even a process framework. Kanban is a tool to drive evolutionary change. You visualize your process, you draw your conclusions, and you learn from it. This learning cycle makes Kanban an agile tool -- not the visualization and not the conclusions you draw from it.
"Pitfalls of Agile XIV: KanBut," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, 16 June 2011
From the simplest to the most complex decisions, we like to believe that we are making them with an objective perspective and a willingness to take all the parameters and factors into account. The tragedy, however, is that we often don’t give enough credit to our wealth of information in making those decisions.
"Computers Don't Know All the Answers," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, 15 June 2011
The uptake of cloud computing is happening across all segments of organizational and enterprise practice. A valuable section of the data in the cloud these days comes from what is called "public sector information" (PSI) -- also referred to as "open data."
"BI and Open Data in the Cloud," Business Intelligence Executive Update, Vol. 8, No. 8
Just about every one of my clients wrestles with the problem of governing the software process. As the process often eludes us, the natural tendency is to add more and more performance measures in order to ensure "completeness" of the governance system. More often than not, the end result is a baroque system that is difficult to implement, use, and comprehend.
"Metrics: Less Is More," Agile Product & Project Management Advisor, 19 May 2011
There are a lot of things in the IT world that don't make sense right off the bat. One of them is the role of data in the world of management and analysis. Since the beginning of the computer revolution, managers and technology people have vastly underestimated the role that good data plays in decision making.
"Big Data Meets the Real World," Business Technology Trends & Impacts Advisor, 26 May 2011
Since the beginning of the year unknown cyber intruders have been able to penetrate sensitive government IT systems in the US, Canada, France, and Australia. In the last case, the intruders were able to access the personal email accounts of several senior Australian government officials, including possibly the prime minister's.
"Securing a Cyber Attack: From Phishing to Cyber War," Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 24, No. 5
Agility plays a varying role depending on the size of the organization. The way a large business reorganizes itself to become agile can be different from that of a small business. The internal organizational and HR structure is significantly disturbed as a result of a business becoming agile and collaborative. For a small business, there may not be any perceptible difference in the internal structure but there may be a significant change in its business model and the way it supplies its customers.
The development of industry-specific social media monitoring and analysis applications is important because such focused applications promise to make it more practical for end-user organizations to utilize social media-monitoring and analysis to supplement their traditional CRM, BI, marketing, and other analytics efforts with insights gleaned from analyzing social media sites.
As I was pondering IT's role in designing and building a more sustainable environment, I began to wonder whether IT more ominously but properly ought to be linked to increasing global warming and not reducing it. If computers were not available to us over the past 50 years, what would have happened? Surely we would still have cars and probably more gas-guzzling cars than we do now. But what would economic growth have looked like? Can one imagine economic growth without automated computation?
"IT Isn't as Green as You Think," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, Vol. 4, No. 10
Innovation is a core competency at some companies, a casual pursuit of interesting activities at others. What is it at your company?
Since the beginning of the computer revolution, managers and technology people have vastly underestimated the role that good data plays in decision making. Over the years, more and more sophisticated tools for manipulating larger and larger mounds of data -- 4GLs, multidimensional databases, management dashboards, and so on -- have promised to revolutionize management, only to come up short in practice.
"Big Data Meets the Real World," Business Technology Trends & Impacts Advisor, 26 May 2011
Digital data genesis represents the notion that organizations must, in order to stay competitive in the future, develop the ability to embed digital computing equipment and IT in organizational processes to serve goals other than transaction processing, thus creating data in digital form and capturing it at its inception.
"Rearchitecting" may be a new term to many, but a tool-assisted rearchitecting project is a more cost-effective way of performing a rewrite due to the leverage from applying those tools to harvest as much of value as possible from the legacy system.
Ah, another day, another data breach; another insincere apology most probably written by a corporate lawyer.
"Sorry for Whose 'Inconvenience'?," Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Advisor, 19 May 2011
We are clearly at the beginning of an era in which more companies build more applications on more devices. Irrespective of the kind of business you are in -- health services, financial services, retail, travel, media, gaming, training, advertisement, and so on -- your dependence on new applications is growing.
"Why You Need Agile to Cross the Chasm," Agile Product & Project Management Advisor, 5 May 2011
Vendors and other proponents still have some work to do when it comes to educating organizations and potential customers about how to go about applying predictive analytics practically if we are to see real widespread adoption of the technology. The good news is that the interest is certainly there, and organizations say they realize the potential value proposition afforded by predictive analytics and are eager to apply the technology.
Since the turn of the year, we've seen a lot of "CIO's Concerns for 2011" and similar articles. These can be dangerous if, in fact, CIOs aren't all alike -- or are facing similar problems or indeed playing significantly different roles in the enterprise.
