The Perilous Pitfalls of Unconscious Decision Making

Every day as leaders, we are called upon to make decisions—some more important than others—but all having impacts on the organization and its stakeholders. Investments get made for better or worse, employees are redirected this way or that, customer requirements get met or are left unsatisfied, suppliers receive orders while others get cancelled, and stakeholders far and wide have their interests fulfilled or imperiled.

Leadership decisions have a domino effect. The decisions we make today will affect the course of events well into the future--especially when we consider a series of decisions over time.

Yet leadership decisions span the continuum from being made in a split second to those that are deliberated long and hard.

In my view, decision makers can be categorized into three types: “impulsive,” “withholding,” and “optimizers.”

1. Impulsive leaders jump the gun and make a decision without sufficient information—sometimes possibly correctly, but often risking harm to the organization because they don’t think things through.
2. Withholding leaders delay making decisions, searching for the optimal decision or Holy Grail. While this can be effective to avoid overly risky decisions, the problem is that they end up getting locked into “analysis paralysis”. They never get off the dime; decisions linger and die while the organization is relegated to a status quo—stagnating or even declining in times of changing market conditions.
3. Optimizers rationally gather information, analyze it, vet it, and drive towards a good enough decision; they attempt to do due diligence and make responsible decisions in reasonable time frames that keep the organization on a forward momentum, meeting strategic goals and staying competitive. But even the most rational individuals can falter in the face of an array of data.

So it is clear that whichever mode decision makers assume, many decisions are still wrong. In my view, this has to do with the dynamics of the decision-making process. Even if they think they are being rational, in reality leaders too often make decisions for emotional or even unconscious reasons. Even optimizers can fall into this trap.

CIOs, who are responsible for substantial IT investment dollars, must understand why this happens and how they can use IT management best practices, structures, and tools to improve the decision-making process.

An insightful article that sheds light on unconscious decision-making, “Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions,” was published this month in Harvard Business Review.

The article states: “The reality is that important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are sometimes hopelessly flawed.”

Here are two reasons cited for poor decision making:

• Pattern Recognition—“faced with a new situation, we make assumptions based on prior experiences and judgments…but pattern recognition can mislead us. When we’re dealing with seemingly familiar situations, our brains can cause us to think we understand then when we don’t.”
• Emotional Tagging—“emotional information attaches itself to the thoughts and experiences stored in our memories. This emotional information tells us whether to pay attention to something or not, and it tells us what sort of action we should be contemplating.” But what happens when emotion gets in the way and inhibits us from seeing things clearly?

The authors note some red flags in decision making: the presence of inappropriate self-interest, distorting attachments (bonds that can affect judgment—people, places, or things), and misleading memories.

So what can we do to make things better?

According to the authors of the article, we can “inject fresh experience or analysis…introduce further debate and challenge…impose stronger governance.”

In terms of governance, the CIO certainly comes with a formidable arsenal of IT tools to drive sound decision making. In particular, enterprise architecture provides for structured planning and governance; it is the CIO’s disciplined way to identify a coherent and agreed to business and technical roadmap and a process to keep everyone on track. It is an important way to create order of organizational chaos by using information to guide, shape, and influence sound decision making instead of relying on gut, intuition, politics, and subjective management whim—all of which are easily biased and flawed!

In addition to governance, there are technology tools for information sharing and collaboration, knowledge management, business intelligence, and yes, even artificial intelligence. These technologies help to ensure that we have a clear frame of reference for making decisions. We are no longer alone out there making decisions in an empty vacuum, but rather now we can reach out –far and wide to other organizations, leaders, subject matter experts, and stakeholders to get and give information, to analyze, to collaborate and to perhaps take what would otherwise be sporadic and random data points and instead connect the dots leading to a logical decision.

To help safeguard the decision process (and no it will never be failsafe), I would suggest greater organizational investments in enterprise architecture planning and governance and in technology investments that make heavily biased decisions largely a thing of the past.

The Perilous Pitfalls of Unconscious Decision Making

Vision and The Total CIO

Vision is often the telltale demarcation between a leader and a manager. A manager knows how to climb a ladder, but a leader knows where the ladder needs to go—leaders have the vision to point the organization in the right direction!

Harvard Business Review, January 2009, asks “what does it mean to have vision?”

First of all, HBR states that vision is the “central component in charismatic leadership.” They offer three components of vision, and here are my thoughts on these:

1. “Sensing opportunities and threats in the environment”—(recognizing future impacts) this entails “foreseeing events” and technologies that will affect the organization and one’s stakeholders. This means not only constantly scanning the environment for potential impacts, but also making the mental connections between, internal and external factors, the risks and opportunities they pose, and the probabilities that they will occur.
2. “Setting strategic direction”—(determining plans to respond) this means identifying the best strategies to get out ahead of emerging threats and opportunities and determining how to mitigate risks or leverage opportunities (for example, to increase mission effectiveness, revenue, profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction).
3. “Inspiring constituents”—(executing on a way ahead) this involves assessing change readiness, “challenging the status quo” (being a change agent), articulating the need and “new ways of doing things”, and motivating constituent to take necessary actions.

The CIO/CTO is in a unique position to provide the vision and lead in the organization, since they can bring alignment between the business needs and the technologies that can transform it.

The IT leader cannot afford to get bogged down in firefighting the day-to-day operations to the exclusion of planning for the future of the enterprise. Firefighting is mandatory when there is a fire, but he fire must eventually be extinguished and the true IT leader must provide a vision that goes beyond tomorrow’s network availability and application up-time. Sure the computers and phones need to keep working, but the real value of the IT leader is in providing a vision of the future and not just more status quo.

The challenge for the CIO/CTO is to master the business and the technical, the present and the future—to truly understand the mission and the stakeholders as they are today as well as the various technologies and management best practices available and emerging to modernize and reengineer. Armed with business and technical intelligence and a talent to convert the as-is to the to-be, the IT leader can increase organizational efficiency and effectiveness, help the enterprise better compete in the marketplace and more fully satisfy customers now and in the future.

