The Doomsday Machine is Real

There is a fascinating article in Wired (Oct. 2009) on a Doomsday Machine called “the Perimeter System” created by the Soviets. If anyone tries to attack them with a debilitating first strike, the doomsday machine will take over and make sure that the adversary is decimated in return.

“Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.”

The Doomsday machine has supposedly been online since 1985, shortly after President Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) in 1983. SDI was to shield the US from nuclear attack with space lasers (missile defense). “Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction.”

The logic of the Soviet’s Doomsday Machine was “you either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you’re dead.”

The Soviet’s system “is designed to lie dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosion.”

Perimeter had checks and balances to hopefully prevent a mistaken launch. There were four if/then propositions that had to be meet before a launch.

Is it turned on?

Yes then…

Had a nuclear weapon hit Soviet soil?

Yes, then…

Was there still communications links to the Soviet General Staff?

No, then launch authority is transfered to whoever is left in protected bunkers

Will they press the button?

Yes, then devastating nuclear retaliation!

The Perimeter System is the realization of the long-dreaded reality of machines taking over war.

The US never implemented this type of system for fear of “accidents and the one mistake that could end it all.”

“Instead, airborne American crews with the capacity and authority to launch retaliatory strikes were kept aloft throughout the Cold War.” This system relied more on people than on autonomous decision-making by machines.

To me, the Doomsday Machine brings the question of automation and computerization to the ultimate precipice of how far we are willing to go with technology. How much confidence do we have in computers to do what they are supposed to do, and also how much confidence do we have in people to program the computers correctly and with enough failsafe abilities not to make a mistake?

On one hand, automating decision-making can help prevent errors, such as a mistaken retaliatory missile launch to nothing more than a flock of geese or malfunctioning radar. On the other hand, with the Soviet’s Perimeter System, once activated, it put the entire launch sequence in the hands of a machine, up until the final push a button by a low-level duty station officer, who has a authority transferred to him/her and who is perhaps misinformed and blinded by fear, anger, and the urge to revenge the motherland in a 15 minute decision cycle—do or die.

The question of faith in technology is not going away. It is only going to get increasingly dire as we continue down the road of computerization, automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Are we safer with or without the technology?

There seems to be no going back—the technology genie is out of the bottle.

Further, desperate nations will take desperate measures to protect themselves and companies hungry for profits will continue to innovate and drive further technological advancement, including semi-autonomous and perhaps, even fully autonomous decision-making.

As we continue to advance technologically, we must do so with astute planning, sound governance, thorough quality assurance and testing, and always revisiting the technology ethics of what we are embarking on and where we are headed.

It is up to us to make sure that we take the precautions to foolproof these devices or else we will face the final consequences of our technological prowess.

The Doomsday Machine is Real

The Window and the Mirror and Enterprise Architecture

I came across some interesting leadership lessons that can be helpful to enterprise architect leaders in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins.

At the most basic level, Collins says that a “level 5” executive or great leader is a “paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will." “Level 5 leaders channel their ego away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company…their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.”

Furthermore, level 5 great leaders differ from good leaders in terms of “the window and the mirror.”

• Great leaders—“look out the window to attribute success to factors outside themselves, [and] when things go poorly, they look in the mirror and blame themselves.”
• Good (non-great) leaders—“look in the mirror to take credit for success, but out the window to assign blame for disappointing results.”
  

Interestingly enough, many leaders attributed their company’s success to “good luck” and failures to “bad luck”. Collins writes: “Luck. What an odd factor to talk about. Yet, the good-to-great executives talked a lot about luck in our interviews. This doesn’t sound like Harvard or Yale MBAs talking does it?

Collins comments on this bizarre and repeated reference to luck and states: “We were at first puzzled by this emphasis on good luck. After all, we found no evidence that the good-to-great companies were blessed with more good luck than the comparison companies.”

What puzzles me is not only the lack of attribution for company success to global factors, general market conditions, competitive advantage, talented leadership, great architecture, astute planning, sound governance, great products/services, creative marketing, or amazing employees, but also that there is no mention or recognition in the study of good-to-great leaders in the benevolence from the Almighty G-d, and no apparent gratitude shown for their companies’ success. Instead, it's all about their personal brilliance or general good luck.

Where is G-d in the leaders' calculus for business success?

It seems that the same good-to-great leaders that “look out the window to attribute success to factors outside themselves,” also are looking down at superstitious or “Vegas-style” factors of luck, rather than looking out the window and up to the heavens from where, traditionally speaking, divine will emanates.

Perhaps, there should be a level 6 leader (after the level 5 great leader) that is “truly great” and this is the leader that not only has personal humility and professional will, but also belief in a power much higher than themselves that supersedes “good luck.”

The Window and the Mirror and Enterprise Architecture

Nanotechnology and Enterprise Architecture

“Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. In its original sense, 'nanotechnology' refers to the ability to construct items from the bottom up.” (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology)

Two examples of nanotechnology include the manufacturing of super strength polymers, and the design of computer chips at the molecular level (quantum computing). This is related to biotechnology, where technology is applied to living systems, such as recombinant DNA, biopharmaceuticals, or gene therapy.

How do we apply nanotechnology concepts to User-centric EA?

