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November 02
Our New Website

As saamwerk grew as a company, we had to start reflecting this growth in our website as well and thus we started with the process to transfer our website to a SharePoint driven website about a month ago. The requirements were clear: Do it in SharePoint and do it well! The first requirement was fulfilled entirely and my personal opinion is that we achieved the second. Please let us know what your thoughts are.

What is not clear in all of this is that the new website is a culmination of an international effort: Everything started of very well! The design was coming together and the technical issues not as hard as imagined. In short, we were on track to complete the project in no time at all. Then we added the blog page. There was just no way for us to get all the elements in the correct location on the screen and we were stumped. After two days of frustration for the whole team – all tried their best to fix this – it became apparent that a new approach was required. Time to call a friend.

The biggest obstacle is that advanced SharePoint skills is a very rare commodity, not just in South Africa but also in the rest of the world. Fortunately for the IT industry there is a tool to assist: oDesk.com. I took note of them a year or two ago since the World Economic Forum put them on a list of new world entrepreneurial companies to watch in the following decade, but never had an opportunity to use them. This was the ideal time.

I thus registered a new account and placed a small advert (all for free) explaining the problem with a warning that this is a very small job. Within 36 hours I had thirteen responses from all over the world: Romania, Argentina, India, Pakistan, USA, Great Britain and the Ukraine. The decision fell on the Ukrainian and were we pleased with the result! Not only did they fix the problem in no time, they also did a whole lot of knowledge transfer and provided some advanced tools for troubleshooting similar issues in the future. All within a few hours of consultation.

How did we do it? Well, we used the tools available to anyone in the world today:

  1. We started with a discussion and some demonstration of the issue via GoToMeeting from Citrix.
  2. Then we started sharing desktops across the internet and they did some work on our local PCs while we were watching.
  3. Lastly, we created a connection the live server for the deployment of the new package, still while we are watching.

Quite remarkable, isn't it?

Tapping into a world-wide skills market opens new doors for any company and puts real meaning to the phrase Global Village. My only remaining thought on this: If we are in a global village, why does our trade processes represent a marketplace where trust is an unknown commodity. After all, village trade is based entirely on trust because we have the ability to communicate properly and build a relationship based on personal experience rather than an intricate document called a contract. Don't throw away the contract; simply bring back some old age relationships.

July 13
Some Sharepoint Trivia

saamwerk is not just Sharepoint, but for most of our users that is what they see on a daily basis. But just how big is your peer group? Microsoft is for some reason very quiet about Sharepoint sales statistics compared to other products (it is quite easy to learn that they were selling around 658 000 Windows 7 licences per day during the second half of 2010 and that a new Office 2010 license is sold every second across the globe) but we have managed to collect a few numbers ourselves.

It’s all in the numbers

By the end of March 2011 (just before Sharepoint’s tenth birthday) Jared Spataro, Director of Sharepoint Product Management just said that they have been adding 20 000 users every single day for the last five years – that is 7.3 million users per year. We did have some other numbers as well from the end of 2009 – before the launch of Sharepoint 2010 which sparked a whole new wave of customers:
  • There were a total of 17 000 customers (not licences!),
  • These customers had more than 100 million users,
  • Sharepoint was already worth $1.3 billion to Microsoft.

Other trivia

Sharepoint is quite difficult to define, so let’s look at it from different angles:

  • Sharepoint is the server sibling the dominant Microsoft Office,
  • Sharepoint is actually not one product but a collection of six different server products, all bundled into on single back-end:
    • Sites,
    • Communities,
    • Content,
    • Search,
    • Insights and
    • Composites.
  • Thousands of Microsoft employees are working on developing Sharepoint (and Office!) in fourty different teams.
    • The core team is bases in Redmond, Virginia, USA
    • Other teams are based in Silicon Valley, Boise, Boston, Ireland, Norway, India, China and Japan.
  • The biggest cost items for Sharepoint is not the licences but other items such as
    • Servers and storage,
    • deployment and assessment services,
    • development and maintenance services,
    • input/output hardware such as MFPs and scanners as well as other software.

Last comments

Microsoft has a policy it calls dogfooding – using their own products before anyone else and there has been no exception with Sharepoint: They’ve been using Sharepoint 2010 18 months before it was released! To this day they still run one of the biggest Sharepoint implementations in the world and will continue to do so for the coming years!

Have you joined the joy ride?

May 05
saamwerk: Now with extra icons

PDF, DWG and DXF file extensions now have icons

Up to yesterday, all file types not originating from Microsoft Office had a blank icon on your saamwerk site. Now everything has changed! PDF (Portable Document Format), DWG (Native AutoCAD file format) and DXF (Drawing Interchange Format – a file format developed by AutoDESK to enable interoperability between AutoCAD and other programs) now each have their own icon.

We hope this will make your life much easier! Please let us know should you regularly use other file formats for which you would like to have specific icons.

April 25
Sometimes mountains are simply mountains!

In Afrikaans we have the wonderful expression of “moenie ‘n berg van ‘n molshoop maak nie” – don’t turn a molehill into a mountain. Clearly indicating that we as humans tend to exaggerate when analysing issues. In short, the assumption would be that the person does not really understand the depth of the subject at hand and thus is not in the position to distil the issue to its simplest form. While this is true, today’s short note is to state the reverse: “Moenie ‘n molshoop van ‘n berg maak nie!” – Don’t turn a mountain into a molehill.

The Excel-generation

Excel is a brilliant tool that over the last decade or so, transformed the way we work. The vast array of functionality and possibilities this functionality enables is simply astounding. Even Microsoft has been surprised by its versatility and readily admits that Excel today is not what the intention was when they created it.

Today its functionality spans from standard spread sheeting, database tools, data analysis and mining, charting and many more. Really amazing!

As with all things in the universe, on the other side of the positive, there will always be a negative: It has taught the decision makers in an enterprise that things are easy. Now, from a personal perspective this is true, but the moment a system needs to go beyond a single PC and the data has any kind of longevity, things start to get complicated! We’ve all seen what happens to an Excel sheet used for bookkeeping over time: At first it is easy but later, as complexity starts to creep in, things tend get out of hand very quick.

Easy does not mean little work

IT professionals are notorious for bad communication – or so we are told. In actual fact: They are brilliant with communication for those who care to listen to what they are saying. One expression that always catches them though is when they listen to a problem and eventually comes to a conclusion: “This is easy”.

Now, most observers take this to mean the following:

  1. It is not a lot of work,
  2. I can have it by tomorrow.

From the perspective of the observer, this is probably true since he has an Excel-type solution in mind. The developer, however, has a very different take on this:

  1. It is not mentally challenging,
  2. It is still a lot of work,
  3. There is a lot of testing of assumptions coming up because although I will build it, I am not the end user!
  4. I can provide small increments of functionality to keep the client of my back, but the eventual product will only be ready in a month.

Clearly this is going to lead to a whole lot of conflict.

Moenie ‘n molshoop van ‘n berg maak nie!

In IT (whatever that may mean!) there should be a clear distinction between configuration and development. Configuration is that part where pre-defined procedures are quickly configured to the client’s needs. In saamwerk terms we would quickly add a library, start an approval process for the documents in the library and publish them to a public library. All of these are simply still configuration: Opening the box and laying it out on the plate – fast food at its best!

Development on the other hand is creating functionality that does not yet exist, either by expanding existing functions or by creating something from scratch. Developers sit with a real conundrum: They are normally expected to produce something quickly but must also be careful to include sufficient safeguards in terms of data validation, error checking and others to ensure quality and longevity. Remember, the developer is not the end user and thus cannot assume anything! They really are the gourmet chefs of the IT world!

This takes significantly longer than creating the same output in Excel for your own personal use! As a rule of thumb: Increase your time scale to the next level when comparing personal solutions with enterprise solutions:

  • What you can create in a day in Excel will take a developer a week,
  • What you can create in a week will take a developer a month.

