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Actions Speak Louder Than Words

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In the last episode of the ACME E&L story, we left the CIO, Colin Black, musing how he was going to explain Cloud-Native “Unicorn” thinking to the Exec Board. After a few moments of reflection he decided a two-pronged approach would be best:
a)  Gradually introduce new concepts such as “Safe Fail”

b)  Demonstrate he could deliver business-relevant outcomes quickly.

Pragmatically, he reasoned focusing on the latter was his priority. The current highest priority for the Board was the impending merger with ACME’s second largest competitor. The newly merged company, MACME Plc. would be launching in just a few weeks – and the Board decided it needed to establish a new corporate identity and culture from day one. The CIO suggested this would be an ideal time to move all employees to a new email and office tools platform. He reasoned that email addresses would change under the MACME brand anyway and it would also be a good opportunity to create a MACME Branded intranet portal to help build the new culture.

This episode of the story is an interview with the Project Manager, Mr Olivier Gris, leading the transition from Microsoft Exchange to G Suite at ACME E&L Ltd. Olivier has worked with the CIO in the past and is regarded by him as his most trusted PM. In this interview, with a technology journalist, Mr Gris explains how he led his team to get 10,000 employees to a single instance of G Suite in 10 weeks. He discusses the ups and downs of the project, and most importantly the lessons learnt. He also explains, right up front, why this project fits with the CIO’s “Think Like a Unicorn” mantra and how emerged as a trust-winning strategy for the CIO with the entire business.

This story is a real company and a real project. The company identity and the character’s names have been changed.

***

Why did the CIO decide to use Google G Suite?

“Several reasons; The CIO wanted to ensure IT was in-line with the retail Entertainment and Leisure business, where revenue directly proportional to service availability. And, in increasingly ‘Digital World’, he knew IT had a strategic role to play”.   

“The CIO has a bias towards Cloud (and Google’s G Suite, in particular, due to earlier successes). The firm was heading for a merger, and the CIO wanted to make sure the new merge-co (MACME E&L) would be ‘born into a Digital World’ from the get go. The company being acquired already used Google G Suite, yet ACME E&L, the acquiring company used Microsoft Exchange. So he felt it was a no-brainer to follow the one that already ‘lived’ in the Cloud”.

“He favoured for SaaS on the Cloud for 3 main reasons;

  1. The software is constantly updated – no massive change plans required, instead, lots of small increments; little triangles of risk as opposed to one big one.
  2. People were increasingly working from home and they wanted a consistent experience.
  3. Online collaboration would be far easier – anytime, anywhere”.
“The company being acquired already used G Suite, but had actually created three separate instances. This turned out to be a questionable decision for a number of reasons:

  • They outsourced a problem; a troubled service, taking its troubles with it.
  • Unfounded security fears; Head Office was concerned that the shop staff might take a more cavalier attitude towards security and compromise the whole business.
  • Not fully appreciating that G Suite was built with strict security policies in mind, which could be configured to prevent cross-contamination between the shops and the Head Office.
  • Not believing that Google’s DC level security was likely to be far more robust than anything the could implement in their own DCs. This motivated by the fact that a hack into Google would be a very newsworthy event compared to a hack into their DC.

 So, with those points in mind, he felt it was a ‘given’ go for one instance of G Suite for the whole MACME E&L business”.

Was there an ROI calculation for this project?

“No, there wasn’t a formal benefits case. Things were moving quickly,; the business had bigger-fish-to-fry with the impending merger. The merger was costing money on a daily basis, largely to do with the sale of real estate and conditions set by the regulator. So there wasn’t ROI per se. What convinced the Board was that running two different platforms would be crazy, and that deployment Cloud was low-risk for office tools. And that, combined with ‘The Sword of Damocles’ of day one of the merger, meant something had to be done fast. They also saw the value of one platform bringing staff together after the merger. For those reasons, the Board was happy to support the CIO’s recommendation without doing a formal ROI”.

What were the steps and how long did it take?

“The steps at a high level were a bit unusual, mostly due to complications imposed by regulator – we weren’t allowed to share any corporate data ahead of the merger as the regulator deemed they may be a risk of competitive advantage. So nothing between the two pre-merger firms could be shared before day one of the merger. They did, however, allow us to set empty email accounts for the company being acquired within ACME E&L. That meant running a mirror instance then switch to single instance later, and then merge two Google G Suite instances. This all took a while to agree with the regulator and resulting the final decision on how to handle the two firms data was made just 7 weeks before the merger. This created a challenging set of constraints on both pace and approach. In the end, we managed to transfer most of the data (held in a dormant state) in batches over 4 weeks”.

Is there a long-tail of users yet to adopt?

