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March 30, 2008
Careful What You Ask For...
Anyone who has visited Archestra more than once ( all nine people! ...well, ok, eight not couting myself) knows that a major point getting made is this: what looks like problems without solutions is often due to the romantic allegiance we have to a misleading vocabulary.
It's especially important to catch those times when strategy, management, execution, and other fundamentals are being wrestled by name. In that vein, one of the longest-standing friends of Archestra -- Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith, Esquire -- caught the notice (again) of a somewhat newer friend -- Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt -- setting the stage for the commentary now here.
Bruce starts it off by reviewing ideas in the The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig. Rosenweig explores the historical ineffectiveness of management guru wisdom, and Bruce shortly comes to his own punchline: "In this unknowable world, what attitude and what approach grace us with the best odds of success? Only one: Critical thinking."
But as you read Bruce's fluid argument to the conclusion, you pass through the equally important question in his theme: "What do you have to know, to be the best performer?"
Jack, a seasoned spokesman for the Theory of Constraints (TOC), embraces Bruce's conclusion; but moreso he picks up that earlier question with his own followup, posing a perhaps ironic counterargument to Bruce's conclusion. With no pretense of being gurus, both men argue for the value of logic to management that would aspire to the top rung of performance. But Jack shines a light in the dark corner of logic's chronic problem with gaining broad acceptance. Case in point: Jack's observation that TOC works but still doesn't proliferate poses this question: "What does it take to get chosen as the management approach?" And our question, naturally, becomes "if you aren't chosen, then how can you be the key to success?"
Evidently, what it takes to be chosen is a combination of marketing and politics -- and the facts may be that the underlying genius of "success" is not the management approach used but instead the competitive approach employed by the executives. What Jack points out, intentionally or not, is beautifully brutal: that sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. And we must remember that winning ugly is still...winning. TOC companies may be winners, but most winners don't use TOC. (True, or false? Jack suggests, True.)
Consequently, when it comes to competition, we can't be sure that a great lot of companies should do anything in common; but instead we have to focus on why something works for the company that it works for.
In other words, there is a glaring difference between strategic management and competitive strategy, with the better competitors doing most of the winning, not foremost the better managed.
What executives must be responsible for is figuring out what strategy their company can win with; and what managers must do is figure out whether the company is doing what that appropriate competitive strategy calls for.
As both Bruce and Jack assert, critical thinking ought to be a key tool, and here we assert that it is a key tool in both competition and management. But what overrides both circumstances is the possibility that the thinking will be done about the wrong thing.
Eschewing mythologies and the emperor's new clothes, Jack quotes Bruce's counsel against that problem : "rigorous and unblinking analysis of reality as it is, not as you want it to be..." What we must take this to mean is not that some approach is inherently more competitively clairvoyant than another, but instead that executives and managers must not run the company based on a mythology (of an approach) that does not fit the company. To puncture the mythology, you have to be able to cut through the marketing and politics that surround it within the company.
New punchlines: as the top person in charge, you can't know what strategy will be your most successful against the competition before you know your organization; and when you reach an understanding of what your organization can do, you then have to either select a strategy that fits the organization, or you have to change your organization to fit a different strategy. What's tough is that you have to do this while the game is already underway.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 1:53 PM
March 26, 2008
Who Knows how to Manage Knowledge Management?
The initial impetus for practicing knowledge management as a discipline is to Effect a different outcome from what has already otherwise been obtained.
Best practices of knowledge management are meant to Affect the approaches to gaining the target outcome.
Question behind the outcome: "Why should knowledge be managed?"
Answer: knowledge has proved to be a resource that is critical to efficiently determining a two-part condition:
- when solution options exist and
- which options are optimal.
In the past, opportunity and quality have both suffered because effective knowledge was not available to be incorporated in a timely way during investigations and decision-making.
The goal of managing knowledge is to achieve timely discovery and acquisition of quality-checked knowledge for use during "live" investigation and decisioning.
It is important to recognize that investigation and decisioning are "constants" across a wide range of distinctive eforts:
- development (design, build)
- analysis (assess, interpret)
- auditing (measure, validate)
The management discipline provides people (roles), processes and tools to facilitate the following treatments of knowledge:
1 - discovery/generation
2 - QA
3 - acquisition/distribution
4 - lifecycle control (content versioning and retirement)
Practices within the discipline are "best" when they accomplish the following two things:
- they manage to align each of the four treatments individually with the operational environment that is meant to be sustained by executive influence (or group culture),
- but the practices align them in a way that allows each treatment to align with the other treatments (!) -- especially so that you get a chain linkage from 1 to 4 that allows 4 to also loop back as a "supplier" to 1.
