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March 24, 2007

The Rite(s) of Way

Today's coffee talk topic: performance improvement is neither performed nor improved. Talk amongst yourselves.

If you've been reading stuff around here before, you know that we always separate performance, competency and capability the same way we separate effects, causes and prerequisites. We even generally eschew pondering the catness of dogs and the appleness of oranges. But that doesn't mean we blow off the criss-crossings of ideas. This piece is about the intersection of Susan Conway in Optimize Magazine (January 2007, p. 50), and our everpresent mates at McKinsey.

Conway, driving north-south, describes her trip: "In my research over the past several years, I've found that measuring specific business challenges is possible using a productivity-impact framework (PIF) to understand what IT solutions are needed to increase productivity... PIF is a Lean Six Sigma (LSS)-compliant process that supports the correlation of ... variables ... to measure the impact of information and technology on an enterprise's productivity... Measuring, mapping, and understanding the right combination of technology and business processes, practices, and procedures let an organization achieve productivity gains...both capability and the efficiency or speed of delivery ... of products and services to customers."

McKinsey, driving East-West, routinely promotes the need to understand what kind of "productivity" would be most relevant by distinguishing and targeting the three essential strategic business needs: "Stay in the Race", "Win the Race", and "Change the Rules"... Their thought: when you come to the three-pronged fork in the road, chances are you need to pick one of the prongs before proceeding.

Conway's path is about using tools to speed up work that can also be procedurally optimized. We can call that "how to work" or "Do the Work Right". McKinsey's concern, on the other hand, is about heading in the right direction in the first place -- or let's call it "Do the Right Work".

This still allows us to see how they can -- and arguably should -- complement each other. There are lots of intersections. In drawing that up (below), a larger frame of reference emerges that starts to "organize" the ongoing 3-letter-hell blitz of "solutions" crowding our many fields of enterprise management.

We like the idea that Conway's three terms can represent what the enterprise ought to be worried about getting good at. Still, with that frame of reference, I took a second pass. In the second pass I stretched but not shifted what appears to be Conway's focus on IT per se. Why? Because: as tools, IT gets (from Conway) a specific kind of attention as an "enabler" bottom layer or element in a "productivity model" (north-south axis); but in effect, there are no managerial solutions listed in the framework here that are really practiceable without IT. As a result, we should revisit this "productivity" issue in Conway's north-south axis. What is shown below is a better version of the frame using some alternative terms. The new frame's north-south terms (or second dimension) -- information, communications/workflow, and governance/practices -- describe and stack the supporting roles of those solutions shown, in a model of "strategic" productivity. That is, the bottom row supports the middle row, which supports the top row. Meanwhile, this new frame assumes that all three of Conway's PIF terms are really a third dimension -- the PIF pertains to tactical productivity within each (and every) "solution" shown in the frame.

Corrected frame:

Glossary of solutions:
ITSM - IT Service Management
BSM - Business Service Management
PLM - Product Lifecycle Management

SOA - Service Oriented Architecture
BPM - Business Process Management
OPM - Operational Performance Management

KM / BI - Knowledge Management, and Business Intelligence
SCM - Supply Chain Management
CRM - Customer Relationship Management

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 24, 2007 7:10 AM

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