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Forrester’s Empowered: Workplace HEROes + DIY Technology = Recipe for Shadow IT Disaster, or Front-Line Innovation?

October 10, 2010 By brenda michelson

Like many with corporate IT backgrounds, I find the do-it-yourself (DIY) technology movement simultaneously intriguing and frightening. Intriguing, because of the ease of connecting with co-workers, partners, customers and information to solve problems, improve interactions and advance the business.  Frightening, because I’ve lived through (barely) the data, network and integration nightmares brought on by islands of Access, Excel, FileMakerPro, Visual Basic, etc.

Of course, today’s DIY technologies – Smart mobile devices, Pervasive video, Cloud computing services and Social technologies – are exponentially more powerful than their office productivity predecessors.  Therefore, they must be exponentially more troublesome, right?  Well, that depends.

In Empowered, a new book by Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, the authors address this very challenge, how to balance front-line innovation with back-room risk management.  Or, as the authors describe it, changing the way your business runs to harness the power of HEROes: highly empowered and resourceful operatives. 

Following an attention grabbing introductory section, the book’s guidance is presented in two more parts.  In part two, the authors focus on HERO projects, describing opportunities and challenges, elucidating with real-world examples, sharing tools and walking through a four-step process to match-up with that other critical DIY base, your empowered customers.

A helpful tool is the HERO Project Effort-Value Evaluation.  After answering a series of questions on a potential projects effort and value, you calculate your projects EVE score.  Scores fall into one of six categories, from no-brainer (value exceeds effort by 25 points) to shadow IT (high effort).  On the Shadow IT projects, the authors don’t say never, however they point out the risk factors, success impediments, and advise collaboration with senior management and IT.

 

In part three, the authors discuss how management, information technology and HEROes work together to achieve that all important opportunity-risk balance.

The critical concept in part three is the establishment of a HERO Compact.  The HERO Compact is an accord between management, information technology and HEROes, guiding each group’s behavior to make “HERO-powered innovation successful”.

In the spirit of empowerment, I’ve clipped the high-level HERO Compact from Amazon’s Search Inside this Book. 

The chapter continues with specific pledges for IT, management and HEROes.  Each pledge reinforces that success requires individual responsibility, collaboration and trade-offs.

For example, the IT Pledge includes: “I will respect requests for new technology support and find ways to say, “Yes, and” rather than automatically saying “No.”. 

The HERO Pledge includes: “If my projects entail a significant effort, I will work with my managers and IT to better understand the long-term impact of those projects”.

And the Management Pledge includes: “I will respect assessments of technology risk in HERO projects and work with IT and others to quantify, mitigate and ultimately manage that risk”.

Empowered does a nice job of describing the compelling workforce and customer benefits of embracing DIY technologies, while painting a realistic view of the traps and risk, and offering pragmatic advice and tools for prospective HEROes, managers and IT to co-create a front-line innovation environment.

Organizations struggling to keep up with their customers, employees or competitors on the DIY technology revolution need to read Empowered and think seriously about HERO Compacts.

 

[Disclosure: Forrester sent me a free “no obligation” copy of Empowered.]

Filed Under: business, business-technology, cloud computing, innovation, social, trends Tagged With: books

Zephyr on “Cloud Watch”

August 26, 2009 By brenda michelson

Zephyr doing his part for the family business…

Posted via email from brenda's posterous


[Note: This was a test of the Posterous Service for use with my to be launched (redacted) project.]

Filed Under: off topic, social Tagged With: archive_0

A small action on Blog Action Day 2008 – Poverty

October 15, 2008 By brenda michelson

As I considered what to write for today’s blog action day on poverty, I couldn’t help but think of how fortunate I am to be contemplating ‘poverty as an issue’ from behind a keyboard as opposed to as a life circumstance. Going down that path for a minute, I’m grateful my grandparents had the foresight and fortitude to reach Ellis Island and that my parents instilled in me the importance of education, working hard and living within means (savings good, debt bad). Essentially, my family provided me the circumstance and tools to reach towards success. 

