Tag Archives: Next Generation Enterprise

Does Cloud+Consumerization Doom the Federated IT Operating Model?


The Federated IT Operating Model is Under Threat!

Today, most organizations employ some sort of Federated IT Operating Model.  Wikipedia defines a federation as:

…characterized by a union of partially self-governing states or regions united by a central (federal) government. In a federation, the self-governing status of the component states, as well as the division of power between them and the central government, are typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of the latter.”

Typically, enterprise-wide or common applications, initiatives and infrastructure are a centralized (federal) responsibility, while local applications and activities are under the control of business units or functions.  This “federal rights/states rights” model has infinite variations.  Definitions of “common,” “enterprise-wide” or “infrastructure” are subject to interpretation, and these tend to change over time, with changing business conditions, leadership, technology and other forces.  There’s also inevitably a “shadow IT” phenomenon – sometimes quite large – where much IT activity happens outside the realm of IT governance.

Just as in countries with a federal governance model, the competing forces between state and federal rights pull and push over time, leading to an ebb and flow of centralization and decentralization.  This can be healthy – like an accordion, making sweet music as the parts are squeezed together or pulled apart.  It’s never static, but constantly responding to the forces of change – just as all living systems “breathe” in some way or another, and have their seasonal variations.

But every now and again, new forces surface and combine together to disrupt the gentle ebb and flow – the so-called Arab Spring comes to mind.

The New Forces of Change

IT governance is undergoing such a confluence of new forces.  These include:

  • Cloud computing – it is easier, faster and cheaper (on the face of it) to leverage the cloud to host applications and provide IT services (e.g., storage, transaction processing, data analytics) rather than have your federal IT group provide these services.  Much of this activity takes place in the “Shadow IT” realm.
  • Mobile computing – more of us are doing more via smart phones and tablets.  This exposes us to mobile applications and the many “app stores” including Apple’s and Google.  Getting an app is as simple as clicking a button – and many apps are free, or cheap enough to add to your mobile phone bill without feeling any pain.
  • The shift in the personal computing operating system – from Windows, et al, which can be controlled by the central (federal) IT department, to technologies such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android which are much harder (perhaps impossible?) to control centrally.  The genie is already out of the bottle, and it’s not going back any time soon!
  • Economic climate – the economic climate facing most businesses, whether in the US or just about anywhere else is in the doldrums.  This keeps people scrutinizing costs, prepared to make short term economic moves, even if at the expense of the longer term, and trying just about anything to get “unstuck”!  Such a climate tends not to favor centralization and federal power (just ask President Obama’s campaign advisers!) but empowers local forces and factions.

Beware the Unintended Consequences

So, what to do about it?  Here’s three options:

  1. Take a laissez-faire approach – a path of least resistance.
  2. Push back, hunker down and reinforce the federal model with more controls and stronger sanctions for “shadow” behavior.
  3. Adopt a “mutual adjustment” approach that navigates the stormy waters to constantly find the optimal balance.

From my perspective and experience, Option 1 has potential (likely?) unintended consequences.  We saw this when many central IT groups were slow to respond to the emergence of the Personal Computer.  When they did respond, it was generally via Option 2 – they tried to constrain them.  That drove a lot of rogue and shadow behavior and set many companies IT efforts back several years.

For most of us, Option 3 is the practical and pragmatic solution.  Let’s face it, there are all sorts of unknowns in terms of how these forces will play out over time.  We need some form of centralized coordination of infrastructure. However, the terms “coordination” and “infrastructure” must be defined clearly and re-defined from time to time as we gain experience with cloud computing and consumerization of IT.  There is not a right and wrong here – but a critical need for organizational clarity so that you are setting the bounds of infrastructure clearly and in a way that is appropriate to the times and to your business context.

Seven Steps to a Mutually Adjusting IT Operating Model

I believe IT leaders must approach this in the same way they would approach any needed change:

  1. Create and “market” a compelling end state vision.
  2. Surface and “sell” the cost of status quo or of going down the wrong path.
  3. Define a credible and palatable path to the future.
  4. Enroll key stakeholders in joining together on that path.
  5. Engage selected key stakeholders in the governance model.
  6. Surface and celebrate successes along the way.
  7. Take action to discourage deviations from the path.

