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How Will You Measure Your Life? – Harvard Business Review
“I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.
That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.”
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Busting CIO Myths — Interview with Jeanne Ross
Governance: “good governance is about making everybody smarter about IT. “When setting up governance, most companies start with IT investments when they should start with implementation reviews,” says Ross. “Companies with the best governance are constantly assessing whether projects are realizing their business case.”"
Purpose: Ross. “Quarterly financial goals are destroying us. IT is about the long-term strength and agility of the business. Let somebody else worry about quarterly goals; the CIO should focus on making the company great forever.”
That doesn’t mean IT can ignore all quarterly pressure, but CIOs should discourage investment that is driven by short-term thinking. “This is UPS’s genius,” Ross says. “They understand that they need low package-delivery cost and high reliability. They use those metrics to set goals, and they build systems to operationalize their business.” CIOs must push back, she says. “If we measure IT the way we measure the last advertising campaign, we’re in trouble.” -
Cloud & the evolution of the enterprise architect – Cloud Computing News
I owe a follow-up on James’ excellent article. In short, I believe we need to embrace the mindset of Product Managers, who continually evolve a solution, rather than try for all-at-once perfection.
“In businesses that are themselves complex, there are tremendous efficiencies to be gained by the smart application of IT. That element of the enterprise architect’s role doesn’t go away.
What does change are the skills needed to evaluate how business applications, data sets and services are going to interact-and survive-in a complex, adaptive systems environment. If developers are the DNA of software in the cloud, the enterprise architect becomes the immune system, encouraging the growth of systems that help the business thrive, and killing those that would cost the business.
In this sense, my friend Brenda Michelson, a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture, put it best: the role is no longer one of enterprise architect, but rather one of the enterprise product manager…”
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Big Data, Tiny Insights | Om Malik
“Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it. Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.” — Sameer Patel
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The Simplicity Thesis | Fast Company
“Here are just a few ways to get started in achieving minimum complexity:
Think end to end. Simplicity relates to the entire customer experience, from how you handle pricing to customer support.
Say no. Kill features and services that don’t get used, and optimize the ones that do.
Specialize. Focus on your core competency, and outsource the rest–simplicity comes more reliably when you have less on your plate.
Focus on details. Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.
Audit constantly. Constantly ask yourself, can this be done any simpler? Audit your technology and application frequently.
The next thing to understand is that simplicity is a relative, moving target. The accelerating speed of innovation ensures that you’re never the simplest solution for long.” -
“You can actually become more creative by changing your mind-set. Anyone can innovate, if they choose to. Disruptive innovators do it by choice, not chance. Their everyday actions swap out an “I’m not creative” mind-set for an “I am creative” one. And then magical (not mystical) things unfold.
The magic materializes as people engage unique innovation skills (what we call their innovator’s DNA) on an everyday basis. For example, by asking provocative questions, observing like anthropologists, networking with people who see the world in 180-degree opposites, and experimenting with intensity, innovators obliterate the “I’m not creative” brain barrier and, more often than not, break out from the pack.”
In 2010, when I wrote the Elemental Links tagline, “Technology Insights for Business Enthusiasts”, some of my trusted associates pushed back, telling me that I need to lead with TECHNOLOGY. But, here’s the thing. In the enterprise, from which I came and continue to serve, a technology-first mindset leads to disdain.
Contrary to the hyperbole of the technology press, analysts, pundits and product marketers, true, enduring, information technology success begins with a business-first mindset, which includes constant context checks.
Now, it would be fair to slap a (micro) pundit label on me, so what follows are snippets from three business-first technology executives, excerpted from this week’s WSJ:
“What directors really value in a CIO is sound strategic thinking and a great ability to execute, says Gambale, a former CIO at Merrill Lynch, Bankers Trust, and Alex Brown, and former partner at Deutsche Bank Capital.”
“We never start with technologies; we always look at trends in the world that are or may be having an impact on the future of our business. One example is the acceleration of innovation to market. Consumers and users want one-on-one connections to any service or product they interact with, so we have to respond. This is thoroughly changing the way we operate—the always-on, instant nature of interaction today.
We look at those megatrends and forces to see which ones will truly impact our business. Then we go look at what strategies we can devise to take advantage of those trends. The final step is evaluating which technologies can enable those strategies. The value is how we enable this dramatic change through technology.
Every three years or so, we review our strategies. Three years ago we focused on the idea of visualization. We have visualized data across the entire company. Everything we do is visual. This transforms the way the business performs because it creates what I call “information democracy.” There are no more layers. The discussions we are having are much more robust.”
“We’re truly guided by these big arcs of change [analytics, cloud computing, emerging markets and “smarter planet] that we believe in,” Rometty said. “They lend context and clarity. When you run a big company, context and clarity mean a lot.”
This week, I wrote about data fetishes on Active Information. Excerpt:
“On the Big Data front, I’m intrigued by the potential of fast, wide and deep data processing to solve hard problems, learn from outliers and make informed, data-driven decisions.
And, as my clients will attest, I advocate instrumenting everything as a means to discover true customer, business and systems behaviors.
However, I don’t believe that all data has equal value. Nor does all valuable data hold its value over time. Good data programs rely on context and include data weeding.
But, what about the data that should never, ever get in your attention? According to Wharton’s Peter Fader, the least valuable data is the noisiest in the Big Data space: social and mobile.”
Read the post: Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Input Output.
It is naive to believe one can, or should, blueprint an enterprise. An enterprise is a complex system that must continually, adapt to survive and thrive.
For any system to sustain, shift, and grow, over time, it requires energies (accelerants), efficiencies, connectors (& disconnectors), and means to remove waste.
Enterprise architecture should focus its attention on fortifying these core functions of the enterprise system, via the infusion of intellectual and digital capability.
Enterprise architecture should capacitate fluidity, not rigidity.
On May 1 — while sacrificing yet another shirt to a hotel iron — I had an epiphany of sorts, which I immediately tweeted:
“Legacy isn’t the big IT problem. Entrenchment is. Entrenched investments, mindsets, skills, business process & information wiring. -me, now”
Shortly afterwards, I followed up with:
“what we have isn’t a technology problem, it’s a thinking problem.”
Based on the huge (positive) response from the community on twitter, I shared that I was inspired to elaborate my tweets to an Entrenchment essay.
So far though, the time for long-form thinking and writing alludes me. [Not to mention good hotel irons].
In the interim, I’ve been tweeting under an #entrenchment hashtag, and more recently, scribbling entrenchment bursts.
Convincing myself these bursts could be considered micro-essays, I’m going to share them on elemental links, under a new entrenchment category.
Someday, they may evolve into a cohesive essay, or daresay something longer. But for now, I’m going micro.
I hope they provoke some re-thinking. Feedback encouraged.
Series starts with On enterprise blueprinting
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because you’re a creative badass | Justine Musk
creative badass manifesto
