Information Technology Management

Understanding IT Infrastructure and DevOps as a company's differentiating capabilities

2014-04-25T00:05:00.001-07:00

What lays at the heart of most companies' operating capabilities? Of course, information technology (IT) infrastructure! Companies with more complex operational characteristics rely on new bleeding edge technologies in their IT infrastructure. Effective infrastructure enables business' capabilities, ineffective - destroys them. The deepest challenges in the IT infrastructure management is bridging the decision making between business and technology domain.

If company's core business is in technology, and in particularly in software technology, then there is another very important component of bridging IT with business. It is so called DevOps. DevOps is a combination of words "development" and "operations". According to Wikipedia it means a "software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) operations professionals". For business it means enabling business agility and aligning with IT infrastructure.

For business to be competitive it needs ability to implement changes or innovations very fast. A life-cycle from the development to operation can use different project management methods. Latest trends in the project management methodologies are agile frameworks. Even these approaches are faster and more adaptive than waterfall, sometimes they are not fast enough for a business. So, DevOps helps making agile development to be more agile and prevents from elevating of risks of premature pushing to operations. DevOps solutions comes from shifting company culture towards measuring performance, unifying processes and tools.DevOps tools are a big part of the concept. The buzz words are “infrastructure as code”, “model driven automation”, and “continuous deployment”. Choice of right tools and their implementation eliminates a lot of manual work and foster automation.

As a result their adoption makes a big difference in improving company's agility. Speed of implementing changes that enable new business capabilities comes from the contemporary IT infrastructure and DevOps. Ability of a company to recognize this fact and adopt, invest accordingly is a game changer.

SCRUM - Product Owner and ScrumMaster

2014-03-30T17:26:00.003-07:00

I was working in the Scrum framework for the last 4 years. My role is a Product Owner. It has been a journey with many challenges, opportunities and lessons learned. Despite the fact that there is a clear trend that more and more companies adopt agile development, it doesn't make it easier to bring up to speed any new project participant. It is hard for newcomers to understand right away the SCUM's benefits. It is not easy to make them think and act withing the framework and have relevant expectations. I would say that it doesn't matter if a a new participant is in the development team or on the business side, it is equally demanding to make them grasp the SCRUM process. Having geographically dispersed teams makes managing adoption, changes to the new processes for newcomers even more complicated. In a series of posts I will share my "lessons learned" and knowledge from my previous researches and training. Since I am a project manager by trade, it is part of my professional obligations to educate about project management and in this case about Scrum.

In a very simplified description there are four main roles in Scrum:

1. Stakeholders
2. Product Owner
3. Team
4. ScrumMaster.

Here is a good diagram that I have borrowed from the site describing pretty well these roles

However, in practice it is more complicated than fitting all participants into these well defined roles and expect the desirable behavior from them. A big part of the success in the SCRUM adoption process are Product Owner and Scrum Master. In the real life and especially in the geographically dispersed teams their responsibilities sometimes are not well understood withing a company which cause them sometimes to fulfill partially each other roles.

Here is an excerpt from the Andrew Pham and Phuong-Van Pham book "Scrum in Action: Agile Software Project Management and Development " about qualities for people in these two roles.

The seven qualities of a great Product Owner are:

Know how to successfully manage the stakeholders’ expectations and sometimes conflicting priorities.
Have a clear vision and knowledge of the product.
Know how to gather requirements to turn the product vision into a good product backlog.
Be fully available to actively engage with the team, not only during the sprint, but also during the release and sprint planning.
Be a good organizer who can juggle multiple activities, while keeping things in perspective and maintaining her composure.
Know how to communicate the product vision; not only to the team, but also with the business, so their trust in the team remains intact throughout the life of the project.
Be a good leader, able to guide, coach, and support the team as needed while making sure that the business gets the value they expect out of IT.

The seven qualities a ScrumMaster should have are:

In depth theoretical and practical knowledge of Scrum
Great servant-leadership ability
Strong organizational skills
Great communication skills
Excellent presentation skills
Conflict resolution skills
Excellent human development skills.

Big part of the Product Owner and Scrum Master responsibilities is to protect a team from the external environment.