Image courtesy of Charles Ayoub

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Do You Approach Strategy Formulation as an Event or a Continuous Process?


I find that most strategy efforts aren’t very strategic.  Nor do they have much real impact, or lead to significant change.

The Problems with Traditional Strategy Formulation Approaches

I think the supporting evidence for my findings lies in the fact that most companies either:

  1. Don’t undertake strategy formulation initiatives unless they feel they have to (e.g., 5 or more years have passed since they last conducted a strategy session, or the current strategy is clearly not working!)
  2. Do undertake strategy formulation regularly and rigorously (typically annual), with a detailed process spanning many weeks and taking lots of time.  When they are through the effort, everyone breaths a big sigh of relief, and gets back to work – and to executing against the original strategy!

Those in camp 1 above often engage strategy consulting firms.  Nothing inherently wrong in that, except that it can be a high cost route that ends in a good strategy that either:

  • Does not fit the firm’s capabilities particularly well, or…
  • Does not get sufficient engagement with those in the firm who must understand, buy into and execute against the new strategy.

Those in camp 2 above usually have a full time strategy organization – a small, but expensive group of bright folk who need to justify their existence.  Nothing inherently wrong in that, either, except that:

  • The results are often less than inspiring.  They do a good job going through the motions, but the thinking isn’t really very strategic, nor the goals very ambitious.
  • The results typically do not get sufficient engagement with those in the firm who must understand, buy into and execute against the new strategy.

Strategy Formulation as a Continuous Process

I believe much better results can be achieved if strategy formulation becomes:

  1. A continuous process.
  2. A firmwide capability – a strength, even!
  3. A collaborative process.

We are living in unprecedented times.  Uncertainty and change are everywhere.  Market conditions can change overnight.  The globally interconnectedness of everything creates a complex environment that behaves in unpredictable ways.

New Possibilities Enable Continuous Strategy

At the same time complexity has increased and predictability decreased, information technologies create new possibilities for a very different approach to strategy formulation:

  • From an event to a continuous process enabled by the Internet
  • From a “canned” exercise for the select few to a “social” exercise for the many – employees, customers, suppliers, partners
  • From lengthy “big bets” with high uncertainty to rapid “business experiments” with low risk
  • From a dearth of data to help evaluate strategic options to a plethora of powerful business analytics, predictive modeling and simulation tools to help bring strategy formulation and execution together into a rapid learning model

Some of today’s fastest growing companies have figured this out and are quietly, but aggressively honing their continuous strategic capabilities.  Meanwhile, the large majority of companies are stuck in the old paradigm – afraid to open up the strategy process – just when the need for a shot of innovation and fresh thinking are matters of survival!

What do you think?  Are you in a company that is successfully moving to a more continuous approach to strategy?  Should your company be doing more to make strategy continuous?  How can you help achieve this?

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IT Organizational Implications of Cloud Computing


First off, let me make myself clear.  I firmly believe that Cloud Computing, in its various forms, is real, absolutely inevitable and will completely revolutionize the form and role of the IT Organization.  Some readers will look at that sentence and laugh – it’s like saying “day will pass into night.”  Obvious, beyond dispute, devoid of insight.  Others will also laugh at my opening proclamation – only in their case, because my assertion is completely ridiculous to them – beyond belief.  Of course, to many businesses, especially smaller and medium sized, Cloud Computing is already real, and has been for some time.  So, feel free to debate me (comments and opposing views highly welcome!) but I will stick with my beliefs on this.

For IT Leaders, the Cloud Changes Everything!

For me, the big question is, what does the migration to Cloud Computing mean for today’s IT organization?  What structural changes are necessary to successfully leverage Cloud Computing capabilities?  How quickly should you be moving IT services to the Cloud?  How does the Cloud impact the IT Service Portfolio and the capabilities needed to deliver those services?  What are the implications for IT competencies?  How does business-IT governance change in a Cloud Computing world?

I think these are important questions whose answers are not yet totally clear.  As I reflect back on the shift from mainframe to client-server computing, many IT organizations were less than stellar at anticipating needed changes.  As a result, they experienced more bumps and potholes in that journey than was necessary.  For example, for all that had been learned about back-up and recovery in a mainframe world, the onset of client-server computing created gaping holes in the IT organization’s ability to cope with data protection and loss at the Personal Computer level.  The same was true for the evolution from client-server to the web – many of the controls put in place for client-server computing were ineffective (and some even counter-productive) as more work moved to the Internet.

