Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Brenda Michelson “Eventually technology just disappears,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s the ultimate achievement. No more ports and prompts and plug-ins.”
– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/the-future-as-imagined-by-google/?ref=technology
via Tumblr http://bmichelson.tumblr.com/post/62716555447
“Some CIOs, and many other IT professionals, act as if they believe that their jobs are finished when the technology is installed. The problem is that from the point of view of every other executive, the job is finished only when the business achieves the outcomes it wants and has paid for. When IT teams deliver only technology, what they deliver is perceived in the same terms, and not as value.”
– Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value by Richard Hunter, George Westerman
via Tumblr http://bmichelson.tumblr.com/post/61670584980
“change is predictable, though its outcomes are not”
– Think Like a Futurist: Know What Changes, What Doesn’t, and What’s Next by Cecily Sommers
via Tumblr http://bmichelson.tumblr.com/post/61597284688
and another, tagged correctly. upon completion, i will use my trail manners and leave no trace via Tumblr http://bmichelson.tumblr.com/post/60653742811 Send to Kindle
Testing IFTTT recipe. (Sorry for the interruption) via Tumblr http://bmichelson.tumblr.com/post/60650407059 Send to Kindle
Related posts:
This Is the Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Interesting article on the tools built/used by Google developers, and the woman who oversees the dev tool team. For the tool insights, jump to “For Google Eyes Only”.
“Google’s developer tools are, in some ways, a reflection of the egalitarian philosophy Meckfessel sees at play throughout the company. A single system, available from any company web browser, provides instant access to practically every piece of code that underpins practically every Google product and service. It even houses the code used to build, well, itself, in the kind of circular setup that’s so very common in the world of software.
The result is any Google engineer can tinker with code built by any other Google engineer. “The code is completely open — within the company,” Meckfessel says.
That doesn’t mean anyone can rewrite the code for, say, Gmail, compile it into executable software, and completely revamp the popular email service all on their own. But it does mean they can peruse and edit any of Gmail’s underlying code — and if they submit it to the right person for review and testing and compilation, they can indeed change the live service.”
tags: google development
“Everybody has this idea that Twitter is easy. With a little architectural hand waving we have a scalable Twitter, just that simple. Well, it’s not that simple as Raffi Krikorian, VP of Engineering at Twitter, describes in his superb and very detailed presentation on Timelines at Scale. If you want to know how Twitter works – then start here.”
tags: architecture twitter scale
The Body Data Craze – Newsweek and The Daily Beast
Overview of the Quantified Self trend.
“Welcome to my biography, 2013-style. It includes more data points than it possibly could have 20 years ago. And it’s part of a national obsession of a people who, literally, number our days. According to a recent nationwide survey for Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project, 7 out of 10 people self-track regularly—using everything from human memory to a memory stick—some aspect of health for themselves or for someone else. Among the 3,000 adults questioned, the most popular things to monitor were weight and diet. A third of the people surveyed also track more esoteric elements of their health, from blood pressure to sleep to blood sugar. While many of them keep this information “in their heads,” a full 50 percent actually keep a written record of the data either using technology or on paper. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, in 2012 the U.S. sports and fitness category was a $70 billion business; and earlier this year, market firm ABI released a report that estimated that 485 million wearable computing devices—like smart watches and smart glasses—will be shipped annually by 2018.””
tags: quantifiedself
Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Big Data Takes Center Stage
“The next change requires accepting messiness instead of insisting on clean, carefully curated data. “[In] an increasing number of situations, a bit of inaccuracy can be tolerated, because the benefits of using vastly more data of variable quality outweigh the costs of using smaller amounts of very exact data. . . When there was not that much data around, researchers had to make sure that the figures they bothered to collect were as exact as possible. Tapping vastly more data means that we can now allow some inaccuracies to slip in (provided the data set is not completely incorrect), in return for benefiting from the insights that a massive body of data provides.””
The Quantified Self: Fundamental Disruption in Big Data Science and Biological Discovery
Research paper in Mary Ann Liebert, Big Data on Quantified Self. Big potential to aggregate individual data to make medical / biological discoveries and generate cures / remediations.
