tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653339198846292482024-03-09T00:21:45.162+11:00Plato's RevengeIT Management Blog: my thoughts about putting the "i" in ITHein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.comBlogger84125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-1571144845378323252019-07-08T21:55:00.004+10:002020-02-20T16:04:01.581+11:00Information Security Governance Model<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Based upon my experience at two organisations where I recently worked, I developed an information security governance model.<br />
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The key message is that you should not only detail ISO 27001/27002 controls on the corporate level but also for each operational team (group of people with similar expertise) so that people at the work floor know what <u>their</u> responsibility is. In the end, they are the ones actually <i>doing</i> the implementation and execution of the security measures. Generally, corporate level controls are still too abstract for the people on the work floor and not all controls apply to them.<br />
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<b>Common mistakes in security governance</b><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Security is seen as something of the security officers; security officers have to design objectives for the security controls </li>
<ul>
<li>Even if there were no security officers, the organization should still be in control of its security. </li>
<li>Security is too big, too widespread and relies on too many business and technical skills for security officers to cover this all; the only way to deal with it is make sure that the business and technical specialists know their responsibilities and deal with security risks. </li>
</ul>
<li>Security responsibility is assigned to a single manager only (or to managers only) </li>
<ul>
<li>Many security issues relate to low level, technical and sometimes very complex issues; the managers generally lack the knowledge to recognise risks or specify which control measures to take. </li>
<li>Employees do not know what their responsibilities are. </li>
</ul>
<li>ISO 27001/27002 control objectives are specified on the corporate or division level only. </li>
<ul>
<li>This gives insufficient guidance to the people on the work floor; you need to specify control measures in such a way that employees know what their responsibilities are. </li>
</ul>
<li>Reliance on the audits or security officers for the C (check) of the PDCA. </li>
<ul>
<li>Operational teams should do their own checks and team managers should use these for their Act and Plan; audits and security officers checks should be additional; team managers should be in control.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
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<b>Consequences / symptoms</b><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Security officers are forcing solutions onto the operational teams or are implementing solutions themselves. </li>
<li>Security officers are alerting management to risks but management does not know what to do with them and therefore forget or ignore them. </li>
<li>Unnecessary conflicts between security officers and operational teams. </li>
<li>Implementation of security controls are implemented in a rush just before an audit. </li>
<li>Audit issues have been assigned to managers but tasks have been watered down so much that at the operational level nothing happens. </li>
<li>Everyone is responsible, so no one is responsible. </li>
<li>Managers have been assigned a responsibility but have no mandate to get things done in other teams where various aspects of the measure have to be implemented. Therefore the implementation of the control stalls. </li>
<li>Issues have become so urgent that security officers get the attention of the CEO who enforces to put a control in place urgently, disrupting business and IT operations. </li>
<li>Decisions are made based upon emotion instead of rational analysis of risks.</li>
</ul>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0L468H8Fd8w/XSMu90FbyrI/AAAAAAAABeo/qSiTuo2ORAcYS7ud9V-uQOiizye6NJauwCLcBGAs/s1600/cycli.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="329" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0L468H8Fd8w/XSMu90FbyrI/AAAAAAAABeo/qSiTuo2ORAcYS7ud9V-uQOiizye6NJauwCLcBGAs/s320/cycli.PNG" width="236" /></a><b>The governance model in summary</b></div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Organise the PDCA cycle not only at the corporate level but also on the divisional and operational level.</li>
<li>Formulate the ISO controls for each operational team and define what their specific security responsibilities are. Let the teams do a periodic self assessment supported by security specialists.</li>
<li>Organise a periodic management review at the divisional level. The team managers bring the reports by their own teams and appropriate actions are formulated. It might be that projects need to be started and as such you probably will have a security programme of projects.</li>
<li>Because multiple teams can have a responsibility relating to a specific ISO control, someone must make sure that the sum of all those responsibilities adds up to the total what the organisation needs. The execution between teams might also need to be coordinated. For that you can group ISO controls in processes and assign a process manager to coordinate all the controls per process. One way to group the ISO controls is, is according to the ITIL processes.</li>
</ul>
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I have detailed the model in a powerpoint presentation. If you are interested in the model, please contact me on platosrevenge@gmail.com and I will send this to you.</div>
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-18546759557751776242019-03-23T21:52:00.000+11:002019-05-26T15:27:33.088+10:00ShoppingApp<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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At Christmas I thought I had some extra time left and needed a new hobby. So I thought to pick up programming again. Making a shopping list for the weekly trip to the supermarket was something that could get a hand. I already tried to automate the shopping list creation process through Excel but there was still the problem to bring the list to the supermarket. Walking around to the house with a laptop wasn't very handy either.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1zNfdrwLeCs/XJYRd3zAwaI/AAAAAAAABVs/nOJ4WAgmRUcP2T--rI2M5gYpephOpBU9ACLcBGAs/s1600/shopping%2Bicon%2Bwhite%2Bbackground.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="172" data-original-width="171" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1zNfdrwLeCs/XJYRd3zAwaI/AAAAAAAABVs/nOJ4WAgmRUcP2T--rI2M5gYpephOpBU9ACLcBGAs/s1600/shopping%2Bicon%2Bwhite%2Bbackground.png" /></a></div>
I looked at some tools to build apps and ended up with Android Studio. I bought a book about Java and 2,5 months later, the result: the ShoppingApp.<br />
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Download and install the ShoppingApp <b>from the Google Play Store.</b><br />
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Unfortunately it is Android-only.<br />
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If you see any improvements, you can mail to platosrevenge@gmail.com.<br />
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My ShoppingApp website can be found here: <a href="http://shoppingapp.bouman.net/">http://shoppingapp.bouman.net/</a><br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-79074689113666487692017-04-25T19:11:00.000+10:002017-04-25T21:38:02.119+10:00SDLC - Business versus IT streams<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A model I created a long time ago.</div>
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-27994636311037064722017-02-23T02:21:00.000+11:002017-03-06T20:14:46.883+11:00Be careful with assigning more power to the CSO to improve information security<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Information security has never been as important as now. It's being said and heard everywhere. But organisations should be cautious to translate this to more power for the CSO/CISO.<br />
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Information security is a complex matter and is all about risk management. Risks should be assessed daily throughout all levels of the organisations: business management, IT management, IT specialists and end-users. When a firewall expert makes decisions on how to configure a firewall, it is impossible for a Security Officer to participate. The same applies to when the business owner of an application specifies his requirements.<br />
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To make these security decisions, you take a variety of issues into consideration such as the perceived threat, the cost to mitigate, impact on usability or operational efficiency.<br />
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Information security is just one of the subjects that is being delegated down through the management hierarchy, just like for example financial responsibility. <br />
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The risk is that if a CSO and his team are assigned power, they will start telling the people in the organisation what they can and can’t do. And they will threaten staff with non-compliance and force them to follow rigid frameworks. Those others than might take a passive approach and will not take their responsibility and refer to the security department for taking actions. The relationship between Security Officers and the IT-team is in many organisations far from optimal. This has a negative impact on the actual security, even if you are compliant. Compliance does not mean that all is secure. <br />
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Specifically, because information security is so important, all employees and all managers should be made fully aware of their responsibility. They should be trained and should be guided with the process. Their effectiveness should be measured through personal KPI’s and team KPI’s. Audits will assist to measure the effectiveness of the organisation but audits and compliance should still be considered as a tool to assist with the objective of the organisation. And information security is only one of the objectives. <br />
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The Security Officers play of course a very important role. They can’t be made responsible for the security of the systems. Simply, because to achieve good security, actions should be taken spread out through the organisation that requires too much knowledge of too many technologies. <br />
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The Security Officers therefore should use the regulations and frameworks to guide the organisation through the processes, help them to check the status where they are at and provide recommendations for improvement. Of course, when they see a risk, they should not give in and still report the risk via an escalation path to management. But management then decides whether to accept the risk or to act. <br />
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If you need to improve your information security, I recommend to set stricter KPI’s for your managers and transform Security Officers into friendly but honest consultants.<br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-38654919774792344762016-12-29T20:39:00.000+11:002016-12-30T08:44:33.400+11:00Resource planning<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Resource planning is an essential aspect to doing projects. You need to do this however for a large part outside de project context or outside the control of the project management office. It will need to be done by the (operational) IT managers. I thought to write this down as I see too often that organisations still struggle with this. Though it will never be a stroll in the prak.<br />
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Projects come and go and are generally resourced partly through people from the existing operational teams and partly through temporary hiring. Projects are these days less about completely building something new and more about adding or changing something that already exists. Therefore it is important to use existing skills and knowledge.<br />
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Certain resources will work almost fully dedicated for the project for a longer period of time. Other resources will need to perform tasks intermittently and for shorter durations. Planning the latter group is the most difficult. Those people will work probably for many projects and will also have to perform operational support tasks.<br />
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Because the IT manager will know which person has the right skills to perform the required project tasks, it is the IT manager who will need to do the resource assignment. In fact, the IT manager has the responsibility to maintain the full resource planning for everyone within his team. Additionally, it is advised that project resources are also recruited and managed by the IT manager. In that case, he can assign some support staff to work on the project so existing knowledge can be leveraged for the project and some of the temporary staff can do support work.<br />