Source: Scrum in Action: Agile Software Project Management and Development by Andrew Pham and Phuong-Van Pham.

By my humble opinion, a big part of the SCRUM success in IT projects is having a baseline for project inputs, outputs, tools, roles, expected behaviors as in any framework build on practicality.

So, educating new project participants is a very important part of any company that wants to harvest from the Agile frameworks used in IT development.

Are You on the Cloud?

2012-09-03T22:44:00.001-07:00

I am pretty sure that most of technical people are aware about the technical term "cloud", and even can give some kind of description about what does it mean. The well known association of the cloud computing is with the software as a service, SaaS. However, there are more and more areas of IT services which are moving to the cloud. So, knowing the acronyms for such cases is a part of the IT literacy.

I have filled a survey today "Managing Cloud Applications" posted by the The Office of the CIO® in collaboration with Katepano SaaS Monitoring and Optimization which reminded me about my intention to create this post and to list all abbreviations.

Here is the list of the cloud services that I am aware of:

PaaS - Platform as a Service
BaaS - Backup as a Service
BPaaS - Business Process as a Service
CaaS - Communication, Content, and Computing as a Service
DaaS - Database as a Service DaaS ( another one) - Desktop as a Service
IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
IDaaS - Identity as a Service
MaaS - Monitoring/Management as a Service
NaaS - Network as a Service
SaaS ( another one) - Storage as a Service
SECaaS - Security as a Service
UCaaS - Unified Communications as a Service
APMaaS - APM (Application Performance Management) as a Service
LaaS - logging as a service

Here are some other acronyms that go together with the cloud:
SOA - Service Oriented Architecture
SOCCI - Service Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure

As you can see, there are so many IT service already on the cloud that they are even reusing the same surnames. According to industry definition by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the "as a service" acronym formed a category XaaS which unites all cloud-related services.

The IaaS was pioneered by Amazon. UCaaS becomes a popular because it is easy to outsource. The MaaS is almost a requirement for IT that uses cloud. The NaaS is a choice for the mature large companies because they want to get out of the IT business.

According to the market forecasts, by the 2015 year the XaaS market will be more then $40 billions. Microsoft's latest strategy shift to the cloud with its offering of the SkyDrive cloud storage service and cloud-based Office 365 is a strong evidence of the industry shift to the cloud.

So, are you YOU on the cloud? Do you use other then listed above services?

Resources: NETWORK WORLD, August 13, 2012. Volume 29, Number 14.

Information Technology Management: Visualize Your Experience

2012-06-23T13:17:00.001-07:00

Information Technology Management: Visualize Your Experience: Do you know that you can present your resume through infographics by using free ans easy tools that pull out info from existing sites.

Visualize Your Experience

2012-06-23T13:11:00.001-07:00

Do you know that you can present your resume through infographics by using free ans easy tools that pull out info from existing sites.

Social Media Demographics - infographic

2012-03-24T22:51:00.001-07:00

Via: Online MBA Resource social media

Word clouds from the words used on sitecore.net, created with Wordle

2012-02-28T20:29:00.000-08:00

Digital presentation of Sitecore on twitter http://bit.ly/xRXgCJ

Tying Business Intelligence with Business Process Management

2012-02-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

Companies are watching carefully, using business intelligence and analytics tools to figure out what’s happening in their markets from the perspective where efficiency can make the difference between profit and loss. The goal is to use right analytics tools to guide business processes changes towards “dramatic productivity enhancing”. This is a responsibility of CIO to establish cooperation between IT department and business units to create a data warehouse and to enable the best use of predictive analytics tools and techniques and tying them with BPM. The metrics are: improvement of financial forecasting, customers retaining and operating profits.

Examples of successful data enabling changes where analytics and BPM are connected:

· The insurance industry – fraud detection;
· Order management, global inventory and invoicing;
· Increasing timing intervals of reports for the decision making produced results allowing adjust business process;
· Analytics tools integrated with customer-relationship management (CRM) or e-commerce systems helps improving processes for engagement with customers;
· Introducing measurements and showing success from the analytics-BPM helps CIO to add more dedicated to analytics staff to their teams.