Which Aspects of Cloud Computing Could Bite Your IT Organization?

In the next few posts I will explore some of IT organizational implications of Cloud Computing.  Aspects we will examine will include:

  • Mobility implications – both for the business user and the IT professional charged with enabling that user.
  • The distinctions between Infrastructure as a Service, Applications as a Service, Platform as a Service, Development as a Service and Business Process Services and how these impact IT organizations.
  • The distinctions between Public, Private and Community Clouds and their implications for IT.
  • Accounting implications, including funding and budgeting.
  • Implications for Business-IT Governance.
  • Security and Privacy.
  • Implications for the work teams and flow of work involved in requirements analysis to solutioning.
  • Impact on Enterprise Architecture.
  • Implications for IT Services and Service Management.

Please weigh in – let us know your experiences, issues and concerns about the shift to the Cloud.  Do you agree with my assessment that this shift is inevitable?  How fast do you see it happening?  What does it mean for you personally, and for your career?

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Design Thinking 2.0: Enabling Innovation with Web 2.0 – Part 2


In my first post in this series, “Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution” I summarized the concepts of Design Thinking and raised the question of how Web 2.0 might enable increased innovation.  (For an interesting perspective on Design Thinking by Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum, see his excellent essay based on his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art in London.)

In my next post I will  drill down and suggest ways to use Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to increase innovativeness and business success, but for now I want to examine the Core/Edge distinction in order to focus us clearly on Edge capabilities, where innovation tends to surface – without being encumbered by the Core.

“Core” and “Edge” Capabilities

Identifying the best ways to leverage collaborative technologies for innovation require an appreciation of the distinction between “Core” and “Edge” business capabilities.  The notions of “Core” and “Edge” I think were first articulated in June 2005 by John Hagel III, a former McKinsey consultant, and John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox in a Wharton Summary interview titled “Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?“  In that interview, Hagel noted:

The… edge… has to do with the notion of competitive advantage, but it also has to do with the view that the ability to develop capabilities involves operating at the edge. Of course, “edge” has multiple meanings as well. It means the edge of the enterprise, the edge of business processes, geographic edges in terms of emerging economies, demographic edges in terms of younger generations coming in with different mindsets – it’s a whole set of edges that create the opportunity for accelerating capability building.”

Seely Brown noted in the same interview:

… being able to listen deeply and participate on the edge, you can pick up things before anybody else picks them up, and you can use that to accelerate your own capability building… This puts a new spin on why distributed collaboration around the world might be critical in creating this sustainable edge.”

My colleagues and I picked up this theme in our multi-company research at nGenera and I covered it in some depth starting in March 2008 with my “Surfing and IT Innovation” post, followed in July 2008 with my “Edginess and IT Innovation” post.

The reason this Core/Edge distinction is so important for IT professionals in the corporate environment is that the Core exerts enormous gravitational pull – innovation activities such as business experiments at the edge tend to get pulled into the core where standards and rigid processes rule.  The Core typically consumes 70% to 90% of IT resources, starving edge activities of the resources and focus they need to flourish.

Requirements of Core Capabilities

Core Capabilities exist to support exploitation of existing business opportunities.  As such they tend to be ‘locked down’, complex and hard to change – in fact, they are designed to prevent ‘bad change.’  Core processes are intended to be highly stable and predictable, typically built on proprietary and relatively fixed architectures.

Requirements of Edge Capabilities

By contrast, Edge Capabilities exist to stimulate and support the exploration of new business opportunities. As such they must be open, agile, transparent and adaptive.  While Core capabilities must ‘prevent bad change’, Edge capabilities are designed to stimulate ‘good change.’  They leverage open, emergent architecture and open sourcing. This, of course, is the realm of Web 2.0 – social media, open source, open innovation, cloud computing, etc.

Balancing Core and Edge Capabilities

The table below further highlights the differences between Core and Edge capabilities and shows example of each type.  My point here is that most IT organizations have many years of experience in perfecting Core capabilities but have relatively little experience with Edge capabilities.  The IT leaders’ natural preference is to control rather than facilitate, to direct rather than stimulate.