• Integration vs. Decomposition: Traditional EA has looked at things from the top-down, where we decompose business functions into processes, information flows, and systems into services. But nanotechnology, from a process perspective, shows us that there is an alternate approach, where we integrate or build up from the bottom-up. This concept of integration can be used, for example, to connect activities into capabilities, and capabilities into competencies. These competencies are then the basis for building competitive advantage or carrying out mission execution.
• Big is out, small is in: As we architect business processes, information sharing, and IT systems, we need to think “smaller”. Users are looking to shed the monolithic technology solutions of yesteryear for smaller, agile, and more mobile solutions today. For example, centralized cloud computing services replacing hundreds and thousands of redundant instances of individuals systems and infrastructure silos, smaller sized but larger capacity storage solutions, and ever more sleek personal digital assistants that pack in the functionality of cellphones, email, web browsing, cameras, ipods, and more.
• Imagination and the Future State: As architects, we are concerned not only with the as-is, but also with the to-be state (many would say this is the primary reason for EA, and I would agree, although you can't establish a very effective transition plan without knowing where your coming from and going to). As we plan for the future state of things, we need to let our imagination soar. Moore’s Law, which is a view into the pace of technological change, is that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 24 months. With the rapid pace of technological change, it is difficult for architects to truly imagine what the true possibilities are 3-5 years out--but that can't stop of from trying based on analysis, trends, forecasts, emerging technologies, competitive assessments, and best practice research.

The field of information technology, like that of nanotechnology and biotechnology is not only evolving, but is moving so quickly as to seem almost revolutionary at times. So in enterprise architecture, we need to use lots of imagination in thinking about the future and target state. Additionally, we need to think not only in terms of traditional architecture decomposition (a top-down view), but also integration (a bottom-up view) of the organization, its processes, information shares, and technologies. And finally, we need to constantly remain nimble and agile in the globalized, competitive marketplace where change is a constant.

Nanotechnology and Enterprise Architecture

Creating Win-Win and Enterprise Architecture

We are all familiar with conflict management and day-to-day negotiations in our everyday leadership role in our organizations, and the key to successful negotiation is creating win-win situations.

In the national bestseller, Getting to Yes, by Fisher and Ury, the authors call out the importance of everyday negotiation and proposes a new type of negotiation called "principled negotiation".

“Everyone negotiates something every day…negotiation is a basic means of getting what you want from others. It is a back-and-forth communciation designed to reach an agreement when you and the other side have some interests that are shared and others that are opposed. More and more occasions require negotiation. Conflict is a growth industry…whether in business, government, or the family, people reach most decisions through negotiation.”

There are two standard ways to negotiate that involve trading off between getting what you want and getting along with people:

Soft—“the soft negotiator wants to avoid personal conflict and so makes concessions readily in order to reach agreement. He wants an amicable resolution yet he often ends up exploited and feeling bitter.”

Hard—“the hard negotiator sees any situation as a contest of wills in which the side that takes more extreme positions and holds out londer fares better. He want to win yet he often ends up producing an equally hard response which exhausts him and his resources and harms his relationship with the other side.”

The third way to negotiate, developed by the Harvard Negotiation Project, is Principled Negotiation.

Principled Negotiation—“neither hard nor soft, but rather both hard and soft…decide issues on their merits rather than through a haggling process…you look for mutual gains wherever possible, and that where your interests conflict, you should insist that the results be based on some fair standards independent of the will of either side.”

In principled negotiation, the method is based on the following:

1. People—participants are not friends and not adversaries, but rather problem solvers
2. Goal—the goal is not agreement or victory, but rather a “wise outcome reached efficiently and amicably”
3. Stance—your stance is “soft on the people, hard on the problem”
4. Pressure—you don’t yield or apply pressure, but rather “reason and be open to reasons”
5. Position—you don’t change your position easily or dig in, but rather you “focus on interests, not positions”
6. Solution—the optimal solution is win-win; you develop “options for mutual gain”

In User-centric EA, there are many situations that involve negotiation, and using principled negotiation to develop win-win solutions for the participants is critical for developing wise solutions and sustaining important personal relationships.

• Building and maintaining the EA—first of all, just getting people to participate in the process of sharing information to build and maintain an EA involves negotiation. In fact, the most frequent question from those asked to participate is “what’s in it for me?” So enterprise architects must negotiate with stakeholders to share information and participate and take ownership in the EA initiative.
• Sound IT governance—second, IT governance, involves negotiating with program sponsors on business and technical alignment and compliance issues. Program sponsors and project managers may perceive enterprise architects as gatekeepers and your review board and submission forms or checklists as a hindrance or obstacle rather than as a true value-add, so negotiation is critical with these program/project managers to enlist their support and participation in the review, recommendation, and decision process and follow-up on relevant findings and recommendations from the governance board.
• Robust IT planning—third, developing an IT plan involves negotiation with business and technical partners to develop vision, mission, goals, objectives, initiatives, milestones, and measures. Everyone has a stake in the plan and negotiating the plan elements and building consensus is a delicate process.
  

In negotiating for these important EA deliverables, it’s critical to keep in mind and balance the people and the problem. Winning the points and alienating the people is not a successful long-term strategy. Similarly, keeping your associates as friends and conceding on the issues, will not get the job done. You must develop win-win solutions that solve the issues and which participants feel are objective, fair, and equitable. Therefore, using principled negotiation, being soft on people and hard on the problem is the way to go.

Creating Win-Win and Enterprise Architecture

Realistic Optimism and Enterprise Architecture

Optimism can be a key to success in your personal and professional life!

The Wall Street Journal reported in Nov. 2007 that optimism leads to action and that “if even half the time our actions work out well, our life is going to turn out for the better…if you are a pessimist, you are unlikely to even try,” says Dr. Phelps an NYU neuroscientist. Similarly, Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania observes that “optimists tend to do better in life than their talents alone may suggest.”

So while optimism is often “derided as a naïve, soft-soap disposition that distorts the realities of life,” Duke University researchers found that optimists actually lead more productive and by some measures, successful lives. For example, they found that optimists “worked longer hours every week, expected to retire later in life, were less likely to smoke and, when they divorced, were more likely to remarry. They also saved more, had more of their wealth in liquid assets, invested more in individual stocks, and paid credit-card debt bills more frequently.”

At the same time, overly optimistic people behaved in a counter-productive or destructive fashion. “They overestimated their own likely lifespan by 20 years or more…they squandered, they postponed bill paying. Instead of taking the long view, they barely looked past tomorrow.”

Overall though, “the influence of optimism on human behavior is so pervasive that it must have survival value, researchers speculate, and may give us the ability to act in the face of uncertain odds.”

Optimism coupled with a healthy dose of realism is the best way to develop and maintain the organization’s enterprise architecture plans and governance. Optimism leads the organization to “march on” and take prudent action. At the same time, realism keeps the enterprise from making stupid mistakes. An EA that is grounded in “realistic optimism” provides for better, sounder IT investments. Those investments proactively meet business requirements, but are not reliant on bleeding-edge technologies that are overly risky, potentially harmful to mission execution, and wasteful of valuable corporate resources.

Realistic Optimism and Enterprise Architecture

Organizational Politics and Enterprise Architecture

Organizations are intrinsically political systems, “in the sense that ways must be found to create order and direction among people with potentially diverse and conflicting interests.”

“All organizational activity is interest-based…an organization is simultaneously a system of competition and a system of collaboration.” “Because of the diversity of interests… [the organization] always has a latent tendency to move in diverse directions, and sometimes to fall apart.”

Organizational politics is founded in Aristotle’s idea “that diversity of interests gives rise to the ‘wheeling and dealing’, negotiation, and other processes of coalition building and mutual influence that shape so much of organizational life.”

“Organizational politics arise when people think differently and want to act differently. This diversity creates a tension that must be resolved through political means…there are many ways in which this can be done: aristocratically (‘We’ll do it this way’); bureaucratically (‘We’re supposed to do it this way”), technocratically (‘It’s best to do it this way’), or democratically (‘How shall we do it?’). In each case the choice between alternative paths of action usually hinges on the power relations between the actors involved.”

“Power is the medium through which conflicts of interest are ultimately resolved. Power influences who gets what, when, and how.” Organizational power is derived from formal authority, control of scarce resources, control of information, use of structure, policies, and rules, and so on.

(Adapted from Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan)

Recognizing the importance of organizational politics—individual, group, and special interests, as well as the resulting conflict, and resolution through the levers of power is critical in User-centric Enterprise Architecture.

EA works within a diverse organization, takes competing interests and organizational conflicts, and turns it into common objectives and goals and the striving towards their achievement.

Enterprise architects work across organizational boundaries to synthesize business and technology to create interoperability, standardization, efficiencies, enterprise and common solutions, and integration.

Through the target architecture and transition plan, EA seeks to transform the organization from its intrinsic conflicts into a force with unity of purpose and mind to achieve ever greater accomplishments.

Organizational Politics and Enterprise Architecture

Testing EA in Virtual Reality

In enterprise architecture, we develop IT targets and plans for the organization, but these are usually not tested in any meaningful or significant way, since they are “future tense”.

Wouldn’t it be incredible to be able to actually test EA hypotheses, targets, and plans in a virtual environment before actually setting off the organization in a specific direction that can have huge implications for its ability to conduct business and achieve results?

MIT Technology Review, in an article entitled “The Fleecing of the Avatars” (Jan/Feb 2008) addresses how virtual reality is being used to a greater extent to mimic and test reality.

One example of the booming virtual world is Second Life, run by Linden Labs. It has 10,000,000 subscribers and “about 50,000 are online at any one time.” In this virtual world, subscribers playing roles as avatars “gather to role-play reenactments of obscure digital Star Trek cartoon episodes, build and buy digital homes and furniture, and hang out on digital beaches.”

However, more and more virtual worlds, like Second Life, are being used by real world mainstream businesses. For example, many companies are developing a presence in the virtual world, such as Dell with a sales office in Second Life, Reebok a store, and IBM maintains business centers in this virtual world. Further, “the World Bank presented a report in Second Life about business development.”

“But big companies like Sun, Reebok, and IBM don’t really do business in virtual worlds; they ‘tunnel’ into them. [In other words,] To close a deal, you need to step out of the ‘sim’ and into the traditional Sun or Reebok or IBM website.”

