On Friday February 19, 2010, I underwent laser eye surgery (Intralase Sub-Bowman’s Keratomileusis) to correct my short sightedness. I have worn glasses since I was 6 years old and contact lenses since I was 16. Over the past 15 years, I developed an allergic reaction to the protein buildup on the contact lenses and had to restrict my use to sports only. This is a quantum leap forward for me and I am floored by the results – no more glasses! Thank you to my surgeon, Dr. Suren Sanmugasunderam, FRCS (C) and his team at London Eye Centre.
The evolution from squinting to see, to having thick, then thin lens glasses to contact lenses and now to laser eye surgery led me to think more about several topics:
Problem Management – as described by IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL):
A `problem’ is an unknown underlying cause of one or more incidents, and a `known error’ is a problem that is successfully diagnosed and for which either a work-around or a permanent resolution has been identified. Read more...
I had a great phone call with Roger Sessions (@RSessions), CTO ObjectWatch a month ago about IT Complexity. Over the past few weeks, I got a chance to read about Roger’s approach Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP) in a series of white papers:
Some key points that resonated with me:
- Autonomous Business Capabilities (ABC)
- Mathematical Basis for Understanding Complexity
Years ago, we used a simplified model to articulate why we needed to build our Enterprise Architecture practice. The central premise of the argument was that as functionality increases so does complexity. We proposed using IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture to manage complexity. See the slides here.
Roger has published a new white paper – The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity on October 22, 2009. The main sections of the paper are: Read more...
- The Coming IT Meltdown – calculating the costs
- Cause of Failure – measuring IT complexity
- Designing Simpler IT Systems
- Impediments to Simplicity
- Call to Action
I attended a half day seminar offered to IT leaders in Vancouver today by Microsoft Canada. Essentially, this was the launch of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 to the Vancouver market. There were about 100 people in attendance.
Here is my Twitter stream from the session today … http://twitter.com/#search?q=leodesousa msft
The day began with an engaging keynote by Jim Carroll – Futurist, Trends & Innovation Expert. Jim spoke laid out themes of :
- Run the business
- Grow the business
- Transform the business
Next, Jim provided examples from his consulting engagements to highlight the themes. One of Jim’s quotes was “Success comes to those who evolve.” Another quote, “Many kids going to elementary school will have careers in fields that don’t exist today. Think about a “location intelligence” professional.” With the huge growth of spatially related data, there is a real need for people skilled in location intelligence.
Jim also talked about the “new economy” typified by: Read more...
- A relentless focus on growth – changes in construction mgmt focused on green sustainable initiatives
- Speed to change product lifecycles – auto makers who can retool production lines in 10 days vs 10 months
Reading Roger Sessions (@RSessions) work on IT Complexity reminded me of a set of slides we created to articulate the value of IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture.
We (my colleague Dave Cresswell and I) used a simplified model to articulate why we needed to build our Enterprise Architecture practice. The central premise of the argument was that as functionality increases so does complexity. We proposed using IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture to help manage complexity. The slides resonated well with our senior leadership and in the many EA talks I have given over the years.
The example we use in the slides involves the change in functionality of collaboration services. (Note the curves shown are representative and not based on statistical data – so please no complaints about statisical significance) The slides show how collaboration functionality increased over time from green screen, text only email on the mainframe (IBM PROFS) through client server email (Lotus Notes) to fully web enabled collaboration spaces and community of practices. Unfortunately, the IT architectures used to deliver the new functionality increased in complexity at an even quicker rate. Where the two curves cross is a point of diminishing returns because more effort is spent managing the complexity resulting in no resources available to deliver the new functionality. Read more...
I added Roger Sessions, CTO of ObjectWatch to my blogroll today. I have been following Roger on Twitter @RSessions particularly his posts and discussions on IT Complexity and how it relates to IT project failures. On Thursday, Oct 8th Roger and I shared a conference call and agreed to investigate opportunities to collaborate on IT complexity based on Roger’s work on Simple Iterative Partitions.
I will be speaking with our staff and our IT faculty to see how we might be able to integrate lessons on complexity into courses and programs at BCIT.
Thanks for the insights Roger and I hope to contribute to the discussion. Keep it up!
Andy Blumenthal wrote a great post “Adaptive Leaders Rule the Day“. In his post, Andy reviewed a Harvard Business Review July 2009 article “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” and commented on the article’s insights on adaptive leadership.
I really liked Andy’s quote “Leaders need a proverbial “toolkit” of successful behaviors to succeed and even more so be able to adapt and create innovative new tools to meet new unchartered situations.”
Andy listed some of the successful behaviours in the “toolkit”. I recommend you read the full article to get all of Andy’s insights.
Here is the list of successful behaviours:
- “Foster adaptation”
- Stabilize, then solve
- Experiment
- “Embrace disequilibrium”
- Make people safe to question
- Leverage diversity
Taking a similar approach to my previous post on Generative EA Principles, I will explore and share how Andy’s list of behaviours fit with our EA practice (and maybe yours). We have a long way to go to fully leverage the successful behaviours but having some clear names for what we have accomplished helps. Thanks Andy! Read more...
Tags: application portfolio, complexity, enterprise architecture, higher education, itil, itsm, leadership, management, solutions architecture, strategic planning, technology lifecycle
Over time, technology provides more and more functions and hopefully value to your enterprise. The challenge is how to manage the complexity that comes with technology. I started my IT career as an IBM 360 mainframe computer operator managing VM/CMS and DOS/VSE CICS systems. IT architectures were relatively simple. One large computer, a few large boxes for hard disk drives, several tape drives and an a large line printer. For the most part, our clients interacted with printouts and some lucky ones got access to 3270 green screen terminals.
Think about today … while our technology provides a very functionally rich environment for delivering value to our organizations, the technological complexity has gone through the roof.
Delivering our ERP in 1992 took one IBM RS/6000 RISC box with Oracle 6 RDBMS and Oracle forms installed on all client PCs. Now we need a P Series Server running AIX (Unix) for the Oracle database, VMWare Servers running SUSE (Linux) for the Oracle Application Server(s), Load Balancers, DNS servers, DHCP Servers, Novell network servers and various workstations (PCs running Windows XP and IE 6 or 7 with client side Java)!!! Read more...