]]>Below: the official archestra guide to the Stuffosphere. This explains why you like their stuff. It also explains why they want each other's stuff, which they can't have, so they'll have to one-up it or put each other out of business. So far, Apple is the most competent at putting other guys out of business, but that just explains why they are in this picture in the first place.They are most at risk, because their act is the easiest one to screw up.
Key points to presume, gratuitously, from the guide:
- facebook should buy Yahoo and Netflix (which then gives Microsoft something to do for a while with both Skype and Bing)
- google should consume Hulu and fix Motorola so that it can have a real tablet play and assure that YouTube dominates streaming
- apple should figure out how to absorb Pixar, Kodak's world, Adobe's world, and the Gaming worlds
- amazon should go into banking or something
Copyright 2011 Malcolm Ryder / archestra
]]>"for the first time in a century, we have a viable alternative to the status quo. Thanks to the Web, we can imagine organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering."
In this vision, Hamel basically equates "organization" and "community", in a way that may in fact prove to be prescient but to date is probably more just emotionally appealing in its potential to get past conventional and vexing old problems. In devil's advocate mode, let's compare, but not devalue, the terms of that imagined organization against a harder set of terms.
1. Large: a matter of scale. But reach and scale are not the same thing.
2. Focused: a matter of goals. But interests and goals are not the same thing.
3. Specialized: a matter of competencies. But intents and competencies are not the same thing.
4. Efficient: a matter of resources. But commitments and resources are not the same thing.
5. Disciplined: a matter of compliance. But affinity and compliance are not the same thing.
Web-based communities are far more like "markets" than they are like organizations, and they have fundamentals of structural coherency that are not the same as "organizations". It may be, yes, that we can view and study both organizations and markets for their innate "chemistry" and "physics" -- but in so doing, it is the viewing perspective that is the same (consistent) across both markets and organizations, not the subjects that are necessarily actually similar to each other.
Lying behind this comparison of terms is a notion perhaps strongly dissimilar to Hamel's: management does not create organizations; rather, organizations create management. Although Hamel provides a great list of characteristic actions and responsibilities of traditional management right up front in his article, these are by and large things that organizations ask and/or need managers to do for one dominant reason: to provide a certain kind (not amount) of accountability for Form.
In large part, the conventional view of management has the pronounced characteristic of fusing, if not confusing, "accountability" with "form" itself, with a kind of "progressive" slant to evolving from accounting as "control" to accounting as "influence" -- evolving from restriction to persuasion. The analog of web life, where groups form around attractions instead of within boundaries, is therefore provocative, but if it is instructive then the type of instruction it provides needs to be dispassionate. Dispassionately: we already know how to run things differently, but who is it that cares?
On the terms of reach, interests, intents, commitments and affinities, it is not surprising that communities have the ability to form and reform themselves so spontaneously and dynamically. But the main purpose of a community is not to "act out" -- rather, it is to "bring together". Conventional management is highly intolerant of acting out unless it is in a prescribed direction; and except in the name of innovation or escape it is too anxious to just settle for "bringing together" (which after all actually has the sole function of creating pre-conditions, not causing other effects). Communities want to benefit from togetherness, of course; but communities know that they and/or their members can come and go mainly at their own expense -- that in fact, they are naturally ephemeral.
The real dynamics of communities is done a disservice by applying the popular notion "self-organizing" to them; and it's that "organizing" part that allows managers to be seduced by the idea that the "self"-ness can somehow be appropriated into an externally-directed technique called Management 2.0 or whatever...
Seeing past the seduciton, it is marketing that is the most obvious paradigm for managing on the basis of the terms of communities. With that notion, the analogous future "managed organization" would be a market of work moreso than an organization of labor. As an irresistible segue from that observation: in this future it would not be an organization that is capturing value from labor, but instead it would be work that is driving the market to value.
Having said that, the real challenge surfaces. Namely, how do investors latch on to value in such circumstances? Why would they invest? Who can be that kind of investor? The most probable outcome of a search for Management 2.0 is not that some newly discovered management will supplant an earlier one; instead, an other additional kind of management will increase as a natural consequence of cultural change stimulated by the new pervasiveness of experience on the web.