Vision and The Total CIO

Weapons or Troops and The Total CIO

Should the CIO focus on day-to-day operational issues or on IT strategic planning and governance issues?

From my experience many are focused on firefighting the day-to-day and putting some new gadget in the hands of the field personnel without regard to what the bigger picture IT plan is or should be.

In many cases, I believe CIOs succumb to this near-term view on things, because they, like the overall corporate marketplace, is driven by short-term results, whether it is quarterly financial results or the annual performance appraisal.

The Wall Street Journal, 30 October 2008, had an article entitled,
“Boots on the Ground or Weapons in the Sky?”—which seemed to tie right into this issue.

The debate is to which kind of war we should be preparing to fight— the current (types of) insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan or the next big war, such as potentially that with Russia or China.

Why are we facing this issue now?

“With the economy slowing and the tab for the government’s bailout of the private sector spiraling higher…lawmakers are signaling that Pentagon officials will soon have to choose.”

And there are serious implications to this choice:

“The wrong decision now could imperil U.S. national security down the road.”

The two sides of the debate come down to this:

Secretary Gates “accused some military officials of “next-war-itis,” which shortchanges current needs in favor of advanced weapons that might never be needed.”

In turn, some military officials “chided Mr. Gates for “this-war-itis,” a short-sighted focus on the present that could leave the armed forces dangerously unprepared down the road.”

From war to technology:

Like the military, the CIO faces a similar dilemma. Should the CIO invest and focus on current operational needs, the firefight that is needed today (this-IT-itis) or should they turn their attention to planning and governing to meet the business-IT needs of the future (next-IT-itis).

But can’t the CIO do both?

Yes and no. Just like the defense budget is limited, so too is the time and resources of the CIO. Sure, we can do some of both, but unless we make a conscious decision about where to focus, something bad can happen.

My belief is operations must be stabilized--sound, reliable, and secure—today’s needs, but then the CIO must extricate himself from the day-to-day firefighting to build mission capabilities and meet the needs of the organization for tomorrow.

At some point (and the sooner, the better), this-IT-itis must yield to next-IT-itis!

Weapons or Troops and The Total CIO

IT Planning, Governance and The Total CIO

CIOs are consumed by day-to-day tactical/operational IT issues and firefighting IT problems, and as a result, there is a lack of focus on IT planning and governance—two of the biggest problems facing CIOs today.

ISACA, an organization serving IT governance professionals, conducted a survey consisting of 695 interviews with CEO/CIO-level executives in 22 countries, and published the results in IT Governance Global Status Report 2006.

Here are some of the amazing findings from this study.

Firefighting predominates: “Organizations are suffering from IT operational problems…only 7% of the respondents experienced no IT problems at all in the previous year…Operational failures and incidents…are mentioned by approximately 40 percent of respondents.”

IT’s alignment with Business is weak: Only 56% of the organizations surveyed “understands and supports the business users’ needs.”

Strategic Planning is underrated by CIOs: “More than 93 percent of business leaders recognize that IT is import for delivering organization strategy…Somewhat paradoxically, general management perceives the importance…slightly higher than does IT management.” In fact, in the public sector, IT was viewed as a commodity versus strategically by 47% of respondents!

IT governance is lagging: “CIOs recognize the need for better governance over IT,” to align IT strategy and manage risks. Yet, “when asked if they intend to do or plan IT governance measures, only 40 percent replied in the affirmative.”

Liza Lowery Massey, who previously served as CIO of Los Angeles, says in Government Technology, 9 July 2007:

“Establishing IT governance up front is the No. 1 thing I would do over in my career. IT governance is crucial to a CIO’s sanity.

Further, Liza wrote in Government Technology, 14 April 2008:

“Now when I help my clients implement IT governance, I see the benefits firsthand. They include shrinking your IT department’s to-do list, achieving IT/business alignment, putting teeth into policies and standards, and focusing departments on business needs rather than technology. My work life would certainly have been smoother had I set up governance to address these issues instead of trying to handle them all myself.”

CIO Magazine, 1 November 2006, has an article by Gary Beach, entitled “Most CIOs Fail to Convince Top Management That IT Can Transform Business.”

In this article, Gary notes that the rate of investment in IT is half the rate of corporate profit growth, and he asks why?

Certainly, the failure to align with business, and effectively plan and govern IT is hindering CIO’s ability to succeed.

The unfortunate result, as Andy McCue reported in Silicon.com on 26 April 2007, is that “CIOs and the IT department are in danger of being relegated to the role of support function because of a lack of vision and technology innovation.”

The answer is clearly for CIOs to “stabilize the patient” and get out of firefighting mode, and allocate sufficient time, attention, and resources to IT planning and governance. Only in this way will CIOs effectively align IT with business requirements, solve genuine business problems, innovate and transform the enterprise, and fulfill the strategic role that the business is looking for from them.

IT Planning, Governance and The Total CIO

Talent, Determination, and The Total CIO

To become a great CIO or a great anything, what is the driving factor—talent or determination?

Fortune Magazine, 27 October 2008, has a book excerpt from Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin.

Often, as individuals we’re afraid that if we don’t have the inborn talent then we can’t really compete and certainly won’t succeed. But that isn’t true!

Here’s an interesting anecdote about Jeffrey Immelt and Steven Balmer. “One of them recalls, ‘we were voted two guys probably least likely to succeed.’” They played waste-pin basketball with waded-up memos at P&G before becoming CEOs of General Electric and Microsoft.

Research shows talent is not the decisive factor:

“In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training…Such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist. But they do suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.”

So if innate talent is what makes for high achievement, what does?

The answer is…”deliberate practice” characterized by the following:

• Stretch goals—“continually stretching an individual just beyond his ir her current abilities.”
• Repetition—“top performers repeat their practice activities to a stultifying extent.”
• Feedback—“in many important situations, a teacher, a coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.”
• No pain, no gain—“we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over…if the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them.”

So what do you do if you want to be a great CIO or successful in any professional endeavor?