Companies discover new ways to save:

· Business analytics produced incredible results for CUNA Mutual to open their eyes where that should concentrate their effort to attract new customers. Example: to attract generation Y – build mobile and web products; provide up-sale additional services in convenient way.
· Outsourcing of analytics and data warehousing by using the 3rd party vendor (like Oco) thorough their SaaS tools can resolve a lot of timing issues and save money by providing timely reports and provides for for necessary changes in the business processes. Example: transportation expenses were cut by 12-15%.

Organizations can improve their conversation with customers:

· Many modern BI and analytics tools provide prebuild statistical models which remove the need for highly educated resources and reduce time of the analyses. Example: complex analyses as segmenting customers based not simply on demographics and the products and services they buy, but also on less cut-and-dried information, such as how they behave at a website or what comments they make during call- center interactions .
· Key to game-changing decision making is the ability to detect and respond to market changes, taking into account historical knowledge. Evaluating historical data such as the average annual revenue the customer represents, her payment history and other bought product, and forming the customer value, Direct TV created tactics how to cut churn rates and retain customers.
· Coca Cola created an innovative personalized way of attracting their consumers to interact through the website and provide information about where the products were purchased and offer customers some rewards for that. The company uses this feedback to tailor its pitches and have a relevant dialog with customers. The company has learned that watching behavior is more meaningful than reading questionnaires Web visitors are asked to fill out. The idea is not just to save business but to create new business.

Analytics tools help companies create more money-generating interactions with customers and shave costs from internal operations. CIOs should connect analytics technologies with ideas about refining business processes.

Resources: Kim S. Nash, CIO. June 17, 2010. Business Intelligence Meets BPM: Using Data to Change Business Processes on the Fly. Retrieved from www.cio.com

Business Intelligence and Social Media

2012-02-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

I have heard different opinions about the value of organizational activities on social medial channels. A lot of advocates (or anti-advocates) see the value of social medias only as another channel to bring visitors to their website.

In such statements at this stage a very important aspect of collecting followers is overlooked. Most of social media website have APIs that let query information about people who are part of your network (your friends, followers, etc.). By privacy policy you can only view the profile of people who allowing queries. A lot of recent software tools exploit this social networking openness. I can see that somebody will come (or already did) with models for software applications that will do a business intelligence analysis of the data about visitor's behaviour on your website and your activities on social medias, and will provide suggestions how to engage your followers even further. There will be a clear "aha" moment for your organization how to push social media followers to create a business value for you. Since they are already following you, it means that they are already initiated engagement. Something particular for their needs or interest needs to be done to make them do a second step on the engagement ladder. At some points business intelligence analysis can turn this ladder in the slide.

Very exiting time we are living with the turning point of the web to become a proactive and coming to you with the information you are interested, instead of the current and past way of you going and searching the information on the web. Social media networks are the channels for that, so collect your follower and obtain more!

Data Warehouse

2012-02-09T21:24:00.000-08:00

What is a Data Warehouse?

• A pool of data combined from databases across an enterprise to be the source for decision making.
• A repository of current and historical data of potential interest to managers throughout the organization.
• A subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, nonvolatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.

How does a Data Warehouse differ from a database?

Most operational databases have a product orientation and are tuned to handle transactions that update the database.

What is a Data Mart?

A small warehouse designed for a strategic business unit or a department and is a subset of the datawarehouse.

What is the Data Warehousing process?

Data for the data warehouse is imported from various internal and external resources and is cleaned and organized in a manner consistent with the organization’s needs. After the data is populated in the data warehouse, data mart can be loaded for a specific area or department. Alternatively data mart can be created first and then integrated into an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) if needed.

What are the major components of a data warehouse?

• Data sources
• Data extraction and transformation
• Data loading
• Comprehensive database
• Metadata
• Middleware tools.

What are the three steps of the ETL process?

1. Extraction – reading data from one or more databases. Typically all the input data are written to a set of staging tables.

2. Transformation – converting the extracted data from its previous form into the form in which it needs to be so that it can be placed into a data warehouse or simply another database. Transformation occurs by using rules or lookup tables or by combining the data with other data. Any data quality issues pertaining to the source files need to be corrected before the data are loaded to the data warehouse.