The above rule is probably still underestimating the time!

Last Comments

If the above is true, why would anyone ever employ a developer to create an enterprise strength solution? The answer is simple: The Excel-solution is a personal view and not easily transferred to the team without a lot of errors creeping in. The enterprise solution is truly re-usable and thus allows the enterprise to transfer the strategic thoughts of the in house entrepreneurs in your enterprise to an operational and even clerical level.

In short: It allows the enterprise to overcome certain skill shortages by extending the reach of the highly skilled individuals via processes and procedures. All of this while applying inherent security and quality procedures.

Albert Einstein once famously said that everything should be broken down to its simplest form, but not simpler than that. Sometimes a mountain is a simply mountain!


April 05
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

“Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…”
“There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain…”

I’ve been quiet for quite a while now. There are many reasons, but the two that stand out are simply that the first three months of 2011 has been extremely busy for saamwerk and the second is that it took me a very long time to compile this post. This version is probably the hundredth mental version while it is about the tenth written version since, while the subject is actually meaningless, the content of this post is hard hitting and full of potential pit falls.

One of the reasons the first three months of this year has been extremely busy from a saamwerk perspective is simply part of human nature: We insist in ignoring the process and instinctively wants to focus on the end result.

To place the previous sentence in perspective: IT (all sectors) is the ultimate support industry. In short: We do not really produce much. Our work can only be valued in terms of what other industries achieve. IT is simply a secondary (seldom) or tertiary (most of the time) industry and even when there is some manufacturing involved, like PCs, the piece of equipment still serves the other industries. No Word developer has ever produced primary value but has unlocked immeasurable amounts of value in other industries.

We all should know this; but still, IT people are measured on their output. How else?

Lorem ipsum

As early as the 16th century it became apparent to the first people involved in publishing that when you use comprehensible text when displaying overall presentation and the elements making this up (font, typography and layout), people will inadvertently focus on the text and not what is on display. Spelling mistakes and different views on the exact content would then take over the conversation. So, they came up with a solution: Add text that is meaningless to most users: Lorem ipsum!  (Read more about the history and other trivia about the Lipsum at the end of this post.)

By focussing on the wrong areas three things have happened:

  1. The required decisions could not be made. Trust me, once someone is fixated on spelling and other issues it is extremely difficult to get his attention back where it belongs!
  2. Discontent has now been created with the designer since his great design has been measured by the wrong yard stick: Spelling and grammar.
  3. Due to the previous issue the required conversation got broken since the designer will now hide his designs and will not put them on display again before the end result. While once bitten, twice shy, this has disastrous consequences on both quality and timing of the eventual deliverable.

Unfortunately, due to reigning hierarchies, the poor designer will be blamed for the late delivery of the product.

Fact: Very few people are actually involved in the hand-to-hand delivery of value. Most are making up the back office and has a supporting role. This is also true for companies and even industries! A transport company does not exist because someone has a burning need to move goods but because someone has a burning need for the goods being moved. Without the need for the goods, there would be no transport company.

Conversations and storylines

In any venture it is extremely important to create some space for conversations to happen and mature. To a certain extend it is not even important what content the conversation has, but the fact that there is a conversation is what is important. Over time a coherent storyline will develop that can be measured and can be defined. However, the conversation supporting the storyline is in most cases stifled by our own preconceived ideas, unnecessary formality, hierarchies or whatever. It is upon the leaders in the venture to identify the stifling factors and remove them!

Take a simple scenario: Due to the lack of availability of the leaders the conversation is over-reliant on email. Immediately the conversation is stifled because email has an inherent longevity that telephone or face-to-face conversations do not have. The result is that the conversation will be stifled since people will not readily admit to mistakes as they would in other conversations. The effect is that proper guidance cannot be given, the conversation is stifled and the storyline does not develop. Do not be surprised if your team members do not trust each other in a situation resembling this!

