IT Governance is key, but some good tricks and more there if you want to fail !
And you know that bad IT governance is a big risk...
- Look about IT governance this "perfect" synthesis report by PWC...
- And what is board implication in IT governance? and more...
The first objective of IT governance is strategic alignment (this "mechanical" concept !).
A rather new magazine focus on that...
- Concerning alignment, some nice companies, Staples, Wells Fargo, Dow Chemical and Dell Computer manage their strategies not just one application at a time, but how they attack integration as an end-to-end process, from supplier to customer.
- Some new tricks on this alignment topic? There, a good checklist...
- Good IT governance implies some ethical aspects...
...and
IT projects still fail !!
Only 28% of IT projects succeed these days, down from 34% a year or two ago. Outright failures -- IT projects canceled before completion -- are up to 18%. The remaining 51% of IT projects are "challenged" -- seriously late, over budget and lacking expected features (Standish Group)...
- Agile programming is a know set of strategies (and even Extreme programming... ) in that domain. That impacts portofolio strategy management (one of the key "communication" aspects of good governance !). Can a solution for portofolio management be to implement only 1 program (just a joke), an ERP, solving everything for everybody. What is the real relation between agility and ERP's?
Again the same old theoretical and practical key problem, what part must be "mechanized" and what part (of everything) has to remain "organic"...
And always, some guidance and toolkits updates: Cobit, so useful to everybody, the need of scorecards and dashboards...
tags: IT governance , IT scorecard, projects
(stole the title of this post from there...)
Let's start these posts by this fantastic recent study by Bain about trends on usage of management tools in 2007.
This study shows usage and usage satisfaction, in different continents, of the main "management tools": Balanced Scorecard, Benchmarking, BPR, Collaborative Innovation, Consumer Ethnography, Core Competencies, Corporate Blogs, CRM, Customer Segmentation, Growth Strategy Tools, Knowledge Management, Lean Operations, Loyalty Management Tools, Mergers and Acquisitions, Mission and Vision Statements, Offshoring, Outsourcing, RFID, Scenario and Contingency Planning, Shared Service Centers, Six Sigma, Strategic Alliances, Strategic Planning, SCM, Supply Chain Management, Total Quality Management.
I like the results! But read the full story, with differentiation of acceptance and satisfaction by continents...
Among existing yottabytes of data, we will use, during our life, billions of information (data becomes information when it correspond to some conscious or unconscious project or objective I have...), but how much tacit or explicit knowledge (information embodied after really using it, "learning by doing"...)?
I always was reluctant to the next word, wisdom, the word appearing a bit too spiritual to me. But competency is a good one. In my opinion, competency emerges when knowledge can, in real life, be applied to some specific and useful process...
In front of a problem, everybody try to find the perfect expertise.
This is not so easy, our mind is always balanced between confidence and doubts. We are tempted to trust some nice sources, gambling unconsciously between pleasure of finding fast and cold and unpleasant hard work...
People are therefore statistically more tempted by "lovable fools" than by "competent jerks"
But KM topic still open !
- How can we separate Wheat & Chaff?
- Back to basics, KM jargon
- KM frontiers always moving, from time to time, need of refocus, its relation with HPT (Human Performance Technology)
- Companies have still to define their strategy on that...
- Some quick wins are possible...
What is real value of KM? It is highly of the type of work model we have in an organization, and alignment of decisions with it...
- Profit/employee becomes a new key indicator, even for Wall Street !
- But can we measure KM?
- Is knowledge sharing so easy?
- Must we collect information or can we get it from other sources? The old connection/collection debate...
And this dream of learning?
Can learning be made, with a good KM system, without human intermediation? I don't think so.
Some steps of learning are:
- Illumination (human based, sort of psychoanalytical transfer mode)
- Deepening (Can be Information based, personal work)
- Project, transforming information into knowledge (Vertical or horizontal human interaction necessary)
And, just for pleasure, why not some contest on KM...?
- Is KM dead?
- Let's kill KMS (KM Systems)
- Let's kill Knowledge Management
Not impressed by high tech evolution? Just read 2007 ten emerging technologies.
And what's new just now?
about Computing
- Super lenses and chips, to see nanometers...
- Intel going on...
about Communication
- Optical fibers ... and the web
- IBM going on...
- and all the mobile stuff, changing potentially your life...
about Storage
- Nanotubes again...
- and flash memory on your desktop
about Man/Machine interfaces
- what about ultramobiles
- some virtual earphones
- Internet names length
- and emoticons...
- and last but not least, if you don't succeed to retrieve information (all those blogs !!!), why not organize your disorder?
Governing IT (look at this PWC perfect report) is (and that is not new!) key for company performance:
Strategic alignment is key, but clearly a subtle adaptive one, not too mechanistic...
What are CEO feelings on that?