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With respect to resource planning, the IT manager will first of all need to make an estimate of the total amount of operational support work he has that needs to be performed. These tasks can be work related to:<br />
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<li>Operational support tasks such as incident and problem management, fulfilling user requests, responding to system events, systems monitoring, service desk tasks, applying software patches, replacing faulty, etc.</li>
<li>Proactive support tasks such as upgrading software to a new versions, structural hardware replacement or implementing changes as requested by the users (all these activities could potentially be executed as projects).</li>
<li>Overhead tasks such as team meetings, training, holidays, sick days, etc.</li>
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This gives a baseline of the amount of resources that is minimally required. Certain tasks will require to be performed by people with specific skills. In those cases you will need to plan on an individual basis.<br />
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It is not always required to plan on the individual basis and you could maintain the information on the summary level.<br />
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The “ total available” gives insight in how much time is available for projects. If projects require more, you will need to insource additional people. If these resources work only for projects, then you could leave those people out of your operational resource planning and leave the management up the project manager or the project management office.</div>
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As you will perform multiple projects and will have multiple project managers, you will also have some project coordination through a project management office or something similar. </div>
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When planning all your projects, you will need to ask yourself the question whether you will be able to perform all those projects. It happens unfortunately too often that certain resources are over-allocated by different projects because there was not overarching planning. Each project will have to make its own resource plan and the project management office will need to integrate those plans to see what the total project resource demand is per operational team or some cases per individual. <br />
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You will get a resource plan similar as you would have per team but instead of tasks you would haven projects. Each project manager will provide a single line item per resource or skill/team for the resource plan. You can then reorganise this demand to a demand per team. On a summary level, the total demand from all projects could be something like the table below.<br />
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If you then subtract the demand for a team from the availability, you see what is required for additional hiring of staff. Using the above examples, this is for team 1 as follows:</div>
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In this example, you will need an additional person with specific skills. Initially for 2 days per week, then for 1 day per week, then not at all and then you need this person again. That is unpractical. Usually you just can’t hire skilled people this way. Therefore you might need to adjust your project portfolio by either delaying or cancelling a project. Another option is to delay or cancel certain operational tasks. <br />
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Adjustments will need to be made continuously. You might need a Unix administrator only for 2 days at the end of the project. You will need to plan this into the resource planning but as we all know, projects run rarely according to the plan. You might even find out only a week before that you need to reschedule. Alignment between projects and the support tasks is needed. If you, as an IT manager, have been strict enough not to give away the time required for support tasks and have planned sufficient contingency into this, you will be flexible to accommodate these last minute changes. Instead of doing the support tasks next week, you do them this week. This flexibility can be obtained for a large part from the proactive tasks and less from tasks such as incident management. <br />
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What you definitely should not do is to ignore the issue and simply over-allocate the resources. What happens then is that support tasks are delayed or cancelled which over time will result in an increase in the number of incidents. What also will happen is that projects will take longer than planned and will be delivered with a lower quality. The latter will result in a higher number of incidents for the support teams to resolve.<br />
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Besides people, resource planning can also apply to the systems themselves. If you have 3 projects that all want to modify an existing component, all through the development, testing and production-deployment phases, you will need to align all these activities between the projects and support activities. <br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-74156107930436953052016-12-08T01:27:00.002+11:002017-01-03T20:15:25.702+11:00Verantwoordelijkheden en projecten<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Introductie </b><br />
In elke organisatie zal er altijd onduidelijkheid en discussie zijn over de verantwoordelijkheden. Tegenwoordig zijn organisaties bijna continue aan het veranderen. Een heldere toelichting over hoe verantwoordelijkheden ‘werken’ kan de discussie over verantwoordelijkheden in betere banen leiden en kan ondersteunend zijn het vormgeven van de organisatie. <br />
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<b>De theorie van verantwoordelijkheden</b><br />
<b></b>Bij het opzetten en aansturen van een organisatie is het van groot belang om een helder beeld te hebben hoe verantwoordelijkheden ‘werken’. De eerste stap is om niet te spreken over verantwoordelijkheden maar over ‘accountability’, ‘responsibility’ en ‘mandaat’.’ <br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Accountability betekent aansprakelijkheid; eindverantwoordelijkheid. </li>
<li>Reponsibility betekent verantwoordelijkheid voor de uitvoering. </li>
<li>Mandaat is de bevoegdheid om in naam van een ander te handelen, maar zonder de daarbij horende verantwoordelijkheid. </li>
</ul>
Er is een derde vorm van verantwoordelijkheid en dat is via een contract of werkafspraken (eigenlijk een speciale vorm van mandateren). <br />
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Delegeren is het overdragen van bevoegdheden, inclusief de verantwoordelijkheid. Verantwoordelijkheden kunnen te allen tijde gedelegeerd worden binnen de eigen hiërarchie. Steeds met 1 stap naar beneden. Deze delegatie betekent enkel een delegatie van de ‘responsibility’ met de bijbehorende bevoegdheden. Je behoudt dan ten alle tijden de accountability. Die blijft altijd achter. Bijvoorbeeld een directeur heeft een verantwoordelijkheid die hij kan delegeren aan een divisiemanager. De directeur blijft accountable en de divisiemanager is dan responsible. Indien de divisiemanager dan weer delegeert aan een teamleider, dan wordt de teamleider responsible terwijl de divisiemanager accountable blijft. De directeur is dan ook nog steeds accountable. <br />
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Je kan niet zijwaarts in een hiërarchie delegeren. Want dan zou de manager van de persoon aan wie je zijwaarts hebt gedelegeerd ineens accountable worden. Bijvoorbeeld, een teamleider Netwerk & Datacenter kan niet delegeren naar een teamleider Servicedesk. <br />
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Je kan wel zijwaarts mandateren. Dus een bevoegdheid uitdelen. Je blijft zelf responsible. Zodra je dat doet, wordt de manager van degene aan wie je een mandaat hebt gegeven niet accountable. Mocht het blijken dat degene aan wie je het mandaat hebt gegeven, de taken niet goed uitvoeren, kun je in je hiërarchie escaleren tot je bij de eerste gemeenschappelijke manager terechtkomt die dan moet sturen. <br />
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Je kan ook intern een dienst verlenen en dit kan dus ook zijwaarts. Dit is een speciale vorm van mandateren waarbij je afspraken maakt of een ‘contract’ afspreekt. Het is dus van belang in deze afspraken ook sturingsmechanismen in te bouwen. Het concept is in feite niet anders dan wanneer je werkzaamheden extern uitbesteedt. Maar de partij die een dienst verleent en dus een mandaat verkrijgt van de verantwoordelijke (reponsible), zal in een goed georganiseerde organisatie een verantwoordelijkheid hebben gekregen van zijn manager om een goede dienst te verlenen. Dus middels deze afspraken heb je als dienstverlener een responsibility op je genomen en dat betekent dat jou manager daarvoor accountable is. <br />
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<b>Toegepaste theorie </b><br />
De volgende partijen ondervinden dagelijks in hun werkzaamheden de consequenties wanneer er onduidelijkheden zijn omtrent verantwoordelijkheden: <br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Projectleiders </li>
<li>Servicemanagers </li>
<li>Proceseigenaren (procesmanagers) </li>
</ul>
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<b>Verantwoordelijkheden projectleiders versus lijnmanagers </b><br />
Een projectleider krijgt zijn verantwoordelijkheden om een projectresultaat op te leveren van zijn opdrachtgever. Meestal een stuurgroep en van al deze leden kan hij verantwoordelijkheden gedelegeerd krijgen. <br />
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Om een project uit te voeren, zal de projectleider meestal mensen vanuit de lijn moeten aansturen. Dit is een zijwaartse stap en derhalve gaat dit om een mandaat die hij moet krijgen van de betreffende lijnmanager. Als deze lijnmanager hiërarchisch onder een stuurgroeplid valt, krijgt de lijnmanager, als het goed is, een opdracht die aansluit bij deze van de projectleider. Als deze lijnmanager niet hiërarchisch onder de stuurgroep valt, dan kan dit een probleem opleveren aangezien de lijnmanager wellicht andere instructies en prioriteiten ontvangt. Vandaar dat het dus van belang is om de stuurgroep zo vorm te geven dat het merendeel van de benodigde resources voor het project hiërarchisch onder de stuurgroepleden hangen. <br />
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Een praktisch probleem is in veel gevallen dat de tweezijdige aansturing van zowel de projectleider als de lijnmanagers vanuit de stuurgroep niet altijd consistent is en dat er daardoor onduidelijkheid ontstaat over de aansturing van de resources door het project. <br />
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De uiteindelijke responsibility van de aansturing van deze resources blijft bij hun directe teamleider. Mochten resultaten en voortgang onvoldoende zijn, dan heeft de projectleider enkel de weg naar de stuurgroep om hier iets aan te doen. <br />
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De verantwoordelijkheid van de projectleider hangt af van het werkmodel dat aangehouden wordt. Er zijn in principe 3 werkmodellen te onderkennen: <br />
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<u>1. De projectleider zet een werkpakket uit bij een lijnmanager</u><br />
De projectleider is dan alleen responsible voor het “wat” en “wanneer klaar” en niet voor het “hoe”, “waarmee”, “wie” en “wanneer doen” dat bij de lijnmanager ligt. De lijnmanager committeert zich aan het “wanneer klaar”. De projectleider geeft het mandaat aan de lijnmanager om de tijd en het geld te besteden. <br />
De lijnmanager heeft de volledige controle over hoe en met welke kwaliteit het deelproduct wordt opgeleverd en is dus “responsible” voor het leveren van een dienst conform de afspraken. Bij problemen kan de projectleider de manager van de betrokken lijnmanager aanspreken, aangezien deze een accountability heeft t.a.v. de responsibility van de lijnmanager. <br />
Aangezien normaal gesproken deze lijnmanager aan het eind van het project het deelproduct ook in beheer krijgt, is dit een werkmodel met vele voordelen. Het vraagt de lijnmanager echter wel om extra planning- en aansturingsinzet te leveren. De projectleider is er dan verantwoordelijk om op werkpakketniveau te coördineren en voor coherentie in het geheel te zorgen.<br />
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<u>2. De projectleider krijgt medewerkers en middelen toegewezen door de lijnmanager. </u><br />
De projectleider is dan verantwoordelijk voor het “wat”, “wanneer” en ten dele voor het “waarmee”, “wie” en “hoe” waarvoor een gedeelde verantwoordelijkheid is. <br />
De lijnmanager geeft de projectleider het mandaat om zijn mensen voor de afgesproken inzet aan te sturen. <br />