• Set goals.
• Plan how to reach them.
• Observe yourself/self-regulate.
• Self-evaluate.
• Adapt to perform better.
• Repeat.

This is where determination comes in and makes the difference between success and failure.

“What you want—really, deeply want—is fundamental because deliberate practice is an investment. The costs come now, the benefits later. The more you want something, the easier it will be for you to sustain the needed effort.”

In any case, “the evidence…shows that the price of top level achievement is extraordinarily high…by understanding how a few become great, all can become better.”

Talent, Determination, and The Total CIO

Balancing Strategy and Operations and The Total CIO

How should a CIO allocate their time between strategy and operations?

Some CIOs are all operations; they are concerned solely with the utility computing aspects of IT like keeping the desktops humming and the phones ringing. Availability and reliability are two of their key performance measurement areas. These CIOs are focused on managing the day-to-day IT operations, and given some extra budget dollars, will sooner spend them on new operational capabilities to deploy in the field today.

Other CIOs are all strategy; they are focused on setting the vision for the organization, aligned closely to the business, and communicating the way ahead. Efficiency and effectiveness are two of their key performance measurement areas. These CIOs are often set apart from the rest of the IT division (i.e. the Office of the CIO focuses on the Strategy and the IT division does the ops) and given some extra budget dollars, will likely spend them on modernization and transformation, providing capabilities for the end-user of tomorrow.

Finally, the third category of CIOs, balances both strategy and operations. They view the operations as the fundamentals that need to be provided for the business here and now. But at the same time, they recognize that the IT must evolve over time and enable future capabilities for the end-user. These CIOs, given some extra budget dollars, have to have a split personality and allocate funding between the needs of today and tomorrow.

Government Technology, Public CIO Magazine has an article by Liza Lowery Massey on “Balancing Strategy with Tactics Isn’t Easy for CIOs.”

Ms. Massey advocates for the third category, where the CIO balances strategy and operations. She compares it to “have one foot in today and one in tomorrow…making today’s decisions while considering tomorrow’s impacts.”

How much time a CIO spends on strategy versus operations, Ms. Massey says is based on the maturity of the IT operations. If ops are unreliable or not available, then the CIO goes into survival mode—focused on getting these up and running and stable. However, when IT operations are more mature and stable, then the CIO has more ability to focus on the to-be architecture of the organization.

For the Total CIO, it is indeed a delicate balance between strategy and operations. Focus on strategy to the detriment of IT operations, to the extent that mission is jeopardized, and you are toast. Spend too much time, energy, and resources on IT operations, to the extent that you jeopardize the strategy and solutions needed to address emerging business and end-user requirements, and you will lose credibility and quickly be divorced by the business.

The answer is the Total CIO must walk a fine line. Mission cannot fail today, but survivability and success of the enterprise cannot be jeopardized either. The Total CIO must walk and chew gum at the same time!

Additionally, while this concept is not completely unique to CIOs, and can be applied to all CXOs, CIOs have an added pressure on the strategy side due to the rapid pace of emerging technology and its effects on everything business.

Balancing Strategy and Operations and The Total CIO

The Outlook for Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture in its current form is due for a review by the next administration—McCain or Obama.

Will EA be the same under the next president?

Government Executive Magazine, 15 September 2008, discusses “seven election-proof initiatives likely to go on in some form or another no matter who wins in November,” and enterprise architecture is one of those.

The Federal Enterprise Architecture is looked at as a mixed bag by the Office of Management and Budget.

On one hand, it has been “a jargon-filled, technical IT effort, and one of the toughest for the Bush administration to tackle.”

On the other hand, “prognosticators say it will survive in some form because it has been a useful planning tool for chief information officers.”

Indeed EA is a challenge for any organization—planning and driving business and technology change, breaking down organizational and functional silos, pushing for information sharing, interoperability, and reuse, mandating technical standards and preferred products, insisting on performance measurement, and enforcing compliance of IT security, privacy, Section 508, records management—EA is even more taxing for OMB which is looking to do these things across the entire federal government!

What is undeniable is that enterprise architecture plays a vital function in our organizations!

The vice president of FedSources, Ray Bjorklund, states: “As painful as an architecture is to create, it is really very helpful.”

Glenn Schlarman, former chief of Information Policy and Technology Brach at OMB, states “I don’t give architecture in its current state much of a chance of survival because it’s too complex. If they could distill it down to a couple of salient points and wrap it with security then maybe it can be saved.”

While the Schlarman’s points may sound harsh, I actually agree with him on the unnecessary complexity. This is a core tenet of User-centric Enterprise Architecture. As Schlarman says, we need to “distill” the message and clearly present it to our organizational decision makers. It needs to be useful and useable to them!

EA will not only be saved, but will continue to thrive. As global competition continues to heat up, the pace of technology change spins faster and faster, and constrained resources continue to press us to do ever more with ever less, our organizations will be forced to respond in strength. Organization’s will continue look to enterprise architecture to better plan business process improvement and IT enablement and to govern sound investments and change. User-centric EA will keep the efforts focused on valuable and actionable architectures.

The Outlook for Enterprise Architecture

Intel is King of Change and Enterprise Architecture

Intel is one of the most amazing companies. They are the world’s largest semiconductor company, and the inventor of the popular x86 microprocessor series found in most PCs. Intel has around $40 billion in annual revenue, and ranked 62 in the Fortune 500 last year.

The Wall Street Journal 27-28 September 2008 has an interview with CEO of Intel, Paul Ostellini, that offers some useful lessons for enterprise architects:

• Plan for change—“A CEO’s main job, because you have access to all of the information, is to see the need to change before anyone else does.” It’s great when the CEO has access to the information for seeing ahead and around the curves, but many do not. Information is critical and leaders need plenty of it to keep from steering the enterprise off a cliff. An important role of enterprise architects is provide business and technical information to the CEO and other executives to give them clear vision to the changes needed to grow and safeguard the business. (Perhaps better information would have prevented or reduced the damage to so many companies in dot-com bubble a few years ago and the financial crisis afflicting Wall Street today!)
• Question repeatedly—a prior CEO of Intel, Andrew Grove, taught him “Ask why, and ask it again five more times, until all of the artifice is stripped away and you end up with the intellectually honest answer.” It easy to accept things on face value or to make snap judgments, but to really understand an issue, you need to get below the surface, and the way you do this is to question and dig deeper. I think this is critical for enterprise architects who are evaluating business and technology and providing recommendations to the business that can potentially make or break change efficacy. Architects should not just capture information to plunk into the architecture repository, but should question what they are seeing and hearing about the business, validate it, categorize it, and analyze it, to add value to it before serving that information up to decision makers.
• Measure Performance—“we systematically measured the performance of every part of the company to determine what was world class and what wasn’t. Then as analytically as possible, --we made the cuts…and saved $3 billion in overall spending.” Measuring performance is the only way to effectively manage performance. If decisions are to be anything more than gut and intuition, they need to be based on quantifiable measures and not just subjective management whim. Enterprise architects need to be proponents for enterprise-wide performance measurement. And not just at the top level either. Performance measures need to be implemented throughout the enterprise (vertically and horizontally) and dashboard views need to be provided to executives to make the measures visible and actionable.
• Communicate, communicate—“I made it my job to communicate, communicate, communicate the positive message. I did open forums, I did Webcasts, I told the employees to send me questions via email and I’d answer them...you have to convince them through reasoning and logic, the accuracy of your claims.” Good communication is one of those areas that are often overlooked and underappreciated. Leadership often just assumes that people will follow because they are “the leaders”. NOPE! People are not sheep. They will not follow just because. People are intelligent and want to be respected and explained to why….communication early and often is the key. The approach to architecture that I espouse, User-centric EA, focuses on the users and effectively communicating with them—each the way they need to absorb the information and at the level that is actionable to them. Making architecture information easy to understand and readily available is essential to help make it valuable and actionable to the users. User-centric EA uses principles of communication and design to do this.

Intel, in its 40 year history, has repeatedly planned for change, measured it, and managed it successfully. Intel’s CEO, Gordon Moore, is the epitome of driving change. Moore, the founder of Moore’s Law, captured the exponential change/improvement in silicon chip performance—identifying that the number of transistors packed on silicon chip would double every two years. Intel’s subsequent obsession with Moore’s Law has kept them as the dominant player in computer processors and may lead them to dominance in cell phones and other mobile devices as well.

Intel is King of Change and Enterprise Architecture

Andy Blumenthal Presents How Enterprise Architecture Shapes IT Governance

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Andy Blumenthal Presents How Enterprise Architecture Shapes IT Governance

View more Microsoft Word documents from ablumen.

Andy Blumenthal Presents How Enterprise Architecture Shapes IT Governance

Toyota and Enterprise Architecture

MSNBC on 24 April 2007 reported: “through a shrewd combination of investing in environment-friendly vehicles, offering sharp new models and wooing drivers with brand power, Toyota has toppled GM from the top global sales spot for the first time ever.”

Harvard Business Review, June 2008, reports on “Contradictions that Drive Toyota’s Success.” (by Hirotaka Tekeuchi, Emi Osono, and Norihiko Shimizu) “Toyota Motor Corporation has become one of the world’s greatest companies because of Toyota Production System (TPS)…enables the Japanese giant to make the planet’s best automobiles at the lowest cost and to develop new products quickly.”

What is Toyota’s secret?

Reaching for the stars—Toyota sets “near-unattainable goals.” For example, “consider the company’s strategy: Meet every customer need and provide a full line in every market.” This runs counter to Michael Porter’s strategy of “choosing what not to do.” Additionally, Toyota’s goals are “purposely vague” to force exploration, innovation, and collaboration to meet them.

Consider the goals stated by Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe:

“Build a car that makes the air clean [not just less dirty], prevents accidents [not just reduces accident’s], makes people healthier and happier when they drive it [not just a car that gets you from place to place], and gets you from coast to coast on one task of gas [not just incrementally improving gas mileage].”

Have you ever seen anything like these goals in your organization’s strategic plans?

I highly doubt it. But imagine how your enterprise would change culturally and competitively overnight if you did!

Of course, Toyota’s strategy of Kaizen—continuous improvement—is part of their unending desire to succeed and not be satisfied. They view improvement as not something you achieve, but as something you continuously strive for.

We can apply Toyota’s reach goals and Kaizen philosophy to making enterprise architecture planning more effective too. We need to stop conveniently “planning” on things we are working on now or for which we have a head-up that are just around the corner. Sure it’s easy to plan with 20-20 hindsight and it helps us to achieve our unit and individual performance plans and gets inappropriately recognized and rewarded, but this is really a short term outlook and not one that will drive organizational success. Instead, like Toyota, we need to set goals that are stretch goals for the organization, and which make us go beyond our comfort zones, so that we can truly work to break out of the box and differentiate ourselves and our organization from the status quo and the limits of our imagination. Setting the bar truly high and then not settling for anything less than continual improvement is a long term strategy for success and one that needs to be genuinely encouraged and rewarded.

Here’s another important aspect of Toyota’s success:

Employees are highly valued— “Toyota views employees not just as pairs of hands, but as knowledge workers.” Ideas are welcome from everyone up and down the organization. “Employees have to operate in a culture where they constantly grapple with challenges and problems and must come up with fresh ideas…when people grapple with opposing insights, they understand and come up with effective solutions.” In fact, at Toyota, “employees feel safe, even empowered to voice contrary opinions and contradict superiors.” There is a culture of open communications, and a tremendous value is placed on personal relationships and networking. Additionally, value is placed not on results, but for “how much trust and respect the manager has earned from others,” and “refusing to listen to others is a serious offense.”

This concept of valuing employees and listening to them can shed light on how we need to develop effective enterprise architecture and sound governance; whereby, we provide all major stakeholders a voice at the table--to participate in and influence planning, decision making, and innovation. This is the way to achieve higher returns and lower risks. We need to stop planning and making decisions on the whims of the few or based on gut, intuition, and politics. We must cultivate information sharing, collaboration, and elevate people as the quintessential element of our enterprise’s success.

