Let’s Start Fresh with a Digital Platform!
A dichotomy seems to be emerging in corporate IT strategy and enterprise architecture. Let’s take a closer look at what looks like a seemingly promising strategy to propel your business into the digital era. A Reliable but Inflexible Set of Operational Assets In the right corner, we have the technology backbone of an organization’s operations. […]
Beauty in All Creations
In the world of buildings, the importance of architectural beauty is rarely questioned. Well-designed buildings inspire us, comfort us, and ignite seldom felt emotions. The widely recognized merit of beauty is, in part, founded on the fact that human constructions are tangible creations. We live in them, work in them, and look at them. We […]
Reading: Digital Ethics
My children -as well as the majority of people that aren’t aware of what’s behind- tend to take the digital applications that they see, touch and use as something that just “is what it is”, as if it was picked from a tree.It couldn’t be further from reality. Behind all this digital ‘stuff’, there are […]
What Drives Quality
Making parallels between corporate IT work products and those of other fields is adventurous. Nevertheless, I need to find a way to explain what quality control means for corporate IT without getting technical. Imagine for a moment that your corporate IT team was not delivering technology solutions to your business, but rather automobiles. Also assume, […]
Silo Generator #3
The two previous silo types could be labeled as structural silos. They are almost permanent and vary only after major reorgs or when applications are introduced or retired. The third one, the project silo, is the most damageable type of silo.Although projects and their rigorous management are an absolute must for any organization to govern […]
No One is Accountable for What Is Not Measured
In a previous article on the construction industry’s distribution of roles, I demonstrated that centuries of cumulative trials and errors have led to a clear delineation between the main stakeholder’s responsibilities, all to the benefit of the paying customer and the public in general. In corporate IT, as we saw in the following article, things are quite different: […]
Corporate IT’s Non-Speed Formula
A crucial aspect of your organization’s agility lies in the speed at which your IT function can deliver change. Not the small run-the-mill types of change, but the mission-critical delivery of the new enabling technologies, digital platforms and IT solutions that your business needs to strive. Speed gives you a competitive edge in your respective […]
IT’s Quantitatively Measured Duties Are What Really Matter
Despite corporate IT’s renowned penchant for solving complex problems, there are some issues for which you should not count on them. The ones that involve conflicting accountabilities. Finding the clashing duties is not obvious, but this series of two articles will guide you to them. The first step is to understand what really counts. Clashing […]
The Unmeasured and Inconsequential Aren’t Getting Any Better
In part 1 of this article, we saw that what really counts in corporate IT is not only measured, but also metered quantitatively, with standardized gauges that leave as little space as possible for misinterpretations. Through exploring a parallel with the pizza delivery business, I attempted to show that anyone can be assigned conflicting accountabilities, such as […]
Complex But Not-So-Adaptive
How the Usual Engagement Model Doesn’t Foster Quick Self-Adjustment in Corporate IT Your organization is a complex, open system[1]. Open, because it needs to interact with its environment to exist. Complex because it is made of a great number of interacting components, is hard to understand, is difficult to change and often yields unpredictable results. The General […]