The coherent storyline is what creates trust: A sense that everyone is working towards a common goal. Good storylines contains nuances, has many detours and possibilities and changes with time. A novel published in one era will very seldom create the same amount of excitement twenty or thirty years down the line simply because the culture of the audience has changed. Critics and historians will still enjoy the text, but republication will always yield limited popular results.

A side note: The unconscious reason why social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are so popular is that it allows a group of friends and other contacts to slowly but surely develop a coherent storyline, even though the conversation is stuttered and extremely slow to develop.

Process driven vs Output driven

We already discussed the fact that very few people are actually involved in primary value creation. The rest simply supports the primary output. This does mean that a lot of processes cannot be measured on output alone. In fact, many support processes are designed to make it impossible for one person to complete the process! A well designed creditor’s process, for instance, necessitates the segregation of duties to the extent that one person cannot complete the process. Thus, Accounts Payable and Payment are handled by different individuals.

In many other business processes this is not the case. It is quite conceivable and accepted practise for an engineer to start and complete a design on his own. An auditor can very easily start the audit process and produce the output of financial statements all on his own.

These cultures and expectations many times clash and leaders should be aware of this and manage it in order to create the required storyline. If you get this right, a lot of pain can be avoided.

Last comments

saamwerk implementations are difficult to define since it goes to the core of the enterprise culture: How people interact with each other. Previous learnings can be used as a guideline, but only by using saamwerk in day to day life will a conversation develop that will eventually result in a fairly stable process.

Beware, fairly stable does not mean static! The technological and business environments are nowadays fast changing dimensions in the dynamics of your business and should be managed as such. When the facts change, new decisions are required.

In each enterprise saamwerk endeavours to find the correct balance between bottom up organisation and top down coordination to make the implementation work. A stifled conversation (both internal and with us) hampers this process.

More about Lipsum


  1. Lorem ipsum (shortened to Lipsum) means something like pain itself although it is not proper Latin. Dolorem = pain, grief, misery and ipsum = itself. One does get the feeling that the choice was intentional!
  2. The point about a good Lipsum is to make it meaningless, thus all Lipsums contains random words and letters rendering it completely useless in any language although it resembles something meaningful.
  3. The original text was taken from Ciceros’ first century De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the boundaries of good and evil). The quote at the top of this post comes from section 1.10.32.
  4. Word 2007 and 2010 has a function to create your own Lipsum: Simply type =lorem(i,j) and press enter. i denotes the number of paragraphs and j the number of sentences per paragraph required.
  5. The most common Lipsum goes like this:
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.


January 18
2011 from a saamwerk perspective

The New Year has come and gone and we are already full steam ahead. You probably already forgot what a holiday actually consists of! New Year does provide us with the opportunity to take the time and think about what lies ahead for the year. saamwerk is no different and thus, here is our view of what the business community needs to take note of from the IT world.

Moneyweb asked Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, to give his view and we take it from there.

Three major themes

According to Goldstuck, there are three themes for this year: Cloud (software as a service), tablets and video. Actually no surprise here, but, we will see more and more of this! 

Cloud

By now, you should know that saamwerk is part of the cloud phenomenon. Cloud services very simply means that you buy functionality from external providers instead of hosting it on your own network. In practical terms: Instead of installing and maintaining your own email server (which can be very resource intensive) you now outsource your email server to a service provider who will then host and maintain your email service on his servers. The same goes for document management, financial management, customer relationship management and many other functions. Yes, you probably picked it up: Most ERP vendors today have cloud offerings and there are also some very good cloud only ERP products in the market.

Our engineering and construction community will appreciate the fact that they were not left behind: Vendors, such as AutoDesk, are entering the cloud market at a rapid pace. Products such as AutoCAD WS already hosts drawing services with built in versioning, sharing and many more functions. And, it’s absolutely free!

The biggest obstacle in cloud services are still around governance, trust and transparency. These issues will be heavily discussed during the year on many forums.

