Tag Archives: Enterprise 2.0

Digital Business and the Fate of the IT Organization


Social-MediaInformationWeek just published an excellent article titled “Goodbye IT, Hello Digital Business.” The article presents a compelling case for “Digital Business” as a lens into what the more information and IT-savvy companies are doing. It presents some good case studies from Digital Business leaders in the retail industry. It also presents some interesting statistics on emerging platforms for building customer ties, on the main opportunities for today’s CIOs and how IT teams are interacting directly with customers.

Are IT Organizations Asleep at the Digital Switch?

I found the statistics InformationWeek presented as both believable based on my consulting experience, and disturbing! The numbers reinforce the facts that:

  • The majority of IT organizational focus and energy continues to be consumed by legacy solutions, keeping the metaphorical “lights on and trains running on time.”
  • The IT organization typically does not play a major role in business innovation.
  • The IT organization is slow to enter the world of mobile computing.
  • Many IT staff don’t have the customer-facing skills and business knowledge to play in the emerging Digital Business space.

The statistics indicate a move in the right direction – no surprise there.  But the shift is slow – rewarding the early movers with the advantage of a differentiated experience for their customers and for their employees – especially for those IT staff that are involved in these frontier applications. The early movers, through business experimentation and studying success stories are building their digital capabilities.

Accelerating the Shift

Exploiting Digital Business is not just about innovation, agile channels, mobile computing and social media – it has profound implications for the IT organization and its context – the IT Operating Model. I’ve posted before about how IT Operating Models must change for what I called Enterprise 2.0 – aka, Digital Business.  (See here and here.)

Some companies are accelerating the shift through IT Transformation programs – reorganizing, rethinking IT processes and value streams, re-skilling the IT organization and, in some cases, radical outsourcing initiatives. Other are using ‘skunkworks’ approaches to learn and build credibility through early business experiments. Some have the most progressive and promising Digital Business initiatives happening in the shadows – outside the purview of their IT organizations. I find that to be a dreadful indictment of the IT leadership! If that is not a wake-up call for a new CIO, I don’t know what is!

Digital Business is Literally Business-IT Convergence

I’ve posted before on the concept of Business-IT Convergence. In many respects, Digital Business is all about the convergence of IT with the business – business products and services become digital, and IT capabilities – historically located in an IT organization – converge with business capabilities. Some IT professionals and leaders will see this as very threatening. Others will see it as the solution to many perennial problems associated with the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ of the business-IT relationship.

What do you think? How is Digital Business impacting your work life?

Image source courtesy of Devicix

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Driving Business-IT Convergence – The Evolving Role of the Business Relationship Manager (Part 2 of 2)


cloudIn Part 1 of this 2-part series I defined the BRM role – with the caveat that it is by no means standardized.  In fact, as far as IT Service Management standards such as ITIL® and ISO/IEC 20000 are formalizing the existence of the Business Relationship Manager (BRM) role and corresponding process as a new best practice, they are selling the role short in terms of its potential strategic impact to business.  I went on to describe the typical BRM in terms of their purposes, goals, responsibilities and accountabilities.  To the title of this post, I introduced the shift from business-IT Alignment to Convergence and why this is so important as every aspect of business strategy and operations is increasingly dependent upon information and IT.   Today, the BRM operates at the leading edge of the convergence movement – a movement being accelerated by the ‘consumerization of IT‘, digitization of everything, and by the “Internet of Things.”

In part 2 of this 2-part series, I’d like to discuss needed BRM competencies, how the BRM role changes over time with increasing maturity (of both the BRM and her business partner) and how the way that the BRM engages with the business partner shifts the nature of the relationship from one of order taker to that of strategic partner.

Typical Competencies Required of the BRM

Drives Value Realization

This might be the most important competency for a BRM.  It includes knowing how to surface, clarify and promote the best value-delivering opportunities for IT investments and assets, and how to ensure that these actually deliver on their promised value – delivered in ways that are felt and seen.  This requires skills in Program Management (with implied Project Management skills), Portfolio Management, influence, persuasion, communication, finance and organizational change.

Understands Business Environment

Driving value realization also requires a great understanding of the business, its ecosystem and its competitive landscape.  Successful BRMs have a keen sense of the top strategic business and IT issues – both short and long term, and how these issues relate to initiatives in their industry.  In short, they understand the “business of the business.”  They are viewed by business leaders as a proactive partner in finding the right solutions to business needs and not as a mere “order takers” for IT services.

Aligns IT with the Business

First, let me say that some readers will fume at the subheading.  “IT and the Business are one and the same!” they shout.  While this may reflect a laudable perspective (and one that will gradually materialize as IT-business convergence takes place) it is rarely, if ever, the case today.  Unless your business is information technology, then “business” is where profits are generated, and IT organizations work in support of that.

With that digression out of the way, alignment can be a tricky concept, and in some respects sounds inconsistent with my argument for business-IT convergence.  But alignment represents the necessary table stakes – business leaders and IT leaders need to be ‘on the same page’ in terms of mission, vision, values and goals for both IT and the business – and how these relate to each other.  Mismatches in any of these can spell disaster to the ability to build and sustain value-producing business-IT relationships, let alone converge business and IT capabilities.

Successful BRMs work closely with business leaders to predict demand for IT services and to manage that demand.  They take the lead in highlighting competing objectives.  They are effective at managing the flow of demand through negotiations and seek to iron out demand/supply disconnects between IT and business leaders.  Most important, they constantly seek ways to foster convergence – empowering business leaders – teaching them to fish, as it were, rather than always fish for them!

