From Michael Porter forward, much has been written about how organisations benefit by structuring around value chains to deliver products efficiently and at scale. Arising in manufacturing and the production line, the ‘chain of functions’ metaphor has been widely used to describe how organisations create value, or add it, for decades. Today, platform-based ecosystem enterprises are replacing hierarchical and functionally-based organisations, and Porter’s ‘value chain’ is collateral damage.
The Best of Adam Sharp by Graeme Simsion
My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is an intoxicating cocktail of familiar ingredients that smelled spicy, was near impossible to put down once started, and had my tummy turning in places. It is a script in waiting that could be equally imagined on stage or screen. The witty and sharp writing engages, the characters are familiar, the story lines flowing and deftly resolved. It’s an Eternal Triangle of players who neither trust nor care about each other, with a sane onlooker who sweeps up one of the broken pieces. The three leading characters manage to screw each other into a complex not-so-private tryst in a French farmhouse, with all the accouterments. Like most ménage à trois it ends in tears. Adam comes out relatively undamaged and the other two get what they deserve.
Continue readingSoftware is the fabric of the information age. It is eating the machine age. In the end it might even eat itself. Software is so successful, so pervasive, so adaptable that code, and the ability to code, are devaluing. Software is the commodity of our age and software development the occupation of the new working class.
Enterprise Architects should just get over being precious about software… and architecture, enterprise architecture, strategic planning etc.
Continue readingMy mower broke last time I used it. Payback for all the times I have mistreated it, yanked its handle, tilted it on 2 wheels over a gutter, or banged it roughly into a tree stump. The chassis rusted out where the handle attaches, so much so that the handle on the left side pulled off, taking with it a nicely rectangular chunk of rusted mower. So I did what any self respecting man would do. I left it in the shed and ignored it.
‘Shadow IT‘ is a term used to describe information systems and solutions built and used inside organisations without explicit organisational approval. Cloud services, mobility and ‘Bring Your Own Device’ are driving an explosion in Shadow IT. Shadow IT, like shadow finance and shadow economy suggests noncompliance and illegality. Unlike the black market, shadow technology notionally unleashes immediate benefits but harbours a latent potential to damage its host. Quantifying the risk, and getting sufficient attention to do something about it, is the issue.
Continue readingOn a crowded loop station this morning I notice a regular looking middle-class man in his late thirties, standing to the side of the crowd on the station platform, tentatively reaching into the yellow recycle bin to retrieve a mint condition daily newspaper, probably discarded by a fellow traveler minutes earlier. No regular scavenger, his down-turned eyes and the furtiveness of his stance convey a sense of the stigma that society holds for what should be a perfectly rational and sensible act — reusing something that is at hand rather than buying his own.
For a method that purports to tackle real-world problems, practical examples of systems thinking in action are elusive. Refreshing, then, to read a special edition of the Cornell Policy Review on systems thinking, which presents accounts of the systems thinking craft in a readable and digestible form. In the interests of better policy, Cornell Institute for Public Affairs Fellow Harrison Speck makes some headway in understanding the question of why child protection case workers in Texas do not always stay long in their jobs (paper and video).
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Systems thinking is on to something. There’s something there. It harbors truths that conventional business and organisational perspectives miss. It is easy to get this impression from the volumes of social media, literature and management debate it continues to sustain after three decades. But systems thinking as a discipline or body of knowledge does not make it easy to get to those insights and truths. Ways to penetrate the systems thinking morass are neither obvious or accessible.
Continue readingEven with the best and most complete of models and frameworks, the practice of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in organisations isn’t always effective. Analysis does not always explain everything that happens, and changes that Enterprise Architects (EAs) make do not always deliver the expected benefits. When EA does not deliver value as expected, or when it cannot be represented as a transparent cause and effect relationship, some EA defenders draw our attention to long delays in the enterprise’s adoption of information technology. In light of this, EA should be thought of as an investment against things that might otherwise go wrong — kind of like a ‘flu shot for 2025. Other apologists blame flaws in the EA frameworks and methods used, or in the way that they are used.
Continue readingIt seems that certain verbs are becoming nouns, for no particular reason that I can see based in grammar, semantics or the logic of language. This appears to be a recent phenomena, and in a few cases, nounification has propelled these lucky innocuous verbs into the noun stratosphere. The first is the innocent little doer-word ‘reveal’.
reveal1
rɪˈviːl/
verb1.make (previously unknown or secret information) known to others.
designerlythinking 