Search Results for: business model

Ben Geller, VP Marketing, Troux

 

At our recent customer conference we took a moment to share the common characteristics we see in our most successful customers.  Since this was so well received by the conference attendees we thought it would be a good idea to share with a wider audience.

1. Start with the end in mind.  Seek business value and outcomes that materially impact the top and bottom-line.  If delivering business value is not your top priority – it should be.  Delivering anything less ensures your effort will be regarded as not being relevant.  Ignore an approach that puts business value at it’s heart more than once and you can be sure your Enterprise Architecture (EA) program will be destine to sit on the shelf along with all of the enterprise models and charts that have been created.  Our most successful customers always tie their efforts back to answering key questions business stakeholders want to address.  Take a look at one of our recent blogs titled ‘Doing the Right Thing vs. Doing Things Right’ – for more details.   
2. Gain the Right Level of Sponsorship.  Another common trait we see in our most successful customers is their ability to obtain executive management support for their Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM)/ EA initiatives.  Executive sponsorship is absolutely crucial.  Organizational change management is one of the hardest things in business.  If you don’t have executive sponsorship, you just aren’t going to get the organization to change its behaviors. For an EPM/EA program to be successful, you need participation from people outside the EA program. The executive sponsor does not need to be an EA expert or even care about the discipline of EA. But he or she must care about the results.  To read more about this condition for success see our blog titled ‘How to avoid common mistakes with your EA program – Part I’.
3. Start Small and Market Internally.  A common mistake many EPM/EA teams make is based on a ‘Boil the Ocean’ approach to information gathering.  Gathering and assessing data can be quite seductive. But if taken too far it’s the equivalent of modeling the universe, and it’s a recipe for disaster. In fact if we see any problem today in our deployments, it’s that people get so excited they want to gather all their data at once.  It is also important to market your success internally. You secured support from the organization by promising something good for them, so make sure you go back and tell them you did it.  Then the organization as a whole can share in your success.  Read more about these success criteria in our blog titled  ‘Just say no to modeling the universe’.
4. Collaborate Rather Than Dictate.  In a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) blog¹ Michael Krigsman stated, “Modern CIOs must reconcile the gap between their role as protector of corporate information assets and the need to drive organizational innovation and openness.   We all are quite aware that promoting collaboration inside a large organization doesn’t just happen; it requires a thoughtful plan, coordination, and effort.  Enterprise Portfolio Management can help CIOs change the unwanted behavior that often is manifested by information hoarding and create a culture of collaboration by giving CIOs the means to shift the conversation from technology to business strategy and innovation.  See our blog ‘Lessons Learn from Social Networking’ to read more about EPMs role in institutionalizing collaboration. 
5. Seek Value Early and Often.  Instant gratification is something we all have grown accustom.  The same holds true for business.  Programs and projects that deliver their intended results in short order are often viewed as benchmarks for other efforts to come.  Delivering value early and often should become a key part of any EPM/EA project teams battle-cry.  Our most successful customers have been able to go from project start-up to delivering quantifiable business results in a few short weeks.  Take a look at the case study from Scottish Widows Investment Partnership – a 2012 InfoWorld/Forrester EA Award winner to see how they delivered results in just 12 weeks. 
6. Institutionalize and Embed in Process.  We have found that the organizations that achieve “best in class” results from their EPM/EA efforts are those that recognize that it is lifestyle change, not a one-time “crash diet.  To make EPM/EA a lifestyle change rather than a crash diet, an organization must commit first to “instrumenting” the business to measure the performance and business value of key enterprise assets such as applications, technology, business capabilities, investments and information.  By tying EA/EPM to key processes and initiatives such as application portfolio management, cloud migration, mergers and acquisitions, to name a few, EA/EPM teams will ensure the lifestyle change they deliver will have positive impacts across the enterprise.  For more examples of how to embed EPM in key processes read our blog titled ’Application Portfolio Management: Crash Diet or Lifestyle Change’.

 

I had had the pleasure of being on a panel of Enterprise Architecture (EA) experts at The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach, California. We were assembled to discuss complex trends such as big data, Cloud Computing, security, and overall…

Below is a copy and paste of the document where i note down all my thoughts on what i’m calling ‘Open work’

I thought i’d share the raw shizzle in the interests of practising what I preach and trying to be as open as possible as I work these thoughts through (hopefully) into something coherent, useful and publishable. Enjoy! all comments welcome

Open Work

What is openness?