Manages Relationships

Any role with the word “relationship” in the title has to imply a high level of competence at creating, sustaining and developing strong relationships among stakeholders – especially between business units and the IT groups that support them.  Relationship skills do not come naturally, and are not easily developed in some people.  Effective BRMs are able to build and maintain relationships with senior IT and business leaders.  They are seen as a value-added participant in strategic business-level discussions (i.e., worthy of a “seat at the table”).  Successful BRMs are not shy in speaking up when the demand for IT services outpaces supply ability or capacity.

Manages Organizational Change

Another tough set of skills and behaviors to master!  This requires deep understanding of the organizational levers for making change (people, process, and technology) and how IT and business strategies translate into practical plans of action for change.

The successful facilitator of change engages in discussion with IT and business leaders on the intended and unintended consequences of change, and is willing to confront senior executive sponsors if they are not “walking the talk” and proactively leading the change themselves.  They understand the total cost – both technical and human – of end-to-end implementation.  They can surface the hidden costs and potential obstacles that could derail the change.

They have the ability to identify key stakeholders at the outset of a project, to assign decision-making roles, and ultimately hold leaders accountable for results.  They think and act in terms of outcomes, not deliverables.

Manages Projects and Programs

Successful BRMs typically have several years of project and, ideally, program management experience under their belts.  They have demonstrated competency in project management fundamentals and in the complexities of program management. They demonstrate the ability to get things done through others, even though they may lack ultimate authority.

Effective Communication

Successful BRMs are recognized for their ability to listen, speak, write and communicate clearly and effectively. They demonstrate the ability to negotiate win-win, or at least buy-in, in situations where there are opposing viewpoints.  They are effective at influencing those that they hold no real power over.  They have the ability to recognize and surface disconnects between IT and business leaders and are able to resolve problems through difficult confrontations.

Financial Savvy

Successful BRMs have good knowledge of finance and accounting – they know their ROIs from their NPVs and know how to build a business case that is compelling.  They understand Portfolio Management and have at least basic knowledge of Options theory.  They understand the financial drivers of the business and the drivers of the industry within which the company operates.

The BRM Maturity Journey

BRM Maturity - The Merlyn Group

The graphic above shows how the quality of the Business Partner experience grows and the BRMs maturity increases.

Ad Hoc Relationship

At the lowest maturity level, the BRM role has typically not been formalized.  As such it is being handled in an ad hoc way – the ‘squeaky wheel’ Business Partner gets the most attention.  Or, in some cases, the least demanding Business Partner, regardless of their potential to use IT for high value purposes get the most attention.

Order Taker Relationship

I see this most frequently. Typically, IT supply has been badly broken and the business-IT relationship is hostile, so the BRM role is introduced to “patch things up!”  The BRM, in her ignorance, believes the best way to improve the relationship is to say “yes” to any and all business demands.  This is nearly always a losing proposition.  IT can’t meet the demand, and if they did, there’s little to no business value to be gained.

Advisor

This is a more constructive and productive relationship, where the Business Partner sees the BRM as an advisor.  By this time, there has usually been some formalization of the BRM role and its rules of engagement.  There’s also been some level of training for the BRM – or at least some thought put into the selection of people for the role.

Strategic Partner

The ‘Holy Grail’ of BRM implementations.  This should be the clear ambition – one that is understood and shared by the BRM and her Business Partner – with the recognition that you aren’t a Strategic Partner because you say you are, or because you want to be.  You reach that elevated position because you’ve earned it – and because your Business Partner sees you that way.

IT Matures as the BRM Role Matures

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the BRM role does not act in isolation.  It is inextricably linked to IT supply.  If IT supply is broken, the BRM role will be limited, and might not even make it to Order Taker.  This, from my experience, is a common situation.  Things are bad, so the BRM role is introduced.  Unless supply improves, the BRM is doomed to failure – and may actually make things worse.  Promises are made and expectations set that cannot be kept.  On top of lousy supply, the BRM is seen by the business partner as ‘overhead’ – yet more evidence that the IT team is clueless, always adding cost without demonstrating value!

To reach the Holy Grail of Strategic Partner, IT supply has to be excellent – both with steady state services (networks, email, help desk, etc.) and with solution delivery (projects and programs).  The “strategic” BRM needs IT supply to work flawlessly.  IT supply needs the BRM to suppress low value demand while stimulating demand that delivers real business value.  That way, everyone is happy and a virtuous cycle is sustained.

Image courtesy of TradeArabia

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Resolving the CIO Paradox


Last week I posted a review of the excellent book, “The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership” by Martha Heller.  Martha examines the CIO role, stakeholders, staff and future, and provides a rich trove of practices shared by leading CIO’s.

Reading the book and writing the review got me thinking about the current state of IT leadership, and where this is going in the next few years.  After all, this blog, started back in 2007, is titled “IT Organization Circa 2017″ and was originally intended to explore just that topic!

The CIO Role is Essentially “Unnatural”!

I first became aware of this fact back in 1980, when reading Alvin Toffler‘s remarkably prophetic book, The Third Wave.  (I had the privilege of having dinner with Mr. Toffler early in the 1980′s and talking with him at depth about the coming implications for IT leadership, further reinforcing my beliefs around this).  In the book, Toffler argues that Second Wave economies (Industrial Revolution, late 17th century through the mid-20th century) were largely driven by an unnatural breach between “consuming” and “producing.”  He pointed out that in the first wave economies (Agrarian Revolution) most of us produced for ourselves what we needed to consume.  The Industrial Revolution tore production and consumption apart – we worked in offices and factories to earn the money to buy the goods and services that came out of the offices and factories.  Toffler further argued that in the third wave, technologies would “heal” the breach, creating what he called “prosumers.”

