How About Strategy? – Learning about strategic alignment

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Nowadays, organizations operate in a dynamic and fast changing environment which makes formulating a consistent strategy a challenging task and executing that strategy even more difficult. More than half of organizations surveyed in previous economic studies indicated that they have not been successful at executing strategic initiatives. Moreover, a majority of organizations face problems when executing their strategic vision.

In an environment where competition and globalization of markets is intensifying, managing and surviving change becomes increasingly important. A business strategy determines the decisions and course of action that businesses take to achieve competitive advantage and is therefore crucial to survive change. Nonetheless, several economic studies indicated that many organizations fail to implement strategic alternatives. Therefore, it is important to know more about the reasons underlying the difficulties of organizations to reach strategic alignment.

Strategic alignment

Organizations develop and implement strategies to achieve (strategic) goals. The development of a strategy is about formulating what should be changed to evolve from the current situation to the desired future state. Strategy implementation is about translating the strategic plans into clear actions to execute the strategy. Strategic alignment is the ability to create a fit or synergy between the position of the organization within the environment (business) and the design of the appropriate business processes, resources and capabilities (IT) to support the execution. Strategic alignment cannot be reached when strategy development is considered to be a separate process from strategy implementation. Strategy development and strategy implementation are intertwined processes which both need to be successful for superior firm performance.

The way how organizations move from strategy development to strategy implementation is influenced by many factors. Consequently, strategic alignment is influenced by several factors which all contribute to the successful development and implementation of a strategy. We distinguish three categories in which several factors are combined that influence strategic alignment. How organizations manage the factors within these three categories determine whether they are able to reach strategic alignment or not. These three categories are:

  • Culture and shared beliefs: the collective thoughts and actions of employees towards the strategic orientation of the organization determine whether strategy implementation will be successful or not. Consequently, all the employees must be clear on the what, why, when and how of the strategy. According to previous studies the inability of management to overcome resistance to change is an important obstacle to strategy execution.

  • Organizational capabilities: capabilities, resources, systems and processes should be aligned with the strategy to be able to execute the strategy properly. An organization needs to consider their existing and needed capabilities and resources during strategy development and implementation. Strategic change gets obstructed when long-term strategic goals are not translated to short-term objectives or actions.

  • Communication: creating understanding throughout the organization about the strategy, like why it is developed and how it is implemented, is essential for developing and implementing a strategy. There should be a clear definition of purpose, values and behaviors to guide the implementation process. A poor or vague strategy makes it nearly impossible to successfully execute a strategy which makes it a killer of strategy implementation.

 

Strategic Alignment Survey

To get a better understanding of the strategic alignment efforts of organizations, we have created the Strategic Alignment survey. We seek to understand more about the way in which organizations move from strategy development to strategy implementation. The information gathered from this survey contributes to the work done on improving strategic alignment within organizations. We would like to learn from your organization’s experiences regarding strategy development and implementation and its efforts towards strategic alignment. For this reason we kindly ask you to fill in the Strategic Alignment survey.

In return for your time and effort spend there are several rewards which might interest you. The analyzed results of this survey will be published in a whitepaper to which you will have access. In addition, you can receive the book ‘Strategizer – The Method’, in which initial results on strategic alignment are documented, and you have a chance to win a book voucher worth €200,-.

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Managing conflict at work

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Conflict at work often appears when competent people come to challenge the status quo, the inertia, amongst other reasons.Also a factor is the poor organisation of the enterprise with confusing roles and overlaying responsibilities that create tension …

The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ Starts to Take Shape

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By Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability, The Open Group The Open Group published a White Paper on Open Platform 3.0™ at the start of its conference in Amsterdam in May 2014. This article, based on a presentation given at … Continue reading →

One Simple Solution to Unite the CIO and CMO

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Why can’t CIOs and CMOs just get along? Based on my experience, there is one primary reason why their relationship is adversarial: the CIO and CMO can’t agree on who is responsible for what, so they are perpetually trampling on each other’s toes. Our 2014 Digital IQ study identified a strong CIO-CMO partnership as one of the five critical behaviors to maximizing the value from digital technology investments. The majority (70%) of top performers in our […]

$harp Practice

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I’ve commented on the questionable ethics of some consultants previously, but something I witnessed recently prompts me to revisit the issue. In the last three or so years in particular I suspect that I’ve witnessed, initially unnoticed, a growing tendency for consultancies to see clients’ projects increasingly in terms of cash flow and less as […]

