ZyPAD + iPad = Wow!

This is great--the ZyPAD by Eurotech.

A true wrist-mounted computer.

Rugged, wearable, ergonomic, GPS, bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled.

Turns off when arm is down and lights up when arm is up.

According to Trendhunter, sales are initially targeting military, law enforcement, emergency services, and healthcare.

I can see this expanding to sales, delivery, production, warehousing, and loads of service-based jobs--such as in "may I take your order please?" or "how would you like to pay for that?"

Runs on Windows CE--ugh!

I'd like to marry up the function and operating system of an iPad with the fit and form of the ZyPAD and then I think we may just have a real winner!

ZyPAD + iPad = Wow!

The Printer’s Dilemma

There is a lot of interest these days in managed print solutions (MPS)—sharing printers and managing these centrally—for many reasons.

Some of the benefits are: higher printer use rates; reduction in printing; cost saving; and various environmental benefits.

Government Computer News (5 April 2010) has an article called “Printing Money” that states: managed printing is an obvious but overlooked way to cut costs, improve efficiency, and bolster security.”

But there are also a number of questions to consider:

- What’s the business model? Why are “printing companies” telling us to buy less printers and to print less? Do car companies tell us to buy less cars and drive less (maybe drive more fuel efficient vehicles, but drive less or buy less?) or do food companies advise us to buy less food or eat less (maybe eat healthier food, but less food)? To some vendors, the business model is simple, if we use their printers and cartridges—rather than a competitor’s—then even if we use less overall, the managed print vendor is getting more business, so for them, the business model makes sense.

- What's the cost model? Analysts claim agencies by moving to managed print solutions “could save at least 25 percent of their printing expenses” and vendors claim hundreds of thousands, if not millions in savings, and that is attractive. However, the cost of commodity printers, even the multifunction ones with fax/copy/scan functions, has come way down, and so has the print cartridges—although they are still too high priced—and we change them not all that often (I just changed one and I can barely remember the last time that I did). As an offset to cost savings, do we need to consider the potential impact to productivity and effectiveness as well as morale—even if the latter is just the “annoyance factor”?

- What’s the consumer market doing? When we look at the consumer market, which has in many analyst and consumer opinions jumped ahead of where we are technologically in the office environment, most people have a printer sitting right next to them in their home office—don’t you? I’d venture to say that many people even have separate printers for other family members with their own computers set ups, because cost and convenience (functional)-wise, it just makes sense.

- What’s the cultural/technological trend? Culturally and technologically, we are in the “information age,” most people in this country are “information workers,” and we are a fast-paced (and what’s becoming a faster and faster-paced) society where things like turn around time and convenience (e.g. “Just In Time inventory, overnight delivery, microwave dinners, etc.) are really important. Moreover, I ask myself is Generation Y, that is texting and Tweeting and Facebooking—here, there, and everywhere—going to be moving toward giving up there printers or in fact, wanting to print from wherever they are (using the cloud or other services) and get to their documents and information immediately?

- What’s the security impact? Understanding that printing to central printers is secure especially with access cards or pin numbers to get your print jobs, I ask whether in an age, where security and privacy of information (including corporate theft and identity theft) are huge issues, does having a printer close by make sense, especially when dealing with sensitive information like corporate strategy or “trade secrets,” mission security, personnel issues, or acquisition sensitive matters, and so on. Additionally, we can we still achieve the other security benefits of MPS—managing (securing, patching etc.) and monitoring printers and print jobs in a more decentralized model through the same or similar network management functions that we use for our other end user-devices (computers, servers, storage, etc.)

- What’s the environmental impact? There are lots of statistics about the carbon footprint from printing—and most I believe is from the paper, not the printers. So perhaps we can print smarter, not only with reducing printers, but also with ongoing education and sensitivity to our environment and the needs of future generations. It goes without saying, that we can and should cut down (significantly) on what and how much we print (and drive, and generally consume, etc.) in a resource constrained environment—planet Earth.

In the end, there are a lot of considerations in moving to managed print solutions and certainly, there is a valid and compelling case to moving to MPS, especially in terms of the potential cost-saving to the organization (and this is particularly important in tough economic environments, like now), but we should also weight others considerations, such as productivity offsets, cultural and technological trends, and overall security and environmental impacts, and come up with what’s best for our organizations.

The Printer’s Dilemma

From Planning to Practice

Real planning is hard work. I’m not talking about the traditional—get the management team together, offsite for a few hours or days and spell out a modified mission and vision statement and some basic goals and objectives—this is the typical approach. Rather, I am referring to thinking and planning about the future with a sense of urgency, realism, and genuine impact to the way we do our jobs.

In the traditional approach, the management team is focused on the planning session. They are engaged in the planning for a short duration, but when back in the office, they don’t go back in any meaningful way to either refer to or apply the plan in what they or their employees actually do. The plan in essence defaults to simply a paperwork exercise, an alignment mechanism, a check box for the next audit.

In contrast, in a comprehensive planning approach, the focus is not on the planning session itself, but on the existential threats and opportunities that we can envision that can impact on the organization and what we are going to do about it. We need to look at for example: What are our competitors doing? Are there new product innovations emerging? Are there social and economic trends that will affect how we do business? How is the political and regulatory environment changing? And so on. The important thing is to think through/ work through, the impact analysis and plan accordingly to meet these head-on.

This is similar to a SWOT analysis—where we evaluate our Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, but it differs in that it extends that analysis portion to story planning (my term), where the results of SWOT are used to imagine and create multifaceted stories or scenarios of what we anticipate will happen and then identify how we will capitalize on the new situation or counter any threats. In other words, we play out the scenario —similar to simulation and modeling—in a safe environment, and evaluate our best course of action, by seeing where the story goes, how the actors behave and react, and introducing new layers of complexity and subtext.

Harvard Business Review (HBR), Jan-Feb 2010, has an article called “Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape” by Michael Jacobides that states “in an age when nothing is constant, strategy should be defined by narrative—plots, subplots, and characters---rather than by maps, graphs, and numbers.”

The author proposes the use of “playscripts” (his term), a scenario-based approach for planning, in which—“a narrative that sets out the cast of characters in a business, the way in which they are connected, the rules they observe, the plots and subplots in which they are a part, and how companies create and retain value as the business and the cast changes.

While I too believe in using a qualitative type of planning to help think out and flesh out strategy, I do not agree that we should discard the quantitative and visual analysis—in fact, I think we should embrace it and expand upon it by integrating it into planning itself. This way we optimize the best from both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

While numbers, trends, graphics, and other visuals are important information elements in planning, they are even more potent when added to the “what if” scenarios in a more narrative type of planning. For example, based on recent accident statistics with the car accelerators (a quantifiable and graphical analysis), we may anticipate that a major foreign car company will be conducting a major recall and that the government will be conducting investigations into this company. How will we respond—perhaps, we will we increase our marketing emphasizing our own car safety record and increase production in anticipation of picking up sales from our competitor?

Aside from being robust and plausible, the article recommends that playscripts be:

· Imaginative—“exploring all the opportunities that exist.” I would also extend this to the other relevant element of SWOT and include envisioning possible threats as well.

· Outward-facing—“focus on the links a company has with other entities, the way it connects with them and how others perceive it in the market.” This is critical to take ourselves out of our insular environments and look outside at what is going on and how it will affect us. Of course, we cannot ignore the inner dynamics of our organization, but we must temper it with a realization that we function within a larger eco-system.

To me, the key to planning is to free the employees to explore what is happening in their environment and how they will behave. It is not to regurgitate their functions and what they are working on, but rather to see beyond themselves and their current capabilities and attitudes. Life today is not life tomorrow, and we had better be prepared with open minds, sharpened skills and a broad arsenal to deal with the future that is soon upon us.

From Planning to Practice

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

“Postmodern IT” and Enterprise Architecture

We all want to know where IT is going in the future, what the trends are, so we can meet our future in it head-on.

CIO Magazine, 1 May 2006, had an article called, “The Postmodern Manifesto”, predicting what the postmodern IT department will look like. 2+ years have passed (a long time in IT according to Moore’s Law), but these IT trends remain solid and true.

• Business innovation—“IT will assume responsibility for business innovation across the company. IT has spent the better part of 40 years automating business processes…IT’s role in process innovation will only increase…’we’ve gone from being the engineers of new processes to being the movers of innovation across the company,’” says Judith Campbell CIO of New York Life.

This view is consistent with the Federal Enterprise Architecture Practice Guidance, November 2007 that states: “Results-oriented architecture is developed with the context of the Performance Improvement Lifecycle broken down into three-phases: ‘Architect’, ‘Invest’ and ‘Implement’. Each lifecycle phases is comprised of tightly integrated processes which combine to transform an agency’s top-down strategic goals and bottom-up system needs into a logical series of work products designed to help the agency achieve strategic results.”

Bottom line is the IT function and enterprise architecture in particular is viewed as the discipline for business process reengineering, improvement, and the introduction of new technologies, and the measure of success is results—cost-savings, cost-efficiencies, and performance improvements.

• Federated governance—“IT governance will settle on the federated model and shared services…CIO’s have come to a consensus on the overall model for IT: a mix of centralized and local services known as the federated model, which is governed centrally by a small headquarters staff that gives varying degrees of autonomy to IT groups allied with different business units, functions or geographies.”