“A key contemporary trend emerging in big data science is the quantified self (QS)–individuals engaged in the self-tracking of any kind of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information as n=1 individuals or in groups. There are opportunities for big data scientists to develop new models to support QS data collection, integration, and analysis, and also to lead in defining open-access database resources and privacy standards for how personal data is used. Next-generation QS applications could include tools for rendering QS data meaningful in behavior change, establishing baselines and variability in objective metrics, applying new kinds of pattern recognition techniques, and aggregating multiple self-tracking data streams from wearable electronics, biosensors, mobile phones, genomic data, and cloud-based services. The long-term vision of QS activity is that of a systemic monitoring approach where an individual’s continuous personal information climate provides real-time performance optimization suggestions. There are some potential limitations related to QS activity—barriers to widespread adoption and a critique regarding scientific soundness—but these may be overcome.”
tags: bigdata healthcare quantifiedself
“Micro Service Architecture is an architectural concept that aims to decouple a solution by decomposing functionality into discrete services. Think of it as applying many of the principles of SOLID at an architectural level, instead of classes you’ve got services.
Conceptually speaking MSA is not particularly difficult to grasp but in practice it does raise many questions. How do these services communicate? What about latency between services? How do you test the services? How do you detect and respond to failure? How do you manage deployments when you have a bunch of interdependencies?”
tags: architecture
You Are Not a Large Corporation — I don’t know a thing. — Medium
Totally. Well, not the llamas.
“You can define “success” without it being tied to quarterly shareholder reports or even income. It can be tied to the amount of days you can afford not to work. Or by how much you can donate to your favourite animal charity that rescues llamas. Or by how often you can work from the road.”
tags: success
“So she posted her solution online, and then…” | johnstepper
Good post by John Stepper. I’ve highlighted the issue I encounter most in enterprises: the quest for credit, as mandated by current performance practices:
“People who are aspiring to make a difference will share their work online so others can use it and improve on it. Yet it’s a phrase you might never hear at work. Why not? And what can we do about it?”
“I won’t get credit.” A more insidious barrier is when people feel their contributions won’t be recognized. Particularly in a management system of competitive ratings and bonuses, there is a heightened sense of internal competition. Feeling like you’re fighting for your share of a finite pie will grossly inhibit your willingness to contribute and collaborate.
…
“And credit? This comes in several forms. Social recognition from relevant peers is often powerful enough to drive continued contribution. Beyond that, though, it’s the role-based community that knows about all the good jobs within the firm. When individuals contribute, they do so for their own reputation and their access to opportunities in addition to the good of the community.”
15. Ivan Poupyrev | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
“Ivan Poupyrev had a theory: What if he sent a broad spectrum of AC current through everyday objects? Would those objects be able to sense touch? The answer is yes, and Touche is the sensor system developed by Poupyrev and his team at Disney to do it.
Connect Touche to a living orchid and the plant’s entire skin becomes touch-sensitive just like a smartphone screen; attach it to a computer-music program and you can play the flower like a violin. Touche is compatible with almost any object you can grab–wooden tables, metal sculptures, water tanks, even breathing humans. Touche could make every square inch of Disney World responsive to touch–and open up a world of possibility for connecting objects to the Internet. “My long-term vision,” Poupyrev says, “is making the entire world interactive.””
tags: innovation touch interactiondesign
The audacious plan to end hunger with 3-D printed food – Quartz
“[Anjan Contractor] sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.”
tags: 3dprinting hunger
How to Run IT at the Speed of Silicon Valley – The CIO Report – WSJ
“a combination of technologies, management practices and cultural features that enable Valley technologists to work fast. These practices are used by their engineering and IT organizations.”
“…Before companies become fast, they have to learn how to accelerate. There are new skills to learn. But perhaps more challenging is the need to unlearn old ways. For example, traditional development practices, such as change control boards to oversee code changes, are inconsistent with rapid, iterative and agile practices. Companies that use both agile and traditional techniques must figure out how they will co-exist. While CEOs may not completely agree with LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman’s maxim, “if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve launched too late!”, they need to support CIOs who, in their quest to create faster, more agile IT organizations, attempt to follow its spirit.”
tags: IT acceleration
In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
“In this future, the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects. Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution.
