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Michael Watkins wrote an interesting post "Demystifying Strategy: The What, Who, How, and Why", he defines business strategy as:

"a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making….. A good strategy provides a clear roadmap, consisting of a set of guiding principles or rules, that defines the actions people in the business should take (and not take) and the things they should prioritize (and not prioritize) to achieve desired goals."

In a nutshell, as illustrated below:

• Mission is about what will be achieved.
• The value network is about with whom value will be created and captured.
• Strategy is about how resources should be allocated to accomplish the mission in the context of the value network.
• Vision and incentives is about why people in the organization should feel motivated to perform at a high level.

Together, the mission, network, strategy, and vision define the strategic direction for a business. They provide the what, who, how, and why necessary to powerfully align action in complex organizations.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Strategy, Vision, Mission, Value, Business, Goals, Management, Leadership, Planning

 

Mike Walker wrote and interesting post on a discussion he had on “Making Sense of Architecture Standards" which resulted in the following image:

 

 

• Taxonomy and Ontology: Such as IEEE 1471, “. . .an architecture is a conception of a system. There may be many conceptions of a system… What this provides to the enterprise architect, solutions architect or domain architect is a way to have a constant set of terms for describing what it is they are building. This should be at the core to your architecture activities.”
• Information Model and Decision Support: Decision support help us to "..focus more on … What are the right questions  … How do I organize those questions … What do those answers mean … Meaning what is the process in which I get the information, consume it, process it and ultimately make it actionable."
• Process Framework: "… when talking about decision support, there is a need for a process to wrap how we make our decisions…. Having this higher level process framework is essential to architects. There are a series of benefits for the organization … Constancy in how solutions are created … The right people are selected for the right job … Proper metrics can be obtained to gauge health of the EA process … Predictability of results which lends to being able to apply some level of risk management to decisions"
• Actors: These are people with the appropriate skills and competencies.
• Manage: The ability to effectively execute strategy and tactics "…This aspect covers PMO based processes, service management and IT Governance aspects. In the service management area specifically we are seeing closer alignment with EA. The latest version of ITIL has alignment with EA practices."

This is a great overview of the enterprise architecture standards and how they relate and interact.

 

Technorati Tags: EA, Enterprise Architecture, Framework, Standards, ITIL, TOGAF, IAF, Zachman, IEEE 1457, PMO, Process

Michael Hugos has a great post on agility where he makes the following point:

“Experience shows me (again and again) that agility is not about working fast but about finding elegantly simple solutions to business problems. You’ll know you’ve found an elegantly simple solution when the business people agree it solves their most important and immediate problems and when the developers know the solution can be built and tested in 30 days or less.

Unless you find a solution that meets these two criteria, it’s not possible to be agile. And often, because people can’t find these simple solutions, they mistakenly claim that agility itself doesn’t work. They come to this conclusion because they attempt to be agile by cramming complex solutions into short development cycles through working harder, longer, and faster.

That attempt has as much chance of success as trying to cram ten pounds of you-know-what into a five pound bag. Inevitably, the bag breaks, and then there is a mess to clean up.

An elegantly simple solution (a robust 80% solution) doesn’t do everything (there isn’t time for that), just the most important things. Finding this solution is not easy; it’s the creative part. It requires business people to figure out what tasks out of all the tasks they perform are the most important ones and what system features they need to handle those tasks. Then developers have to figure out how to build and test a system to deliver those features in the short amount of time available.”

We spend too much time complicating our lives by trying to do too much, too fast! There seems to never be enough time to do something correctly, but always enough time to do it over again! Given to complexity of managing technology, we’re prone to think that complex solutions, are better solutions. Instead we need to focus on implementing good enough solutions, solution that bring about small wins. Small wins, if continually applied, in a thoughtful and strategic manner, quickly add up to significant results. Small wins are more manageable and have less of an impact if they fail. Seeking big wins are extremely difficult, prone to failure and require significant political will! Focus on the small wins…. simple things done well!