This is consistent with the need for IT organizations to be interoperable, secure, share information and services, and be cost effective, yet at the same time stay nimble and allow “unique resources to remain local.”

• Return on Investment (ROI)—“IT ROI will become even more difficult to prove…Tacit IT is not about automation…Tacit IT is all about decision support, knowledge management, business intelligence and artificial intelligence…And the pressure will be on vendors to make technology think rather than automate.”

IT has always been challenged in measuring return on investment (or in the government return on mission), but it is especially difficult when it comes quantifying the return on an abstract called information.

This performance measurement challenge is manifest in the field of enterprise architecture as well.

At the 1105 Government Information Group Enterprise Architecture Conference in DC this past week, Keith Herrington of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) presented the following:

“• Observation: Within the Federal government there is no observed link between the maturity of the enterprise architecture effort and the performance of the enterprise as a whole.”

I too have personally seen many agencies struggle to quantify the results of their IT and architecture programs and hence, anecdotal evidence, unfortunately continues to prevail as the default “measurement.”

• Transformation—“CIOs will have to step up…’the concept of providing a secure, stable infrastructure is merely the price of admission,’ says Jeffrey Campbell, CIO of BNSF Railway. ‘[to survive], you have to be a transformational CIO.’”

So true! According to an article in Architecture and Governance Magazine, Volume 3, Issue, “Metrics that Matter”: “IT should measure three types of attributes in what is essentially a modified form of the Balanced Scorecard approach to measure performance and change management. Those three attributes are: strategic value, project management effectiveness, and operational effectiveness. Ironically, while the first two matter the most to executives in most cases, IT typically focuses on the third area, which executives only care about if the IT department has a history of failure and thus needs to be closely monitored on the basics.”

Yes, we need to make sure the IT computer and server “lights” stay on, the network is up and the communications are available, but more importantly we need to take IT to the next level, to strategically partner with the business to architect, govern, and achieve genuine, measureable ROI and transformation!

“Postmodern IT” and Enterprise Architecture

The Visionary and Enterprise Architecture

In User-centric EA, we develop a vision or target state for the organization. However, there are a number of paradoxes in developing an EA vision/target, which makes this goals quite challenging indeed.

In the book, The Visionary’s Handbook by Wacker and Taylor, the authors identify the paradoxes of developing a vision for the enterprise; here are some interesting ones to ponder:

1. Proving the vision—“The closer your vision gets to provable ‘truth,’ the more you are simply describing the present in the future tense.”
2. Competing today, yet planning for tomorrow—“By its very nature, the future destablizes the present. By its very natures, the present resists the future. To survive you need duality [i.e. living in two tenses, the present and the future], but people and companies by their very nature tend to resisting living in two tenses.” “You have to compete in the future dimension without destabilizing the competition [i.e. your ability to compete] in the present and without subverting the core values that have sustained your business in the past.”
3. Bigger needs to be smaller—“The bigger you are, the smaller you need to be….great size is great power, but great size is also stasis.”
4. The future is unpredictable—“Nothing will turn out exactly as it is supposed to…yet if you fail to act, you will cease to exist in any meaningful professional or business sense.”

So how does one develop a viable target architecture?

The key would seem to be in deconflicting past, present, and future. The past cannot be a hindrance to future change and transformation—the past must remain the past; lessons learned are welcome and desirable, but the options for the future should be open to innovation and hard work. The resistance of the present (to the future) must be mitigated by continuous communications and marketing; we must bring people along and provide leadership. The future is unknown, but trends and probabilities are possible for setting a way ahead; of course, the target needs to remain adaptable to changing conditions.

Certainly, any target architecture we develop is open to becoming a "target" for those who wish to take pot shots. But in an ever changing world and fierce global competition, we cannot sit idle. The architecture must lead the way for incremental and transformative change for the organization, all the while course correcting based on the evolving baseline and market conditions. EA is as much an art as it is a science, and the paradoxes of vision and planning need to be managed carefully.

The Visionary and Enterprise Architecture

Business Technology Trends and Enterprise Architecture

There are a number of key business technology trends that enterprise architects need to be aware of─McKinsey Quarterly reports these on 26 December 2007.

