Author: mdegeorge Page 17 of 21

Matthew De George is a well respected management consultant focused on technology-enabled business transformation. He typically wont tell you what your strategy should be. But he'll "get it", and he'll help you execute. Matthew brings 20 years of experience in transforming business and customer-facing processes through the effective implementation of technology and information management practices.

Interesting:

“Accounting rules dictate that inception has to be funded out of SG&A. What this means is that before we can spend out of a capital budget, we must spend some SG&A money first. It’s also important to bear in mind that the same is true at the other end of the delivery cycle: last mile tasks such as data migration can’t be capitalized; they also must be funded out of SG&A.

In effect, our SG&A budget (also known as operating expense, or OpEx) is leveraged with capital expense (CapEx). A contraction of OpEx proportionally reduces the CapEx accessible to us.”

And then the likelihood and mitigation:

“This “perfect storm” is more common than you might think. Mitigating exposure is done through a variety of different mechanisms.

One is to hedge the project portfolio by bringing several investments into the early stages of delivery and then putting them into operational suspense. This creates a deliberate OpEx expenditure at the beginning of a fiscal cycle (before risks of OpEx impairment are realized over the course of a year) to multiple project inceptions, and then rendering some of those investments dormant. This diversifies the IT project portfolio, allowing IT capability to shift among different projects should one or more of those projects be cancelled.”

– http://www.rosspettit.com/2010/04/mitigating-corporate-financial-risks-of.html

Thought of the day

By mdegeorge

On April 16, 2010

In Uncategorized

Incentives beat intention.

— Post From My iPhone

‘New’ to MWT – ‘business intelligence’ is bunk

By mdegeorge

On April 1, 2010

In IT Vendors failures

As I sometimes do, I’m adding a new subject to this blog. It’s in a group of topics that I would vaguely classify as ‘business topics that are a good idea until they get co-opted by IT vendors’.

Note that it’s IT vendors that break these concepts not IT. In many cases the concepts themselves have been formalised by the IT industry and should be seen as positve contribution that the IT industry has made to an understanding of organisational value – but then they ‘jump the shark’ and turn into bullshit.

I’m talking about Business Inteligence, Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resourse Planning, Master Data Management, etc.

For the first installment, of check out this link:

http://www.agilityissensible.com/2010/03/value-of-operational-intelligence.html

Agility is Sensible is a great resourse and the above post is no exception. The question is why are organisations stuck doing BI when they should naturally be planning for more opperational intelligence and realtime analysis?

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Eton St N,Sutherland,Australia

IT as business process standardisation

By mdegeorge

On March 31, 2010

In Uncategorized

“The Quarterly: CIOs debate whether IT should follow business change or lead it—in your case, for example, by furthering Shell’s globalization through IT standardization. What is your view?

Alan Matula: I see it somewhat differently. IT is like cement to the standardization activities. If you don’t cement changes with IT, then over time they will erode and revert back. IT provides the transparency that you need for driving standardization in a large, diversified corporation like Shell.”

– https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_Technology/BT_Strategy/Managing_IT_transformation_on_a_global_scale_An_interview_with_Shell_CIO_Alan_Matula_2559

Breaking down innovation accountabilities

By mdegeorge

On March 25, 2010

In Collaboration Architectures, General MWT, Innovation, Personal

I’m attending an ‘innovation workshop’ today. I’m looking forward to it but it also feels a little bit dirty. Innovation is important – but I’m not sure it can be managed directly. Management of anything politicises it; but with vague notions like ‘innovation’ it’s hard to establish the accountability required to balance the politics.

The session today will interesting. I’m sure we will have the inevitable ‘what is innovation?’ discussion. But I’m sure the normal process of people wondering how this might help their career will interfere with that. Also, participants come from multiple vendor and client organisations so this will limit the sorts of ideas that can be discussed.

I’m not lamenting this dynamic – it’s a natural part of work life. But the trick will be to quickly convert this forum into a set of processes that ensure value is directed towards the sponsoring organisation. I believe breaking up ‘innovation’ into a number of separate processes for which accountabilities can be established is the answer to this.