With this overview, it is possible to understand where most of the phenomena that are now associated with KM should be able to fit in, and to simultaneously recognize that the various phenomena can be creatively "fitted in" to exploit special circumstances such as existing resources, emergencies, enthusiasm, or general curiosity and inventiveness. Those circumstances should be governed by a higher-level strategy. The typical phenomena include collaboration, multimedia (rich content), social networks, semantic search, library science, and games.
Any KM effort that is more than exploratory will run up against the challenge of organizational change, and that change will itself need to be managed. The more important it is for knowledge management to succeed, the more important it is to understand the implications of the current state of executive or culture influence versus their desired future state. Knowledge Management (KM) may indeed participate in changing those aspects, but it should be assumed that those aspects predetermine KM's likely prosperity and scope in the organization.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:29 AM
March 23, 2008
I'ma Get Open Source on Yo' Ass
Yahoo joins Google and builds a nonprofit to run OpenSocial so that the OpenSocial developers can have a freezone for exchanging "intellectual property assets" without a moola market. As the Associated Press stated on the Yahoo website, "the idea behind the Google-initiated OpenSocial platform is to create a common coding standard for the ['social tools'] applications so they work on hundreds of Web sites."
We decided to look up the meaning of "tools" to be confident of the richness in the breaking story. Using Yahoo's search engine, we kept coming up with entries like this exemplary one from Dictionary.com:
tool - noun: a person manipulated by another for the latter's own ends
No avoiding the thought that Yahoo would now be Google's tool; so we used Google's "Web Definition" search functon to see what happened. The search on "define tool" ripped in under two seconds to the most appropriate place we can think of, the socially open Urban Dictionary:
1. tool 4455 votes up, 517 votes down
One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used. A fool. A cretin. Characterized by low intelligence and/or self-steem.
3. tool 1708 votes up, 443 votes down
someone who is a complete idiot/ one who is used by other people, and usually dosen't even realize it/ someone who can't think for themselves/ an asshat.
People who wear huge logos on their shirts are tools.
This would be a good moment to mention that Google has given up its rights to the OpenSocial branding, as part of the deal. No fools in Gtown central.
Clearly you can be a tool without being a social tool; so how wack it is that three of the most powerful companies in the free world are aggregating the tools. This might make them social, but a better question is this: does going social on a social network make you a tool if you weren't one already?
The sports pages of the conventional business press can be expected to focus on that, backhandedly, in their ongoing coverage of the market strategy smackdown between the G force and MondoSoft. But of course, that's hardly the key story.
The key story will be the one that inevitably will break on the non-profit NPR when someone looking for a job at Google tries to sue Google for using their social site residue as an excuse to not hire them -- residue found on hundreds of websites thanks to the easy proliferation path of OpenSocial.
"So, Mr. Lovitz; how do you explain your involvement in this August 2007... occasion... at the Omega Hip VIP room?"
"Uhh... Acting!"
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:42 PM
Suddenly, It All Made Sense
Finally, that track that everything went off of, and where to get back on.
For the hi-res view, click here and go full screen or print.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2008
Who Knows how to Manage Knowledge Management?
The initial impetus for practicing knowledge management as a discipline is to Effect a different outcome from what has already otherwise been obtained.
Best practices of knowledge management are meant to Affect the approaches to gaining the target outcome.
Question behind the outcome: "Why should knowledge be managed?"
Answer: knowledge has proved to be a resource that is critical to efficiently determining a two-part condition:
- when solution options exist and
- which options are optimal.
In the past, opportunity and quality have both suffered because effective knowledge was not available to be incorporated in a timely way during investigations and decision-making.
The goal of managing knowledge is to achieve timely discovery and acquisition of quality-checked knowledge for use during "live" investigation and decisioning.
It is important to recognize that investigation and decisioning are "constants" across a wide range of distinctive eforts:
- development (design, build)
- analysis (assess, interpret)
- auditing (measure, validate)
The management discipline provides people (roles), processes and tools to facilitate the following treatments of knowledge:
1 - discovery/generation
2 - QA
3 - acquisition/distribution
4 - lifecycle control (content versioning and retirement)
Practices within the discipline are "best" when they accomplish the following two things:
- they manage to align each of the four treatments individually with the operational environment that is meant to be sustained by executive influence (or group culture),
- but the practices align them in a way that allows each treatment to align with the other treatments (!) -- especially so that you get a chain linkage from 1 to 4 that allows 4 to also loop back as a "supplier" to 1.
With this overview, it is possible to understand where most of the phenomena that are now associated with KM should be able to fit in, and to simultaneously recognize that the various phenomena can be creatively "fitted in" to exploit special circumstances such as existing resources, emergencies, enthusiasm, or general curiosity and inventiveness. Those circumstances should be governed by a higher-level strategy. The typical phenomena include collaboration, multimedia (rich content), social networks, semantic search, library science, and games.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:51 AM
Who Knows how to Manage Knowledge Management?