“Toyota’s culture…places humans, not machines, at the center of the company. As such, the company will be imperfect, and there will always be room for improvement.”

People are flawed, but our endeavors make us great!

Toyota and Enterprise Architecture

Spore and Enterprise Architecture

The Wall Street Journal, 2 September 2008 reports that Electronic Arts is releasing this week, “Spore, one of the most talked-about titles in videogame history.”

What is Spore?

Spore is a simulation game (like the The Sims and Grand Theft Auto). In Spore, “players shape the evolution of everything from tiny organisms to mature creatures to planets and galaxies. The most unusual feature is that users’ creations are not only theirs to view; they become part of the environment experienced by others.”

The interactive last part sounds like a prehistoric version of Second Life, which just may be the most interesting part to the new game.

On a recent vacation, I had the opportunity to test a free software download version called Spore Creature Creator, and while the game concept and the strange looking creatures were intriguing, I found the game quickly turned ho hum, boring.

Why is Spore so Important to Electronic Arts?

Electronic Arts has had six consecutive money losing quarters and is desperate for a product winner.

“Analysts have chided the company for being too reliant on sequels to its successful game franchises [such as Madden Football etc.], rather than developing new titles to spur growth.”

At a development cost of $50M, and $25M in marketing, distribution, and manufacturing costs, the company needs to sell a whopping million and a half copies of Spore at a price of $50 just to break even. (Note: a “blockbuster—generally mean sales of one million units or more for a PC game).

What is wrong with Electronic Arts Spore game concept?

Desperate times lead to desperate measures—Electronic Arts is losing money and prestige and is desperate for a hit, and one that signals a turnaround for the company. However, Spore is not a game changing event.

First, Spore is based on other simulation style games and is adding what? I’d say, aside from some creative graphics, not much. So it’s not particularly innovative, which is what they really need a dose of (you can’t keep milking the same cow endlessly with sequels—even Star Wars and Harry Potter eventually run out of steam).

Second, when organizations, like Electronic Arts are struggling and faced with daunting challenges, they need to be careful not to fall into the desperate flailing of a drowning victim. It’s important to remain calm, keep your whits about you, and always follow a careful thought out plan to survive.

To me that’s really the essence of Enterprise Architecture, sound planning and governance.

In the case of Electronic Arts, instead of simply rolling out their next sequel, they needed to be planning on their next big innovation. While Spore may be a cultural curiosity or phenomenon for a while, it does not measure up to true innovation.

Spore and Enterprise Architecture

Microsoft, Jerry Seinfeld, and Enterprise Architecture

ComputerWorld, 21 August 2008 reports on a news article in the Wall Street Journal that “Microsoft hires Seinfeld to bite Apple.”

“Continually painted by Apple and other rivals as uncool and unsafe, Microsoft plans to spend $300 million on a new series of advertisements designed around its ‘Windows Not Walls’ slogan that will feature Seinfeld and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.”

“Microsoft is not only trying to turn around a stodgy corporate image, but also wants to reverse recent product misfires, including the Windows Vista Operating System and the Zune digital music player.”

“Apple has rubbed in Microsoft’s lack of success and highlighted its own winning streak in a series of ‘Mac vs. PC’ ads.”

Is the Seinfeld ad a good branding strategy?

Well as my wife said, “this is as close as Microsoft can get to cool.”

Seinfeld, while rated by TV Guide in 2002 as one of the greatest TV programs of all times, is at this point somewhat dated—having aired nine seasons between 1989 and 1998—so it was over ten years ago! (Wikipedia)

In perspective, Seinfeld was already off the air before Vista, Zune, or the iPhone was ever created.

Microsoft’s attempt at reversing their “stodgy corporate image” is a feeble attempt that in fact solidifies that very image. It is no wonder that Microsoft is enamored with the 1990’s when they were the king of the hill in corporate America and in the technology arena with the launch of Microsoft Office in 1989 (the same year Seinfeld episode 1 aired) and before Google was founded in 1998 (the last season Seinfeld aired).

The Wall Street Journal, 21 August 2008, reported that “Microsoft is a little like the General Motors of technology. The software giant is, of course, much more successful, financially and in market share, than the troubled auto maker. But as at GM, Microsoft’s very size—over 90,000 employees—and it bureaucratic structure often make the company seem more stolid and less innovative than smaller, nimbler rivals like Google and Apple.”

From an enterprise architecture perspective where is Microsoft going wrong?

Microsoft is still living in the past—hence, the choice of the historic Jerry Seinfeld as their new image maker. Rather than acknowledging their current architecture and looking to the future or target architecture and how to transition forward, Microsoft keeps looking in the rearview mirror at where they were 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Microsoft keeps trying to catch up to the new generation of innovators like Google and Apple by either trying to acquire the 2^nd tier competition like Yahoo or developing copycat products like the Zune.

More recently, Microsoft has tried to become more agile and take advantage of smaller groups to break their bureaucratic and cultural logjam. One example is Live Labs, “a small operation that aims to turn technology theories into real, Web-based products relatively quickly. It has only about 125 employees, and even that modest number is broken up into smaller teams tackling specific projects.”

Even if Live Labs succeeds, what are the other 89,875 employees at Microsoft doing?

To really compete in the future, Microsoft needs better planning and governance and this is what enterprise architecture can bring them—a forward looking and improved decision making framework.

Microsoft, Jerry Seinfeld, and Enterprise Architecture

IT Project Failures and Enterprise Architecture

Based on a number of studies done in the last 10 years (such as The KPMG Canada Study, The Chaos Report and others), it has been established that more than 50% of IT projects fail outright!

Why do IT projects fail? More often than not, it’s because managing IT has become a by the seat of the pants proposition—where things get decided by gut, intuition, politics, and subjective management whim. And we know that is not how to manage IT.

The way to make order out of IT project chaos is through enterprise architecture and IT governance.

EA is how we plan IT, synthesizing business and technology information, and driving business process reengineering, improvement, and the introduction of new technologies.

