Intelligence and Governance

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Katy Steward of @TheKingsFund asks What Makes a Board Effective? (Feb 2013). She’s looking specifically at the role of the Board in the National Health Service, but there is much that can be generalized to other contexts. She asks some key questions for any given board.

  • Are its members individually effective and do they communicate effectively – for example, do they challenge themselves and others?
  • Do they use energetic presentations and have insightful conversations?
  • Do they support their colleagues and have good decision-making skills?

In this post, I want to develop this line of thinking further by exploring what the concept of organizational intelligence implies for boards.

1. Boards need to know what is going on.

  • Multiple and diverse sources of information – both quantitative and qualitative
  • Understanding how information is filtered, and a willingness to view unfiltered information as necessary. 
  • Ability to identify areas of concern, and initiate detailed investigation 

2. Boards need to make sense of what is going on.

  • Ability to see things from different perspectives – patient quality, professional excellence, financial accountability, social accountability. 
  • Ability to see the detail as well as the big picture. 
  • Courage to investigate and explore any discrepancies, and not to be satisfied with easy denial.

3. Boards need to ensure that all decisions, policies and procedures are guided by both vision and reality. This includes decisions taken by the board itself, as well as decisions taken at all levels of management.

  • Decisions and actions are informed by values and priorities, and reinforce these values. (People both inside and outside the organization will infer your true values not from your words but from your actions.) 
  • Decisions and actions are guided by evidence wherever possible. Ongoing decisions and policies are open to revision according to the outcomes they yield.
  • Decision-making by consent (Robertson)

4. Boards need to encourage learning.

  • Effective feedback loops are established, monitoring outcomes and revising decisions and policies where necessary. 
  • Courage to experiment. Ability to tolerate temporary reduction in productivity during problem-solving and learning curve. Supporting people and teams when they are out of their comfort zone. 
  • Willingness to learn lessons from anywhere, not just a narrow set of approved exemplars.

5. Boards need to encourage knowledge-sharing

  • All kinds of experience and expertise may be relevant 
  • Overcoming the “silos” and cultural differences 
  • The collective memory should be strong and coherent enough to support the organization’s values, but not so strong as to inhibit change.

6. Boards work as a team, and collaborate with other teams

  • Effective communication and collaboration within the board – don’t expect each board member to do everything. 
  • Effective communication and collaboration with other groups and organizations.
  • Circle Organization (Robertson)

Note: The six points I’ve discussed here correspond to the six core capabilities of organizational intelligence, as described in my Organizational Intelligence eBook and my Organizational Intelligence workshop.

See also

Brian Robertson, The Sociocratic Method. A Dutch model of corporate governance harnesses self-organization to provide agility and a voice to all participants (Strategy+Business Aug 2006)

Steve Waddell, Wicked Problems, Governance as Learning Systems (Feb 2013)

Updated 1 March 2013

Intelligence and Governance

by

Katy Steward of @TheKingsFund asks What Makes a Board Effective? (Feb 2013). She’s looking specifically at the role of the Board in the National Health Service, but there is much that can be generalized to other contexts. She asks some key questions for any given board.

  • Are its members individually effective and do they communicate effectively – for example, do they challenge themselves and others?
  • Do they use energetic presentations and have insightful conversations?
  • Do they support their colleagues and have good decision-making skills?

In this post, I want to develop this line of thinking further by exploring what the concept of organizational intelligence implies for boards.

1. Boards need to know what is going on.

  • Multiple and diverse sources of information – both quantitative and qualitative
  • Understanding how information is filtered, and a willingness to view unfiltered information as necessary. 
  • Ability to identify areas of concern, and initiate detailed investigation 

2. Boards need to make sense of what is going on.

  • Ability to see things from different perspectives – patient quality, professional excellence, financial accountability, social accountability. 
  • Ability to see the detail as well as the big picture. 
  • Courage to investigate and explore any discrepancies, and not to be satisfied with easy denial.

3. Boards need to ensure that all decisions, policies and procedures are guided by both vision and reality. This includes decisions taken by the board itself, as well as decisions taken at all levels of management.

  • Decisions and actions are informed by values and priorities, and reinforce these values. (People both inside and outside the organization will infer your true values not from your words but from your actions.) 
  • Decisions and actions are guided by evidence wherever possible. Ongoing decisions and policies are open to revision according to the outcomes they yield.
  • Decision-making by consent (Robertson)

4. Boards need to encourage learning.

  • Effective feedback loops are established, monitoring outcomes and revising decisions and policies where necessary. 
  • Courage to experiment. Ability to tolerate temporary reduction in productivity during problem-solving and learning curve. Supporting people and teams when they are out of their comfort zone. 
  • Willingness to learn lessons from anywhere, not just a narrow set of approved exemplars.