The initial impetus for practicing knowledge management as a discipline is to Effect a different outcome from what has already otherwise been obtained.
Best practices of knowledge management are meant to Affect the approaches to gaining the target outcome.
Question behind the outcome: "Why should knowledge be managed?"
Answer: knowledge has proved to be a resource that is critical to efficiently determining a two-part condition:
- when solution options exist and
- which options are optimal.
In the past, opportunity and quality have both suffered because effective knowledge was not available to be incorporated in a timely way during investigations and decision-making.
The goal of managing knowledge is to achieve timely discovery and acquisition of quality-checked knowledge for use during "live" investigation and decisioning.
It is important to recognize that investigation and decisioning are "constants" across a wide range of distinctive eforts:
- development (design, build)
- analysis (assess, interpret)
- auditing (measure, validate)
The management discipline provides people (roles), processes and tools to facilitate the following treatments of knowledge:
1 - discovery/generation
2 - QA
3 - acquisition/distribution
4 - lifecycle control (content versioning and retirement)
Practices within the discipline are "best" when they accomplish the following two things:
- they manage to align each of the four treatments individually with the operational environment that is meant to be sustained by executive influence (or group culture),
- but the practices align them in a way that allows each treatment to align with the other treatments (!) -- especially so that you get a chain linkage from 1 to 4 that allows 4 to also loop back as a "supplier" to 1.
With this overview, it is possible to understand where most of the phenomena that are now associated with KM should be able to fit in, and to simultaneously recognize that the various phenomena can be creatively "fitted in" to exploit special circumstances such as existing resources, emergencies, enthusiasm, or general curiosity and inventiveness. Those circumstances should be governed by a higher-level strategy. The typical phenomena include collaboration, multimedia (rich content), social networks, semantic search, library science, and games.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:51 AM
March 18, 2008
The End of Irrational Execution
Faisal Hoque, Chairman of BTM, appeared in Baseline Magazine with a brief discussion on the three elements needed for "Transformation: Inertia to Agility" (BTM innovates new business models and enhances financial performance by converging business and technology.)
As usual, Faisal offers a wonderful summation of what levers to throw and why to throw them. Here, he observes innovation, efficiency and abandonment.
Sound familiar? Perhaps the most interesting aspect of his article's proof point -- Amazon -- is that it shows how far we have recovered from the dot com era assumptions, particularly when it comes to understanding that in a business we actually have to get paid for making people happy. What Hoque really pins down, though, like a refreshed road marker, is that the "making" part is not the business, but is instead the competency.
Amongst the problems in the mix, the inertia that Faisal details is arguably the description of how business frustrates competency (“We have to meet this quarter’s numbers or we’re toast.” ), while on the other side of the coin Hoque highlights how competency, through enterprise architecture, can drive a business ("the first step is to get a clear picture of the entire enterprise...").
Meanwhile, that flashback we easily have on older preached wisdom like "Fail Faster!" and "Destroy Creatively!" still seems to apply, but the difference is that we have actual history on that now. The history begs the question, "why are only the exceptions successful?" Hoque's answer looks to be a turnaround on the old saying "If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter how you get there..." The turnaround is, "If you don't know how to get there, it doesn't matter where you're going." But we can't make the mistake of joining the casual crowd exuberance for "execution": the point is that enterprise architecture is the competency enabler that then delivers execution for the business.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2008
Innovation by CIOs: the Same Old Same Old
Proposed: Business is built on IT, and CIOs know more about what IT could offer to innovation, so they should drive the innovation.
On the one hand, it looks good on paper. It's not new, but it seems to make sense.
On the other hand... wait, where IS the other hand?
The CIO Insight Discussion hosted some talk from industry analysts Forrester and kicked off followup commentary.
Reader Jon McAdams had left an earlier comment there that saved the rest of us some writing... So I'll segue from some of what he was pointing at.
CIO's who don't feel very "chiefly" should rightfully question whether their compensation is in line with how they'll actually be measured. But in the world of performance measurement, speaking truth to power is personally relatively expensive. How do you afford it? There's the dilemma.
Proposed: Any CIO who wants to use the word "Innovation" more than once a business quarter should be prepared to provide the definition of what innovation is, by distinguishing its flavors from each other: the planned, the authorized, and the actual. If the CIO is a decision maker in all three dimensions, then there is, fortunately, no dilemma; there's just execution.
But in execution, there are two tracks to follow: priority, and production. If the CIO is not being paid to decide and validate their alignment with each other, then again there is, unfortunately, no dilemma. There's just the matter of whether other people around the CIO want to know what's real or not before they take the actions they actually take.
Let's face it, giving action orders to the "head of IT" doesn't require having a CIO or being realistic. Meanwhile, getting orders can be done with one hand tied behind your back. But being held responsible for the consequences of someone else's higher up decisions is clearly not a prescription for being the chief.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack