Posts Tagged ‘ebizQ’
Herding Consultants 2.0
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…
Agility, process focus and adaptability
I’ve just been watching a presentation from Gartner and Fujitsu on the need for a process focus to support agility and adaptability. Once again it’s being delivered by our friends at ebizQ. While the video quality is unimpressive and the talking heads are unnecessary (to me at least) the sound is good and the message is useful. I have added a link to that presentation in the Files & links list on our Resources page.
One point that struck me is the need for CIOs to focus more on business process improvement and the IT infrastructure that supports that goal. Gartner claims that BPM will be a CIO’s top priority for some time to come. That makes sense to me and is consistent with my own experience and observations.
This won’t be a lengthy post since I just wrote one yesterday. I found this presentation useful and wanted to get the word out to you as quickly as I could.
Talk to you later…
20% Savings! Really?
Originally posted on 7/15/09.
Recently, I read an article by Gartner with a title referring to a 20% cost savings in the first year after a BPM project. Being in the BPM consulting business, I was delighted with the title alone and have included a version of the article provided by ebizQ in the Files section on my Resources page. It can also be found on the ebizQ site at http://www.ebizq.net/news/11095.html?rss . If you’re a Gartner Group client you should check out their article directly at www.garter.com . I’m sure it will be more detailed. Obviously, one of Gartner’s motivations for publishing this information so that it’s available to folks who are not Gartner customers was to drive interest in one of their BPM summits. That’s not a problem for me if the information is useful and accurate. I do think this information is useful and accurate. By no means do I think that those savings claims will be true for everyone. I do think that the pursuit of improving BPM for any company will lead to impressive results. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be investing in a business to help clients get there.
I do differ on one of their points. The article states that organizations which adopt BPM without establishing a business process competency center find their efforts don’t deliver the promised results. I ran manufacturing organizations, process technology organizations and IT organizations for many years. Based on firsthand experience and observation in the real manufacturing world I believe that BPM has to be at the core of the manufacturing or service organizations to be sustainable, not in an external group. Sustainability is the key. I believe that the client is best served if, instead, they have what I call a Business Process Architect. That should be a person on the client’s succession plan to be the COO and have significant leverage or ownership in the company’s operations (service or manufacturing) organizations. That person doesn’t need a competency center.
Other than that one point, I think this article has merit. Consistent with this article, our SLR methodology strives to institutionalize a continuous improvement mindset broken down in to two distinct parts. First, the step change component which is the combination of RUP and Lean approaches and an ongoing Six Sigma type continuous improvement component. Both become must a part of the corporate culture and be sustained. This ends the overt StrAIT Advisors pitch for this post.
I believe that most of the points made in this article are worthwhile so Gartner gets gold stars from me. I hope you found this post to be valuable. See you next time…