In Part 3 of this series, we will look at a generic Design Thinking process and see how each step can be enabled by Web 2.0 “Edge” capabilities.

Image courtesy of Larval Subjects

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Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution


About 3 years ago I first become aware of what can best be called a ‘movement’ dedicated to “Design Thinking,” when the term started showing up in some of my favorite blogs (e.g., Idris Mootee’s Innovation Playground).  The concepts became clearer and more compelling to me in June, 2008 when the Harvard Business Review published a wonderful piece on Design Thinking by Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, the world-renowned innovation and design firm).  Since then, several books as well as some remarkable shifts in company fortunes have reinforced my interest, including Tim Brown’s ‘Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspired Innovation‘ and ‘The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage‘ by Roger L. Martin.

Most recently I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how Web 2.0 might help foster and enable Design Thinking.  I’ve been doing this as part of a new multi-company research project I am leading.  And I’m very excited!

The Case for Design Thinking in the U.S.

The insightful Thomas L. Friedman, in a New York Times Op-Ed column on March 2, 2010 titled, “A Word From the Wise” noted comments in a speech by Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, who was in Washington to talk about competitiveness:

that a 2009 study done by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and cited recently in Democracy Journal “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness — not great, but not bad. Yet that same study also measured what they call ‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future. The study relied on 16 different metrics of human capital — I.T. infrastructure, economic performance and so on. On this scale, the U.S. ranked dead last out of the same 40 nations.”

Too many companies (and the governments that shape corporate behavior through taxes and regulations) have become too comfortable with exploitation, and not sufficiently adept at exploration.  They have come to rely too much on analytical thinking, and not enough on intuition.  They have become so bogged down in their business core, they have all but ignored the edge where customer problems meet the creative process to create new products and services.

In the next few posts, I want to share what I have discovered and learned so far, and hopefully stimulate some constructive discussion and engage you, my readers, in shaping the upcoming research.

Does Your Executive Management Know What They Are Doing?

In a 1998 HBR article entitled, “Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn from Design,” Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, Kamal M. Malek, observed:

Today’s markets are increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely what they’re trying to achieve or how best to achieve it. They can’t even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. For guidance, they can look to the managers of product design, a function that has always been fraught with uncertainty.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Marshall McLuhan

So, the big question for me is how can the tools we have shaped into Web 2.0 enable ‘Design Thinking’ to help us realize dramatically higher business performance?  It seems that we have a whole new and powerful set of capabilities – social networking, crowdsourcing, innovation jams, social and semantic search, collaborative project, program and portfolio management, polling, listening feeds and activity streams, tags, 2D and 3D modeling, prototyping, virtual worlds, workflow modeling and automation, and on and on. And yet, aside from knowing that a distant friend is having a bad hair day, most of these tools and technologies are still looking for a meaningful business purpose.

So, What Is “Design Thinking”?

There are many definitions and descriptions, but the ones I’ve found most illuminating are:

The methodology commonly referred to as design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results.” – Mark Dziersk, Fast Compan

A discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” – Tim Brown, Ideo

Design thinking is always linked to an improved future.  It is a creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas, rather than critical thinking which is more concerned with analysis and the ‘breaking down’ of ideas.   Design Thinking moves design from a downstream (tactical) step to upstream (strategic) – vests everyone involved with the role of ‘designer.”  At its best, Design Thinking balances art and science, intuition and analytics, validity (doing the right things) and reliability (doing things right), exploration and exploitation

Design Thinking Has Profound Organizational Implications

Design Thinking has profound implications for:

  • Organization structures
  • Rewards, recognition, compensation
  • Portfolio management and strategic alignment
  • Governance and leadership style
  • Talent management and global sourcing

I believe that it also presents a significant opportunity …

  • For IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Legal, etc. to step forward and make a real contribution to business success
  • To re-think ‘staff /line’ roles and responsibilities
  • To learn to love matrix management!

How is Design Thinking playing out in your organization?  How have Web 2.0 capabilities helped (or hurt) these efforts?  How do you see this playing out over the next couple of years?