]]>]]>In a simplified view, the difference between a departmental structure and a business unit structure is, essentially, the lines of operational reporting required to account for the objectives that distinguish the department from any other department, or likewise the unit from any other unit.
Departments have responsibility mainly for managing operational resources that support business functions.
Business units have responsibiliy for accountable functions that map directly to business policy and business performance targets.
When an IT organization arranges itself to operate like a business, it will become policy and performance oriented in terms of the targets for business compliance and business impacts in the relationship that the business has with its customers and partners.
Talent within the IT organization will need to be assessed in terms of the roles that staff need to keep operations flowing towards business compliance and business performance.
As a result, the concept of operational performance metrics comes to the fore. These metrics attend to how selected methods of activity succeed in operational events and time periods for which outcomes such as compliance, customer satisfaction, efficiency, and customer retention are known to be good.
When it comes to talent in the IT organization, four key flavors of interest will map to those same outcomes:
- Compliance comes under risk management
- Customer satisfaction comes under requirements management
- Efficiency comes under resource management
- Retention comes under relationship management
Expertise in risk, requirements, resources and relationships is therefore fundamental to any notion of talent in the organization; and execution of course will rely on practical skills applied under the guidance of the expertise.
The combination of expertise and practical skills will be what most people think of as "competencies", so it is fair to construct a framework or at least an outline of the valuable competencies that must be available to the organization.
Conventionally, we have thought of "skills and experience" as the way to characterise the relative value of a staff member. But a more truthful reckoning of what was usually being acknowledged is a baseline and history of "tools and assignments". Depending on whether the history was predominantly one of breadth or of specialization, talent could be cast as success rates in situations involving "overviews" or involving "focus". This works fine when the essential matter is to determine "resourcefulness" in current conditions. Wise generalists and genius specialists both tend to get promoted, not just recruited. But it is complicated to think about resourcefulness when the challenge is an unknown or volatile future. Agility may quickly outweigh optimization.
A shift in perspective -- from that of staff positions to operational roles -- is part of moving towards competency. By analogy, operations are like a dramatic performance, and roles are the cast of the performance. The structure of the drama relies on the interaction of the roles. The director is preoccupied with the logic of the interactions. The director will work on that logic, attempting to streamline and optimize its force as the "cause" of the production "effects". The audience (or customer) gets the impact of the "production", and the players who are the best "inter-actors" are the ones with the most "talent" -- that is, for the demands of the situation, they are the ones with the most competency.
Interactions between managers of relationships, requirements, risks and resources are not fundamentally altered by the size of the organization. Small or large, the same bases have to get covered, so current IT staff will need to look at the scope of their current tools and assignments and understand what they have now that should be used for the purpose of the interactions of the four "Rs". Within the existing staff, the more readiness exists to support the Rs, the more talent is said to be present.
We can look at the Rs in light of the idea that the IT organization will take what is has and deliver capabilities in the form of services, just as if the services were products. The goal is to determine what products are both (a.) the most successful ones amongst customers and are (b.) the most likely ones to enjoy high sustained quality from the IT organization's production.
Aside from the analogy of a stage drama, there are several well known reference models appropriate for IT re-organization. The most important one currently is ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library. ITIL adoption is now pervasive and, consequently, is written about extensively by already successful practitioners. In ITIL, the interactive logic of operations is expressed as management processes, and processes are conducted co-operatively by roles. The effect of the co-operating processes is to create and deliver warrantied high-value services.
In the sense of providing services as if they were products: the outfit called Pragmatic Marketing has long offered a framework of interrelated competencies that account for how products are strategized and produced for targeted customers. In effect, it is a product management model that can guide thinking about a product called "a service", and it indicates where competencies need to be filled by roles.
Another familiar model, whether deemed successful or not, is matrix management, also extensively documented but often not presented with rigor that transcends a company's persistent idiosyncracies or tendency to change for other reasons.