The development of company’s virtual presence online and their connection back to the real world is potentially a precursor to planning disciplines like EA testing out hypotheses of targets and plans in virtual reality and then actually implementing these back in the real organization.

Others are actually planning to use virtual worlds to test and conduct research. So there is precedent for other disciplines such as EA. For example, Cornell’s Robert Bloomfield, an experimental economist, “conducts lab research—allowing 20 students to make simulated stock trades using real money…and seeing how regulatory changes affect their behavior. He envisions a day when he can do larger studies by setting up parallel virtual worlds. ‘I could create two virtual worlds, one with legal structure, one with another, and compare them…I might lower the capital-gains tax in one and see how business responds. There are things I can’t do with 20 people in a classroom but I can do with 2,000 or 20,000 people in a virtual world.”

Could enterprise architecture do something similar in a virtual world? For example, could we test how business processes need to change when new technology is introduced or how information sharing improves with better architectures for discovering and exchanging data? How about testing people’s reactions and behavior to new systems in a broader virtual world instead of with a more limited number of customers in user acceptance testing? Another possibility is testing the effectiveness of new IT security in a virtual world of gamers and hackers?

Modeling and simulation (M&S) can improve enterprise architecture by testing plans before deploying them. We need to to hire and train people with knowledge, skills, and experience in the M&S discipline and with tools that support this. Then we can test hypothetical return on investment for new IT investments before we open our organizational wallets.

Testing EA in Virtual Reality

Leading Through Planning

Recently, I was reminded of two pointers in developing an effective IT strategic plan:

1. Strategic planning is about leadership and setting direction—There is an interesting saying with respect to this that the manager ensures that you do things right, and the leader ensures that you do the right things. The strategic plan, including the vision, mission, and value statements are about leadership establishing and communicating what the ‘right thing’ is. An effective metaphor for this is that the manager ensures that you climb the ladder, but the leader ensures that the ladder is up against the “right” wall.
2. Strategic planning goals, objectives, and initiatives have to be aligned and actionable —that means that you need to set the strategic plan elements at an appropriate level of detail and in cascading fashion. One way to do this is to navigate up and down between goal, objectives, and initiatives in the following way: To navigate to a higher elements of the plan hierarchy, ask why. Why do we do XYZ? To navigate to lower levels of detail and specificity, ask how. How do or will we do XYZ.

Together, these two guidelines help to develop an IT strategic plan that is both effective in terms of goal setting and organizational focus as well as at the appropriate levels of detail and alignment to be truly actionable.

Leading Through Planning

Is Free Worth the Price?

In the computer world, free is often the architecture and economic model of choice or is it?

We have various operating systems like Linux, Chrome, Android and more now costing nothing. Information is free on the Internet. Online news at no cost to the reader is causing shock waves in the print news world. There are thousands of free downloads available online for applications, games, music, and more.

What type of business model is free—where is the revenue generation and profit margin?

Yes, we know you can use giveaways to cross sell other things which is what Google does so well making a boat load of money (billions) from its free search engine by selling ads. Others are trying to copy this model but less successfully.

Also, sometimes, companies give product away (or undercharge) in order to undermine their competitive challengers, steal market share, and perhaps even put their rivals out of business.

For example, some have accused Google of providing Google Apps suite for free as a competitive challenge to Microsoft dominant and highly profitable Office Suite in order to shake one of Microsoft’s key product lines and get them off-balance to deflect the other market fighting going on in Search between Google and Microsoft’s new Bing “decision engine.”

So companies have reasons for providing something for free and usually it is not pure altruism, per se.

But from the consumers perspective, free is not always really free and is not worth the trouble.

Fast Company has an interesting article (October 2009) called “The High Cost of Free.”

“The strategy of giving everything away often creates as many hassles as it solves.”

Linux is a free operating system, yet “netbooks running Windows outsell their Linux counterparts by a margin of nine to one.”

“Why? Because free costs too much weighted down with hassles that you’ll happily pay a little to do without.”

For example, when you need technical support, what are the chances you’ll get the answers and help you need on a no-cost product?

That why “customers willingly pay for nominally free products, because they understand that only when money changes hands does the seller become reliably responsive to the buyer.”

And honestly, think about how often--even when you do pay--that trying to get good customer service is more an anomaly than the rule. So what can you really reasonably expect for nothing?

“Some companies have been at the vanguard of making a paying business of “free.” IBM, HP and other tech giants generate significant revenue selling consulting services and support for Linux and other free software to business.”

Also, when you decide to go with free products, you may not be getting everything you bargained for either in the base product or in terms of all the “bells and whistles” compared with what a paid-for-product offers. It’s reminiscent of the popular adages that “you get what you pay for” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Sure, occasionally there is a great deal out there—like when we find a treasure at a garage or estate sale or even something that someone else discarded perhaps because they don’t recognize it’s true value—and we need to be on the lookout for those rare finds. But I think we’d all be hard pressed to say that this is the rule rather than the exception. If it were the rule, it would probably throw a huge wrench in the notion of market equilibrium.

And just like everyone savors a bargain, people are of course seriously enticed by the notion of anything that is free. But do you think a healthy dose of skepticism is appropriate at something that is free? Again, another old saying comes to mine, “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.”

Remember, whoever is providing the “free” product or service, still needs to pay their mortgage and feed their family too, so you may want to ask yourself, how you or someone else is paying the price of “free,” and see if it is really worth it before proceeding.

From the organization’s perspective, we need to look beyond the immediate price tag (free or otherwise discounted) and determine the medium- to long-term costs that include operations and maintenance, upgrades, service support, interoperability with other products and platforms, and even long-term market competition for the products we buy.

So let’s keep our eyes open for a great deal or paradigm shift, but let’s also make sure we are protecting the vital concerns of our users for functionality, reliability, interoperability, and support.

Is Free Worth the Price?

The CIO Support Services Framework Improves IT Operations

The CIO Support Services Framework Improves IT Operations

What Stops Us From Going Cashless

How many of you ever wondered why we continue to use dollar bills and coins when we have credit and debit cards that make cash virtually obsolete?

I for one have long abandoned cash in lieu of the ease of use, convenience, orderliness of receiving monthly statements and paying electronically, and the cleanliness of not having to carry and handle the cold hard stuff.

Not that I am complaining about money at a time of recession, but seriously why do we not go dollar-digital in the “digital age”?

Before debit cards, I understood that some people unfortunately have difficulty getting the plastic because of credit issues. But now with debit cards, everyone can shop and pay digitally.

Even government run programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP aka food stamps) now uses an electronic card for purchasing no money paper stamps.

It seems that credit/debit card readers are pretty much ubiquitous—stores of course, online—it’s the way to go, even on the trains/buses and candy machines.

From the taxman perspective, I would imagine it is also better and more equitable to track genuine sales transactions in a documented digital fashion than enabling funny “cash business.”

So why don’t we go paperless and coinless and fully adopt e-Commerce?

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, 11 Sept. 2009, described a trendy NYC restaurant that was doing just that.

“The high-end New York City restaurant said goodbye to dollars: Tip in cash if you like but otherwise, your money is no good here.”

Others have been going cashless for some time now.

“In the world of online and catalog retailing, credit and debit cards have long been king. And in recent years, a handful of airlines have adopted ‘cashless cabins.’”

As the NYC restaurant owner said, “Suddenly, it struck me how unnecessary cash was…[moreover,] the convenience and security of going cashless are well worth the added cost.”

Further, from the customer perspective, using a debit or credit card lets users optimize their cash flow and earn reward points.

I believe that the day is coming when bites and bytes are going to win over paper and coins.

This is going to happen, when the IRS requires it, the government stops printing it because it always has (i.e. inertia), when retailers recognize that the benefits of digital money outweigh the fees, and when resistance to change is defeated by common sense of modernization.

What Stops Us From Going Cashless

IT Leaders--In Service to User Diversity

A colleague sent me this article about "Electronically Challenged Seniors" with the comment "I think this sums up my abilities to a “T”." While in her case, she was grossly exaggerating--she is a highly intelligent, technologically proficient, and experienced professional--I though this was a fascinating commentary on how IT leaders need to take into consideration a wide variety of end-users when planning and rolling out new information technology.

For example, too often we treat IT training as a after-thought, communications with our users as a sidetrack from the "cool technology" itself, and the rollout and adoption of technology in our organizations as "you'll take what we give you, when we give it to you, and you'll like it!"

Certainly, generational differences have long been acknowledged in terms of IT awareness, understanding, desire, usage, and expectation. Those generations who grew up with the computer, PDAs, internet, social media and so on and so forth are not only versatile in them, but expect basically the "latest and greatest" to be available to them at work. While prior generations who did not grow up with these modern technologies, although fully capable of learning and using them, may not intuitively understand them or feel the same level of desire to adopt them.

As IT leaders, we need to work with people from many generations and walks of life--with various levels of breadth and depth of technical prowess, desire, and expectation, and we need to serve them all by understanding their particular IT requirements, service levels, and training needs, and tailoring our approach to servicing them to help each group--based on user segmentation--to be as productive, engaged, and comfortable as possible.

Of course, we can't make everyone happy all the time, but perhaps, we can work ever harder to be more understanding, empathetic, and helpful to our variety of users--"challenged" or otherwise.

IT Leaders--In Service to User Diversity

Happy Birthday Internet

On September 2, 2009, the Internet celebrated its fortieth birthday.

ComputerWorld (14 Sept. 2009) reports that 40 years ago “computer scientists created the first network connection, a link between two computers at the University of California, Los Angeles.” This was the culmination of research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1960s.

This information technology milestone was followed by another, less than two months later, on October 29 1969, when Leonard Kleinrock "sent a message from UCLA to a node at the Sanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California."

While the Internet conceptually become a reality four decades ago, it didn’t really go mainstream until almost the 1990’s—with the founding of the World Wide Web project in 1989, AOL for DOS in 1991, and the Mosaic browser in 1993.

Now, I can barely remember what life was like before the Internet. Like the black and white pictures of yester-year: life was simple and composed, but also sort of lifeless, more boring indeed, and less colorful for sure. In other words, I wouldn’t want to go back.

Also, before the Internet, the world was a lot smaller. Even with connections to others far away—by phone and by plane—people’s day-to-day connections were more limited to those in close proximity—on their block, down on Main Street, or in and around town. It took an extra effort to communicate, share, deal, and interchange with people beyond the immediate area.