1) Managing Relationships

• Distributing co-creation—“The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Today…companies routinely involve customers, suppliers, small specialist businesses, and independent contractors in the creation of new products. … By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.” Examples include Linux and Wikipedia
• Using consumers as innovators—“As the Internet has evolved--an evolution prompted in part by new Web 2.0 technologies--it has become a more widespread platform for interaction, communication, and activism…Companies that involve customers in design, testing, marketing (such as viral marketing), and the after-sales process get better insights into customer needs and behavior and may be able to cut the cost of acquiring customers, engender greater loyalty, and speed up development cycles.”
• Tapping into a world of talent—“Software and Internet technologies are making it easier and less costly for companies to integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders [globally], and this development opens up many contracting options for managers of corporate functions…This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it.”
• Extracting more value from interactions—“Technology tools that promote tacit interactions, such as wikis, virtual team environments, and videoconferencing, may become no less ubiquitous than computers are now. As companies learn to use these tools, they will develop managerial innovations--smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions.”
  

2) Managing capital and assets

• Expanding the frontiers of automation—“Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What's more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service…The trick is to strike the right balance between raising margins and making customers happy.”
  
• Unbundling production from delivery—“Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever smaller increments cost-effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.”

3) Leveraging information in new ways

• Putting more science into management—“Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From "ideagoras" (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.”
  
• Making businesses from information—“Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities…[For example,] A retailer using digital cameras to prevent shoplifting could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores, and could also use these insights to improve its layout or placement of promotional displays.
  

From a User-centric EA perspective, many of the business technology trends not only ring true, but are in fact essential to the practice of good User-centric EA.

• First, managing relationships, whether through co-creation with partners, customer involvement, outsourcing, or making interactions more valuable, all point to the “User-centric” aspect of User-centric EA, in which we bring the users, stakeholders, and subject matter experts collaboratively into the EA process to provide them more value from EA information products and governance services, so that the EA is useful and usable to them.
• Second, in terms of leveraging information “to make smarter decisions,” this is the value proposition of EA—information transparency to enhance decision-making. McKinsey underscores the growing importance of information, such as EA provides as follows: “Given the vast resources going into storing and processing information today, it's hard to believe that we are only at an early stage in this trend. Yet we are. The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall. Leaders should get out ahead of this trend to ensure that information makes organizations more effective, rather than less. Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures.”
• Third, in better managing capital assets through additional automation, interoperability of systems, and utilizing reusable components, these too are core elements and principles of EA, particularly in terms of applying and implementing technology (automation) to align with business requirements, and developing interoperable systems and using service oriented architecture to deliver reusable component services. This is all about more effective management of our technology base and the development of a farther reaching, stretch target to continue to get more value from technology.
  

All signs from Mckinsey point to the importance of User-centric EA as the way forward in this field.

Business Technology Trends and Enterprise Architecture

Driving Innovation and Enterprise Architecture

The Wall Street Journal, 24 September 2007 reports that “managing innovation is one of the biggest challenges that companies face.” Why? “They not only need to come up with new ideas, but also need to foster a culture that encourages and rewards innovation.”

Douglas Solomon, the Chief Technology Officer of IDEO (an innovation and design consulting firm) provides some insights on how to make a culture more innovative:

In general, “corporations inherently have antibodies that come out and try and kill any innovation.” Small companies don’t have sufficient resources and big companies “don’t always have the thought processes and the skills to really think outside their current business, nor the permission to really do it.”

Here are four things organizations need to be innovative:

1. Degree of discomfort—“there are still people who say, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And I don’t think these companies are in a really good position to change…you have to have a certain degree of discomfort in your business to be willing to make the changes that are necessary”
2. Design thinking—rather than analytical thinking extrapolating from the past to the future, innovative thinking requires ‘design thinking’, which is rooted in creativity, optimism and is goal-driven, trying to create new possibilities for a new future.
3. Time to innovate—“you have to actually build processes, you have to support people, you have to give them time…to think on their own…you have to provide a reward system for encouraging innovation.”
4. Risk tolerance—“you have to tolerate risk, if you’re going to try to be innovative.” Doug Merrill the VP of engineering and CIO of Google adds that “Every company in the world says ‘don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness.’ Every company in the world says ‘It’s OK to fail.” And for 99% of them, it’s probably not true.”

In User-centric EA, developing a target state and transition plan for an organization requires innovation. If there is no innovation in your target architecture and plans, then you’re just regurgitating the same old stuff to the enterprise and it’s probably of very limited, if any, value. EA must step outside its traditional box and come to the table with innovative ideas and new approaches to the business; that is it’s real value add.

As we see above, being innovative is hard: It requires sometimes going against the grain, standing out amidst nay-sayers and the ‘old guard,’ looking outside the enterprise for best practices and marketplace trends, and being optimistic and open-minded to future possibilities that are not eclipsed by ingrained thinking and turf battles. Finally architecting the future state must be grounded in present realities (including constraints such as resources, politics, and other priorities and requirements), but innovate we must if we are to make a better state tomorrow than the one we have today!

Driving Innovation and Enterprise Architecture