At this point, it became clear to me what my blog action day ‘action’ should be. Give others an opportunity to create their own success. This led me straight to Kiva.org, a micro-lending site that brokers loans between individuals and (working poor) entrepreneurs in the developed world. 

I just made my first loans, one for bigger fishing nets and another to transport a child to school. Check it out, do what makes sense for you.

Filed Under: business, innovation, off topic, social

elemental links spring blog clean-up

June 7, 2008 By brenda michelson

As I’ve been waiting for the grass to get dry enough to mow, I did some spring clean-up here at elemental links.  The two things that will be noticeable to blog visitors (not feed subscribers) are a long-overdue category consolidation — it was as tedious as it sounds — and the posting of my delicious links on the site.  Hopefully the link-post job will work, because I removed all duplicate link splices – Feedburner and FriendFeed.

In addition to the clean-up activities, I also pulled some posts over from my Business-Driven Architect blog.  You could say I’m working on my ‘source of record’.  I don’t think those posts will show up in the feed, because I posted them here using the original post date.  The new old posts are:

  • Tammy Erickson: Taking the offensive in recessionary times
  • Six Sure Fire Ways to Sink your Enterprise Architecture
  • Business-IT Integration Continued: IT Geeks on the Front Lines of Innovation
  • Enterprise Architects, Professional Escalation, and City Planning
  • From the Archives: IT Fundamental Truths

I think that’s it for now.  If you are curious how the lawn mowing went, follow me on Twitter.  I do tweet (converse) about business and IT as well.

Filed Under: social

My Time Between Airports

July 22, 2007 By brenda michelson

Obviously, I’ve been remiss in my blogging. I spent the majority of May and June on the road. During that period, my writing was limited to the specific engagement, or email to business associates and friends of the following pattern: "Delayed at [airport code] waiting on [crew, plane, weather, parts]". My favorite was Cincinnati when we couldn’t take off because of a hole in the runway. A hole that "mysteriously appeared" in the time between boarding and pulling away from the gate…

Between airports, I attended InformaticaWorld and IBM’s Impact, delivered SOA training and workshops in Ohio with my friend Beth Gold Bernstein, facilitated a roundtable discussion on business architecture and SOA at ArchitectureGov, and ran the SOA Consortium’s Inaugural European events in Brussels.

Yes, I’ve been busy. At the moment, I’m heading to San Francisco, to represent the SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank. My upcoming events include:

Agile2007 in Washington D.C. – I’m still looking for perspectives, practices and stories of Agile and SOA

New England BEA User Group in Cambridge, MA – I’m excited to hear my friend Annie Shum’s latest thinking on IT, Innovation and the (messy) Human Factor.

SOA Consortium meeting in Jacksonville – As SOA-C Program Director, I plan and facilitate these meetings

Enterprise Architecture Conference in Las Vegas – I’m speaking on SOA and Business Architecture

OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal – I’m participating in a panel discussion on the Future of SOA

Of course, it’s not my intent to attend these events and then hoard the knowledge. I’ve been meaning to share insights from each of my travels, amongst other things. But, I can’t seem to find the time, or perhaps focus. Two factors to blame there. One, the Maine summer. When I am home, I find myself drawn to outdoor activities. Two, I tend to scribble my ideas on paper, note cards, etc, which doesn’t lend itself to quick posts. As for the latter, I’m experimenting with TiddlyWiki as a way to capture and organize (through tags) my field notes and random thoughts. Hopefully, this will lend some much needed structure to my process, and result in more frequent and timely posts. It certainly can’t make it worse!

In the meantime, I do plan on looking back, and sharing insights from the last couple of months. You can also find some SOA related writing from me at the SOA Consortium blog. As well, the SOA Consortium’s first Executive Summit whitepaper is now publicly available.

If you are going to any of the future events I’ve listed and want to connect, email me – bmichelson at elementallinks dot com.

Oh, I picked TiddlyWiki because I wanted something simple that I could install locally. If you are evaluating Wikis, I recommend this comparison site.

Filed Under: circuit, social

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Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

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