3. Load – putting data into the data warehouse.

Why is the ETL process so important for data warehousing effort?

ETL is extremely important for data integration and for providing clean quality data for data warehouse. Quality data becomes a strategic asses for a company.

Abbreviations Used in Business Intelligence

2012-01-22T14:24:00.000-08:00

ADS – automated decision systems

ADW - active data warehousing

ANN – artificial neural network

BA – business analytics

BAM – business activity management

BI - business intelligence

BICC – BI Competency Center

BPM – business performance management

BSC - balanced scorecard

CPM – corporate performance management

CRISP-DM - cross-industry standard process for data mining

CSF – critical success factor

DBMS - database management system

DMAIC - define, measure, analyze, improve, control

DSS – decision support system

DW – data warehouse

DWA - data warehouse administrator

EAI - enterprise application integration

EDW – enterprise data warehouse

EII - enterprise information integration

EIS – executive information systems

EPM - enterprise performance management

ETL – extract/transfer/load

GIS – geographical information systems

GUI - graphical user interface

HITS - hyperlink-induced topic search

HOLAP - hybrid OLAP

IPA - intelligent process automation

KDD - knowledge discovery in databases

KMS - knowledge management systems

KPI – key performance indicators

MIS – management information systems

MLP - multi-layered perception

MOLAP- multidimensional OLAP

NLP - natural language processing

ODS - operational data store

OLAP – online analytical processing

OLTP – online transaction processing

PDA – personal digital assistant

PLM - product life cycle management

RDW - real-time data warehousing

ROLAP - Relational OLAP

RDBMS - relational database management system

SEM - strategic enterprise management

SEMMA - sample, explore, modify, model, assess

SOA - service-oriented integration

SCM – supply chain management

SVD - singular value decomposition

SVM - support vector machines

TDM - term-document matrix

TUN – Teradata University Network (teradatauniversitynetwork.com)

Supporting sites:

teradatauniversitynetwork.com

pearsonhighered.com/turban

information-management.com

tdwi.org – the Data Warehousing institute

olapreport.com

dssresources.com

businessintelligent.ittoolbox.com

b-eye-network.com

aisnet.org
enterprise.waltoncollege.uark.edu/mec.asp

hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/academic/edu_home.jhtml

bpir.com

idea-group.com

knowledgestorm.com

cioinsight.com

technologyevaluation.com

baselinemag.com

2012 - The Year of the Big Data

2012-01-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

According to the Wall Street Journal columnist DENNIS K. BERMAN, analytics harvesting from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. He calls it Big Data, analytics, or decision science. Over time, this will significantly change our world. Computer performance power grows so fast, that "systems can now chew through billions of bits of data, analyze them via self-learning algorithms, and package the insights for immediate use." Analytics and self-learning algorithms will be a game changers. An example of the trend is the fact that Hewlett-Packard recently bought Autonomy which has a technical solutions to clean unstructured data and to apply analytics to that big data. It also helps organizations to derive meaning and value from their information. A collection of computer technologies that work with the Big Data are collectively known as Business Intelligence (BI), and also referred to as business analytics.

The importance of analytics is that it help us reduce human biases from our decision-making. Using BI will help us eliminate our worst human tendencies. The key point is to have analytics in a real time. Such information is a must for all types of decisions, for strategic planning and forecasting, and even for survival. Now business cycles become shorter and compressed; that is why faster, more informed, better decision making is a competitive imperative. Organizations have to work smart. A championship of BI become a smart choice for more and more companies.

Examples of how Opera or Mu Sigma helps their customers improve decision making and as a result increase revenue attract venture companies. Investing money in BI becomes very actual due to the fact that there is a whole class of things that couldn't be done five years ago.

Resources: DENNIS K. BERMAN http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203462304577138961342097348.html

Organizational Perspective - from good to great.

