August 22nd, 2009 — Enterprise architecture, Organisations, Structure and people
In the current economic context, although the IMF announces that recovery have started, the companies should not weaken and continue the effort of adaptation. As I had shown in the posts “Is it time to revise his strategic planning?” and (currently in French) “Qui croit qu’après la crise, il y aura un retour à la normale ?”, giving the objective to belong to the group of survivors is not enough, it is necessary that the companies are prepared with the resumption of their activity and being able to provide the capacity in accordance. That still required and requires, with each one of them, a great effort of transformation, more especially as the recovery will be done in a context of business renovated, because customers and suppliers are changing their behavior. A new place will have to be found, an example is the automotive industry which evolves with forced march to electric vehicles, for being poised to answer the challenges of the international regulation and customers requests of respectful industrial products for environment.
In this context, it is astonishing of reading, in the analyzes of Gartner on Architecture Enterprise (AE), that the quality of the work of the architects was not sufficient to show and articulate the value of the AE with other levers of change. It is even worrying because the value of AE is precisely to successful in changing. How did it happen ?
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June 15th, 2009 — Enterprise architecture, Organisations, Strategy, Structure and people
Even if bureaucracy brings values of rationality, good organisation and high control, some famous managers like Jack Welch declare themselves as foes of bureaucracy. Because, in most of cases, this system does not fit with modern business. In spite of that, a lot of companies stick on bureaucracy illusion, especially in France where business culture is very compatible with it.
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May 28th, 2009 — Blogroll, Enterprise IT, IT Strategy, Organisations, Strategy, Structure and people
In this times, transparency is expected to fix a lot of ill behaviour which led to crisis. Better transparency brings the hope to have trustworthy financial information and to improve market efficiency. Better transparency helps direct democracy and makes easier social and politics. However, a lot of our business is based on information asymmetry which is transparency contrary.
Accessing information is often matter of power. Less people know about your intentions, less they have control on you. Indeed, if you release all your strategic plans to the Market, it is easier to your competitors to counter you. On the other hand, if you say nothing about your plans, your intentions, how will you find people to follow you ? Finally transparency may be the right balance between information you need to keep for being able to succeed in your business and the one you should release to gather enough trust from your stakeholders to succeed.
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April 13th, 2009 — Product strategy, Strategy, Structure and people, long-range planning
By these times of crisis, we never need more than today to have a strong vision of future which will help to keep the right direction while weathers are bad.
A lot of organisations are working on it : french governement, unesco,
Here is a little trying of post office business vision for these next years.
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March 8th, 2009 — Culture, Enterprise IT, Enterprise architecture, IT Strategy, Organisations, Strategy, Theories
Today most of discussions regarding organisation performance turn around the concept of service. Companies and company sub-entities are deemed to be more efficient when committed to services delivery. Would it be due to modern economies orientation for which services industry represent 70% ? The successes of the cloud computing, of Software as a service associated with the spread of ITIL outside production departments, are far from the bottom of the drivers list. Even SOA, though a declining fame, contributed to service orientation success.
But, are they, all these, the same services ? Some people says these are different points of view. If true, it means that it exists a unique definition of service which unify all the previous. Then, all would be services ? this is the question of this post.
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February 11th, 2009 — Enterprise IT, Enterprise architecture, IT Strategy, Strategy, Supply strategy, Theories
These last 20 years, Information Technology (IT) reshaped the world : business, media, politics, government, defence,… Companies undertook great changes especially around 2000 before the internet bubble went burst. Even if the changes were visible and obvious, statistics didn’t demonstrate a clear link between IT investment and profitability. Several models have been build, (ex : Hytt and Bryjolfsson 1996), the results were not clear and they were too complex for being used by company management.
This brought forward the balanced scorecard (BSC) method from Norton and Kaplan and the IT BSC which simplifies the question. With BSC, it is up to company managers to identifying the links and the effective actions to settle for implementing company strategy. BSC requires that management shares point of views regarding strategic hypothesis, activities drivers, results and indicators. In this case, the model produced is specific to a company, its value is empirical and depends on managers experience.
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January 12th, 2009 — Customer strategy, Plan
As I meet again my customers in this starting of year, most of them does not succeed to keep cost words out of their lips. Either budgets were frozen in spite of no impact study on operations or budgets were already sized on the lowest possible line as pessimistic scenario. All was fuelling gossips about the questions : when will it stop ? how many people to shed ? How to get business ?
Was preventive downsizing the best to do in this context ? Should they do differently ?
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December 22nd, 2008 — Enterprise IT, Enterprise architecture
In such times of crisis, cost cutting is the most frequent question to be dealt with by a CIO. Business unit managers and CEO would like to get back as much money as possible to preserve strategic company investments and operations. Each manager is keen to show how best he is in company strategy support, so CIO.
Then it is time to have ideas.
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December 5th, 2008 — IT technology, Web2.0
The term “post-industrial society” was first coined by Daniel Bell in 1973. He predicted things like the global diffusion of capital, the imbalance of international trade, and the decline of the manufacturing sector on the behalf of service industry. This leads to slow growth economies since services usually show less productivity growth than manufacturing. This is the Baumol Effect which states that in labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing,education, or the performing arts, there is little or no growth in productivity over time.
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October 30th, 2008 — Enterprise IT, Enterprise architecture, IT Strategy, IT technology
Strictly speaking CIO extent is around company information asset management, even if he encompasses often operations management as well. Larger companies which would like to lead processes on its own, may feel better with a second IT manager dedicated to technology, this is a CTO. According to company main stakes, this manager could be outside IT department, where he reports to COO or CEO, or inside and then he reports to CIO.
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