StrAIT Blogging

Archive for the ‘Observations’ Category

Well I’m back on a social media post. I know, I know, I promised the last post on social media was my last post on social media. So shoot me (just kidding). I just attended a webinar put on by HubSpot and the American Marketing Association. It reminded me of one of my blogging hot buttons. One of the recommended best practices in blogging is to specify keywords in the metadata, i.e., data describing the post but not visible in the post that you can see. Then the author uses them as much as possible in the body of the post. This is supposedly a good thing for search engines to see in the post. I suppose that it tells them that the author is talking about what he claims he’s going to talk about. When I do that, my wording sounds forced and artificial. Some people can write that way and it sounds natural. I suppose that when I’m writing that way I feel artificial, so that’s the way it comes out. Excessive wordsmithing can be a bad thing.

Raisin Bran

The presentation also included some interesting ways to categorize blog posts. I have included some of the slides from the presentation. The first category is Rasin Bran. This metaphor speaks to the most basic form of blog post. The presenter told us that they are typically small but useful posts, typically providing “how to” type information. While I don’t write as many of these as the presenter recommends, I do try to make mine useful. The slide tells us to be able to “whip these out”. To be honest, it’s unlikely that I pop out posts as quickly as this slide would imply. I have to catagorize my posts as more of a cup of rasin bran than a bowl.

Spinach

This category of posts are intended to be more thoughtful and be intended to establish a reputation as a thought leader for the author. I confess that is one of my goals. My goal is not so much to be an academic wizard on the technology but to be a practical voice for the use of technology to derive real business benefits. I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about a subject, mapping the major points back to my own experience and applying some common sense in my recommendations. The slide tells me to not do too many of them. Well, this category has been my bread and butter (no pun intended) since I started my blog. I guess that gives me a dinner plate full of spinach or a smaller plate if it’s steamed.

Roasts

This category implies a post that is more like a whitepaper or some other more serious academic work. While I don’t think this is my style, some of my posts have drifted in this direction. Typically, if I feel strongly about a topic and feel that my experience is particularly valuable, I may generate more words than normal. This is fairly rare but they are definitely here. It is impractical to make this the norm because they are more work, especially if I have to create diagrams or illustrations. These topics tend to focus on managing people, organizational communications and aligning technology to the needs of its customers. These are core issues in the successful alignment of technology to business process and aligning those business processes to a clients business goals (“alignment” is one of my keywords but maybe I’ll get credit for “aligning” as well).

Tobasco and Chocolate Cake

I’ve grouped these last two together since I don’t intentionally do many of either of these. The Tobasco category implies making inflamitory statements that promote a lot of comments. I suppose I should do more of these type of posts but I’ve never been one to say inflamitory things just to get a rise out of people. That’s never seemed like a useful thing to do. I seem to be able to be mildly inflamitory without even trying and the purpose of this blog is to be a useful reference for my viewers.

I think that this post is probably as close to Chocolate Cake as any post I’ve written. It has nothing to do with any type of alignment (there’s that keyword again) and probably isn’t that useful in running an organization. The Chocolate Cake slide recommends using video and images. Well these slides are images and videos of raw food doesn’t sound like the thing to do. However, I must admit that I am having fun writing this and I’m not being all that serious. I guess that means this post is mostly Chocolate Cake with a side of Spinach. If you like thise slides here is a link to more HubSpot presentations.

The presentation also said that a good post should be between 500 and 800 words. This one is slightly over 800 words, so it’s time to shut it down before the blog police come for me. I hope this post was a good mix of Chocolate Cake and Spinach for you. See you next time…

I moderated a panel at an event here in Houston today. The event was our local TechExecs CIO Panel Forum and covered Cloud 2.0 topics. I have been writing about similar topics in recent posts on this blog. See a security focused example here. Prior to our panel segment, we heard from several vendors mostly talking about cloud technology. There was quite a bit of good information presented and I learned that several vendors have been making more progress in the maturity of their products and services than I had given them credit for.

For example, one of the vendors was layeredtech. An intriguing notion in their presentation was the idea of a Virtual Private Data Center, or VPDC. While this acronym seems to be a natural extension of virtualization and cloud technologies that have been around for a while now the acronym is actually fairly new. My simple metric for that assessment is that there is no listing in Wikipedia for VPDC or Virtual Private Data Center (heads up layeredtech, you should fix that). The attraction of a VPDC is the notion of a holistic, virtualized data center that can dramatically simplify corporate IT life and lower costs for large, mid-size and small companies is compelling. The ability to quickly adapt a data center to align a company’s data center to better align with business process changes is music to my ears.

Another example was from iland. The presentation today discussed cloud-based disaster recovery. While that idea has been around a while and there are multiple vendors offering similar services, I found it interesting how well thought out their presentation was. It was just another indication to me of growing maturity. If you haven’t considered this scenario for disaster recovery yet, I suggest it’s time to do so.

