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Innovation [2010-02-01]

2010/02/01 in Innovation, Mailing List by peg | Comments

Another week and another collection of interesting ideas from around the internet.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

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Why we can’t keep up

2009/06/22 in Business-Technology by peg | Comments

We’re struggling to keep up. The pace of business seems to be constantly accelerating. Requirements don’t just slip anymore: they can change completely during the delivery of a solution. And the application we spent the last year nudging over the line into production became instant legacy before we’d even finished. We know intuitively that only a fraction of the benefits written into the business case will be realized. What do we need to do to get back on top of this situation?

We used to operate in a world where applications were delivered on time and on budget. One where the final solution provided a demonstrable competitive advantage to the business. Like SABER, and airline reservation system developed for American Airlines by IBM which was so successful that the rest of the industry was forced to deploy similar solutions (which IBM kindly offered to develop) in response. Or Walmart, who used a data warehouse to drive category leading supply chain excellence, which they leveraged to become the largest retailer in the world. Both of these solutions were billion dollar investments in todays money.

The applications we’ve delivered have revolutionized information distribution both within and between organizations. The wave of data warehouse deployments triggered by Walmart’s success formed the backbone for category management. By providing suppliers with a direct feed from the data warehouse—a view of supply chain state all the way from the factory through to the tills—retailers were able to hand responsibility for transport, shelf-stacking, pricing and even store layout for a product category to their suppliers, resulting in a double digit rises in sales figures.

This ability to rapidly see and act on information has accelerated the pulse of business. What used to take years now takes months. New tools such as Web 2.0 and pervasive mobile communications are starting to convert these months into week.

Take the movie industry for example. Back before the rise of the Internet even bad films could expect a fair run at the box-office, given a star billing and strong PR campaign too attract the punters. However, post Internet, SMS and Twitter, the bad reviews have started flying into punters hands moments after the first screening of a film has started, transmitted directly from the first audience. Where the studios could rely a month or of strong returns, now that run might only last hours.

To compensate, the studios are changing how they take films to market; running more intensive PR campaigns for their lesser offerings, clamping down on leaks, and hoping to make enough money to turn a small profit before word of mouth kicks in. Films are launched, distributed and released to DVD (or even iTunes) in weeks rather than months or years, and studios’ funding, operations and the distribution models are being reconfigured to support the accelerated pace of business.

While the pulse of business has accelerated, enterprise technology’s pulse rate seems to have barely moved. The significant gains we’ve made in technology and methodologies has been traded for the ability to build increasingly complex solutions, the latest being ERP (enterprise resource planning) whose installation in a business is often compared to open heart surgery.

The Diverging Pulse Rates of Business and Technology

This disconnect between the pulse rates of business and enterprise technology is the source of our struggle. John Boyd found his way to the crux of the problem with his work on fighter tactics.

John Boyd—also know as “40 second Boyd”—was a rather interesting bloke. He had a standing bet for 40 dollars that he beat any opponent within 40 seconds in a dog fight. Boyd never lost his bet.

The key to Boyd’s unblemished record was a single insight: that success in rapidly changing environment depends on your ability to orient yourself, decide on, and execute a course of action, faster than the environment (or your competition) is changing. He used his understanding of the current environment—the relative positions, speed and performance envelopes of both planes—to quickly orient himself then select and act on a tactic. By repeatedly taking decisive action faster than his opponent can react, John Boyd’s actions were confusing and unpredictable to his opponent.

We often find ourselves on the back foot, reacting to seemingly chaotic business environment. To overcome this we need to increase the pulse of IT so that we’re operating at a higher pace than the business we support. Tools like LEAN software development have provided us with a partial solution, accelerating the pulse of writing software, but if we want to overcome this challenge then we need to find a new approach to managing IT.

Business, however, doesn’t have a single pulse. Pulse rate varies by industry. It also varies within a business. Back office compliance runs at a slow rate, changing over years as reporting and regulation requirements slowly evolve. Process improvement and operational excellence programs evolve business processes over months or quarters to drive cost out of the business. While customer or knowledge worker facing functionality changes rapidly, possibly even weekly, in response to consumer, marketing or workforce demands.

