Elemental Links

Link Collection — May 13, 2012

brenda michelson — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:30:33 +0000

How Will You Measure Your Life? – Harvard Business Review

“I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.”

tags: Business hbr christensen
Busting CIO Myths — Interview with Jeanne Ross

Governance: “good governance is about making everybody smarter about IT. “When setting up governance, most companies start with IT investments when they should start with implementation reviews,” says Ross. “Companies with the best governance are constantly assessing whether projects are realizing their business case.”"

Purpose: Ross. “Quarterly financial goals are destroying us. IT is about the long-term strength and agility of the business. Let somebody else worry about quarterly goals; the CIO should focus on making the company great forever.”
That doesn’t mean IT can ignore all quarterly pressure, but CIOs should discourage investment that is driven by short-term thinking. “This is UPS’s genius,” Ross says. “They understand that they need low package-delivery cost and high reliability. They use those metrics to set goals, and they build systems to operationalize their business.” CIOs must push back, she says. “If we measure IT the way we measure the last advertising campaign, we’re in trouble.”

tags: cio governance entarch
Cloud & the evolution of the enterprise architect – Cloud Computing News

I owe a follow-up on James’ excellent article. In short, I believe we need to embrace the mindset of Product Managers, who continually evolve a solution, rather than try for all-at-once perfection.

“In businesses that are themselves complex, there are tremendous efficiencies to be gained by the smart application of IT. That element of the enterprise architect’s role doesn’t go away.

What does change are the skills needed to evaluate how business applications, data sets and services are going to interact-and survive-in a complex, adaptive systems environment. If developers are the DNA of software in the cloud, the enterprise architect becomes the immune system, encouraging the growth of systems that help the business thrive, and killing those that would cost the business.

In this sense, my friend Brenda Michelson, a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture, put it best: the role is no longer one of enterprise architect, but rather one of the enterprise product manager…”

tags: cloud computing enterprise-architect entarch
Big Data, Tiny Insights | Om Malik

“Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it. Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.” — Sameer Patel

tags: bigdata
The Simplicity Thesis | Fast Company

“Here are just a few ways to get started in achieving minimum complexity:

Think end to end. Simplicity relates to the entire customer experience, from how you handle pricing to customer support.
Say no. Kill features and services that don’t get used, and optimize the ones that do.
Specialize. Focus on your core competency, and outsource the rest–simplicity comes more reliably when you have less on your plate.
Focus on details. Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.
Audit constantly. Constantly ask yourself, can this be done any simpler? Audit your technology and application frequently.
The next thing to understand is that simplicity is a relative, moving target. The accelerating speed of innovation ensures that you’re never the simplest solution for long.”

tags: simplicity
Crush the “I’m Not Creative” Barrier – Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen – Harvard Business Review

“You can actually become more creative by changing your mind-set. Anyone can innovate, if they choose to. Disruptive innovators do it by choice, not chance. Their everyday actions swap out an “I’m not creative” mind-set for an “I am creative” one. And then magical (not mystical) things unfold.

The magic materializes as people engage unique innovation skills (what we call their innovator’s DNA) on an everyday basis. For example, by asking provocative questions, observing like anthropologists, networking with people who see the world in 180-degree opposites, and experimenting with intensity, innovators obliterate the “I’m not creative” brain barrier and, more often than not, break out from the pack.”

tags: innovation creativity mindset christensen

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

business-first technology leadership wins

brenda michelson — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:54:08 +0000

In 2010, when I wrote the Elemental Links tagline, “Technology Insights for Business Enthusiasts”, some of my trusted associates pushed back, telling me that I need to lead with TECHNOLOGY. But, here’s the thing. In the enterprise, from which I came and continue to serve, a technology-first mindset leads to disdain.

Contrary to the hyperbole of the technology press, analysts, pundits and product marketers, true, enduring, information technology success begins with a business-first mindset, which includes constant context checks.

Now, it would be fair to slap a (micro) pundit label on me, so what follows are snippets from three business-first technology executives, excerpted from this week’s WSJ:

“What directors really value in a CIO is sound strategic thinking and a great ability to execute, says Gambale, a former CIO at Merrill Lynch, Bankers Trust, and Alex Brown, and former partner at Deutsche Bank Capital.”

via Art Langer: Virginia Gambale Says CIOs Should Offer Strategic Advice to Corporate Directors – The CIO Report – WSJ.

“We never start with technologies; we always look at trends in the world that are or may be having an impact on the future of our business. One example is the acceleration of innovation to market. Consumers and users want one-on-one connections to any service or product they interact with, so we have to respond. This is thoroughly changing the way we operate—the always-on, instant nature of interaction today.