De projectleider heeft dan meestal beperkte keuze over de selectie van de medewerkers en de wijze waarop en de middelen waarmee gewerkt worden, worden veelal door de lijnmanager bepaald. Deze gedeeltelijke verantwoordelijkheid levert vaak verwarring en problemen op. Met name wanneer andere activiteiten die door de betreffende medewerkers moeten worden uitgevoerd, de voortgang van het project verstoren. <br />
De lijnmanager kan zich wel eens niet verantwoordelijk voelen voor het project, de voortgang en de resultaten. De aansturing vanuit de stuurgroep via de hiërarchie richting de lijnmanager om zich aan het project te committeren wil nog al eens haperen. <br />
Over het algemeen gesteld kan je in dit model ervan uit gaan dat de lijnmanager zal moeten bepalen over “hoe” het project wordt uitgevoerd, aangezien dit een vakinhoudelijk aspect is en de projectleider over het algemeen deze kennis niet heeft. <br />
De overdracht van het projectresultaat aan het eind van het project gaat in dit werkmodel vaak impliciet maar kan makkelijk problemen leveren wanneer er iets niet goed is aan het projectresultaat. <br />
Bij problemen wordt escalatie in de lijn door de projectleider lastig. Vandaar dat er veelal teruggevallen wordt direct te escaleren naar de stuurgroep. <br />
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<u>3. De projectleider huurt zijn eigen medewerkers en middelen in. </u><br />
De projectleider is dan verantwoordelijk voor het “wat”, “wanneer”, “hoe”, “waarmee” en “wie”. De projectleider is dan niet enkel verantwoordelijk voor de sturing van het proces maar ook expliciet voor het gehele projectresultaat. <br />
De lijnmanager is natuurlijk een stakeholder die requirements m.b.t. het operationeel beheer aanlevert, maar is verder niet bij het project betrokken. <br />
De lijnmanager neemt het projectresultaat wel in beheer bij het beëindigen van het project en dat is het moment dat de verantwoordelijkheden worden overgedragen van projectleider naar lijnmanager. <br />
In dit werkmodel is een groot risico dat de overdracht naar het operationele team als onderdeel van het project onvoldoende is. Hierdoor kan de lijnmanager achteraf in de problemen komen. <br />
Op het moment dat een projectleider namens een opdrachtgever een gedelegeerde verantwoordelijkheid heeft gekregen om een project uit te voeren, heeft de directe teammanager in de hiërarchie van de projectleider nog geen accountability over het project gekregen. Hij is er hoogstens accountable voor dat deze projectleider bepaalde vaardigheden heeft en, indien dit zo is vastgelegd, de projectleider aanstuurt om het project op een bepaalde manier uit te voeren. De projectleider wordt ‘ingehuurd’ door de opdrachtgever. <br />
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<b>Verantwoordelijkheden servicemanagers versus lijnmanagers </b><br />
Voor een servicemanager geldt in feit hetzelfde. Op het moment dat bijvoorbeeld een dienst aan een klant wordt aangeboden, heeft hij een gedelegeerde verantwoordelijkheid gekregen om de dienstverlening aan te sturen. Echter de verantwoordelijkheid voor vele aspecten van de uitvoering van deze dienst, zoals het hoe, wat, wie en waarmee, ligt bij de lijnmanagers. <br />
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Een servicemanager heeft derhalve de verantwoordelijkheid om ervoor te zorgen dat het geheel aan diensten dat door de lijnmanagers geleverd wordt, een coherent geheel vormt en de gevraagde dienst conform afspraken voor de klant realiseert. <br />
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Indien de dienst naar de klant niet goed functioneert, zal de servicemanager de lijnmanager erop moeten aanspraken en eventueel de afspraken met de lijnmanagers aanpassen. <br />
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Het risico bestaat dat de servicemanager de individuele teamleden gaat aansturen. In geval van incidenten en crisissituaties is dit begrijpelijk, echter hierbij kan snel verwarring ontstaan, net zoals bij het werkmodel 2 voor de projectleiders.<br />
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Een servicemanager bewaakt over het algemeen de service level agreement (SLA) die de organisatie heeft met de klant. In feite zijn de diverse lijnmanagers verantwoordelijk voor delen van deze SLA.Als deze delen helder zijn vastgelegd, zou dit kunnen vergelijken met werkmodel 1 voor projectleiders. Onderling hebben de diverse lijnmanagers, als het goed is, duidelijke afspraken in, bijvoorbeeld, operational level agreements (OLA's). De servicemanager kan samen met de klant ook operationele afspraken maken met de lijnmanagers ten behoeve van de operationele aansturing van de dienstverlening als aanvulling ten aanzien van de SLA. De SLA beschrijft het "wat" en de operationele afspraken het "hoe".<br />
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<b>Verantwoordelijkheden proceseigenaren versus lijnmanagers </b><br />
Ook voor proceseigenaren (procesmanagers) geldt een equivalente situatie als bij de servicemanagers. We spreken dan niet over een dienst maar over een proces.<br />
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In de procedures en werksinstructies wordt dan duidelijk vastgelegd wie waar verantwoordelijk voor is. Als dit goed is uitgewerkt zou je dit kunnen vergelijken met werkmodel 1 voor projectleiders. De uitdaging die de meeste organisaties hebben, is dat dit vaak onvoldoende is uitgewerkt en waardoor er onduidelijkheden zijn.<br />
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<b>Helder vastleggen van verantwoordelijkheden en afspraken </b><br />
Proceseigenaren, servicemanagers en projectmanagers sturen hun taken aan via onderlinge afspraken en dus via een mandaat of werkafspraken. <br />
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Ook worden verantwoordelijkheden overgedragen en het is van groot belang dat deze momenten van overdracht duidelijk zijn geformuleerd. Bijvoorbeeld bij het beëindigen van een project, komt een moment dat een bepaald aspect van de verantwoordelijkheid wordt overgedragen van de projectleider naar de servicemanager en een ander aspect weer naar de lijnmanagers. <br />
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Omdat deze overdrachtsmomenten een standaard onderdeel vormen van de bedrijfsvoering van DICTU, kunnen de basisprincipes eenmalig centraal worden vastgelegd. Maar per project of systeem zullen er ook speciale verantwoordelijkheden moeten worden overgedragen of vastgelegd. Dit kan dan bijvoorbeeld middels beheerdocumentatie, service levels, procedures, werkinstructies, werkafspraken of overdrachtsformulieren. <br />
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Daarnaast gaat de organisatie steeds meer de vorm aannemen waarbij onderling diensten worden aangeboden. Ook daarbij is het van belang om helder inzicht te hebben in het verloop van de verantwoordelijkheden en de mandatering. Als diensteverlener moet je duidelijkheid hebben wat je eigen verantwoordelijkheid is die je vanuit de hiërarchie hebt verkregen en welke bevoegdheid je gemandateerd hebt gekregen en waarbij de verantwoordelijkheid nog bij de ‘klant’ ligt. Let daarbij op dat de ‘klant’ het mandaat dus ook weer kan intrekken. <br />
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Het is dus van groot belang dat naast het vastleggen van verantwoordelijkheden van proceseigenaren, servicemanagers en projectleiders, ook de verantwoordelijkheden van de lijnmanagers worden vastgelegd en dat daarnaast ook de onderlinge afspraken en overdrachtsmomenten worden vastgelegd. Zonder een heldere en eenduidige vastlegging van deze vier elementen gaat een organisatie niet effectief werken.</div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-56463994755776326022015-12-19T00:24:00.003+11:002015-12-19T00:27:23.512+11:00Project Management Framework<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Anywhere I go, I notice that there are always options to improve the project management framework that the organisation uses. Despite the increased popularity of agile methods, classic project management remains important and relevant.<br />
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Via the attached link, you can find a document that shows a project management framework mapped to the products of the system development life cycle. Specifically because this SDLC varies per project type. In the document I have included 2 variations for this. One for infrastructure projects and one for application delivery projects.<br />
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You can adapt this model to your needs. You can add more variations. You can specify which products will be mandatory and which optional. You can also adjust what the level of planning accuracy will be required per phase. And of course you can add and remove phases, products, etc. It's just a starting point, but the structure has the advantage of giving in a single picture the whole approach and which products to deliver.<br />
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<a href="https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B34ACC25FFDDAED6!21697&authkey=!AJvPiGipJ1StAbY&ithint=file%2cpdf" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="244" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZPwLMtWdvug/VnQI4SJTk2I/AAAAAAAABO0/Wyiq4dveZtc/s640/pmf.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B34ACC25FFDDAED6!21697&authkey=!AJvPiGipJ1StAbY&ithint=file%2cpdf" target="_blank">View PMF here</a></div>
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-4827325524123175872014-12-20T02:56:00.001+11:002014-12-20T02:56:20.154+11:00Big data? well, try to get little data right first<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
National Australia Bank reminds me of a football team mate of a long time ago. When he asked you if you wanted a beer and you said no, he would give you one. If you said yes, he would give you three.<br />
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NAB sends a banks statement by mail even if we said we don't need one and will get them online. If we say we want one, we get two. They just can't get it right. Somewhere in their computer system they have missed the concept of the shared account. We have tried to rectify this a few times, but without success.<br />
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The dutch ABNAMRO bank is not much better. They have problems creating a new account for my son because his details sit somewhere deep in the system. Staff can't find him when you call their helpdesk or visit a branch. But the account can't be created. We'll give it one more try.<br />
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If companies can't get their basics right, they should be careful with trying to be smart with big data. Of course a single error does not matter too much when driving market trends or bother people with so called targeted personalised advertising.<br />
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But even the specialist organisations can get things horribly wrong. The dutch bureau of stastics (CBS) sent my son a survey relating to his driving experience one and a half year before his legal driving age. I won't repeat what I said when I saw this letter.<br />
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The problem with the bank examples are probably bad user interface design or bad information architecture. Besides this, probably a bit of uncaring employees who don't want to go all the way to provide a good service, both during building and maintaining the system as during customer service.<br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-58069936422667058262014-09-22T19:46:00.002+10:002014-09-22T19:46:21.947+10:00Cultural differences, rules and frameworks in IT<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Having moved back to the Netherlands from Australia, it is fun to see again that the cultural differences are also reflected in how the profession is approached. Just as businesses are different and have different corporate cultures you see this also on the national level.<br />
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One of the first things you notice when you arrive in Australia, is that first of all driving in traffic is a bit more relaxed. You don't have all the bikes and almost everyone keeps to the speed limit. In the Netherlands it is all much more aggressive on the road. The rules on the road in the Netherlands are a bit more logical to me as it is in Australia. For example, I found it rather illogical that each time the left lane (the slow lane) disappears. This makes it that people are constantly merging while this would not be necessary. I had to laugh when they finished the M2 upgrade in Sydney, at some point they first showed a sign "keep left unless overtaking" and immediately following a sign "left lane ends". Sydney roads are just a mess. Of course no-one keeps left. Everyone drives in the middle lane.<br />
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In the recent years, ITIL has become very popular around the world and has become the defacto global standard for IT Service Management. Though it is a UK developed standard, it is not a surprise that the Dutch were the early adopters. The same thing applies to Prince2. Whereas PMBOK seems to be more popular in the US and Asia including Australia, is it all Prince2 over here.<br />