But here’s a better way to think about what we’re building: It’s the Programmable World. After all, what’s remarkable about this future isn’t the sensors, nor is it that all our sensors and objects and devices are linked together. It’s the fact that once we get enough of these objects onto our networks, they’re no longer one-off novelties or data sources but instead become a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance. Really, it’s the opposite of an “Internet,” a term that even today—in the era of the cloud and the app and the walled garden—connotes a peer-to-peer system in which each node is equally empowered. By contrast, these connected objects will act more like a swarm of drones, a distributed legion of bots, far-flung and sometimes even hidden from view but nevertheless coordinated as if they were a single giant machine.”
Obama orders agencies to make data open, machine-readable by default | Ars Technica
good, but note the “if implemented”…
“President Barack Obama issued an executive order today that aims to make “open and machine-readable” data formats a requirement for all new government IT systems. The order would also apply to existing systems that are being modernized or upgraded. If implemented, the mandate would bring new life to efforts started by the Obama administration with the launch of Data.gov four years ago. It would also expand an order issued in 2012 to open up government systems with public interfaces for commercial app developers.
“The default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable,” the president’s order reads. “Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable.” The order, however, also requires that this new “default state” protect personally identifiable information and other sensitive data on individual citizens, as well as classified information.”
Will Your Golden Years Be Robot-Assisted?
I’m totally counting on an eldercare robot, tho I might choose a name other than HERB:
“Robots—in addition to other uses—are now being viewed as a way to meet the needs of a fast-growing aging population, with technologies that assist in daily care and provide companionship. Over the next 18 years, 78 million baby boomers will turn 65 at a rate of about 8,000 a day. And most will not be able to afford the daily help often required by age-related disability.
At the same time, health care costs are skyrocketing. Robots could help address both costs and manpower issues.”
tags: robotics healthcare demographics
“The same week that brought us a video of someone firing a gun built using parts manufactured on a 3D printer, on Wednesday offered us an inspiring story about using the same type of printer to manufacture a prosthetic hand for more than hundred times less than the cost of a traditional prosthetic set of fingers.
The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.”
tags: 3dprinting robohand makerbot
SAP Takes It All to the Cloud – NYTimes.com
The inevitable: “We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”
“Deep Learning is a first step in this new direction. Basically, it involves building neural networks — networks that mimic the behavior of the human brain. Much like the brain, these multi-layered computer networks can gather information and react to it. They can build up an understanding of what objects look or sound like.
In an effort to recreate human vision, for example, you might build a basic layer of artificial neurons that can detect simple things like the edges of a particular shape. The next layer could then piece together these edges to identify the larger shape, and then the shapes could be strung together to understand an object. The key here is that the software does all this on its own — a big advantage over older AI models, which required engineers to massage the visual or auditory data so that it could be digested by the machine-learning algorithm.
With Deep Learning, Ng says, you just give the system a lot of data “so it can discover by itself what some of the concepts in the world are.””
Reading a point-of-view piece by Cynthia Montgomery in Rotman Magazine reminded me of a soapbox tweet of mine: “we need to value execution on par with creation”.
That tweet was inspired by a consultation I did on a critical project that had fallen into the PowerPoint-to-Execution Gap.
This project made all the right upfront moves: defined a bold, yet attainable business vision, rallied executive support, hired a top talent technology consultancy, and hand-picked a skunkworks team.
Upon completion of the upfront, they had a well-defined business problem (process, requirements, data, roles), which would be supported by a state-of-art technology architecture. The creation portion was top-notch.
The problem was that company and project executives assumed that execution would take care of itself. They didn’t recognize that there is a strategic element to execution, involving not just scheduling, but careful packaging and orchestration of development, delivery, acceptance and business transformation activities.
In her Rotman piece, The Role of the Strategic Leader, Montgomery speaks to the often missed leadership component in strategic work, the “ongoing responsibility of leading strategy”.
“A great strategy, in short, is not a dream or a lofty idea, but rather the bridge between the economics of a market, the ideas at the core of a business, and action. To be sound, that bridge must rest on a foundation of clarity and realism, and it also needs a real operating sensibility.”
To illustrate her point, Montgomery — a Harvard Professor — describes how her MBA and Executive Education students inevitably debate the importance of strategy versus execution:
“Every year, early in the term, someone in class always wants to engage the group in a discussion about what’s more important: strategy or execution. In my view, this is a false dichotomy and a wrongheaded debate that the students themselves have to resolve, and I let them have a go at it.”