Thanks to web search engines, looking into any of the above will likely lead to the discovery of many other specific models, so these others will not be itemized here. However, as a way of forecasting what a re-organization might provoke, it is useful to consider how the four Rs might generally affect each other.
Logically, if you're a provider, customers are more or less represented by what kind of requests they have, so their Requirements provide the rationale for having a Relationship with them. The scope of requirements, which can be tracked and analyzed, is compared to the practical chance of fulfilling them in production, so this chance (which includes both means and opportunity) is a representation of Risk. Acceptable levels of Risk set the boundaries of operations, and Resources are applied to production within those boundaries.
This arrangement of dependencies is not one saying, in reverse order, that resources "cause" risk, or that risk "causes" requirements, etc. But if not having satisfied customers is the current state, then the causes of that problem may be found in poor understanding and control of requirements, and/or risks, and/or resources.
We may also consider that where the current state is not a problem but instead is an option or opportunity, managers of the four Rs may each have a perspective on what can be moved, added or changed to create a viable production path to the option. In this case, they will need to assure that they wind up in alignment with each other rather than creating a scenario that cannot be realized on time or sustained long enough.
IT Providers who produce services focus long and hard on determining how to be sure that, in operations, requirements are not too risky to themselves or to the customer. This is done mainly through what is generally called a Service Level Agreement (SLA), and when the customer buys the service they buy this form of product quality guarantee. SLAs are terms and conditions that pre-set expectations about the service as a product, so that the provider is not compelled to do something it is not really prepared to do.
Meanwhile, a catalog of services not only shows a potential customer what products and quality is offered; it also shows them how to ask the provider for things in a way that is easy for the provider to understand. Without the threat of underachieving, the provider can actually spend more time looking into additional options. To show that the provider has a range of services and competencies, the provider can make a different catalog available for each different major type of customer.
Back to roles:
Customers will want a representative from the provider who is a good-to-great navigator through the catalog.
Meanwhile, new services might also be crafted from managed realignments of existing resources. (Resources include equipment, money, time, knowledge and labor).
Technology engineering will never stop, but the need for that expertise to be in-house will continue to change with industrial scale innovations that make it possibly unreasonable for companies to "roll their own" when the requirements for satisfying customers and partners do not disqualify solutions already available from elsewhere. This makes business and technology analysts critical to spearheading the transformation of an IT organization into a services provider, and engineering staff must be aligned to production as creators of exceptional resources working under sophisticated supply chain managers.
While much of the above is more the implications about remodeling instead of instructions, what is definite is that IT remodeling is a strategic project, or else it will probably fail to be better instead of just different.
]]>While most missteps in measurement can be traced to one or more of those three issues, two additional and potentially dramatic problems complete the list.
The first is in not realizing that both signal and noise must be measured, even though the operational goal will always be to minimize noise. This requirement exists nonetheless because understanding noise is the key to removing it; we use our understanding of it to find it and counteract it, leaving less to obscure the signal. The most famous and complex of this problem is known as the Observer Effect, which is also associated with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In short, the measurer himself is the noise that must be mitigated.
The second is even more of a requirement: avoiding confusion between rational measurement and logical measurement. Far from synonymous, the rational and the logical have very specifically different jobs.
Logical measurement is done within an already established framework, and its purpose is to grade the characteristics and relationships of components that have been presented as the necessary parts of an already defined whole. Therefore, if you have a model for something, what logical measurement does is to test the integrity of the actual state of things in terms of the intended state of things. Essentially, managers pursue validations with logical measures, and confirmations established by counting grade points covers a huge percentage of the information needing to be processed.
Rational measurement has a completely different function. Relative to logical measurement, the purpose of rational measurement is to determine if there is a model that makes sense of the prevailing or expected conditions. Rational measurements, in other words, are not aimed at manipulating conditions to conform to an existing model. Instead, rational measurements may show that the model is irrelevant to the prevailing conditions. Rational measures can find a pattern in the available information, and the pattern may thereafter be refined into a model. The refinement may also conflict with or even obsolete some prior model that has usually been associated with the circumstances in which information was gathered. Rational measurement discovers what really matters regardless of presuppositions, as opposed to dealing with only what counts within a presupposition.