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Now that I am back, I am confronted with two additional frameworks created in the same spirit as ITIL: <a href="http://aslbislfoundation.org/en" target="_blank">Application Services Library</a> (ASL) and<a href="http://aslbislfoundation.org/en" target="_blank"> Business information Services Library</a> (BiSL). If you have the experience, they are pretty straightforward. The question is of course whether you need to master these frameworks in order to do a good job. Not necessary according to me, but I have seen enough situations where they would definitely add value.<br />
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And do the Dutch manage their IT better then the Aussies? From what I hear not be definition. In the end most of it is common sense and if you have quality people who understand IT (and information) and how to manage this effectively, you would do the same thing.<br />
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The risk with too much process and procedures is that you become slow and bureaucratic. Not that these frameworks intend anything of this. It is a different way of running your business or your country. Being more lean can make you more agile, supports growth better and can increase profitability. However you have a higher risk that you do things wrong and inefficient. Having more rules and more focus on doing things right, can avoid that but has a risk that you increase the bureaucracy and that you slow your business down. Ideally you have only top professionals who know exactly what to do so you can cut out all the bureaucracy and be lean and agile. But unfortunately that is not always achievable.<br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-31690169124966421612014-04-13T14:52:00.002+10:002014-04-18T07:28:56.329+10:00IT Support is a waste of money<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
And with that I mean that a large amount of IT support effort and costs are required due to shortcomings in project delivery. <br />
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There is of course always a certain amount of IT support required. For example, maintaining and replacing existing equipment and cabling. Or smaller software enhancements that would not require a project. And even though end-user computing becomes easier and you might have the vision that end-users should be able to purchase their own equipment and connect it to the network, reality is that many people in this world cannot setup their own iPhone.<br />
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However, a significant part of IT support is due to failures in projects. Implementation of business applications is a typical example. Bad software coding as part of a first project can lay a horrible foundation for any future changes you want to make. Once you have a system that is built with spaghetti code and/or using the wrong technology, you will find that each enhancement or bug fix you put in place will create a large number of new problems. Software development support is then going to cost you a multitude of what it could be.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ie09bSgUJyE/UzSmfAxs5_I/AAAAAAAAAiQ/8P4TmY1l4q8/s1600/5857974428_459be807fc_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ie09bSgUJyE/UzSmfAxs5_I/AAAAAAAAAiQ/8P4TmY1l4q8/s1600/5857974428_459be807fc_m.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/5857425767/in/photolist-9VAQBr-bWRgpE-e2tHPV-c1ChGq-8RBvD8-9VDDH7-biU65M-cTRZ9m-cTRZrj-cTS1Bw-cTS26W-cTS1cq-e7W4YQ-egjjYV-dkYpDB-dkYstA-dkYq4a-dirk6Y-dkYpux-dirmvz-dkYsnb-dkYqEt-dkYtvj-ekfVXP-dkYqnZ-9mtmug-deiRFq-deiV5V-gnyedB-gnxWY5-ghLYc8-ghLnEW-ghLCy3-ghL68A-9jdZSx-ghL7Vf-ghKRQU-9eNequ-bwwHhA-bbSh8z-bZwHv5-7H7C2k-7Mu8XK-e7Yqti-8G2wh2-m7N21K-hbHQ6z-bBatzH-d6FFD1-dTBHPV-dTBLNB" target="_blank">Sebastian Muller</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
A good project will deliver a system that will run basically unattended without bugs until the business need has changed and enhancements are required. These enhancements can then be implemented fast, quickly and with minimal effort. <br />
<br />
And if you have scoped your project right, these new enhancement requests will not be trickling in a soon as the project is completed. They come only if the business actually changes. Many enhancement requests are due to incomplete requirements or ineffective design during a project.<br />
<br />
I have seen over time two instances where an enterprise grade business application was developed using PL/SQL and with a small layer of Java on top of it for the user interface. PL/SQL is not suited to build enterprise applications. Maintenance and new development will constantly run into many problems. You feel that with every fix you put in place, two new problems are created. Developers have problems estimating the work and new development takes forever. Let alone that the testing process is a nightmare because the number of issues you find never seems to end.<br />
<br />
In one of those cases I had the opportunity to rebuild the system (thanks to a great team) and basically achieve after that the ideal situation described earlier. Once the bad situation is in place and the system is in use, it is not easy to obtain the funding to replace it. It won't be cheap but will be necessary if the respective system is core to the business.<br />
<br />
So to minimise IT operational expenditure, you need to run projects effectively. There is of course a big challenge in running projects effectively. If you separate out the team that runs projects from the ones that provide support, you easily run the risk that the project people will focus on achieving their specific targets. Delivering on time and within budget. Yes, quality is also mentioned. <br />
<br />
But some quality can only be measured over a longer period of time after the project has ended. And, oops! The project team is not there anymore and is not accountable anymore!<br />
<br />
For example, when you buy a car, you assume that it will keep on running for the next 10 years with a certain amount of maintenance. I am not a specialist in cars, so I will rely on the reputation of the car maker and the dealer that they will provide me with a quality product. When I test the car, I cannot test durability. I am not checking under the hood, list all parts and check the quality of each part. My test will be limited to a test drive and some other visual checks on the surface.<br />
<br />
When I create software, I will test whether the functionality meets the requirements. You do not look under the hood. Looking under the hood will be to check the source code. Of course you can do that. But who will give a neutral assessment? The project team will always find that they have done it according to best practices. I can contract an external party, but we all know that software developers never agree with each other. And if you have outsourced the development, then it is a competitor that would do the quality check and that is not a neutral party.<br />
<br />
So the only option is to have an internal capability to verify the source code. If you have a large organisation with multiple development teams on the same technology platform, you could let those other teams do that. You probably will also be able to build continuity with those teams and build centres of excellence. (And <a href="http://www.bouman.net/2010/07/dont-outsource-your-incompetency.html">don't outsource your incompetency!</a>)<br />
<br />
Not all organisations (and even large organisations) have the means to achieve this scenario.<br />
<br />
The way I addressed this, was to make sure that the project developers were also responsible for the support. My philosophy is that if you make a problem, you fix the problem. And since most developers like to work on projects with new technologies, their reward of delivering good work during projects was that they needed to spend less time on software support and could spend more time working on new development. (Please note that in this case I was responsible for both projects and support.)<br />
<br />
The key factor is to understand peoples rationale: "What's in it for me?"<br />
<br />
If there is no incentive for a development team to deliver a quality piece of code, the application might look good on the outside during project delivery, but there is a risk that many coding issues have not been resolved under the hood and they will become a problem in the future. And there is always pressure on time and budget, so project managers will also drive to cutting corners and removing non essential features (that later would become enhancement requests).<br />
<br />
Many projects in a matrix organisation where the project management function is separated from the IT support function, rely on sourcing project team members from the IT support organisation. Besides providing the resources, the IT support organisation also needs to provide the IT practices to assure that work is done through a quality mechanism. The "project" is in these cases just a project manager from the PMO who does not have all the skills and expertise. He will rely others to bring that into the project. In other words, the project relies on the IT support manager to be successful.<br />
<br />
The question is then "What's in it for the IT support manager?"<br />
<br />
Consider this line of thought. If the project is successful, IT support will be less. And if IT support will be less, the IT support team will need less people. And if the IT support manager manages less people, he will be less important and will earn less. When managers are applying for a new job, the first thing they are being asked is the number of people and the size of the budget they managed.<br />
<br />
Though the IT support managers might not think that way on purpose. (Though it might cross their mind. It did cross my mind.) They will be working hard on trying to resolve all the problems they have to deal with. But there is a high risk that they are less driven to make the project successful because their key objective is fighting fire and to put processes in place to assure that any issues that popup are dealt with most efficiently and effectively. Their personal KPI's often will not contain anything relating to project delivery. This is not their fault. It is a consequence of the way we have organised ourselves and it is one of the key reasons why projects in a matrix organisation are so difficult to do right. <br />
<br />
It is not always practical and advised to integrate the IT support/operations role and the IT Project function (e.g. PMO). Therefore, in my opinion, it is necessary that IT support is strongly linked to project success and vice versa through individual KPI's and clear descriptions on responsibilities and accountabilities. Projects deliver new business capability to stay in business, to achieve growth and achieve strategic objectives. IT support is a cost that you want to minimise.<br />
<br />
As I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to drive both support and projects and in the end I was successful in minimising the IT support activity and having the team primarily focussed on assisting the business with their improvement initiatives. So it can be done, but this is not always easy and definitely not always easy in all contexts.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-45163642734736591312014-03-05T18:59:00.000+11:002014-03-05T18:59:15.858+11:00Understand the priorities given to your business stakeholders<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As an IT project manager, you usually receive the direction from your
steering committee that your project is very important and that you
need to drive active participation by the business team. You explain
that they have limited time available because they already have so much
on their plate. However the steering committee responds with the fact
that they should make the time available.<br />
<br />
<br />
The problem
here is that those steering committee members (and/or sponsor) are
usually the (direct) manager of those business team members. And you
should not be surprised that when they speak 1:1 with those team members
they give them a whole series of other high priority tasks which
results in your project moving to a lower position on their priority
list. There is clearly a misalignment between the various communications
on priorities.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X6DBRGKvv00/UxbXyMc5AdI/AAAAAAAAAeE/fwW-tqLPCFQ/s1600/Give_way.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X6DBRGKvv00/UxbXyMc5AdI/AAAAAAAAAeE/fwW-tqLPCFQ/s1600/Give_way.png" height="176" width="200" /></a></div>
It
is important for a project manager to find out if this is the case and
bring this to the attention of the steering committee because otherwise
you will only be criticised by not being able to deliver your work on
time and you basically have no hope in hell to control your schedule.