Governance is how we administer structured, consistent, and collaborative decision making, so managing IT is no longer a black box affair.

Together EA and IT governance provide for sound IT investment decision making, where EA serves as a strategic information asset to guide and influence capital planning and investment control activities of select-control-evaluate to ensure more successful IT project delivery.

Interestingly enough, Federal Times, 4 August 2008, corroborates the true high failure rate of IT projects.

According to the GAO, “Baseline adjustments hide the truth on OMB’s IT projects.”

“OMB considers a project to be over budget and off schedule [i.e. at risk] if it is projected to miss its targets by more than 10 percent.”

The reason though that all the IT projects missing the mark don’t show up on the OMB high-risk list is that “nearly half of the 180 IT projects surveyed by GAO have been rebaselined at least once. Of those, half were rebaselined twice and 11 percent were rebaselined four or more times,” according to David Powner GAO’s director of IT management issues.

What exactly does rebaselining mean?

“Nearly all of the rebaselined projects altered their cost and schedules because of changes in requirements or funding,” according to Karen Evans, OMB’s IT administrator.

So, if your changing the projected IT cost and schedule to match the actual—well then guess what? Naturally, more of your IT projects magically seem to meet their cost and schedule goals, and the true IT project failure rate is obscured.

Note that OMB is only looking at cost and schedule overruns and that doesn’t even take into account missing the mark on IT project in terms of performance parameters—one of the most important aspect of IT projects true success.

Perhaps, if we focus more on truly investing in better enterprise architecture and IT governance, then organizations wouldn’t need to rebaseline their cost and schedule projections to make for faux IT project success.

IT Project Failures and Enterprise Architecture

Prediction Markets and Enterprise Architecture

A very interesting article in ComputerWorld, 7 August 2008, called "Bet on it; Employee wagers help companies predict the future," shows how difficult planning can be and highlights the necessity of bringing stakeholders to the table to get better information (enterprise architecture) and better decisions (IT governance).

Google, for example, has for three years been using employee bets (over 80,000 so far) to predict market technology. “And Google has found that its employee bets are usually right.”

“Forrester Research Inc. suggests that other companies can benefit from putting in place prediction markets to more effectively tap employee opinions on topics ranging from if a store will open on time to picking specific features for a new product.”

Oliver Young, a Forrester analyst, says that “One of the biggest struggles that most companies have—not surprisingly—is predicting the future. Simple things like project updates are full of politics, full of meetings. One of the biggest values of prediction markets is you get a lot more people looking at these major questions.”

Other companies like Best Buy, Corning, HP, and Qualcomm are using predictive markets for sales projects, product evaluations, estimating project delivery, and assessing market conditions.

In predictive markets (a.k.a. crowdsourcing), “employees operate as traders to earn points--and potential prizes and other recognition--for correctly predicting future events…for example, a person who has been good at predicting how new products will be received can be invited into meetings where new product designs are discussed.”

While betting is typically associated with greed and vice and people ending up losing their shirts, in predictive markets, employee betting is used in a positive way to capture information from a broad spectrum of people and thus, enable better governance/decision making.

Predictive markets are an affirmation of the need to bring people in the planning and decision making process. Information needs to be captured from across the enterprise , for example, using predictive markets or other collection techniques.

The more information served up in a user-centric way, the better the decisions.

Prediction Markets and Enterprise Architecture

Robot Soldiers and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture can plan, but it must also perform outreach to meet stakeholder requirements and get their buy-in and commitment. A plan without acceptance is shelf-ware.

National Defense Magazine, March 2008, reports on Robot Soldiers, where the technology now exists to make them autonomous and carry lethal weapons—a deadly combination—but the military is not ready to accept it (yet).

“An armed robot with body armor could walk into an ambush, ‘coolly find target, and prioritize them, without getting scared, without making a mistake…In a constricted environment you don’t want to go one on one with a computer controlled weapon system. You’re not going to win that one. The robot is going to get you before you get him.’”

These soldier robots have come a long way. In World War II, the Germans tele-operated 8,000 Goliath suicide robots to blow up bonkers or tanks. Now these robots are autonomous meaning they need little to no operator intervention. “A reconnaissance robot, for example, can be sent into a bunker without any radio link, and come out with a complete map populated with icons showing the location of people, weapons, or evidence of weapons of mass destruction.”

Additionally, robots can now carry lethal weapons, including guns and rocket launchers or non-lethal weapons such as pepper-ball guns, and they have various sensors “to help them navigate rooms and avoid obstacles,” and track friendly forces. They can protect themselves against tampering, conduct explosive ordnance disposal (such as in Iraq), patrol installations, and bring the fight to the enemy. The robot soldier can accompany a real-life soldier—it can follow and keep pace—and when the soldier picks up a weapon and points it at something, so does the robot. A handy companion indeed when you’re about to get into a firefight!

Yet, despite how capable these robot soldiers are, barriers to acceptance remain. Outfitting an autonomous robot with a lethal weapon to use against humans is a big step and one that many in the military establishment are not ready to accept. But is it just a matter of time, especially if our enemies are developing these capabilities too?

It’s interesting that technology can get ahead of our ability to accept it, integrate into our norms, cultures, and way of life. An enterprise architect’s job is not just to identify and introduce new technologies (and business process improvements) to the organization, but to actually help manage the change process and adapt the new technologies to meet the mission.

In the case of robot soldiers, the acceptance and culture change will need to be met with many safety precautions to ensure that even robots functioning autonomously can be managed safely.

Robot Soldiers and Enterprise Architecture

Situational Awareness and Enterprise Architecture

EA is a tool for situational awareness and planning to drive modernization, transformation, and improved results. Enterprise architecture helps us as organizations to be more aware of our business and technology resources, desired outcomes, and ways to link resources/investments to results.

As far as mankind can remember, we have always looked to plan ahead to manage change and complexity. In the times of the pharaohs, people looked to the stars for a sign of what was to come. In past centuries, others have looked into the crystal ball to foretell events and plan accordingly. To many, these rudimentary methods were all they had to gain a semblance control over their lives and a world that probably felt very out of control much of the time.