Scientific evolution is essentially rational, while scientific application is primarily logical. This observation is important to, for example, the notion of innovation, where value is generated through new combinations of ways to do things with effects to produce. "Newness" in methods or effects is born of rational measures, although the sustainability of the new is often critically dependent on logical measures that can generate a return on the investment made in the new.
Meanwhile, it will turn out that logical measures may disprove the sustainability of an existing model (including a new one), but they are unlikely to show what model should replace it. Rational measures will be the gateway to the even newer model.
We tend to think of rational measures as a part of what is called "creative problem-solving", as if that effort is something that occurs outside of the normal mandate for efficiency in management. Looking at the efficiency notion correctly, however, exposes that it is dominated by a concern for resource accounting within an accepted model, dedicated to sustainability. Naturally, this only makes sense in environments where being really good at staying the same is the best way to be appropriately effective. But the fundamental challenge to management is not to stay the same; instead, it is to stay effective -- and that means being able to change when appropriateness itself has changed.
The most obvious familiar example of that idea is the ultimately unpredictable series of changes that are made by a coach during a sporting contest. Success is predicated on things that reduce variables and simultaneously enhance adaptability. Management attends, correspondingly, to the risks of certain outcomes, and to the evidence that it it is time to make a change -- allowing existing capacity to be effective. The punchline may be that rational measurement is better at coming to grips with what is actually under the control of management. In situations where there is a strong competitor, a volatile environment, or both, it is les likely that a logical focus on efficiency will have meaning except under the guidance of a rational focus on effectiveness.
Rational measures are the ones that focus on the kind of change that makes or breaks the relevancy of models, as opposed to on variances that prove or disprove incidental compliance. From this, we can see that both strategy and innovation are essentially rational, not logical. Strategy and innovation must both look beyond what is internally logical and desirable within a model, and this will include considering much of what logic tries to ignore or discard.
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The most rampant and disturbing example is the use of the term "transparent" to mean "visible" -- which of course is, well, silly, since transparent things are by definition quite hard to see.
Yes, yes, we know how this came about: things used to be hard to see until the obstructions became transparent. Removing obstructions has been hard and really useful. This doesn't make the current misuse of the term "transparent" less silly, but it points to a certain sloppy earnestness in business conversation, reflecting a need to be associated with some idea taken to be universally important. It may be that no one who is important in themselves needs to use the term "transparent" for any reason, having as they might a vocabulary that lets them correctly use words like "evident" or "visible".
Evidence can be deceiving, however. Take performance measures, for example. We have recently run across enthusiasm for the idea of "rubrics". Rubrics have the combined cool factor of secret decoder rings and great advice on technique. Simplified, a rubric is a list and a scope of target characteristics deemed significant. A rubric offers the chance for all who will use it to shoot for the same high grades, since the rubric says what to be like in order to get the high grade. It's like being given the answers to the test before the test is given. The road to success becomes highly ... visible.
So then, what's not to like? Wouldn't a rubric level the playing field by stating in advance how everyone is held to the same standards?
The answer is, why would it? A rubric on its own may be inherently flawless, but a rubric is pointless except in how it is used. As performance criteria, the terms of the rubric may have the virtue of consistency,capable of giving the same results from the same test over and over. But it may have the flaw of treating apples and oranges as if there was no difference between them. Terms that reveal a great orange may very well "reveal" a bad apple.
As a way to see this clearly, imagine two soccer teams, one conissting of high school players and one of college players. Each team has the same structure, made of the positions and roles that players can fill. A pretty straightforward rubric, used in evaluating performance, will point out that the college team is invariably better than the high school team. The post-game stats are going to look pretty bad for the high school team. But that measurement is dis-informative, because by ignoring the context of the respective teams, it fails to take into account that the high school team might be excellent amongst other high school teams, while its poor performance relative to a college team is trivial regardless of how factual it may be.
