This is a good laugh
Photos: The 10 moods of Stephen Conroy – Photo Galleries – iTnews.com.au: “”
Category: Uncategorized Page 8 of 11
The CIO in Crisis: What You Told Us – Jim Stikeleather – Harvard Business Review: “The bifurcation of IT and business is a myth. There have been two paths of discussion around this. One is the concept of alignment. The other is the idea that as IT socially enables companies, the actual concept of management and how we organize and structure work as practiced today begins to disappear. There were numerous discussions around COBIT and ITIL — popular IT process- and service-management frameworks — and there is a lot that COBIT in particular offers. But too often, it turns alignment into supplication or worse, subservience. “
Don’t mistake poise for leadership
It’s hard to express this idea without resorting to this nonsense Escher-chart where the definition of each series changes over time and as they cross.
But I believe this helps explain the evolving relationship of the I.T. function with the rest of the organisation, the need to develop capability engineering disciplines, and enterprise information management’s role post-Cloud.
There is an organisational metaphor here somewhere.
Via io9:
If you place 32 metronomes on a static object and set them rocking out of phase with one another, they will remain that way indefinitely. Place them on a moveable surface, however, and something very interesting (and very mesmerizing) happens.
An interesting ambit claim by the marketing profession – and a good recognition that marketing must evolve to what I call “customer experience campaigns”… Mix up product customisation and the “lean startup” principles and everybody is starting to converge…
I can’t say enough good things about this story:
The truth turned out to be simpler: The employee had contracted a Chinese consulting firm to do his job for him for around one fifth of his salary
Now, I’ve worked in the outsourcing industry so I know you can’t promote the merits of outsourcing and at the same time suggest that this guy was somehow hurting the company. Well you can but it’s very hypocritical.
At any time, completely out of his control, his job could have been outsourced to China. But he didn’t wait. Sure – he’s clearly done the wrong thing under current contracts with his employer. But that will change over time.
Remember when the internet was new and everybody thought that it would mean “big companies” would be smaller? It didn’t happen because the same technology was available for big companies to use internally and thereby retain their size. This is the same – all of the technology to outsource is available to individuals as well as large corporations.
Information security is going to be extremely important because this stuff cannot be stopped. No organisation wants to waste time forcing individuals to be less productive by forcing them to do the work themselves.
Image above is from my MWT notes ~2005. Finally getting to build it out as a proposition.
“Here is a great story from the Netherlands. As in most cities, the consequences of increasing traffic were a major problem in the city of Drachten. Traffic jams and accidents in the town centre were steadily increasing, as did the doses of the standard medicine for this modern disease; more traffic lights and more signs to regulate and control drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. The same medicine as any other growing city would chose to combat its traffic problems. However, traffic authorities in Drachten found that increasing doses did not help. In 2003 the city decided to challenge accepted truth. A bold decision was made to remove all traffic lights and signs in the town centre, based on a belief that people pay more attention to their surroundings when they cannot rely on strict traffic rules.
Results were impressive. On the busiest intersections crossing times fell significantly, and accidents were reduced to almost zero.”
– From http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/end-performance-management-we-know-it