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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

Recommended Reading: Switch by Chip and Dan Heath

September 28, 2010 By brenda michelson

In my quest for change-friendliness, I’m working through a stack of reading on capabilities, business dynamics, business-technology innovation and change. 

Like many, I have the bad habit of multi-tasking my reading, so items don’t move to the finished stack as quickly as I’d like.  However, a book that grabbed my full attention is Switch, How to Change Things when Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath.

Switch is not your typical change management tome.  There’s no 10-Step Plan or Come-to-Consensus moment.  Instead, the Heath brothers present a clear 3-part framework based on scientific research of how the human brain works.  In short, the framework advocates appealing to individual’s rational (Rider) and emotional (Elephant) sides, and shaping the change path.

The book is broken into three sections – Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant and Shape the Path.  Consistent with their earlier book, Made to Stick, and their Fast Company column, Switch is replete with real-world anecdotes about identifying, motivating and executing difficult changes. 

One story that stuck out for me was Jerry Sternin’s work in 1990 with Save the Children in Vietnam.  Save the Children was invited to Vietnam to combat malnutrition.  However, when Sternin arrived, he was given "six months to make a difference".  This deadline made the research Sternin collected on malnutrition root causes — poverty, lack of clean water, poor sanitation and nutrition ignorance — "true but useless" (TBU).

Sternin didn’t have the time or money to address the underlying issues.  He needed to identify a more direct way to make a difference.  Forgoing the typical "focus on the problem" route, Sternin set out in search of bright spots.   Sternin sought out well-nourished village children to learn how they defied the odds.  Once identified, Sternin studied how these homes varied from the norm, on the lookout for deviations related to nutrition.  Through observation, Sternin was able to identify differences in what and how the well-nourished children were fed. 

Instead of issuing a proclamation of his findings,  Sternin created a change path.  Sternin instituted a mothers-teaching-mothers community program to change feeding habits.  Making these seemingly small adjustments – number of meals per day, individual servings, sweet potato green and shrimp supplements to rice — dramatically improved childhood nutrition in the studied villages, and then spread throughout the country, eventually reaching 2.2 million people in 265 villages.

Besides the humanitarian aspect, what appealed to me about Sternin’s story was the problem solving technique.  Instead of getting lost in "true but useless" (analysis-paralysis) Sternin identified and exploited bright spots.  In a later example, a similar technique is described as Appreciative Inquiry.

Reading Switch, I picked up techniques related to change and solving hard problems.  The latter was a pleasant surprise for me.  If your work involves change, hard problems or the combination, I highly recommend Switch.

Filed Under: change Tagged With: archive_0, books

IT Savvy: Getting an Edge from IT

December 1, 2009 By brenda michelson

The WSJ has published a Business Insight Interview with MIT’s Peter Weill on IT Savvy, his (excellent) recent book, co-authored with Jeanne Ross.  The interview covers a few of the main ideas of the book, standardization for innovation, IT as strategic asset vs. liability, creating digital platforms, and the importance of connecting projects.  A couple of excerpts:

BUSINESS INSIGHT:Your newest book is about IT-savvy companies. How do you define IT savvy?

DR. WEILL: IT-savvy companies make information technology a strategic asset. The opposite of a strategic asset, of course, is a strategic liability. And there are many companies who feel their IT is a strategic liability. In those companies, the IT landscape is siloed, expensive and slow to change, and managers can’t get the data they want.

IT-savvy companies are just the opposite. They use their technology not only to reduce costs today by standardizing and digitizing their core processes, but the information they summarize from that gives them ideas about where to innovate in the future. A third element is that IT-savvy companies use their digital platform to collaborate with other companies in their ecosystem of customers and suppliers.

So, IT-savvy companies are not just about savvy IT departments. It’s about the whole company thinking digitally.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: You’ve done some research that suggests IT-savvy companies are more profitable than others. Tell me a bit about that.

DR. WEILL: The IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies. And the profitability shows up in two ways. One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. Think about UPS or Southwest Airlines or Amazon: They run those core processes flawlessly, 24 hours a day.