“We were close to 100% users set up and running within 8 weeks. One or two people might’ve been missed due to Maternity leave, or similar. But we think we have caught those by marrying up Active Directory entries with HR records”.

“We’re planning to fully decommission Exchange early in the New Year (around 10 weeks after go live). We need this extra time to recreate distribution lists, transfer archived mail, and deal with automated email-based workflows”.

“So, in summary, we went from zero to 98% of our users up and running on G Suite in 5 weeks – and the remainder 4-5 weeks later”.

How many users now?

“We now have around 10,000 users on G Suite since the merger. Around half of these transitioned from Exchange whilst the other half were consolidated onto a new G Suite instance. Interestingly, the Google to Google transfer was more technically challenging in some ways; the tools available for Exchange to G Suite are very mature, however, this wasn’t the case for G Suite to G Suite, so the latter was more ‘hand-balled’”.

What were the biggest hurdles?

“We had a few unusual issues to contend with; for example, someone in Asia had hijacked the domain name we wanted for the merged company. This meant we had to work with our legal team to get that fixed, and that added pressure to the schedule. But, I’d say the people related issues were the biggest. We had underestimated how fond people were of Microsoft Exchange email. It’s very mature and people like it. For many, Google G Suite was seen a step backwards; email is what they see every day and, at first, many didn’t like the switch to browser-based email. On top of that, they didn’t see the advantages of the move to G-Suit in things like collaborative and home working. To tackle this, we took a viral approach to adoption; we sought-out enthusiastic supporters and helped them spread the word. We ran ‘Right-Fit’ workshops with the users where we discussed the pros and cons of G Suite and shared ideas and use cases (from previous workshops). It was important to hear the user’s voice and, then help them get the most from the tools; these were not training sessions – they were interactive workshops“.
“Probably the most compelling use case for the shops was around Google Forms & Sheets; for example, data sets for performance, schedules and promotions could be shared with the Head Office & other stores, faster and more accurately using Forms and Sheets. This resulted in many hours of saved at the retail outlets”.
What was the user feedback?

“The user feedback from retail area managers has been superb. We conducted a few sample surveys after we’d run the ‘Right Fit’ workshops – the results speak for themselves: ratings rose from a mark of 1 to 5 before the workshop, to between 6-10 afterwards. Workshop attendees were asked to rate Google G Suite pre and post training (1 being ‘Poor’ and 10 being ‘Awesome’)”.

 

 

Figure 1 Feedback from area managers across two regions of the U.K.

 Southeast Region


Midlands



“

Feedback from Head Office staff was less enthusiastic at first. However, many are now seeing the benefits of collaboration and remote working.

We had to be realistic, not all users would like the change; for example, an Executive Assistant who manages multiple diaries finds this harder to do in Google calendar than in Exchange. Google Slides lacks functionality compared to PowerPoint, some complained about this, but others saw this as a good thing; they can focus on writing great content rather than be distracted by too many features and options. And then, there are some people, who just don’t like working in the Browser”.

 

What’s the best feature?
“I’d say Hangouts for Head Office, and Google Forms/Sheets for shops. Voice & video meetings on Hangouts becoming the norm. The users already understand the power of collaboration – both collaborative document building, and data sharing”.

What’s the least popular?

“The least popular app is Google Slides compared to PowerPoint and the management of multiple calendars. Other than that, spreadsheets with complicated rules and macros can be a challenge to recreate in Google Sheets. Having said that, some users are beginning to see advantages in using Sheets; for example, one recently built a spreadsheet that made use of easy access to other Google data to calculate the distance between two postcodes”.

“Uncovering large ‘Spreadsheet Apps’ was an interesting spin-off. We were looking deeper into the use of complex spreadsheets; these are the powerful spreadsheets, built by users, which have become important ‘Shadow IT’ tools that are now critical to the business operation. There’s probably a good argument to say these should be brought under more rigorous support as bona fide apps in the future”.

How does it fit the overall “What Would A Unicorn Do?” strategy?

“The retail industry has gone digital; our digital products are our lifeblood. This means the role of the CIO is more important than ever – and the Board is listening to the CIO. The CIO has made it clear that our move to the Cloud is key to improving service automation. The IT team must refocus on delivering outcomes for competitive advantage: ‘Build for Competitive Advantage – Buy for Competitive Parity’ is the mantra. In other words; ‘Don’t re-invent functionality that can be provided by commodity services’. Moving to Cloud-based offices tools is directly linked to the CIO’s strategy; He asks the question; Why don’t we manage IT services in the way the likes of that Amazon Netflix do?”.
From the CIO’s perspective, moving to G Suite was a tangible, and pragmatic step; a first move to digital without putting revenue generating systems/services at risk. This was his chance to show how his Cloud-native strategy will deliver results quickly. He could demonstrate tangible value, he believed he would show that: everybody in the firm would like the collaboration features, the shop staff would save time when sharing data and, for everyone, wasting time travelling to meetings would become a thing of the past. It turned out he was right”.