We look at those megatrends and forces to see which ones will truly impact our business. Then we go look at what strategies we can devise to take advantage of those trends. The final step is evaluating which technologies can enable those strategies. The value is how we enable this dramatic change through technology.

Every three years or so, we review our strategies. Three years ago we focused on the idea of visualization. We have visualized data across the entire company. Everything we do is visual. This transforms the way the business performs because it creates what I call “information democracy.” There are no more layers. The discussions we are having are much more robust.”

– Filippo Passerini, president of global business services and CIO of Procter & Gamble in WSJ CIO Journal

“We’re truly guided by these big arcs of change [analytics, cloud computing, emerging markets and “smarter planet] that we believe in,” Rometty said. “They lend context and clarity. When you run a big company, context and clarity mean a lot.”

via New IBM CEO Says Will Maintain Longer-Term Strategy

Active Information: Data, rather than brute force and sheer will, wins races

Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Active Information

brenda michelson — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:59:04 +0000

This week, I wrote about data fetishes on Active Information. Excerpt:

“On the Big Data front, I’m intrigued by the potential of fast, wide and deep data processing to solve hard problems, learn from outliers and make informed, data-driven decisions.

And, as my clients will attest, I advocate instrumenting everything as a means to discover true customer, business and systems behaviors.

However, I don’t believe that all data has equal value. Nor does all valuable data hold its value over time. Good data programs rely on context and include data weeding.

But, what about the data that should never, ever get in your attention? According to Wharton’s Peter Fader, the least valuable data is the noisiest in the Big Data space: social and mobile.”

Read the post: Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Input Output.

On enterprise blueprinting — entrenchment

brenda michelson — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:40:03 +0000

It is naive to believe one can, or should, blueprint an enterprise. An enterprise is a complex system that must continually, adapt to survive and thrive.

For any system to sustain, shift, and grow, over time, it requires energies (accelerants), efficiencies, connectors (& disconnectors), and means to remove waste.

Enterprise architecture should focus its attention on fortifying these core functions of the enterprise system, via the infusion of intellectual and digital capability.

Enterprise architecture should capacitate fluidity, not rigidity.

Entrenchment: What we have is a thinking problem

Entrenchment: What we have is a thinking problem

brenda michelson — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:37:55 +0000

On May 1 — while sacrificing yet another shirt to a hotel iron — I had an epiphany of sorts, which I immediately tweeted:

“Legacy isn’t the big IT problem. Entrenchment is. Entrenched investments, mindsets, skills, business process & information wiring. -me, now”

Shortly afterwards, I followed up with:

“what we have isn’t a technology problem, it’s a thinking problem.”

Based on the huge (positive) response from the community on twitter, I shared that I was inspired to elaborate my tweets to an Entrenchment essay.

So far though, the time for long-form thinking and writing alludes me. [Not to mention good hotel irons].

In the interim, I’ve been tweeting under an #entrenchment hashtag, and more recently, scribbling entrenchment bursts.

Convincing myself these bursts could be considered micro-essays, I’m going to share them on elemental links, under a new entrenchment category.

Someday, they may evolve into a cohesive essay, or daresay something longer. But for now, I’m going micro.

I hope they provoke some re-thinking. Feedback encouraged.

Series starts with On enterprise blueprinting

Link Collection — May 6, 2012

brenda michelson — Sun, 06 May 2012 11:30:33 +0000

because you’re a creative badass | Justine Musk

creative badass manifesto

tags: creativity

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Link Collection — April 29, 2012

brenda michelson — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:30:31 +0000

When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End? – Justin Fox – Harvard Business Review

Provocative view. Lots of good linked content.

“It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.

Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”"

tags: internet neal-stephenson innovation
Citigroup’s massive scalability challenges, by the numbers – Cloud Computing News

Massive scale measured in business terms: trillions of $

“$12.5 trillion. That’s the amount of customer money for which Benjamin’s half of Citi is responsible. About a quadrillion dollars worth of transactions flow through his system every year.”

tags: scalability citi
The Creative Monopoly – NYTimes.com

“[Thiel's] lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.”

Now think about the competitive environment that confronts the most fortunate people today and how it undermines those mind-sets.

tags: creativity economics competition
Beyond the 10,000 Hour Rule: Richard Hamming and the Messy Art of Becoming Great

“”Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well,” Hamming says. “They believe the theory enough to go ahead; [but] they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory.”

