The Tao of "New"

Back in April of 2007, Optimize Magazine ran an article by M.S. Krishnan titled Moving Beyond Alignment. Its summary: strategic business innovation requires a flexible infrastructure so that the company can utilize the business models needed to achieve goals. Thus IT governance and architecture must enable the enterprise to "synchronize with changes in the business environment".

Meanwhile, scheduled for late 2010, the book from strategic technology architects Greg Suddreth and Whynde Melaragno called The Path to Real Business Transformation discusses "dynamic synchronization... a rigorous, business-case-driven collaboration between the business-process owners and their IT counterparts." For this, the framework of problem-solving is what they call business architecture.

"Innovation" always has an aura that suggests the big moment of arrival of the new. But getting to utilize the new is the only way that value is derived from innovation, and utilization requires integration into, and synchronization of,  the operational scheme of things. This emphasis on synchronization firmly declares that the problem of follow-through on business strategy is fundamentally about coordinating the moving parts.

Anyone who has tried to manually shift gears in a moving vehicle knows that synchronization has two operator-controlled aspects: time spent in the gear, and timing of gear changes. In a competitive context, where time and timing are pre-planned and managed for variances and circumstantial adjustments, this plan is even seen as a strategy itself. The performance level of the plan's execution, especially in complex or volatile environments, is then most often seen as "agility". Achieving agility is, for that reason, a common business objective related to scoring business goals.

Suddreth and Melaragno further state that "business architecture" is developed through a process that defines and institutes long-term change within a framework of strategy (for example of goals, related positions and directions), planning (for example, of resources), and execution (for example, of services). They go on to point out that multiple business areas must be complementary in the context of solving a defined business problem.

To assure proper pursuit of that agreement, it becomes necessary to appreciate the difference between innovative business uses of IT versus business use of innovative IT.

• In the former case, the emphasis is on the business-level understanding of how moving parts might be aligned in a new way.
• In the latter, the point is to introduce moving parts that have a different set of characteristics and interactions than those typically tried before.

From the point of view of these authors, the former issue is a concern of business architecture; and the latter issue is a concern of IT architecture, in which (among other things) the business architecture is  "physicalized" according to Suddreth and Melaragno.

Given those points above, it would seem that the challenge is to prioritize business innovation, then leverage business architecture to identify and incorporate IT innovation that can be scheduled within IT architecture for a reasonable chance of sustained synchronization.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:36 PM

June 22, 2010

Social Networking

Leadership effectiveness requires followership.

Following requires accepting an extrinsic agenda.

Acceptance requires accomodating the agenda within a disposition.

The disposition is a point of view from within a network of influences.

Change management must generate a disposition favorable to leadership. 

It is said, "Individuals do not evolve; individuals change, and populations evolve."

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:51 PM

June 21, 2010

The Vertical Web

The periodic media campaigning for Web 2.0, 3G, Web 3.0, 4G and the rest are testimonials to the waves of functional innovation that break across the public-use digital information networks. These successive "versionings" represent a willingness on the part of network operators to try to provide relatively unprecedented capabilities with continuous -- if yet tenuous -- availability.

Although corporations are in a better position to maximally exploit new web environments, the common verification of web evolution is most strongly felt at the individual user's level, where over time the following distinctive progressions have occurred as "status quo" of reasonable expectations and the baseline expectation of using the web. In the original stage, digitization supported broadcasting; then in the next stage browsing supported the read/write web; and bandwidth pulled up the third stage. In that representation, key bundles of capability reached a critical minimal maturity at each stage and together set operational expectations.

 

Tracking such progressions always raises the question of "what next?" -- and in this case the most important next stage will find enough overall functionalities and interoperabilities such that an entire system -- and ecosystem -- for a given subject domain can be affordably traversed on the web by the individual user. This "vertical integration" means that the web will cease to be an undifferentiated "superhighway" and a series of outlets or malls, and instead become the virtual world of rich, semantically inter-activated media in which lifelike simulation will become comprehensive daily personal production: not just an internetwork of information but an internetwork of targeted special interest.