2012-01-18T21:21:00.000-08:00

Does every company has a strategic plan? Is this plan communicated to all level of organization and used for creating operational plans in every department? Are operational plans in every department even exist? A good example would be a marketing department. If such a plan exist, is it aligned with the organizational strategic plan? Continuing as example with the marketing department, are all activities in the department, and project portfolio are driven by this plan? These are questions that any growing organization starts to ask at some point during its growth.

According to the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), an organizational strategy can turn a good organization into a great one. And of course strategies that fail, or luck of strategy can quickly damage the organization's reputation and brand, internally and externally. "Effective strategy execution is the responsibility of all level of management, who must be involved actively and consistently to orchestrate required organizational changes and to manage the portfolio of investments that underpin these change initiatives."

An organization should have a governance mechanism that force the linkage between strategy and project portfolio. The right governance in project portfolio management provides decision-making transparency and increases likelihood of realizing desired return on investment.

OPM3 contains the Best Practices designed to help organization to achieve that.

The OPM3 framework contains three interrelated components: Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes.

Best Practices include:

SMCI Best Practices - Standardize, Measure, Control and continuously Improve
Organizational Enabler Best Practices - structural, cultural, technological, and human resources.

A Capability is a specific competence that must exist in the organization to be able to execute project management processes. Development of Capabilities leads to Best Practices. These capabilities determine the organizational maturity.

An Outcome is a tangible or intangible result of applying a capability.

OPM3 maturity assessment can help organization to see which Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes an organization has and reveal about the organization's maturity level. Based on the assessment an organization can create an improvement plan.

Resource: PMI, Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), Knowledge Foundation.

IT risks present in Corporate America today

2011-11-27T22:24:00.001-08:00

Corporate America has a wide range of IT risks today because most of business models have a dependency on IT. Depends on two strategic dimensions of how much the company relies on cost-effective, uninterrupted, secure, smoothly operating technology systems (referred as "defensive" IT), and how much the company relies on the IT for its competitive edge through systems that provide new value-added services and products or high responsiveness to customers ("offensive" IT), and also on the role of IT, and IT governance in the company, following risk factors can be identified.

• Proper security of IT networks within and outside the company.

• Service outage because of the power failure or natural disaster.

• Inadequate disaster recovery or business continuity measures.

• IT-related surprises coming from lax or ineffective project management. The larger IT projects - the higher the risk.

• Problems with IT-related activities outsourced to 3rd party vendors.

• Legacy systems can present surprises of incompatibility with newer systems or the way of the processing the information.

• Legal problems can arise around the intellectual property issues related to IT.

• Missing the fresh threads and opportunity of using leading-edge technology applications that competitors switch to.

• Risk that IT investments don't create a business value for the organization.

• Aligning of IT assets with the concurrent needs of multiple regulations. Example: data retention, information protection.

• Insufficient number of IT staff.

• IT staff with inadequate skills.

• Lack of agility/development problems.

• Problems with document content and knowledge management.

• Electronic archiving or storage problems.

• Privacy incidents.

• IT infrastructure is inadequate to meet the current and future needs of business in a cost-effective and timely manner.

The Global business faces probably the majority of all possible IT risks. Establishing the adequate IT governance can help to mitigate or eliminate most of risks.

Resource:

Applegate, L.M., Austin, R.D., Soule, D.L. (2009). Corporate information strategy and management: McGraw-Hill.

IT Impact on Organizations

2011-11-16T17:09:00.001-08:00

Many organizations are struggling to understand the reality of an economic transition from the industrial economy to a global network economy. In this new reality organizations must become much more agile, innovative, and entrepreneurial and not loosing the efficiency, power, and reach. Choosing the right business model become very challenging. How to build the capabilities that would align the organization with the environment and the chosen strategy to quickly and effectively respond to opportunities and threads. Most executives confront problems that they do not wish to sacrifice efficiency for speed; neither can they abandon authority and control as they empower others. It can be characterized by wish: "we want to be global and local, big and small, and radically decentralized with centralized reporting and control."

