Brenda Michelson

Link: How To Make Meaningful Estimates For Software Products | Wait, I Know This One

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If you’ve worked with me in the past few years, you know I advocate bringing product management thinking and practices to enterprise/business software projects, particularly those trying new tech, methods, outcomes and such. The things that Nils classifies as interesting:

“There is a fundamental disconnect between estimates and interesting things. Interesting things are unpredictable.”

…”I prefer timeboxes, and for interesting things, we get done what we get done in the timebox. The art of product management is figuring out what to do in the timebox.”

Source: Wait I know this one
via Diigo

my path: towards technology infusion

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“IT, or better said, the digital capability IT provides, is infused in every aspect of a business including process execution, customer interaction, employee and partner collaboration, knowledge discovery, information access, delivery, and flow.

In order to provide top tier digital capability, we need to abolish these artificial divides of business and IT, and focus on building organizational capabilities that combine business, technology and human elements.”

– me, on my soapbox last year.

Foundational for my personal (not client specific), work, writing, whatever form it takes.

past is prologue: fluid enterprise, blended architecture

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In what feels like eons ago, I wrote the following (excerpt) in 2004. The architectural strategies I refer to are SOA, event-driven architecture, process-based architecture (BPM), Grid (morphs to Cloud and IoT) and real-time, right-time (morphs to fast data, operational analytics).

I was thinking about this today as I contemplate (circle) my technology infusion work and current industry hype and practices.

From below, the ideas of architectural blends, business interaction patterns, fluid enterprise attainment, multi-use assets and architecture for execution hold firm.

“…Organizations shouldn’t be looking at these strategies in isolation; the strategies need to be considered collectively. The strategies should be mixed, as part of an architectural portfolio. Then we can select the right architectural strategy in each situation. But we shouldn’t stop there. With merely a menu of strategies to use, we need to take the next step.

We need to blend the strategies to work together, so we can seamlessly use different architectural strategies within the course of a business interaction. Now when our most important customer places an order, using our service-oriented Web site, the notable event not only informs us, but also invokes a promotions service, which tailors a special offer for that customer. We can send the customer this offer via email, or it can be available to her as a business-process-in-waiting, activated when she makes her next contact with us—in person, on the Web, or on the phone.

This is the true promise of the architecture strategies, used together to create what we call a “fluid enterprise.” In a fluid enterprise, lag time is squeezed, traditional organizational boundaries are dissolved, supply chains are optimized, information delivery is sped up, and attention is focused at the edges—where the customers are.

While this blended approach can bring great power to our businesses, it won’t help us one iota if it is executed poorly. We can’t take on this enterprise architectural blending activity with a traditional enterprise architecture mindset. We need more than a blueprint to make this happen—we need a realized architecture that can be easily used by projects. We need our architecture to be actionable.

But it isn’t just our architecture practices that need adjustment. We also need to think differently about our portfolios: business solution, information, and infrastructure. These new architecture strategies augment what is in place. Their power is in connecting and altering the behavior of existing assets. For example, as inventory is received in a warehouse, a content management system can be automatically reposting the product page for the received product that had been out of stock. The assets in our portfolios are no longer sole-purposed applications or databases; they are also potential multiuse components and triggers to be exploited in the new architecture.”

via business-driven architecture : elemental links : Page 3.

Patterns of intrapreneurs and great enterprise architects

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Reading Recognize Intrapreneurs Before They Leave – Vijay Govindarajan and Jatin Desai – Harvard Business Review, I was struck by the commonality between the intrapeneurs referenced in the article, and the best enterprise architects I’ve met, worked with.

Quite possibly, it is because really great enterprise architects are forward-thinking, creative, reflective and execution-capable.

The pattern match:

“Pattern #2: Strategic Scanning. Intrapreneurs are constantly thinking about what is next, one step into the future. These passionate change agents are highly engaged, very clear, and visibly consistent in their work and interactions. They are not sitting around waiting for the world to change; they’re figuring out which part of the world is about to change, and they will arrive just in time to leverage their new insights. Learning is like oxygen to them.