"For the CIO: One "Size" Does Not Fit All," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, 16 March 2011
Risk management is really tough. It involves thinking the unthinkable and then, because you have thought of the unthinkable, feeling compelled to do something to prepare for it.
"Learning from Disaster, Again," Business Technology Trends & Impacts Advisor, 28 April 2011
IT is a catalyst for change -- particularly for changing the lives and well-being of billions of people at the bottom of the pyramid in emerging markets. As emerging markets are beginning to use IT in a big way for their socioeconomic development, they present enormous opportunities that are yet to be fully tapped.
Undertaking a project to replace an existing application with a modern implementation is fraught with difficulties, cost overruns, and outright failures. We can avoid the two primary causes of failure by starting at the end of the project, at acceptance testing, and working backward in project planning until we get to the start.
Yes, we have all had terms such as Web 2.0, the long tail, crowdsourcing, and new innovative business models built on social media concepts pounded -- like long nails -- into our skulls over the past couple of years. Some companies have been able to make use of these tools, but many have not.
"Social Media Monitoring: More than Just Casual," Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 10, No. 10
Is it really too much to ask that those in charge of activities that can possibly cause large environmental and economic damage, as well as those who conduct their oversight, act with at least a modicum of risk management professionalism?
Kanban is about gradual change -- a gentle but highly effective approach. We are so used to big changes and radical changes ... the modern world is fast-paced, after all. So a gradual, incremental change could be a challenge to the patience of some. Patience will pay off, though, as results show an actual acceleration in the improvements the organization needs.
"The Viral Growth of Kanban in the Enterprise," Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3
Visualization is not for the weak-minded; it's not for people who can't communicate with words; it's for people who solve complex problems by the most effective and unambiguous means available.
The availability of data mining/predictive analytics via the software as a service (SaaS) model is important because it puts the technology -- one that has typically been hard to get started with because of complexity, cost, skill set requirements, processing needs, and so on -- within reach of more end-user organizations that otherwise might not be able, or would be unwilling, to attempt to use the technology.
Customers have attempted to shield themselves from some of the seedier aspects of the Internet by employing firewall technology. But many of the cloud offerings I see basically ask the user to move data assets over the firewall onto a server under someone else's protection.
To get others to move to a compelling future, perhaps the most important thing to build is a bridge back to the past. When designing change, it might be better to focus on what needs to stay the same to get better acceptance of what needs to change.
"Move Forward by Building Bridges to the Past," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, 9 February 2011
Companies have been running "lean and mean" for a few years now, and productivity of the workforce is very high because of it. CEOs may be eager to invest in IT to get to some of the efficiencies available to them through technology innovation, while they continue to try and hold the general workforce levels down until more certain times are "more certain."
Connecting business analysis with EA is not only a matter of traditional practices, such as reuse of common assets, but also needs to emphasize pragmatic factors, such as operating model alignment, core context strategy, and impact analysis.
There is no one correct position on strategic IT adoption and use, even within a single department or division. It depends on how technology affects various factors of the business. Future technology strategy should be evaluated in terms of all relevant business factors, beginning with an understanding of where you are now.
Kanban is counterintuitive in a number of respects. For example, Kanban limits the amount of work in progress, which actually allows you to get more work done and with better quality. This makes most leaders stop for a moment and wonder whether such a thing is actually possible. As a result, some leaders decide not to try Kanban, whereas others see the potential and try it out.
"The Viral Growth of Kanban in the Enterprise," Cutter IT Journal, March 2011
When the deadline finally arrives and a software release isn't ready, it sometimes comes down to a terrible choice: shipping with lots of bugs, or slipping the date and spending more money. Given that choice, many execs often say two tragic words: ship it. BAM! Instant technical debt.
For every vendor presentation claiming that cloud computing is an unprecedented revolution, there is an analyst paper denouncing the hyperbole. Every new example of IT goes through this phase, just as surely as a child goes through the "terrible twos" -- and at about the same age.
Security should never be taken lightly -- especially when it comes to devices (and applications) designed specifically for interacting with sensitive corporate data, and which are intended to be let outside the castle walls of the organization. However, as I hope I've highlighted here, corporate developers have a number of tools available that allow them to put in place considerably robust security capabilities for mobile BI applications. Consequently, I believe that security is no longer quite the bogey man it once was when it comes to mobile BI.
"Vendors Address Mobile BI Security," Business Intelligence Advisor, 25 January 2011
Organizations often take action based on goodwill, offering changes, improvements, or enhancements in the hope of building future business. Unfortunately, most organizations never go back to evaluate the true value of those investments in goodwill. In order to test their value, there's a need to know what the goals are and what the depth of the investment will be.