Many researches suggests that IT was seen as a key enabler of controlling operations while also providing real-time information analytical tools. In 1950s and 1960s some of the hybrid organizational solution model, matrix,emerged. Companies that adopted these approach had the same drive as we have now days: need to be adoptive, information-intensive, team-based, collaborative, and empowered. But companies that adopted the hybrid design of the 1960s through 1980s soon learned that the new structures and systems bred conflict, confusion, information overload, and costly duplication of resources. Over past decades, strategic thinking has outdistances organizational capabilities. One of the "lessons learned" why matrix organizations didn't succeed in the past was understating about organization's inability to provide and manage timely information. All pressure of handling complexity was put on managers directly. They would have dazzling array of conflicting information.
Only the now days IT can provide the capabilities of meeting the information challenge and making the matrix organizational structure successful.
Some other important "lessons learned" from the past:

Speed counts, but not at the expense of control.The faster the pace, the greater the need to monitor business operations and clearly define and enforce the rules of the road.
Empowerment is not anarchy. The isolated efforts to empower employees can lead to disaster when not accompanied by more comprehensive redefinition of authority and control through organization.
Transforming an organization requires more than just changing the structure.

For the success there should be a comprehensive approach to organization design that includes analysis and realignment of capabilities within four key areas of business model design: processes and infrastructure, people and partners, organization and culture, and leadership and governance. Improved access to information and high-capacity networked communication systems are core elements of redesign in all four areas.

Resource: Applegate, L. Corporate Information Strategy and Management. 2009.

Lean Six Sigma: a foundation for innovation

2011-11-12T21:17:00.001-08:00

Lean approaches focus on reducing cost through process optimization. Six Sigma is about meeting customer requirements and stakeholder expectations, and improving quality by measuring and eliminating defects.

However, Lean Six Sigma’s goal is growth, not just cost-cutting. Its aim is effectiveness, not just efficiency. In this way, a Lean Six Sigma approach drives organizations not just to do things better but to do better things.
Here are several questions:

• Do you have a clear vision of where you want your company to be in two years? In
five years? In ten years?
• How closely tied is this vision to the needs of your current and target customers? And is your understanding of these needs based on actual assessments or assumed information?
• Will this vision require innovations in your business model? In your products or services? In your markets?
• What will you need to do at the operational level to enable and drive these innovations?
• To support innovation, what changes will be required to your management approach, organizational structures, metrics and skills?
• How are you making innovation happen more systematically? Are you establishing
the right environment?

Resources: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/at/bcs/pdf/br-stragchan-driving-inno.pdf

Project Management: Implementation and Best Practices at Sitecore.net - Dreamcore Europe 2011, London

2011-11-12T11:08:00.001-08:00

I made a presentation at Sitecore developer's and customer's conference "Dreamcore Europe 2011" in June 2011, in London, about project management experience on sitecore.net. Link to the presentation video

Changes in Human Resource Management

2011-10-13T23:20:00.000-07:00

I am reading about a history of business processes' development. Some business processes are hundred years old and some have emerged as a result of new technologies and IT in particularly. Below is a process view and the resulting organizational structure.

Organizational Focus

Employees are the problem
Employee
Doing my job
Understanding my job
Measuring individuals
Change the person
Can always find the better employees
Motivate people
Don't trust anyone
Who made the error?
Correct errors
Bottom-line driven

Process Focus

The process is the problem
People
Help to do things done
Knowing how my job fits into the process
Measuring the process
Change the process
Can always improve the process
Remove barriers
We are all in this together
Why did the error occur?
Reduce variations and special cases
Customer driven

I think it is fascinating and quite different from traditional approaches for human resources treatment.

Free SEO Toolkit

2011-10-08T21:11:00.001-07:00

Pretty cool SEO tollkit can be downloded from Misrosoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo

LEVERAGE IT TO CREATE BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

2011-09-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

Part IV
Analyzing Value

Company business value evaluation can be done by looking at its financial statements. Financial ratios that involves comparison with other companies and historical performance are used to provide answers to questions regarding the economics of the business model. These ratios can help to understand the impact of the strategic decisions. Example of the financial metric is using the DuPont Formula to determine return on equity (ROE):

ROE = (Profit margin)*(Asset turnover)*(Equity multiplier) = (Net profit/Sales)*(Sales/Assets)*(Assets/Equity)= (Net Profit/Equity)

ROE is important to understand business model performance.