The very notion of the IT professional, grouped into IT organizations, managed by CIOs in order to help consumers of IT is inherently very “second wave.”  In fact, over the last 60 years or so, we have seen more and more examples of IT “Prosumerism.”  The first spreadsheets (Visicalc, et al) allowed someone with virtually no IT training to create financial models that a few years earlier could only be produced by teams of expert programmers.  Desktop publishing allowed anyone to get into the publishing business.  YouTube, et al allows anyone to create and publish their own videos, and today high quality movies are produced by amateurs on relatively low cost consumer equipment.

The forces behind this IT prosumer revolution are not going away – rather they are leading to an exponential growth of the IT prosumer – a trend which some people refer to as the “consumerization of IT.”

CIO as Enabler or Barrier?

So, what’s a poor, embattled CIO to do?  On the one hand, the CIO has an obligation to protect a company’s assets against the continuous and growing threats from hackers, viruses, criminals and bad technologies.  On the other hand, the CIO and her IT organization must constantly, even aggressively be preparing for and pushing people towards IT “prosumption.”

As an IT leader, how much of your time and actions are devoted to protecting those who use IT from it’s perils, versus creating the infrastructure and an educated business community that can safely exploit information and IT for competitive advantage?

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Book Review – The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership


I’m often asked to review new books – I usually decline.  There’s a couple of reasons why I stay away from book reviews:

  1. It’s just not what my blog is about – there are many sites that do a great job reviewing books, and I love the “wisdom of the crowd” effect you get from customer reviews on sites such as Amazon.com, so I don’t feel the need to add my own voice to the book review universe.
  2. I’ve been asked to review some books that were real clunkers!  I felt an obligation to say something (after all, the author has had a hand in getting me a review copy!) but I wanted to keep my authenticity, so I tend to end up “damning with feint praise” as they say!  (e.g., Fred’s book is nothing if not short!”)

Notwithstanding the above, when the request to review The CIO Paradox by Martha Heller came in, it was accompanied by sufficient clues as to its content (including a table of contents and a sample chapter) to convince me I’d enjoy reading the book, and have no problem creating an honest review.  It also helped that I was familiar with Martha’s writing for CIO magazine, including her first article on the CIO Paradox back in 2009 – a piece that resonated strongly with me from my work with CIO’s.  I suspected this book would be of value to my readers.

The CIO Paradox

Martha sets up the book with a question she started asking CIOs in 1999:

When you walked into your most recent CIO job, what did you find?”

She almost always got the same response:

I inherited a mess. IT had no credibility with the business. Projects were overdue and over budget. We had no project management discipline, no governance, no career paths, and the team had outdated skills.”

Thirteen years later, Martha points out, she is still asking the question, and getting the same response. CIOs continue to inherit a mess.  She goes on to ask:

How can this be? How can CIOs strive tirelessly to improve their IT organizations only to leave “a mess” in their wake? … is there something so inherently problematic about the CIO role that even talented, intelligent, and experienced leaders have trouble making it work?”

Great question!  From her work with the CIO Best Practice Exchange and the CIO Executive Council and as an executive recruiter, where she talks to hundreds of CIOs and helps them build their teams, she concluded that there are a set of paradoxes – conflicting forces that are deeply embedded in governance, staffing, executive expectations, and even corporate culture.  She groups these into four major categories which become 4 major sections of the book:

Your Role

  • You were hired to be strategic, but spend most of your time on operational issues.
  • You are the steward of risk mitigation and cost containment, yet you are expected to innovate.
  • You are seen as a service provider, yet you are expected to be a business driver.
  • IT can make or break a company, but CIOs rarely sit on corporate boards.

Your Stakeholders

  • You run one of the most pervasive, critical functions, yet you must prove your value constantly.
  • Your many successes are invisible; your few mistakes are highly visible.
  • You are intimately involved in every facet of the business, but you are considered separate and removed from it.
  • You are accountable for project success, but the business has project ownership.

Your Organization

  • Your staff is most comfortable with technology, but must be good with people.
  • Your staff is doing more with less, but must make time for learning finance and the business.
  • You develop successors, yet the CEO almost always goes outside to find the next CIO.
  • You are forced to seek cost-efficient overseas sourcing, yet you are expected to ensure the profession’s development at home.

Your Industry

  • Technology takes a long time to implement, yet your tool set changes constantly.
  • Technology is a long-term investment, but the company thinks in quarters.
  • Your tools cost a fortune, yet they have the highest defect rate of any product.
  • You sign vendors’ checks, yet they often go around you and sell to your business peers.

Leading and Interesting Practices

For each paradox, Martha shares leading and interesting practices from CIOs.  She names names, and writes clearly and insightfully about approaches that have worked – some simple, some more involved.  This makes for an easy and interesting read.  It also provides a comprehensive compendium of improvement ideas to consider.

A Suggestion for a “Meta-Practice” Based on The CIO Paradox

As I was reading the book, thinking back over my many years of management consulting and helping my clients think through and address some of these paradoxes, I found myself running through a thought experiment.  In the experiment, I had some of the IT leadership teams I’d worked with read the book.  Then they’d come together for a one-day retreat, where they’d discussion questions such as:

  • Which CIO Paradox have we made the most progress on solving?  What were the keys to our success?
  • Which CIO Paradox seems like it is the toughest for us to solve, and why?
  • Which practices suggested in the book should we be implementing, and how?

A variation on this theme would be to share the book with senior business executives, and run the retreat with them – perhaps as a prelude to a business-IT strategy/roadmapping process?  That could open up some invaluable dialog!