It's all over but the shouting: social media is now a major driver of decisions that cross-cut corporate awareness, brands, service, product development, and, ultimately, purpose. In a sense, it's amazing it took so long.
Net-Geners emphasize learning from others through working (and playing); solitary learning may be a first step, but the information gained is likely to be shared sooner rather than later. Thus, it's common practice for new information (validated or not) to be shared, not protected and certainly not hoarded.
Many CIOs and other executives are beginning to take a hard look at the energy consumption in their companies because of cost. IT can be one of the biggest users of energy. Your data center, for example, is a very hungry beast when it comes to energy consumption and therefore a big cost to your company. Your server and network architecture strategies should include an energy expense component as you look at the TCO of your data center.
While advanced forms of life on Earth may be the result of a series of improbable events that created the stability necessary for their evolution, success doesn't have to be so dependent upon good luck. Seeking to minimize uncertainty while maximizing stability and predictability can also create the necessary conditions for organizational success to evolve.
Today's customer is different -- demanding, empowered, increasingly impatient, and even angry. Even one poor experience can 'go viral,' rippling across the social networks at light speed.
"Technology and the Customer Experience," Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2
Many of the greatest breakthroughs in IT have come from innovations in visualization, such as UML and Business Process Modeling. In fact, object-oriented anything is an extension of visualization. Words alone are abstract by definition. Words must be processed by the individual reading or hearing them after they've been processed by the person writing or saying them. Then words must be parsed and interpreted before they are comprehended.
In the pressure to invent a future, IT leaders should be reminded that coming up with a vision of the future is much easier than actually getting the organization to the future. Many people don't share the visionary's enthusiasm and are fearful of the change and what it means. While outright resistance is usually easily dispensed with, silent opposition is not. The most effective forms of resistance are these hidden ones -- the missed meeting, the unanswered e-mail, the double talk and two-step when explaining lack of progress, the hidden agendas, the "victimitis" about all that ails them, and in some cases, the much more ambitious and mischievous Machiavellianism opponents embark upon to thwart the best-laid plans.
"Move Forward by Building Bridges to the Past," Business-IT Strategies Advisor, 9 February 2011
A number of factors influence the growing adoption of data mining and predictive analytics. More general trends affecting data-mining adoption include that organizations have a great deal of data to analyze — so much data, in fact, that that the term "big data" is now in vogue, and companies are looking for ways to capitalize on this valuable resource by utilizing predictive analytics to gain additional insight.
Over the years, I've heard almost every new technology brought into organizations from end users being dissed as not being strategic, from PCs to iPads. Much of the reluctance of many CIOs, I think, is that their security guys are reluctant to step up to the plate. Indeed, most software security guys, regardless of organization size, tend to view everything that goes wrong as the user's fault, which in turn leads them to think that the only secure system is the one absolutely no one can access.
It's amazing how organizations spend vast sums in the interest of discovering the newest, latest, and most advanced business practices and technologies. They throw their energies behind radical change, while ignoring the improvements that can be made through effective implementation of existing practice.
Are businesses aggressively monitoring social media? Most businesses vote with their feet and their dollars. Do they agree that social media is significant? If so, we ought to see corporate monitoring of social media that is indicative of adoption and potential significance.
"Social Media Monitoring: More than Just Casual,"Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 10, No. 10
In creating, developing, and maintaining architectures, architects too often focus on identifying objects of the architecture under design and too often minimize or forgo the identification of relationships among objects, despite the stipulation of ISO 42010 requiring architectures to have relationships specified.
Deciding the priority and funding for major IT initiatives, such as developing a new system or supporting a new technology, are among the most important functions of the IT governance process. Anyone who has been part of an IT governance committee recognizes that business needs and goals are the key basis for these decisions -- IT strategy must be synchronized with business goals. But organizations sometimes make broad statements about technology strategy without establishing that linkage, saying, for example, "Our goal is to be an innovator in the use of IT." This kind of expansive pronouncement, while no doubt intended to be inspiring, doesn't relate the indicated technology strategy (in this case, being an innovator in the use of IT) to the impact on business operations and goals, and also implies that all parts of the enterprise ought to have the same IT goal.
The business technology relationship can be widened and deepened to yield significant business value. But there are land mines everywhere. Many of the explosions that result are self-inflicted, almost deliberate, since we seem nearly incapable of fixing the same-old problems in regards to people, process, organization, and corporate culture -- as opposed to technology -- which by and large works pretty well.