If company is growing rapidly the financial return is not enough to understand its value. Drivers for value creation needs to be understood. The ability to offer value-added services to customers can be a key driver to revenue growth.

In business model value audit there are 3 ares which are listed below.

Identify internal and external stakeholders: assess the internal and external stakeholders interests and expectations. Question to answer:

What do stakeholders require and what they are willing or able to provide?
Can company attract, retain, and motivate key customers?
Are these customers willing and able to pay?
How do the interests of other stakeholder groups (e.g. employees, partners,
government, society)
What are the objective and subjective benefits that every key stakeholder receives while doing business with the company?

Identify business model drivers and alignments: assess the insights gained. Questions to answer:

What are the key opportunities and threads identified during the strategy audit?
What are the key strength and weaknesses during capability audit?

The SWOT analysis can help to identify key revenue, cost, and asset efficiency drivers. If you develop a business model dashboard, you can show the linkage and alignments between different components. You can identify how IT can help to enable every key driver of economic value.

Develop the financial model and determine financial needs: - after the business model drivers and value delivered to key stakeholders is identified, you can develop the financial model for the company.

In summary, the power of business model audit comes from linkage between strategy, capability and value drivers of business performance. According to S. Shapiro, when strategy, capabilities and value are aligned with each other and external environment, a business model can create a "virtuous cycle" of innovation, productivity and increasing returns. The contemporary dynamics of business models makes it even more important to understand these linkage to be able to adjust to the environment.

Resources:
L. Applegate, R. Austin, D. Soule. Corporate Information Strategy and Management, 2009

LEVERAGE IT TO CREATE BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

2011-09-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

Part III
Analyzing Capabilities

After strategic goals are defined, the next step is to get resources to build capabilities needed to achieve these goals. Capabilities let company fulfill the current strategy and to grow.

A business model capability audit frames analysis in the four areas:

Analyze processes and infrastructure: includes evaluation of core operating processes to produce products, deliver services, acquire and serve customers, manage relationship with key stakeholders and deliver innovations. It also includes analysis of processes where company involved with suppliers, customers, and partners. Then a question "do end-to-end support processes (payroll, finance, HR, etc.) enable the efficient and effective strategy execution?' should be answered. "Do participants at all levels have needed information and infrastructure required to support them? Are operations defined as the best in class for speed, quality, cost, and production? Is IT structured to form the foundation for execution? IT should not only enable firms to coordinate activities and share information within the organization and across extended network of suppliers, customers and partners, but also let have an up to day current information for executive to take action which will create value,

Evaluate people and partners: with all core processes defined company needs to identify if there is needed expertise withing company resources and how easy it it to attract, develop, motivate, and retain the expertise to carry the core processes execution. Some questions to answer:

Does company have the image to attracts talents?
Are culture and incentives in place to enable leadership to engage and inspire?
Are performance targets, measurements systems, rewards, and punishments in place to provide fairness and transparency?

Examples of salesforce quality and productivity measurements are sales per employee, customer retention per employee, and customer profitability per employee. IT is a tool for increasing business intelligence.

Assess organization and culture: identify if organization design makes it easy or harder fro people to make decisions and get work done. Questions to answer:

Do people have grouped into right units?
Do they have accountability authorities to make their decisions about the work they are doing to meet performance targets?
Are roles and responsibilities are clear?
Are mechanisms like formal reporting relationship, steering committees and liaison positions, information and communication systems in place to coordinate work across units?
Does the informal culture support individuals and groups?
Do shared visions and values enable employees and partners to work effectively together?
Does everyone understand boundaries for decision making and actions beyond which they should not cross?

The ability to use IT to supports sharing information related to above challenges and monitor decisions and actions makes company agile and flexible to changes.

Evaluate leadership and governance: assess the level of company's leadership strength. Effective leaders use governance structure and system that includes:

strategic control - observing the environment, determining strategic positions, setting goals, prioritizing projects and investments
operating control - setting clear short-term objectives, and controlling business operations and projects
effective risk management - identification and management of key risks
effective development and management of the shared culture and values that helps in decision making

Questions to answer:

Have leaders communicated compelling and clear vision for the future that unites people and partners around common goals?
Do leaders at all levels balance creativity and innovation with disciplined execution?
Can they set goals and deliver results?
Are leaders well connected and have they demonstrated a track record of success?
Are there a high-performing board of directors and an executive team that closely monitor strategic and operating performance/
Do the board and executive team have a systems in place to identify and manage risks while also ensuring that the organization's culture and values guide decisions and behavior levels?