Two “Killer Practices”

Finally, as I was reading the book’s closing chapter – a “Breaking the Paradox” checklist, I was sorting out in my own mind which practice could have the highest transformational impact for an IT organization that was already doing well in terms of business-IT maturity.  I tried to distill this down to a single practice, but in the end, I whittled the list down to two:

  1. Reach beyond IT. CIOs are picking up new titles left and right. We see “CIO and VP of customer care,” and “CIO and VP of strategic planning” all the time. Whether they take on an additional title or not, it is time that CIOs apply their leadership far beyond the IT organization.
  2. Move closer to the revenue. When technology data is directly related to a company’s products or services, the CIOs of those companies have a shot at driving revenue.

To view the table of contents, advance praise and a sample chapter click here.

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The Futility of Collaboration without Context


The term ‘collaboration’ gets thrown about as something inherently valuable and worthwhile – an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.  In reality, collaboration in of itself is:

a). Unlikely to happen
b). Unlikely to create anything of value

So Many Collaboration Platforms, So Little Collaboration!

Collaboration platforms are everywhere!  Most IT shops have at least one collaboration platform (usually SharePoint) and often several others.  And some people do participate.  The question is, with what result?  The answer often is little that is really worthwhile, and even less that can truly be called “collaboration.”

I used to wonder if there was something in our human nature that inherently resisted collaboration.  Of course, the opposite is true – human beings are both inherently gregarious and naturally collaborative – it’s in our instinct for survival.  The reason I was seeing so little collaboration on collaboration platforms was not that people did not want to collaborate – it’s that they did not understand (or believe in, or want) the purpose for collaboration.

The Collaboration Context

Alan Kay is credited with one of my favorite quotes, “Context is worth 80 IQ points!” In the case of collaboration, context not just the extra IQ points – it’s the whole enchilada of collaboration!

Several years ago, while I was an Executive Vice President at the The Concours Group – a management consulting, research and executive education firm, we were acquired by a company that had developed a collaboration platform.  Our new management was very keen for us to “eat our own dog food” and encouraged everyone in the company to get on the platform and ‘collaborate.’

I found this to be an interesting and enlightening experiment.  Most of us did indeed get on the platform.  Thoughts were posted and commented upon.  Interest groups popped up.  We had a ‘social reputation’ system, and I was proud the day my avatar suddenly listed me as a “Docent”, though I could not find out what that actually meant in this context!  After an early spike, usage dropped.

After a while, someone introduced Yammer into the firm.  A new groundswell of so-called “collaboration” surfaced, but after a while, that too dropped.  I observed that in spite of putting time and energy into “collaboration”, in reality, people were engaging in conversations that, while they may have been interesting, never went anywhere.  Conclusions were never drawn, deliverables were never created, insights never extracted, lessons never learned and applied.

The problem was not the tool – it was a lack of context.  There was no clear purpose or intent to the collaboration.

So, What’s Your Collaborative Intent?

  • Are you trying to engage people in problem solving?  For example, stakeholders and/or subject matter experts might be invited to review and expand upon a cause-effect analysis.
  • Are you trying to create a deliverable, such as a project proposal?  People might work together on creating the proposal, perhaps each working on their own section, but reviewing and commenting on others sections such that the whole is coherently structured and internally consistent.  Or you might wish to get everyone’s input to the whole proposal, rather than have people focus on their section.
  • Do you want a community of practice or interest to capture and evolve a body of knowledge – best practices, templates, examples of how to do something, such as charter a project?
  • Are you creating an ‘operating manual’ for an organization, with processes, roles, competencies, rules of engagement, and so on?  Perhaps people will be encouraged to not only create and/or refine the knowledge content, but will also rate the content based upon usability, clarity or how well the organization handles a given situation.
  • Are you encouraging people to share across organizational silos – looking for points of leverage or redundancy?

Each of these ‘collaborative intents’ implies a specific goal or set of goals.  And each goal, in turn, might lend itself to a different type of collaboration mechanism.  While content or document management systems might be great for managing ‘documents of record’, they might not be so effective at encouraging multiple authorship.  In fact, document-centric tools tend to deepen and strengthen the traditional document mindset, where a document is something you email around to people to get their input.

It’s all a question of context – what are you hoping to gain through collaboration?  Is the goal clear?  Do those that must participate understand and believe in the goal?

Graphic courtesy of diagoal

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The IT Payoff From Years of Belt Tightening – Lower Costs, and High Dysfunctionality!


Mature IT organizations rightfully resist labels that separate them from the businesses they serve.  Any discussion of “IT” as distinct from “business” is anathema – a position I wholeheartedly support.  “Us and Them” made a fine title for a progressive rock tune back in 1973 but is an unhealthy perspective when the “them” is the business where profits are generated, and the “us” is essentially a support function.

Be that as it may, while the intent to resist separating IT and the business is worthy, there is a reality that in most enterprises the business generates revenues and profits while the support functions generate costs (necessary as those costs might be).  So when times are tough (or when a senior executive comes across some anecdote about the wonders of outsourcing IT to Timbuktu) the IT organization comes under pressure to take out costs.  Sooner or later, this comes down to reducing headcount, whether by natural attrition (IT managers represent a significant population ripe for retirement, and many have taken ‘packages’ to do so early) or by downsizing.

