Posts Tagged ‘business-IT alignment’
Training in a Social World
Now that we’re in to course design for the TechExecs Professional Growth Network (that’s the new name) I’ve confirmed that’s it is really a lot of work if you want to do it well (big surprise). To that end we’ve settled on using the active training techniques laid out in “Training the Active 
Training Way” by Mel Silberman for our base framework. Notice that I use the word “framework”. We don’t want to build just more “cookie cutter” professional training courses. We want a format that integrates the social component that TechExecs does well with a solid foundation of training best practices.
Clicking on the book image on the left will take you to its Amazon.com page where you can find out more about it. For more information on the whole idea of active training and what Mel Silverman is all about, click on the Active Training icon on the right. What attracted us to this approach is that it recommends various components that should be present in some form to achieve the desired course objectives. Our objective is to provide practical advice to IT professionals and leadership to help them build a better bond with their customers, either internal or external to their company. That means incorporating real world insight from multiple sources as well as a means for members to collaborate on customer relationship topics and business skills.
Most of us have been to some form of training at some point in our careers that failed to keep our attention and interest. When that happens, not only do we not gain anything from the training but we may actually become more negative about the subject in general. That problem becomes more acute today since wireless technology lets us do many things from any location. The students can engage in email exchanges on their phones or laptops. They can surf the web. They can even watch a movie or other video. For those of us who will be delivering the course content the bar has been raised for being interesting and relevant.
This is why Silberman’s work is so useful. He talks about some social interaction prior to the start of the class, getting the student’s brain engaged early and getting students more involved during the class. He discusses blending eLearning into the mix and helping them retain what they’ve learned. That plays well into the whole idea behind TechExecs which is 
to create a collaborative community of senior IT professionals. His inclusion of both social content as well as eLearning makes this approach an ideal fit for the TechExecs PGN.
We also have to have some overall view of what the PGN can be in the long term. While all the pieces won’t be there on day one, it’s vital that we have some form of a roadmap. Having done a tour of duty in the world of software product management, I can assure you that the absence of a roadmap for the growth of your software will result in a poor feature set as well as slow delivery. The same is true for training (just another product). The trick is not to get lost in “analysis paralysis”. We must have a basic roadmap but leave it open enough to adapt to what we learn from our experience and our customer’s needs.
That’s the trick. Taking one part lecture, one part coaching, one part social interaction, one part eLearning and one part collaborative environment then rolling them up into one cohesive offering that provides genuine value to our members. That will undoubtedly be an iterative process that includes as much feedback from our membership as possible. I’ve already received some feedback and offers of help. I will be following up on those offers as soon as I get a little more work done on the framework for the PGN. I still want to encourage more feedback from our members on what structure would be the most valuable to you.
This is tough work for us non-career trainers (that’s me whining) but I believe that the final product will be worth it. Stay tuned for more and don’t be afraid to speak up.
Thanks for stopping by…
A New Branch on the TechExecs Tree
I recently became the new National Programs Chair at TechExecs. I’m excited about this new role because I believe that this provides another means of helping the IT community build closer bonds with their customers. I often have written about the benefits of business-IT alignment. Mostly it’s been about improving business processes and then making sure the client’s IT hardware and systems are supportive of those processes. This time it’s different.
In this new role we can expand that focus to include more support of the human resources of the IT world. Over the years, I have observed a very persistent disconnect between the technical community and their customers. The core problem is that there is minimal shared vocabulary and sensitivity to the other side’s issues. We will be providing seminars and workshops on topics like:
- Relationship building
- Consensus building
- Internal customer relationship management
- Internal sales techniques
Understanding your internal customer’s business issues
- Business skills development for IT professionals
- Understanding your customer’s business processes
- Other similar topics of interest to our members …
These are some of the types of topics we will cover but these are not necessarily the titles we’ll use. The overall goal is to help our membership grow the skills that will help them be better at their current jobs as well as make them more competitive in the marketplace. Obviously, we have our own ideas but we need to hear from our customers. We need to hear your ideas and needs. We’d like to hear your opinions on this topic as well. We want to make this new offering as valuable as we can for our membership. Please either comment on this post or send me an email at mnpattison@gmail.com.