To be clear, Design Thinking is essentially human centered, and there is something potentially incongruous in discussing the use of Web 2.0 to enable it.  However, I still firmly believe that these collective and collaborative technologies have a role in “greasing the skids” to make Design Thinking more accessible.  I will pick this up and drill down a bit further into this realm and discuss  ideas on how Web 2.0 can play a positive role in Design Thinking.

Graphic courtesy of IDEO

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Exploring an IT Operating Model for Enterprise 2.0 – Part 3: Process Management


In Part 1 of this series, I suggested that the implications of Enterprise 2.0 for the IT organization are dramatic.  I also suggested that the ways of designing and executing an IT Operating Model in a Web 2.0 context are quite different from traditional approaches.  In Part 2, I outlined the major elements of an IT Operating Model as being:

  • Processes – how we perform activities that deliver predictable and repeatable business results through competent people using the right tools.
  • Governance – how we make and sustain important decisions about IT.
  • Sourcing – how we select and manage the sourcing of our IT products and services.
  • Services – our portfolio of IT products and services.
  • Measurement – how we measure and monitor our performance.
  • Organization – how we structure and organize our IT capabilities.

In the next series of posts we will consider how these elements can be dramatically improved with Web 2.0 capabilities.

Web 2.0 and Process Management

Process Management, including all phases of process design, deployment, automation, including work flow and continuous improvement, are well-served by collaborative approaches and Web 2.0 tools.  With minor add-ons, SharePoint plus some creative use of Wikis works well for most aspects of process management.  Furthermore, once you are in a browser and on the web, you have access to a plethora of collaborative tools that are helpful when performing process management work, including project management, mind mapping, polling, voting, training and communicating, financial modeling, drawing, 3-D modeling, and so on.  Cheap, and in many cases free, these tools let you create a productive environment, or even a “process management toolkit” for reengineering your IT operating model.

Microsoft, in their “People-Ready Process” approach to Business Process Management argue (appropriately, in my opinion) that you don’t need to standardize on a single tool – the needs and preferences of analysts, process owners, architects, and so on, as well as the tools with which each may be familiar, will vary.  Also, most of these Web 2.0 tools are evolving rapidly, so focus more on the techniques and building the skills, while being prepared to switch or upgrade tools as the market allows.  (Obviously, you need to work closely with your collaboration managers and enterprise architects to ensure they are well informed about what you are doing, and that you don’t create any ‘unpleasant surprises’ for them or the IT operations environment!)

Graphic courtesy of Microsoft People-Ready Process: Collaborative Process Design

Not Just About IT Processes!

Note that while my primary intent and focus for this series of posts is using Web 2.0 approaches in the design and deployment of IT Operating Models for an Enterprise 2.0 world, the same approaches apply to Enterprise 2.0 business process management.  However, I generally feel that the IT organization is well served “doing unto themselves” before they go too far “doing unto others”!  This is a matter of both need (i.e., IT organizations need a healthy dose of collaborative process management!) and experience (i.e., IT organizations should gain some first hand experience in the approaches before they plunge into business process management 2.0!).

Not Just About Web 2.o Tools

As IT professionals, we inevitably gravitate towards the tools, but collaborative approaches bring so much more than useful tools.  I find that with collaboration, it is so much easier to follow agile methods – thereby delivering value sooner.  It also brings the issues of organizational and cultural change to the foreground.  It is an old cliche that “people don’t resist change – it’s being changed that they abhor!”  By bringing a broader swath of stakeholders into end-to-end process management, the challenges of process deployment, adoption and ongoing refinement are significantly reduced.  People are far more engaged in their processes, including their design, use and improvement.  Furthermore, the rapid, iterative methods afforded by such collaborative approaches also facilitate a “design for implementation” approach – helping eliminate design flaws up front, and to iron out kinks faster than traditional methods allow.

Tell us about your experiences with collaborative business process management.  What’s worked well for you?  What not so well?  What have been the benefits?  What have some of the impediments been?

Cartoon courtesy of Doug Savage, Savage Chickens

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Exploring an IT Operating Model for Enterprise 2.0


First, in the interests of full disclosure, the title for this blog was inspired the excellent blog, Wierarchy, and its latest post on Exploring the HR Management Framework for Enterprise 2.0. Note, I have changed the title from “an” to “the”  as I feel there are multiple possible management frameworks for IT, and from “Management Framework” to “Operating Model” as I believe that the concept of an “operating model” is more tangible and actionable for IT folk – especially through Web 2.0 tools, as I shall show in subsequent posts.

