John McCain announced that he'd win the war and bring the troops home by 2013. I wonder how much he's betting on the Mayan apocalyptic prophesy for 2012. If the 2012 prophesies turn out to be nothing more than an astrological Y2K, McCain's might be in big trouble!
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( 0 / 0 )I've come to think of companies in terms of brains. Like brains, companies build neural pathways which are common pathways which drive communications and behavior. Also like brains new neural pathways are created all the time as people come and go and processes change. However, what is really interesting is that unless there is conscious desire to change a particular pathway or a catastrophic event occurs damaging existing pathways, communications and behaviors will remain consistent in spite of the appearance of these new pathways.
For people, this is most recognizable when considering addictions, such as smoking or alcoholism. Unless the person consciously works to change their behavior, then the brain will continue to force the person to repeat their addictive behaviors. In it's less recognizable form, people gain new neural pathways when they create new memories. Until they access those memories, those pathways will exist, but not be accessed.
What this tells us is that companies need to take extraordinary efforts to bring new team members into the fold. I am familiar with many companies where a handful of individuals become identified as "heroes"--the group of individuals that are known because they consistently deliver. In these same companies, I've also seen many very capable individuals that are not getting a chance to participate and contribute because the company's natural behaviors are to go to the "heroes" first. One could say this is their addiction.
Overall, the hero syndrome works well for companies with regard to responding to crises situations. However, most companies don't measure the downstream impact of the hero situation on the rest of the organization. For one, it creates animosity for others capable of fulfilling the needs of a given situation, but not given the chance. Secondly, the company is at risk in the event that a hero leaves the fold. It's a short term impact though as this is an event that will force the company to access one of it's new neural pathways, thus raising one or more others up to the new rank of hero.
For me, the larger issue at hand is overall productivity. The company is a machine. When it leverages only known neural pathways, the machine is not running as efficiently as it can and the company is spending money on resources that are not being fully leveraged. By not expending the necessary energy to force the machine to change with the introduction of new neural pathways (new resources) it cannot scale efficiently.
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( 0 / 0 )I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies engaged simultaneously in 50+ of IT projects as well as small companies with one or two products and I don’t believe there is a need for any organization to have a full-time software architect. Once the modeling is done, it is the work of coding and testing that truly takes the full-time effort. Once underway, 100 hours a month of time is enough for any architect to respond to most needs of all ongoing projects.
Those who have worked in software development, whether in corporate IT or in commercial software companies are most likely familiar with the analogy between building software and building buildings. That is, the architect designs the building and the software developer builds the building. Sometimes there is the equivalent of a structural engineer, but most often times the analogy is left in its simple form as a means of differentiating the roles and to demonstrate the separation of concerns and skills.
The importance of the analogy is to instill that without proper architecture up front, there is significant risk your building might fall down. However, the aspect no one discusses of this analogy is that the engineer is on site full time during the build out, while the architect does 80% of their work up front and then might provide intermittent reviews while the build out is occurring.
How do general contractors deal with this? They hire architectural firms to perform the design and review function. How do organizations deal with this function with regard to software? They hire the architect full time. Hence, the architect’s dilemma--what they heck am I supposed to work on when no new buildings need designing?
Additionally, it’s not uncommon to find that most commercial entities start building their software with engineers alone foregoing the architecture until a crises occurs, resulting in the answer, “let’s get an architect in here.” The belief here is that the architect will save the day and make sure all the buildings under development will meet coding standards and remove all future worry. Oh yes, and this is all to happen without tearing down the building and starting from scratch.
The architects answer of, “you need to start this over and do this right,” is often met with rejection and animosity toward the architect. Moreover, usually an engineer will come up with some hack to get the build out going again, which results in the architect now a full time expensive resource who in their mind couldn’t even come up with the simple answer that some engineer 1/2 the price figured out.
This all results in the architect stuck in a position where they deem all those in charge around them to be blithering idiots who have no care for the quality of the things they build as long as it leads to the end result of recognizing the revenue. In the case of real buildings, this approach cannot occur because life and death are at stake. However, in the case of software, since the impact to the actual business is minimal, when compared to loss of human life, the organization ends up with a group of hackers that look like heroes and a few architects wondering how they got into the mess they’re in.
Hence, it is my belief that until the IT industry recognizes software architecture in the same way as construction recognizes building architecture, that software architects will forever be frustrated by their situations.
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( 1 / 1 )Perhaps its the volume of business I do with Blockbuster, but once again I noticed that their aging retail system is at the crux of so many of their issues. For one, it limits their ability to roll out new programs as I described in an earlier posting. But, more importantly, it inflexibility causes issues that end up directly impacting the customer and the front-line store employees.
Again, my experience surrounds the rollout of their new online program and exchange benefits. As it turns out, the connection between Blockbuster retail and Blockbuster online is stove-piped. Hence, the retail stores support the program, but are not directly responsible for it's business unit.
How do I know this? What else is there to do but talk when you're waiting for the store manager to come override an issue at the register due to an inadequate IT support for a new business initiative.
What I saw as the result of this inability to deliver support for new business initiatives in a timely fashion was: A) my time was wasted, B) the people behind me time was wasted and C) the store employees grew more and more frustrated with these issues.