Aligning technology with business

We can manage each of these pulses separately. Rather than using a single approach to managing technology and treating all business drivers as equals, we can segment the business and select management strategies to match the pulse rate and amplitude of each.

Sales, for example, is often victim of an over zealous CRM (customer relationship management) deployment. In an effort to improve sales performance we’ll decide to role out the latest-greatest CRM solution. The one with the Web 2.0 features and funky cross-sell, up-sell module.

Only of a fraction of the functionality in the new CRM solution is actually new though—the remainder being no different to the existing solution. The need to support 100% of the investment on the benefits provided by a small fraction of the solution’s features dilutes the business case. Soon we find ourselves on the same old roller-coaster ride, with delivery running late,  scope creeping up, the promised benefits becoming more intangible every minute, and we’re struggling to keep up.

There might be an easier way. Take the drugs industry for example. Sales are based on relationships and made via personal calls on doctors. Sales performance is driven by the number of sales calls a representative can manage in a week, and the ability to answer all of a doctor’s questions during a visit (and avoid the need for a follow-up visit to close the sale). It’s not uncommon for tasks unrelated to CRM—simple tasks such as returning to the office to process expenses or find an answer to a question—to consume a disproportionate amount of time. Time that would be better spent closing sales.

One company came up with an interesting approach. To support the sales reps in the field they provided them with the ability to query the team back in the office, answering a clients question without the need to return to head office and then try to get back in their calendar. The solution was to deploy a corporate version of Twitter, connecting the sales rep into the with the call center and all staff using the company portal via a simple text message.

By separating concerns in this way—by managing each appropriately—we can ensure that we are working at a faster pace than the business driver we supporting. By allocating our resources wisely we can set the amplitude of each pulse. Careful management of the cycles will enable us to bring business and technology into alignment.

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What we’re doing today is not what we did yesterday

2009/05/22 in Business-Technology by peg | Comments

Telxon

Telxon hand unit

The business of IT has changed radically in the last few years. Take Walmart for example. In the 80s Walmart laid the foundations for its future growth by fielding a supply chain data warehouse. The insight the data warehouse fueled their amazing growth to become the largest retailer in the world. However, our focus has moved on from developing applications. More recently Walmart fielded the Telxon, a barcode scanner with a wireless link to the corporate back-end. This device is the front end of a distributed solution which has let Walmart devolve buying decisions to the team walking the shop floor.

For a long time IT departments have defined themselves by their ability to deliver major applications into the enterprise. CRM, MRP, even ERP; all the three letter acronyms. For a long time this has been the right thing to do. Walmart’s data warehouse, to return to our example, was a large application which was a significant driver in the company’s outlier performance for the next couple of decades.

The world has changed a lot since that data warehouse went operational. First the market for enterprise applications grew into the mature market we see today. If you have a well defined problem—an unsupported business activity—then a range of vendors will line up to provide you with off-the-shelf solutions. Next we saw a range of non-technology options emerge, from business process outsourcing (BPO) and leveraging partnerships, through to emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

What used to be a big problem—fielding a large bespoke (or even off-the-shelf) application—has become a (relatively) small one. Take CRM (customer relationship management) as one example. What was a multi-year project requiring an investment of tens of millions of dollars to deploy a best-of-breed on-premises solution, has become a few million dollar and a matter of months to field SaaS solution. And the SaaS solutions seem to be pulling ahead in the feature-function war; Salesforce.com (one of the early SaaS CRM solutions) is now seen as the market leader (check with your favorite analyst).

Nor has business been standing still while technology has been marching forward. The productivity improvements provided by the last generation of enterprise applications have created the time and space for business stakeholders to solve more difficult problems. That supply chain solution Walmart deployed that was the first of many, automating most (if not all) of the mundane tasks across the supply chain. Business process methodologies such as LEAN (derived from the Toyota Production System) and Six Sigma (from GE) then rolled through the business, ripping all the fat from our supply chains as they went past. The latest focus has been category management: managing groups of product as separate businesses and, in many chases, handing responsibility for managing the category back to the supplier.