Montgomery revisits that early term debate with a real-world case on Gucci:
“I always bring that discussion up again at the end of my course, when we talk about Domenico De Sole’s tenure at Italian fashion eminence Gucci Group. De Sole, a tax attorney, was tapped for the company’s top job in 1995, following years of plummeting sales and mounting losses in the aftermath of unbridled licensing that had plastered Gucci’s name and distinctive red-and-green logo on everything from sneakers to whiskey — in fact, on 22,000 different products — making Gucci a cheapened and overexposed brand.
De Sole started by summoning every Gucci manager worldwide to a meeting in Florence. Instead of telling managers what he thought Gucci should be, De Sole asked them to look closely at the business and tell him what was selling and what wasn’t. He wanted to tackle the question “not by philosophy, but by data” — bringing strategy in line with experience rather than relying on intuition. The data were eye opening. Some of Gucci’s greatest recent successes had come from its few trendier, seasonal fashion items, and the traditional customer — the woman who cherished style, not fashion, and who wanted a classic item she would buy once and keep for a lifetime — had not come back to Gucci.
De Sole and his team, especially lead designer Tom Ford, weighed the evidence and concluded that they would follow the data and position the company in the upper middle of the designer market: luxury aimed at the masses. To complement its leather goods, Ford designed original, trendy — and, above all, exciting — ready-to-wear clothing each year, not as the company’s mainstay, but as its draw. The increased focus on fashion would help the world forget all those counterfeit bags and the Gucci toilet paper. It would propel the company toward a new brand identity, generating the kind of excitement that would bring new customers into Gucci stores, where they would also buy high-margin handbags and accessories.
To support the new fashion and brand strategies, De Sole and his team doubled advertising spending, modernized stores, and upgraded customer support. Unseen but no less important to the strategy’s success was Gucci’s supply chain. De Sole personally drove the back roads of Tuscany to pick the best 25 suppliers, and the company provided them with financial and technical support while simultaneously boosting the efficiency of its logistics. Costs fell and flexibility rose.”
The lesson from the Gucci case, according to Montgomery is clear:
“The only way a company will deliver on its promises, is if its strategists can think like operators.”
Montgomery continues:
“In effect, everything De Sole and Ford did — in design, product lineup, pricing, marketing, distribution, manufacturing, and logistics, not to mention organizational culture and management — was tightly coordinated, internally consistent, and interlocking. This was a system of resources and activities that worked together and reinforced each other, all aimed at producing products that were fashion forward, high quality, and good value.
It is easy to see the beauty of such a system of value creation once it is constructed, but constructing it isn’t often an easy or a beautiful process. The decisions embedded in such systems are often gutsy choices. For every moving part in the Gucci universe, De Sole faced a strictly binary decision: either it advanced the cause of fashion-forwardness, high quality, and good value — or it did not and was rebuilt. Strategists call such choices ‘identity-conferring commitments’, and they are central to what an organization is or wants to be and reflect what it stands for.”
Returning to the student debate (and the PowerPoint-to-Execution Gap):
“When I ask executives at the end of this class, “Where does strategy end and execution begin?” there isn’t a clear answer — and that’s as it should be. What could be more desirable than a well-conceived strategy that flows without a ripple into execution? Yet I know from working with thousands of organizations just how rare it is to find a carefully honed system that really delivers. You and every leader of a company must ask yourself whether you have one — and if you don’t, take the responsibility to build it. The only way a company will deliver on its promises, in short, is if its strategists can think like operators.”
Successful strategy demands execution excellence, which starts with an execution strategist. Or, if you are lucky, with one of the rare strategists who think like operators.
49ers Select New Technology For NFL Draft | Only A Game
podcast / article on SF 49ers use of stats and SAP’s HANA appliance in scouting, drafting. Continues to speak of NBA statistics and further use of HANA in sports business.
“49ers COO Paraag Marathe says piling up information is easy, but the challenge is making it user-friendly for coaches and general managers.