Retailers need to realize the cost of not having agile systems, will eventually be reflected on their employees and in front of customers. For me, it is to the point where I am re-evaluating NetFlix once again.
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( 0 / 0 )Once, there was a great king Ceo and Ceo was having difficulties running his kingdom. So, Ceo created the role of a minion to help him run the kingdom and his name was Erp. Erp did an okay job running the kingdom and collecting the taxes.
However, the king soon realized that Erp couldn't help him in obtaining the foods he wanted to eat when he wanted to eat them and didn't know where the king's favorite playthings were stored in the kingdom. So, the king creates three new minions to help him run the kingdom -- WiMuS, TiMuS and SCisM.
For awhile King Ceo was happy because the kingdom was now running smoothly and he was able to have whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it and he knew where everything was in the kingdom. However, before he knew it, King Ceo realized that his kingdom was now split into four distinct factions that refused to work together and King Ceo was once again saddened by his new situation. Moreover, King Ceo couldn't just remove the minions because they had become so deeply rooted in the workings of the kingdom and each had their supporters within the kingdom. To remove any one minion would risk causing major disruption to the entire kingdom.
Then, one day, a King from another land came to conquer King Ceo and because the kingdom was split into factions, King Ceo did not have an accurate picture of how he would defend the kingdom from attack. The King was also only getting partial information from each minion that was designed to make them look better in the King's eyes.
So, King Ceo did the only thing he could, he created agents of the kingdom and had them infiltrate Erp, WiMuS, TiMuS and ScisM's factions and report on all their activities. And, finally, the King had a complete view of his kingdom and was able to assemble a defense that allowed him to fend off the attackers and even take over their kingdom.
Avorcor produces the agents that infiltrate your multiple factions and allow you to create an accurate picture of your company and develop strategies that will help you to succeed.
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( 0 / 0 )One of the most frustrating things about being part of the software industry is the lack of respect for semantics. Most software engineers, even those of us that move into managerial positions, like to be semantically accurate at heart. Then, comes the marketeer, who joins in to participate in the selling of software products to a market, that must have total disdain for semantics because over the years they have butchered thousands of really good names by attaching it to really poor representations.
Case in point, use of the term "as-a-Service". What does it mean if being semantically accurate? It means being delivered as a service, thus serving a consumer. How does that translate into a business model where the software is rented on a use basis? Isn't that Software-as-a-Rental or Software-for-a-Fee?
Software-as-a-Service means software acting in the role of a service provider, the software, not the company providing the software. So, something delivered "as-a-Service", to me, means that something is being served up to consumers. It would be great if that's what the majority of the world understood SaaS to be--software being provided as a service to a community--but they believe it means Software-as-a-Rental and they think that because the marketeer's created that association in their minds.
We chose Supply-Chain-as-a-Service for the name of our product suite, because we turn the supply-chain into something that is serving up metrics, notifications and data to a community of users that are interested in that information. Instead of the supply-chain being something that just operates, we make it something that can be instrumented. We believe this change will dramatically change the way that businesses respond to supply-chain activities. We also believe that it's possible because we turn the supply-chain from something that acts in a vacuum to something that provides a service to the organization and it's business partners.
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( 0 / 0 )What could Blockbuster do if they has a service-oriented design for their retail systems? Okay, I'm making some assumptions that they don't based on my consumer experiences, but I'm going to venture a guess that they could more readily implement changes in their online store policies in their retail outlet point of sale systems.
Why do I say this? Blockbuster most recently changed their online distribution plans from unlimited in-store exchanges to plans that limit how many in-store exchanges you are entitled to a month. READ: THE BUSINESS PROCESS CHANGED
If you as a consumer go into a Blockbuster and ask how many exchanges you have left in a month, they tell you they don't have that information available. READ: IT COULDN'T RESPOND QUICKLY ENOUGH TO MEET THE NEEDS OF THE BUSINESS.
If Blockbuster's system was service-oriented, they could have easily implemented the necessary services and deployed the change to the POS to call those services and deployed the changes when the business process change occurred. Instead, now the customer and the employees in the retail outlets are frustrated and annoyed. Additionally, the retail outlet cannot tell you when you are checking out if the title you are holding is on it's way to you, so I've had about 3-4 collisions where I rent a title only to get home and find the title in my mailbox.
Blockbuster, give me a call, I can fix this for you....oh, and I'll also fix your loophole for in-store exchanges.
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( 0 / 0 )Was having a conversation with a peer today about Guerilla SOA. I'm a believer of the approach and have been using successfully with customers now for 3 1/2 years. My peer was supporting the concept that SOA had to be enterprise in design or the effort would be for naught because the organization would end up with duplication of effort.
I explained that I believe that Enterprise SOA without organizational change is a pipe dream. You cannot have a command and control hierarchy overlaid with a loosely-coupled mesh that is invasive of several domain areas simultaneously. I used the example of customer data. I said, if a company is really buying into E-SOA, then they should create an organizational unit who's sole purpose is the capture and management of customer data. If this is their sole purpose, you can bet they'd ensure reuse across the organization or they would soon be disbanded.
But, saying that you're going to make CRM an enterprise initiative and have an CRM service that all groups will use without organizational change is like Eisenhower creating a covert operations unit that was jointly owned by the military, white house and congress. We all know how well that one turned out.
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