Which brings us back to the Telxon. If we’ve all been on the same journey—fielding a complete set of applications, optimizing our business processes, and deploying the latest, best practice, management techniques—then how do we differentiate? Walmart realized that, all things being equal, it was their ability to respond to supply chain exceptions that would provide them with an edge. As a retailer, this means responding to stock-outs on the shop floor. The only way to do this in a timely manner is to empower the people walking the floor to make a procurement decision when they see fit. Walmart’s solution was the Telxon.

The Telxon is an interesting device as it reveals an astonishing amounts of information: the quantity that should be on the shelf, the availability from the nearest warehouse, the retail price, and even the markup. It also empowers the employee to place an order for anything from a pallet to a truck-load.

Writer

Writer Charles Platt during his stint as a Wal-Mart employee in Flagstaff, Ariz.

As one journalist found:

We received an inspirational talk on this subject, from an employee who reacted after the store test-marketed tents that could protect cars for people who didn’t have enough garage space. They sold out quickly, and several customers came in asking for more. Clearly this was a singular, exceptional case of word-of-mouth, so he ordered literally a truckload of tent-garages, “Which I shouldn’t have done really without asking someone,” he said with a shrug, “because I hadn’t been working at the store for long.” But the item was a huge success. His VPI was the biggest in store history—and that kind of thing doesn’t go unnoticed in Arkansas.

Charles Platt, Fly on the Wall (7th Feb 2009), New Your Post

Clearly the IT world has moved on since that first data warehouse went live in Arkansas. Enterprise applications have been transformed from generators of competitive advantage into efficient sources of commodity functionality. Technology’s ability to create value should be focused on how we effectively support knowledge workers and the differentiation they create. These solutions only have a passing resemblance to the application monoliths of the past. They’re distributed, rather than centralized, pulling information from a range of sources, including partner and public sources. They’re increasingly real time, in the Twitter sense of the term, pulling current transactional data in as needed rather than working from historical data and relying on overnight ETLs. They’re heterogeneous, integrating a range of technologies as well as changes in business processes and employee workplace agreements, all brought together for delivery of the final solution. And, most importantly, they’re not standalone n-tier applications like we built in the past.

But while the IT world has moved on, it seems that many of our IT departments haven’t. Our heritage as application factories has us focused on managing applications, rather than technology, actively preventing us from creating this new generation of solutions. This behavior is ingrained in our organizations, with a large number of architects through project managers to senior management measuring their worth by the size of the project (in terms of CAPEX and OPEX required, or head count) that they are involved in, with the counter productive behavior that this creates.

In a world where solutions are shrinking and becoming more heterogeneous (even to the extent of becoming increasingly cross discipline) our inability to change ourselves is the biggest thing holding us back

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The Value of Enterprise Architecture

2009/05/07 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Presentations by peg | Comments

Is Enterprise Architecture in danger of becoming irrelevant? And if so, what can we do about it?

Presented as part of RMIT’s Master of Technology (Enterprise Architecture) course.

The Value of Enterprise Architecture  

The Value of Enterprise Architecture

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Managing technology, not applications

2008/10/13 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | Comments

For some time we’ve been focused on the quest of slaying the business-technology alignment dragon. We don’t seem to have succeeded—at least not very often. Worse still, the rules of the game seem to be changing as we speak. Rather than manage IT as a large capital expense and asset, aligning business and IT by aligning investment, some companies are working to find and exploit the synergies between the two. Craig’s List is taking a significant chunk of the global classified advertisement market with a staff of 20 people, while Threadless is a case study of applying similar ideas to the old world business of designing, manufacturing and selling t-shirts. These organizations are so lean that they are virtually impossible to compete against.

How do they do it? What are the insights they are finding? Where are they finding them? And, most importantly, what can we learn from them? We’ve started this email as a platform to share some of our thinking. Hopefully this will provide inspiration for applying some ideas from these new school players thinking to our old school organizations.

Manage technology, not applications

We’re getting it all wrong—we focused on managing the technology delivery process rather than the technology itself. Where do business process outsourcing (BPO), software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and partner organisations sit in our IT strategy? All too often we focus on the delivery of large IT assets into our enterprise, missing the opportunity to leverage leaner disruptive solutions that could provide a significantly better outcome for the business.

