Link Collection — July 22, 2012

  • Becoming more strategic: Three tips for any executive – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Strategy in Practice

    “Because strategy is a journey, executives need to study, understand, and internalize the economics, psychology, and laws of their industries, so that context can guide them continually.
    For example, being able to think strategically in the high-tech industry involves a nuanced understanding of strategy topics such as network effects, platforms, and standards. In the utilities sector, it involves mastery of the economic implications of (and room for strategic maneuvers afforded by) the regulatory regime. In mining, leaders must understand the strategic implications of cost curves, game theory, and real-options valuation; further, they must know and be sensitive to the stakeholders in their regulatory and societal environment, many of whom can directly influence their opportunities to create value.”

    “Moreover, many senior executives are happy to delegate thinking about such technology issues to their company’s chief information officer or chief technology officer. Yet it’s exactly such cross-cutting trends that are most likely to upend value chains, transform industries, and dramatically shift profit pools and competitive advantage.”

    tags: strategy mckinsey entrenched

  • Are You a Strategist? — HBS Working Knowledge

    “Montgomery maintains that strategy has been narrowed to a competitive game plan, separate from a firm’s larger sense of purpose. This has led to the eclipse of the leader’s unique role as arbiter and steward of strategy. The exaggerated emphasis on sustainable competitive advantage has drawn attention away from the fact that strategy must be a dynamic tool for guiding the development of a company over time.

    “Strategy has become more about formulation than implementation, and more about getting the analysis right at the outset than living with a strategy over time,” Montgomery says. “As a consequence, it has less to do with leadership than ever before.”

    Leading strategy
    Montgomery explains that leading strategy requires confronting four questions: What does my organization bring to the world? Does that difference matter? Is something about it scarce and difficult to imitate? Are we doing today what we need to do in order to matter tomorrow? Being a strategist means living these questions, she says.

    For a leader, becoming a strategist starts with getting clear on why, whether, and to whom your company matters.”

    tags: leadership strategy entrenched

  • The CIO As Chief Systems Officer – The CIO Report – WSJ

    “As a result, companies need talented executives in the business who can step back and look at what is going on from a holistic, systems point of view. How do you frame strategies so they can be quickly operationalized to meet the time-to-market demands of the business? How can you position what you are able to get done in the near term as phase one of your longer term strategy? As companies struggle to address those questions, CIOs are increasingly being asked to play the role of Chief Systems Officer, someone who understands the strategic requirements of the business and has the tools and the business ability to operationalize the strategy in a timely way.”

    tags: cio systems

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Link Collection — July 15, 2012

  • Magazine 2012 July – Best of Maine: Unsung Hikes from an AMC Trip Leader

    “A hiking guide for the Maine Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club, Carey Michael Kish has been exploring Maine’s forests and mountains for more than forty years. He is the editor of the AMC’s recently updated Maine Mountain Guide (amcstore.outdoors.org), beloved by hikers for its detailed no-nonsense trail descriptions and full-color topographical maps. Added to the tenth edition are more than two hundred trails that are either relatively new or often overlooked. We gave Kish, who loves them all, the tough task of recommending ten.”

    tags: maine amc

  • Why the days are numbered for Hadoop as we know it — Cloud Computing News

    Discusses technologies beyond Hadoop, in context of Google’s stack.

    “Most interesting to me, however, is that GMR [Google Map Reduce] no longer holds such prominence in the Google stack. Just as the enterprise is locking into MapReduce, Google seems to be moving past it.”

    tags: hadoop google gigaom

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  • Let Your Ideas Go – Nilofer Merchant – Harvard Business Review

    “Now, I wasn’t always a believer in openness. I once ran right over other people, because I wanted to be “right” more than I wanted to build an idea that became real in the marketplace. And I personally liked being in charge and controlling and telling other people what to do. I came up through business with the old mentality. In my 20s, I ran a 200M unit at a Fortune 500 company. I remember one particular time when I was locked in a death match with a colleague over whose idea would win. I kept my idea in a closed fist, and fought tooth and nail to both prove it was best and I was the best. I won. The board adopted my plan.

    And yet ultimately I lost. I was fired a month later because the team didn’t trust me. I also lost my best friend with whom I had once run a marathon. It was a spectacular failure that helped me move past the industrial era thinking I was trained in.