"The Truth and Nothing But the Truth," Cutter IT Journal, 26 January 2011
It is my long-held belief that the unprecedented growth for the past 25 years fueled by technology, globalization, consumer expectations, and the rise of India and China has enabled organizations to -- in the words of GE CEO Jeff Immelt -- "hunker down" to survive challenges and as a result avoid facing and solving a fundamental problem: traditional leadership and management models developed over the 20th century are not viable for the increasingly chaotic 21st century.
In this day and age of WikiLeaks, can we really consider any data in electronic format truly safe? This biting question is raised again and again in government, military, and corporate offices the world over. Moreover, I would argue that it is one of the more important questions of our day as we increasingly turn to information systems to help us deal with (if not outright save us from) many of our most pressing problems.
"WikiLeaks and Data Security in a Web 2.0 World," Business Intelligence Advisor, 11 January 2011
Customers rarely compartmentalize their experiences the way organizations do. Customers don't spend time thinking about the company offering the service. They spend their time on fulfilling their need. All interactions they have with peers, friends, family, industry research firms, and so on, form a cohesive and largely tacit collection of skill and knowledge that we have to understand.
The market momentum behind cloud computing continues to grow. Many organizations will likely move some of their IT operations into the cloud, some at greater risk than others. This movement cannot be stopped, but organizations should head into the cloud with their eyes open. Viewing migration to cloud computing solely as an exercise in cost cutting may blind organizations to other risks.
Everyone wants to innovate. But most companies are terrible at invention, innovation, and entrepreneurialism. Many companies talk a good game -- "we're an innovation culture" -- but in fact they're pitifully staid and innovate mostly in the past; that is, toward business models, processes, and technologies that are anchored solidly in the 20th century.
Net-Geners emphasize learning from others through working (and playing); solitary learning may be a first step, but the information gained is likely to be shared sooner rather than later. Thus, it's common practice for new information (validated or not) to be shared, not protected and certainly not hoarded.
"Innovation and the Net Generation," Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 10, No. 8
When social networks emerged about 10 years ago (remember Friendster?), they were seen as relevant to people's home computing life, not to business. The notion of "social networks for the enterprise" or "enterprise social media" surfaced only very recently, around 2007, and is still controversial with many managers and HR departments.
"If You Build It, They May Not Come," Business Intelligence Executive Update, Vol 11, No 1
Through the years, employees have become inured to the idea that there is a chasm between them and their management and that there is little that they can do to influence organizations above their next line in the management food chain. If we can find ways to tap into their insights, we have the ability to build on a solid foundation, rather than build a new structure altogether.
Technology management is challenging. At best, IT's a moving target. The technologies themselves keep changing, and the role we expect them to play continues to evolve. The nuances of managing in such a fluid environment are multidimensional: it's about the biases of management, vendor manipulation, and ambiguous project requirements -- and lots more insidious, nefarious realities. Right?
Cloud computing has taken its place among the gallery of IT silver bullets that many of us have seen come and go over time. Like those before it, this concept has kernels of truth that have been amplified and distorted by the market to fuel sales of hardware, software, and services. Some intelligent IT consumers will be able to separate the actual benefit from the puffery. However, many IT consumers will move to the cloud in the absence of a clear picture of benefit versus risk. This warms the hearts of those who can't wait to exploit the latter group.
One of the keys to architectural value is the successful identification, design, and development of architectural views. This involves understanding the goals that architecture is expected to deliver, who or what must be influenced to achieve them, what the leverage points are in the relevant processes, and what form of architectural deliverable will provide the appropriate influence at those leverage points to achieve the desired architectural goals.
"EA New Year's Resolutions, Sixth Edition," Enterprise Architecture Advisor, 1 January 2011
Remember when we believed that the Internet would bring out the best in all of us? Alas, it doesn't seem to be working out that way. Instead, it's providing a global way for the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union to operate effectively as an international. And, in a bad economy, the search for the "unbelievably good deal" and simple greed provide a steady supply of people to be separated from their money.
Governments at all levels are in the midst of an extraordinary transformation. One catalyst for this transformation is a newly "e"-nabled, Internet-savvy citizenry -- a citizenry that expects (and prefers) electronic interaction with their government and real-time responses, anytime, anywhere, anyhow. Another catalyst is renewed mandates for government accountability, transparency, and accessibility, the likes of which civilization has never seen before.
"E-Government: Embracing the Challenges and Opportunities ," Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 23, No. 11
Barriers to the continual refinement of today's traditional search engine are looming as the Internet continues to grow exponentially, as the information signal-to-noise ratio continues to shrink, and as we embrace the emerging Web 3.0 era, which is characterized by semanticallty linked data.
Business seems to be leaving the "hallowed" principles of competition and greed, enshrined in a market-driven economy, and now embracing enlightened self-interest, environmental sustainability, and above all, collaboration.
