7 years, 9 months ago

Architect Your Predictive Analytics Capability To Unleash The Power Of Digital Business

Predictive analytics has become the key to helping businesses — especially those in the highly dynamic Chinese market — create differentiated, individualized customer experiences and make better decisions. Enterprise architecture professionals must t…

7 years, 9 months ago

Architect Your Predictive Analytics Capability To Unleash The Power Of Digital Business

Predictive analytics has become the key to helping businesses — especially those in the highly dynamic Chinese market — create differentiated, individualized customer experiences and make better decisions. Enterprise architecture professionals must t…

10 years, 5 months ago

What Are You Doing To Get Off XP?

In case you haven’t heard Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP and Office 2003 in April of 2014. What this means is that Microsoft will no longer patch security vulnerabilities discovered in XP or Office 2003, and therefore there will be security holes discovered that can be exploited by hackers which will never be […]

10 years, 6 months ago

The Open Group works with Microsoft to create Open Management Infrastructure

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

10 years, 10 months ago

Functional Organization at Microsoft

@iamjaygreene and @jimkerstetter of @CNETNews are not surprised by the departure of unpopular Windows boss Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft.

Some pundits (e.g. ZDnet’s Larry Dignan) had predicted that Sinofsfy would survive if Windows 8 was a
commercial success. By letting him go immediately after Windows 8 went live rather than waiting,
Ballmer has clearly signalled that it is not about Windows 8 success but
about something else.

In pieces written in the weeks before Sinofsky’s departure, Greene and Kerstetter mention the following issues.

  • Sinofsky successfully battled with Ray Ozzie for control of Windows Live Mesh. Ray Ozzie left Microsoft immediately after Ballmer folded Windows Live Mesh into Sinofsky’s organization.
  • According to unnamed critics within Microsoft, Sinofsky created a rigid product development process that puts more control in
    his hands and diminishes Microsoft’s ability to innovate.
  • In a similar fashion to Scott Forstall at Apple (who also lost his job recently), Sinofsky zealously promoted his group’s work at the expense of the rest of the company.
  • Manu Cornet’s cartoon of Microsoft’s organization chart is thought to be a reference to Sinofsky.

The comic is a set of 6 organizational charts, edges with arrows show who reports to whom. Amazon's is very traditional, each manager has exactly 2 people below her. Google's is colorful (nodes are colored red, green, yellow, blue) and is extremely messy. Edges are overlapping all over the place, it's unclear who reports to whom. Facebook looks like a social network with bidirectional arrows and a distributed structure. Microsoft's is divided in three sub-structures that are pointing guns at each other. Apple's is a circle with a large red dot in the center, and everyone around it reports to that red dot -- the arrow heads are particularly large and even the people two levels away from the center red dot also have arrows point at them coming directly from the red dot. Oracle's is divided into two sections, the first section is labelled 'Legal' and is huge, the second section is labelled 'Engineering' and is tiny.
Original cartoon by Manu Cornet

But this story isn’t just about personality clashes and organizational politics. Sinofsky has championed an approach to organization structure, which he calls Functional Organization, and this is described in a book called “One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making,” (2009) co-written with Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti.

The Functional Organization builds management reporting lines around job functions — such as
product management, development, software testing. This may be contrasted with a Product Organization where multi-disciplinary teams work on specific
feature sets together.

Sinofsky and Iansiti argue that functional
organizations create clearer road maps for workers to march toward a
final goal. However, critics within Microsoft disagree. Apparently referring to Sinofsky’s Functional Organization, Charlie Kindel, another ex-Microsoft executive is quoted as saying that “it represents a siloed perspective, it represents an us versus them perspective”.  Another former senior executive (unnamed) has referred to the approach as “Soviet central-planning”, where tight control from the top squeezes out innovative thinking from below.

Announcing Sinofsky’s departure, and the appointment of Julie Larson-Green as his successor, Steve Ballmer wrote “The products and services we have
delivered to the market in
the past few months mark the launch of a new era at Microsoft. To
continue this success it is imperative that we continue
to drive alignment across all Microsoft teams, and have more integrated
and rapid development cycles for our offerings. …  Her unique product and innovation perspective and proven ability to
effectively collaborate and drive a cross company agenda will serve us
well as she takes on this new leadership role”.

(BBC News 13 November 2012)

So is this the end of the Functional Organization in Microsoft? Martin Fowler talks about the oscillation between FunctionalStaffOrganization and
TechnicalStaffOrganization, essentially the same dynamics (he reckons) as drive the
boom-bust cycle of EnterpriseArchitecture. (PreferFunctionalStaffOrganization). So perhaps now the cross-company silo-busting agenda will have the ascendency for a little while.

Read more »

11 years, 2 months ago

Why the Yammer Acquisition Means Almost Nothing to Your Enterprise

I would argue that while the acquisition is great for Microsoft, and absolutely fabulous for Yammer’s investors, for most enterprises it’s not really a net positive and potentially, could be quite negative depending on your company’s disposition towards the cloud.
Continue reading

11 years, 5 months ago

High-Velocity BPM Comes to the Cloud

For years, we have been known for our ability to rapidly deliver BPM solutions to our clients. It is also known that as a result of our intuitive user experience, many of our customers have quickly become self-sufficient in building a large portfolio of automated processes across their businesses.  Many customers have over hundreds processes […]

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11 years, 6 months ago

A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships

How BPM Can Increase Your Overall SharePoint Maturity Over 43% of organizations deploying SharePoint are looking to purchase workflow or business process management (BPM) add-on applications for the platform, according to the 2011 “How Are Businesses Using SharePoint” survey. Like many businesses deploying SharePoint, usage within the organization expands dramatically as users find it a useful […]

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11 years, 10 months ago

Well on our way to 2019

I just viewed a new video from Microsoft about their future vision of our lives in 2019. Which is a great video offering a glimpse of things to come. Although, I was thinking that we probably won’t have to wait until 2019 to see these new technologies come to life. I had my process and case […]

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  2. Mobile BPM: Connecting People to Process Wherever They Are In an increasingly more mobile society, work is not completed…
  3. Work Smarter – Introducing Metastorm Smart Business Workspace In our recent blog post about the Future of Social…

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