Resources:
L. Applegate, R. Austin, D. Soule. Corporate Information Strategy and Management, 2009

LEVERAGE IT TO CREATE BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

2011-09-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

Part II
Analyzing Strategy

Analysis include 4 areas:

Assess business context: helps define company's boundary positioning by analyzing the industry’s trend's and disruptors, by defining what opportunities can be pursued and their associated risks, and sorting out the opportunities that will not be pursued. It provides the high level of industry understanding. It helps framing choices concerning company's boundary’s positioning. It also include analysis and identification of IT trends, disruptors, opportunities and risks.

Analyze customers: includes analysis of current and future customers by identifying pressing customer's problems and determination how existing and future products and services can resolve these problems. It is done by talking and observing customers, involve them in designing the products. The goal is to help framing the choices regarding a company's market positioning. IT solutions for collection the a real time data and interact with future and current customers is an important foundation for market positioning decisions.

Analyze competitors and substitutes: helps understand what alternatives customers have, which firms offers different solution, how different this solutions are, how much customers are willing to pay. The goal is to help framing the choices regarding a company's product positioning. IT can serve as a source of differentiation and proprietary advantage.

Assess the business network: analyzes the network of suppliers, distributors and other partners who will be included to implement the strategy. It helps frame more choices regarding the role a company plays and its positioning within business network.

Resources:
L. Applegate, R. Austin, D. Soule. Corporate Information Strategy and Management, 2009

LEVERAGE IT TO CREATE BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

2011-09-07T22:52:00.000-07:00

PART 1
A good business model is essential to every successful business.

During the previous century the well-established business model was used by most executives to drive their companies. Dot-com era destroyed this model. In today's global network economy new business models are emerging. Radical changes how companies create value within industry requires a new management tools to define strategy and its execution - framework of a business model. IT has great impacts on the three components of a business model - strategy, capabilities, and value. It plays bigger roles in transforming business models.

Business Model definition:

A business model defines how an organization interacts with its environment to define a unique strategy, attract the resources and build the capabilities required to execute the strategy, and create value for all stakeholders.

There are fundamental principles how to run a sustainable business. Using these fundamentals is very important during the turbulent time. An enterprise's business model frames these fundamentals. It can be used for strategic analysis and decision making. It also used to assess the IT impact on the business.

Strategy:

According to Michael Porter, strategy is a set of choices that determine the opportunities you pursue and the market potential of these choices.

These choices define strategic positioning along four key dimensions:
• Market positioning - customers to serve and channels to reach the customers
• Product positioning - products and services to offer and the price to be charged
• Business network positioning - role within extended network of suppliers, producers, distributors, and partners
• Boundary positioning - markets, products, and businesses that will NOT be pursued.

A successful positioning attracts many copy cats. Sustainable advantage happens when barrier for entrance is high and it is difficult for competitors to imitate.

Business model audit can by done by analyzing strategy, capabilities, and value created for all stakeholders.

Resources:

L. Applegate, R. Austin, D. Soule. Corporate Information Strategy and Management, 2009

New aspect of looking at innovation - say no to 1000 different things and concentrate on the essence.

2011-05-22T01:45:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs: Get rid of the crappy stuff, Article by Carmine Gallo, Forbes

Main thoughts that I liked in this article are:
- Get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.
- While anyone can learn the principles that drive Apple’s innovation, few businesses have the courage to do so.
- A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Your customers demand simplicity and simplicity requires that you eliminate anything that clutters the user experience — whether it be in product design, website navigation, marketing and advertising materials and presentation slides.
- Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.

Microsoft Project 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010

2011-05-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

Resource: TecEd

Tech Ed provides the most comprehensive technical education across Microsoft's current and soon-to-release suite of products, solutions and services.