Our panelists represented primarily larger and mid-sized companies. My overall impression from their comments was that they had well thought out opinions on each topic that not long ago were considered quite controversial. Remember, the Gartner Hype Cycle chart referenced in my security focused post mentioned above is new information. It still shows cloud computing at the peak of inflated expectations with some amount of negative hype still ahead. Our panelists were all highly competent professionals. There comments reflected well considered opinions about cloud security and value to their businesses. My overall conclusion from today’s event is that cloud computing has matured to the point of acceptable risks for people whose necks are on the line for such decisions. That’s a big deal.

I suggest that you catch a TechExecs event in a city near you. They don’t require much travel and only last half a day. Yet they are still able to provide useful information and a good networking opportunity. And as we all know, the moderators are really the big draw. It’s their witty way of reading printed questions, shutting up and listening for someone else to deliver the wisdom. I do the shut up part really well.

Thanks for stopping by. Until next time…

What kind of title is “Herding Consultants 2.0″? I suppose for search engine optimization reasons I should have used “aligning” instead of “herding” but at some point the whole alignment theme can get boring. I’ll stick with “herding” this time. Having been on both sides of the consulting table leads to some firm convictions about what that means in an era of highly available sources of judgment and advice. In the “old” days (before the late 1990′s) consultants found consultants based on their business offerings, sales campaigns and contacts. A relationship was built based on repeated personal contact. The competitive differentiator was the consultant’s previous work and their skills inventory. That ultimately led to a “resume bake off” when consultants competed for your business. That model is still viable to a large extent.

A new model has appeared over the last few years based on Internet based tools and virtual presence. Blogs have grown rapidly and any consultant worth his salt has one (me included). We use some tool to subscribe to the blogs that interest us, such as our email clients, browsers or any number of other tools. My preference is a tool called BlogBridge. That keeps the blog posts out of my inbox which reduces clutter and makes them easy to scan. The end result is that I now have subscribed to many blogs. I did that because there are many topics about which I want to stay current or have an interest. That creates a need to assign levels of credibility to each blog. BlogBridge makes the assignment of a ranking very easy. It’s the deciding on a rank that’s hard.

My current technique is to look over my “herd” of consultant blogs to spot trends. Once I do that I decide if I’m in agreement with the consensus. If not, I research the topic more to validate my opinions. I’m not trying to be a technical expert but I am trying to understand the topic well enough that I can offer my own options and judgment in a way that adds value for my target clients (C-level executives in mid-market manufacturing or manufacturing related service businesses who are trying to make decisions on the use and deployment of technology tools). I will then vet my opinions with a few people whose opinion I trust and who have differing backgrounds.

This just reinforces the point I have made before. It’s the personal relationships that matter most. It also reinforces the idea that there is just a huge amount of opinions and “experts” out there. Another way of “herding” all of the consultants you rely on for advice is to let the large consulting companies do it for you. For example, both Gartner and Forrester have become active bloggers. You can also just sign up with either of them and get even more information. Essentially, by relying on their blogs you are letting them do the vetting for you. There are other, smaller consulting groups like ebizQ and TechRepublic, which offer similar capabilities. I watch some consultants from each of these.

In summary, my point is that we need techniques to vet the web-based consultants we have all come to rely on. We each need to decide how much effort to apply to that vetting exercise and how to leverage our own personal networks. I have my approach and I recommend that you develop one that works for you.

Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…

Let’s start by being very clear. For any business everything must ultimately align to the success of that business, period. That being said we can now focus on how all of the various pieces that make up that business must align with each other. At a high level, it is obvious that all business activities must support each other for the business to be successful. However, what I have observed over the years is that alignment is easy to get lost in the multitude of daily pressing details that we must deal with. This thought was best captured in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In this book there is one diagram that has stuck with me over the years because it is direct and simple. It is shown in Figure 1.

 

 

  

  

 

 

  

  

Figure 1 Covey’s time management matrix
 

For more information on Covey’s teachings look here. In this diagram we see Quadrant I as the place where most of us spend much of our time. Quadrant II is where we need to spend most of our time. We need to manage our time such that we can spend more of it thinking about planning, relationships and collaboration. Spending our time here is where alignment happens. We won’t spend any time on Quadrants III and IV. We are wasting our time there.
So what else do we need to consider when aligning our business operations? I argue that we must first understand that all things technology can best be represented as a circle bisected into two parts. One part includes the tools; the hardware and software that enable our business to function. The other part includes how those tools are used to deliver real benefits to our business. Each of those parts is dominated by very different states of mind. Historically, IT has focused on tools and the business users focus on their application. There is overlap for each group as shown in Figure 2.