Tablets

Apple upset the cart a year or so ago with the iPad. Up to this point tablets was seen as a special kind of computer. To be used as a laptop, but with some special features. The iPad changed all of this and opened a whole new world. Also, for the first time there was a real challenger to the hegemony held by paper. The battle still rages, but the writing is on the wall.

There are still arguments that they screen is too small, remote locations is not friendly to these instruments and many more, yet, the vendors don’t see it this way. Once again, AutoCAD WS was developed with tablets in mind! Are we in South Africa not seeing it yet, or are they maybe just on the wrong track?

Video

I do not have the current figures on hand, but the last I’ve seen is that we are heading to 36 hours of video uploaded every minute of the day – and this is YouTube only. A lot of it still junk, but more and more really good channels are starting to emerge: Educational material, Edutainment, business channels and many more. Video is fast becoming a powerful business tool and you should not be left behind. Soon you will receive your first video CV! 

Further, TV is definitely under fire and broadcasting in the traditional sense of the world will change. Advertising revenues are not yet moving to the web in big numbers, but the merging of traditional media is getting real.

Just think of it: You are reading your newspaper and instead of a photo, you have a video with the full speech instead of just a summary written by a (probably) biased journalist. Should you wish to get more info, you simply select the text you want to search on and do an instant search on the topic. Remember, this is not science fiction, it is already happening albeit on a very low level.

Last comments

During the years leading up to the beginning of this century we got used to Big Brother setting up the big infrastructure and dictating the terms: the SABC (and later private networks) decided in South Africa what you would like to watch and by when. Just one example to show how our corporate requirements dictated to our social requirements. The internet has changed this and the change is picking up speed at an ever increasing rate. Our social needs are now dictating to our corporate needs, even though corporates only grudgingly are following. Remember how long it took for email to become part of mainstream business processes? Long after we adopted email for our social needs!

An enterprise today basically has two choices:

  • Be an early adopter of technology and set the agenda in terms of business adoption and future development,
  • Lag and then be forced to adopt functions that does not suit you and you did not have any input in its development. In other words: Other industries set the agenda and you are now stuck with what they developed.

saamwerk will this year set up forums (both physical and virtual) to start discussions within certain industries to set the agenda for the adoption of certain technologies in mainstream business processes. Should you wish to join these forums already, please do not hesitate to send me an email

Mistakes will be made and some ideas even discarded, but from this will emerge a more productive tomorrow.


December 01
Keep your eye on your Mercedes S-Class!

Mike Gualtieri is a senior analyst at Forrester. We follow each other on Twitter (find him on @mgualtieri and myself on @pvddussen). Last week he caused quite a stir by proclaiming that Java is a dead-end for enterprise application development. Note: Not a dead-end, but a dead-end for enterprise application development. Personally I agree with Mike, but the really valuable bit came from the comments section:

Personally, I think the bigger item to discuss is not what programming platform the typical enterprise should be using, but what the changing face of the IT department is. Have we reached the tipping point where there is enough off-the-shelf stuff available for non-technology enterprise so that the development group really becomes the integration and orchestration group? Or will it be something else?
- Todd Biske

Just imagine: You walk into a (virtual) shop where you pick the functions you want, pay for it and start using it. Well, in my opinion we areon the tipping point and the momentum is building up.

The Aston Martin DB5, Jaguar E-Type and the Honda Accord

James Bond drove an Aston Martin DB5 and many people to this day would love to drive a Jaguar E-Type. They were iconic sports cars from the 1960s. But recently, Top Gear (watch part one and part two) put these three cars next to each other and raced them. Well, the Honda Accord comes home first by the proverbial country mile. 

The problem is that both these iconic cars are from the 1960s with engineering to match. The Accord, while not even trying to be a sports car, contains the latest engineering and thus was able to make both cars look silly. The facts are that their manufacturers lied about their performance; they are unreliable, unsafe, environmentally unfriendly and simply just old. 