5. Boards need to encourage knowledge-sharing

  • All kinds of experience and expertise may be relevant 
  • Overcoming the “silos” and cultural differences 
  • The collective memory should be strong and coherent enough to support the organization’s values, but not so strong as to inhibit change.

6. Boards work as a team, and collaborate with other teams

  • Effective communication and collaboration within the board – don’t expect each board member to do everything. 
  • Effective communication and collaboration with other groups and organizations.
  • Circle Organization (Robertson)

Note: The six points I’ve discussed here correspond to the six core capabilities of organizational intelligence, as described in my Organizational Intelligence eBook and my Organizational Intelligence workshop.

See also

Brian Robertson, The Sociocratic Method. A Dutch model of corporate governance harnesses self-organization to provide agility and a voice to all participants (Strategy+Business Aug 2006)

Steve Waddell, Wicked Problems, Governance as Learning Systems (Feb 2013)

Updated 1 March 2013

Humility and the Art of Enterprise Architecture

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As a lot, Enterprise Architects are not terribly humble people.  We name frameworks after ourselves, and sometimes go to great lengths to correct the “misinterpretations” of others who describe our work in a way that we don’t agree with. 

Yet, recognizing that the field is young requires that we should be willing to change as the field of EA changes; that we should be willing to look back on our models, developed in the past, and admit that we missed a few steps that we wouldn’t miss today.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss, on LinkedIn, a blog post that I made five years ago.  I look back on that blog post and must admit that my opinions are a bit different now than they were five years ago.  I still agree with my post, but I would certainly use different words today than I used in the past.  I am more than willing to admit it. 

I also look at the efforts of Alexander Osterwalder whose Business Model Canvas has proved both practical and flawed.  He missed the fact that he needed to create a differentiation between the customer’s needs and the value proposition of the business offering to fill some of those needs.  Did he go back and create an updated canvas?  Nope.  He created a new canvas to describe demand as though it fits with his older one (hint: it’s a mess). 

The venerable John Zachman, probably one of the most humble men I’ve met, also made this same mistake.  While his original model was only a couple of columns, and was updated only a few years later into the table we see today, the field of EA has changed.  The table is no longer representative of companies with multiple business models (most of them) and the lack of a “customer” row simply relegates his “ontological table” to the dust bin. 

Neither man will change.  They have “legacy” models, with their names attached.  To paraphrase Forrest Gump, humble is as humble does.

I would like to think that my willingness to upend my EBMM and replace it periodically with new versions shows my willingness to admit that (a) I’m often wrong, and (b) I’d rather learn than become stale.  That said, I’m no paradigm of humility, myself. 

After all, a truly humble EA would not have written this blog post. 

(As my teenage daughter would say: Oh snap, you pwned yourself!)

#InfoArch – Post 2. The starting point

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As often, we needed to start somewhere. The main idea here was about “marking the starting point” and formalize it, in order to be able to come back and measure what has been achieved later on during the journey. So, as a starting point, we performed a survey, involving stakeholders across every different main organizations […]

#InfoArch – Master Data – Short definition

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Master Data is the core information, that is needed, to Manage and Operate the Company businesses. Master Data is a Core asset for Enterprise/Company. As such, it has to be Governed and Managed properly. Customer, Product, Supplier and Financial information entities are typical examples of some very essential Master Data. They need to have a […]

Take Every Opportunity to Document

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I am always surprised (and I really shouldn’t be) that we do a great job of responding to critical incidents but almost always fail to document what we did so it can be referenced in the future. As IT leaders we need to proactively document the impacts of planned and unplanned changes.  Whethere it is […]

The post Take Every Opportunity to Document appeared first on Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education.

The Open Group works with Microsoft to create Open Management Infrastructure

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OMI is a highly portable, easy to implement, high performance CIM/WS-Management Object Manager in OMI, designed specifically to implement the DMTF standards. OMI is written to be easy to implement in Linux and UNIX® systems. It will empower datacenter device vendors to compile and implement a standards-based management service into any device or platform in a clear and consistent way. The Open Group has made the source code for OMI available under an Apache 2 license. Continue reading →

Turning around the Team

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Without doubt the biggest contributing factor to success on projects where I’ve been engaged as an Enterprise Architect is the human dimension. Bringing a method that people can buy into, in a language that they understand and then reinforcing this wit…

Turning around the Team

by

Without doubt the biggest contributing factor to success on projects where I’ve been engaged as an Enterprise Architect is the human dimension. Bringing a method that people can buy into, in a language that they understand and then reinforcing this wit…

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