Now the military has a crystal ball all of its own to deploy to the battleground to provide better situational awareness to our troops, and this is particularly helpful for identifying the enemy in close urban combat, as that which we find ourselves fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, now-a-days.

National Defense Magazine, March 2008, reports that ODF Optronics, a technology company in Tel Aviv, Israel has developed an eye-ball surveillance system “which consists of a hardened sphere that houses a sophisticated camera system and comes with a wireless display unit. Durable eye ball can be thrown over walls, into streets, tunnels, houses, or any other place of interest. Once the sphere hits the ground it establishes a 360-degree video image of the surrounding area and feeds it to operators holding the small display unit. It also features audio and day/night sensors.”

Other models like the omni-directional system, “is a sensor platform that is housed inside a hardened pole that can be mounted on top of a vehicle. It provides a 360-degree field of view for the crew inside…A five camera system is housed inside the cylindrical structure that transmits video images to a rugged laptop sitting inside the vehicle.”

ODF is now working with the DoD technical support working group and DARPA developing new sensors, because they “understood that military forces need to see the world around them.” But the truth is with all need to see the world around us with ever more comprehensive views, better resolution and clarity of image, and enhanced processing to understand what we are seeing. Only with this type of situational awareness are we better able to plan and respond to the world around us.

Like the ODF eye-ball for high-tech military surveillance and reconnaissance, our organizations need the ability to capture and analyze information and develop what Danny Nadri, a retired Israeli Air Force captain calls “quick actionable information.” And enterprise architecture is one important tool to provide us this situational awareness and planning capability.

Situational Awareness and Enterprise Architecture

Earned Value Management and Enterprise Architecture

“Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project management technique used for measuring project progress in an objective manner. EVM combines measurements of technical performance (i.e., accomplishment of planned work), schedule performance (i.e., behind/ahead of schedule), and cost performance (i.e., under/over budget) within a single integrated methodology. When properly applied, EVM provides an early warning of performance problems.” (Wikipedia)

There is a terrific article on EVM called “If the Pharaoh Had Only Used An Earned Value System in Building the Pyramids,” by Lt. Col. William Neimann USAF (Ret.) Lt. Col. Neimann demonstrates very effectively how to use EVM (a scary topic to many) in a humorous scenario of ancient Egypt and the building of the pyramids.

The article starts as follows:

"The developer of the great pyramid of Egypt might be looked upon as the father of program management. He had one of the first programs in recorded history that required a great deal of integration and coordination (i.e. program management). He did not, however, have the relatively new concept of "earned value" to assist in the management of this ambitious program. An "earned value" concept is the heart of all defense contractor management information systems, which comply with DoD Instruction 5000.2 concerning the earned value management control system (EVMCS). But let's go back nearly 5,000 years to the construction of the pyramids to see if "earned value" would have been of any utility in managing that program.”

So what are the key measures in EVM for identifying cost and schedule variances?

(Positive is favorable, Negative is unfavorable)

• Cost Variance (CV) = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP) - Actual Cost for Work Performed (ACWP)

So, if the Pharaoh’s project manager budgeted 14 million shekels for the pyramid construction, but actual cost came in at 13 million shekel, then the project has a positive or favorable cost variance of 1 million shekels. The pyramids are under budget.

• Schedule Variance (SV) = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP) – Budgeted Cost for Work Scheduled (BCWS)

So, if Pharaoh’s project manager calculates that work performed was budgeted at $10 million shekels, but was scheduled to be 14 million shekels complete, then the project has a negative or unfavorable schedule variance of 4 million shekels. In other words, the pyramid builders have performed 4 million less work than planned. The pyramids are that behind schedule.

To calculate the overall project status at any given time:

• % Schedule = (Budgeted Cost for Work Scheduled (BCWS)/Budget At Completion (BAC)) * 100
• % Complete = (Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP)/Budget At Completion (BAC)) * 100
• % Spent = (Actual Cost for Work Performed (ACWP)/Budget At Completion (BAC)) * 100

How efficient is the project?

Greater than 1 is favorable, less than 1 us unfavorable:

• Cost efficiency = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP)/Actual Cost for Work Performed (ACWP)
• Schedule efficiency = Budgeted Cost for Work Performed (BCWP)/Budgeted Cost for Work Scheduled (BCWS)

(Adapted from Earned Value Management Gold Card, Defense Acquisition University)

There are a number of other measures, but you get the idea.

EVM is important to Enterprise Architecture, why?

Enterprise architecture planning and IT governance is all about making order out of chaos in managing IT. By setting strategic direction with the architecture and enforcing it with sound governance, we set the stage for more successful IT project delivery. EVM is a way to measure IT projects success in terms of cost, schedule, and performance. Through EVM, we can measure our IT projects to ensure that we are meeting our EA plan and making course corrections as necessary through the governance process.

EA, IT governance, and EVM are ways to ensure that we no longer manage IT by the “seat of our pants” approach (gut, intuition, politics, and subjective management whim). We now have tools to plan, govern, and measure transformation.

Earned Value Management and Enterprise Architecture

Always Forward and Enterprise Architecture

ComputerWorld Magazine, 26 June 2008, has a terrific interview with Loraine Rodgers, formerly Xerox CIO, Citibank senior VP, city of Phoenix CIO, and American Express director.

Her early years…

Ms Rodgers found out at 16 that she was adopted and was “so angry at being lied to I threw away my merit scholarship and refused to go to college. But I took a programmer aptitude test and I aced it, so I started in IT as a programmer. I started in the weeds.”

Over the years, “I always volunteered for seemingly thankless jobs—challenging assignments that nobody wanted.”

Here’s the best part of what she said and I believe very inspirational…

“I am self-propelled, driven, excited about life, love to learn. I got my undergraduate degree at age 40, and my MBA at 42—all working full time. I move forward always—not necessarily in a straight line, but always forward. I have been fired once, laid off twice and promoted over 27 times. I repackage myself regularly and keep moving forward. I perceive the possibilities. I am not hindered by obstacles. There are no obstacles. Some things just take longer.”