At present with the Internet, every email, chat, information share, e-commerce transaction, social media exchange, and application are a blast across the reaches of cyberspace. And like the vastness of the outer space beyond planet Earth, cyber space represents seemingly endless connectivity to others over the Internet.

What will the Next Generation Internet (NGI) bring us?

ComputerWorld suggests the following—many of which are already with us today:

• Improved mobility—like “showing you things about where you are” (for example, where’s the nearest restaurant, restroom, or service station or even where are your friends and family members).
• Greater information access—“point your mobile phone at a billboard, and you’ll see more information” about a particular advertisement.
• Better e-commerce—“use the Internet to immediately pay for goods.”
• Enhanced visualization—Internet will “take on a much more three-dimensional look.”

I believe the future Internet is going to be like Second Life on steroids with a virtual environment that is completely immersive—interactive with all five senses and like speaking with Hal the computer, answering your every question and responding to your every need.

It’s going to be great and I’m looking forward to saying “Happy Birthday Internet” for many more decades, assuming we don’t all blow ourselves out of the sky first.

Happy Birthday Internet

The Bigger Picture is Beautiful

Just some reflection for the Jewish new year this week.

Enterprise architecture is about planning, governance, and the bigger picture.

This is a short inspirational video of the real bigger picture out there.

http://www.blessyoumovie.com/

Let this serve as a source of encouragement to all.

Andy

The Bigger Picture is Beautiful

IT Communications, A Must Have

Being in a technical field like IT, we often see disconnects between the “techies” and the business people—almost like they are speaking foreign languages at each other. The result is that the techies don’t really understand the business requirements and the business people don’t understand the technical solutions. It’s sort of comical to watch, if not for being so sad in terms of the huge number of failed IT projects that result.

One thing we’ve realized is that we need to be able to communicate and communicate well between the business and IT or else we are not going to be very effective at IT service provision and enabling the business to perform at its best.

One solution has been to have IT staff whose job it is to translate between the business and IT units—these people are in roles at times called “business liaisons” or IT-business relationship managers. It is helpful to assign these liaisons to each business unit and give them authority and accountability for managing and nurturing a healthy relationship and unambiguous communication between business units and IT providers. The liaisons “own the customer” and ensure that requirements are captured correctly and understood by IT, that the proposed IT solutions are clearly explained to the business, and that the customer is satisfied with the systems and services they are receiving.

A second solution is hire IT communications specialists who more broadly “market” and communicate IT plans, policies, processes, goals, objectives, initiatives, milestones, and performance. I have found these professionals to be indispensable to “getting the message out there” and enhancing awareness and understanding for IT in the organization. Of course, IT leaders play a critical role in developing and honing the actual message, and in delivering ongoing two-way communications throughout the organization. In essence, they are the ambassadors and communicators par excellence inside and outside the organization with all IT stakeholders.

In short, IT needs to communicate early and often and communicate, communicate, communicate.

ComputerWorld, August 31-September 7, 2009 has a wonderful article affirming the criticality of IT communications in an article entitled: “Marketing IT: An Inside Job” by Mary Brandel.

As Brandel states: “It’s not about hype. It’s about conveying IT’s value.” I would add that it’s not only about conveying IT’s value, but also about creating IT value, by improving the two-way communication between the business and IT and thereby generating more effective solutions.

The article provides a number of useful suggestions for marketing and communicating IT that I’ve adapted, such as customer satisfaction surveys; IT annual reports that communicates accomplishments, alignment to strategic plan, “resources saved, awards won, and conferences at which staff members have spoken;” e-Brochures with “video coverage explaining goals,” services, policies, and plans; and Twitter alerts on service outages.

The key though which Bandel points out is that IT leaders need to “embed a 24/7 marketing mindset throughout the [IT] organization.” While business liaisons and IT communications specialists are focused on and specialize in this, it is still imperative for everyone in the IT organization to understand and be able to market and communicate IT services and processes to customers. All IT personnel are representatives to the business and should present and represent that customer service is our #1 goal.

From my perspective, this means transitioning our IT organizations to be wholly user-centric. This means a clear and ever present awareness that the business is IT’s raison d’être.

IT Communications, A Must Have

Is there an IT leader in the House?

True IT leadership means that those who are in charge of information technology really care about and drive the success of the mission, the satisfaction of the customers, and the well-being of their employees.

To me, these three critical leadership focus areas are tied to the areas of people, process, and technology.

People: The people are your people—your employees. This is the area of human capital that unfortunately many leaders say is important, but all too often remains mere lip service. We need to focus on providing an environment where our employees can thrive professionally and personally. Where there is challenge and growth. Where we match the right people to the right jobs. Where we provide ongoing training and the right tools for people to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Where we treat people as human beings and not as inanimate economic objects that produces goods and services.

Process: The process is the mission and the business of our organization. As IT leaders, we need to ensure that our technology is aligned to the organization. Business drives technology, rather than doing technology for technology’s sake. Everything IT that we plan for, invest in, execute, support, secure, and measure needs to be linked to enabling mission success. IT should be providing solutions to mission requirements. The solutions should provide better information quality and information sharing; consolidation, interoperability, and component re-use of our systems, and standardization, simplification, and cost-efficiency of our technology—ALL to enable mission process effectiveness and efficiency.