Did you feel the sense of strategic importance at the project level?

“Absolutely, we knew we needed to make new CIO look good, and it did the trick! Initially, there was a question about the wisdom of switching to G Suite in the midst of the merger, but we explained that we would be going through the pain anyway, so why not get it over with from the get go? We also helped make the case to take the opportunity to rebrand the merged company from day one of its operation; to access G Suite, users logged into to a new look & feel that told the MACME Plc story and the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues old, and new”.

Which of the CIO’s principles did this project support?

“The main principles we followed were:

The move to Cloud SaaS meant no more massive upgrades and, at the same time, providing services any time any place – at the desk, at home or elsewhere. The IT teams were not spending time on software upgrades and hosting of commodity services; the focus was on offering more differentiated services to our internal and external customers. We choose a tried-and-tested service from Google, and by Clouding rather than Outsourcing, commodity services were made much simpler to deploy and upgrade; we simply trust the provider to new helpful features and services incrementally, with no need for massive retraining programs”.

What were the IT savings?

“The IT headcount savings were minimal; a saving of around 8 outsourced FTEs. Rather than headcount reduction, people have more interesting jobs to do. In terms of assets, the Exchange infrastructure will be decommissioned in a few weeks time and we will reduce our CAPEX storage cost as we move away from shares on hosted disk”.
What has the project cost?

“The cost of transformation was about £1million. If you set this against roughly comparable yearly OPEX costs between the Microsoft Licensed model and the Google Service Fee model, and take into account the time saved across 5,000 retail outlets, the cost benefits case stands up. Not to mention the intangible benefits of improved collaboration, and anywhere working”.

Why Google G Suite over Microsoft Office 365 Azure?

“My last client was in Local Government, in their case they decided to switch to Microsoft Office 365.  Both the Google and Microsoft Cloud offerings stack-up against each other. The important point is, that in either case, software maintenance is simplified, as is the deployment of new functionality. We chose Google’s G Suite because the CIO had deployed it successfully before and was impressed by its simplicity and the rate of user adoption (particularly around collaborative working)”.

Are there organisations that should avoid SaaS office tools and if so why?

“Not many in my opinion. Organisations with highly sensitive data in – I’m talking ‘State Secrets’ here – would probably need special features and deployment models not available in commodity SaaS products. However, I believe, for most commercial organisations, their security concerns around the Cloud simply don’t stack up. Let’s face it, Google’s, Amazon’s or Microsoft’s Data Centres are going to be among the most secure in the world; they probably do a much better job of securing them than your company – a breach of security for them would be a much bigger headline!”.

“For a small business, it’s no-brainer!  However, at the other end of scale, companies with a lot of legacy ‘Shadow IT’ in complex spreadsheets and email-enabled workflow, might find the journey to SaaS more complicated and longer than ours.  For them, I’d recommend: the risk assessment be done scientifically, rather than emotionally, plan to implement in incremental steps, and listen and act on, user feedback at each increment”.
“Perhaps paradoxically, the tight time constraints imposed by the merger on our project was an advantage. The value of a single platform for the new company gained the attention of the Board, and that put pace and weight behind the project. I would recommend that any CIO thinking of moving to the Cloud find similar Board level support early on”.

“In summary, I would argue going Cloud is a much better way for delivering and managing IT services, and that a move to SaaS office tools is a relatively low-risk way to start that journey”.



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Organizational Economics and the Enterprise Architecture of a Religious Organization

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The Question

A reader of my blog, who is a minister in the Methodist Church, commented on one of my posts, (this is my paraphrase of the question)”How do you measure the benefits of a religious organization, like a local church?”  Or, “How would I apply Enterprise Architecture to religious organization”, since I posit that all organizations can benefit from Enterprise Architecture, as I’ve discussed in several previous posts.
This post is written with a slant toward the Methodist tradition, of which I am a part, but will apply equally well to all religious organizations.