This becomes a potential issue when rewards are tied to the trivial. In an organization where performance evaluations are needed not only for assessment but for motivational purposes, rewarding trivial differences born of inappropriate comparisons is not only a good fake-out of management staff, but it is a good de-motivator of non-management staff.
Again, even at risk of being mis-used, a rubric has inherent virtues. But not only must it be context-sensitive to what it measures; also, the rubric itself exists in a larger functional context -- sharing influence with at least two other key instruments.
The other instruments are oldies but goodies: non-prize compensation (salary) and positions (titles). These go along with the key important offering of the rubric evaluation: recognition (reputation). High-performance in these three dimensions offers, respectively, the possibility of raises, promotions, and bonuses. But note that in this arrangement, rubrics should not determine salary or titles!
The relationship of compensation, position and recognition is this: they don't need each other to be respectively evaluated -- but each one may be seen as circumstantially influencing each other. The challenge for management, in understanding context, is to identify the circumstances that relate the various dimensions, while not confusing them with each other.
Clarity requires that we have a fundamentalist view of the three issues. That is, what is the purpose of each, which then allows its assessment to reveal some form of excellence that should be rewarded?
Putting it bluntly, the effort spent on maintaining each dimension looks for an impact that would be seen as a Return On Investment. A good ROI merits a reward.
Salary -- this is about a slice of total resource capacity that should be competitively affordable to retain. Retaining the resource assures structural integrity in operations. In this dimension, high performance is about affecting organizational stability and potential.
Title -- this is about a definition of a boundary for a role. Setting the role boundary affects the potential interactions with and of the structural components. In this dimension, high-performance is about affecting organizational behaviors.
Reputation -- this is about attraction, in a magnetic sense. Cultivating attraction affects the willingness of parties to co-operate. In this dimension, high-performance is about affecting the real-time resourcefulness of the organization, which in effect generates its agility in its environment.
With those independent values given, what are the significant relationships between them?
This perspective makes it somewhat obvious as to how a performance evaluation should look for critical contributions from the party being evaluated. Along with that, there is a reasonable expectation that raises, promotions, or bonuses recognize high performance (ROI) in the dimensions of compensation, position, and recognition, respectively. And earned Reputation, which associates with Rubrics, is a primary factor in quality... secondary in capability, and a non-factor in availability.
Even intuitively, context makes sense to us. We feel like rewarding someone who did something remarkable from a starting point of being lesser paid, junior level, or previously unnoticed. And naturally it is less surprising if something notable is done by a party that started out being higher paid, more senior level, or well-known -- mainly because those are conditions in which we already have greater expectations of something notable being done. Meanwhile, at any given time, some desired outcomes have higher priority than others and will therefore be linked to greater rewards.
But in the end, even the more accurate and relevant perspective above will not save someone from being mis-evaluated due to their having been put in a position unlikely to foster the high-end achievements.
So, what a rubric must do is find its place in the context of the evaluated party's opportunity to perform -- and clearly state what kind of ROI it is trying to both invoke and detect by looking for certain characteristics within that opportunity. Rewards should be about exceeding expectations that are reasonable within the opportunity.
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We would say that "Social Networks" are something whose time has come. And this would be true due in no small part to the acceptance that business really does run fundamentally in and on an "Information Economy" -- with social networks being a dazzling opportunity to easily generate and acquire information heretofore untapped or even orphaned in time and place. In short, what is sought is an infusion of Social Knowledge into Business Networking, and "social network" actually becomes a handy abbreviation.
No wonder that the phrase "Social Network" has special meaning to a large business.
But in reality, businesses have a funny way of not worrying about the "special meaning" of something, and instead grasping and acting on the "convenient use" of something. Convenience is sometimes pleasant but often unruly, which, in business lingo, probably means counter-productive.
If everyone keeps their head on straight, then there will be agreement that "a Network becomes a Medium for Communication of Information that may be Shared in the Production or Distribution of Knowledge"... With all the capitalized moving parts in that description, a few questions arise. For example: did the business actually "capitalize" (i.e., fund) all the parts (on its own or through partners)? Is the "connectivity" of the Network to the Production or Distribution being managed? What if anything is being done to transform Communication coincidences or Information coincidences into Shares? And does the business acknowledge that each moving part already carries a legacy of "administration" that is different from the other parts? Does it acknowledge that applying a "social" aspect to any of the parts requires both control and flexibility (i.e., policy)?