Microservices and the Internet of Things – First impressions

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I must say I was sceptical when I first heard the term “microservices”. It sounded like yet another wash-rinse-repeat cycle of earlier incarnations of SOA. It appears I was wrong – this architectural pattern has some  interesting characteristics that, in my opinion, offer some real potential for event-driven, edge-processing systems (that are prevalent in the Internet of Things).
After watching Fred George’s video, I realised what he described was an event-driven, agent-based, systems’ model, rather than how many of us see SOA implementations today (often way-off the original notion of a SOA). At a conceptual level, the pattern describes a ‘Complex Adaptive’ system.  Essential principles of the architecture, however, appear teasingly elegant and simple. Few of these design principles are unique to microservices, but in combination, they make a compelling story:
Publish anything of interest – don’t wait to be asked, if your microservice thinks it has some information that might be of use to the microservices ecosystem, then publish-and-be-damned.



Amplify success & attenuate failure – microservices that publish useful information thrive, while those that left unsubscribed, wither-on-the-vine. Information subscribers determine value, and value adjusts over time/changing circumstances.



Adaptive ecosystem – versions of microservices are encouraged –may-the-best-service-win mentality introduces variety which leads to evolution.



Asynchronous & encapsulated – everything is as asynchronous as possible – microservices manage their own data independently and then share it in event messages over an asynchronous publish-subscribe bus.



Think events not entities – no grand BDUF data model, just a cloud of ever-changing event messages – more like Twitter than a DBMS. Events have a “use-by-date” that indicates the freshness of data.



Events are immutable – time-series snapshots, no updates allowed.


Designed for failure – microservices must expect problems and tell the world when they encounter one and send out “I’m alive” heart-beats.



Self-organizing & self-monitoring – a self-organizing System-of-systems’ that needs no orchestration. Health monitoring and other administration features are established through a class of microservices.



Disposable Code – microservices are very, very small (typically under 1000 lines of code). They can be developed in any language.



Ultra-rapid deployment – new microservices can be written and deployed with hours with a zero-test SDLC.

It struck me that many of these design principles could apply, in part, to a 2020 Smart Grid architecture I’m working on, and to the much boarder ‘Internet of Things’ecosystem.

The microservices pattern does seem to lend itself to the notion of highly autonomous, location-independent s/w agents that could reside at the centre, mid-point or edge of an environment. I can imagine that the fundamental simplicity of the model would help, rather than hinder, data privacy and protection by being able to include high-level system contexts, policies and protocols (e.g. encryption and redaction) applied to the event-streams. This pattern, of course, won’t be the ‘right-fit’ for all situations, but it does seem to offer interesting opportunities in:

  • Agility – very small disposable services are deployable within hours
  • Resilience – withstands service failures and supports service evolution
  • Robustness – it’s hard to break due to: simplicity, in-built failure handling and lack of centralized orchestration

It may be that the microservices pattern can only be applied to operational decision-support and behaviour profiling situations. But if that’s the case, I still see great potential in a world where many trillions of sensor-generated events will be published, consumed, filtered, aggregated, and correlated. I’m no longer a developer, but as an architect, I’m always on the look-out for patterns that could: either apply to future vendors’ products and services, or could act as a guide for in-house software development practice.

As always, I’d be keen to hear your views, examples and opinions about microservices and their potential application to the IoT. Have you come across examples of microservices pattern in an IoT context – deployed or in the labs?

I whole-heartily recommend setting aside an hour to watch the video of Fred George’s presentation on microservices:


131108 1110 Dune Fred George Recording on 2013-11-08 1106-Vimeo from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.

Post-post:
  • Another great post about microservices  – including downsides.
  • More here including “The 8 fallacies of distributed computing”.
Duke Energy are doing some interesting things in the Edge Processing space.

Here’s a video on microservices in the conext of IoT  (worth ignoring the references to Cloud/Azure):

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/exploring-microservices-in-docker-and-microsoft-azure

I’d like to talk to anyone who’s impelmenting/ thinking about a Staged Event Driven Architecture using microservices for Edge Processing.