An Organization’s Enterprise Architecture

Within Organizational Economics, any organization’s Enterprise Architecture has three sub-components, Mission, Governance, and infrastructure.
·         Mission: What the organization is supposed to do; it’s goal, target, or objective.
·         Governance: Within what parameters or rules it can perform its mission.
·         Infrastructure: What personnel, intellectual, physical, and financial support it has for achieving its mission.
To support the Missionof an organization, its leadership chooses Strategies(approaches or plans) for going from where it is to where it wants to be.  It implements these strategies using tactics, plans that account for the organization’s Governance and Infrastructure (its rules and talents/abilities/support).  Management then executes the tactics in operations(the actions of the organization).  The operations have two components, processes and tooling.
Additionally, the leadership and management of the organization is responsible for legislating, enforcing, and adjudicating some or all of the laws, rules, and/or regulations the make up the organization’s Governance.  [Sidebar: For an individual Methodist churches this would be called Administration.]
Finally, the organization must provide for its Infrastructure, “the tools and talents” it needs to perform the operations.  These tools include financial, physical, and intellectual.  For a religious organization this would be the money, time, talents of the adherents and the buildings, property and assets of the organization.

Processes and the OODA Loop

All processessupporting the mission or infrastructure of any organization fall into the OODA model of Col. John Boyd.  The OODA, as discussed in several previous posts includes four step: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

Observe

Initially, data is gathered by observing some aspect of the current state of the Universe.  This includes data about the results of their previous actions.  In point of fact,
Datum—some observation about the Universe at a particular point in four dimensions
Data—a set consistent datum

Orient

The Orient step in the process is an individual’s model of how the world (Universe) works (descriptive) or should work (prescriptive).  These models are sometimes called paradigms. 
Rules from Governance enable and support the Orient step, by structuring the data within the individual’s or organization’s model.
Information—patterns abstracted from the data.  This is the start of orienting the observations, the data and information.  The pattern analysis to convert data into information is derived from the organization’s model of its environment or Universe.  For religious organizations this is found in its “bible” and its organizationally related texts like the “Book of Discipline” of the Methodist Church.
Knowledge—identified or abstracted patterns in the information.  Using the same paradigm, environmental model, or model Universe, people analyze and abstract patterns within the information.  This is their knowledge within the paradigm.  When they can’t fit information into their model, they often discard as aberrant, an outlier, or as an anomaly.  When enough information doesn’t conveniently fit into their model the adherents have a crisis.  In science, at least, this is the point of a paradigm shift.  In religion this is a reformation (the reforming of the “bible” and/or the “book of discipline”, that is the rules of governance.  While in science some conservative adherents to the old model lose their reputations after a time, in religion people on both sides of the model’s discontinuity lose their lives.

Decide

Once the organization or individual has the knowledge, he or she uses input their knowledge within their models of the Universe to make decisions.
Wisdom—is the understanding of the consequences of the application of knowledge.  
This is the hard part of the OODA Loop because it’s difficult to understand both the consequences and the unintended consequences of a decision.  If your paradigm, environment, or Universe model is good, or relatively complete, then you’re more likely to make a good decision.  More frequently than not people, even religious people, make decisions that are “Short term smart and long term dumb.”  Part of the reason is that they are working with a poor, incomplete or just plain wrong paradigm (view of the world or universe).  This is where the Risk/Reward balance comes in.  When choosing a path forward, what are the risks and rewards with each path?  [Sidebar:  A risk is an unknown and it is wise to understand that “you don’t know what you don’t know”.]

Act

Once the decision is made people act on those decisions by planning a mission, strategies, and so on within their paradigm.

Religious Organization’s Orienting Model

Joseph Campbell’s four categories of functions of religions: include: the metaphysical, the cosmological, sociological, and pedagogical.  While there may be much quibbling with some of what Mr. Campbell writes, the four functions of religion (and perhaps culture) ring true.

The Metaphysical Function

Awakening a sense of awe before the mystery of being
“According to Campbell, the absolute mystery of life, what he called transcendent reality, cannot be captured directly in words or images. Symbols and mythic metaphors on the other hand point outside themselves and into that reality. They are what Campbell called “being statements” and their enactment through ritual can give to the participant a sense of that ultimate mystery as an experience. ‘Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion…. The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is.’”
This is truly the “religious function of the four; the other three tending to be more cultural than religious.

The Cosmological Function

Explaining the shape of the universe
“For pre-modern societies, myth also functioned as a proto-science, offering explanations for the physical phenomena that surrounded and affected their lives, such as the change of seasons and the life cycles of animals and plants.”
While there still is much proto-science, science is serving the cosmological function in today’s culture and has identified many patterns in information and knowledge, and clarified many previously fuzzy concepts and theories.  Still, at this time, religion plays a significant role in many “ultimate” questions.  These include: What was there before the Big Bang (if there was one), what architected “the laws” of the Universe (e.g., the speed of light), why am I here, and what happens to me after I lose consciousness in the process of dying?