    I started to understand, for any idea to win, I had to let them go, I had to let other people in. After now another 12 years of working through different approaches, I’ve come to a new understanding. It is this: the future is not created; the future is co-created. Whenever we want something bigger, and better, and faster, we need to be able to let go of a tight grip and open up.

    Openness is powerful, even catalytic…”

    tags: ideas openness

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  • Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at stati

  • Why We Need More IT Leadership, Not Less – Valuedance

    “We don’t really need executives to blog, friend, or tweet, but we do need them to understand how their current IT capabilities stack up against the competition; how IT-enabled changes to business processes and information could enhance the customer experience; and what it means to sponsor a project, drive IT adoption, and realize value from IT-enabled investments.  It’s time (actually way past time) for executives to assume personal accountability for understanding and managing IT and to cascade digital accountability and authority down through their organizations by incorporating IT-smarts in job descriptions and hiring criteria.”

    tags: cio leadership susancramm

  • Rafael Nadal demonstrates Babolat Play & Connect interactive tennis racquet

    This is ‘data-gadget-sports’ cool. And hey, my tennis game has nowhere to go but up.

    “But tech can also make us better athletes by providing us with information about our sporting performance – whether it’s shoes which log a basketball player’s jumps, or outfits which give dancers feedback about their moves. Tennis players could soon be getting in on the tech-helping-hand action with the introduction of an interactive racquet.”

    tags: tennis babolet data

  • The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization: An information graphics and visualization reading list

    Good list. I’ve read some — Roam, Tufte, Yau.

    Perhaps this one should be next for me:

    2. Nigel Holmes on Information Design, by Steven Heller (Amazon)The art director of The New York Times interviews one of the best infographics designers ever. 140 pages of insight.

    tags: information graphics visualization

  • When Venture Capitalists Become IT Consultants – Businessweek

    I see this with my clients. Establishing relationships with VCs is a part of a good listening post strategy

    “When Equinix (EQIX) Chief Information Officer Brian Lillie wants new business tools, he seeks advice from a venture capitalist, bypassing sources like IT consultants or the biggest names in enterprise software.

    He takes that unusual route because many of the latest innovations in cloud computing and software-as-a-service are coming from startups, not enterprise mainstays like Oracle (ORCL) or International Business Machines (IBM). Venture backers who get early looks at emerging companies as they consider cash infusions can be the best guides to the most promising new technology.

    tags: CIO CTO VC

  • Chevron explores the use of open source software called Hadoop to reduce costs. – The CIO Report – WSJ

    ““The ship collects ridiculous amounts of data,” said Walker. Chevron gathers information that includes five dimensions – the x and y coordinates of both the wave’s source and target – along with the time it was collected. The company uses Hadoop software to sort that data. It’s one step in more than 25 steps Chevron takes with the data to create a picture for engineers to use to locate oil reservoirs. Chevron uses a supercomputer to create models and simulations of the underground environment.”

    tags: chevron open source hadoop

  • Technology Business Management Council Creates New IT Benchmark – The CIO Report – WSJ

    Good idea. Share experience and metrics in commodity stuff. Free up CIO agenda for differentiating uses of technology.

    “A new non-profit group, launched today during a videoconference attended by over 500 members, says it wants to help CIOs by developing best practices and benchmarks they can use to run their IT organizations. The new group, the Technology Business Management Council, is an outgrowth of IT optimization services vendor Apptio, and inherits the vendor’s methodology for managing IT organizations. The organization’s governing council includes respected IT executives, including its co-chair, Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby, as well as First American Financial CIO Larry Godec and Clorox CIO Ralph Loura.

    The council is trying to address a problem CIOs have traditionally struggled to resolve– proving the value of the IT services their organizations provide, and making the case for IT investments the company needs to improve productivity and seize new market opportunities.”

    tags: IT management cio

  • How Starbucks is turning itself into a tech company | VentureBeat

    Similar to the creation of e-commerce groups in the 90s — mix of business and tech pros — organizations are now creating Digital Ventures for customer touching, revenue generating, business-technology (digital) capability. As e-commerce was led by tech-aware business exec (marketing), digital ventures are being run by Chief Digital Officers (CDO).

    This continues the bifurcation of classic IT into supporting and revenue lines.

