Sunday, December 19, 2004

Strategic Planning and Tactical Deployment in the Applistructure.   I was just thinking that it was two years ago that I was doing the Strategic Planning for us.  What a scary thought!!!   Now that I am elsewhere I need to be sure to get this viewpoint to the folks doing it today.  Comments and ideas from[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] One of the big complaints around enterprise applications has always been their large monolithic nature. Deploying these applications is so difficult that its the stuff of legend. Large businesses exist simply to integrate them into the enterprise and make them interoperate with legacy applications. When I was CIO for Utah, we started a project to put in SAPs payroll system. We had to hire Cedar to install and customize it for us. Meanwhile, another development is enterprise applications is on-demand services like Salesforce.com. The great thing about on-demand applications is that they can be deployed tactically. An SVP of Sales with a corporate AMEX card can order up Salesforce.com on his lunch hour and have his team using it the next day. Nothing to deploy and, more importantly, no painful interaction with the CIO. Enterprise applications like SAP, PeopleSoft, or Siebel, on the other hand, are strategic in nature. To deploy one, you have to plan (a lot), budget, initiate a project, and assign people. Of course, if you're successful (and I stress if), you have automated major parts of your business, cut your operations costs, and increased your ability to monitor your business. You may have also just set in stone the business process that the SVP of Sales wants to change the week after the project ends. Right now, Salesforce and its competitors are a small part of overall enterprise application space. CIOs tend to view them with interest, but don't pay much attention to them. I think that's going to change. To understand why, let me differentiate strategic planning from strategic deployment. Large monolithic enterprise applications are both strategically planned and strategically deployed. The problem with the SVP of Sales just ordering in Salesforce.com over lunch is that while the deployment is easy (call it tactical), the planning isn't there. Pushed to its extreme, you end up with a hodgepodge of automated business processes that don't work together. Enterprise applications vendors are providing Web services interfaces to smaller and smaller pieces of their applications. Consequently, these applications start to look like infrastructure. Some people are calling them "applistructure." This applistructure represents large chunks of business processes just waiting to be put together in interesting ways. To make use of this applistructure, there are two things that have to happen. First, vendors need to create business models that allow smaller parts of their large applications to be heated up on demand. We also need to see an increase in the number of business processes that are available in the on-demand model. Right now, you're pretty much limited to salesforce automation, some call center services, and payroll. There will be more. Second, and more importantly, organizations need to be able to create strategic plans for their business that don't revolve around a deployment project. Many IT shops use system deployment as their chief organizing principle and that's a mistake--it usually doesn't serve the business. IT shops need to plan around business needs. This is just another way of saying that IT organizations need strong enterprise architectures. Enterprise architectures provide a context within which various groups can quickly and flexibly deploy IT services. Done right, an enterprise architecture allows decentralization of the deployment without a concomitant degradation in interoperability. This creates a way for tactical deployments to be driven by strategic goals and the result is a more flexible IT organization that's aligned with business needs. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] 11:34:08 AM    comment []

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

A list of blogs rfor resources: PDC Bloggers Longhorn Blogs .NET Weblogs DotNet Junkies SQLJunkies SQL Team Geeks with Blogs ActiveHead's .NET Blogs Do you know any other Microsoft-oriented communities to add to the list? [The Scobleizer Weblog] 5:09:58 PM    comment [] IT salary survey: Hopes for a better 2004. WASHINGTON - More than four out of 10 U.S. IT workers received no raises during 2003, but 60 percent expect to receive a raise of at least 3 percent in 2004, according to a new survey released by skills assessment firm Brainbench. [InfoWorld: Top News] 2:27:23 PM    comment []

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Are Public CIOs Headed for Extinction?. Government Technology has launched a new magazine called "Public CIO." There's an article in the first issue called On the Verge of Extinction? that asks if enterprise-level CIOs in the public sector will ever catch on. The article quotes me quite extensively. I was interviewed for the article in March and I was feeling pretty strongly about these issues back then---and it shows. I don't necessarily agree that enterprise-wide CIOs are headed for extinction. I think there are some important reasons why enterprise-wide coordination and even consolidation are vital to a proper functioning government in the 21st century. Foremost among them are my views on eGovernment maturity models. Still, as Jerry Mechling from Harvard says at the end of the article: [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] 8:01:50 PM    comment []