This is a short post but it won’t be the last on the topic. Don’t forget to send me your ideas on this post as soon as you can. Thanks for stopping by…
Virtualized Operations for the Rest of Us
Recently, I was reading an article in the Digital Energy Journal Issue 22. What caught my eye was the title, “How virtual collaborative environments can save $120,000,000″. That’s an intriguing title and I was curious where the $120M came from. Much of the article quoted people at Capgemini. That ultimately led me to the paper that Capgemini calls “TechnoVision 2012 for Upstream Oil and Gas” (the Capgemini link will take you there for the whitepaper and a video). Basically, it’s Capgemini’s grand vision for using IT technology to change how E&P does its business. I agree with most of what I read but was struck by the scope of the vision. Their vision clearly targets the super-major size energy company. The vision is a collection of really big projects. I wanted to look at the vision through the eyes of midsize businesses. This is actually a continuation of my post “Microsoft and the Energy Industry“.
I’m not going to try to restate the details of the Capgemini vision here. You can get a copy of the whitepaper for yourself using the link provided above. The DEJ article considers the benefits of building a virtual representation of a manufacturing/production facility much like what can be done with a 3-D CAD program. That model is then connected to real-time data from the actual facility as well as data from other sources. The result is a virtual working environment which allows control and maintenance of the facility, collaboration with facility coworkers (including showing them as avatars) and collaboration with remote experts as needed. I think that the article presents a version of the Capgemini vision but is overkill. For example, I don’t agree with the need for avatars walking through and interacting in the virtual environment. That idea may be appealing for a public presentation but in actual use it would get old and clumsy.
The ideas were sufficiently intriguing that I digested the TechnoVision paper. Fortunately, there were no avatars mentioned there. What was appealing in that paper was a clearly useful list of business drivers. They are:
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The Growing Influence of NOCs (National Oil Companies)
This means national and regional politics won’t be declining anytime soon.
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Exploiting Unconventionals
This means the need to access unconventional sources of energy.
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The Aging Workforce
The baby boomers continue to retire with more people leaving the industry than enter it.
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Alignment of Quality Provisions
Aligning long term investments with oil price cycles
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Increased Public Scrutiny for Compliance Excellence
While the current oil release in the Gulf was not included as a motivating factor in the paper, but increased public scrutiny is now a certainty.
All of these factors affect the midmarket as much as the super-majors. The problem is the midmarket doesn’t have the same level of resources. I argue that the midmarket can get much of the same benefits as those referenced in the Capgemini paper by using low cost, commodity hardware and software as mentioned in my previous post referenced above. No avatars, just control panels built from commodity portal software, like Microsoft SharePoint or IBM WebSphere. Those same tools can also be used for collaboration although there are other low cost alternatives. Let’s not forget about the growing selection of low cost social media tools that can be hosted internally if you’re not ready to use cloud computing for mission critical applications.
I believe that you would be best served by thinking of my vision as well as the Capgemini vision as frameworks. A framework is just standard base of tools from which to build your own unique solution. That solution must contain business processes which include more external collaboration with experts and trading partners. Those business processes should also be automated with tools that allow quite a bit of flexibility and adaptability. Business process management tools are becoming increasingly mature and flexible. They can provide all the adaptability most companies need.
In summary, I agree with the bulk of Capgemini’s TechnoVision but advocate addressing the same issues with a somewhat more pragmatic approach. Commodity hardware and software tools used to automate more inclusive business processes can now be an effective alternative for companies of all sizes. The business drivers listed above still apply to all segments of the energy business and must be addressed. A framework based on common tools will allow projects to be simpler and faster to execute. And let’s not forget that they will offer a dramatically higher probability for success.