WOW!

Ms. Rodgers is inspirational on an individual and organizational/enterprise architecture level.

Ms. Rodgers story is one of overcoming life’s challenges to succeed beyond probably her wildest dreams and most of ours. To succeed individually or as an organization, there are always challenges. Life is not a straight line upward, but is marked by up and downs, hopefully like Ms. Rodgers professional life, it has generally more ups then downs, and going always in an upward pattern.

Ms. Rodgers idea of always repackaging herself and constantly moving forward is terrific and in EA can be associated with an organization continually looking to reengineer and improve their processes and introduce new technologies to enable the mission and results of operation. The key is to always being grateful for what we have been granted, yet to always strive to improve things one step further: never to be satisfied with status quo or mediocrity.

Similarly, architecting the organization is not a one-time event; rather, it is an ongoing cycle of planning, governing, and transforming. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Whether on an individual or organizational level, we must learn to “move forward always—not necessarily in a straight line, but always forward!"

Always Forward and Enterprise Architecture

Bill Gates and Enterprise Architecture

On July 1, Bill Gates is stepping down from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft, but will continue to serve as Chairman. Bill Gates grew Microsoft into the worldwide software development leader with revenue of $51 billion for fiscal year ending June 2007 and 78,000 employees in 105 countries and regions.

As the prior CEO and chief software (and technical) architect it is definitely worthwhile to look at the legacy that Bill is leaving behind at Microsoft.

Fortune Magazine, 7 July 2008, provides four lasting imprints that Bill Gates is leaving on Microsoft and here are my thoughts on these as relates to enterprise architecture:

1. Software can do anything—Gates has a “utopian view of software. He believes it can do anything.” Like Bill Gates, we need to believe in the mission of our organization. Such belief is critical in inspiring passion for and dedication to what we do. However, blind belief that any one thing can do anything is folly. For example, software without hardware is a no-go as is hardware without software. Both are non-starters without the people to innovatively apply them to our greatest challenges.
2. Engineers rule—“Microsoft employees about 30,000 programmers among its 90,000 employees. In operating groups, engineers are involved in every major decision…Microsoft $8 billion computer science R&D lab is the world’s largest” Engineers are critical to solving our challenges, but you should not ignore marketing and sales either. Marketing and sales reach out and touch the people. You cannot ignore the human aspect to solving problems. Maybe it partially Microsoft’s obsessive engineering approach that has left it vulnerable on the people side, for example: “Apple’s biting ad campaign has successful painted Windows as uncool.”
3. “Institutionalize paranoia”—“’It’s very Microsoft to prepare for the worst,’ says Gates…Bill and Steve (Ballmer) created what I guess I’d characterize as a culture of crisis,’ says chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. There’s always someone who’s going to take the company down.” Paranoia is a disorder, but fighting for competitive advantage is reality. Your competitors are not laying down to die; they are fighting for their professional lives, and you need to meet the challenge every day if you want to be the best out there.
4. “Invest for the long term”—“Whatever the cycle is, we will keep investing through the cycle, because we know on the other side of whatever cycle happens, there is opportunity,” says entertainment division president Robbie Bach. The approach for long term planning is very enterprise architecture focused. However, the architecture planning without the good governance to administer structured, consistent, collaborative decision making is not very workable. Planning without effective decision making and enforcement falls short on the execution side. Again, perhaps here too, Microsoft could benefit from a less top heavy culture and a more open decision process, where all project and product stakeholders have a serious voice at the table. Then turning over the reins from Bill will not be as traumatic requiring approximately four years of preparation and turnover.

In the end, Microsoft is truly terrific company and Bill Gates is leaving a company that is nothing short of spectacular. Of course, even the best can get better with continuous learning and innovation and that is the next chapter for Microsoft in the world of the likes of Google and Apple.

Bill Gates and Enterprise Architecture

Information Warriors and Enterprise Architecture

In the digital age, information is critical to decision making. This is the case in the board room as well as on the battle field.

Information superiority is critical to our warfighters ability to intelligently and efficiently defeat our enemies. Many of the Department of Defense‘s modernization initiatives are aimed at getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Unfortunately, there are still some information gaps.

National Defense Magazine, December 2007, reports “troops in digital age, disconnected.”

Apparently, not everyone in the military is getting all the information they need (at least, not yet).

“The problem often is described as a ‘digital divide’ between the technology haves—the upper echelons of command—and the have-nots---the platoons and squads that are deployed in remote areas. These small units for the most part are disconnected from the Army’s main tactical networks and only are able to communicate with short-range voice radios…[however,] at the top echelons, commanders can tap into loads of data—maps, satellite images, video feeds, and reams of intelligence reports.”

Often though it is the small units on the front lines that need to send and receive critical information on combatants or other situational updates that can have life and death implications. This is why the net-centric strategy for virtually connecting all units is so important to achieving the vision of true information dominance.

Here are just a few important ways that information can help our warfighting capabilities:

• Providing information to soldiers to locate enemy combatants (such as from “live video from unmanned aircraft)
• Enabling location tracking of soldiers to save lives when they are endangered (such as from GPS locators)
• Sending information updates back to command for coordination and enhancing decision capabilities (such as from streaming voice and video, instant messaging, etc.)

The good news is that there are a lot of new information technologies coming online to aid our military, including the Future Combat Systems (FCS) and Joint Tactical Radio Systems (JTRS).

To ensure the success of these technologies, we need to manage the solutions using enterprise architecture to validate requirements, reengineer the processes, and effectively plan and govern the change.

1. Requirements management—“how to identify essential needs for information as opposed to providing information indiscriminately”
2. Business process reengineering—according to Marine Corps. CAPT Christopher Tsirlis “it’s not just about the latest and greatest technology but also changing the organization to use new technology.”
3. Planning/governance—we need link resources to results;“the technology exists, the question is how we resource it, and what is the right amount for each level.”

With a solid enterprise architecture and innovative technologies, we can and will enable the best information warriors in the world.

Information Warriors and Enterprise Architecture