When you are aware of this, it is valuable information for other team
members because this can avoid friction. For example a Business Analyst
who is not able to get enough time of the business stakeholders to
complete his work, could otherwise get agitated and come in conflict
with those stakeholders.<br />
<br />
If you explain the competing
priorities as given to the team members to your steering committee and
if they are taking the project serious, this can result in a radical
change in behaviour from the respective business team members and
suddenly your project flies.<br />
<br />
<br />
The conflicting
priorities could be addressed with effective portfolio and resource
management but this is not always in place. That is a story by itself.</div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-31400454268644477232013-09-18T19:30:00.000+10:002013-09-18T19:30:47.318+10:00We all need to predict the future<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Sometimes, I find it frustrating to get work estimates from colleagues. It is even more difficult to ask for completion dates. It is indeed a difficult task and basically you don't always know what is involved and it is even more difficult to predict what other work will interfere. However forecasting is a necessary task we all have to do at times.<br />
<br />
Not everyone is comfortable with making business decisions, since basically that is what you do. I also found that people sometimes misunderstand the context in which these forecasts are asked. Quite often I have to explain that we are in early stages of a project and that a high variation is acceptable or that giving an estimate is not a commitment to deliver any work by a certain date.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Lctvkr1qRWk/UfITKQb6rYI/AAAAAAAAAao/4XawncXAdY8/s1600/forecast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Lctvkr1qRWk/UfITKQb6rYI/AAAAAAAAAao/4XawncXAdY8/s320/forecast.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I found that the more technical/operational people are, the more reluctant they are to provide estimates. If they give an answer, they want to be exact and accurate. And that is simply not possible when making forecasts. Specifically when high level estimates are required in the early stages of a project. Technicians prefer to give you an answer when they have completed the job.<br />
<br />
However, the more frequent people are involved in estimating, the more forthcoming they will become with volunteering estimates. For example, I had a case where a DBA was very reluctant to specify the tasks that needed to be performed. The project manager came to me in despair saying that the DBA was not willing to contribute.<br />
<br />
The way I resolved this was by using my little knowledge of what was required. I wrote this down on the white board and asked for confirmation that this was it. As a true techie, the DBA could not stand any inaccuracies and started correcting me. Initially just the minimal information was contributed. Each time I tried to fill in some gaps of information, this was which again corrected. After a while I had a good list of tasks and started adding the expected effort to each tasks. Again these would be corrected. In later planning exercises the DBA was much more forthcoming and learned to contribute and make his how plans.<br />
<br />
Identifying task completion dates is another challenge. In some cases you simply get the answer that there are so many unknowns that it is basically impossible to predict. Even project managers at times tend to come with these arguments in order not to give any form of forecast at all. I disagree since you can usually give a best case and a worst case scenario. For any form of planning this is crucial information.<br />
<br />
And don't forget that our CEO's, senior management, sales and marketing people have to make predictions of how our business will go, how much money we will earn and how much expenses we have. The uncertainty and consequences they have to deal with is much higher. If they would stop forecasting, just because they can't predict the exchange rate, what the Chinese or what the government will do, we all would be out of a job in no-time.<br />
<br />
So, just make a best guess and know that this is not bad at all since you will use much of your experience whether you are fully aware of it or not. The more you do it, the better, or at least more comfortable, you will become.<br />
<br />
<br />
</div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-55878173692871805182013-09-07T14:01:00.000+10:002013-09-07T14:02:32.411+10:00Fix the browser back button<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have always found the scripts running on web pages disturbing, but specifically with tablets running over wireless it has become very noticeable that when you go back to the previous page in the browser, these scripts cause a significant delay in rendering the page. I don’t notice it that much on my desktop due to the fixed line connection and the extra computing power, but most of my information consumption is done via tablets where this annoying. <br />
<br />
This is specifically the case for newspaper websites, for example, where you click on an article from the home page, read the article and want to go back to the home page to look for other information. A previous web page is in principle cached by your browser. However it generally will check again with the server if there is a new version of the page and it will re-run the scripts on the web page. I suggest that browser makers change this behaviour. If you just visited a web page and go back to it, just show exactly what was in the cache and allow the user to scroll through the page and click on hyperlinks. Don’t check the server. Don’t re-run the scripts. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D2v5VXp_0h4/UgyHzo9r1eI/AAAAAAAAAcE/LY1Nv-SI8qc/s1600/wm_back.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D2v5VXp_0h4/UgyHzo9r1eI/AAAAAAAAAcE/LY1Nv-SI8qc/s200/wm_back.png" width="200" /></a></div>
There will be complaints coming from the marketeers who want to count the return to the page as a second visit and even more when it comes down to dynamic scripts for advertisements. Free information needs to be paid by something, so I am OK with advertisements. But why not just suspend the scripts temporarily while you have left the page and when you return, continue the execution? The browser would need to maintain a run-state of the page and you probably can only do this for a certain number of past pages. Given that an IOS app and a tab of the browser do something similar, we should be able to do this for web pages as well.<br />
<br />
If I had anything to say about how to build newspaper websites, I would build them rather differently. Clicking on an article should show the article in a popup so you don’t leave the home page. You read the article, close it and you’re back at your starting point without the need to re-load that page. There are many good technologies to achieve this. In addition, I would use all those cookies that you already have placed in my browser cache to know a bit more of me. Using this information, you should start loading articles that I most likely will view in the background. This will make it a much smoother reading experience. I haven’t followed the latest developments in browser technology and it might be that browser makers may need to include some capabilities for this, though I belief this can be achieved already now. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, newspaper makers should be much smarter with targeting content. They probably will tell me to take an (online) subscription, but even as an anonymous recurring visitor you should be able to do something smart. The Sydney Morning Herald should have figured out by now that in the sport section, I never click on a rugby article while often will read the football articles. If they want to earn their money through advertising, they probably like me to visit their website frequently. And for that they will need to provide me with relevant content.<br />
<br /></div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-52581787394267232262013-08-19T09:24:00.001+10:002013-08-19T09:24:52.317+10:00Motivation must come from within (what we can learn from football)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Our PMO manager at work wrote an internal blog post about people in a work situation with an increasing level of enthusiasm for their work. The first having no enthusiasm while the last one was really excited to contribute to God and the greater good. The question was how we all could become as enthusiastic and motivated as this last person.<br />
<br />
I don’t have the need to work for God – or the shareholders if you wish. I do want to contribute to the greater good of the company but most of all I like to do a good job for myself and know that I’ve done a great job. But in the end, doing a good job and contributing to the greater good are basically the same. And in the end this will benefit the shareholders.<br />
<br />
In the work situation there are always many things that are not going well and we all are very good in complaining about it. You run the risk that you only see the problems and forget the good things that happen.<br />
<br />
It reminds me of my son. He is a good football player but currently plays in a team that is under performing – they are on the bottom of the ladder. The team has played some nice football and managed to score enough goals but unfortunately they managed to concede even more. I noticed that my son's performance was not anymore as it was in the beginning of the season. He was obviously getting a bit down of losing each game while putting so much effort in – and as it happened – having to compensate for the weaknesses. The result was that over time he was putting less effort in. Why bother if you are going to lose the game anyway? <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ixwpkXsHgc4" width="420"></iframe><br /></div>
<br />
<br />
So I sat down with him and tried to explain to him that the joy must come from within himself. Regardless of the total outcome, he needed to look at his own performance and if this was good, he should be proud and enjoy what went well. I showed to him (I make the odd video here and there) how he was able to perform better in the past. I knew he had a switch to simply step up. <br />
<br />
The next game he had an outstanding game and scored two beautiful goals despite the team losing the game. His coaches and many of the parents complimented him on his performance. On the way home I asked him whether he had enjoyed the game more. Though still disappointed with the loss, the answer was clearly confirmatory. <br />
<br />
It is important to celebrate the successes that you have and this celebration can be as simple as positive feedback. By looking at your successes in the past, you can motivate yourself and set yourself and the company up for success. <br />
<br />
The PMO manager had another blog post about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)" target="_blank">priming</a>. You can prime yourself for success or failure. My son put in his mind the picture of how he can do well. And he did. At work, it is not much different.<br />
<br />
But will others pick up from your motivation? Probably. My son played an excellent game again a week later but I noticed that the striker he pairs up with, worked also extremely hard and I was impressed with his game as well.</div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-26567276050567710392013-07-18T10:25:00.002+10:002013-08-12T14:34:41.897+10:00Forget the iPad. Surface RT is the new productivity tool.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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</xml><![endif]-->I never really liked the iPad given the fact that it has limited ability to be productive with. When the Surface RT came out, I thought to give this a try.<br />
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The iPad is good for reading emails and websites. But as soon as you create data on it, it is troublesome to bring this into the normal corporate network environment. In the end you are still copying files across, regardless of the fact that you use cloud storage solution such as Drop Box. The problem with IOS is that apps don’t have access to a common file storage and it is not that intuitive to open a file from Drop Box or store an email attachment there. <br />
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The early advantage of Apple with its iPad and iPhone makes that Microsoft has an uphill battle to demonstrate that their products can compete or are better. My evaluation is that the Surface RT is a better alternative to the iPad. It still keeps a variety of aspects simple to the user such as the limitation to be able to install apps only via the app store and limitations to fiddle around with the operating system but is open enough to have a file system, provide the classical desktop option and provides you with the full MS Office Suite. In that context, I do belief that the Surface RT, specifically with the new Windows 8.1 release, can change the need of a laptop/iPad combination to a desktop/Surface combination. <br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g-nAVDG7160/UeUe9IhYbfI/AAAAAAAAAZ4/RxA5dzkCsos/s1600/surface.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g-nAVDG7160/UeUe9IhYbfI/AAAAAAAAAZ4/RxA5dzkCsos/s1600/surface.jpg" /></a></div>