You can get them fixed though: Bigger brakes, a new engine, new cooling system and a new suspension. Well, the DB5 still broke the record as the slowest car ever on the Top Gear track! Even slower than a Range Rover. By this time you could have bought yourself a brand new Ferrari.

The Mercedes S-Class

Now here is a car with a heritage! A car that most of us will never own but actually have to keep an eye on. The S-Class always have the new gadgets first and thus gives us a glimpse at what our own cars will probably have as extras in the next ten to fifteen years. ABS brakes, airbags, pretentioners in the seat belts, the first turbocharger for a diesel engine, double pane window glazing, rear-parking markers, traction control and even heated seats – all made its appearance in the S-class first. 

I know now that in ten years I will probably buy a car with built in infrared headlights with a display in the dashboard. Why? Well, the new S-Class has it! 

Last comments

Up to now you probably felt that I was just going on and on about cars. I don’t even like cars that much. But there is something we can learn from the above. First, emotion about old styling is all very well, but you won’t get the performance you require today. Simply put, by not just remembering what was but perpetuating it, you are putting your company at risk in an environment that is foreign to the tools that were available.

Second, you have to get yourself something to get a glimpse of the future so that you can already start to think about the implications this may have on your business down the line. Take the pain out of the change by looking into the future.

When doing this, the bit about Java at the top comes in focus: The traditional role of the IT department is changing. Just as a big company’s fleet management department does not design, build and commission any vehicle, they simply buy it as a commodity, the same way the IT industry has commoditised many functions over the years. Let’s be honest: the IT needs of most companies are at least 80% the same. Then there are clusters of specific functions: A bank needs a banking system, engineers drawing and drawing management capabilities, etc. Stuff you should be able to buy out of a box.

In 1960 at the centennial anniversary of MIT, John McCarthy suggested that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility” such as water and electricity. Although the idea was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, the technology just was not advanced enough to support his dream. Today, his dream is not a dream anymore, it is becoming reality so fast that most of us struggle keep up.

Are you still hanging on the asynchronous commercial processes or are you entering real-time business? That is the implication of what is happening in IT today. Simply taking new technology but continuing with old business practises will not suffice.

The S-Class of business processes has passed many companies, shown what is possible and yet got ignored.

October 18
We can only be what see on our mental horizon

 

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts."
- Marshall McLuhan
 
Marshall McLuhan was a very smart man! He was born in 1911 and died in 1980 – a time of huge change and turbulence in the world. But also a time that taught humanity to steer clear of risk. Two massive wars in one century were too much for most of our parents and grand parents. However, Marshall McLuhan kept on dreaming and thinking and today his work is heralded as the cornerstone of media theory. In 1962 he published a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and in this book he famously prophesized the World Wide Web, thirty years before it was invented:
 
"The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopaedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind."
 
McLuhan also exclaimed that each new way of communication is always perceived in the light of its predecessor – mistakenly so! This brings us to the point of this posting: In the advent of the internet, we could only see the usefulness of the internet from our perception of paper. Thus, we deconstructed a letter and from this deconstruction we created email. In practise no different from any form of letter we ever produced, although we changed the medium. Over time this changed! The medium (not the information) changed our behaviour in several ways until Christopher Locke said:
 
"When you receive an email you expect it to be brief, funny, hastily written, ill-considered, thoughtless, regrettable. All part of the charm!"
 
The letter as we knew it has been transformed into a new form that barely represents the original because our mental horizon has shifted. We started to see beyond the piece of paper and exploited the new medium to its fullest. This is happening again: Email is currently strong, but the cracks are already appearing, giving those who look a glimpse at the imminent death of email. Our individual behavioural change, over time, leads to a cultural change and cultural changes will always be reflected in the way we conduct our business. Now we have completed the circle back to the beginning of this post: The outcome of any process that involved using yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts to do our work today, will result in anxiety since both the tool and the concept is removed from today’s context. It is foreign to those who have to execute the job, those whom management are legitimately exploiting to achieve the desired result.
 