Technology: The technology is the satisfaction we create for our customers in both the technology products and services that we provide to them. Our job is ensuring technology WOW for our customers in terms of them having the systems and services to do their jobs. We need to provide the right information to the right people at the right time, anywhere they need it. We must to service and support our IT customer with a white glove approach rather than with obstructionist IT bureaucracy. We shall find a way—whenever possible—to say yes or to provide an alternate solution. We will live by the adage of “the customer is always right”.

Recently, in reading the book. “The Scalpel and the Soul” by Dr Allan J. Hamilton, I was reminded that true IT leaders are driven by sincere devotion to mission, customer, and employee.

In the book, Dr. Hamilton recalls the convocation speech to his graduating class at Harvard Medical School by Professor Judah Folkman whose speech to a class of 114 news doctors was “Is There a Doctor in the House?”

Of course there was a doctor in the house, there was 114 doctors, but Professor Folkman was pointing out that “these days, patients were plagued by far too many physicians and too few doctors.” In other words, there are plenty of physicians, but there are few doctors “in whom you put your trust and your life”—those driven by sincere devotion and care for their patients, the success of their medical treatment, and their fellow practitioners.

While an IT leader is not a doctor, the genuine IT leader—like the real doctor—is someone who sincerely cares and acts in the best interests of the organization’s mission, their customers, and their people.

Just like when there is a doctor in the house, the patient is well cared for, so too when there is a genuine IT leader in the C-suite, the organization is enabled for success.

Is there an IT leader in the House?

Internet Addiction—The Real Thing

Yes, people talk about having an Internet addiction and chuckle. But this is becoming the real thing!

AP (3 September 2009) reports that ReSTART, the first U.S. residential treatment center for Internet addiction opened near Redmond (home of Microsoft).

The center offers a 45-day program costing $14,000 to treat pathological computer use.

This includes “obsessive use of video games, texting, Facebook, eBay, Twitter” and more.

So far only one patient is in treatment, but more are sure to be coming.

“There are many such treatment centers in China, South Korea, and Taiwan—where Internet addiction is taken very seriously—and many psychiatric experts say it is clear that Internet addiction is real and harmful.”

How does using the Internet or computer harm people?

“The effects of addiction are no joke. They range from loss of a job or marriage to car accidents for those who can’t stop texting while driving. Some people have did after playing video games for days without a break, generally stemming from a blood clot associated with being sedentary.”

Experts are debating whether to include Internet Addiction in the next version of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders 2012.

“’Internet addicts’ are folks who have severe depression, anxiety, disorders, or social symptoms that make it hard for them to live a full, balanced life and deal face-to-face with other people.”

What are the warning signs (according to AP)?

• Preoccupied thinking about computers and the Internet
• Using it longer than intended
• Using it for increasing amounts of time
• Repeatedly making unsuccessful efforts to control use
• Jeopardizing relationships, school or work to spend time online
• Lying to cover the extent of use
• Using it to escape problems or feelings of depressions

I suppose everything can be taken to an extreme even computer use. In which case, even highly useful, productive, and transformative information technology can be misused and abused.

Oddly enough, we seem to be feeding the addiction like a glutton—there is an almost endless array of new computer gadgets and applications giving almost endless reason to get online and soak up all the information, social media, e-commerce, and entertainment available. It’s all very alluring and compelling.

Seems pretty easy for people to go of the deep end with this.

So when was the last time you stayed off the Internet for more than 24 hours? How many of you are compulsively checking email, Blackberrys, Facebook, Twitter, IM, texting, and surfing the net? I would even throw in compulsively on the cell phone—yap, yap, yap.

Will there come a time when people reject this 24/7/365 e-lifestyle and push for greater online moderation?

Looking at other types of addictions, at one time people smoked like chimneys and then the realization of the negative side effects led to people putting on the nicotine patches or otherwise going cold turkey, either kicking the habit or greatly cutting back.

The same occurred with a period in society of heavy drinking/alcoholism followed by prohibition and then a more moderate acceptance of social drinking.

It seems that the addiction line gets crossed when people can no longer control their behavior and it results in them hurting themselves or others.

The problem is that we don’t have very good foresight with any of this and we only tend to see the negative consequences of overuse/abuse only after some time—that the empirical nature of science.

So will we wait for a higher prevalence of socio/psychological disorders from Internet addiction, greater numbers of burnt out workers, higher divorce rates, more child neglect, further accidents because people can’t stop their darn texting while driving OR will we be able to foresee the unintended, but certain effects of doing too much of a good, Internet thing?

Internet Addiction—The Real Thing

Zipcar = Cloud Computing

No, not exactly. But they actually do have a lot in common in that they are both about sharing resources and using them to achieve cost-savings and flexibility.

An article in Fortune Magazine (September 14, 2009) on Zipcars really got me thinking about this.

With cloud computing, we are sharing our IT infrastructure, storage, and/or applications with others and using the services of cloud providers. It is one big virtual environment, where instead of everyone having their own technologies and applications, we make use of shared resources and we meet our information technology needs on demand and pay only for what we use.

Zipcars has the same-shared model as the cloud, and shifting toward this new paradigm is going to help preserve the environment.