As we move well into the 21st century, there will be several skill sets critical to the impact of IT on the businesses we enable. One of those skills is business relationship management (BRM). BRM is the face of IT. Business partners "sell" IT and simultaneously enable business models and processes through the application of technology to business problems and opportunities. If you get the BRM function wrong, there's little or no hope for what we used to call "alignment" and what we think of today as business technology "optimization."
Even during times of recession, we find certain things hold true, including the fact that the use of budgeting and financial management tools, as an integral part of IT governance, makes a difference in how managers view the value that IT delivers as well as the competitive edge IT provides.
"IT Budgets on a Roller-Coaster Ride," Cutter Benchmark Review, 1 July 2010
To show employees that it's OK to fail, there's often a need to retrain management personnel. They need to identify the boundaries that are available to team members and the areas where team members can take liberties. "You can spend up to...." "You can take up to X days...." "You can try...." Those are phrases that managers and supervisors need to become accustomed to using. And if those extra days, dollars, and approaches don't pay off? As long as we document how and why they didn't succeed, we're doing the right things.
While collaboration is the very lifeblood of a modern organization, we need to avoid the anarchy that can come with inconsistent definition of terms. There have to be some ground rules! The overall recommendation is for EA to act as the main custodian in this regard, at least in terms of settling on common definitions. If you think this is going too far, then in a large organization add a layer of governance through which formal common definitions are controlled.
Governance just ain't what it used to be. Not so many years ago, governance was about control exercised by "Nazi" storm troopers. Big companies, especially, saw control as badges of honor in the fight against technology independence. Corporate IT just loved to tell the business units what they could and could not do. Command and control was the management style that supported enterprise dominance of technology infrastructure and applications acquisition, deployment, and support. CIOs over the age of 60 remember the good ol' days with fondness. It was a different time. Technology was unstable, centralized, and relatively expensive. It was also foreign to most business managers who saw technology run by a secret society that met privately in secure data centers. Yes, it had the feel of a military operation. But things have changed dramatically. Slowly but surely, the old governance models have given way to new interpretations and definitions of governance.... Or, more accurately, new requirements -- the new governance is now a business necessity.
"The New Governance," Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Executive Update, Vol. 7, No. 10
Transformative government is less about the technology than it is about freeing our thinking to embrace change itself. It's all about breaking free of the shackles of fiscal year budget planning cycles and thinking more broadly about planning, perhaps a decade forward in horizon, across the politics of multiyear election terms. It takes a long time to accomplish big things. How many tech-savvy children of the 1980s and 1990s will need to be elected in order for this digital culture shift to reach a tipping point? Must we first stop doing things in ways we've always done them before we have the time (or resources) to think about, and imagine, new ways of defining government?
"E-Government: Embracing the Challenges and Opportunities," Cutter IT Journal, Vol. 23, No. 11
Committing to certain stories or a number of story points is like a surgeon committing to a certain time period in which the patient recovers: you commit to something that is simply out of your control. If a team does not finish as many stories as it thought it would during the planning meeting, it just means that it has responded to change. The change may have been on the domain level, but most times the change is in the assumptions it made for the estimation. If a surgeon tells you that you will probably recover within seven days from a surgery, he or she assumes that you will not catch an infection with some awkward multiresistant bacteria that sends you to intensive care for three weeks. Still, infections like that happen. The Agile Manifesto tells us to value "Responding to change over following a plan," so committing to a plan violates the agile values and is also not what Scrum suggests.
Most people tend to think of social media monitoring and analysis tools as useful primarily for monitoring specific products or brands for marketing purposes -- and this is how they are typically used today. However, these tools can also be used to defend an organization's reputation. In fact, social media monitoring and analysis can allow a company to develop a broad understanding of the opposition it faces regarding a new product, service, or specific incident without having to resort to covert operations or subterfuge. In addition, this analysis will be based on a greater sampling of many different social media sites, thus providing a much more comprehensive and balanced understanding than is typically possible from just tracking one or a few online groups or social sites manually.
"Play Better Defense with Social Media Monitoring," Business Intelligence Advisor, 16 November 2010
Nature seems to endow us with persistent propensities. Chief among those is the ability to reliably reproduce management dysfunctionalities across time and space. Like dandelions, these dysfunctions endlessly cover the lawn of organizational life and are remarkably hard to remove.