So, What’s an IT Operating Model?

eHow, in their very simplified discussion on how to develop a business operating model state that an operating model is:

the basic framework that your company follows to get your products into the hands of consumers”

If we translate this to the IT space, we could say that “an IT operating model is the basic framework your IT organization follows to get your products and services into the hands of its consumers and customers.”

Why Does Enterprise 2.0 Demand a New IT Operating Model?

This is a question I get from time to time, and I think there are at least three key answers:

  1. The types of IT products and services the IT organization must deliver in an Enterprise 2.0 world are quite different from those in a 1.0 world.  Enablement of enterprise collaboration, for example.
  2. The ways that IT products and services can be delivered in an Enterprise 2.0 world are also quite different.  Through “the cloud”, for example.
  3. The ways of designing and executing an IT Operating Model in a Web 2.0 context are also quite different.  Collaboratively, and through “the cloud”, for example.

I’m actually most excited about point 3. above.  It’s something I’ve been exploring, both through multi-company research and through actual consulting engagements, and can now state unequivocally that Web 2.0 provides an incredibly powerful context through which to design and actualize an IT Operating Model.  But in the next few posts, I’m going to explore each of the three questions.  And, in the interests of collaboration, let me ask a question…

How are you using Web 2.0 approaches to change your IT Operating Model?

Image courtesy of FredCavazza.net

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Deming’s 14 Points Revisited: Part 10


This post picks up on Parts 1 to 9 and examines the ninth of Deming’s 14 Management Points, which urges:

Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

I’ve posted before on organizational silos (see Bustin’ Silos with the Role Bomb!), the inefficiencies they introduce and how silos tend to dampen the magic of innovation and collaboration.  “If only the left hand knew what the right hand was doing” is a familiar cry of woe!

The Promise of Business Process Reengineering

Deming’s 9th Point in many ways foreshadows the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) movement of the 1990′s with its end-to-end business processes (e.g., order-to-cash, hire-to-retire) and process management discipline cutting across traditional organizational boundaries.  BPR almost always leveraged information technology to gain efficiencies in terms of speed and resources – sometimes in innovative ways, often shifting work to the customer.

Unfortunately, in spite of the promise, there were quite a number of horrible BPR failures, especially in the early 1990′s.  Many early failures were associated with the so-called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) monster software packages that often accompanies BPR efforts.  But, there have also been some spectacular successes and ERP together with at least some form of process management are invariably at the heart of them.

Matrix Management

Process Management led organizations (that were not already there) towards the discipline of matrix management.  For some organizations, having more than two “bosses” (over-simplifying the situation enormously) represents too great a culture shift.  As such, the inertia associated with traditional hierarchies, silo behaviors and limited collaboration tends to overwhelm moves towards cross-departmental or cross-geographical boundaries.   Some companies (J&J comes to mind) seem to manage really well with complex operating company and market structures.  For them, matrix management, while never without its frustrations as with any management system, works well and is effective.  They have established the tools and disciplines to ensure clear lines of accountability together with a reasonably entrepreneurial spirit.

Is Collaboration a Tool to Break Down Departmental Barriers?

Web 2.0 promises to take collaboration to new levels – both within the organization and across its ecosystem. The conundrum, however, is:

  • Web 2.0 tools and technologies can help break down organizational boundaries
  • Organizational silos inhibit the institutionalization of collaborative behaviors

In other words, organizations that are already collaborating well across organizational boundaries are better positioned to exploit Web 2.0 than those with strong organizational silos.  I believe some proficiency with matrix management is necessary for success with cross-enterprise collaboration.  Given that, and with a thoughtful deployment of Web 2.0 tools with clarity of the strategic intents for the collaboration initiative, I believe Dr. Deming would be delighted to see the possibilities inherent in the world of Web 2.0, and its potential for “breaking down barriers.”

