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September 29, 2007
Beyond Alignment: Balance?
What actually makes any "Top Ten" list interesting is knowing something, maybe a lot, about what didn't make it onto the list.
Baseline Magazine's Topline section ran their top ten best practices for IT-Business alignment in August, with Robert Hertzberg laying out "core principles" that should help companies get past what he called "messing up this fundamental aspect of I.T. management"... What it said, in its own words, is that "a lot of these [practices] are about structures and processes... but think beyond alignment." Since the article handily lives in full online (and also still in print for the diligent researcher), we can just revisit it here both in summary and with an eye towards what it didn't say.
After a couple of readings, the ten items in the list group into an interesting basic story. The highlight of this story is that the best practices all seem to hinge on meetings and facetime, documentation, and/or interaction and teaming. Put simply, without communications, most of the practices don't happen or don't matter. But there's more. In summary fashion, here's how the high-level dynamic stacks up: communications mediates between what we care about and who cares. More specifically, as shown in the pictures below, the core ten practices list advises to model and measure commitments (what we care about), and to organize support and awareness (who cares).
Looking at the themes represented in the core ten list, it turns out that this means managing risk, strategy and ROI on the one hand, and managing projects, relationships and incentive on the other. So what was left out of the list? It's not so much a matter of line items as it is a matter of further identifying what must be done about what made the list. Curiously, the Baseline list, claiming to be largely about structures and process, didn't use any of many key terms that one might expect in a discussion aimed at I.T. managers. In the images below, we can see the general correspondence of the themes found in Hertzberg's list (upper image) to the way I.T. managers might ordinarily implement structures and processes to support the core practices (lower):
Given this "big picture", the most interesting and maybe disturbing omission in the original Hertzberg list was any clear reference to the roles of managed knowledge and of managed I.T. architecture as factors of alignment between the Business and I.T. We can only speculate whether this is some kind of sign of the times, or instead is meant to be implied by whatever lies within the list's advised "thinking beyond alignment".
But as suggested in the illustrations above, alignment itself may be something needing a degree of redefinition. What if the key to preventing the "messing up" is first and foremost about balance? Namely, balance between the attention to what we care about (the left side of the pictures) and the attention to who cares. For example, many practices aim to "optimize" efforts within a single area, presuming that the results will be valuable in some absolute way. But whenever the energy given to the issues on one side of the picture aren't matched by corresponding emphasis to issues on the other side, it is arguably unreasonable to expect good things to happen, and it is easy to expect counterproductive exaggerations of some kind to occur instead.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 22, 2007
Being Steve Jobs
Oh well.
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(Image credit: not mine. Vidcap from the copyrighted commercial DVD.
On that note, how long before Jobs has it streaming to an iPod?
Consider this image use free pubilicity.)
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 21, 2007
CIO 2.0 part Two
When Gartner Group published its Resource Synchronization Chart at ITXpo 2000 seven years ago, it identified a 4-level maturity model that identified the highest level of maturity -- System Synchronization -- in terms of a "business unit's view of IT Value" in association with "IT Asset Management" and "Operations Management".
Seven years later, it may be the case that only some large interesting companies, not the numerous smaller or just plain boring ones, are going to be recognized as having reached system synchronization.
What is the BU's view of IT value at this synchronization level? "Facilitate Business Value Creation". When we look at what "value" has to mean, it almost always means "a distinction with a difference", as opposed to the popularly known opposite, a distinction without a difference. A proper understanding of this will mean not just glamourizing year-over-year growth, but equally well recognizing companies that successfully maintain themselves where others can't even play.
Value comes in the difference that a distinction makes, while the distinction itself comes from actions taken. Actions are the source of alternatives, contrasts, innovations, or namely all the things generally associated with well-executed strategies that provide a competitive (survival) advantage in a business ecosystem. Action is essentially labor, and technology is essentially labor enhancement. So the question of aligning technology and business has never been complicated, not for the Pony Express and not for Amazon.com, but also not for dentists and not for a pro baseball club.
Politics and economics in implementation are where most of the complication typically arises, but with companies that mainly play in markets actually created by superior labor capabilities, a refreshing absence of confusion about IT can exist. The real challenge is for those companies to know that they are doing the right work -- literally, to know that they are making the right difference.