The Sociological Function

Validate and support the existing social order
“Ancient societies had to conform to an existing social order if they were to survive at all. This is because they evolved under “pressure” from necessities much more intense than the ones encountered in our modern world. Mythology confirmed that order, and enforced it by reflecting it into the stories themselves, often describing how the order arrived from divine intervention. Campbell often referred to these “conformity” myths as the “Right Hand Path” to reflect the brain’s left hemisphere’s abilities for logic, order and linearity. Together with these myths however, he observed the existence of the “Left Hand Path”, mythic patterns like the “Hero’s Journey” which are revolutionary in character in that they demand from the individual a surpassing of social norms and sometimes even of morality.”
More than any other the sociological function of religions leads to culture, to cultural conflict, and religious wars.  This is the key reason for the incessant wars among the three great monotheistic religions—especially when “the authorities” in each want to hold the political power that comes with the cosmological function (the function of how the Universe and God work).

The Pedagogical Function

Guide the individual through the stages of life
“As a person goes through life, many psychological challenges will be encountered. Myth may serve as a guide for successful passage through the stages of one’s life.”
Within the context of a given combined metaphysical, cosmological, and sociological model or paradigm, teaching the paradigm becomes important so that members of the organization can navigate in an orderly manner through the model.  Order reduces risk and increases cost efficiency, while creativity increases risk but may increase effectiveness.  All religious/cultural models work to decrease risk for its adherents and teaching the adherents the cultural behaviors is seminally important for the religious organization to last.

The Methodist Denomination; an Example

All religions create prescriptive paradigm or orienting model that include all four functions (or dimensions) as discussed by Campbell.
All religious orienting models are based on religious authority; either priests, shaman, etc., “Holy” texts, or both.

The Catholic Church before 1500

The Catholic Church before Luther and the Reformation and before Guttenberg and printing used both written text and Clerical Authority, with the latter being far more important.  Clerical Authority caused the burning and killing of the faculty or the library and museum (university) at Alexandria, the extermination of the Templers, the near extermination of the Huguenots, and Inquisitions killed hundreds of people and attempted to rewrite science (see the biographies of Galileo, Copernicus and others).  A big part of this was that the Catholic Church’s hierarchy believed their paradigm that they were the final authority on knowledge and wisdom.  They’re model included an Earth centered Universe with the Pope or Jerusalem at the very center.  This meant that they were always right and competing models damned the heretics to Hell.  To this was added a major dose of politics; e.g., “The ends justifies the means” inferred to the Jesuits.    

Strategies (Based on the Christian Protestant Paradigm)

Enter, initially, Luther and Guttenberg.  In 1455 Guttenberg has perfected the printing press and began to print the Bible so that by 1500 there were a comparatively large number floating around, as well as many other books with both ancient and “modern” ideas.  In 1507, Professor Dr. Luther challenged the authority of the Catholic Church hierarchy, saying that the scriptures, not the Pope and his minions held the core to the Christian paradigm or prescriptive model of how the Universe should work and that all people should be allowed to read these and interpret them for themselves.  This change or shift in strategy was greatly facilitated by the increasing number of printed scriptures.
This meant that people had to learn to read, which meant they learned to write.  The ability to write meant that many more people had the ability to express concepts, ideas, and theories across space and time.  Learning was not just for the clerics and clergy.
One consequence for the Catholic Church was that science took on the cosmological functions, reducing the church hierarchy’s political authority.  Another was the increased risk of “Christians” against “Christians”.  And finally there was the blossoming of intellectual and economic wealth; since knowledge is the root of all wealth.

