brenda michelson's technology advisory practice
This morning, David Linthicum, Bill Russell and I exchanged our Top 3 Cloud Computing Stories for October. I admit, I was surprised neither of them called out the awarding of the GSA IaaS contract. Then again, they have a much better perspective than me on how IT in the US government works (or not).
To learn what we did pick, and why Buzz Lightyear is breaking through this post, listen to the podcast.
“Execution is the great unaddressed issue in the business world today. Its absence is the single biggest obstacle to success and the cause of most of the disappointments that are mistakenly attributed to other causes.” – Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Yesterday, after a particularly trying conference call, I tweeted “too many inventors, too few executors”. Later in the day, I ran across the above Ram Charan quote while sampling Alan Fine’s You Already Know How to be Great.
I think it’d be a fair statement to substitute “business” with “enterprise architecture” in Charan’s quote: ‘Execution is the great unaddressed issue in the enterprise architecture world today’.
Too many enterprise architecture teams eschew project management and delivery responsibilities, and then complain, no one listens, or uses their ideas. These disappointments are attributed to communication issues, shortsightedness, and lack of management support.
While those issues might exist, perhaps the root cause is lack of execution ability on part of the enterprise architecture team. If you can’t transition your idea to practice, why do you think your constituents can?
For enterprise architecture success, your team must include the rarest of EA types, someone who sets (or gets) the vision, and can strategize and drive the execution.
If I was feeling marketing, rather than preachy, I’d tell you I have a tremendous ability to execute. 🙂
I picked up the Fall 2010 issue of Rotman Magazine because it is focused on complexity and uncertainty, two concerns of change-friendliness. Before I reached my intended target articles, I discovered an interesting Thought Leader Interview with Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences.
In the interview, Ostrom speaks to two hard problems, the challenge of dealing with common-pool resources (CPR) and how to approach collective action dilemmas. While the context of the article is averting massive climate change, I found aspects applicable to classic business and IT issues. Particularly, the management of common pool resources. According to Ostrom:
“Common-pool resources, on the other hand, are any kind of resource where it is difficult to exclude anyone from using the resources, and where my consumption withdraws from the ‘pool’ that is potentially available to others. For example, with a fishery, the fish I remove from the system, you can’t catch. At the same time, it’s difficult to exclude anyone from using a CPR, and people will benefit from it whether or not they contribute to it. Theses two characteristics of CPRs are related in many ways, and when people talk about the ‘commons’, this is what they are referring to.”
In business-IT terms, the basic common pool resources are budget dollars and talent time. Some might add services of SOA and Cloud Computing, but the end of day resource limitations on SOA and Cloud services comes down to time and money. Who will pay for the change to Service X? Can we afford to scale service Y? Why must marketing wait on a customer service change to Service Z?
To deal with these management and allocation issues, we (IT) set up steering committees, governance boards, policies and waiver procedures. Most often, an IT representative – CIO, Relationship Manager, Chief Architect – sits at the center of the policy and decision-making processes. Even in the best situations, there is always a disappointed constituent, and often, lingering ill will.
There has to be a better way. Well, in her research, Ostrom has identified 8 design principles found in robust common pool resource institutions:
For CPRs that are part of larger systems:
What struck me about Ostrom’s findings is that the appropriator, the resource consumer, is at the center of the policy-making, monitoring and enforcement processes of effective common pool resource systems.
What can we learn from this? If (forgive me) we think of IT as a fishery, with the fishery infrastructure, processes and species specialization under the management of the CIO and team, could the fishing, consumption of IT goods, services and time be better governed by those hungry for service?
Or, would an appropriator-led governance regime result in widespread fishery failure?
Discuss.
Did you miss the Event Processing Symposium at Credit Suisse on October 6? No problem. The Event Processing Community of Practice (EP CoP) just released individual speaker podcasts, with slides. The speaker line-up:
[Disclosure: The EP CoP is a client.]
[Update November 2, 2010 – Unfortunately, the Optimization for Innovation Conference has been postponed until 2011. However, don’t let that stop you from watching Chris Curran’s video below, or following his work.]
Did I mention that Chris Curran, CTO of Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, is the opening keynote for the Optimization for Innovation conference I’ve been working on? Below, is a video preview of Chris’ session.
To see the full Optimization for Innovation program, go here.
[Disclosure: The Business Ecology Initiative is my client.]
