Brenda Michelson

Entrenchment: What we have is a thinking problem

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On May 1 — while sacrificing yet another shirt to a hotel iron — I had an epiphany of sorts, which I immediately tweeted:

“Legacy isn’t the big IT problem. Entrenchment is. Entrenched investments, mindsets, skills, business process & information wiring. -me, now”

Shortly afterwards, I followed up with:

“what we have isn’t a technology problem, it’s a thinking problem.”

Based on the huge (positive) response from the community on twitter, I shared that I was inspired to elaborate my tweets to an Entrenchment essay.

So far though, the time for long-form thinking and writing alludes me. [Not to mention good hotel irons].

In the interim, I’ve been tweeting under an #entrenchment hashtag, and more recently, scribbling entrenchment bursts.

Convincing myself these bursts could be considered micro-essays, I’m going to share them on elemental links, under a new entrenchment category.

Someday, they may evolve into a cohesive essay, or daresay something longer. But for now, I’m going micro.

I hope they provoke some re-thinking. Feedback encouraged.

Series starts with On enterprise blueprinting

Link Collection — April 29, 2012

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  • When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End? – Justin Fox – Harvard Business Review

    Provocative view. Lots of good linked content.

    “It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.

    Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.””

    tags: internet neal-stephenson innovation

  • Citigroup’s massive scalability challenges, by the numbers – Cloud Computing News

    Massive scale measured in business terms: trillions of $

    “$12.5 trillion. That’s the amount of customer money for which Benjamin’s half of Citi is responsible. About a quadrillion dollars worth of transactions flow through his system every year.”

    tags: scalability citi

  • The Creative Monopoly – NYTimes.com

    “[Thiel’s] lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

    Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.”

    Now think about the competitive environment that confronts the most fortunate people today and how it undermines those mind-sets.

    tags: creativity economics competition

  • Beyond the 10,000 Hour Rule: Richard Hamming and the Messy Art of Becoming Great

    “”Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well,” Hamming says. “They believe the theory enough to go ahead; [but] they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory.”

    This is perhaps the most important advice from among Hamming’s many suggestions. The path to excellence requires this balance between confidence and doubt, and though this balance is challenging, it’s tractable so long as your recognize what you’re facing.”

    tags: expertise talent

  • The Flight From Conversation – NYTimes.com

    “WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.”

    tags: sherryturkle technology society

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — April 15, 2012
  2. Link Collection — April 22, 2012
  3. Link Collection — April 1, 2012

Dear Data entrepreneurs, I’ll choose my own movie. Go study cancer. — Active Information

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This week on active information, I excerpt and comment on a Kauffman Foundation report on healthcare that I found both enlightening and enraging.

My lead-in:

“Why is it we can predict a consumer’s propensity to read Hunger Games, upgrade their iPad or download music featured on the Voice, yet we fail miserably at predicting life-threatening events, such as a women’s propensity to develop breast cancer?”

The post: Data entrepreneurs, Ill choose my own movie. Go s… – Input Output.

Thanks to Joe McKendrick for pointing out the report.
Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Big Data from left field; Big Data Rx
  2. Developing data literacy: Informed Skeptics & Big Judgment — Active Information
  3. Active Information: Data Scientists, Moneyball, Competitive Analytics & Big Data Definition

Forrester: Forcing A New Role For CIOs & Dragging IT Out Of The Backrooms

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John Brand of Forrester writes on the inevitable shift of CIOs and IT. I strongly agree with the following two points. We are in a systems-of-systems world. Organizations fighting this shift are swimming against the digital tide.

“There is no “big suite” solution. Over the past 30+ years, IT has thrived on the ideals of consolidation and centralisation. One system. One repository. One place to put stuff. If only I had a penny for every time I heard the phrase “we need a single repository”. For years Ive been saying that users dont care about where something lives. They care about how to access it. Its not about a single repository. Its about a seamless repository. Google doesnt hold the worlds information sources. Its merely appears to users like it does. Forget the big suites. The one system. The strategic vendor. Focus on the right tool for the right job. Focus on the fact that the job will change — and so should the tools. The building industry hasnt rested on its laurels because it thinks its found the one perfect set of materials, construction methods and tools to do every job. Why do we think in IT that theres only one vendor, one platform or one language that we need to deal with? Embrace diversity, but still maintain a focus on management. Continuous design will be a capability that every organization will need to learn. Its not about doing it “right” the first time. Its about continually doing it better and better.   

Systems are no longer isolated — and neither are we. Over the last decade and a half, the world has connected — and interconnected — an amazing array of technologies. We are now all completely dependent on each other. And so are our systems. Our newer systems are not built on batch uploaded data sets that we can control and cleanse — but on masses of big data that we need to extract meaning and structure from. We cant have the luxury of first defining a structure and populating data into it. We must work with what we have or what we can get. Fast.”

via The Empowered BT Era Will Force Yes, Force A New Role For CIOs – And Drag IT Out Of The Backrooms | Forrester Blogs.