Pattern #3: Greenhousing. Intrapreneurs tend to contemplate the seed of an idea for days and weeks between calls, meetings, and conversation. As they shine more light on it, the idea becomes clearer, but they don’t yet share it. They know that others may dismiss it without fully appreciating it — so they tend to ideas in their greenhouse, protecting them for a while from potential naysayers.

Pattern #4: Visual Thinking. Visual thinking is a combination of brainstorming, mind mapping, and design thinking. Only after an exciting insight do intrapreneurs seem able to formulate and visualize a series of solutions in their head—rarely do they formulate just one solution. They do not act impulsively on a solution immediately, keenly aware of the need to honor the discovery phase for the new solution, giving it time to develop and crystallize.”

Link: G.E.’s ‘Industrial Internet’ Goes Big – NYTimes.com

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Another on G.E.’s Industrial Internet:

“The executive in charge of the project for G.E. also said that by next year almost all equipment made by the company will have sensors and Big Data software.

“Everyone wants prediction about performance, and better asset management,” said William Ruh, vice president of global software at G.E. “The ideas of speed, of information velocity, is what will differentiate the winners from the losers.”

“The so-called Industrial Internet involves putting different kinds of sensors, sometimes by the thousands, in machines and the places they work, then remotely monitoring performance to maximize profitability.”

Source: NYTimes

via Diigo

Link: GE’s Radical Software Helps Jet Engines Fix Themselves | Wired Design | Wired.com

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I think I’d enjoy Jet Engine school way more, now:

“A few years back, after an internal audit of their vast and various business holdings, the folks at General Electric made something of a discovery: Their company was roughly the fourteenth biggest software maker in the world. They’d never really thought of themselves as a software company–all that coding was being done by developers hidden in silos within other silos in the corporate structure–but they figured maybe it was time to start.

So in June 2011, the company hired designer Greg Petroff and put him in charge of user experience for the whole shebang. His first project was an ambitious one: creating a system that will bring all of GE’s industrial machines, from wind turbines to hospital hardware to jet engines, onto one cloud-connected, contextually-aware, super-efficient platform.”

Source Link: Wired

via Diigo

Link: GM Opens the Door to Online New-Car Sales – WSJ.com

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“By the end of this year, GM plans to extend a Web-based application, called Shop-Click-Drive, to its entire dealer network. The app would let new-car buyers use their computer screen to lock in the price of a new car, get an estimate of the trade-in value of their old car, apply for financing and even arrange a test drive or delivery of their new vehicle.

GM’s app acts as an electronic door to its independent brick-and-mortar dealers, and so represents a cautious step toward adapting to consumers whose experience with online shopping for appliances and other goods has made them less willing to visit showrooms.”

via Diigo source link: WSJ.com

Link: disrupt thyself

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“Success in self-disruption requires at least the following six elements:

1. An autonomous business unit. The unit should have all the functional skills it needs to succeed, freeing it from reliance on the parent organization, and it must not report to the business or businesses that are being disrupted.

2. Leaders who come from the relevant “schools of experience.” These leaders have addressed a variety of challenges, especially in the kinds of problems the new growth business will face. They are often necessarily sourced from outside the organization” …

source link: bmichelson on tumblr excerpting HBR article on Disrupting Consulting
via Diigo

Additional disruption of consulting in Scott Berkun’s Consultants Should All Get Real Jobs

Don’t fret being misunderstood, Bezos on change via my Tumblr

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Bezos has a different view — a long view. “Everything we’ve ever done people have said this. People said customer reviews were a bad idea, third-party selling is a bad idea, personalization is a bad idea,” and he does have a point. “In 1994, typing your credit card [info] on the internet is a bad idea. Every single thing that’s new is a bad idea.” And then Bezos repeats one his best rehearsed and most convincing soundbites. “Willingness to be misunderstood is one of our greatest strengths.”

via Tumblr http://bmichelson.tumblr.com/post/62900280822