Except in some Darwinian sense, it does not logically follow that our CIO 2.0 is supposed to know what the right difference is. If that were the case, we wouldn't need chief marketing officers. But where does "the right difference" come from, anyway? From the perspective of someone who both cares about the distinction made by the labor and who can reward well enough. What is more sensible, then, is that all executives who can articulate how labor and opportunity are related to serve the interest of a market should be responsible for organizing the enterprise appropriately. The responsibility is what makes them executives or chiefs. There is no demonstrated reason why CIO 1.0 couldn't be qualified to do that. But there has always been plenty of evidence as to why CIO 1.0 has not been allowed to do that, if not at the hiring gate, then afterwards. The question is, why is that going to change now?
Meanwhile, we just can't know how many great "marketers" have been undermined by inadequate labor. As for convergence, well, rebranding good ideas is important because it gets fresh audiences paying attention. But the biggest problem to solve in the business-IT relationship is not going to go away until organizations learn to prefer "resource" accounting over "property" accounting. And what is a resource? An asset with a job to do. Guess what happens when bad assignments are made.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
CIO 2.0 part One
Faisal Hoque, father of the Business Technology Management Institute, talks about the issue of solving the right problem instead of the wrong one in the CIO Insight article "Convergence, Yes; Alignment, No." As CIO Insight put it, Hoque noted that "rather than a goal, alignment is a stage on a journey to a more complete merging of IT and business that he calls convergence." With convergence, Hoque explains, "The business model is so intertwined with IT that there's no separate orientation."
What are the key features of this view for the top IT manager, for the CIO of the future? The same as for the CIO of now.
The first is the working definition of IT, which must position IT as business technology. This means technology of the type of business, not technology owned by the corporation of business. Here is a brief primer on business technology:
The second key feature is the working definition of "management". In the abstract, this has to mean "drive and authorize all key decisions about the utility value of the phenomenon at hand throughout its lifecycle." Naturally, the scope of this responsibility may involve or even necessitate collaboration and power sharing, and this means that a model of value-generation must exist to which all can subscribe. If this is to occur with IT, the concept of "IT" must be "operationalized":
From there, the third key feature, the point of it all, is to apply the operational potential to the business needs: this is how the IT model becomes the "dynamic" of the business model.
dynamic
1817, as a term in philosophy; 1827 in the sense "force producing motion," from Fr. dynamique (1762), from Ger. dynamisch, introduced by Leibnitz 1691 from Gk. dynamikos "powerful," from dynamis "power," from dynasthai "be able to have power," of unknown origin. The fig. sense of "active, potent, energetic" is from 1856. Dynamics as a branch of physics was in use from 1788.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
Given the numerous points at which IT could be mapped to needs, it isn't hard to appreciate that the current state of a business operation may have to go through significant re-modeling (transformation) to base the business model itself on the influences of IT. Speaking of that, the evolution of IT's realization as a business enabler actually is a goal, not just a stage. But the sneaky punchline to this is that the business may not need to be its own "IT-enablement" provider. Fusing the IT model and the business model (value management) is not the same problem to solve as the problem of establishing competency in the role of IT provider (performance management).
(This discussion continues in the follow-on article CIO 2.0 part Two.)
Image credits:
http://www.how-to-draw-and-paint.com/images/BasicHorse3.jpg
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/~pererat/7751.jpg
http://www.tsc-global.com/index1.html
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 19, 2007
What is "Scope", anyway?
Lots of Archestra stuff points out that needs are not requirements. This is worth repeating because it's so easy to forget. But keeping that in mind, when is a solution not a solution? When it doesn't solve the right problem.
One of the best ways to not solve the right problem is to not identify the problem correctly in the first place.
Over and over again, organizations experience confusion in problem definition. Often they are helped by the funny way that solutions arrive on the scene without enough definition themselves, and start redefining the problem the way somebody stretches into a badly fitting suit.
When that happens, the hard questions about scope should kick in. Most solution consultants will say that the point of adopting a solution is to reach a target "future state" that is measurably different from the "current state". What ought to be front and center is the probability that the "future" is soon enough and that it's a place you can stay long enough when you get there. In other words, what has to happen, as opposed to what hypothetically could happen, is something that is feasible (you can do it now) and viable (you can keep it up). If those two points aren't covered, then what is the point of struggling so hard to do something relevant to generate benefits?
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Make IT a Business Strategy
In the CIO Magazine article Let the Business Drive IT Strategy, the visibility of many views on strategy helps to paint the map so that people concerned with IT strategy management can see where their relative starting points are, not just their goals.