IT departments are, by tradition, inward looking asset management functions. Initially this was a response to the huge investment and effort required to operate early mainframe computers, while more recently it has been driven by the effort required to develop and maintain increasingly complex enterprise applications. We’ve organised our IT departments around the activities we see as key to being a successful asset manager: business analysis, software development & integration, infrastructure & facilities, and project or programme management. The result is a generation of IT departments closely aligned with the enterprise application development value-chain, as we focus on managing the delivery of large IT assets into the enterprise.

Building our IT departments as enterprise application factories has been very successful, but the maturation of applications over the last decade and recent emergence of approaches like SaaS means that it has some distinct limitations today. An IT department that defines itself in terms of managing the delivery of large technology assets tends to see a large technology asset as the solution to every problem. Want to support a new pricing strategy? Need to improve cross-sell and up-sell? Looking for ways to support the sales force while in the field? Upgrade to the latest and greatest CRM solution from your vendor of choice. The investment required is grossly out of proportion with the business benefit it will bring, making it difficult to engage with the rest of the business who view IT as a cost centre rather than an enabler.



Figure 1

Unfortunately the structure of many of our IT departments—optimised to create large IT assets—actively prohibits any other approach. More incremental or organic approaches to meeting business needs are stopped before they even get started, killed by an organisation structure and processes that impose more overhead than they can tolerate.

Applications were rare and expensive during most of enterprise IT’s history, but today they are plentiful and (comparativly) cheap. Software as a Service (SaaS) is also emerging to provide best of breed functionality but with a utillity delivery model; leveraging an externally managed service and paying per use, rather requiring capital investment in an IT asset to provide the service internally. Our focus is increasingly turned to ensuring that business processes and activities are supported with an appropriate level of technology, leveraging solutions from traditional enterprise applications through to SaaS, outsourced solutions or even bespoke elements where we see fit. We need to be focused on managing technology enablement, rather than IT assets, and many IT departments are responding to this by reorganising their operations to explore new strategies for managing IT.

Central to this new generation of IT departments is a sound understanding of how the business needs to operate—what it wants to be famous for. The old technology centric departmental roles are being deprecated, replaced with business centric roles. One strategy is to focus on Operational Excellence, Technology Enablement and Contract Management. A number of Chief Process Officer (CPO) roles are created as part of the Operational Excellence team, each focusing on optimising one or more end-to-end processes. The role is defined and measured by the business outcomes it will deliver rather than by the technology delivery process. CPOs are also integrating themselves with organisation wide business improvement and operational excellence initiatives, taking a proactive stance with the business instead of reactively waiting for the business to identify a need.



Figure 2

The Technology Enablement team works with Operational Excellence to deliver the right level of technology required to support the business. Where Operational Excellence looks out into the business to gain a better understanding of how the business functions, Technology Enablement looks out into the technology community to understand what technologies and approaches can be leveraged to create the most suitable solution. (As opposed to traditional, inward focused IT department concerned with developing and managing IT assets.) These solutions can range from SaaS through to BPO, AM (application management), custom development or traditional on-premises applications. However, the mix of solutions used will change over time as we move from today’s application centric enterprise IT to new process driven approaches. Solutions today are dominated by enterprise applications (most likely via BPO or AM), but increasingly shifting to utility models such as SaaS as these offerings mature.

Finally a contract management team is responsible for managing the contractual & financial obligations, and service level agreements between the organisation and suppliers.

One pronounced effect of a strongly business focused IT organisation is the externalisation of many asset management activities. Rather than trying to be good at everything needed to deliver a world class IT estate, and ending up beginning good at nothing, the department focuses its energies on only those activities that will have the greatest impact on the business. Other activities are supported by a broad partner ecosystem: systems integrators to install applications, outsourcers for application management and business process outsourcing, and so on. Rather than ramping up for a once-in-four-year application renewal—an infrequent task for which the department has trouble retaining expertise—the partner ecosystem ensures that the IT department has access to organisations whose core focus is installing and running applications, and have been solving this problem every year for the last four years.

This approach allows the IT department to concentrate on what really matters for the business to succeed. Its focus and expertise is firmly on the activities that will have the greatest impact on the business, while a broad partner ecosystem provides world class support for the activities that it cannot afford to develop world class expertise in. Rather than representing a cost centre in the business, the IT department can be seen as an enabler, working with other business to leverage new ideas and capabilities and drive the enterprise forward.

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