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Technology can change what it means to manage

A16z Podcast: Engineering a Revolution at Work | Andreessen Horowitz: “today’s cloud-based tools change the role of managers”

Including this:

“Theses are the things to me that are just these huge cultural shifts in how you manage an organisation.  What your role of a manager is in a meeting is no longer to be reported to.  Because frankly if you want to know, you should just go to the place that everybody on the team is already using to keep track of there information.  When you get everybody together it shouldn’t be to argue the pros and cons of how the information was gathered, or is it the right number, or is the number pivoted the right way.  We wall agree, this is the number, is it good or bad?  What should we do as an organisation to change that number?”

Given the premise of this blog, and the time I’ve spend in information management, to see the idea that technology can effect what it means to manage is always pleasing.

And this:

“It’s not that you’re going to look at a 15 page status report and say ‘how can I do a 15 page status report in this tool?” or look at this giant tracking spreadsheet and say ‘how do I do this in a tablet?’.  What’s happening is new tools… The tools are now five years old, or at the very least two or three years old, and all of the sudden we’re seeing this explosion in new approaches to the work products themselves and that’s what’s particularly exciting right now… There’s enough experience with the form factor to say now we don’t just have to do it the old way.”

 

Man who introduced serious ‘Heartbleed’ security flaw denies he inserted it deliberately

I think it’s amazing that people would assume that somebody purposely inserted a bug into software they were building, rather than admit that developing software takes effort.  

Man who introduced serious ‘Heartbleed’ security flaw denies he inserted it deliberately: “‘It’s unfortunate that it’s used by millions of people, but only very few actually contribute to it,’ he said.

‘The benefit of open source software is that anyone can review the code in the first place.

‘The more people look at it, the better, especially with a software like OpenSSL.'”

Internet of Things to revolutionise industry: GE – city, Internet of Things, cisco, ge, Rockwell Automation, internet of everything, Sense-T, mining – Computerworld

Another example of “information-enabled products”:

Internet of Things to revolutionise industry: GE – city, Internet of Things, cisco, ge, Rockwell Automation, internet of everything, Sense-T, mining – Computerworld: “‘For the most part, that install base of machines we’ve sold over the years is essentially just metal that’s out there, and for us we see this as an opportunity of enabling that technology to work completely differently,’ Sheppard said.

‘If we could optimise that equipment just by 1 per cent – so just get 1 per cent more efficiency out of that equipment that’s out there today – we could deliver $20 billion in productivity to our customer base.’”

Full Stack Startups… Re-intermediation(!)

This is a significant trend:

Andreessen Horowitz: “Suppose you develop a new technology that is valuable to some industry. The old approach was to sell or license your technology to the existing companies in that industry. The new approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses existing companies.”

Remember the old “disintermediation” view of how the Internet would change industries? Well that absolutely happened. And it happened with exactly the impact on customer focus on which it was predicted.  

But now this! Rather than disintermediation of industries you get the situation where a new entrant can create a “stacked” entry and apply an end-to-end service. 

This reminds me of the first question that popped into my head at a recent Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) financial services event on “systems of engagement”:

Is it easier to build systems of engagement on top of an organisation with good systems of record, or to build (or aquire) systems of record for an organisation with good systems of engagement?

So, does this mean this?

 

The Enterprise Information Management (EIM) Commodity

 

EIM in the past

Event: Using Business Architecture to Enable Customer Experience and Value Strategies

Most interesting presentation I’ve seen for a long time:

https://opengroupevents.webex.com/ec0701l/eventcenter/enroll/join.do?confViewID=1004789686&theAction=detail&confId=1004789686&path=program_detail&siteurl=opengroupevents

Partially interesting because I already agree with most of it –  but still, exceptionally well presented both visually and the ideas.

You’ve already missed it – but I’m sure there will be a video or blog entry somewhere… 

 

 

 

Information-enabled business transformation: Moving Beyond Information Management

Now that data scientists and cloud BI are going mainstream (a nice overview of trends here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/blog/2013/12/top-10-trends-business-intelligence-2014-27275) we are finally seeing information management evolve into information-enabled business transformation.  

This is an important evolution from my perspective.  To be able to use some solid IM foundational capabilities as building blocks for true business transformation is my main interest in IM.  I’ve been learning IM approaches for the last 3-4 years specifically with this in mind.  

For example, see the following overview of typical information services (starting from the bottom of the stack) building into information-enabled capabilities (at the top of the stack).  This was created back in 2012 as part of the process of developing the SMS Management & Technology Information and Data Management (IDM) service catalogue:

IDM Overview for Overview Appendix  New Diagrams v0 1

 

It’s a little hard to read the “knowledge books” at the top of the stack that are the information-enabled capabilities that I thought would be important at the time.  

They are:

  • Collaborative risk management
  • Information-embedded products
  • Customer touch-point information integrity
  • Market-making technology
  • Integrated performance reporting
  • Value-added compliance
  • Dynamic product configuration / pricing
  • Yield management
  • Budget integrity (budgeting and forecasting + prediction + event-based assumption validation)
  • Extend time horizon of decision making
  • Agile Innovation 

Customer centricity – solved

I just found a nice overview diagram (nice in content, not in style) where I thought I’d solved the problem of creating a customer-centric organisation just by breaking the challenge into its components.

It’s a year or so old but to be honest it still looks about right:

 

PDF:  The Problem of Customer Orientation is Largely Solved – if you have the will to implement

 

Capabilities-driven strategy

My year of capability engineering… http://strategyand.pwc.com/global/home/what-we-think/cds_home

The future is getting closer

Amazon trials drones for package delivery – Hardware – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au: “Amazon said it hoped drones would be able to put products in customers’ hands in around 30 minutes.”

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