In the last four companies I've worked at (present included), none has actually licked the problem because the effort to cover these bases is huge and in fact there has been no "chief knowledge officer" to lead and enforce what is really necessary to make these parts work together properly and sustainably: namely, Engineering!
Let's face it, the "culture" of social networking is emotionally averse to the idea of environmental engineering, because the culture is about finding the magic in organic evolution, and it thinks that engineering will work against it. This aversion results in having the sense that crafty opportunism, packaged as "innovation", "grass roots" and "collaboration" should be the strategy for growing the environment we want to call the Social Network. The problem is, of course, that making a Social Network into an actual Business Environment is the only way that a social network can be both valuably and practically leveraged by or integrated with a larger, legitimate, managed business environment. The goal of that would be to eliminate the most predominant problems of business (not workforce) adoption of social networks:
- information mistaken for knowledge
- expensive and unvetted redundancy both within and across different information and communications systems
- unreliable completeness of collections and conversations
- unaligned value judgments amongst frequent users vs. occasional users
- and unaligned value judgments among managers of the business vs. non-managers.
Understandably, quality management is not outranked by any other type of service management attention. But where managers depend on measurements, the most common problem is a confusion about what measurements are "quality" measures and which might be unnecessary or better suited to a different management concern. The most frequent point of confusion is with performance management.
To distinguish the two, first it is worth noting that many measurements are important to both. But as facts within a point of view, these "shared" measurements fit differently into the two perspectives.
Quality is a percentage of a level of performance achieved both without defects and within the intended structural design of the acting entity. In comparison, performance itself is a level of operation achieved versus a target level of operation. As an example highlighting the difference and the relationship, high performance may be obtained from an acting entity, but because the quality of the entity is poor, the entity may break down or be distorted by the effort to reach and sustain the high performance. Logical management approaches aim to synchronize performance expectations with identifiable levvels of quality.
In overall operations, services underpin the performance of both products and processes, while the services themselves are also managed for their own performance. Different contexts then contribute the conditions that point those performances at quality considerations.
A business process that needs support is a "problem" for which applying a service is a "solution". In general, a service is a subscribed behavior of an operation. In this way we can see how standardized observations of the performance characteristics of the operation help to account for the success or failure of the business process.
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Having a strategy means taking a position from which operations will extend in logical directions and relations. In that sense, the strategy dictates a structure. This structure must function as an environment within which to comply to the strategy. Within the environment, certain behaviors are critical to the strategy by forming an alignment to the sustainability of the strategy. This means that the strategic requirements of the environment are for the environment to sustain the mandated logic of the operations.
No wonder, then, that strategy often precipitates re-organization. Organizing that environment is an architectural concern. Architecture creates the "spaces" in which behaviors conform to generate the impacts that function as the support for the strategy.
Spaces created by architecture are designed spaces, and the purpose of the design is to specify the characteristics of the space that are necessary to assure the needed functions (which are the impacts of behaviors).
The essential behaviors pertinent to a strategy are generic, but for any given strategy the behaviors are specifically related. This reflects the reality that strategy does not define behaviors (which are autonomous, portable and reusable) but instead defines their relevance. Behaviors typically needed for strategy include, for example:
These behaviors may be understood as "domains", and within a domain the activity can occur across a "range" of various disciplines, locations, resources, events, processes, and other phenomena.
The importance of acknowledging the domains and range is to understand that at minimum there is, for a strategy, an architectural framework that maps out commitments to some domains and commitments to some of the range. This framework is readily envisioned as a 2-dimensional matrix, but the likelihood is that more than two dimensions will be needed to sufficiently articulate both current commitments and the progression of successive commitments over time.
Architecture also is responsible for designing the spaces (the intersection of domains and ranges) in such a way that they facilitate the progressions, not just the moment. This is, for example, what is meant by saying that a flexible architecture is a prerequisite to strategc agility.
We can apply the concept of an architecture of a strategy to the scale and activity of an "enterprise". This architecture is especially important to an enterprise because it is the nature of an enterprise to set external boundaries and internal relations that in both cases cross over multiple significant time periods and multiple discrete organizations. Enterprise Strategy does not simply mean "the enterprise's strategy" -- but much more significantly and primarily it means "strategy that enables continuity and persistence of operation as an enterprise". To that concern we secondarily add the context of particular goals being addressed by the selection and plan of a strategy dedicated to external impacts (being, namely, where you're going to be and why you're going to be there).
Understanding the order of precedence of those two issues is esential to understanding that the relationship of strategies to enterprises is that they need each other but that the relationship may still fail or succeed. This relationship outcome usually has only some predictable factors, and uncertainty is a built-in characteristic of strategies but not of their good architecture. The risks of a bad strategy can include the risk of disrupting the viability of the enterprise, and the benefits of a good strategy can include enabling enterprise status where it had not existed before.
The Archestra Topical Framework (June 14, 2005) is the central reference framework of the work that appears on this website. As a reference it may be used as an instrument -- to contrast or confirm, extend or constrain, and describe or dissect the subjects, topics and propositions about strategy that come from theorists, analysts and practitioners, presented in their work.
(This text, and the Archestra Frameworks, are copyrighted by Malcolm Ryder.)
]]>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.
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.
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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."
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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
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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
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(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:
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IT strategy must be seen not as a monolithic pronouncement but instead as a continual practice with which use of information technology is tailored to the business use of information.
Business use of information falls into many separate but inter-operable domains including (but not limited to) communications, learning, analytics, research, and history -- along with production, and then of course, process management.
When we say "business strategy", the assumption is that there is a type of influence that the business seeks to have on its community of stakeholders and in its operating environment. This is an influence that depends on a position that the business can establish for itself, relative to other functional or operational entities that are either contiguous or party to the community and environment. The strategy is made up of the intent and plan to take the position for the purpose.
The use of information corresponds to the strategy, but -- not all information usage is about the strategy, except in the sense that it needs to either allow or cause the strategy to succeed. This means that the usage itself needs to succeed given the particular method of usage and the actual information itself.
IT strategy must concern itself with what methods can be combined with what kind of information, to provide the opportunity that the business strategy needs, by creating effects that are either preconditions or causes of the opportunity.
Accordingly, for IT strategy to make sense, first the opportunity needed by the business strategy must be identified, and then the type of information usage needed for the opportunity must be enabled by IT.
This requires understanding how the different information usages will co-operate to create conditions that will add up to the opportunity.
Some of those combinations are intuitively appealing because they are part of proven past efforts.
Bottom to top, those pairings usually allow the business to identify functions, design ways to conduct them, and generate specific operational capabilities from the designs. Obviously, relevant capabilities are an essential type of "opportunity". Drawing learning from history, or drawing analytics from research, and so forth, are typical interactions, and the effects of one pair are commonly leveraged by the pair above it.
At the same time, there is no guarantee that accomplishments in one area will flow up into others. Even where certain lineups are compelling, it is necessary to look into how a network of influences can arise in non-linear fashion amongst the full set of usages. These influences can be inhibitors as well as promoters.
For example: history can predispose analytics, by culturally reinforcing attention to some issues and neglect of others. Meanwhile, learning can predispose communications, by preselecting audiences. And production may impact research, whenever they compete for resources or persuasiveness.
Along with new capabilities, most business strategies can think in terms of ideas (knowledge), relationships and assets when exploring the types of opportunities that may be needed. Usually, in a mature business organization, these are all enjoying focused management The question is, for each type of opportunity, what should IT do to enable and orchestrate the six or more basic information usages required for creating and maintaining it?
The touchpoint between business strategy and IT strategy is those usages. In practice, the business strategist must determine which certain opportunities should be pursued. The IT strategist must identify, engage and evolve the related touchpoints so that their interactions are balanced towards providing the opportunities that the business strategy needs.
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