The Principles of the Global Workforce

1. Distance doesn’t matter.

Employees now expect to be able to collaborate in real-time with any co-worker. They expect to have access to whatever data or services the company offers no matter where they happen to be. Where in the world that co-worker actually works is irrelevant. They may be working from home, different offices, at airports, manufacturing facilities, or even on a ship somewhere. Knowledge workers need the flexibility to work wherever they must in order to best complete their jobs. That may mean on-site, at a customer’s office, or even from the quiet of their own home. IT must be an enabler for the way business needs to operate. Waiting 20 minutes for a file to be sent between workers – even if they are across the world from each other – is no longer acceptable for the employee or for the customer project that they are working on.

2. Business never stops.

With a globalized workforce – and a rapidly globalizing customer base – businesses cannot afford their operations to be stopped for even a few minutes. Responsiveness to disaster or failure – often characterized by recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) – must go far beyond responding to common problems like a failed SAN or a downed fiber connection. Issues like hurricanes or a flu pandemic might force workers to operate from home for an unspecified period of time. Compromised data centers may require enterprise to rapidly switch operations to secondary locations with no loss in information.

3. Applications and data must be available everywhere but all in one place.

With organizations working harder to protect their valuable data and sensitive customer information, many IT organizations are engaging in IT consolidation projects. Consolidating data makes it easier to track, protect, and restore. Beginning with remote tape backup and progressing to more complicated projects like file servers, document management applications, PLM systems, and Web applications, CIOs are demanding that data be brought back from remote offices. At the same time, businesses recognize that the data and applications were “out there” for a reason – that’s where they needed to be accessed. So while consolidation is an important strategy for data protection and cost control, it can negatively impact business operations unless LAN-like performance can be maintained everywhere.

4. Knowledge must be harnessed – and data must be managed.

Consolidation goes a long way to eliminating the islands of storage and data that evolve over time. But with organizations being required to react quickly in the face of
change, or move in order to take advantage of an opportunity, flexibility in moving data and applications is essential. CIOs must be able to quickly move massive amounts of data, and potentially set up application infrastructure in remote locations overnight. New offices and merged/acquired businesses must quickly be absorbed into the fabric of the existing organization by providing them immediate access to new systems and data.

5. There are no second-class enterprise citizens.

The days of the “important” people working at corporate HQ are rapidly fading. Employees everywhere are now empowered to make important decisions. Whether it is designing or manufacturing a product, working with a customer, or working on a localized version of an advertising campaign, work happens everywhere. And the work of the distributed employee isn’t less important than anyone else’s work. Just as importantly, these workers need to interact with their colleagues, applications and data everywhere. CIOs and IT managers may no longer prioritize workers based on their geographic location. Every member of the enterprise needs to have access to the same applications, at the same level of application performance.

from "The CIO's new guide to design of global IT infrastructure"

Cynefin Framework

 

Cynefin

The Cynefin framework has five domains. The first four domains are:

  • Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense - Categorise - Respond and we can apply best practice.
  • Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply good practice.
  • Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.
  • Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act - Sense - Respond and we can discover novel practice.

The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision. In full use, the Cynefin framework has sub-domains, and the boundary between simple and chaotic is seen as a catastrophic one: complacency leads to failure.

via en.wikipedia.org

Cloud Decisions

Belmont-clouds_9

• Evolution rather than replacement.

The private cloud can evolve from existing virtualized infrastructure, enabling the transition to cloud computing without a complete and disruptive infrastructure overhaul.

• Security and compliance.

With a private cloud, data is retained within the enterprise, behind the corporate firewall, where IT can exercise full control over security, privacy, and regulatory compliance. With public clouds, enterprise data is housed in external data centers—and may move from location to location, without IT’s knowledge or consent. The dynamic movement of data in a public cloud may also present compliance challenges with local regulations.

• Service level agreements (SLAs).

Keeping applications in-house can help IT continue to meet SLAs deining performance, availability, and other critical business requirements. Some external providers may not be able to furnish the same level of service.

• Cost.

A large enterprise private cloud can provide economies of scale, resulting in total cost of ownership (TCO) that is competitive with or lower than public clouds. Intel IT, for example, found that services can be hosted internally at equal or lower TCO than hosting them externally.

• Building expertise.

Architecting a private cloud enables IT organizations to develop a knowledge base that can be applied to public clouds in the future. When creating the private cloud, IT will need to develop detailed application and data inventories, and gain key skills such as managing cloud SLAs. This experience will help build effective relationships with public cloud providers, enabling IT organizations to assess whether they meet enterprise requirements

 

(excerpt from http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/cio-agenda-paper-vmware.pdf)

Social Network Users' Bill of Rights

1. Honesty: We will honor our privacy policy and terms of service.

2. Clarity: We will make sure that our policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand.

3. Freedom of speech: We will not delete or modify user data without a clear policy and justification.

4. Empowerment : We will support assistive technologies and universal accessibility.

5. Self-protection: We will support privacy-enhancing technologies.

6. Data minimization: We will minimize the information users are required to provide and share with others.

7. Control: We will work toward enabling users to own and control their data and won’t facilitate sharing their data unless they agree first.

8. Predictability: We will obtain the prior consent of users before significantly changing who can see their data.

9. Data portability: We will make it easy for users to obtain a copy of their data.

10. Protection: We will treat user data as securely as our own confidential data unless they choose to share these data, and notify them if these data are compromised.