But in that map, how did we wind up in so many different starting places that we decided to call by the same name?
Here is a 50,000 foot high view to consider. What does "IT Strategy" mean? Strategy for what? The candidates are found in two dimensions.
First - what is used:
- Services
- Resources
- Information
Second - how it is organized for use:
- Provision
- Architecture
- Property (assets)
Make a 3x3 matrix of the above, identify what needs to happen in each cell and who needs to care (owner, operator, consumer), and then on the business side at least everyone can see what they are trying to talk about.
With that view, it then becomes meaningful to talk about the business's ideas of performance (goals), value (impacts), and risk (policy and culture) -- with the objective of assigning people to be responsible for them and then investing to make those people successful.
This isn't about "succeeding with a strategy"... it is about actually managing with a strategy.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 15, 2007
Run That By Me Again
Recent messages from Hill & Knowlton alert that a topic of growing study about performance is on workers selecting their own career track. It goes without saying that this makes sense only if the selections turn out to be rewarding for employers. But what about the other side of the coin? You can't spend one side without spending the other too.
Much is made of the idea that, in life, and presumably here in self-selection career mode, we would transfer "lessons learned" from one arena to another. Alas,
this limitation is the case whenever the model of organizational performance can't be abstracted from the ladder of careers. Those square pegs that worked in another model won't fit neatly into the round holes provided for inserting rungs in the ladder.
The most important piece of the old system to change is the piece where employers and employees negotiate the terms of "compensation" -- terms that must include warranty (of opportunity) as well as objectivity (of measurement).
Both opportunity and warranty must be encoded in the operational "playbook". When the people in charge can show how the organizational model feeds the plays, instead of the other way around, the resourcing and subscription of the work is then much less restricted. Just as processes actually depend more on particular roles than on particular participants, participants need to be replaceable without breaking the system.
This has the fascinating effect of requiring managers to get more strategic in the organization of operations, just as the general manager of a baseball team is on even an everyday hour-to-hour basis. And, on the flip side, how many employees are willing to be "players" instead of secured workers?
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 14, 2007
Smart enough to be Lucky
Along with confusion about "business intelligence" comes similar uncertainties about "predictive analytics".
Aside from the very entertaining irony of not being able to predict the value of predictive analytics, is this another case of managers and markets just making things harder than they need to be?
The very notion of analyzing one's way to a "correct prediction" is so provocative, it's hard to even make a comment about it that stays on point instead of swinging freely between paranoia and irrational exuberance... But let's look at the enthusiasms, this way:
- everyone wants predictive analytics;
- a subset of everyone wants to pay for it;
- a subset of that payers' group is willing to trust it;
- and a subset of that trusting group is willing to depend on it.
Meanwhile, the difference between what makes predictive analytics successfully marketable versus successfully useful is a gap just as large as between the whopping percentage of enthusiasts versus the miniscule percent of dependents.
Useful? To figure out where you ought to be within that gap, you have to decide whether you need, or not, to bet on change in order to get what you insist on gaining. The more you need to bet on change, the more you're ready to rely on predictive analytics.
But "predictive analytics" is confusing to people because it makes them think of "calculation" which makes them think of "facts" -- and in other words encourages the idea that there's science leading to certainty. The problem is that it isn't the kind of certainty they suspect! The real point of prediction is not to identify certain future outcomes; it is to identify certain future possibilities. If you're only interested in one possibility, you're not looking for analysis, you're looking for accounting.
(Timo Elliott's BI Questions Blog is the most recent location of discussion that provoked these comments.)
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 3, 2007
Performance Management meets Business Intelligence
If we assume that management prominently features Planning at the front end of the cycle of "management performance" (i.e., exercizing good competency in the discipline of "management")...
...and if we assume that planning uses intelligence in the form of research that provides indicators of the potential for future success and risk...
... then to establish that business intelligence (BI) is part of performance management (PM), it is unnecessary to go any further than the concept of forecasting. The important view of this involvement is that neither effort (BI nor PM) wholly includes or excludes the other; rather, they logically intersect, co-operatively.
BI manages the perception of the operational environment. PM manages investment in the operational dynamics.
Perhaps there will be comments from the readers on the idea that strategy manages the relationship of BI and PM for a target group of stakeholders...
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack