May 12th, 2013

Link Collection — May 12, 2013

  • Obama orders agencies to make data open, machine-readable by default | Ars Technica

    good, but note the “if implemented”…
     
    “President Barack Obama issued an executive order today that aims to make “open and machine-readable” data formats a requirement for all new government IT systems. The order would also apply to existing systems that are being modernized or upgraded. If implemented, the mandate would bring new life to efforts started by the Obama administration with the launch of Data.gov four years ago. It would also expand an order issued in 2012 to open up government systems with public interfaces for commercial app developers.

    “The default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable,” the president’s order reads. “Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable.” The order, however, also requires that this new “default state” protect personally identifiable information and other sensitive data on individual citizens, as well as classified information.”

    tags: opendata US

  • Will Your Golden Years Be Robot-Assisted?

    I’m totally counting on an eldercare robot, tho I might choose a name other than HERB:

    “Robots—in addition to other uses—are now being viewed as a way to meet the needs of a fast-growing aging population, with technologies that assist in daily care and provide companionship. Over  the next 18 years, 78 million baby boomers will turn 65 at a rate of about 8,000 a day. And most will not be able to afford the daily help often required by age-related disability.

    At the same time, health care costs are skyrocketing. Robots could help address both costs and manpower issues.”

    tags: robotics healthcare demographics

  • Technology is a tool: We can print guns, but we can also print prosthetic limbs — Tech News and Analysis

    “The same week that brought us a video of someone firing a gun built using parts manufactured on a 3D printer, on Wednesday offered us an inspiring story about using the same type of printer to manufacture a prosthetic hand for more than hundred times less than the cost of a traditional prosthetic set of fingers.

    The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.”

    tags: 3dprinting robohand makerbot

  • SAP Takes It All to the Cloud – NYTimes.com

    The inevitable: “We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”

    tags: SAP HANA cloud

  • The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

    “Deep Learning is a first step in this new direction. Basically, it involves building neural networks — networks that mimic the behavior of the human brain. Much like the brain, these multi-layered computer networks can gather information and react to it. They can build up an understanding of what objects look or sound like.

    In an effort to recreate human vision, for example, you might build a basic layer of artificial neurons that can detect simple things like the edges of a particular shape. The next layer could then piece together these edges to identify the larger shape, and then the shapes could be strung together to understand an object. The key here is that the software does all this on its own — a big advantage over older AI models, which required engineers to massage the visual or auditory data so that it could be digested by the machine-learning algorithm.

    With Deep Learning, Ng says, you just give the system a lot of data “so it can discover by itself what some of the concepts in the world are.””

    tags: AI brain algorithm data Ng

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May 3rd, 2013

Avoid the PowerPoint-to-Execution Gap: Strategists as Operators

Reading a point-of-view piece by Cynthia Montgomery in Rotman Magazine reminded me of a soapbox tweet of mine: “we need to value execution on par with creation”.

That tweet was inspired by a consultation I did on a critical project that had fallen into the PowerPoint-to-Execution Gap.

This project made all the right upfront moves: defined a bold, yet attainable business vision, rallied executive support, hired a top talent technology consultancy, and hand-picked a skunkworks team.

Upon completion of the upfront, they had a well-defined business problem (process, requirements, data, roles), which would be supported by a state-of-art technology architecture. The creation portion was top-notch. 

The problem was that company and project executives assumed that execution would take care of itself. They didn’t recognize that there is a strategic element to execution, involving not just scheduling, but careful packaging and orchestration of development, delivery, acceptance and business transformation activities.

In her Rotman piece, The Role of the Strategic Leader, Montgomery speaks to the often missed leadership component in strategic work, the “ongoing responsibility of leading strategy”.

“A great strategy, in short, is not a dream or a lofty idea, but rather the bridge between the economics of a market, the ideas at the core of a business, and action. To be sound, that bridge must rest on a foundation of clarity and realism, and it also needs a real operating sensibility.”

To illustrate her point, Montgomery — a Harvard Professor — describes how her MBA and Executive Education students inevitably debate the importance of strategy versus execution:

“Every year, early in the term, someone in class always wants to engage the group in a discussion about what’s more important: strategy or execution. In my view, this is a false dichotomy and a wrongheaded debate that the students themselves have to resolve, and I let them have a go at it.”

Montgomery revisits that early term debate with a real-world case on Gucci:

“I always bring that discussion up again at the end of my course, when we talk about Domenico De Sole’s tenure at Italian fashion eminence Gucci Group. De Sole, a tax attorney, was tapped for the company’s top job in 1995, following years of plummeting sales and mounting losses in the aftermath of unbridled licensing that had plastered Gucci’s name and distinctive red-and-green logo on everything from sneakers to whiskey — in fact, on 22,000 different products — making Gucci a cheapened and overexposed brand.

De Sole started by summoning every Gucci manager worldwide to a meeting in Florence. Instead of telling managers what he thought Gucci should be, De Sole asked them to look closely at the business and tell him what was selling and what wasn’t. He wanted to tackle the question “not by philosophy, but by data” — bringing strategy in line with experience rather than relying on intuition. The data were eye opening. Some of Gucci’s greatest recent successes had come from its few trendier, seasonal fashion items, and the traditional customer — the woman who cherished style, not fashion, and who wanted a classic item she would buy once and keep for a lifetime — had not come back to Gucci.

De Sole and his team, especially lead designer Tom Ford, weighed the evidence and concluded that they would follow the data and position the company in the upper middle of the designer market: luxury aimed at the masses. To complement its leather goods, Ford designed original, trendy — and, above all, exciting — ready-to-wear clothing each year, not as the company’s mainstay, but as its draw. The increased focus on fashion would help the world forget all those counterfeit bags and the Gucci toilet paper. It would propel the company toward a new brand identity, generating the kind of excitement that would bring new customers into Gucci stores, where they would also buy high-margin handbags and accessories.

To support the new fashion and brand strategies, De Sole and his team doubled advertising spending, modernized stores, and upgraded customer support. Unseen but no less important to the strategy’s success was Gucci’s supply chain. De Sole personally drove the back roads of Tuscany to pick the best 25 suppliers, and the company provided them with financial and technical support while simultaneously boosting the efficiency of its logistics. Costs fell and flexibility rose.”

The lesson from the Gucci case, according to Montgomery is clear:

“The only way a company will deliver on its promises, is if its strategists can think like operators.”

Montgomery continues:

“In effect, everything De Sole and Ford did — in design, product lineup, pricing, marketing, distribution, manufacturing, and logistics, not to mention organizational culture and management — was tightly coordinated, internally consistent, and interlocking. This was a system of resources and activities that worked together and reinforced each other, all aimed at producing products that were fashion forward, high quality, and good value.

It is easy to see the beauty of such a system of value creation once it is constructed, but constructing it isn’t often an easy or a beautiful process. The decisions embedded in such systems are often gutsy choices. For every moving part in the Gucci universe, De Sole faced a strictly binary decision: either it advanced the cause of fashion-forwardness, high quality, and good value — or it did not and was rebuilt. Strategists call such choices ‘identity-conferring commitments’, and they are central to what an organization is or wants to be and reflect what it stands for.”

Returning to the student debate (and the PowerPoint-to-Execution Gap):

“When I ask executives at the end of this class, “Where does strategy end and execution begin?” there isn’t a clear answer — and that’s as it should be. What could be more desirable than a well-conceived strategy that flows without a ripple into execution? Yet I know from working with thousands of organizations just how rare it is to find a carefully honed system that really delivers. You and every leader of a company must ask yourself whether you have one — and if you don’t, take the responsibility to build it. The only way a company will deliver on its promises, in short, is if its strategists can think like operators.”

Successful strategy demands execution excellence, which starts with an execution strategist. Or, if you are lucky, with one of the rare strategists who think like operators.

Tagged as: executionexcellence, soapbox

Posted by brenda michelson at 12:19 pm in 2015IT | Permalink | Comments(0)

April 28th, 2013

Link Collection — April 28, 2013

  • 49ers Select New Technology For NFL Draft | Only A Game

    podcast / article on SF 49ers use of stats and SAP’s HANA appliance in scouting, drafting. Continues to speak of NBA statistics and further use of HANA in sports business.
     
    “49ers COO Paraag Marathe says piling up information is easy, but the challenge is making it user-friendly for coaches and general managers.

    “And that’s something that’s sort of overlooked. People want to get reams of data and put together like this really robust analysis,” Marathe said. “But you know what? If it’s not communicated [or] it’s not simple and clear, it’s not going to be used.” …

    “Does our simulation make sense  in the context of that team’s roster, that team’s depth charts, in the context of that team’s salary cap? Will they be able  to afford these kind of players, or are they going to make a different trade, are they going to make a different pick? That kind of real-time simulation is the real beauty of this virtual draft board. Otherwise, what you have is those big magnets.””

    tags: nfl sports statistics sap hana

  • Get Innovation Right: Tap Into Women Over Forty | LinkedIn

    “According to New York Times article Innovators Get Better with Age, research indicates that a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. He also notes that the directors of the top five grossing films in 2012 were in their 40s and 50s. While Nobel Prize winners may make their break-through discoveries earlier in life – the average age is around 38 – typically it takes twenty years to socialize their ideas, meaning they don’t receive recognition for their achievements until around the age of 60.”

    “Then there’s the research around entrepreneurs. “The average founder of a high-tech startup isn’t a whiz-kid graduate, but a mature 40-year-old engineer or business type with a spouse and kids who simply got tired of working for others,””

    tags: innovation age workforce

  • Does Your Architecture Pass the “So What” Test? | Doug Newdick’s Blog

    Nice reminder and simple check from Doug Newdick. Reminds me of a quote I recently pulled from the New Yorker: “Harm averted is benefit unseen”. Be prepared to show / communicate value, even if it’s for harm averted.

    “Does your architecture pass the “So What” test? Can you demonstrate the specific value that a particular architectural deliverable or activity will add? If not, why are you even bothering? In this case, as with justice, your activity must not just add value, it must be seen to add value.”

    tags: enterprise_architecture systems_architecture

  • 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013 | MIT Technology Review

    Good list from MIT Tech Review. Several I’ve discussed with a client as they relate to the future of healthcare, and therefore, society. [Deep learning, DNA sequencing, Additive Manufacturing, Robotics]

    tags: technology trends

  • Great Innovators Think Laterally – Ian Gonsher and Deb Mills-Scofield – Harvard Business Review

    “The creative process is just that: a process. Recognizing value that others have missed doesn’t require preternatural clairvoyance. A well-honed creative process enables us to intuitively recognize patterns and use those insights to make inductive predictions about divergent ideas, both vertically within categories, and horizontally across categories. By understanding the genealogy of innovation within a given category, we can imagine what might come next.

    We need to break out of thinking that is solely based on what we know, what we assume, and what we’ve experienced. Many of us are so entrenched in our industries that we don’t know how to think laterally or horizontally. We usually go a mile deep but only an inch wide. We haven’t given our people and ourselves the time and opportunities to explore other industries, cultures designs, ways of being and doing, and other “adjacent possibilities.”"

    tags: creativity thinking hbr

  • How Kaggle Is Changing How We Work – Thomas Goetz – The Atlantic

    “Because here’s the thing: the Kaggle ranking has become an essential metric in the world of data science. Employers like American Express and  the New York Times have begun listing a Kaggle rank as an essential qualification in their help wanted ads for data scientists.  It’s not just a merit badge for the coders; it’s a more significant, more valuable, indicator of capability than our traditional benchmarks for proficiency or expertise. In other words, your Ivy League diploma and IBM resume don’t matter so much as my Kaggle score.”

    tags: kaggle datascience workforce

  • Cartoons from the Issue of April 22nd, 2013 : The New Yorker

    Perhaps I’ve spent too much time talking about trend convergences with a client, but this cartoon amused me.

    tags: newyorker cartoons trends

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April 7th, 2013

Link Collection — April 7, 2013

  • What’s Next in the Techonomy? — Hagel & Seely Brown

    “In the last few decades, we have witnessed a steady doubling in the price performance of digital technologies. However, we are reaching a tipping point of this exponential growth, and it is unclear how the cumulative effects of technology will reshape our economy, political systems, and collective future. One thing is clear: in the hands of existing institutions-firms, schools, non-profits, civic institutions and governments-this awesome technology will achieve only a fraction of its potential.

    Unfortunately, we haven’t seen the same exponential rate of change in institutions as we have in technology (Unlike computer chips, government and business structures don’t predictably get faster and less expensive). Managerial fiefdoms, rigid hierarchies and tightly scripted procedures remain from the industrial revolution era like vestigial structures; they were important at some point, but it’s unclear what purpose they serve now…”

    tags: innovation technology institutions

  • How To Think Like An Engineer ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community

    Good insights in here. If you already think this way, consider passing it along to folks who “don’t get your thought process”…

     ”Excelling in business today means knowing how to think through technological abstraction and ambiguity. Here, we listen in as engineers discuss this very skill–and decode their secrets for how to hone it.”

    tags: thinking engineer

  • Big Data’s Promise and Limitations : The New Yorker

    “Big Data can be especially helpful in systems that are consistent over time, with straightforward and well-characterized properties, little unpredictable variation, and relatively little underlying complexity.

    But not every problem fits those criteria; unpredictability, complexity, and abrupt shifts over time can lead even the largest data astray. Big Data is a powerful tool for inferring correlations, not a magic wand for inferring causality.”

    tags: bigdata

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March 24th, 2013

Link Collection — March 24, 2013

  • LEAD Frameworks | LEAD Frameworks, Methods & Approaches

    Speaking of Enterprise Architecture frameworks, this just crossed my radar via Twitter. Just passing it along, not an endorsement as I haven’t had a chance to dig in.

    “LEAD is an abbreviation for “Layered Enterprise Architecture Development” and is often used as a synonym to describe the entire LEAD concept. The LEAD Frameworks refers to either the entire LEAD concept, or to a specific LEAD Framework. A certified LEAD practitioner is called a LEAD eXpert or a LEAD Architect.

    The LEAD version 3.0 currently consists of 10 frameworks, 6 methods and 4 approaches that are all integrated to each other with supporting maps, matrices and models that can be used for all aspects of enterprise modelling e.g. business model, competencies, value, services, processes, information, applications, data, platforms, infrastructure and cloud as well as for transformation and innovation modelling.”

    tags: enterprise_architecture entarch

  • #ogChat Summary – Business Architecture | The Open Group Blog

    I participated in this Business Architecture tweet jam. It was fun and interesting. No surprise, I have a different view than the rest. I’m @bmichelson in the linked post.
    “The Open Group hosted a tweet jam (#ogChat) to discuss the evolution of Business Architecture and its role in enterprise transformation. In case you missed the conversation, here is a recap of the event.”

    tags: business_architecture business_analysis #entarch #bizarch

  • Amazon launches “Send to Kindle” button for web publishers and WordPress blogs — paidContent

    I added this to elementallinks.com. Look for the “Send to Kindle” icon at the end of my posts. I tested on 3 devices: Kindle Touch, iphone and ipad, works well.
     
    “Amazon is now allowing publishers to add “Send to Kindle” buttons to their websites and WordPress blogs, the company announced on the Kindle blog Tuesday.”

    tags: kindle blogs

  • Taotwit’s Too-Big-To-Tweet: TOGAF Good or Bad? – Definitely Ugly!

    Nigel raises some great points on TOGAF and the challenges in applying EA frameworks in the real-world. Not to mention, a world where english is NOT the first language.

    “TOGAF just tries too hard and ends up failing on a few counts: it’s too comprehensive to be a usable framework and not specific enough to be a methodology.”

    However, Nigel also recognizes that TOGAF is currently the only credible option to get newbies up-to-speed.

    So, how do we change that?

    tags: entarch enterprise_architecture togaf

  • Big data in the age of the telegraph – McKinsey Quarterly – Organization – Strategic Organization

    Decision-making and authority placed nearest the real-time data, circa 1854.

    “Daniel McCallum created the first organization chart in response to the information problem hobbling one of the longest railroads in the world. In surprising contrast to today’s top-down organization pyramids, in McCallum’s chart the hierarchy was reversed: authority over day-to-day scheduling and operations went to the divisional superintendents down the line, who oversaw the five branch lines of the railroad. The reasoning: they possessed the best operating data, were closer to the action, and thus were best placed to manage the line’s persistent inefficiencies.”

    Plus, cool 1854 org charts… flow with data.

    tags: mckinsey data real-time active-information

  • The Arguments Your Company Needs – Michael Schrage – Harvard Business Review

    What is your company’s most important (current / ongoing) argument? Is it focused on strategy, value or individuals?

    “Asked several years ago to describe the most important argument taking place at Walmart, then-CEO Lee Scott immediately replied, “The size of our stores.” The world’s largest retailer was debating just how small its footprints and formats could be while still serving customer needs and its own brand equity promise. That conversation, Scott said, provoked a lot of new thinking and analysis.”

    ..”All firms have strategies and cultures. But sometimes the quickest and surest way to gain valuable insight into their fundamentals is by asking, “What’s the most important argument your organization is having right now?”"

    tags: schrange hbr business_analysis

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January 20th, 2013

Link Collection — January 20, 2013

  • Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients : The New Yorker

    Excellent article on using data to provide an unusual window into healthcare, and how to improve it.

    “Besides looking at assault patterns, he began studying patterns in the way patients flowed into and out of Camden’s hospitals. “I’d just sit there and play with the data for hours,” he says, and the more he played the more he found. For instance, he ran the data on the locations where ambulances picked up patients with fall injuries, and discovered that a single building in central Camden sent more people to the hospital with serious falls—fifty-seven elderly in two years—than any other in the city, resulting in almost three million dollars in health-care bills. “It was just this amazing window into the health-care delivery system,” he says.”

    tags: healthcare datascience newyorker

  • Solving the Wanamaker problem for health care – O’Reilly Radar

    Good article by Tim O’Reilly, et al. Broad coverage of healthcare issues and opportunities with data science.
     
    “How is data science transforming health care? There are many ways in which health care is changing, and needs to change. We’re focusing on one particular issue: the problem Wanamaker described when talking about his advertising. How do you make sure you’re spending money effectively? Is it possible to know what will work in advance?”

    tags: healthcare datascience O’Reilly

  • Why IT Fumbles Analytics – Harvard Business Review

    This is an excellent article. Calls out the different thinking and actions required for analytics success. Despite the title, this is not an IT bashing article.

    “In their quest to extract insights from the massive amounts of data now available from internal and external sources, many companies are spending heavily on IT tools and hiring data scientists. Yet most are struggling to achieve a worthwhile return. That’s because they treat their big data and analytics projects the same way they treat all IT projects, not realizing that the two are completely different animals”.

    tags: hbr analytics bigdata

  • Disruptions: Design Is Driving Technology Forward – NYTimes.com

    “We’re on the tail end of technology being special,” says John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “The automobile was a weird alien technology when it first debuted, then, after a while, it evolved and designers stepped in to add value to it.”

    …“We have this exciting next step for design,” he said. “Now that we have enough technology to do anything, design can now begin to be better than the technology itself.”

    tags: technology design maeda

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