The utopian goal of lean is to provide perfect value to customers with zero waste. Therefore, lean has a positive appeal to every aspect of business, including green business. Bradfield-Moody and Nogrady describe "resource efficiency" as the next great market. Success, in our carbon-based economy, will be defined as achieving goals with minimal waste and maximum resource efficiency. Therefore, in my opinion, the time is not far away when the words "lean" and "green" will be synonymous -- for a lean and efficient business has to be a carbon-efficient business as well. The underlying philosophy here is that just as the lean effort is not a cost overhead, the effort to reduce carbon is not an overhead. For example, if an organization attempts power (and thereby cost) reduction through data server virtualization, it results in carbon reduction as well. The reduction in inventory through the use of a highly optimized and mobile-enabled process, as the business becomes lean, also correspondingly reduces its emissions.
As the adoption of agile development and project management increases, this presents a challenge to the inclusion of architecture. Right off, I'll assert that good agile practices are not contrary to architecture. But many implementations of agile do indeed use it as an excuse not to do architecture or design. That is the fault of management, not agile itself. Two different sets of activities need to take place to address the integration of agile and architecture.
First, the implementation of agile must include architecture. This is typically in the inclusion of a Sprint 0, which addresses architecture and design before development begins; understanding and usage of architectural guidelines and patterns during development; and a definition of "done," which may include a small amount of validation and documentation.
Second, architecture must adapt to the processes and needs of agile. Heavyweight architecture specification won't cut it. Lightweight patterns to define architecture appear to be the most successful approach I've seen. Complete integration occurs when architecture provides tests that fit into the test-driven development environment.
Risk arrogance -- the belief that risk affects everyone else but not you -- is a surefire way to get yourself in trouble sooner or later, or both. You can cheat the risk reaper for a while by stacking the deck in your favor, but not forever.
Mismanaged risks are like that, whether they affect a whole industry or merely an IT project. Mismanaged IT project risks -- deliberate or unintentional -- steal from an organization's future just as easily.
Don't bother to understand requirements, or short cut on testing? You'll pay in the future with scarce resources that could have been used for creating something better. The only question will be how much of that future did you destroy today?
There's no perfect size for a user story because it depends on the duration of your iteration cycle, the speed at which you can get software built and tested, and what your customer considers valuable. A team embarking on a new project often takes a couple of cycles to work these factors out. Unless the team is working on a rotten code base (which has been developed in a hurry or poorly maintained), it should always be possible to identify slices of functionality that can be built and tested in a couple weeks. When I hear teams claiming that they cannot, I suspect that they are not challenging assumptions about how epics can be sliced into stories.
Collaboration is the name of the game in business today, and as I've been saying for some time now, one of the most important trends I see impacting BI, and enterprise software in general, is that it is going social. In fact, social media's impact actually extends way beyond software, and what we are really witnessing today is the rise of "social business,” which represents a new way to engage with employees, partners, and customers.>
The road less traveled can be appropriate if it is territory we might not have otherwise tried and when it offers a fresh or different perspective on how we can leverage our work efforts. It can also be extremely fortuitous when the existing approaches have not served our interests well through the years. Some people will sit in the same traffic jam daily for 10 years. Others will try new avenues, optimizing their efforts in some cases and harming them in others, but often learning something new. That learning comes at a price. New tactics, processes, and procedures have a human toll in that we are often challenged by our lack of familiarity with the "new." It takes time and energy. The learning curves required may be readily accepted or harshly rejected. Our mission should be to ensure that the infrastructure, personnel, and processes are sufficiently well understood that there will not be widespread rejection of new processes just because they're new. If they're to be rejected, let it be because they represent bad paths.
It has been just over 50 years since preeminent IBM computer scientist Hans Peter Luhn coined the term "business intelligence." And ever since then, BI has been viewed as getting information to the people who need it in a timely fashion and in a form that is easily consumed and acted upon (the right data to the right people at the right time). From those seemingly prehistoric days of data processing, when BI consisted primarily of monthly reports on green bar paper, to today's splashy interactive graphics on wireless mobile devices, both the data that is available and the means with which to deliver it to the right people have changed dramatically.
But have these changes made a measurable impact in organizations, or have the results fallen short of the promises? Almost everyone has access to far more data in a much more timely fashion than they used to (well, almost everyone), but is it better, more actionable data? In a real sense, BI tools, and the data hubs, data warehouses, and operational data stores that feed them, expand our view of data in the same way that a more sensitive telescope can see deeper into the universe. We now have the ability to see things in detail that we could never even see before; we can see deeper into the data on which our enterprises function. The real question with BI today is, are we seeing the right things at the time we need to see them?
Technical innovation is widely viewed in the developed and developing world as the driver for economic and cultural growth and prosperity. The growth of network services and social media have made new innovation processes feasible, and the members of the next generation of knowledge workers often have been among the leaders in such approaches. However, few established organizations have developed strategies to encourage the new generation in these approaches, resulting in organizations being at a disadvantage in the competition for sustainable innovation.
"Innovation and the Net Generation," Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 10, No. 8
I've always encouraged a strong connection between SOA and EA. SOA is a critical architectural style moving forward and needs to be done at an enterprise level to achieve the full potential. In that respect, it must align with the EA domains of business, information, application, and technology as well as the disciplines of security, performance, governance, people, and processes. Ignoring those connections is a waste of time, energy, and opportunity. But a myopic view that ignores the differences in scopes, roles, and responsibilities doesn't benefit anyone either.
"SOA and EA: Related, But Not the Same," Enterprise Architecture Advisor, 22 September 2010
I don't doubt that most of you currently working on a project have identified a series of risks to your project. But do you know which one or maybe two are the ones that tell you that this is the time that an urgent review of the project is necessary -- before something terrible happens? If you don't, then you probably haven't identified the right risk(s).
Each project has its own canary. I have frequently mentioned that assumptions made are risks accepted. Tracking assumptions can be one set of canaries.
Another might be related to basic processes that need not only to exist but to be done well, like requirements definition or ensuring adequate test coverage. If basic processes don't exist, or aren't done well, then you have a canary already gasping for breath.
If you are the project manager, and you don't know which risk or project measure is the canary, I would urge you to sit down with your staff and try to identify it now.
Who knows, the canary might just save your project -- and your job.
Technical debt is about doing the system right, not about doing the right system. It is essentially a quantifiable measure of how good the quality of your code is. It does not address functional completeness, nor can it predict success in the market. However, functional completeness might not amount to much if your technical debt is high. Likewise, market success is likely to elude you if you do not pay back your technical debt in a timely manner.
I've long felt that the criterion for defining project success as meeting a specification within the constraints of time and cost is misdirected. It really ignores the business, the client, and organizational satisfaction. My criterion is that project success is measured by delivering expected business value. After all, isn't it expected business value that justified the need to do the project in the first place? There are of course some exceptions in the case of mandated and otherwise required projects regardless of whether or not they deliver business value.
"What Is a Requirement, Really?" Agile Product & Project Management Advisor, 9 September 2010
I see a growing demand for software, services, and personnel that will enable organizations to analyze social media as well as to interpret and apply the results to achieve some kind of business goal or competitive advantage. This demand has already started; however, I expect it to really begin to ramp up next year. This demand will come from commercial organizations seeking to capitalize on social media as new advertising/marketing channels. However, government and political organizations will also seek to use social media analysis to uncover and track criminal and terrorist activity, as well as to monitor and influence their constituents. In particular, I see a growing use of social media analysis by governments to counter negative sentiment expressed by activists and extremists. For example, I believe that the Chinese government is already using such techniques to find and influence negative sentiment pertaining to Tibetan independence. The same can be said of the US government, which in addition to using social media analysis and marketing to monitor civil unrest in such countries as Iran, is also using the technology to track potential terrorist activities online, and to try and blunt propaganda campaigns conducted by fundamentalist Islamic groups in areas deemed to be of extreme strategic importance.
We require effective techniques for analyzing demand that allow the business analyst to consider a range of factors in taking a good idea, turning it into a solid concept, and working progressively through the business case to project initiation. In particular, demand-side techniques (such as business goal analysis) must be balanced with supply-side techniques (such as impact analysis). Business proposals are not always "valid” and do not take priority by default. In the rush to put business cases together, somehow attention falls naturally on costs and (less so) on the envisaged benefits. In concentrating on how much, it is easy to lose sight of why.
Having a strong point of view about what the business really needs means one has to study the business deeply and passionately and think like a customer, a competitor, and an owner. You can't walk away from or claim ignorance of the essence of what the organization does. You must imbibe it deeply. Doing so lets you better engage in a richer understanding of other business leaders' challenges and perspectives. I believe this is what makes great IT leaders valuable.
But let me be clear, leaders do in fact serve. They serve customers, stakeholders, and employees. They know how to avoid intruding into a teammate's space. They know how to let others take their place when needed. But they serve from the strongest position of ownership they can find. It isn't an either or thing -- these days, an IT leader must do both.
Kanban is definitely up to something, and it's worth paying attention to it. But even more useful is seriously trying it out the right way. The survey results are in agreement with what the majority of people who have truly paid attention or have tried Kanban think of it. The degree of improvement on quality, satisfaction, and performance reported by those doing Kanban strongly suggests it's a valuable methodology to adopt. My recommendation is to read more about Kanban, contact an expert, and carry out a conversation to better understand what Kanban can do for you based on your specific needs. For successful adoption, the best route is to take both training and coaching. It is also of high importance to bring lean thinking into your organization. Your Kanban coach should be able to provide that to you. No matter if you are already doing agile or not, Kanban is a fabulous, natural next step.