Another good reason to move away from the iPhone/iPad is that it does not allow you to specify a reason when you decline a meeting invite. This is rather problematic for the organizer since he does not know whether the person would want to reschedule the meeting or that you do not want to attend full stop. This is a bit of a personal rant, but I find this rather problematic.<br />
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Microsoft also provides the Surface Pro, however this is basically an ultrabook with a full OS on it and such with all the supportability issues that come with it. The whole idea is to have something that “just works” and requires little to no support. <br />
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Below my evaluation of the Surface RT. You can find many evaluations of the Microsoft Surface RT tablet on the web but I thought it would still be valuable to add my experience to this.<br />
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I know this comes across as an advetisement for Microsoft but unfortunately that's the result when you have a positive review of a product. Don't forget that I am still impressed with the way Apple transformed it the industry with the iPhone and iPad.<br />
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<b>Dependency on the Microsoft ecosystem. </b><br />
The system relies on the ecosystem of the MS “hotmail” environment (these days called to outlook.com but the ecosystems extends to Skydrive and the app store) similarly as iPad’s rely on iTunes. It means you need to have at least one outlook.com email account and in the email client you cannot really remove this account. <br />
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<b>App Store</b><br />
The key benefit (and also limitation) of the Surface RT is that you can only install apps via the app store. This simplifies this process for the non technical people and should assure that apps “just work”. It means that apps have been reviewed by Microsoft and that you can have a bit more trust in this that it won’t abuse your information and that it won’t spread viruses and other malware on your machine. I belief this is a critical concept for a consumer tool. <br />
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<b>Email client</b><br />
This is a simplified email client. It does all the basic tasks and if linked to Exchange can even do scheduling and showing availability of others. You can add multiple email accounts but it has the limitation that it does not support POP and minimally you need to connect to the outlook.com account. <br />
With Windows 8.1 you now also get the new desktop version of MS Outlook. <br />
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<b>Calendar </b><br />
A simplified email calendar. Does all the basic tasks. The primary limitation for business use is that attachments to a meeting invite cannot be accessed. Minimally you need to link up to the outlook.com account. <br />
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<b>People (contacts)</b><br />
The people tool can link up with Exchange contacts. A modern feature is the integration with Facebook and LinkedIn. Note that this linkage is primarily via the outlook.com contacts. <br />
Problem with the Facebook and Linkedin integration is that the birthdays of all your contacts are copied to your outlook.com birthday calendar. You can turn visibility of this off. However if you also use this calendar on your iPhone, this birthday calendar also needs to be turned off otherwise your will constantly be reminded of those birthdays. Further problem is that my experience is that the iPhone regularly turns the birthday calendar back on. <br />
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<b>Skydrive </b><br />
Skydrive is the Drop Box equivalent and lets you synchronise and access documents that you have stored in the cloud via multiple devices. This way you have access on your mobile devices to the documents stored on your desktop computer. Skydrive forms part of the Microsoft ecosystem. The initial Windows version for RT did not allow you to synchronise files to be accessible off-line but this has been resolved in the Windows 8.1 version. You can now pick folders in Skydrive that you want to have accessible off-line. <br />
In contrast to the equivalent on the iPad, Skydrive presents itself as an extension to the file system, the same way as it would do on a desktop computer and therefore files can be accessed in the normal way using the MS Office apps. <br />
This feature was a necessity since the Surface does not have the option for a SIM card and direct access via a 3G/4G network. Having documents off-line will allow you to continue to work on them while travelling and not having access to a WIFI network. <br />
Using Skydrive – or any equivalent for that matter - in a corporate environment of course will require some consideration with respect to company policies and it might not be acceptable for all businesses.<br />
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<b>MS Office </b><br />
The killer application is MS Office. The Surface RT provides this for free but only intended for private use. If you would want to use this for business as well, you would need to check if this is covered by the corporate licenses. <br />
MS Office is provided via the desktop interface. You can link the apps to the tiled menu but you will see that it switches to the desktop interface. To use the tools effectively, you still need to use a mouse. <br />
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<b>Desktop </b><br />
Windows 8 still provides the desktop, almost as an “app” to switch to. You will find there MS Office and the standard Windows Explorer to access all local files. What you won’t see is a folder for “Program Files”. It is, as if it does not exists. <br />
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<b>MS Outlook </b><br />
With Windows 8.1, Outlook has been added as a desktop app. This provides you with all the necessary business functionality and gives you an alternative option to the standard email, calendar and people apps provided. You could consider using Outlook for business and the other apps for private use. <br />
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<b>OneNote </b><br />
I recently found this app as very useful to write notes during meetings. OneNote synchronizes well with Skydrive and if Skydrive and OneNote are available in the standard business environment, the notes will be immediately available there. <br />
OneNote comes in a desktop version and an app version. The latter has an improved interface for touch and is great to be used in meetings or while on the road. <br />
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<b>Lync </b><br />
A MS Lync app is available but I haven’t had the opportunity to work with it. Lync would be great option to attend and drive remote meetings when not at your desk (I would expect Lync in that case to be available via the desktop.) When driving a meeting via voice conferencing only, it is difficult to keep everyone on the same page of a PowerPoint presentation. Presenting on the screen of the attendees via Lync, will keep everyone on the same page. For the rest Lync would be a great tool to use. <br />
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<b>Skype </b><br />
Skype is the other communications tool available on the tablet and this one works fine. It gives a bigger picture than on the iPhone.<br />
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<b>Citrix </b><br />
A Citrix client is available and this can be used to transform the tablet into a desktop. With the USB slot in the device an external keyboard can be connected. A mouse can be connected via Bluetooth and there is the option to connect the device to a large monitor. This way I have been able to work a whole day using the tablet as a desktop when visiting another office. I found the performance was not always optimal but it is unclear what the cause of that was. At time I also found that I clicked on a folder and the system translated that to a double click. Another issues is that when you put the device to sleep it loses its connection but has problems to recover from that. There is no easy way to kill the session and start again.<br />
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<b>SharePoint </b><br />
Some third party SharePoint apps are available however I found that when connecting to the corporate WIFI, due to the availability of IE on the device, you can directly access SharePoint after authenticating yourself. This gives me, when in the office during meetings, access to almost all my documents. <br />
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<b>Multiple accounts </b><br />
The ability to create multiple accounts allows you to shield the corporate use from the private use. This is even more specifically valuable because many iPads used for corporate purposes are also used by kids at home. A new account with outlook.com however is required and I think that would mean that if you want to install apps, you need to pay again. I haven’t really looked too much into that, since we also have an iPad. <br />
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<b>Hardware </b><br />
The device itself is very practical. The Touch or Type Cover keyboards provide protection for the screen and can easily be attached and removed. The Type Cover keyboard is definitely preferred and the weight increase is minimal. I found the Wedge mouse that can be connected via Bluetooth very useful which leaves the USB connection free for other purposes such as a large keyboard in case you want to transform it to a desktop computer. The HDMI connector allows you to connect a large screen or a TV. You can easily connect to the device to a TV to use the device to stream a full HD movie. <br />
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<b>Battery life </b><br />
With limited use the battery will last up to 2 days. The difference with an iPad is that it continues to run when on standby/sleep and will continue to perform certain tasks. <br />
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<b>Multi tasking</b><br />
IOS is not multi tasking while Windows 8 is. It means that you can switch between apps - while one is downloading data, you can use the other. <br />
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<b>Intuitive interface </b><br />
The interface has been criticized in the press, though my experience shows that it just as simple as IOS. Actually in my opinion a few items are significant improvements such as switching between running apps. Windows 8 allows swiping from the right, while IOS forces you to use the home button to be pressed twice and then select the other app. <br />
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<b>Apps </b><br />
Microsoft has been criticized for the limited apps in the store. However most important productivity tools and apps such as Kindle etc. are available. The only concern that I have are specialized business apps. For example a little while I rolled out a Board Portal where Board members would be able to review board papers. These types of apps can be important and if these are not available, it can be a deal breaker. Often they will have a general Windows application which would mean that the Surface Pro would be the alternative.<br />
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<b>Games </b><br />
Solitaire is available. <br />
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<b>Self Support </b><br />
The tablet can do more than the iPad which means that people who are so called non-technical might struggle at times. <br />
The benefit of the RT version is that people can only install standard apps from the store and it means they can’t really mess too much up. <br />
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<b>Network integration </b><br />
The new Windows 8.1 for RT seems to provide the ability to connect to the workplace. This requires more than just a personal evaluation and requires network setup and trials. VPN is given as an option. <br />
For home use you can connect to a home group. <br />
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<b>Performance/responsiveness </b><br />
As being a complete new product, the performance out of the box of the Surface RT was originally acceptable but could have been better. I feel that Windows 8.1 has improved this. <br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-54894393688733547072013-04-22T22:10:00.000+10:002013-08-12T14:34:08.717+10:00The computer industry that never should have existed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
PC’s sales are declining. And I think that is a good thing. PC’s are multi-purpose computing machines that run an OS. We never wanted a PC in the first place. In order to operate the machine you need quite a bit of knowledge. The success of the tablets and primarily thanks to the iPhone and iPad is that we have now operating systems that you don’t need to deal with. You basically only see a bunch if icons. What you do work with is apps and the installation of apps is dead simple. And that is what we want.<br />