Friday, April 11, 2003

Criticism, how do you deal with it?. Criticism, how do you deal with it?. Here is a long post but it has some good ideas on how to resond to criticism.  How do you respond to criticism? If you're going to be in the public eye (er, be a weblogger) you'll get criticism. How you respond to it will define you as a person and will determine whether or not you continue writing and giving your opinions in a very public way. Today I got a very angry email from a vice president at a Silicon Valley company. I won't reveal the writer's name, since I doubt this person wants to reveal him/herself to the public in the manner that was revealed to me today (if they want to, they can reveal themselves in my comments). I decided not to respond to this person's email, but if he/she is reading my weblog now, he/she will realize that I did read it, did consider the points that were made, and have taken them to heart. This particular email was mostly an ad-hominem attack. Its title was "you suck." And that was about the nicest thing this particular email said about me. In the body this vice president did made some interesting points. Obviously I can't share here, since that'd reveal who wrote the email and the company that this person is currently employed by. The cogent points were that I was attacking the company the email author works for, and therefore I was the lowest type of slime and that I really should reconsider the way I was going about my weblogging and other activities on the Internet. OK, point heard and taken. A note to my readers: this is my hobby, and I will always try to do best for you since you took the time to drop by here and read me. I don't owe any company anything (other than NEC, which gives me a paycheck in return for my 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work). I guess this is a good time to yet again put the standard disclaimer that "my opinions are my opinions and were not approved by (or condoned by) my employer, or my wife, my son, or anyone else." By the way, the best way to prove that I'm wrong isn't to write me an angry email (although I'm sure it's a cathartic experience), but it is to prove me wrong in the marketplace. Nothing makes me feel smaller than to say something is gonna be a failure, and then have it come out and be a raging success. Likewise, nothing makes me feel smaller than to say something is gonna be a success, when it comes out to be a raging failure. This is a marketplace of ideas. If my ideas suck (and some surely do) then they'll get pointed out as the rotten strawberries that they are. So, I've been thinking about this all day. What can I learn from this? What can I help others learn from this? Surely, if I put ideas out there, some people won't like those ideas. So, more criticism is probably ahead for all of us. As Mario Andretti said "if things seem to be under control, you aren't going fast enough." After all, if you deal with customers, bosses, wives, politicians, are a weblogger, etc, you'll eventually meet someone that's really and truely pissed off at you. How should you deal with someone who's irate at you? Imagine if you're a CEO and your biggest customer comes in and says "your product is shitty and I'm switching to XYZ." How do you respond? How do you save the relationship (or, at least your reputation, if the relationship is gone too far already?) Here's some tips that I'm working on -- sort of a FAQ for my department at NEC, since occassionally we do get irate customers. Does anyone else have any others? Any personal stories? 1) Slow down. Don't respond right away. Your first instinct is probably a bad one (it's natural for us to have a "fight or flight" reaction). Don't react by fighting. Get into their shoes first and try to understand where they are coming from. 2) Ask some trusted advisors for advice (if you can -- unfortunately often times the irate person is a customer on the phone and you have to think fast on your feet). Many times you'll be too close to the situation and you'll do something stupid. For instance, I sent this weblog today to several people I know and trust before I posted it. 3) Find out how this person thinks. Figure out what is their motivation for their anger. What do they really hope will happen by spraying anger all over you? (Ask nice, open questions like "how could I solve your problem?") 4) Treat them as if it were the CEO of your company calling and yelling at you. 5) Take their side. "Yeah, this does suck, I'm going to be your advocate, and I'm going to take care of you every step of the way." 6) Sift through the aggregate criticism. A mentor used to tell me "don't over-consider 'outliers'" -- in other words, if only one person is criticising you out of 1000 -- you shouldn't feel too bad. If it's 200 out of 1000, though, that tells you there's a problem. Along that same theme: don't ignore criticism from "little people" and don't overemphasize criticism from "vice presidents." 7) Try to learn from the criticism. If it helps, delete all the personal attacks. I always try to really hear the person and find out what their goal is. If the criticism is coming in person, or over the phone (for instance, from an irate customer) I always listen very intently and ask lots of questions. I try to get all the facts, and never pushback. Pushing back on an irate person will just throw them into hysterics and you might lose any opportunity to learn from the experience and/or start a dialog with the person. I've saved many a customer just by taking their side -- even after they've pissed off many of the other people they've dealt with. 8) Don't respond in email. Try to call the person, if you care about learning more about where the criticism is coming from. Only send happy news in email. Send bad news personally, or at minimum, via a phone call. Bad news is amplified when it's in text (plus it can be emailed around, or posted on weblogs with a note of "look at what this jerk from XYZ company just told me today.") 9) If all else fails, send them to your competitors. I had one lady in the camera store one day who just wouldn't calm down and wouldn't let me get on her side. I finally said, hey, listen, here's the phone numbers and addresses of our competitors, please go and visit them (truth be told, I was also quite rude at this point and told her to "get the hell out of our store.") Guess what, she came back three hours later and bought $3000 worth of stuff from us. I don't recommend you try that technique at home, though. Anyway, do you have any other ways to respond to criticism or someone who's irate? What do you try to learn from such incidents when they arise? More reading on the topic of mistakes and learning from criticism: Bill Gates on Making and Learning from Mistakes. Author Mania: How to Handle Criticism, by Elisha Charles Entrepreneur.com: Five tips on how to handle criticism [The Scobleizer Weblog] 7:09:21 PM    comment []

Saturday, February 22, 2003

Lily Tomlin is Laughing During the last two days hard-hitting commercials of webconferencing provider WebEx. featuring Lily Tomlin (in the role of Ernestine Tomlin) have been kicking the living daylights out of face-to-face meetings. Watch the videos ("1972" and "Competition") on the WebEx site to see what I'm talking about. Tomlin beats-up a hapless executive for wasting money on meetings and travel when he could be reducing costs and increasing revenue by taking advantage of WebEx's webconferencing application. "Where'd you get your MBA?" Tomlin taunts the CEO with disdain. And to add insult to injury, Tomlin explains that unlike face-to-face meetings, you can't catch germs if you're participating in virtual meetings.Doug Fox -- The Future of Meetings] So sad that we have not been able to make better use of this product.  1:38:29 PM    comment []

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