This is perhaps the most important advice from among Hamming’s many suggestions. The path to excellence requires this balance between confidence and doubt, and though this balance is challenging, it’s tractable so long as your recognize what you’re facing.”

tags: expertise talent
The Flight From Conversation – NYTimes.com

“WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.”

tags: sherryturkle technology society

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Dear Data entrepreneurs, I’ll choose my own movie. Go study cancer. — Active Information

brenda michelson — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:38:28 +0000

This week on active information, I excerpt and comment on a Kauffman Foundation report on healthcare that I found both enlightening and enraging.

My lead-in:

“Why is it we can predict a consumer’s propensity to read Hunger Games, upgrade their iPad or download music featured on the Voice, yet we fail miserably at predicting life-threatening events, such as a women’s propensity to develop breast cancer?”

The post: Data entrepreneurs, Ill choose my own movie. Go s… – Input Output.

Thanks to Joe McKendrick for pointing out the report.

Forrester: Forcing A New Role For CIOs & Dragging IT Out Of The Backrooms

brenda michelson — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:21:32 +0000

John Brand of Forrester writes on the inevitable shift of CIOs and IT. I strongly agree with the following two points. We are in a systems-of-systems world. Organizations fighting this shift are swimming against the digital tide.

“There is no “big suite” solution. Over the past 30+ years, IT has thrived on the ideals of consolidation and centralisation. One system. One repository. One place to put stuff. If only I had a penny for every time I heard the phrase “we need a single repository”. For years Ive been saying that users dont care about where something lives. They care about how to access it. Its not about a single repository. Its about a seamless repository. Google doesnt hold the worlds information sources. Its merely appears to users like it does. Forget the big suites. The one system. The strategic vendor. Focus on the right tool for the right job. Focus on the fact that the job will change — and so should the tools. The building industry hasnt rested on its laurels because it thinks its found the one perfect set of materials, construction methods and tools to do every job. Why do we think in IT that theres only one vendor, one platform or one language that we need to deal with? Embrace diversity, but still maintain a focus on management. Continuous design will be a capability that every organization will need to learn. Its not about doing it “right” the first time. Its about continually doing it better and better.

Systems are no longer isolated — and neither are we. Over the last decade and a half, the world has connected — and interconnected — an amazing array of technologies. We are now all completely dependent on each other. And so are our systems. Our newer systems are not built on batch uploaded data sets that we can control and cleanse — but on masses of big data that we need to extract meaning and structure from. We cant have the luxury of first defining a structure and populating data into it. We must work with what we have or what we can get. Fast.”

via The Empowered BT Era Will Force Yes, Force A New Role For CIOs – And Drag IT Out Of The Backrooms | Forrester Blogs.

I’m attending Forrester’s co-located CIO and EA Forums next week in Vegas. Will blog and tweet what I hear. Look me up if you are there.

CIOs Continue Being Held in Low Esteem – The CIO Report – WSJ

Link Collection — April 22, 2012

brenda michelson — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:30:31 +0000

Stealing Computer Code Isn’t Theft, Court Rules – Input Output

“The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the taking of source code by Sergey Aleynikov was not a crime under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets because the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law because it was not physical “goods” or “wares” or “merchandise.” He had taken high-frequency trading computer code from Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank where he worked, as he was about to start a new job at Teza Technologies, a startup in the same business, according to the Chicago Tribune.
In particular, the code did not “become” stolen property even when Aleynikov saved it to a flash drive, a tangible device, noted Waters Technology.
In addition, because the software was used internally rather than sold to other people, that meant it could not be subject to laws regarding interstate commerce, noted the New York Times.”

tags: legal code goldmansachs
Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix $1 Million Challenge | Techdirt

“We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment.

It wasn’t just that the improvement was marginal, but that Netflix’s business had shifted and the way customers used its product, and the kinds of recommendations the company had done, had shifted too. Suddenly, the prize winning solution just wasn’t that useful — in part because many people were streaming videos rather than renting DVDs — and it turns out that the recommendation for streaming videos is different than for rental viewing a few days later.”

tags: bigdata kaggle contest
Amazon launches cloud app store (and eats ecosystem?) — Cloud Computing News

“From Amazon’s perspective it’s easy to see why the marketplace idea was so appealing. Letting users launch fully configured versions of popular products in a single click is a compelling feature, especially for complex software that isn’t easily deployed in the cloud (or at all). For its software-vendor partners, AWS Marketplace represents an opportunity to do SaaS without having to build a SaaS business or infrastructure.”

tags: cloud computing amazon
Ingineering.IT — DevOps, Technical Debt, and Adaptive Organizations

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.