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A little while ago,<a href="http://www.bouman.net/2011/12/microsoft-ultrabooks-byod-and-battle.html" target="_blank"> I asked myself whether Microsoft would get it right with Windows 8</a> and I think they are on the right track. The Surface with Windows 8 RT has received quite some criticism and yes, Microsoft still has some way to go, but in essence Windows RT it is getting close to the IOS concept. The benefit of Windows RT is that it has a file system and that it runs Office. For me that is the killer app to transform a tablet from a consumption device into a production device. The disadvantage is that it still Windows and at times you do notice it. But a bigger issue is for me is that Skydrive is not sync-ing files locally and the limited number of apps in the app store. Though for most apps that I would use, there is also be a web substitute. Hopefully Apple will continue to innovate since Microsoft and the rest do need to be shown the way.<br />
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Most people, both at home and at work, don’t need a PC. They don’t need to work with an OS but just need to work with apps. Businesses are continuing to make their apps web based. Local computing capacity is only required when you can’t connect to the network. That is still in quite some business and personal areas an issue (and hence my complaint about Skydrive). But with the continuing growth of network capabilities and wireless access points, this will change. <br />
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So we move away from PC’s. No more continuously buying new storage capacity. No more buying new PC’s because your PC has become slow just because Microsoft had to apply patches to fix security holes. And much less viruses. Viruses thrive in multi-purpose computing environments. <a href="http://www.bouman.net/2010/03/why-everyone-should-get-degree-in-it.html" target="_blank">Who wanted a PC anyway</a>? How much time have we wasted upgrading our systems, reinstalling software on our computer and fiddling around with the registry?<br />
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Though there will always be a PC market for IT professionals, hobbyists and special purposes, we finally start using dedicated tools that have has primary function the interaction with the environment while data and advanced computing is provided by the cloud, hidden behind easy to use interfaces.<br />
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The cloud will give us apps. The cloud will give us content. The cloud will store and backup our data. The cloud allows us to socialise with others. The cloud will allow us to edit our photos and process our videos. The cloud will give us a report of the kilometres we ran during our morning run and the amount of calories we have burnt. <br />
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But how will we manage all this? If you buy a video camera from Canon, the camera will probably allow you to upload your video wirelessly to their cloud service where you can edit it and publish clips on YouTube and Facebook. And your Nikkon photo camera allows you to the same on the Nikkon cloud. But do we want all our data be spread across all those different cloud services? No, you probably want it all in one place. <br />
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So that is where the big battle will has started. The fight by the big corporations for your life. Yes, you will put everything that there is to know about you in their hands, behind a single password that will be easy to guess. Google and Microsoft have good cards in their hands. Microsoft with Office 365 and Skydrive. Google started already a long time ago, though a lot of people like me don’t like to learn new tools. So I might gravitate towards a Microsoft choice just to stay with Word and Excel. Maybe Apple will be able to change its iTunes/iCloud service into a central hub to manage your content but at the moment it is a rather different concept (though Apple already has a large membership/fan base and they already know how to manage storage). <br />
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<a href="http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.html" target="_blank">Just as Nicholas Carr said</a> that “IT does not matter”, I say that the device does not matter and that the OS does not matter. And in many cases even the app does not matter anymore. It is the service that is provided that matters. <br />
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For a big part, it does not matter to me if I would browse the web or read my email via an Android, iPad or Surface tablet. They all do the same. The brand of the device is irrelevant to me. I can click on an icon to open the email client. The app does not matter to me that much either, as long as it gets my contacts from the cloud. I read my email from an iPad, an iPhone, a Surface tablet, a Windows 7 PC or via a web browser. I don’t care too much about a browser anymore either. I will just use the one that is available on the device. If the website does not render properly, I just go somewhere else. I have seen a variety of Facebook and Twitter apps and they all seem to do roughly the same. So I don’t care about the app but about the use of Facebook as a service. <br />
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Though PC’s will disappear, we will get in return an abundance of devices. All connected to the Internet: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things" target="_blank">The Internet of Things</a>. Devices that just work with an intuitive interface and for which you don’t need to read a thick manual. <br />
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With all its limitations, the Surface RT is a complete replacement for a desktop PC. I can’t install all software that I have on a desktop PC, but once I can do my video and photo editing via the cloud (I probably already can, I just haven’t bothered to look into it) it can do the lot: browser, email, Word, Excel, file system with cloud service, watching movies, Skype and a variety of other apps including Citrix Receiver. And thanks to the USB port that allows me to connect a large keyboard, it functions as a full replacement of my thin client at work. <br />
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The disadvantage of having everything in the cloud is that we will need more bandwidth and storage. We will shoot more videos and photos than ever and this all needs to be stored in the cloud. And we will distribute and share this with others which will result and a multitude of copies. Before the cloud has found real smart ways to avoid duplication of the same thing, we will create a lot of electronic waste. We are going to watch TV on our own time. So no more broadcasting. The same bits need to be streamed to your TV just a few seconds later than to my TV. But I see some smart technologies are already being worked on to reduce the total overhead for both storage and data streaming. <br />
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The advantage of all this is that we are becoming much more productive and entertainment will change from fiddling around with computers to consuming (and creating) content. <br />
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In the business environment the story won't be much different and we're well on our way. We're tracking goods, machines tell us when they need maintenance, we integrate our systems with suppliers and customers, we put our IT infrastructure in the cloud - either private or public - and apps are becoming web-based and where possible we'll buy them in the cloud. We'll have some exceptions here and there, but no matter where we go, we can do all our work at any location.<br />
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Anyhow, the PC industry is diminishing and from my perspective, it should never have been this huge in the first place. But I have this funny feeling about the cloud. I might buy a NAS device after all ...<br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-51901821093274676642013-04-01T09:59:00.000+11:002019-03-29T23:27:46.577+11:00Scorpius - A practical approach to small scale information system development<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I finally took the effort to publish the <a href="https://1drv.ms/b/s!ANau3f8lzEqz934" target="_blank">design methodology</a> I created a long time ago on the web. Most of this has been superseded by Requirements Analysis techniques and UML but still it contains valuable concepts and ideas.<br />
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Antares ceased to exist and the document is not published anymore, I thought it good to have it at hand online so I can use it to discuss concepts with colleagues.<br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-63457203473178538952013-03-24T16:24:00.002+11:002013-03-24T16:24:53.357+11:00Managers, meetings and their available time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I see often that managers spend a significant time in meetings and hardly have any time to respond to questions or have time for a discussion. Their calendar is full and they have to decline many meeting invites. In many cases I fully understand it considering the work that comes to them and having seen their calendar. But still I think there is something not right. The problem is that others don’t get answers to their questions, decisions are delayed and there is much stagnation within activities. Some managers hardly ever see their team members outside formal meetings.<br />
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I belief that as a manager you should have sufficient time to float around your team and freely mingle with your stakeholders outside formalised meetings. So why is there this over-allocation of managers (in meetings)? There could be many reasons. However I belief that there are ways to reduce this.<br />
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If you have constantly back to back meetings, you should ask yourself how this is possible. Could you delegate some of these to your team members and would they have the authority to make the decisions? Has the organisation embarked on too many initiatives? Can meetings be shorter and quicker? I won’t go into how to run meetings because that is a subject by itself and I think already much is said about that.<br />
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But there must be options to respond to questions and assure you can communicate your decisions to your team members and stakeholders timely. <br />
I once worked with a CIO who, being a busy man, consistently would answer at least the next day any questions you had sent by email. He was an early riser and used his morning time to respond to all his email. Very effective. As a project sponsor, he organised also the steering committee meetings meaning that they would always be held regularly and project progress was assured. Most project sponsors would leave it to the project manager to organise the steering committee. This means that then project manager will need to struggle to find the time in the full agenda of the sponsor with the constant risk that they would be delayed or cancelled.<br />
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I also always respond to emails and questions immediately unless I purposely delay it to obtain more information. The issue is that if A asks B who asks C and each person takes 5 days to respond, the whole process is delayed by 10 days. If each person responds within a day, there is only 2 days delay. Delay simply costs money and specifically if A or B are whole teams who also need to produce something following the answer, you can easily see the impact.<br />
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Responding immediately will introduce a temporary feeling of being rushed. But these are short bursts. If you wait, you will have a larger backlog while in the mean time you have the constant stress of all this work piling up. Once you then start working on the responses, you might not be able to complete it all. This will further increase stress and rushed feelings. The risk is then that people will make decisions on their own with the risk that work has to be redone.<br />
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Much time of managers is spent on fighting fire. This can be reduced by implementing best practices. Once you have improved your processes and practices, I have found that a team can rather well run on its own. As a manager you have done a great job if you can go away for a while and this does not cause any issues. Just like a parent who raises a child, your objective is to make your team stand on its own. Don't make your team depend on you. Effectively it will reduce the number of questions being asked to you, it makes it easier to delegate and it will increase the time you have available to work with your team. This is what I found out by experience.<br />
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So if you are an early riser and your calendar is booked out because your are involved in a change program to implement best practices, I predict in any (near) future you will have more time available.</div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-85146477280044051632013-03-05T13:30:00.001+11:002013-03-05T13:49:43.469+11:00How much user documentation do we need?Today I was asked by a colleague to explain how to book a meeting room in Outlook. I was a bit surprised with the question but was able to help. It is one of those computer tasks you tend to expect that people would know this. <br />
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It reminded me of a case long ago where one of my team members said we needed to train users on the defect tracking tool Adminitrack that we used. My response was that it would not be necessary since the tool is so simple that if they wouldn't be able to figure it out themselves, they wouldn't be suitable for testing the much more complex business system that was to be tested. <br />