John Wesley, Adam Smith, and the United States

In 1783, John Wesley had his epiphany; he called it his “heart-warming” experience.  He continued his work among the poor and ostracized, attempting to bring them into the church.  These people had been tenet farmers and owners and workers in “cottage industry” manufacturing that supported the farmers and the estates on which they worked.  These people were being displaced by the new and very controversial mass production using powered tools; that is, the nascent industrial revolution of the early and middle 1700s. 
These people migrated to towns and cities in search of work.  Many that migrated had no skills that were needed in the new industrial economy.  With the debtor laws then in place, they ended up in prison or worse.  By 1811, the displaced workers formed radical groups, called Luddites, who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs; which the machines were.  These were the people that Wesley sought out and these were the people he reached.
As his “cult”, the Methodists, continued to grow, he a) had to have help; additional “clergy” to preach, teach, and comfort the cultists, b) these people needed to read but many couldn’t, and c) most of the rest of the very early Methodists couldn’t either.  Wesley set about educating his clergy and many of the cult members by teaching them to read.  In turn, reading and other skills taught in Sunday school were used by these “Methodists” to compete for jobs and to become entrepreneurs in their own right; that is, the Church of disciplined learning, demonstrated that there was a “Method” to John Wesley’s heretical madness. The Methodist Sunday School (A real school teaching reading, riting, and rithmtic) enabled Methodists to compete for better paying jobs and join the “Middle Class”.  This follows Wesley’s admonition, “Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can”.  This is really the credo for the knowledge-based Enlightened Capitalism as espoused by Adam Smith.
As espoused by Smith, Enlightened Capitalism is really about ensuring that there is an even economic and regulatory platform for all individuals to start from; no one individual being favored in an economic or political sense or even perceived as such.  This means that all individuals feel they have a chance to succeed to the full measure of their God (or nature) given talents.
In 1789, the framers of the United States Constitution used many of the concepts from the An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.  These include:
·         Defense of the country
·         Support of the country’s infrastructure through creation and maintenance of standards that cross state boundaries and support of intra-country communications.
Everything else was left to the states and the people.  The Methodist church and other religious organizations noticed there was a need for, what is now called, “a social safety net”.  This was initially for its members.  So they constructed and supported hospitals, orphanages, old folks’ homes, and so on.  Many of the most prestigious hospitals still include the name of a domination or religious organization.  Many modest sized towns ended up with a Catholic and a Protestant hospital, while cities might have two or three of each plus a Jewish hospital.
In the 1880s and 90s, most Christian churches recognized the need for kids to have physical activity, since fewer of them were “working the farm”.  So, along with Sunday School to teach them to read, the churches built gyms for them to play in.

The Changed Mission

Politically correct, social liberal cultists in the Methodist denomination have turned the strategies of this denomination from a focus on religious activities to forcing societal change through political action (tactics).  They no longer give any weight to the other religious functions discussed by Campbell.
In my opinion, in doing so, they have lost focus.  The consequence is that young adults (gen X and Y) see no difference between the Methodist Church and the Democratic or socialist parties, other than possibly this is the organization to belong to, if you want to earn your way into heaven, (but more about Heaven and Hell in my other blog).  So they see no reason to join the Methodist Church.  Those that are looking for a religious organization head to fundamentalist churches, even religious cults, like James Jones’ Jonestown.  But defining social injustice is even harder and religious organizations have three other functions.  “Wicked Clowns lives matter” is an organization for “social justice”, but does that serve all four functions of a religion?
Remember while “Social Justice” is easy to proclaim, it’s hard to remember the individual as embodied in the song “Easy To Be Hard”
Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Do you only care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needy friend
I need a friend

Choosing a Mission, the Governance, and Infrastructure to Support a Religious Institution

The Three Great Principles

For a Christian church community any mission should be founded on the three great principles of Christianity. 
·         Love and respect God no matter what
·         Treat all others as you would want to be treated
·         Try to be your ownself at your very best all the time.
The first, in the Christian Bible is that, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.”  If a religious institution forgets this principle, it is no longer a religious organization, but possibly a civic or political one.  Additionally, from any serious reading of history, it is the principle all people find most difficult to inculcate into their being and also the one that has caused more wars and more massacres than any other.  The reason is that many religions believe they have a lock on God will and how to please him/her/it.  Their mighty God has given them the right to enslave or kill anyone that espouses any variation from their orthodoxy.  This is true of all closed religions.
However, any Christian denomination must have this as their chief goal and guiding principle.
“The second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”  This is the chief principle of all civic and political organizations, as well as a secondary principle of religious organizations (at least this is what most religious organizations espouse).  This principle is the basis for all laws internal to a culture.  Most people, even those espousing religion, follow the law rather than inculcating the principle into their lives.  My mother said most followers of a particular Christian domination followed the principle of “sowing their wild oats six days a week and praying for a drought on Sunday.”  Hundreds of laws are needed to ensure that not too many “wild oats” are sown.
There is a significant problem with “loving your neighbor as yourself” and that is, many (most) people hate themselves in one way or another.  This may be caused by poor brain wiring, by bad experiences, or both.  This is the reason that I include the third principle.  People, especially young people, try to distance themselves by drink and drugs, and destruction of anything that might be beautiful. Why; because they can’t stand or understand themselves and act out on those feelings.  That is, “I’m entitled and if I can’t…then I’m being disrespected.”
So any local church mission statement must include teaching “my own self at my very best all the time.” (Which is impossible for any human but should be the goal of all humans).