Let the Vicious Cycle Begin

And so begins the cycle – IT steps up to the plate and costs are reduced.  Early on, many of the reductions come from increased efficiency – improved Body Mass Index, if you will.  But muscle and bone are also lost, so delivered value is reduced, services are cut back and quality suffers.  The next time cost savings are needed, IT is again a worthy target – why not – they came through last time!  This time, more bone and muscle are lost.  At the risk of pushing the analogy too far, so is the proverbial membership to the gym (e.g., training, productivity and quality improvement programs) where some level of health was being maintained.  Healthy eating gives way to fast food and cola.  Nobody has the bandwidth to deal with the ‘essentials’ of keeping the lights on and trains running on time, let alone break new ground with the consumerization of IT or the move into Enterprise 2.0. Employee engagement suffers and IT performance degrades.

The cycle continues, and sooner or later top management becomes dysfunctional – not sure whether fight or flight are the best response – whether to embark on a full-blown transformation or simply to nibble at the edges with posters celebrating “Team IT” or the new “Agile” method to embrace.  Middle management is too busy to help with a fix – there’s hardly time to do annual performance reviews and budgets, let alone embark on major change programs. And the troops are, for the most part, disengaged – satisfied in accepting a reasonable wage to show up for work, but loath to give of any discretionary effort, or to put passion into their work.  Over time cynicism becomes so deep and wide, it is accepted as the ‘new normal.’  Discussion of organizational problems is all but banned by the IT leadership team – denial is best way to get through the week without the need for anti-depressant medications.

Forget Common Courtesy

In the downward spiral of belt tightening, age old protocols about responding to requests, answering emails, turning up at meetings on time or meeting commitments fall by the wayside.  As the leadership team slides into dysfunctional behavior, middle management follows by example and the troops aren’t far behind.  It’s a slippery slope, and one that’s tough to reverse!

Getting Back On Track

So, what can be done to reverse the slide – to turn the vicious cycle into one that drives increasing performance and leads to higher recognized business value from IT investments, assets and capabilities?  In practice, the catalyst for change is often a new CIO.  It’s not just that the new CIO brings in fresh ideas – it’s more about the energy and optimism they bring to the table.  If they are worthy of being hired into a turnaround position, they know they have a short ‘honeymoon’ period in which to create some visible signs that the slide is being reversed.  They probably negotiated some freedom to make change happen – reminding the executives that hired them that “businesses get the IT they deserve!”

Absent the new CIO, with the energy for change they embody and the breathing space they buy, my prognosis, I’m afraid, is not optimistic.  Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  I think it’s a legitimate stretch to say, “We can’t solve problems with the same leadership that was in place when we created them!”

Image courtesy of Dysfunctional Psychology / Depression

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The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance: Part 3


Example of Semantic Structure for an IT Operating Model

This is the 3rd and final part of a 3-part post.  (See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.)  This short series represents the culmination of 5+ years of work for my business partner, Roy Youngman, and me.

A Quick Recap

In Part 1, I discussed the frustration Roy and I felt with the state of management consulting, where the artifacts we’d leave behind (PowerPoint slides, Word documents, etc.) rarely became part of our client’s organizational fabric.  Also, the middle managers and the ‘troops’ who had to bring to life the strategies and operating models we were developing often did not get exposure to the work until relatively late in the day.  Because they had not been part of the work, they were slow to understand and embrace it.

I explained that we quickly recognized that the technologies and sensibilities of Web 2.0 and social media promised a better way to help our clients – a way that would engage broader and deeper participation by client staff at all levels, and would leave behind a ‘living, breathing’ IT strategy and/or IT operating model, captured as a set of wiki pages.  These pages were developed collaboratively with our clients, so the act of development and deployment essentially became concurrent – defining the IT operating model was part of deploying it, and vice versa.  We determined that a Semantic Wiki would be an ideal technology to support our consulting work – and more importantly, to provide a platform we could leave behind with our clients to empower their organizational collaboration and ongoing refinement and use of the IT strategy and operating model.

In Part 2, I went on to provide historical context for the wikis first introduction in 1995, and enumerated its strengths and weakness that were limiting IT organizations ability to collaborate effectively using traditional wikis. I went on to explain the concepts behind the Semantic Wiki and how these provided an ideal platform for enabling complex organizations such as IT, where multiple, different value propositions have to be supported.

Balancing Order and Chaos

IT organizations are surprisingly complex, supporting two fundamentally different value propositions:

  • Core capabilities comprising the critical processes, assets and structures that help run the day-to-day business
  • Edge capabilities where innovation, growth and change are cultivated

These distinct value propositions have Operating Model implications, requiring distinct forms of semantic wiki-enablement, as highlighted in Table 1 below.

Value Proposition

Example Capabilities

Needed Wiki Characteristics

Wiki Governance Model
Core
  • Operations
  • Service Management
  • Enterprise Solutions
  • Coherent integrated structure
  • Stable space
  • High integrity
  • Globally governed
  • Workflow controlled
  • Process Owner as key control point
Edge
  • Enterprise Architecture
  • Product Management
  • Departmental Solutions
  • Project & Team Spaces
  • Business Relationship Management
  • Idea Generation
  • Consistent modular structure
  • Agile
  • Support divergent discussion & brainstorming
  • Content can migrate to Globally governed
  • Domain governed
  • Workflow optional
  • Domain Owner as key control point

Table 1 – Types of Wiki Space

Globally Governed Space for ‘Core’ Capabilities

Core capabilities such as data center operations, service management and enterprise solutions (e.g., ERP systems) depend upon processes that are standardized, tightly controlled and centrally planned.  Management systems for these types of capability must focus on integrated, reliable, efficient processes and compliance to norms.

A wiki that supports core capabilities must be highly ordered and globally governed.  For example, each process should have a ‘Process Owner,’ with clearly defined accountabilities for maintaining and continuously improving their processes.  They need defined workflow mechanisms, for example, to control the promotion of a material change to a process page from ‘draft’ to ‘pending approval’ to ‘approved’ to ‘operational.’