Openness is the freedom that is felt at a personal level and experienced in an organisational context to share thoughts feelings, opinions and information
Openness is also the receptiveness to receive what is shared
Openness is the culture that pervades social interactions that are based on freedom

Later on I need to talk about freedom and how to enable that freedom.
Leverage social proof
Don’t judge the sharer, judge the hoarder
Hoarding

The construct that i describe as Openness has both an organisational and personal element

because the Silos can be both be structural and interpersonal
show an organisation, function, team, interpersonal siloes

siloes that can be vertical within hierarchy or horizontol across functions.
graphic of horizontal and vertical partitions.

Ask yourself how many edges do I have, how many edges does my team have? My department? Directorate? How removed am I from these?

What pattern can you apply to break these down? link to fast iterations of virtual structures,
that revolve around hubs. what are the hubs?
Who are the hubs?

WHY?

Symptoms

Where does your orgs ideas come from?
E.g.g corporate goals
Who sponsors your change activity?

are two people/temas working on the same thing in isolation?
Are two intiatives unknowingly working to undermine each other?
are two changes competing for the same resource?
Is there conflict between business units, functions, teams people caused by competing goals?
Do you get different answers if you ask different employees what the organisations top 3 priorities are?

top down
bottom up

top up
bottom down

top bottom
up down

What is wrong with these words where is the width? (Flanking)
These words are part of a language of hierarchy that is anachronistic.

-Reject closed language
Recognise the language you use that is not open.

Compare contrast open/closed phrases, investigate the etymology of these words
E.g.
Buy-in
Post
Role
Function
Directorate
Structure
Organisation
Group
Alignment
Influence
Direct report
Subordinate
Meeting
Conference
Desk
Office
Work
Strategy
Outcome
Lead
Manager
Senior
1:1 (like its something special)
Presentation
Promotion
Hot desk
Go for a coffee
Deadline
Cascade
All hands
Rush hour
Deliverable
Stakeholder is there someone who isn’t a stakeholder?
Influence
Performance review
Transparency: of many things e.g. committments
Lunch and learn is a broken concept, why not learn the rest of the time, and why not in work time

Staff survey, do you share the results and raw data?
concepts/principles
Should I split these into, attitude, enablers, constraints, principles?

Leadership = openness
Be brave

‘Open Argument’, argument is not negative!!!
Conflict too strong word, but the debates are open and lead to a better position, rather than seething resentment

Task over structure

Negatives/things to look out for
Openness needs accountavility or you create cracks. May be counter uintuitive

Also decision making

Signal/Noise and noise reduction.

What are the mechanisms for noise reduction?
Timeliness
Context, tagging or do I need to go there
Cones of interest, sharing those up front. What do I need to know

-Context

Bring the contextual baggage to a conversation.

Move conversation through different mediums for maximum value e.g. Start conversation on desktop, continue on mobile

Relate data and meta data to conversations, e.g. Here is the conversation that led me to talk to you.

Design for collision

-radical/extreme/progressive sharing/shariarchy
-channels of discovery
-foster emergence
-Social architecture: (thinking stack/zachman etc)
-connectedness (connectivity and psychological sense by what? shared vision?
-finding
-serendipity design for
-ego-less
-embrace criticism but by embracing criticism how to avoid paralysis (too many arguments)
-Clear threshold for decision making – stops paralysis
-radical un-secrecy
-Virtual Structures
– finite structures, rapid iteration of create, grow, destroy
– task/problem networks (mayfly)
-Now-ness – relate to the when/tenses of sharing future, past, present
-Presence
– hire for compatibility, culture is context context is people, understand organisational context.
– Energy
– feel time
-ownership
-positively reinforce sharing
– Your goals -> our goals
reward/incentivise colab and sharing, how? measure engagement.
– Shared goals are your compass goals are your culture, the thing direction of travel

Embrace emerging structures

– space is not a barrier, space is not as big as it used to be
there are tools to enable skype, vc units, desktop vc mobile vc

Current State:

-No opportunity for serendepity
-Closed networks
-Entropy

Trends:

-Privacy as commodity/desensitisation
-Hyper sharing
-High bandwidth communication/consumption
-Open source, social networks,
– task/problem networks

Thoughts:

There is no reason not to share
There is no impediment to sharing

appendix
valve handbook
open business cushman 90/10?

References:

http://fasterfuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-10-principles-of-open-business.html

http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/24/why-radical-openness-is-unnerving-reshaping-and-necessary-a-qa-with-ted-ebook-authors-don-tapscott-and-anthony-d-williams/

http://www.ted.com/pages/tedbooks_library#TapscottWilliams

http://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world_1.html

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671797/from-zappos-4-simple-hacks-to-foster-office-collaboration

gore tex
http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/culture/index.html

http://www.managementexchange.com/story/innovation-democracy-wl-gores-original-management-model

http://metro.co.uk/2013/02/25/facebook-twitter-or-email-what-do-we-share-online-and-why-3508887/

http://www.noop.nl/2012/11/taking-care-of-horses.html