I’m attending Forrester’s co-located CIO and EA Forums next week in Vegas. Will blog and tweet what I hear. Look me up if you are there.
Related posts:

  1. CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ

Link Collection — April 22, 2012

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  • Stealing Computer Code Isn’t Theft, Court Rules – Input Output

    “The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the taking of source code by Sergey Aleynikov was not a crime under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets because the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law because it was not physical “goods” or “wares” or “merchandise.” He had taken high-frequency trading computer code from Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank where he worked, as he was about to start a new job at Teza Technologies, a startup in the same business, according to the Chicago Tribune.
    In particular, the code did not “become” stolen property even when Aleynikov saved it to a flash drive, a tangible device, noted Waters Technology.
    In addition, because the software was used internally rather than sold to other people, that meant it could not be subject to laws regarding interstate commerce, noted the New York Times.”

    tags: legal code goldmansachs

  • Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix $1 Million Challenge | Techdirt

    “We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment.

    It wasn’t just that the improvement was marginal, but that Netflix’s business had shifted and the way customers used its product, and the kinds of recommendations the company had done, had shifted too. Suddenly, the prize winning solution just wasn’t that useful — in part because many people were streaming videos rather than renting DVDs — and it turns out that the recommendation for streaming videos is different than for rental viewing a few days later.”

    tags: bigdata kaggle contest

  • Amazon launches cloud app store (and eats ecosystem?) — Cloud Computing News

    “From Amazon’s perspective it’s easy to see why the marketplace idea was so appealing. Letting users launch fully configured versions of popular products in a single click is a compelling feature, especially for complex software that isn’t easily deployed in the cloud (or at all). For its software-vendor partners, AWS Marketplace represents an opportunity to do SaaS without having to build a SaaS business or infrastructure.”

    tags: cloud computing amazon

  • Ingineering.IT — DevOps, Technical Debt, and Adaptive Organizations

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — April 15, 2012
  2. Link Collection — April 1, 2012
  3. Link Collection — February 5, 2012

Reinvention Week, Prussian Officers and Smart & Lazy talent

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Last Friday on Twitter, I was lamenting the compulsion of new people on existing projects to revisit and reinvent every prior decision and action, rather than focus their energy on execution. I tagged the tweets reinvention week. My opening salvos:

Wouldn’t it be cool if new people to a project focused on getting it done, rather than reinvention? #reinventionweek #EntArch

We need to value execution on par with creation. #entarch #reinventionweek

These sparked a conversation with Sally Bean and Neil Ward-Dutton on why this happens: ego, uncertainty, lack of communication and so on.

Certainly, there are instances when revisitation is required, and is the mission of the new person. However, in my experience, too frequently the need is driven by ego. Either, in placing a stamp on the project, or in moving the project to the technology, standards, patterns the new person is expert on, and therefore most likely to be seen as a star and/or become a key player.

In our twitter back and forth, Sally Bean offered: “that’s why we need to hire smart lazy people, not smart industrious ones.”

Sally was referring to Field Marshal Bernhard Graf von Moltke’s model on categorizing officers:

• Smart & Lazy: I make them my Commanders because they make the right thing happen but find the easiest way to accomplish the mission.

• Smart & Energetic: I make them my General Staff Officers because they make intelligent plans that make the right things happen.

• Dumb & Lazy: There are menial tasks that require an officer to perform that they can accomplish and they follow orders without causing much harm

• Dumb & Energetic: These are dangerous and must be eliminated. They cause thing to happen but the wrong things so cause trouble.

I hadn’t see this model before. It’s an interesting take on matching talent (or not) to positions. We always think we need “smart and energetic”. Yet, in a multitude of situations, “smart and lazy” is the better way to go.

CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ

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Wow. Can the CIO escape the chief infrastructure officer corner? Or, has that ship sailed?

“New research suggests chief executives don’t consider CIOs of their companies as partners in managing either strategy or innovation. This data could go a long way towards explaining why so many CIO jobs are advertised as strategic, but end up being largely operational.

According to Gartner, which conducts an annual survey of CEO attitudes towards technology, only 4% of the chief executives of some of the world’s largest companies consider their CIOs as leaders of innovation management within their organizations, or as supporting them in making strategic changes to the business.

Mark Raskino, who conducted the survey, added that 35% of CEOs named the CFO as their main strategic partner in the company, but didn’t mention CFOs at all when it comes to managing innovation either. “In this world of digital disruption, this overall equation is almost a systemic map for creating a blind spot… Strategy and innovation are held separately, and the CIO is held nowhere near any of them,” he told CIO Journal.”

…

“It reflects the extent to which CIOs are under-appreciated by the rest of the executive suite, in large part because “too often, IT leaders see themselves, and CEOs see them, as custodians of the tools” used to drive innovation. High says CIOs can change this perception by leading conversations about how IT can support initiatives for human resources, legal and compliance and marketing departments.

Gartner surveyed 381 companies for this report, 16% of which generate revenues of $50 billion or more, 23% of which earn between $5 billion and $25 billion, and 36% of which earn between $1 billion and $5 billion. Seventy percent of respondents were CEOs, president or board members, and 30% were CFOs. More than half employed more than 10,000 workers.“

via CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ.