Domain Governed Space for ‘Edge’ Capabilities

Edge capabilities, on the other hand, depend upon structures that are loosely knit, with agile processes that can rapidly adjust to entrepreneurial initiatives and fast-shifting technologies.   Management systems and organizational culture must foster new product success and the experimentation needed to get there.  Whereas core capabilities epitomize highly ordered environments, the edge represents the place where chaos and order meet and creativity blossoms.

A wiki that facilitates edge capabilities works best with limited structure and control, where, to paraphrase China’s Chairman Mao Zedong, “one thousand flowers bloom”.  Here the underlying semantic model will be centered on problem areas and the process of ideation, with Business Relationship Managers, Product Managers and Architects as the natural choice for the wiki’s points of control.

Today’s wiki platforms are helpful here, but we expect them to evolve to better support techniques such as brainstorming, innovation jams, mind mapping, and provide integration with tools for simulation and modeling, prediction markets, sentiment analysis and ‘light weight’ collaborative project management.

One Space – Two Wiki Models

IT organizational needs can be comfortably addressed in a single Semantic Wiki, with each value proposition having its own underlying semantic model and associated governance structure.   Having both ‘core’ and ‘edge’ capabilities supported in the same wiki space affords important benefits.  For example, everything is discoverable and linkable across the models.  These characteristics are all but impossible to achieve in a traditional document-centric collaboration approach.

If the primary goal of the core is to ‘prevent bad change’, a tightly structured semantic wiki with a robust governance model is a powerful way to support this goal and the organizations that must deliver against it.  If the primary goal of the edge is to ‘create good change’, a loosely governed semantic wiki with ‘sandboxes’ to generate and test ideas is a great way to support this goal.  Today’s leading wiki platforms, with their semantic extensions offer a single, integrated solution that can help drive IT organizational clarity and improve performance.

An Empowered, Continuously Improving IT Organization

Roy and I have found that encapsulating IT strategies and operating models in a semantic wiki has tremendous benefits that are simply not available in the more traditional approach some call, “death by PowerPoint!”  For example:

  • A far broader group (and ultimately, the entire IT organization and their clients and partners) can be engaged in the process of strategy and IT operating model development and deployment.
  • All the artifacts of strategy and IT operating models (strategy on a a page, key themes, business outcomes, major programs, metrics, processes, and so on) are immediately available to the organization and its stakeholders – this enables continuous improvement and evolution.
  • Significant productivity increases result from having these artifacts available as shared wiki pages.  While the term “knowledge management” (KM) has fallen out of favor, the goals of KM continue to be highly relevant, and the end result of building a semantic wiki for the IT organization creates a very robust and powerful KM platform.
  • A semantic wiki dramatically decreases email traffic and, more importantly, decreases the time taken to find information and increases the confidence that the information found is the ‘single source of truth’
  • Adoption and organizational change management issues can be largely addressed by ensuring that use of the wiki is “in the natural flow of work.”  I will did further into this important concept in a future post!
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The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance: Part 2


This is the 2nd in a 3-part post representing the culmination of 5+ years of work for my business partner, Roy Youngman and me.

A Quick Recap

Roy and I had become frustrated with the state of management consulting and the lack of “stickiness” with our consulting work.  In helping clients develop business-IT strategies and realign their IT operating models, the deliverables we would leave behind as the artifacts of the work (usually PowerPoint slides, Word documents, etc.) rarely became part of the client’s organizational fabric.  Another source of frustration was that we’d typically arrive at those deliverables through a series of workshops – usually with the CIO and IT leadership team.  Middle managers and the ‘troops’ who had to bring those strategies and operating models to life often did not get exposure to the work until relatively late in the day.  Because they had not been part of the work, they were slow to understand and embrace it.

As Web 2.0 and social media began to take hold, we started to see and experiment with better ways to help our clients – engaging broader and deeper participation by client staff, and leaving behind a ‘living, breathing’ IT strategy and/or IT operating model, captured as a set of wiki pages developed collaboratively with our clients.  As such, the act of development and deployment became more concurrent.  Defining the IT operating model was part of deploying it, and vice versa.

However, we’d found that IT organizational attempts to improve collaboration and support knowledge management typically met with limited success, and that collaboration tools and platforms deployed by IT were falling short.  While the power and simplicity of wikis were appealing, their ‘one size fits all’ approach was not well suited to supporting an IT operating model.  We closed Part 1 by summarizing the strengths of a wiki, and suggesting that these strengths also create vulnerabilities.

The Proverbial Double-Edged Sword!

A wikis strengths also create vulnerabilities.  For example, the ease with which users can create and edit pages can quickly lead to a chaotic free-for-all, as content becomes subject to the whims of authors and editors, and absent a meaningful underlying structure, pages proliferate.  The lack of review before modifications are accepted can limit the credibility of a given wiki page as a ‘source of truth.’  A process definition, for example, may have been last edited by someone that introduced a serious error – and that error can proliferate as people refer to and use the process with the assumption that the content on the page is valid.

Sites such as Wikipedia mitigate these vulnerabilities through a robust system of editorial administration, oversight and management – enhanced by the ‘law of large numbers.’  In this case, with a sufficiently large universe of editors, the content of any page quickly converges towards a mean, reflecting “the wisdom of the crowd”.  But with an internal wiki – say one used by an IT organization or other shared services function, the law of large numbers does not apply, so without other mechanisms to manage structure and content, the wiki degrades in quality and value over time.

SharePoint as a Common Culprit!

This degradation is commonplace in organizations using Microsoft SharePoint as their collaboration platform.  While typically deployed to support collaboration, the reality quickly scales back to “a place to store documents”, which, in the words of one of my clients, soon degenerates to, “a place to lose documents!”

The other problem with SharePoint is that its strength is also its weakness.  While it is a good document management system, documents in of themselves are rarely the proper end goal of collaboration.  Collaboration is largely about having multiple authors create, evolve and use content, and documents are a poor medium for developing, codifying, and sharing knowledge.  Wikis provide a far more valuable alternative approach.  As my colleague Roy Youngman noted in his blog:

The nonlinear nature of a Wiki enables well-factored content, thereby minimizing redundancies and preventing contradictions that confuse people. It also allows people to contribute to whatever area of expertise each person happens to have so everyone is drawn in, not just the elite few.  A Wiki approach enhances the discovery of knowledge and exposes the subject matter in the greatest need of improvement.  And the improvement is a constant theme – the very heart and soul of a Wiki.”

Semantic Wikis to the Rescue!

But all is not lost, as the world of Web 2.0 gives way to Web 3.0, tapping into the special properties of the Semantic Web, a term first coined by Tim Berners-Lee.  Tim was the inventor of the World Wide Web and is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards.

Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as, “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.”  A Semantic Web goes beyond the traditional web concept of hyperlinked, human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other.  This enables automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users.  As the W3C describes it:

In addition to the classic ‘Web of documents,’ W3C is helping to build a technology stack to support a ‘Web of data,’ the sort of data you find in databases. The ultimate goal of the Web of data is to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network.”

In some respects, the Semantic Web is designed to overcome the all too familiar limitations of today’s Web – a proliferation of untrustworthy content that can be hard to navigate and make sense of.  Building on the Semantic Web concept and standards, a Semantic Wiki has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages, thereby capturing the meaning of the data within the wiki.

While traditional wikis have structured text and hyperlinks, a Semantic Wiki captures and identifies information about the data within its pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database.  While conventional wikis provide users a simple means of expressing data and metadata, typically through tagging, Semantic Wikis include additional ways to express semantic declarations.  They are therefore able to understand and display the relationships between pages or other data.   For example, you can declare the underlying semantic properties of an IT Operating Model, such as:

  • Processes require people taking on specific roles
  • Roles point to specific competencies people must have to fill them
  • Competencies comprise specific Knowledge, Skills and Behaviors
  • Metrics define process performance

Having these semantic properties explicitly defined enables wiki governance rules and workflows – for example, someone defining a new process will be prompted to define the associated competencies needed for that process, and an appropriate template can be automatically loaded for defining those competencies, thereby encouraging consistency and quality.  A simple query can highlight roles that are missing, or identify associates who are qualified to fill a given role.

The graphic below shows a partial example of the underlying semantic structure for an IT Operating Model.

Example Semantic Structure for an IT Operating Model

Several wiki platforms offer semantic extensions, including Semantic MediaWiki (which extends MediaWiki, the underlying open source platform that powers Wikipedia) and zAgile’s Wikidsmart extension to Atlassian’s popular and powerful Confluence platform.

In combination with other plug-ins and extensions, such as Page Rating, Social Reputation, Workflow and Task Management, a Semantic Wiki can enable real and meaningful collaboration for IT organizations (or any other environment where collaboration can improve service quality, speed of delivery and organizational clarity.)

I will pick up in the 3rd and final part of this series by discussing the two primary value propositions for an IT organization and how a semantic wiki can provide a single integrated space for enabling these differentiated needs.

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The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance


This will be Part 1 of a 3-part post.  This short series represents the culmination of 5+ years of work (on top of a 40 year career in IT!) for me and my business partner, Roy Youngman.  The series of posts also marks the formal announcement of The Merlyn Group, LLC, a business venture we actually started one year ago, but have been ‘flying below the radar’ while we worked with our initial clients and technology.

A Little Historical Context

Roy and I started working together at Ernst & Young back in the early 1990′s.  About 5 years ago, we both became very frustrated with the state of management consulting.  The main problem we saw was a lack of “stickiness” with our consulting work.

Most of our consulting work was either helping clients develop business-IT strategies, or helping them realign their IT operating models (processes, services, governance, organization, metrics, and so on), often in support of new Business-IT strategies.  Our deliverables typically comprised PowerPoint slides, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.  While these all played an important part of informing and aligning our client teams, the artifacts we’d leave behind rarely became part of their organizational fabric.

This was exacerbated by the fact that we’d typically arrive at those deliverables through a series of workshops – usually with the CIO and IT leadership team.  Middle managers and the ‘troops’ who had to bring those strategies and operating models to life often did not get exposure to the work until relatively late in the day.  Because they had not been part of the work, they were slow to understand and embrace it.

A smaller, but no less important concern was the travel involved in all of this.  Post 9-11, travel costs typically added 20% to the cost of an engagement – good for the airlines and hotels, perhaps, but not good for the client and certainly not good for us.  Time lost commuting and the wear and tear on mind and body took their toll.

Enter “Consulting 2.0″…

As the technologies and sensibilities of Web 2.0 and social media began to take hold, Roy and I started to see a better way to help our clients – a way that would engage broader and deeper participation by client staff at all levels, and that would leave behind a ‘living, breathing’ IT strategy and/or IT operating model, captured as a set of wiki pages.  These pages were developed collaboratively with our clients, so the act of development and deployment essentially became concurrent.  Defining the IT operating model was part of deploying it, and vice versa.

This 3-part series of posts will explain how we did this, and highlight some of our key learnings along the way.

The Unmet Promise of Collaboration

We had observed that IT organizational attempts to improve collaboration, enable knowledge management and drive organizational clarity typically met with limited success.  In our research and consulting work, we’d found that limitations with collaboration tools and platforms deployed by IT were a key factor in these disappointing results and that a ‘one size fits all’ approach was all but doomed to failure.  Some aspects of IT require a highly structured and tightly governed approach to enabling collaboration – process management and continuous process improvement, for example.  Other aspects, such as enterprise architecture and business-IT relationship management work best with a looser and more emergent approach.

The Art and Science of Collaboration

The great news was that a new type of tool was emerging – the Semantic Wiki.  We recognized that a semantic wiki would easily accommodate the complexities inherent in IT Operating Models.  But first, let’s review how wikis came about – and how their strengths can create serious limitations for use in an IT organization.

1995 – The Wiki Is Born!

Wikis have been at the heart of collaboration since Ward Cunningham created the first Wiki, known as WikiWikiWeb in 1995.  Ward and co-author Bo Leuf, in their book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, described the essence of the wiki concept as follows:

  • A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
  • A wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
  • A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

According to Wikipedia, the world’s best-known and largest wiki:

A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively, using a simple markup language and a web browser.  A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.  A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted.”

The Wikis Strengths

The keys to a wiki are:

  1. The ease with which people can collaboratively create, access and edit documents.
  2. The fact that those documents can be hyperlinked to create complex and networked text that allows the reader to navigate both linearly (as with traditional text) and non-linearly (jumping from idea to idea).
  3. The ease with which documents can be searched – with the knowledge that you are always looking at the current and only version of the page.
  4. As an inherently web-based concept, wikis benefit from evolving Web standards and technologies such as browsers, mark-up languages and even the magical world of open source – enabling Wiki users and developers to participate easily in a rapidly growing ecosystem of plug-ins.

The Proverbial Double-Edged Sword!

But these strengths also create vulnerabilities. Join me for Part 2 of this series, where will will look at the weaknesses of a wiki as an enabler of IT collaboration, and how a semantic wiki overcomes those limitations.

Graphic courtesy of Semantic Wikipedia

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Changing the Culture of an IT Organization – One Wiki Page at a Time!


I’ve been a student of IT organizational culture since I began my management consulting career some 30+ years ago.  It’s wrong, of course, to generalize too broadly, but I’ve worked with literally hundreds of large enterprise IT organizations (i.e., IT organizations of 250+ members) and have seen more commonalities than differences.  Of course, within any IT organization, there are sub-cultures – architects are not the same as operations people or as solution developers – but again, there are more common threads than sharp differences.

Prevent Bad Change…

For all the change that IT organizations bring about for their customers and clients, IT people are generally resistant to change.  I think this resistance is deeply rooted in a couple of factors:

  1. IT environments are full of technical complexity – layers upon layers of technology containing multitudes of interfaces and dependencies.  Change something over here and something over their is impacted – sometimes in subtle ways that may not be evident for some time, or until some other seemingly unrelated change is made.
  2. IT professionals thrive by taking complex situations and reducing them down – ultimately, to zeroes and ones.  There’s no room for ambiguity in a digital system – as such IT specialists are conditioned to abhor ambiguity.  And yet change is full of ambiguity – what ‘has been’ is no longer, and what ‘will be’ is not yet stabilized.  The natural inclination, then, is to drive out the ambiguity, and typically, the fastest, safest path to achieve that is to revert to the status quo – ending the change before damage is done (or the changed state it reached!)

Meet the Culture Where it is – Or Where You Want it to Go?

This inherent tendency to ‘prevent bad change’ creates some tough dilemma’s when introducing social networking and collaboration capabilities such as Wikis.  Wikis thrive best where a culture is open and emergent – “enabling good change,” if you will.  As you design the governance mechanisms for a Wiki, you have some interesting choices.  For example:

  • Do you allow people to create their own pages?  Or do you put controls on who creates and who edits pages?
  • Do you allow all spaces to be open to anyone in the organization?  Or do you allow for “private” spaces, where a select few (such as an IT leadership team) collaborate?
  • Do you allow people to display avatars that are humorous or ironic?  Or do you insist on “corporate photographs” from people’s security badges?
  • Do you allow people to write in their unique voices – even if a little rough around the edges?  Or do you have a Wiki Gardener monitor pages and clean up the rough edges?

To be clear, I’m not talking about allowing people to violate corporate codes of integrity – potentially offensive or inflammatory graphics or text is clearly out of bounds and violations of such codes of conduct should swiftly be managed as performance management issues.  I’m talking about an open and emergent Wiki environment – complete with the bumps and hiccups it may contain, versus a more closed and structured Wiki, protected from potential ‘voices of dissent’ or the raising of challenging or tough issues.

Governance Designed to Meet the Culture Where it is

You can take the position that Wiki governance should be designed for the current state:  “We are locked down, deeply concerned about security and privacy.  We have to have special ‘standards of conduct’ and controls to keep things structured and secure.”

Governance Designed to Help Shift the Culture

Or, do you take the position that the governance should be designed with an eye to the desired future state: “We encourage open dialog and a thriving ‘community of adults’ – keep within our corporate code of integrity and help make the Wiki a safe, valuable and fun place to grow and share our enterprise knowledge about IT.”

Given the people responsible for approving Wiki governance will probably not have significant experience with the more open model, their inclination will be to ‘play it safe’ and design for the current state.  Unfortunately, that is likely to perpetuate the current culture and probably prevent the Wiki from becoming what they want it to become.  It make take one or two strong, visionary leaders to take the leap of faith, and allow a governance model that reflects their aspirations for the culture.

Graphic courtesy of Positive Change

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