    ‘Adam Brotman, formerly senior vice president of Starbucks Digital Ventures, was named to an entirely new executive role, chief digital officer. With the creation of the CDO role, all of Starbuck’s digital projects — web, mobile, social media, digital marketing, Starbucks Card and loyalty, e-commerce, Wi-Fi, Starbucks Digital Network, and emerging in-store technologies — were packaged together and placed under Brotman’s care.’

    tags: starbucks CDO

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  • Jeanne Harris and Allan Alter of Accenture say CIOs Must Prepare for Range of Possible Futures – The CIO Report – WSJ

    The post is a bit far-fetched in that we’ll go from a “flat, hyper-connected” world to wall-gardened isolationism. However, the point to not design IT of the future around a single scenario is logical. 

    Mostly though, I found the following stat interesting, and befitting my Entrenched theory.

    “In our survey of 152 senior business executives and 162 IT executives, more executives singled out the IT organization than any other as the function they wanted to rebuild from scratch.  Half will revamp their IT organization in the next 12 months.”

    tags: accenture IT entrenched

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  • How Will You Measure Your Life? – Harvard Business Review

    “I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

    That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.”

    tags: Business hbr christensen

  • Busting CIO Myths — Interview with Jeanne Ross

    Governance: “good governance is about making everybody smarter about IT. “When setting up governance, most companies start with IT investments when they should start with implementation reviews,” says Ross. “Companies with the best governance are constantly assessing whether projects are realizing their business case.””

    Purpose: Ross. “Quarterly financial goals are destroying us. IT is about the long-term strength and agility of the business. Let somebody else worry about quarterly goals; the CIO should focus on making the company great forever.”
    That doesn’t mean IT can ignore all quarterly pressure, but CIOs should discourage investment that is driven by short-term thinking. “This is UPS’s genius,” Ross says. “They understand that they need low package-delivery cost and high reliability. They use those metrics to set goals, and they build systems to operationalize their business.” CIOs must push back, she says. “If we measure IT the way we measure the last advertising campaign, we’re in trouble.”

    tags: cio governance entarch

  • Cloud & the evolution of the enterprise architect – Cloud Computing News

    I owe a follow-up on James’ excellent article. In short, I believe we need to embrace the mindset of Product Managers, who continually evolve a solution, rather than try for all-at-once perfection. 

    “In businesses that are themselves complex, there are tremendous efficiencies to be gained by the smart application of IT. That element of the enterprise architect’s role doesn’t go away.

    What does change are the skills needed to evaluate how business applications, data sets and services are going to interact-and survive-in a complex, adaptive systems environment. If developers are the DNA of software in the cloud, the enterprise architect becomes the immune system, encouraging the growth of systems that help the business thrive, and killing those that would cost the business.

    In this sense, my friend Brenda Michelson, a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture, put it best: the role is no longer one of enterprise architect, but rather one of the enterprise product manager…”

    tags: cloud computing enterprise-architect entarch

  • Big Data, Tiny Insights | Om Malik

    “Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it. Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.” — Sameer Patel

    tags: bigdata

  • The Simplicity Thesis | Fast Company

    “Here are just a few ways to get started in achieving minimum complexity:

    Think end to end.  Simplicity relates to the entire customer experience, from how you handle pricing to customer support.
    Say no.  Kill features and services that don’t get used, and optimize the ones that do.
    Specialize.  Focus on your core competency, and outsource the rest–simplicity comes more reliably when you have less on your plate.
    Focus on details.  Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.
    Audit constantly.  Constantly ask yourself, can this be done any simpler? Audit your technology and application frequently.
    The next thing to understand is that simplicity is a relative, moving target. The accelerating speed of innovation ensures that you’re never the simplest solution for long.”

    tags: simplicity

  • Crush the “I’m Not Creative” Barrier – Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen – Harvard Business Review

    “You can actually become more creative by changing your mind-set. Anyone can innovate, if they choose to. Disruptive innovators do it by choice, not chance. Their everyday actions swap out an “I’m not creative” mind-set for an “I am creative” one. And then magical (not mystical) things unfold.

    The magic materializes as people engage unique innovation skills (what we call their innovator’s DNA) on an everyday basis. For example, by asking provocative questions, observing like anthropologists, networking with people who see the world in 180-degree opposites, and experimenting with intensity, innovators obliterate the “I’m not creative” brain barrier and, more often than not, break out from the pack.”

    tags: innovation creativity mindset christensen

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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

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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

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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

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