“And that’s something that’s sort of overlooked. People want to get reams of data and put together like this really robust analysis,” Marathe said. “But you know what? If it’s not communicated [or] it’s not simple and clear, it’s not going to be used.” …
“Does our simulation make sense in the context of that team’s roster, that team’s depth charts, in the context of that team’s salary cap? Will they be able to afford these kind of players, or are they going to make a different trade, are they going to make a different pick? That kind of real-time simulation is the real beauty of this virtual draft board. Otherwise, what you have is those big magnets.””
tags: nfl sports statistics sap hana
Get Innovation Right: Tap Into Women Over Forty | LinkedIn
“According to New York Times article Innovators Get Better with Age, research indicates that a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. He also notes that the directors of the top five grossing films in 2012 were in their 40s and 50s. While Nobel Prize winners may make their break-through discoveries earlier in life – the average age is around 38 – typically it takes twenty years to socialize their ideas, meaning they don’t receive recognition for their achievements until around the age of 60.”
“Then there’s the research around entrepreneurs. “The average founder of a high-tech startup isn’t a whiz-kid graduate, but a mature 40-year-old engineer or business type with a spouse and kids who simply got tired of working for others,””
tags: innovation age workforce
Does Your Architecture Pass the “So What” Test? | Doug Newdick’s Blog
Nice reminder and simple check from Doug Newdick. Reminds me of a quote I recently pulled from the New Yorker: “Harm averted is benefit unseen”. Be prepared to show / communicate value, even if it’s for harm averted.
“Does your architecture pass the “So What” test? Can you demonstrate the specific value that a particular architectural deliverable or activity will add? If not, why are you even bothering? In this case, as with justice, your activity must not just add value, it must be seen to add value.”
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013 | MIT Technology Review
Good list from MIT Tech Review. Several I’ve discussed with a client as they relate to the future of healthcare, and therefore, society. [Deep learning, DNA sequencing, Additive Manufacturing, Robotics]
tags: technology trends
Great Innovators Think Laterally – Ian Gonsher and Deb Mills-Scofield – Harvard Business Review
“The creative process is just that: a process. Recognizing value that others have missed doesn’t require preternatural clairvoyance. A well-honed creative process enables us to intuitively recognize patterns and use those insights to make inductive predictions about divergent ideas, both vertically within categories, and horizontally across categories. By understanding the genealogy of innovation within a given category, we can imagine what might come next.
We need to break out of thinking that is solely based on what we know, what we assume, and what we’ve experienced. Many of us are so entrenched in our industries that we don’t know how to think laterally or horizontally. We usually go a mile deep but only an inch wide. We haven’t given our people and ourselves the time and opportunities to explore other industries, cultures designs, ways of being and doing, and other “adjacent possibilities.””
tags: creativity thinking hbr
How Kaggle Is Changing How We Work – Thomas Goetz – The Atlantic
“Because here’s the thing: the Kaggle ranking has become an essential metric in the world of data science. Employers like American Express and the New York Times have begun listing a Kaggle rank as an essential qualification in their help wanted ads for data scientists. It’s not just a merit badge for the coders; it’s a more significant, more valuable, indicator of capability than our traditional benchmarks for proficiency or expertise. In other words, your Ivy League diploma and IBM resume don’t matter so much as my Kaggle score.”
tags: kaggle datascience workforce
Cartoons from the Issue of April 22nd, 2013 : The New Yorker
Perhaps I’ve spent too much time talking about trend convergences with a client, but this cartoon amused me.
What’s Next in the Techonomy? — Hagel & Seely Brown
“In the last few decades, we have witnessed a steady doubling in the price performance of digital technologies. However, we are reaching a tipping point of this exponential growth, and it is unclear how the cumulative effects of technology will reshape our economy, political systems, and collective future. One thing is clear: in the hands of existing institutions-firms, schools, non-profits, civic institutions and governments-this awesome technology will achieve only a fraction of its potential.
Unfortunately, we haven’t seen the same exponential rate of change in institutions as we have in technology (Unlike computer chips, government and business structures don’t predictably get faster and less expensive). Managerial fiefdoms, rigid hierarchies and tightly scripted procedures remain from the industrial revolution era like vestigial structures; they were important at some point, but it’s unclear what purpose they serve now…”
tags: innovation technology institutions
How To Think Like An Engineer ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community
Good insights in here. If you already think this way, consider passing it along to folks who “don’t get your thought process”…
“Excelling in business today means knowing how to think through technological abstraction and ambiguity. Here, we listen in as engineers discuss this very skill–and decode their secrets for how to hone it.”