Usage: Like cloud computing, Zipcars provides for the use of automobile when you need one and you pay by the hour or day, according to what you use. It’s flexible, saves money, and cuts down on the number of vehicles on the road and therefore on the pollution associated with them.

Cost: Both Zipcars and cloud computing cost pennies on the dollar. For a basic $50 membership and $11.25 an hour you can drive a Zipcar (note: drivers who give up their own cars save an average of $800 per month). For 12-25 cents per month you can store a gigabyte in the cloud or for 10 cents-$1.25 an hour you can process tasks on the Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2).

Functionality: Zipcars move people around and cloud computing moves data.

Centralization: Zipcars are co-located in “company created ‘pods’ or group of cars in parking lots or garages,” and cloud computing services are centralized in data centers of large cloud providers (like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM)

Market: Zipcars has grown already to 325,000 members and is growing 30% a year with a overall market for shared vehicles expected to balloon to $800 million over the next five years (Fortune), and business IT spending on cloud computing is expected to rise from $16 billion last year to $42 billion by 2012 (IDC).

Users: Major companies (not just individuals) are using Zipcars—so far “about 8,500 companies have signed up, including Lockheed Martin, Gap, and Nike.” And brand name companies are signing up for cloud computing, such as NY Times, NASDAQ, Major League Baseball, ESPN, Hasbro and more. (http://www.johnmwillis.com/other/top-10-entperises-in-the-cloud/).

Going green: Each shared Zipcar “takes up to 20 cars off the road as members sell their rides or decide not to buy new ones.” Each move to cloud computing makes some or all of organizations unique servers, storage devices, and applications obsolete.

The trend: With the transportation market, the future will be “a blend of things like the Zipcar, public transportation, and private car ownership (according to Bill Ford), and with the IT industry, the future will be a combination of cloud computing, managed services, and in-house IT service provision.

Zipcars and cloud computing are benefiting from the new shared services model driven by cost-savings, flexibility, efficiencies of allotment, and eco-consciousness. These are driving change in our usage of transportation and computing for the better.

Zipcar = Cloud Computing

Are Organizational Values Valuable?

Many organizations have a value statement that identifies what traits are most important to them.

Organizational values are similar to an enterprise architecture in that the organizational values identify a type of target state for organization members to strive for and adhere to.

The purpose of value statements is to guide people’s behaviors, decisions, and interactions.

For example, one police department that I looked up has value statements around the traits of integrity, pride, service, and fairness. A city that I found had value statements for passion for community, integrity in work, and results through collaboration. A non-profit organization had values of leadership, integrity, excellence, and impact.

As you read the value statements they give you a sense of the organization in terms of who they are, or actually more like what they believe in.

But do they really—i.e. are organizational value statements something that people in the organization are aware of, understand, can locate, recite, or summarize, and moreover, are the values actually used to guide behavior?

Or are these value statements written by leadership, human resources, or some strategic planning function in the organization as an ivory tower effort, and then published in the organization’s glossy annual plan and/or on their website, but never really communicated with or adopted by the people in the rank and file?

The question is not posed in order to be cynical, but to genuinely ask: are organizational value statements “true values” or are they more marketing and branding glitz?

With few exceptions, I would challenge most to identify whether their organization even has a value statement, let alone what it is. Moreover, the last time, they thought of and considered the organizational values in making a decision or taking an action.

Then why do organizations have value statements?

Perhaps, organizations intuitively or through management best practices know that they need to have values, because they are genuinely important. Just like as individuals we have personal values (be they religious or otherwise) that “tell” us who we as human being are and guide our behaviors, so too as organizations, we need to identify the values that will be our “moral compass” and define our organizational identity.

The problem though comes when organizational values are developed as a “project”—a time bound task or “to do” for someone or some committee who researched it, developed it, and got approval on it; but not managed as a “program”—an ongoing endeavor and commitment to create awareness, educate, and even enforce the values through performance rewards and recognition.

Moreover, culture and peer pressure are vey powerful forces that drive employee behavior, whether they consciously are aware of it or not. So many values are indeed employed in day-to-day interactions, but they may not be explicit and they may not be the same values that are actually in the organization’s value statement. That is because the informal network and implicit values may actually be more prominent and powerful in driving people’s behaviors that the formal and documented one in the organization.

The key is for leaders to genuinely commit to the values and their use across the organization. The leaders need to provide for the values to be widely communicated (on wall hangings, pocket cards, employee reference guides, Intranet and so on) and they need to be referred to in periodic communications (speeches, announcements, broadcasts, meetings, etc.). They need to be living, breathing values that touch people daily (and obviate the implicit and unsanctioned ones).

Further, leaders need not only talk about the values, but also they need to exemplify them. In other words, leaders need to practice what they preach and lead by example using the values to drive decisions and actions in a way that is transparent to all.

What I learned when I developed user-centric enterprise architecture is that any ivory-tower exercises or development of organizational shelfware is by definition a failure, and therefore we need to treat all of our strategic planning and management functions as a real-world effort.

If we could do that with both EA and organizational values, it would be great to integrate them and use them to drive an explicit target state for both the performance and the business perspectives, as well as a human capital perspective of the architecture.

Are Organizational Values Valuable?