Phil Wills on experience of deploying microservices at The Gaurdian

Microservices and the Internet of Things – First impressions

by
I must say I was sceptical when I first heard the term “microservices”. It sounded like yet another wash-rinse-repeat cycle of earlier incarnations of SOA. It appears I was wrong – this architectural pattern has some  interesting characteristics that, in my opinion, offer some real potential for event-driven, edge-processing systems (that are prevalent in the Internet of Things).
After watching Fred George’s video, I realised what he described was an event-driven, agent-based, systems’ model, rather than how many of us see SOA implementations today (often way-off the original notion of a SOA). At a conceptual level, the pattern describes a ‘Complex Adaptive’ system.  Essential principles of the architecture, however, appear teasingly elegant and simple. Few of these design principles are unique to microservices, but in combination, they make a compelling story:
Publish anything of interest – don’t wait to be asked, if your microservice thinks it has some information that might be of use to the microservices ecosystem, then publish-and-be-damned.



Amplify success & attenuate failure – microservices that publish useful information thrive, while those that left unsubscribed, wither-on-the-vine. Information subscribers determine value, and value adjusts over time/changing circumstances.



Adaptive ecosystem – versions of microservices are encouraged –may-the-best-service-win mentality introduces variety which leads to evolution.



Asynchronous & encapsulated – everything is as asynchronous as possible – microservices manage their own data independently and then share it in event messages over an asynchronous publish-subscribe bus.



Think events not entities – no grand BDUF data model, just a cloud of ever-changing event messages – more like Twitter than a DBMS. Events have a “use-by-date” that indicates the freshness of data.



Events are immutable – time-series snapshots, no updates allowed.


Designed for failure – microservices must expect problems and tell the world when they encounter one and send out “I’m alive” heart-beats.



Self-organizing & self-monitoring – a self-organizing System-of-systems’ that needs no orchestration. Health monitoring and other administration features are established through a class of microservices.



Disposable Code – microservices are very, very small (typically under 1000 lines of code). They can be developed in any language.



Ultra-rapid deployment – new microservices can be written and deployed with hours with a zero-test SDLC.

It struck me that many of these design principles could apply, in part, to a 2020 Smart Grid architecture I’m working on, and to the much boarder ‘Internet of Things’ecosystem.

The microservices pattern does seem to lend itself to the notion of highly autonomous, location-independent s/w agents that could reside at the centre, mid-point or edge of an environment. I can imagine that the fundamental simplicity of the model would help, rather than hinder, data privacy and protection by being able to include high-level system contexts, policies and protocols (e.g. encryption and redaction) applied to the event-streams. This pattern, of course, won’t be the ‘right-fit’ for all situations, but it does seem to offer interesting opportunities in:

  • Agility – very small disposable services are deployable within hours
  • Resilience – withstands service failures and supports service evolution
  • Robustness – it’s hard to break due to: simplicity, in-built failure handling and lack of centralized orchestration

It may be that the microservices pattern can only be applied to operational decision-support and behaviour profiling situations. But if that’s the case, I still see great potential in a world where many trillions of sensor-generated events will be published, consumed, filtered, aggregated, and correlated. I’m no longer a developer, but as an architect, I’m always on the look-out for patterns that could: either apply to future vendors’ products and services, or could act as a guide for in-house software development practice.

As always, I’d be keen to hear your views, examples and opinions about microservices and their potential application to the IoT. Have you come across examples of microservices pattern in an IoT context – deployed or in the labs?

I whole-heartily recommend setting aside an hour to watch the video of Fred George’s presentation on microservices:


131108 1110 Dune Fred George Recording on 2013-11-08 1106-Vimeo from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.

Post-post:
  • Another great post about microservices  – including downsides.
  • More here including “The 8 fallacies of distributed computing”.
Duke Energy are doing some interesting things in the Edge Processing space.

Here’s a video on microservices in the conext of IoT  (worth ignoring the references to Cloud/Azure):

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/exploring-microservices-in-docker-and-microsoft-azure

I’d like to talk to anyone who’s impelmenting/ thinking about a Staged Event Driven Architecture using microservices for Edge Processing.

Phil Wills on experience of deploying microservices at The Gaurdian

Cynicism is Not a Skill

by

For six weeks and with about $10,000 I had toiled to create an additional bathroom in my previous home just in time to host some relatives during the holidays. I only had time to throw one of our better bath towels over the curtain rod as this ele…

Cynicism is Not a Skill

by

For six weeks and with about $10,000 I had toiled to create an additional bathroom in my previous home just in time to host some relatives during the holidays. I only had time to throw one of our better bath towels over the curtain rod as this element…