Leadership is an Art by Max De Pree – Book Review

 book review, leadership, management, personal  No Responses »
Jun 102009
 

I borrowed a great book from a friend of mine who read it as part of her Masters program.  Leadership is an Art by Max De Pree is a must read for anyone who aspires to a leadership role. The book is short and easy to read. The best part are the real gems that can be applied immediately.

Here are some of my favourite quotes from the book:

  • The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.  The last responsibility is to say thank you. In between, a leader is a servant and a debtor
  • Peter Drucker said “Efficiency is doing the right thing. Effectiveness is doing the thing right” (interesting how this quote ties into what I have been saying about EA for a long time!)
  • Effectiveness comes about through enabling others to reach their potential
  • Encourage roving leadership
  • Leadership is the “Interception of entropy”

I highly recommend this book. It was so good that I read it twice before returning it to my friend, thanks Karin!

Struggling for an ROI … follow-up

 enterprise architecture, it governance, it service management, leadership  No Responses »
Jun 082009
 

Mike Kavis posted another great piece on why we should use Enterprise Architecture. As always, Mike has some real gems in his post.  Here are a some:

  • “It sounds to me like people have a technical solution and are now looking for a problem to solve with it.  It needs to work the other way around!”
  • “Well, coming to the business with technical solutions asking for help to justify them with business drivers is not alignment.”
  • “At this point the ROI should be much easier, because the solutions were driven by the problem statement(s), not the other way around.”
  • “Without this alignment, IT will constantly struggle to sell technical solutions to the business and come up with appealing ROIs.”

With the recent economic situation, business leaders are looking more and more to IT leaders to help enable cost savings and business performance. In my regular meetings with my business colleagues, this is becoming a consistent theme. The only way this will happen is for IT leaders to sit with business leaders and understand their issues and problems.  Once this problem is understood, then the  IT leader can bring to bear the appropriate technology solution.  The ROI is put back on the business (where it belongs) and how the problem is solved not on the technology that enables the problem solving.

I am interested in how to get the IT leader to the “table”. Traditionally (and most commonly), business decisions are made with little IT input. We only hear about it after the fact and need to respond.  How do we as Enterprise Architecture professionals demonstrate our value, gain the trust and build the partnerships with our business (in my case education) colleagues?

I have some suggestions:  Read more...

  1. Establish IT Governance – this is the prime avenue for engaging the organization on what the IT “black box” (and for us toolkit) is about. It puts a focus on business and risk related problems the organization faces and leverages our technology capabilities to solve them.  A critical factor here is that the IT Governance groups need a budget of their own so the final decision rests with them (as does the accountability!). IT Governance is about “Doing the Right Things”.  Think of this as “efficiency”.
  2. Start an EA Practice – there is no need to buy expensive tools and go into the deep dive of documenting everything. Start simple by creating some guiding principles. Vet them with the IT Governance groups. Then communicate them regularly so the Guiding Principles become part of your organization’s common language. Enterprise architecture is about “Doing Things Right”. Think of this as “effectiveness”.

Corporate Information … single source or single search?

 enterprise architecture  No Responses »
Jun 032009
 

Recently, we have been talking about creating a single repository for IT Services departmental information. The idea being that our team members need to go to one place to get the information they are looking for. Instead of wasting time looking at multiple repositories each with their own taxonomies, UX and search features, put it all in one place with one UX and taxonomy.

Today, my thinking took a 180 degree turn with a vendor presentation on “enterprise search“. Instead of making people conform to rigid rules about where to put information, what if we gave them a tool to find the data wherever it resides behind our firewalls? Like someone said today, “Google search for our stuff”

No some of you might say, not taking time to architect an information repository and relying on a search engine is the lazy way out. I have some thoughts that I hope will make you think otherwise. When presented with business challenges, I find it is rarely the technology that is the problem. Instead, it is the ease of use for our clients, customers and stakeholders that should be considered. Enforcing compliance is expensive and in many cases ineffective.  What if we made it easy for people to comply? Educate them on some simple tagging and then let them work like they always have.  The difference is giving them a tool to search for what they need and work to tune that tool so that we see a significant reduction is costly “Search and not find” scenarios.

I will now begin some research on enterprise search and report back later.  Have any of you implemented an enterprise search capability? What do you use?

Here are some links:

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

 Newer Entries

Switch to our mobile site