 

Technorati Tags: Agile, Agility, Simple, Small Wins, GTD, IT, Project, Management, Business, Technology, Architecture, Good Enough, Execution

As discussed in Serge’s post there is a standard being ratified for IT Governance, ISO 38500 which will cover Corporate Governance of information technology. This standard was originally defined as an Australian standard AS8015.

AS8015 provides six guiding principles for good corporate governance and the effective, efficient and acceptable use of ICT. The six principles are:

1. Establish clearly understood responsibilities for ICT (eg, ensure individuals understand and accept their responsibilities)
2. Plan ICT to best support the organisation (eg, ensure ICT plans fit current and future needs and the organisation’s corporate plans)
3. Acquire ICT validly (eg, ICT acquisitions should be made for approved reasons and in the approved way; on the basis of ongoing analysis)
4. Ensure ICT performs well, whenever required (eg, ensure ICT is fit for its purpose and is responsive to changing requirements)
5. Ensure ICT conforms with formal rules (eg, ensure compliance with external regulations and internal policies and practices)
6. Ensure ICT use respects human factors (eg, ensure ICT meets the evolving needs of the ‘people in the process’)

This is a great step forward towards effective governance of ICT within a corporate governance framework.

 

Technorati Tags: IT, Governance, IT Governance, Strategy, Alignment

Global Enterprise Architecture Organisation post on their blog titled "Enterprise Architecture within a Social Ecosystem" discussing how we "tend to treat the complexity of humans beings as information processors as a part of the context surrounding our work, rather than a topic within its scope." This undermines the effectiveness of our enterprise architecture efforts. The social context in which our architectural work take place requires careful consideration if our architectures are to be adopted. 

Here are a few specific instances of ways in which social scientists have long known that the human mind tends not to work precisely as we might expect:

• People tend to find it difficult to visualize a future that is different than the past. We’re natural extrapolaters. For example, when the housing market has been going up for a few years, almost no one can conceive a future in which the median house price will be flat or falling. Similarly, overbuying when times are good and overselling when they are not has plagued the stock market for decades.
• People tend not to periodically re-test the assumptions on which they are basing their behavior to determine whether or not those assumptions still hold. Encyclopedia Brittanica did not properly adjust its business model when Microsoft Encarta debuted, because they continued to assume that all "serious" reference would be published in paper form. They had to declare bankruptcy a couple of years later.
• When preparing to reach a decision, people tend to factor in only a subset of the relevant information, because the full range of variables exceeds the "seven plus or minus two" that they can deal with concurrently.
• People tend to acquire imaginary "property rights" in places and roles they have occupied for a long time. This gives rise to fief building, infighting and other maladaptive uses of enterprise property.
• People tend to perform better when moderately challenged, especially by novelty, and less well when bored.
• Mathematical diagnostic models derived from expert’s judgments frequently outperform the experts themselves because the models eliminate the "noise" in human thinking.

If the people and social issues are considered up-front, they can be incorporated into our planning and mitigated to help ease the adoption of new architectures, ideas and practices. The ultimate goal of any enterprise architecture programme is adoption! Sound architecture and engineering is important, but these aspects aren’t as important as creating the organisations change, required to ensure adoption and the unlocking of business value. This requires a robust social architecture! How much of the softer people and social issues do you consider and plan for in your enterprise architecture initiatives?

 

Technorati Tags: Social Architecture, Change, Change Management, Management, Leadership, Enterprise Architecture, Architecture

The phrase "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" from a post by Bob Sutton describes an important philosophy for architects, Bob Sutton describes the importance of this idea as:

"….the virtues of wise people – those who have the courage to act on their knowledge, but the humility to doubt what they know…to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have ’strong opinions, which are weakly held.’ …… Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to ’see’ and ‘hear’ evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of ‘confirmation bias.’"

When dealing with complex and uncertain futures having strong opinions, weakly held is an important philosophy in how to approach the development of strategy.

