Project Delivery
Supporting IT and Business Alignment
MOF alignment diagram
IT infrastructure, applications and data storage have become inseparable from the implementation of business process for any modern business, regardless of size. Any company that wishes to improve their business processes must work with whoever supports their IT infrastructure very closely. As a result, there has been an increasing emphasis in the IT world to be more responsive to their customers. Several “frameworks” have emerged in recent years to help IT organizations do just that. A framework is a set of policies and business practices that forms the basis for the business processes of the IT organization. These standard frameworks can then be extended or modified to suit the needs of each specific company. Collectively these frameworks are referred to as the field of IT service management, or ITSM.
While our SLRSM methodology is not an IT framework it needs to accommodate the client’s IT organization and any ITSM framework or business practices it is using. To accomplish several ITSM frameworks were reviewed as to how they would interact with our methodology. They were COBIT 4.1, Val IT, ISO 20000, ITIL version 3 and the Microsoft Operations Framework version 4. We will be writing a white paper providing a comparison of these frameworks from a pragmatic, mid-size manufacturer’s perspective sometime in the future. For this post we will limit our perspective how the SLRSM methodology should map to them.
Cobit alignment diagram
The most obvious touch point is the alignment of IT and business requirements. That alignment is core to all of the frameworks. We have included several examples of diagrams shown in documents provided as part of each framework. In each framework, business alignment and collaboration are emphasized repeatedly as foundational elements. This illustrates that the IT world has become much more sensitive to their customers in recent years. That wasn’t always the case. For years, IT organizations isolated themselves from their customers. While CIOs and senior IT management were certainly sensitive to their business counterparts, the IT organizations as a whole did not have a culture which focused everyone on their customers. I remember first hand a number of resignations which occurred after I asked some developers to spend more time with their customers and understand their business issues (not StrAIT Advisors and a long time ago). Some of these islands of isolation still exist. Unfortunately, that will probably be true for some time to come.
So how does the SLRSM methodology address this alignment issue? The keys are in the team formation and the phase reviews. First, the team must be formed to include both manufacturing and IT staff. The simulator and collaborative tools used to execute the project force a structured approach to identifying and quantifying opportunities for business process waste reduction. The phase review process forces that team to articulate details about the identified opportunities and how to address them to the senior management sponsors of the project.
ITIL alignment diagram
As the SLRSM methodology winds down and the “torch” is passed to the client’s continuous improvement team (which should be most of the same people) that alignment is also continued. As a result, the alignment of IT to the client’s core business issues becomes a greater, ongoing part of the company’s culture. It’s important to remember that the client’s continuous improvement process includes both business groups and IT groups, each using the appropriate business processes. For example, the business operations group may find that a Six Sigma DMAIC methodology is best suited for them and the IT groups may find that business process built around ITIL works best for them. Both of those approaches require communication and collaboration with the other.
The relationship and collaboration between IT and the client’s core business groups is a key requirement for any project to be successful regardless of what project methodology is used. It’s our intent to encourage and enable that aspect of our client’s culture.
I hope that you found this post useful. Until next time…
Using the Internet for Sensitive Collaboration during Projects
Revised 8-4-09
I want to post some comments on how I see the use of the Internet to collaborate on and with sensitive information. First, I am sensitive to the “cloud”, i.e., the use of web-based applications and data storage. I use it to provide our website hosting, SharePoint portal and our WordPress blog, including reference files. I have accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I have tried an assortment of tools for blogging (and I need to delete most of those sites) before settling on WordPress. I am looked into Ning and others. I have accounts with Google Docs and Office Live Workspace. And while some of these spaces could be useful I decided to do something different for StrAIT Advisor collaboration needs.
Let’s review StrAIT Advisor’s needs. Our engagements will be fast and when completed, there can be no lasting footprint in the client’s infrastructure. Our engagements typically consist of one of us working with a small team of the client’s people. We will discuss and collaborate on the client’s business processes and value stream (for more information about value streams click here). In both of those scenarios, we will be exchanging messages, documents and drawings that may clearly identify the client’s competitive strengths and weaknesses. The client will assume that none of that information could be accessed inappropriately. Given that I have run IT organizations and been accountable for a company’s cyber security in the past, I am extremely focused on security and best practices. To minimize our client’s risk, we will primarily use the web as the infrastructure for pipes. That means we use appropriate security tools to enable sensitive information to be transported over the web in peer to peer connections but not be stored there unless in an archive located in very secure storage where we know that we can “hug the data”. That is an old IT expression indicating that the user knows positively where their data is located physically and is comfortable with its security.
