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brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

Archives for May 2012

Augmented Reality — Active Information

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This week, I took a bit of a stretch and wrote about augmented reality on active information. Since AR applications involve superimposing data/information within an individual’s active context, it felt like a fit to me. Plus, it’s interesting.

My post starts with a piece from the WSJ on augmented reality glass and then touches on other uses, such as in consumer products and for office productivity.

Even if none of that sounds relevant to you, you should still check out Marco Tempest’s TED Talk: A magical tale (with augmented reality).

 

My post on HPIO: Activating information and business via Augmente… – Input Output.

Roadmap for Digital Government: Information Centricity — Active Information

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Last week on Active Information, I wrote about the new Roadmap for Digital Government.

The drivers of the roadmap are a combination of technology advances cloud, mobile, collaboration, the need for agencies to carryout their missions at a lower cost and higher level of service, and a directive from the President:

“I want us to ask ourselves every day, how are we using technology to make a real difference in peoples lives”.

I was pleased to see the upfront emphasis on taking a thinking, rather than code, mindset:

“Building for the future requires us to think beyond programmatic lines. To keep up with the pace of change in technology, we need to securely architect our systems for interoperability and openness from conception.”

In my post, I focus on the Information-Centricity aspect, and offer some tips for success.

Read: Keys to “Treating all Content as Data” — Roadmap … – Input Output.

Link Collection — May 13, 2012

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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.”

    tags: Business hbr christensen

  • 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.”

    tags: cio governance entarch

  • 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…”

    tags: cloud computing enterprise-architect entarch

  • 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

    tags: bigdata

  • 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.”

    tags: simplicity

  • Crush the “I’m Not Creative” Barrier – Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen – Harvard Business Review

    “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.”

    tags: innovation creativity mindset christensen

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

business-first technology leadership wins

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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.”

via Art Langer: Virginia Gambale Says CIOs Should Offer Strategic Advice to Corporate Directors – The CIO Report – WSJ.

“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.”

— Filippo Passerini, president of global business services and CIO of Procter & Gamble in WSJ CIO Journal

“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.”

via New IBM CEO Says Will Maintain Longer-Term Strategy

Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Active Information

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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.

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

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