"Kanban in Software Development: It's Worth Adopting," Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 10, No. 9
[T]rust is essential for effective teamwork. Agile methods provide mechanisms to build trust slowly over time through making small commitments and delivering on those. Experienced agile coaches can help accelerate this by smoothing the path.
Teams need time to get to know each other in order to gel, and creating opportunities for team members to have some social time can speeds this up. You can also accelerate trust on teams by establishing working agreements that everyone buys into. We can rely on our teammates when they have the appropriate skills. Allowing time for study and learning at work gives a signal that skills are important and provides an avenue for those team members who need to refresh their skills.
Last but not least, building trust starts from the inside-out. Act with integrity and demonstrate that you are willing to invest in trusting your team.
People's relationships are the paths along which the knowledge flows. A former colleague who in the 1990s led early KM efforts at Schlumberger, the oilfield services company, put it in terms that others in his industry would understand, comparing the flow of knowledge to that of oil in the pores of a rock. An organization in which people-to-people connections are recognized and exploited is like a rock with better-connected pores, from which oil can be produced instead of remaining trapped.
We need to be clear about what demand management means before it can be applied effectively, and we need to understand the shift from a supply-oriented view of IT to one that balances supply with demand. Here, the very term "demand management" is most unfortunate in that it carries the implication of a consumer-oriented view of IT in which IT practitioners are brought into the business units they serve. While this approach has the potential advantage of aligning development efforts with business goals, it also carries the well-documented threat of fragmentation and loss of control of IT. A balanced view means handling business demand for IT in such a way that it reaches a harmonious and beneficial relationship with IT supply.
For decades, I have worked with software organizations around the world, helping them improve their software development processes. And every time we apply simple step-by-step approaches -- requirements before design, design before coding, testing before installation -- things get better; users and programmers have a better idea of their requirements; developers develop better programs, and so on. But, like doctors, there is so much technology that comes out and new technology is so much more interesting than dull old process improvement, that step-by-step approaches get forgotten or bypassed and new people are not trained.
These are tough times. Organizations have to do more with less. Managers have to stop being afraid of their staff and they need to get more done with less. This doesn't mean that they should ignore new technologies. Indeed, there are some technologies out there that are mature and would improve productivity by orders of magnitude if used correctly, but they require discipline, and discipline requires management and commitment.
As these Gen-Yers enter the workforce in ever growing numbers in the next decade, becoming our employees (and sometimes our managers!), it behooves us to gain a deeper understanding of how they tick, particularly in relation to the technology that keeps our businesses running. The better we understand how to make use of the unique talents of this up-and-coming generation, the more innovation and creativity we can expect to unlock and take advantage of as we build successful business relationships with its members. Furthermore, and perhaps more immediate, the more we understand this new generation, the more successful we will be in both recruiting and retaining them as effective contributing members of our organizations.
As always, technology itself is not a solution to business problems. At best, it is an enabler to solving them if, at the same time, the company makes the necessary business, process, and organizational changes required. Only then will the potential values and efficiencies of any package be realized. So, if you're contemplating the acquisition of a commercial off-the-shelf application, make sure you go into it with your eyes wide open. There are no silver bullets, just enablers and hard work.
"Beware the Silver Bullets," Enterprise Architecture Advisor, 8 September 2010
Why it is wrong for employees not to tell their bosses of the risks they are encountering, but it is OK for their bosses to "modulate" the truth about risks if doing so serves to "achieve a better outcome"? For instance, on a project where the risks to success are starting to increase, should the project manager acknowledge the situation to his or her team, or continue to tell them that everything is OK? In other words, does disclosing the risks put the project at further risk by sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD, as it often known), thereby possibly creating a self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecy? Is it better to put up an optimistic front to keep everyone focused on the job at hand? But that said, why should the project manager disclose the risks to his or her bosses, for fear of undercutting their support for the project?
Agile leaders focus more on influence than on control. While exercising authority (control) over others' actions and decisions is one of the necessary management behaviors, agile managers rely to a greater extent on influence, steering people in a direction without telling them to do something specific. Steering helps others learn, telling doesn't. As a big part of agility is continual learning, constantly telling people what to do in detail (micro-management) keeps them from learning, and keeps them from being creative and innovative.
Moving from a control mindset to an influencing one is difficult for many. Allowing people to make their own mistakes and learn from those mistakes takes confidence in the process and a trust in people -- especially when a manager thinks he or she already knows the best solution.
"Influence vs. Control: Learning from Mistakes," Agile Product & Project Management Advisor