The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture, where you have to glue together everything and test it and make sure that it all works. We call that the agility paradox—the companies that have more standardized and digitized business processes are faster to market and get more revenue from new products.

Those are the two sources of their greater profitability: lower costs for running existing business processes, and faster innovation.

…

DR. WEILL:  The real secret to IT-savvy companies is that each project links together—like Lego blocks—to create a reusable platform. IT-savvy companies think reuse first. When they have a new idea, the first question they ask is: Can we use existing data, applications and infrastructure to get that idea to market fast? When we look at the impact of reusing processes and applications, we see measurable benefits in the top and bottom lines.

The book also covers defining your operating model, revamping your IT funding model, allocating decision rights and accountability, driving value from IT and leading an IT Savvy firm.  Consistent with Ross and Weill’s other works, the book is research backed and calls out case examples.

Read the article.  Get the book.  Otherwise, risk getting the IT you deserve…

Filed Under: business, business-technology, enterprise architecture, innovation Tagged With: books

Todd Biske’s SOA Governance Book: Buy-it, Read-it, Live-it

October 26, 2008 By brenda michelson

image Back in August — when Todd Biske and I were talking about SOA Governance and football — I had the privilege to read the first draft of Todd’s now released SOA Governance book. I say privilege because Todd wasn’t looking for a back cover quote, he wanted honest feedback on his material.

Lucky for me, the job was easy. The draft was strong, in both content and readability. Along the way, Todd and I had some great interchanges, such as successful governance models beyond command and control. As well, I noted Todd’s guidance on pre-project, project and run-time policies to test the completeness of my service meta models.

Now that I’ve read the published book, I want to augment my “buy-it, read-it, live-it” book review tweet. So, here goes…

5 Reasons to Read Todd Biske’s SOA Governance Book

1. Todd’s view of SOA Governance is outcome, rather than product, centric. Todd defines SOA Governance as “the combination of people, policies, and processes within your organization that will ensure that the desired behaviors of your strategic SOA initiative are achieved“.

Examples of those desired behaviors, or outcomes, are “increasing the number of assets reused by 10% each year“, “decreasing the average time to produce a solution by 10%” and/or “increasing the number of projects delivered by 10% each year“.

While Todd does speak to the technology / product categories that enable SOA governance, at no point does he equate (confuse) SOA governance with the acquisition / implementation of a registry, repository, service broker or runtime monitor.

2. The management fable will resonate with any practitioner who has ever worked in corporate IT. Todd explains SOA Governance in the context of the SOA journey of a fictional corporation. The book follows Advasco’s SOA advocates, implementers and adversaries from an early win, to the trials of sharing, through the mysteries of problem detection and resolution, and finally to SOA success. As the tale unfolds, Todd points out problem areas, suggests corrective action and supplies best practices.

3. The reference chapter is worth the price of the book. Even if management fables aren’t your thing, you’ll find Chapter 8, Establishing SOA Governance at Your Organization, to be an indispensable reference. This chapter covers:

  • People: solution architect, business analyst, tech lead/domain architect, enterprise/technology architect, information architect, security architect, IT manager, service manager/owner, platform manager
  • Organization: Enterprise Architecture, COE/Competency Center, Review Boards
  • Policies: Pre-Project, Project and Run-time
  • Processes: Establishment, Education/Communication, Enforcement, Measurement
  • Technologies: Registry/Repository, Service Testing Platforms, ESB, XML Appliances, Security Gateways, Service Management Platforms, Service Invocation & Exposure Frameworks

4. The advice on governance — policy establishment, communication, enforcement, measurement and feedback — is pragmatic, not autocratic. During their SOA journey, the Advasco team faces challenges where what’s best for the architecture (long-run) isn’t necessarily best for the business that day. Instead of taking an architecture hard line, or business shortcut, the team considers options and implications, and makes pragmatic trade-offs.

5. Exhibiting good SOA form, the book is easily consumed and right-sized.

The book is available on Amazon and via the publisher.

[Disclosure: Todd Biske is a friend, one that I personally recruited into the SOA Consortium, for his thoughtful and pragmatic views on SOA, EA and business solution delivery].

Filed Under: services architecture, soa Tagged With: books

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

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