My first cut of the breakdown is as follows:

Idea management process (capture, rate, sponsor, formally reject, and reward/recognition)
Scanning (internal and external scanning of practices, technologies, and trends)
A formal approach to analysing the organisation
Initiative delivery process (to manage sponsored initiatives)
Slack for brainstorming and black-market idea generation

Some of these, such as scanning, may have separate accountabilities for each organisation (to create competitive tension). The idea management process may be owned by the sponsoring organisation (to ensure transparency to the sponsoring organisation). Items 3 and 4 are likely to be tendered. Item 5 may be measured by the innovation forum but be considered an accountability of business units.

Explicit collaboration

By mdegeorge

On March 8, 2010

In Collaboration Architectures, General MWT

MWT Collaboration Architectures are a critical component of the MWT Model. In short, a collaboration architecture defines how individuals collaborate on a particular task. As with most architecture work, the focus is on what needs to be shared and what needs to be standardised.

Collaboration architectures are not sequential (though there my be some shared sequences for some collaboration architectures) and importantly these are not collaboration processes. Rather than roles and responsibilities their is just enough of a shared framework where the right roles and responsibilities emerge. There is also just enough of a shared understanding of risks so that their is reward in putting effort into risk mitigation rather than an incentive to avoid working on activities with inherent risk.

It’s a simple concept but effective collaboration is not something the management discipline currently guarantees. General management provides a mechanism for defining roles and responsibilities; project management provides a means of managing costs, schedule, and risks; and there are of course disciplines of around strategy to get things started, and conflict management when none of this works are it should.

But ultimately there isn’t a lot of focus on how individuals need to actually collaborate around a set of shared artifacts in order to get something done. It’s been over-stated already – but this situation is not acceptable in the information age. But nor has it been corrected by the information age. Business process management (BPM) technologies are rarely implemented – and when you look at the types of processes they are able to support (i.e. Non-collaborative) that’s almost certainly a good thing.

What’s more, managers themselves are currently facing increasing pressures from the communication technologies that could otherwise support more effective collaboration. Management disciplines are sufficient if the right information gets passed through the manager. But communication technologies, resource mobility, and distributed workforces mean this simply doesn’t happen. Managers are left in a situation where they don’t know what is going on but are still responsible for it.

I’m seen managers response to this challenge in precisely the wrong way. For example, consider the phrase ‘I only need to make sure my direct reports know what they are doing’. I’ve heard this before and it drives me crazy. This is like saying ‘I’ll just manage myself, not the organisation’.

In addition to the above sort of reaction I also see a lot of cases where managers simply refuse to integrate communication & collaboration technologies into their management process. In this case, there is potential for transparency and technology-enabled collaboration but the managers don’t want to use the tools. If the tools are then used in this environment the whole management process can break down because sufficient information isn’t passing through the manager.

I can already hear ‘tools wont solve this’ echoing in my head as I type. This is partially true but the management discipline itself is a tool. All those catch-phases like ‘we need to work together’ and ‘I don’t want to get involved in the details’ are tools. Similarly the phase ‘make sure you CC everybody in the team on every email’ is a tool. But they aren’t tools that help the organisation!

Introducing Human Interaction Management

As I’ve been working through MWT Collaboration Architectures I’ve come across some work on Human Interaction Management (HIM). I’m please to note that work in this area has a lot of similarity to the MWT Collaboration Architecture approach. I’m sure it also has adoption challenges as per the discussion above.

If you’d like to read more about HIM try the following links:

‘The First Step for BPM is HIM’:

http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/ONE_07-09-COL-HumanProcesses-Harrison-Broninski-final.pdf

A ‘Human Interaction Management’ portal:

http://human-interaction-management.info/

Google Docs isn’t the answer:

http://www.information-age.com/research/276941/riding-the-fourth-wave.thtml

Work 2.0:

http://www.peterfingar.com/Work2-0.pdf

“Why Workflow Sucks”:

http://www.ebizq.net/topics/bpm/features/7462.html

Presentations and podcasts for people who don’t read good:

http://harrison-broninski.com/keith/him/presentations.htm

The book:

http://www.mkpress.com/hi/

Project Managers Should Not Fear the Baseline | CIO – Blogs and Discussion

By mdegeorge

On February 15, 2010

In Accounting Failures, Collaboration Architectures, General MWT, IT Management, The New MWT Hierarchy