Organizational Architecture and the Protestant Church

A Mission Statement and the Strategies

There are four dimensions of “my own self”: mental, physical, social, and religious (notice these fit well with Campbell’s functions).  As discussed earlier, John Wesley intuitively understood that the Methodists had to address all of these within the organization that he created.  First and foremost, it addresses the religious needs of its adherents.  Second, from the history of Methodism, it is plain his “methods” and governance created a secure internal environment for his adherents and that their openness combined with discipline continued to attract more.  Third, his Sunday school addressed their mental dimension, while including gyms, etc., addressed the physical.  And like his mentor, Jesus of Nazareth, the people of early Methodism “…grew stature (the physical), wisdom (the mental), and in favor with God (the religious), and man (the social).”
Any mission statementor goal and the strategies for achieving the goal should include a balance of all four religious functions, rather than a great emphasis on just one.   Having said, there need to be a set of strategies for meeting the goal.  These should encompass all four dimensions.  Once these are decided on, the church organization must decide on processes (ordered sets of activities or “methods”) that move the organization toward the goal. 

Processes and Governance

However, the strategies and processes must be limited to those that can function within governance of the organization.  If the mission simply cannot be met within the rules and regulations of organization then either: 1) the governance should change, 2) the strategies should change, or 3) the processes.  The simplest to change are the processes; the most difficult is the governance.  One other thing, the mission or goal should not be changed.

Infrastructure

These follow the practices of organizational architecture.  Finally, the religious organization has to work within the limits of its infrastructure and support systems (even though with the right blessing these may greatly multiple to feed the “my own self” of all members).

GE Safe-Fail, Siemens Fail-Safe?

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This post is not an episode of the ACME E&L story – that’ll continue soon. Last week, The Economist published “Siemens and General Electric gear up for the internet of things” with the tagline: “The American industrial giant is sprinting towards it…

Digital Transformation Hub – Realizing the Shared Economy

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Last week I mentioned to one of my US based colleagues that I would be out of office for three days at the Irish National Digital Week (NDW16), taking the opportunity because the event was being held in Skibbereen, just a few kilometres down the road from my home office. He asked, “Surely an event of that type would be held in Dublin?”  And I replied, “Well there’s a story here that needs to be told; one that will have profound implications for business in Ireland and probably internationally”.

Skibbereen is a small market town in the South West of Ireland. The population is approximately 2000, although there’s perhaps several times that number in the immediate hinterland. It’s not an easily accessible area, you get there by going to Ireland’s second city Cork, and then taking pretty dreadful roads for some 100 kilometres. However the general area is reasonably well known as West Cork, a remote but ruggedly beautiful part of Ireland beside the Atlantic, with peninsulas reaching out into the ocean attracting sailors, divers, kayakers, cyclists, walkers and artists from Ireland, the United Kingdom, America and Germany many who visit, some who make their home here. A cosmopolitan populace that blends indigenous folk and blow-ins in a close knit community. Think of Northern California but 5 degrees cooler.

Over the years numerous leaders in business, technology and the arts have moved to the area or established holiday homes. In 2015 some of these individuals together with local business people established an initiative using private investment to create a digital hub. Notables in the group operating on a pro bono basis include David Puttnam, well known film producer and Ireland’s Digital Champion, Anne O’Leary, CEO Vodafone Ireland, Ronan Harris, VP Sales & Ops Google Ireland and John Field, Director of local retailers. John Field made a suitable building available, once a cinema and latterly a bakery, as the physical presence. Vodafone, in the (ESB/Vodafone) SIRO partnership provided a 1 Gb network, for the hub building and the entire town.  In late 2015 the Hub building, named Ludgate after a 19th Century Irish designer of an analytical engine, opened coincident with the co-located 2015 National Digital Week event.

Last week, the NDW 16 event was once again held in Skibbereen, attended by some 1600 delegates from all over Ireland with 70 speakers and 2 arenas. Speakers included big names such as Google, Paypal, Uber, AirBnB. But what is really interesting about this event is that in spite of the “digital” theme, most of the sessions were about applications, people, collaborations and experiences.

West Cork, like most of Ireland has extensive farming interest. A session that resonated with me was the speaker that showed an image of an obviously recent, top of the range model combine harvester, who quickly went on to show an even newer harvester image, asking the question, “why would I replace a great piece of machinery so quickly, particularly in an uncertain economic climate?” And he proceeded to show the direct cost benefit of the newer model that with GPS guidance and yield data analysis enables huge improvement in cropping precision, efficiency and yield. I never did get to ask when the driverless combine would be available, but we can probably assume it’s not far away. The speaker also commented that this level of technology is fully in production, available to and easily usable by farmers today, and doesn’t just collect big data, but integrates with farm management to instruct fertiliser, treatment and cutting programs. The net effect is to de-skill the farm management task and improve the consistency and quality of outcomes.