  

  

 

  

 

  

  

 

Figure 2   All things technology and interest groups

The overlap between the interests of those two groups is important. The end user group must understand the tools well enough to know what can actually be accomplished in a reasonable period of time and the IT group must understand the needs of the user group well enough to deliver useful tools. Orchestrating the communication between these two interest groups is an ongoing activity between end customers of the tools and those people who must deliver those tools to the marketplace. It is a painful and inefficient process constrained by the financial interests and negotiating positions of each group. It’s beneficial to each group to make this process more effective.
We must also consider the methodologies that are needed for the alignment of business improvement work. For this we will focus on two of the most representative methodologies for their respective interest groups. For the tool provider group we will use RUP, or Rational Unified Process, as the most used (in its multiple variations) and for the end user community the BPM-based methodologies. The overlap diagram is shown in Figure 3.

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

  

Figure 3   All things technology and improvement methodology overlap
 

The key difference here is that BPM is about addressing what business processes are needed and the functionality of the tools each business needs. On the other hand, RUP is focused on the effectiveness of software development. Delivering business process improvements will consist of new capabilities delivered by some combination of revising the current tools used by the business, buying new software and writing new software. Neither BPM nor RUP alone is suitable for doing that, so managing the overlap between those two families of methodologies is crucial.
 

Finally, there is the overlap between those groups responsible for the day-to-day operation of the tools and those responsible for their daily application. That overlap is shown in Figure 4.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

Figure 4 All things technology and daily operations
 

The group responsible for the delivery of those technology tools to the business, either internal IT or external, hosted providers is represented by the ITIL, or IT Infrastructure Library, framework. The group responsible for the daily use of those tools is represented by the various continuous improvement frameworks, such as Six Sigma. Each of these groups needs some framework around which to manage daily operation and incremental improvements. Again, managing the overlap of these two interest groups and their frameworks is extremely important.

In each of the cases above, managing the overlap of the various interest groups is a matter of ongoing communication. That communication must happen within an oversight group composed of representatives of each of the interest groups with shared vocabulary and skills inventory. None of the groups need to be experts in the other’s fields but they must commit to understanding the basic needs and issues. This can be a challenge in most organizations but it is vital if the business wants to improve.

Alignment is important and complex. It requires a commitment from a business’s leadership to insure ongoing communications between the core groups within the company. It requires a commitment to include vendors, external service providers and other external stake holders in that collaboration in a meaningful way. So how do you do that? The options are growing every day. There are portal frameworks, like SharePoint and WebSphere. There are peer-to-peer tools, like Groove and Notes. There are Web 2.0 tools, like Huddle and Zoho. The list goes on. Regardless of what tools you use, the ongoing collaboration between the consumers of technology tools and the providers of those tools, both in improvement activities and ongoing daily operations is vital.

Thanks for your attention. Stay tuned…

In thinking about this topic, it occurred to me that the core issue for me is really the visual representation of influence mapping and the transition from unstructured information to a more structured form. Initial ideas are rarely structured. They are organic, like the way we think. However, structured information, like lists, makes the implementation of those ideas much easier to execute. We use MindManager 8 from Mindjet for our mind mapping tool and to provide the transition to a more structured form for the information. You can check out their website for more information on that tool. You can also look here for more information on mind mapping in general. To make my point I have created an example containing three maps. Each map can represent a project, group activity or a methodology (a collection of methodologies is the case for us).

 

The solid black lines represent normal hierarchical relationships. The dotted lines represent connections of influence. For example, Topic B3 and Topic C3 both influence Topic A2. In our example, the bolder red dotted line represents more direct influence and the smaller blue dotted line represents less influence. You have to set your own standards, like bolder lines representing more influence or one color representing more influence than another. For StrAIT Advisors, our methodology needed to be influenced by other methodologies. A screen clipping is shown below to illustrate how that actually worked for us. 
 

In our case, the dotted blue lines represent the influence of one methodology on our SLR methodology. Some steps were consolidated while others were not influenced at all. After any fine tuning needed for an individual client, the map is exported to Microsoft Project for project execution. In your case, the influences could represent the relationships between projects being handled by your Project Management Office (PMO). Influences between projects are much easier to show on this type of diagram than on a project plan composed of both projects and subprojects. They are much easier to change as well. In a project plan, the connections between tasks are actual dependencies, not connections of influence. Influence is too subjective and vague of a relationship for a project plan.

The need to capture unstructured ideas in team brainstorming meetings or just a casual meeting between collaborators is a vital part of the genesis of change. The conversion of those unstructured ideas into actionable projects is the next vital step. The use of mind maps periodically during the course of any project can be very useful, even if the ideas captured are just stored for the future. You can update them when ideas for improvement occur to the project team.

My core point for this post is that ideas start as unstructured things but must eventually evolve to structured things. Knowing how that process will happen is a key to being successful and adaptable. Identify your tools of choice before your project begins and make sure your leadership has buy-in into your approach. It will help in building credibility and communicating during the course of your project.

I hope this post has been valuable.  Talk to you again later…