Some new innovative ideas on this old alignment topic, like this definition of IT organizations as fitting into one of three categories, which called Solid Utility, Trusted Supplier, and Partner Player.
McKinsey emphasizes on some conditions of success...
All that relies usually on CIO. He is responsible of all dimensions of IT Governance (Strategic Alignment, Operational Efficiency, Risk Management, Security, Business Continuity, Change Management, System Integrity, Cost Management, Regulatory Compliance, Value Delivery):
Don't forget that sometimes IT can put you out of business!
CIO priorities on theses subjects evolve, and more...
Recently published, on those topics:
On Security : Web2 increases security risks and is a new challenge, and globalization is another key issue...
On Compliance: Compliance environment in US and more...
On Business continuity...
With such responsibilities, why CIO careers are not more dynamic, does CIO still means "Career Is Over"?
SOA story is a nice one! It was at the top of CIO challenges for 2007, and reemphasised in recent CeBit, ...
To consider the best way to develop, maintain application is to design them as independant LEGO buiding blocks, exchanging services is a nice creative dream.
But...
picture, in large companies, of application portfolio shows the real mess:
heterogeneous applications, different programming language, weight of history, big amount of usable application, only a small part being used and a smaller part really useful (using Renault CIO typology)
In that kind of case, SOA is more a modern (desperate?) programming way to try to make these old (and new) applications communicate, creating a layer of web services (communication layer using web xml protocols...).
OK, let's imagine it will work (in some years...)
Will that solve the "data base" problem, that created this heterogeneity? Every silo in the company has his own view (about what is client, what is a map, what is a piece of material) and therefore about the meaning, the way it must be coded, the information that must be inside....
Sure, a way to avoid all that is to move progressively to an ERP, insuring communication between silos but nobody can suddenly stop the past and move to a new way. And ERPs have got their own "philosophy of life"...
On that:
- is SOA DOA ? (Dead on arrival!)
- Good SOA synthesis by IBM (clear enough)
- SOA governance is a must, teams are key...
This Web2 emphasis is a bit enervating for some people (like me).
Any rational?
This big Web2 bag contains a lot of concepts and techniques, sometimes rather new (Ajax, long tail, ..), sometimes rather old (social networks, blogging, forums, ...).
Some of those concepts where historically peripheral, borderline, even sometimes freakish, and are now becoming, just because technology is more mature, full mainstream.
- a first immediate consequence is irruption of merchants, vendors, consultants around the concepts
- another consequence is a lack of balance in ideas and marketing.
One exemple: it is not because we have now tools that allow people to participate, to contribute that they will do it!
Some people prefer to be passive, to be softly manipulated by some ideas coming from the others (marketers, politicians,...)
Some recent contributions around these subjects
---- Is Web2 another bubble?
---- Good rebound on web2 & new marketing. B2BC (Business to Business Consumer) concept seems interesting to develop.
---- That implies to move progressively to Entreprise 2.0. Is that so easy?
---- At last, companies are interessed in social networks ("the chart behind the chart")
---- ... and a nice survey on that...
---- so, are we that way entering KM2?
---- Is enterprise 2.0 term equivalent to KM 2.0? Surely not! KM really wider!
---- Short stimulating ideas about social networks replacing KM (but you have to pay for it) !
---- COP's (community of practices) basic rules
---- but... social networks not so simple. Will we have to manage them?
---- The fundamental question is still alive: Will "semantic web", SOA, ..., all those web2 tricks will facilitate impressive new services ? Integrating is sometimes the key. Mashups are in the center. Not so easy !
---- Is web2 replacing, by direct access, consultants? No consultants for Web2?
---- Some happy with blogs ..., some not happy...
---- May be a better way to understand sociology, but big brother can be there....
but social networks are so nice, so easy to build....
About Moore's law, Intel still invest strongly in 45 nanometers technology in competition with AMD, IBM, ...
For the future, why not quantum computers? May be not ready !
..and atom thin graphite to build transistors...
And this fantastic technology, RFID, with all its opportunities and risks, now at 50 micrometer size !
Man/machines interface:
Suppressing the mouse, eye movement driven computer? It's an old dream. I already tried that in an IBM research lab years ago. A bit disorienting, with a funny feeling not to be allowed to look anywhere, and a sort of sea-sick impression. I hope they improved !
... and why not connect your brain directly to games?
...and how much data world wide? and what for? If we cannot absorb more than 1 info/s (short term memory size limitation), compute how many information you will be able to absorb during your all life (3 Billions ?). Multiply by the population (6 Billion?)... It give something at the level of zettabytes, considered by IDC as the level of amount of data stored around 2010...
So we will zap more and more !
About the advances about programming bots (intelligent agents), look at these social bots !
And the other face, risks are always there, hackers and co ...