Accommodating team members with busy travel schedules is another need. Those people need to work in airports even if there is no wireless connection and work at 30,000 feet in the air and traveling at several hundred miles per hour. It will be years before the global transportation industry provides connectivity everywhere. Until then, a peer to peer approach solves this problem. Since most laptops have hard drives that vastly exceed the business needs of most people, the extra storage requirements needed typically don’t represent a major issue.
I have included a simple diagram from our overview presentation to emphasize my point. In that diagram the black arrows indicate the peer to peer connections using the “cloud” and the red arrows and database symbol indicate the archive storage. For the peer to peer collaboration we prefer to use Microsoft Groove. Groove can trace it family tree back to Lotus Notes which came out in the late 1980’s. 
We are satisfied that the security built in to Groove is sufficient to meet the security needs of our engagements. The archived storage can be supplied by the client’s own infrastructure or our SharePoint server. We will try to accommodate our client’s wishes if there are different architectural preferences as long as the same security needs are met and we can reuse our components and don’t have to build a customized solution. Every engagement is different.
I hope this post clarifies why we made the decisions we made. Please let us know what you think. Thanks for your time. We will talk again soon…
Adventures in Social Networking
Originally posted on 7/2/09
I want to admit up front that I am no expert on social media. My goals are simple. First, I want to leverage social media in a way that helps my business. Second, I don’t want to lose touch with friends and colleagues made over the years. I am indifferent about notifying people of my current location, random thoughts or irrelevant personal information.
Given those simple goals, I began doing research on what parts of the vast social media landscape make sense for me to pursue. After some investigation my list has narrowed down to four entities, excluding this blog (we’ll discuss that later).
First, and my primary social site, is LinkedIn. My page there is http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelnpattison. It contains the most useful personal information. It seems to be the social network of choice for professional people of my age group (50+++) and younger. LinkedIn is best suited to both my primary goals. If your goals are similar to mine you should check it out.
Next is Facebook. For me, it is a distant second to LinkedIn. My page there is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1388328440&hiq=michael%2Cpattison. Certainly professionals use this one as well but business connections are not its primary focus. I see it as a more general purpose social media experience to stay in touch with personal friends outside the context of a career.
Next is Ning. It is fairly new for me but is interesting in that it offers a tool to create a fairly exhaustive, branded personal social networking experience. My page at Ning is: http://www.ning.com/michaelpattison. For me, the jury is still out on Ning. I am involved with the CIO Innovations Institute at http://www.cioinnovations.com/ . It’s fairly new and needs time to mature. We’ll see how it goes.
Last, and least, for me, is Twitter. I keep hearing about how valuable Twitter is for business use. My page there is http://twitter.com/mnpattison. I’m sure that it works well in some cases where companies benefit from viral networking and good buzz. That certainly wouldn’t hurt my business either. It’s just that I struggle with the notion of being associated with what I see as the more adolescent nature of what goes on there. I know people who would strongly disagree with that statement. They are spending a lot of time and effort on Twitter. With the other social media sites I’m interested in, I can’t justify this one being ranked any higher than fourth on my list. The amount of time I spend on Twitter is proportional to its ranking. Maybe that will change some day but it’s not today.
Speaking of this blog, I am currently using the simple blog plug-in supplied with my web site development software, WebPlus X2 by Serif (http://www.serif.com/webplus/ ). For those of us who don’t want to get our hands dirty with HTML programming or tools designed for web developers, it’s a pretty good tool; not perfect, but competent and simple to use.
Clearly there is more widely used blog/content management software out there and I should at least know if that would be a better choice than the one I’m using. First is WordPress. It is probably the most used, open source tool available. It is competent and free. I have installed it and have a test blog that I’m playing with. Since it’s a separate product, the search engines have already found it as the blog for StrAIT Advisors, test page and all. It may become my blogging tool someday but I’m going with simple and easy for now.
The other tool I’m looking at is Joomla! (I love that name). It is a CMS (content management system) from the ground up and can do many other things including complete web sites as well. I have installed it next to WordPress and will be evaluating it as I get time for its blogging capabilities. Stay tuned for progress reports…
So that’s a wrap for this installment of my adventures in social media. Please feel free to comment with advice or opinions.
Thanks for stopping by.