We see it with our kids – we call it the generation gap – and our employees where we think we talk the same language, we think we agree, but over time it becomes clear that the message got lost in the interface between different mental horizons. In system/IT terms this is caused by one thing and one thing only: The difference between early adopters and laggards. They can not see each other any more since they are now on different sides of the chasm that was created by the new technology or concept and their vantage points are so different that while words sound the same, there reception is not.
 
In years gone by the pace of technological advancement was slow enough that the laggards would die before the chasm got so wide that the context changed completely. In today’s world, time is not on our side anymore. The laggards have to be dragged into the new world because the alternative is to ghastly to contemplate…
 
Creating a trusting environment between “business” and “IT” is not easy under these circumstances.
 
NB: I always thought it is silly to create a distinction between “business” and “IT”. In a well structured environment the two coexists to the benefit of both. “IT” = “Business” and if it doesn’t it was organisationally designed to give the “business leaders” an easy excuse not to listen.
 

 

October 09
Killing our heroes

I follow a blog called ribbonfarm.com quite closely. The writer, Venkatesh Rao, has some astounding insight in the world, people in general and how we learn and work. His latest posting is titled How Good Becomes the Enemy of Great and in this he has the following sentence:

I’ve since gotten a little sadder and more realistic about the world.

This got me to think and I got to the following paradox in life:

Although we do not trust those who are to become heroes, once they achieved this heroic status, we admire them to the point where we imitate them.

Throughout my life I’ve seen how people actually add weights to the feet of those scaling the mountains of heroism, how they labelled them, belittled them and eventually (after their achievement) accepted them. It always baffled me until I realised something: These trials in front of the feet of those who are to become heroes are meant to be there. It causes those who think they are strong enough to become heroes to loose faith; it makes the rest stronger and focuses their attention on the goal. This enhanced strength and focus is what drives heroes to eventually fulfil there destiny: To change the world.
However, Edmund Hillary could not scale Everest on his own. He had Sherpa Tensing behind him, next to him and in front of him. Frodo Baggins could not resist the power of the ring on his own and Samwise Gamgee had to carry him. Frodo could not relinquish the ring and his nemesis, Gollum, had to take it from him by force and Gollum had to die of his own greed for the ring to be destroyed. Yet, Frodo came forth as the hero.
This paradox does then not apply to all. Those who are to become heroes are supported by others, some unknown, in their quest. Question is, where are you in this equation?
October 01
IT as the positive disruptor

​Over the years professional people has been extremely successful in creating one man shows: One person can initiate and complete the full business process cycle. As workloads increase they first get a few clerks, then junior professionals and once they have established themselves, they will actually take on a partner in order to take on more and more work. In essence there is nothing wrong with this until the major IT disruption: Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 necessitates team work, being agile, being more social, getting rid of the one man show tag. The modern enterprise is a complex environment where people with different skills come together to achieve something meaningful, to collaborate. The modern professional should thus think about where he fits into the modern enterprise, how his business process integrates with the business process of the enterprise, how does he become part of the enterprise! (Note that we steered clear of the legal concept of Company for the purposes of this discussion. Enterprise is not always the same as Company.)
IT has always been thought of the enabler, the people and systems that help us do what we do more efficient. The problem today is that IT has made some major strides forward and actually has become a driver and this is where the disruption lies. IT is now taking a leading role, not just executing strategy but actually developing the strategy. This is a hard nut to crack in most companies and will be for quite a while to come. The power will shift again, but as long as the disruption is seen as negative, as something that makes you lose your focus, business (and professions) will not be able to gain the upper hand again.
What should be done: Think in a matrix rather than a hierarchy when structuring your organisation. Professionals require information specialists, process managers, business intelligence developers and many more to get them into the new way of working. This is expensive and should thus (in the case of small professional companies) be outsourced to other enterprises who specialises in this environment.
Make the jump now! Your customers will appreciate the new value you add, even when they are not on your level.

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