Until next time, thanks for stopping by…
Microsoft and the Energy Industry
The new issue of Digital Energy Journal (Issue 25) is just out. In it is an article about Microsoft’s new products and directions relevant to the energy industry. With my interests in IT leadership, manufacturing operations and E&P surface operations, I was immediately compelled to read it. Since I have a long history with Microsoft both as a customer and a channel partner I have some well entrenched ideas about how Microsoft fits into the manufacturing and energy world (mostly good with a dash of frustration).
As I read the article, a couple of points jumped out at me. First is the use of the Xbox 360 with the upcoming Kinect user interface device (shown in the image on the right). It is a controller-less device that allows the user to control a game like a Nintendo Wii but without any hand held controllers. This device is primarily intended for the gaming world but has potential for the manufacturing and E&P worlds as well. For example, Halliburton Landmark has just announced a new application called GeoGraphix Discovery 3D. It will build on their GeoGraphix product and make that visualization environment easier to navigate.
What got me excited is the ability to apply an Xbox/PC/Network system to create business visualization environment at an affordable cost. Many of us are old enough to remember when cell phones were big, expensive and had to be installed in your car by a technician. We can also remember what happened to their use when cell phones got cheaper and more portable. Their use grew geometrically as well as their applications. Now consider the large and hugely expensive visualization environments now sold to the E&P industry. Then consider what happens when you can have something acceptably close to the same functionality but on commodity hardware. The cell phone evolution gets replayed for visualization systems.
Now let’s consider what happens when that same commodity visualization environment gets connected to 3-D CAD environments of manufacturing plants and E&P surface operations along with other business applications. Now combine that new mix of tools with a more highly regulated and monitored operational environment. That will happen thanks to incidents like the current BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and numerous industrial explosions, fires and chemical releases. The best way to image what I’m talking about is through an example.
Let’s image we’re in an ordinary conference room. We’re facing a wall with three large screen monitors in a row. On the middle monitor is a 3-D model of a process manufacturing plant, offshore platform or some other organized industrial collection of pipes, tanks, buildings and equipment. As we walk through this facility we can reach down and touch a piece of equipment as we pass it. When we touch it, its spec sheet and maintenance history are displayed on the screen on the left. If we are concerned about what we see we touch the equipment again with another gesture of our hand and we dictate a note to be attached on that piece of equipment. That note appears on the screen on the right and a flag appears on the equipment shown on the center screen, indicating the need for follow up. All of this data can also be displayed and accessed in a more tradition way on PCs or laptops located elsewhere (or in the same room). This kind of scenario could have applications for the management of these operations to be able to more easily survey and diagnose issues in their facilities. Connecting to a master data management system would allow such a system to be applied to multiple, similar facilities and managed together more easily. Environmental, maintenance and operational data can be displayed together in more intuitive ways. That can lead to the avoidance of future problems of all sorts. This is industrial strength business-IT alignment.
You can use the above example as a base from which to imagine a scenario more specific to your own experiences. Just don’t forget that we’re seeing this using commodity hardware and lower cost software. This puts such a system within reach of mid-sized manufacturers, energy and service companies. That’s a game changer for those mid-size companies.
The second point that jumped out to me in the article was Steve Balmer’s vision of the energy industry’s migration toward cloud computing. He’s probably right but I struggle with that idea when applied to large quantities of data that need to be brought down to a local system for use and analysis. It really depends on how cloud computing standards, security and infrastructure evolve. I have commented on cloud computing issues in the past so I won’t do it again here. If you’re interested, just click on the cloud computing tag in the tag cloud to the right of this post.
In summary, I think that whether you love or hate Microsoft they are one of the very few companies that can provide a sufficiently diverse, integrated set of applications and devices to allow the creation of such architectures at relatively low cost. Let’s hope that Steve Balmer’s vision for the energy industry can become reality and not get bogged down in bureaucracy or drifting priorities along the way.
Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…
Cloud Alignment – Part IV(Privacy)
This post is the last of the series on Cloud Computing addressing the business application of cloud based resources, focusing on midsize companies. It will also include the conclusion for the series which was originally was going to be Part V. The previous posts in this series are:
In this post we’ll focus on a recent report from the World Privacy Forum titled “Privacy in the Clouds: Risks to Privacy and Confidentially from Cloud Computing”. You can pick up a full copy of the report at their website. Recently, I also attended a presentation on cloud computing. The speaker is a Managing VP at Gartner. It was an interesting presentation and will be the subject of a future post. His pitch was very consistent with my earlier posts on the subject and has influenced this post. Agreement with my views just proves that Gartner has some visionary people on staff.
The tone of this report is sober and cautious. It emphasizes the exposure the terms and conditions impose on the customer by their cloud provider(s). I agree with this concern. As I’ve mentioned before, cloud computing is growing faster than it’s maturing. Standards and regulations are catching up but still have far to go. Another valid concern is the physical location of the data. For example, if the data is located on a server in the US it is subject to disclosure to the Federal Government (with a subpoena) under the Patriot Act. Many foreign companies specifically exclude US servers in their cloud contracts for just that reason.
For many midsize companies, the cost benefits are hard to resist. Essentially, a company exchanges the capital costs associated with building a data center for the operating expenses associated with buying computing power as services. That can be intoxicating and result in a smaller company rushing into the arms of immature cloud service providers. Clearly, it is not advisable at this time for companies to put their proprietary intellectual property in the cloud unless it’s a private cloud behind your own firewall. The main concern is the public cloud but that is also the most accessible source of cloud services.
The health care industry has its own issues with HIPAA and is a major issue in this report. The unintended release of health records for any individual to unauthorized use is about as severe a breach of privacy as you can get. There can be some circumstances where the Patriot Act and HIPPA conflict. I’m not a lawyer or politician so I don’t want to even think about that scenario.
One issue that I had not thought about directly is the scenario when a cloud provider goes out of business. There are now thousands of small companies growing up around cloud computing services. As we have seen over and over again in the technology world, a new technology is born, large numbers of companies vie for their piece of the rock, the field gets overcrowded and a “rationalization” occurs where the strongest survive and the weak can go down hard and fast. There may be some contractual language in the service agreements of those weak companies, but trying to determine how the customer’s data was managed during the dying company’s last days may be impossible to determine with confidence.
The WPF website offers these tips for business and government:
- Beware of “ad hoc” cloud computing. Any organization should have standardized rules in place telling employees when and if they may utilize cloud computing and for what data.
- Don’t put anything in the cloud you wouldn’t want a competitor, your government, or another government to see.
- Read the Terms of Service. Then read the Terms of Service again.
- Make sure that you are not violating any law or policy, by putting data in the cloud, and think twice before putting any consumer data in the cloud.
- Consult with your technical, security or corporate governance advisors about the advisability of putting data in the cloud.
These are simple, sensible guidelines to follow in your voyage into cloud computing. Check out their website for more details.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen over this series, cloud computing is here, it’s not going away and it’s going to grow faster than it matures. The promise is compelling and worth exploring, but cautiously. There are public, private and hybrid clouds. Each of which is appropriate for different purposes. Most of us are already using some form of cloud computing (have you every booked a ticket on an airplane, rented a car online or attended a webinar?) It makes sense that we embrace this technology carefully and expend the effort to be informed consumers.
I believe that eventually, most the problems and risks will be addressed to the point where we can sleep at night. That’s going to take a while. Until then, staying on the sidelines is overly cautious. Try out cloud computing on small, low risk projects until you’re comfortable and more knowledgeable. Then use it for where it makes sense.
I hope this series has been of value. Thanks for stopping by.