11. Right to know: We will show users how we are using their data and allow them to see who and what has access to their data.

12. Right to self-define: We will allow users to create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. We will not link them without their permission.

13. Right to appeal: We will allow users to appeal punitive actions.

14. Right to withdraw: We will allow users to delete their accounts and remove their data.

via blog.diasporafoundation.org

 

The 5 Laws of Engagement

Law 1: We seek comfort in relationships: Surround us with community, which we’ve seen success with like Facebook, Twitter and 4chan. Most interestingly is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Law 2: We all have something to say. So give us tools to express ourselves. Tools include comments, notes, and all the fun things Facebook has given us with Timeline, etc.

Law 3: We need to feel important. Use rewards to make us feel special. How do you make people feel special? One way is through exclusivity like Gilt Group. One way is through badges on Foursquare.

Law 4: We are hypnotized by beauty. Give us something beautiful to look out. Flipboard puts the image first. Instagram is a series of beautiful images within a community.

Law 5: We are captivated by the unknown. So target our curiosity. Foursquare does this with points! Pinterest does with page after page of constant intrigue.

via thenextweb.com

 

Anne Boe's Keys to Successful Networking

  1. Clarify your career goals.
  2. Develop long-term win-win relationships.
  3. Nurture your network daily.
  4. Be actively involved in your community.
  5. Meet as many people as you can.
  6. Take your business cards everywhere.
  7. Make friends, even when you don't need them.
  8. Act like a host, not a guest.
  9. Become an interested person.
  10. Develop your listening skills.
  11. Trust your intuition.
  12. Take people risks.
  13. Master the art of small talk.
  14. Work smarter, not harder.
  15. Value yourself and your life.
  16. Take action daily towards your goals.
  17. Become your own energy manager.
  18. Learn to ask for what you want.
  19. Give thanks for what you have.
  20. Acknowledge your skills and talents.
  21. Say "Thank you. "
  22. Become an inverse paranoid - decide the world is conspiring for you.
  23. Determine your priorities - protect your energy.
  24. Learn to want what you have.
  25. Know that there are more side doors in the world than there are front doors.

[Source: Anne Boe]

Creating an IT Strategy - Management by Maxim

I have heard that 90% of all businesses do not have a written Business Strategy.  Its in their heads - but as an Enterprise Architect how do you extract it so that you can create a viable IT Strategy?  Often times CxOs don't have time to have a strategic dialogue.  One way to solve this problem is to employ the "Maxim Process"

The Maxim Process is described by Broadbent and Kitzis as a pragmatic way to extract enough information for a good enough IT strategy while not investing more than a day’s workshop with senior management. The CIO will organize a workshop with CxOs, which will lead to documenting 2 kinds of so-­‐called Maxims:

  • Business Maxims
  • And as a result IT Maxims

Maxims are a few concise principles that are used to document the strategic direction of an enterprise. A Maxim workshop will usually not produce more than around 5 business maxims. For each of those, management will derive 4-­‐5 maxims for the IT function that will help to support them.

Maxim

A typical Maxim Workshop will be split up into two parts:

  • Part 1: Finding the Business Maxims,
  • Part 2: Deriving the IT Maxims

An external facilitator should moderate the workshop day and process.

To give examples imagine an old economy financial service provider like a big insurance company that runs more than one brand name on the market. For such an enterprise you could find the following business maxim:

  • Create synergies in back office and service functions wherever brand identity is not compromised

IT maxims that could be deducted from such a business strategy could be:

  • Define standard architectures and platforms used by all of the group’s companies in order to leverage synergies and to reduce IT cost
  • Harmonize the IT application systems for the group’s companies wherever there is a business case for this.

 

SOURCE: TOGAF9 QuickStart Guide 2009

Eight Hybrid Thinking Principles for Enterprise Architects

    Jeffrey-is-burning

  1. Coordinate from the outside in. Once the "outside" design is in place, it serves to guide the foundation for inside structures.
  2. Pursue a portfolio of strategies.   Evaluate many small bets instead of single large ones
  3. Harmonize, rather than optimize.  Enterprise architects learn to focus on "harmonizing" a diverse set of existing approaches and less on creating an optimal approach from scratch.
  4. Coordinate, rather than architect.  Hybrid thinking approaches view the enterprise as a collection of interdependent portfolio management processes, with the goal of coordinating across and among these portfolios.
  5. Focus on interactions, not interactors.   Hybrid thinkers must focus on coordinating the behaviors among systems rather than optimizing the internal mechanisms of such systems.  Gartner sometimes refers to this approach by the phrase "architect the lines, not the boxes." "Lines" refers to behaviors shared among systems, and "boxes"
  6. Embrace a different approach to standards.   The focus shifts from thinking of standards as "inhibitors of choice" to "enablers of change." Hybrid thinkers emphasize that the purpose of standards is to enable coordinated interactions and behaviors to change and evolve.
  7. Encourage continuous and participatory interaction.  Hybrid thinking charrettes enable individuals to overcome traditional process barriers by fostering more collaborative, creative and meaningful outcomes. Design is done best when it is peer to peer.
  8. Focus on business outcomes, not IT outcomes.

 

Source: Gartner 2010