Big Data’s Promise and Limitations : The New Yorker
“Big Data can be especially helpful in systems that are consistent over time, with straightforward and well-characterized properties, little unpredictable variation, and relatively little underlying complexity.
But not every problem fits those criteria; unpredictability, complexity, and abrupt shifts over time can lead even the largest data astray. Big Data is a powerful tool for inferring correlations, not a magic wand for inferring causality.”
tags: bigdata
LEAD Frameworks | LEAD Frameworks, Methods & Approaches
Speaking of Enterprise Architecture frameworks, this just crossed my radar via Twitter. Just passing it along, not an endorsement as I haven’t had a chance to dig in.
“LEAD is an abbreviation for “Layered Enterprise Architecture Development” and is often used as a synonym to describe the entire LEAD concept. The LEAD Frameworks refers to either the entire LEAD concept, or to a specific LEAD Framework. A certified LEAD practitioner is called a LEAD eXpert or a LEAD Architect.
The LEAD version 3.0 currently consists of 10 frameworks, 6 methods and 4 approaches that are all integrated to each other with supporting maps, matrices and models that can be used for all aspects of enterprise modelling e.g. business model, competencies, value, services, processes, information, applications, data, platforms, infrastructure and cloud as well as for transformation and innovation modelling.”
#ogChat Summary – Business Architecture | The Open Group Blog
I participated in this Business Architecture tweet jam. It was fun and interesting. No surprise, I have a different view than the rest. I’m @bmichelson in the linked post.
“The Open Group hosted a tweet jam (#ogChat) to discuss the evolution of Business Architecture and its role in enterprise transformation. In case you missed the conversation, here is a recap of the event.”
tags: business_architecture business_analysis #entarch #bizarch
Amazon launches “Send to Kindle” button for web publishers and WordPress blogs — paidContent
I added this to elementallinks.com. Look for the “Send to Kindle” icon at the end of my posts. I tested on 3 devices: Kindle Touch, iphone and ipad, works well.
“Amazon is now allowing publishers to add “Send to Kindle” buttons to their websites and WordPress blogs, the company announced on the Kindle blog Tuesday.”
Taotwit’s Too-Big-To-Tweet: TOGAF Good or Bad? – Definitely Ugly!
Nigel raises some great points on TOGAF and the challenges in applying EA frameworks in the real-world. Not to mention, a world where english is NOT the first language.
“TOGAF just tries too hard and ends up failing on a few counts: it’s too comprehensive to be a usable framework and not specific enough to be a methodology.”
However, Nigel also recognizes that TOGAF is currently the only credible option to get newbies up-to-speed.
So, how do we change that?
Big data in the age of the telegraph – McKinsey Quarterly – Organization – Strategic Organization
Decision-making and authority placed nearest the real-time data, circa 1854.
“Daniel McCallum created the first organization chart in response to the information problem hobbling one of the longest railroads in the world. In surprising contrast to today’s top-down organization pyramids, in McCallum’s chart the hierarchy was reversed: authority over day-to-day scheduling and operations went to the divisional superintendents down the line, who oversaw the five branch lines of the railroad. The reasoning: they possessed the best operating data, were closer to the action, and thus were best placed to manage the line’s persistent inefficiencies.”
Plus, cool 1854 org charts… flow with data.
The Arguments Your Company Needs – Michael Schrage – Harvard Business Review
What is your company’s most important (current / ongoing) argument? Is it focused on strategy, value or individuals?
“Asked several years ago to describe the most important argument taking place at Walmart, then-CEO Lee Scott immediately replied, “The size of our stores.” The world’s largest retailer was debating just how small its footprints and formats could be while still serving customer needs and its own brand equity promise. That conversation, Scott said, provoked a lot of new thinking and analysis.”
..”All firms have strategies and cultures. But sometimes the quickest and surest way to gain valuable insight into their fundamentals is by asking, “What’s the most important argument your organization is having right now?””
tags: schrange hbr business_analysis