Another article on the survey result points to short CIO tenures as a detriment:

“CIOs are seen as employees that move from company to company, never rising to a more senior role and never staying longer than their next job offer, added Lopez.“

Regardless of the cause, the impact is significant. I’m not advocating that the “I” in CIO becomes “Innovation”, but in the now (and forever) digital business world, the CIO needs to press the innovation agenda. Directly, or via a strategic hire.
Related posts:

  1. A Framework for Evaluating the Modern CIO – The CIO Report – WSJ

Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

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Via the open source monkeys, cloud developers everywhere will have an opportunity to learn how Netflix manages a spike laden business on Amazon’s cloud. In addition to the open source news, the article provides a nice overview of the business problem Netflix is solving, why they went cloud, how open source helps with recruiting talent, and profiles one of their big talents, Adrian Cockcroft.

An excerpt:

“Netflix is getting ready to unleash its Simian Army.

The online movie rental company uses a troupe of cloud software — it calls the programs “monkeys” — that poke and prod its online applications and keep the website and its services humming along.

There’s a Chaos Monkey, a program that randomly kills virtual machines to make sure that small outages will not disrupt the overall system. They’ve got Security Monkey — it looks for configuration and security flaws — and Janitor Monkey, too: It looks for system resources that aren’t being used and shuts them down.

Over the next few months Netflix will release the source code for these programs and more, giving cloud developers a look at how it runs its services on Amazon’s cloud. The plan is “to release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year,” says Adrian Cockcroft, the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix. “We will be doing bits and pieces of it through the summer and into the fall.””

via Netflix to Open Source Army of Cloud Monkeys | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Link Collection — April 15, 2012

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  • Crovitz: Complexity Is Bad for Your Health – WSJ.com

    It’ll be interesting to see if SCOTUS determines if (a) the complexity of the entire law makes it impossible to strike down the mandate; or (b) if the mandate is deemed unconstitutional, thus sinking the entire complicated law. 

    Is it too complex to fail? Or, too complex to stand?

    “The justices focused on the complexity of the law to debate what happens if they find some parts unconstitutional, such as the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance. Can the rest of it stay, or must it all fall, and the political branches start on health-care reform from scratch? And how could the court practically pick and choose, given the law’s great length and complexity?”

    “Perhaps ObamaCare will be remembered as the breaking point for top-down planning. There is not enough information available for the government to micromanage a system as complex as health care, which represents more than 15% of the economy. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote some 50 years ago about the “pretence of knowledge,” meaning the conceit that planners could know enough about complex markets to dictate how they operate. He warned against “the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess.”

    tags: complexity healthcare scotus

  • 5 ways to power the Internet of things — Cleantech News and Analysis

    “The Internet of Things could have a mind-boggling 24 billion devices connected by 2020 and that means there will be more than three times the amount of connected devices as people on the planet by that time. So, how will the world power all of these gadgets and machine-driven devices? The answer, beyond plugging all of those devices into the grid, will include farming tiny slices of power when available, from sources like the sun, vibrations, mechanical energy, heat and more.”

    tags: cleantech green internet-of-things

  • Business-Facing IT Jobs In Demand – The CIO Report – WSJ

    “…outsources what he calls “run-of-the-mill coding jobs” to India, said there are plenty of positions for enterprise architects, data integration architects, and business analysts. Such jobs include all of the” thinking work” that ends up in code and can’t be done offshore because it requires core understanding of each individual company, Leader said.

    Recent college graduates could fill core project management and business analyst positions in IT, he said. Leader himself hired project managers, an enterprise architect and business analysts. Many other jobs, including enterprise and integration architects, require strong skill sets that cannot be filled by students fresh out of college, forcing companies to compete for those applicants. “We cannot find people to fill these jobs,” Leader told CIO Journal.”

    tags: wsj entarch integration IT business_analysis

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — April 1, 2012
  2. Link Collection — January 8, 2012
  3. Link Collection — March 4, 2012

Developing data literacy: Informed Skeptics & Big Judgment — Active Information

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“At this very moment, there’s an odds-on chance that someone in your organization is making a poor decision on the basis of information that was enormously expensive to collect.”

This week on Active Information, I highlight a report from the Corporate Executive Board on building organizational capability for Big Data.

My post focuses on human capability, which the Corporate Executive Board refers to as Big Judgment. The data literacy aspect is from a synopsis of Tiffany’s training program.

The post: Developing data literacy: Big Data requires inform… – Input Output.
Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Big Data from left field; Big Data Rx
  2. 8 Rules for Big Data – Active Information
  3. Active Information: Reclaim the “I” in CIO, Big Data & Collective Intelligence

Data-driven decision-making, not just for the business

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I was inspired to write the following active information post after a particularly painful conference call:

“That got me wondering, are we in IT so busy managing everyone else’s data, that we forget to use data for own decisions?”

via Enterprise Devs: don’t just manage data, use it – Input Output.

As March progressed, I found myself asking “What does the data tell us”?” in numerous design sessions.

It ended up being an extremely effective way to refocus otherwise circuitous conversations. Try it.
Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Data-Driven Business Innovation
  2. 8 Rules for Big Data – Active Information
  3. Active Info: Software Architect lessons, Data-driven problem solving