Although very impressive, in many ways this farming case study is actually quite ordinary. It’s an application of digital technology that extends existing practices for improved cost benefit. What really caught my attention was the series of presentations on the “sharing economy”. Naturally there were presentations from the big names like Uber and AirBnB, both expressing concerns about government action or inaction preventing growth. For AirBnB certain cities came in for criticism. Uber asserts the Irish government is effectively protecting the incumbent taxi drivers and preventing rollout. Given both firms are very persuasive on the opportunities to create bigger marketplaces and, in the case of Uber, positively impact emissions, I wondered whether both firms would be better served if they worked with unions and governments to demonstrate how the business model and technologies could be used to extend, improve and integrate the old and new.  Maybe using smaller environments such as Skibbereen or Cork to act as exemplars, rather than taking the more confrontational approach casting the incumbents as Luddites.

A really instructive session introduced a seriously mundane application from Kollect, a local rubbish collection operator that has established a digital business offering “on-demand, pay as you go” rubbish collection. The householder uses a smartphone app to communicate his or her instructions for pickup when the bin is full. Kollect then coordinate the request to third party waste disposal companies who make the pickup. You might say a variant on the Uber model for rubbish collection that claims to reduce collection costs by up to 40%. A big deal in Ireland where bin charges are often highly contentious. This demonstrates like nothing else the pervasiveness of digital opportunities.

A similarly instructive session came from a very impressive Dublin not for profit organization, Food Cloud. They started in an incredibly small, local way to try to address the huge amount of food wasted in the retail supply chain by redistributing to worthy causes. Initially they enabled small businesses to communicate leftovers and collection times at the end of the day by smartphone app and then establish demand from charities. This simple idea has been picked up by food giants like Tesco who have integrated the concept into their own instore systems to make donation part of their core process, and now has grown into a significant operation redistributing food from over 1000 stores to over 3000 charities in the UK and Ireland. Here we see digitization enabling collaborative processes operating for the public good, while reducing costs for the retailer.

Anne O’Leary, CEO Vodafone Ireland spoke about how Ludgate is a focal point for digitization in West Cork and how firms have embraced the concept. Larger Dublin based tech firms are now facilitating employees to work remotely out of the hub; smaller, local firms are setting up in the hub to have access to the hi-speed network facilities. Overall the hub is seen as a great success and delivering on the promise of supporting up to 75 people in the creative co-working environment with the long term objective to create 500 direct jobs and 1000 indirect jobs via a sustainable digital economy for Skibbereen and the wider West Cork area. She went on to say that the SIRO partnership views Skibbereen as a prototype, and is now planning a further rollout to establish 50 hub towns across Ireland.

The following day I was sitting in my kitchen with a neighbour – a lecturer in horticulture. He told me he has a project in progress to plant two thousand and twenty apple trees in and around Skibbereen by the year 2020. The idea being to introduce a greener environment with pervasive blossom in the Springtime, adding to the charm of the town. He is harnessing the enthusiasm of his students to identify the sites, make agreement with owners, to clear the ground, plant, nurture and critically to collect data. He plans to collaborate with digital folk in and around the hub to develop an app and website that will monitor and manage the project, and to establish a research base for different varieties of tree, tracking and publishing crop data that will be of great interest to apple growers everywhere. An outstanding example of how the hub is encouraging students in non-technical disciplines to engage with digital transformation, increasing their understanding of horticulture science by using big data techniques for improved plant management, while improving the environment for everyone.

Notwithstanding the “digital” branding, the NDW16 event was actually little to do with technology; it was all about application of technology and the ability of the new technology platforms to support collaboration of multiple parties. The digital hub clearly acts as an accelerator. The network and technology enabled working spaces facilitate new businesses, new business models and improved remote working conditions for larger companies. But the real digital transformation occurs as non-technical individuals and teams apply their current skills and expertise to leverage the technology and develop new improved business models. And the opportunities for new and existing businesses, not for profits, informal groups and individuals, in fact everyone are unlimited. Simply put, the maturity of the technology platforms is such that we should expect the digitization of pretty much everything we do or engage with, will happen very rapidly over the next few years. Of course change isn’t always comfortable for everyone, and the AirBnB and Uber examples remind us that new business models must address sociological impacts. But as the de facto foreign direct investment model in Ireland comes under pressure from political earthquakes in the UK and USA, the idea that Ireland could rapidly grow significant indigenous capability doesn’t seem impossible. Finally, it must be noted that this initiative has been achieved without government support, by voluntary effort, private investment.

How Enterprise Architecture And Project Execution Are Linked

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What is Enterprise Architecture? Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline for proactively defining a conceptual blueprint to enable businesses to respond to disruptive forces. The objective of EA is to ascertain, analyse and categorise, the […]

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