There is some wisdom in Jim Vaughan’s article and the related comments:

The poor performance of the project usually has less to do with the project manager or the project team and more to do with the systemic failures of the organizational culture to provide the proper tools and governance to allow the projects to succeed. These systemic issues really become the moose on the table that no one wants to talk about. As a result the PM and/or the project team are blamed for the failure.

via Project Managers Should Not Fear the Baseline | CIO – Blogs and Discussion.

EaaS in Australia

By mdegeorge

On January 12, 2010

In Australia, Enterprise Architecture

Very, interesting… I wonder, and I presume I guess correctly, who this is:

“I understand that a major Australian Bank has used this book as its “bible” for its current transformation, which includes the replacement of 30 year old core systems. Their objective is to be able to change business models in 20 minutes. With RWR’s vision implemented; if that’s possible, it might be doable. But I say good luck to them. It’ll be interesting to revisit them in 12 months.”

– from Angry Architect

The book in question is Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, which I think is a profoundly interesting approach.

The Professional Mess

By mdegeorge

On December 23, 2009

In Accounting Failures, Collaboration Architectures, General MWT

There is a very interesting interview with Dr. Thomas Dorman on the Lew Rockwell podcast entitled ‘The Medical Mess’.

Dr. Dorman talks about how placing an intermediary between a professional (the doctor in this case) and their customer (patient in this case) destroys the relationship between the doctor and the patient.

I think anybody, not just Doctors, who considers themselves a professional will recognise the sentiments Dr. Dorman highlights as common to the experience of being over-managed and under-lead in many a large organisation.

In summary:

The intermediary breaks the clear ‘point of transaction’ at which point the consumer owns the service provided – creating arguments and errors which then require regulations
Regulations require the professional to ‘code’ medical conditions and categorise medical conditions based on the codes specified by the intermediary
Because payments are made based on these ‘codes’ it forces the professional to spend considerable intellectual effort on the management of codes – at the expense of spending intellectual effort on the service
Also, ‘if there isn’t a code for something there isn’t a service’. So ‘codes’ must be manipulated to order to produce ‘a fair outcome’. This creates mistrust amongst all parties.
Professionals then spend time ‘documenting things to the satisfaction of the inspectors’ rather than working on services. This amounts to ‘costs escalating exponentially’
This intermediation process is ‘known not to work’ in that it doesn’t create a more effective services. So ‘there must be an agenda’
This agenda is ‘control, rather than providing quality services’

Sadly, Dr. Dorman passed away earlier this year before I even listened to this podcast. The ideas, as always, live on.

Confessions of an aeroholic

By mdegeorge

On December 18, 2009

In Accounting Failures, Airline Industry, Australia, Enterprise Architecture, IT Outsourcing, Personal, Thought of the day

“Airlines are notoriously cyclical because revenue is very sensitive to changes in demand. Profits are greatest when strong demand results in full planes (‘‘load’’) and high prices (‘‘yield’’), but they can disappear quickly when demand falls because costs are relatively fixed and flights can’t easily be cancelled.”

via Confessions of an aeroholic.

I’m currently working on the very edges of the airline industry (via IT outsourcing). I can relate to the ‘aeroholic’ tag. It’s a very compelling industry and while I don’t invest money in it I certainly invest time in it.

So, somebody important let me under his umbrella this morning. I spoke briefly to him and it got me thinking about Boston Consulting Group (from where he had worked as an adviser to Qantas for 10 years).

I think the airline industry’s highs and lows have been managed through sophisticated financial devices (fuel hedging, for example, or deferred losses). This is by necessity, but I think this process might have had it’s own unintended consequences.

I’m currently focusing on what those unintended consequences might have been… because that is where I will be able to have the greatest impact. There are some non-optimal behaviors and outcomes I have noticed. I think if I understand them in terms of the necessities above things will make sense …