 

Strong Opinions…

 

Strong opinions encourage you to develop strong arguments that support your point of view. Consider the alternative, weak opinions, when we have weak opinions:

1. We generally don’t develop robust arguments to support a weak opinion.
2. Weak opinions don’t challenge other people to debate and test the validity of the supporting argument.

Take a strong stand, if you’re wrong, acknowledge it and be open to learning along the way. By taking a strong stand, rather than a weak one, will invite the opposition, debate and dialogue necessary to test that validity of the supporting argument.

 

Weakly Held….

 

Much of the opinions we hold today, are based on what we see today. While strong opinions encourage you to develop strong arguments supporting your point of view, if those opinions are strongly held we often fail to change in response to other people’s ideas and fail to change in response to new information. Considering the human tendency to actively seek information and evidence that supports our existing point of view. People with strongly held opinions invest way too much time and energy, supporting their existing opinions and fail to observe and respond to new information and feedback.

 

Having strong opinions, weakly held enables us to observe and rapidly respond to the changing world. Taking a position and developing a supporting argument, then rapidly testing your point of view, whilst being open to learning is a crucial skill required for success in complex and uncertain situations.

 

Try the following when you’re next faced with a complex issue to resolve:

• What strong opinions do you have about the issue you’re working on?
• Do you have a clear argument to support your opinion?
• Share your opinion with a number people on both sides of the issue.
• Consider how you can incorporate some of the ideas and feedback to strengthen your argument. Or, alternatively should you be changing your opinion?

 

Technorati Tags: Principles, Philosophy, Management, Strategy, Business, Opinions, Decisions

A post “Why Most People Are Wrong About What’s Strategy?” from the blog Innovation Playground, provides some interesting insights from a McKinsey interview with Prof Richard Rumelt of UCLA’s Anderson:

• Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy. They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market share projection. Calling this strategic planning creates false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy.
• Plans are essential management tools….. plan coordinates the deployment of resources—but it’s not strategy. These resource budgets simply cannot deliver what senior managers want: a pathway to substantially higher performance.
• There are only two ways to get that. One, you can invent your way to success. Unfortunately, you can’t count on that. The second path is to exploit some change in your environment—in technology, consumer tastes, laws, resource prices, or competitive behavior—and ride that change with quickness and skill. This second path is how most successful companies make it. Changes, however, don’t come along in nice annual packages, so the need for strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.
• Many people think the solution to the strategic-planning problem is to inject more strategy into the annual process. But I disagree. I think the annual rolling resource budget should be separate from strategy work. So my basic recommendation is to do two things: avoid the label “strategic plan”—call those budgets “long-term resource plans”—and start a separate, non-annual, opportunity-driven process for strategy work.
• Any strategy starts with identifying change. Here’s an example. Right now, the advent of 3G cellular technology makes it possible to deliver streaming video over mobile phones. Cell phone makers, cellular carriers, and media companies all need to develop strategies for exploiting this change. Even though these changes have long-term consequences, companies need to take a position now. By “take a position” I mean invest in resources that will be made more valuable by the changes that are happening.
• Strategic thinking helps us take positions in a world that is confusing and uncertain. You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity. If you want certainty and clarity, wait for others to take a position and see how they do. Then you’ll know what works, but it will be too late to profit from the knowledge.
• So how does a company take a good position? One big factor is a predatory posture focused on going after changes. I saw an interesting pattern. Most executives easily explained how companies became market leaders: some sort of window of opportunity opened, and the leader was the company that was the first to successfully jump through that window. Not exactly the first mover but the first to get it right. But when I asked these same executives about their own strategies, I heard a lot about doorknob polishing. They were doing 360-degree feedback, forming alliances, outsourcing, cutting costs, and so on. None of them even mentioned taking a good position quickly when the industry changes.

“Key takeaway, strategy is about the big opportunity and how well you are prepared for it.”

Technorati Tags: Strategy, Leadership, Management, Change, Trends

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