 

Typically, marketers have been working in the space to create systemic connections of interest to parties in the role of "producers" (meaning, those whose primary function is to make something from being informed, or being supplied with content); and this has been layered atop the older presence of operations by "reporters" (meaning, those whose primary function is to present information). In the next "default" iteration of the web, personal production will be attended by agents and partners, to the same degree that marketers currently scrutinize and manipulate experiences. This additional attendance will "close the loop" between an individual's internally directed (presumed) and externally directed (assumed) personae in the web environment. At that point, specialization of interest domains -- that is, channels -- will become routine and convenient as the typical organization of the web. 

Text and images copyright 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra

 

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:52 PM

June 20, 2010

Innovation and Information

When it's important to assure that things run the way they are already supposed to run, supervisors are on the critical path of success. But what if you need things to change? At that point, managers start looking pretty good, assuming it's clear what really needs to change.

This is where "innovation" gets tricky. It isn't the ability to manage the change that starts the trickiness. The tricky part starts with the decision about "doing innovation" in the first place. Innovation can take place in a way that amounts to being very good at something unnecessary, and it is exactly that risk that challenges would-be innovators -- unless there is a compelling logical justification of the innovation beforehand.

Generally, there are two compelling scenarios: competition, and recovery. Either one drives the desire and need to change rather than to stay put. The temptation is to immediately ask the questions, "competing with who?" or "recovering from what?" but having those answers does not make the value of an innovation assured. A predisposition to change will begin to influence a variety of things, which in effect need to respond not to the high-level goal but to related objectives.

The closer examination of needs seen in the framework here addresses the difference in perspective between what is important and what is also urgent. Circumstantial urgency often has the look and feel of importance, but there should be a deliberateness that is not overly reactive at the expense of being smart. Furthermore, the intent should not be merely to be different, but to be better. Better should mean greater satisfaction of prioritized need.

All innovation, by definition, introduces something new. But the complexity of even an ordinary business means that there are many different things that might be included -- and effort spent on the wrong things can easily translate into economic and political difficulties instead of benefits. Drilling down to more specificity, the following points out the basic types of opportunities to innovate. The role of the innovator is to produce something different, so the key terms that point to innovation opportunities are likewise terms that indicate the value of "products". 

Information relates to innovation by establishing the intelligence needed for deciding -- that is, targeting, describing and validating -- the production of the necessary changes. While any particular change can quickly invoke large amounts of diverse but related data, there are really only four categories of information that matter for innovation.-- because innovation means designing something new against expected future requirements. This perspective becomes the framework for testing the candidacy of any potential innovation.

Typically, innovation is heavily promoted as an industrial virtue, and business success stories are particularly notable when the success is attributed to a clever and courageous innovation.But that sex appeal easily diffuses in the difficulty of managing innovation through to significant benefits,  Understanding why to innovate, what to innovate, and how to represent it amongst the organization's workload protects against the risk of counterproductive speculations that give innovation a bad name.

 All text and images Copyright 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra

 

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:35 PM

June 19, 2010

Forecast: Partly Cloudy

(All text and images copyright 2009, 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra)

Emphasizing the obvious, when a business strategy works, business activities have impact. But it is more precise to say that the activities make the impact -- either by creating circumstances that allow it, or by directly causing it. So, the important way to start thinking about strategic "success" is to start with the practicals: activities mean tasks, and staff comes to work to do tasks with tools.

This makes it obvious why tools like I.T. (information technology) are not just helping business, but instead are an integral part of the "body" of business, as much as are people. Said differently, I.T. management has reasonably been a critical concern of the management of the internal "corporation" of the business.

While "internal IT" has evolved dramatically through several generations of computing, the essential organization of people and "IT" has not really changed: IT is part of the environment in which work is done.