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Deming’s 14 Points Revisited: Part 9


This post picks up on Parts 1 to 8 and examines the eighth  of Deming’s 14 Management Points, which urges:

Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

Fear and Social Networking

From my consulting experience (and, I regret to say, from some of my experience as an employee) fear can be a very real issue in organizations – inhibiting people’s willingness to try new things, to speak out when they see inefficient practices or broken processes, to challenge dumb decisions by management, and so on.  Fear also limits people’s engagement in their work (their willingness to give their discretionary effort).  And, in an age of emerging Enterprise 2.0 – with its dependence upon internal and external social networking, fear can be a major impediment to progress in learning and developing new ways of working, innovating products and services, and better connecting stakeholders.

Today’s climate of high unemployment and the threat of “downsizing” on the horizon, fear in many organizations is on the uptick.  Fear mobilizes the body’s “fight or flight” mechanism, leading to either defensive behavior (hiding, submissive, low engagement) or aggressive (even destructive) behavior.  I sometimes see the variant of passive-aggressive behavior, where, for example, people agree to a decision, then work the back channels to sabotage it!

So, to what degree is fear inhibiting your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness?  What is the source of that fear?  What can be done to eliminate or at least, reduce fear in the workplace?

Fear and Trust

Fear is the opposite of trust. Trust is important for high performing organizations because it leads to synergy and performance. As organizations begin to enter the Enterprise 2.0 realm, fear and trust become even more important.

Author and management consultant Charles Handy, notes that, “If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organization, we will have to rediscover how to run organizations based more on trust than on control. Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough”.

Driving Out Fear

Corporate coach Jan Austin in her excellent blog post FEAR IN THE WORKPLACE: SYMPTOMS, SOURCES, SOLUTIONS, suggests that:

Eliminating fear begins with leaders acknowledging their own responsibility for creating and/or participating in a fear-driven organizational culture. By examining their assumptions and behaviors which have either triggered or perpetuated defensive, fearful responses in others, and consciously choosing to communicate in a more positive, proactive manner, they can interrupt the patterns of fear and the associated defensive routines in the organization. Leaders can take a number of steps to engage organizational constituents in more open, collaborative conversations and encourage greater positive participation in the work of the organization. Leaders can do this by employing simple but powerful facilitation skills.

Jan goes on to suggest techniques four key strategies for leaders, comprising:

  1. Establishing Rapport
  2. Improving Listening Skills
  3. Asking Questions Which Increase Trust and Reduce Fear
  4. Promoting Dialogue

Check out Jan’s post.  How many of these strategies and the techniques she suggests might help your organization become a less fearful and more collaborative place?

 

Image courtesy of The Vancouver Sun

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Deming’s 14 Points Revisited: Part 4


Web - Quality 1This post picks up on Parts 1, 2 and 3 and examines the third of Deming’s 14 Management Points, which urges:

Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.”

This is one of the fundamental issues in quality management, with the quality movement shifting from quality control to quality assurance over the years, in part thanks to Edwards Deming and his peers during the latter part of the industrial revolution.

Testing – Value Add or Overhead?

This is a tough question I’ve had to address.  For example, I’ve facilitated IT groups where the issue of the value of testing, and how to manage it has been an important point of contention in organization and governance design.  I believe that ultimately, testing is overhead.  In that assertion, I distinguish between “inspection of final product (testing) from activities such as prototyping, modeling, running experiments – which to the contrary can be a real value add to IT discovery, solution delivery and support.  I also distinguish activities such as structured walkthrough‘s etc., which have more to do with building quality in than with inspection of final product.

Note that Deming does not suggest eliminating inspection – he urges eliminating the need for mass inspection, and “ceasing dependence” on inspection.  As such I acknowledge there’s such a thing as “necessary overhead,” but that need should be monitored and reduced over time, as built in quality improves.

The Genesis of “Design Thinking”

Today, the movement referred to as “Design  Thinking” must welcome Deming’s admonition to “build quality in!”   But I don’t see evidence of a lot of Design Thinking in most IT organizations.  It is also often lacking in vendor products.

Design Thinking and Enterprise Architecture

One key role that, as I’ve said in many posts, is woefully under-served in terms of its potential to make a real difference to return on IT investment and the whole user experience, is that of the Enterprise Architect.  A key to the junction between problem analysis and solution design, including solutions on a grand scale such as enterprise architectures, the Enterprise Architect should be a conduit to inject Design Thinking into IT products and services.  And, with a nod to Deming, “building quality into the product in the first place!”

Image courtesy of Nanophase Nanoengineering Products

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