However, generating the environment has not always been done exclusively from internal resources. Outsourcing is old news. And increasing technological advances based on use of the internet make it even more likely that the business will find opportunities to have production environments generated and/or hosted externally. Currently, the trend is mostly for external organizations to research and develop new web-based production environments first. While those external environments may then be shared by other businesses, the know-how for building such environments is also growing in, or migrating to, internal IT operations. As such, these new types of environments, called "clouds" are appearing in both external (usually shared or "tenanted") and internal  (usually private) variants, with privacy having a big lead in preference over sharing.

Companies that do not already have a "cloud" environment do already have an environment subject to a vast array of managerial concerns that address costs, engineering, and other factors that are decisive of the range, reach and utility of the environment's functionality in actual use. The different types of concerns also cut across the "levels" of structuring that compose the environment, which means that the overall management complex can be difficult to balance; when balance more or less exists, no one is especially excited to upset it -- and moving from that status quo to something different easily runs into a lot of resistance. 

 Yet in general, the reasons to make the move from a non-cloud environment to a cloud environment are business reasons: the two primary issues ultimately addressed by IT management of the work environment are economy of scope and economy of scale. If either one cannot be solved and sustained to the business's satisfaction, then there will be changes made of some kind. Economy of scope must be considered first, because it more closely relates to the reality of variety in the business's requirements. Normally, an internal non-cloud environment is tamed by managing the three key factors of its dynamics: demand, operation, and capacity. Management approaches focus strongly on the interrelationship of the three. Even the most general schema involves the following approach (as diagrammed)for packaging the Users'  environmental leveraging as services:

 

Put simply, without capacity, demand cannot be met, and without operations, there is no way to meet demand with capacity. Assuming this challenge is adequately addressed, there is always the matter of whether any of those key factors will change, so everyone is concerned about changes getting the upper hand. That set of conditions precedes the actual achievement level of economies of scale. Without economy of scale, the structural components of the environment do not "add up" well in the business perspective.

 

Good design helps to bring resources that are capable of supporting adequate economy of scale, but the actual deployment and utilization of the resources is what finally drives, and surfaces as, "economy". If not attended in a mature way, the dynamics of economy are more difficult to manage than the attributes of systems that can run at large scale: 

Moving an internal environment into a cloud formation will involve a very large number of decisions about what to add / move / change / delete in a restructuring, but most current business-perspective management issues will still be issues; the number of decisions will mount up more due to the number of components that are interlocked in providing services already. Determining those volumes and complexities is an exercise that is tied to the current state of affairs for each given environment, and the rest of this discussion is not aimed at illuminating that practical task. Instead, there is the matter of identifying, from the business perspective, what a managed cloud environment needs to be able to do,  which aims at the reasons and readiness for bothering with one.

That is, the functionalities that workers need supported by their environment must be available on demand, and the provision of those functionalities and support must be rationally administered by the business and by IT management within the business. Users need successful and appropriate interfaces for requesting well-defined services and options, on-demand. The managers of the environment must be able to understand true capacity and operate efficiently to apply it against managed types of demand. And, the perspectives of the Users and Managers must align.The framework shown below organizes these issues to indicate how they map to each other through appropriate administration and related practices.

In considering a move to a cloud environment, the first step is to foresee the organization of management itself as it should apply to the business requirements for the environment. Then, decisions about what and when to move can be made with the understanding that they are moving to something already visibly under control, where that control has a grip on the economies of scope and scale that make the environment correctly viable for the business. Practices such as compliance (including security), procedures (including ITIL), and consolidation (including virtualization) need to stay on the business radar as success factors that mean "porting" (or extending) management attention from the legacy environment to the new one. For leveraging an external cloud, this reaching over would mean engaging with a 3rd-party administration; but for an internal or private cloud the reach is about bandwidth, education and reorganization as necessary.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 1:05 PM