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It makes you wonder again how much user documentation is required. <br />
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When running a project for a new system, the user community might feel uncertain and demand comprehensive user manuals to be written even though you know that they will hardly be used. <br />
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If you buy a piece of technology these days, how big is the manual they ship with it? <br />
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We bought the other day a new mobile phone for my daughter and I instructed her to read the user guide. She looked at me as if I asked her the strangest thing. The guide was smaller than the phone and was no bigger than a few pages. She was finished quickly and would continue to rely on dad if she wouldn't know something. <br />
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But that is the way it goes. I do the same. First ask somebody nearby and only the look for written assistance in second instance. <br />
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So we should keep documentation concise, provided that we build our technology to be intuitive and in alignment with the processes and tasks at hand. Train the users and let them rely on asking the more experienced ones first. Also provide assistance through the IT super users, relation managers or whatever name you have for them. This way you grow a knowledge ecosystem that is much more effective and efficient than the large and expensive volumes of documentation. <br />
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-57581710184472513832013-02-20T20:13:00.000+11:002013-08-12T14:35:52.578+10:00The eco-coach - what sport can learn from business management<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Business management theories often use knowledge and
experiences from sports. I have always enjoyed these parallels (see also <a href="http://www.bouman.net/2010/06/what-we-can-learn-from-football.html">http://www.bouman.net/2010/06/what-we-can-learn-from-football.html</a>). But now I see
that sport also has started to use theories and knowledge from business
management. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xD5T5Y7xOVc/USSSLr6zZMI/AAAAAAAAASs/PNyshXs9N98/s1600/8350156329_d7ec942d2f_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xD5T5Y7xOVc/USSSLr6zZMI/AAAAAAAAASs/PNyshXs9N98/s1600/8350156329_d7ec942d2f_m.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27702064@N02/" target="_blank">Dick Aalders</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I had the privilege to experience briefly Tjalling van den
Berg life in action with young football
players. Tjalling contributed as coach and educator of coaches to the success of the Dutch gymnast Epke Zonderland. (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm_mQXr6JL0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm_mQXr6JL0</a>)
Epke won a gold medal at the 2012 Olympic Games. I was impressed with what Tjalling did, though as an observer he came across
rather funny strange man. Don’t know if the players saw it that way.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tjalling wrote with Ruben Bakema a book called “Coachen” in
which they present the concept of “eco-coaching” (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgVeH2YRD0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgVeH2YRD0</a>
) in which they see the coach to take a more holistic approach to coaching. Not
only focus on the technical aspect but place the sportsperson, his personality
and his development in the centre. In addition to look at yourself as a coach
how you can develop yourself. And they recommend to work with the environment of
the sportsperson including family and new technologies. To be an innovator.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The book has three parts. The first part revolves around
finding yourself as coach and finding the right talent to coach. The second
part revolves around binding with the sportsperson and building team. The third
part is about scoring, to achieve results in a sustainable way and to motivate
the sportsperson.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Particularly in the first two parts we recognise elements
such as characteristics of a good coach (not much different of those of a good
manager), the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), communication sciences and ego-state
from Transaction Analysis of Eric Berne. The book goes quickly and briefly
through a wide variety of theories. In the third part contains more specific sports
theories.</div>
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<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SyllxHTKcMc/USSS_q8kOyI/AAAAAAAAAS0/Ka_H9eqGEcw/s1600/IMG_2792.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SyllxHTKcMc/USSS_q8kOyI/AAAAAAAAAS0/Ka_H9eqGEcw/s200/IMG_2792.JPG" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Us Abe</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The book goes quickly and briefly through a wide variety of
theories and is full of on-liners and that is done on purpose so concepts can
easily be remembered.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For example “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
eco-coach does not let you train harder, but differently, together, smarter and
sustainable</i>”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This reminds me of a project manager who challenged me to
work smarter instead of harder when I said that the time to deliver something was
insufficient. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some other one-liners are:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Even when all coaches
agree, it does not mean they are right.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What he is trying to say that it is very important to listen
to the sportsperson (there is also a section on listening and trying not to talk; <a href="http://www.bouman.net/2011/06/are-you-in-it-for-ride.html">http://www.bouman.net/2011/06/are-you-in-it-for-ride.html</a>). In business this not much different and you need to listen
to your employees since they often know how to come to a successful outcome. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To be successful over
a longer period of time, performance is more important than winning.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We too often aim at short term success which will negatively
impact the long term success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I find
this too often the risk with politicians. If they are elected as minister, this
is for a short period and in that short period they need to score. That does
not always lead to the best decisions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Without change no
innovation and without innovation no progress.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another angle to this, is not to try to be a strategic
partner of the business if the business is not ready for it yet. See Lou
Ehrlich in my blog post<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.bouman.net/2011/02/it-does-not-always-need-to-be-partner.html">http://www.bouman.net/2011/02/it-does-not-always-need-to-be-partner.html</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perform first before
you start innovating.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We read so much about CIO’s and the IT department that need
to drive business improvement. However in so many cases, the internal processes
are rather immature. First provide a good optimal service and control what you
have before you want to change the business. I don’t say here that you should
avoid initiatives that improve the business but more on where you focus on.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another angle would be to say that before you automate
something, you need to have mastered the manual process. I ran in the past in
many occasions where we were asked for some smart IT solution. It turned out
that the business did not understand actually what was required because they
were not able to perform the task via manual processes. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just as my comments, the one-liners do not always apply.
They are guides that help in certain circumstances.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-24380662696443152352012-12-20T19:41:00.000+11:002012-12-20T19:41:53.283+11:00Bring your own identity (BYOID)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The other day I watched a bit of the movie "Minority Report" on tv. The movie is quite often referred to as visionary with respect a gesture based interface for computers. That made me think whether those sci-fi movies do predict the future accurately or not?<br />
<br />
Watching a Star Trek show on tv made me realise that they got the tablets right. You see them walk around with tablet like devices. But what struck me was that they pass on the device in order to pass on information. In Minority Report you see that as well. A glass like plate is passed on to move data from on terminal to another. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We know now that this is not necessary. Information will be available regardless the device. If you want to pass on a report to your manger, you will use a workflow tool. These days unfortunately that is in most cases still email where we create a copy of the original file. But I will have good hopes that somewhere in the future we have progressed beyond that.<br />
<br />
So they got it almost right. It is also a inconsistent since the rest of the movie/tv show relies on the fact that information is available anywhere. Probably it makes a better movie to have actors to move devices around. On the other hand it is good for us humans to remain active, unless we all have sufficient time to participate in sports and other activities on a holodeck :)<br />
<br />
Ever since I worked with the Internet and used a mobile phone, I felt that you don't need to bring your own device. Devices that give access to the cloud and therefore any computer system including that of work, will be ubiquitous. You just need to identify yourself. The other day I read an article somewhere and this concept was referred to as Bring Your Own IDentity.<br />
<br />
For those who have accessed their work environment via Citrix, this should sound familiar. <br />
<br />
But there is more to it and something I did not consider too much in those days and that is that people will have multiple identities in the cloud. We probably want to avoid to login constantly with a different account. It means we login once and present ourselves with the respective persona depending on the role we want to play. For work we represent ourselves in the role we have at work and we will have access to the respective data and systems. At the same time we can play a role in our personal life, say on Facebook. When we leave one company and start working for another, we disconnect from the one environment and connect with the new persona to the new work environment. The war on who controls peoples identity has already started. You see many websites these days that allow you to login using your Facebook account.<br />
<br />
It is easy to see that there are many challenges to be addressed to make this reality from a business perspective for employees. But given the speed of how things go these days, I am curious to find out how long it takes when this will become common practice.<br />
<br />
When it comes down to the predictions in Minority Report, we see Tom Cruise his eyes are being scanned to identify himself. This scanning happens wherever he goes and his identity follows so he is confronted with targeted advertisement wherever he goes. Star Trek uses voice recognition. When will my fridge know what to present when I look at it? Will it scan my brain pattern and recognise what I want to eat or drink? Probably not, since that would mean too much infringement of privacy because what my fridge knows, the cloud knows. Though you never know... If you see what people publish on the web. Young people don't really consider privacy issues and the impact it may have for the future. And those people will be adults one day.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-35926844566917054752012-12-10T20:40:00.000+11:002012-12-10T21:25:19.715+11:00Will trends in information technology improve decision making in society?<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span></div>
A long time ago, I attended a University economics course. The professor explained to me that politicians use a simplified economical model and therefore they too often make the wrong decisions. He also explained that the educated economists usually stay on a distance from the decision makers since they have trouble dealing with people that have “a different way of thinking”. This view was recently reaffirmed by another economics professor.<br />
<br />
What I am trying to say is that society is not run based upon rationale insights and deep understanding of matter. You could bring into the picture personal interests, lack of interest, emotions or incompetence. But it all comes down to the fact that a human (democratic) society is a sub-optimal solution. (Regarding a democracy: there is unfortunately not better alternative.) We need to get the voices heard of all of us and that will include a lot of noise. And people don't respond very well to complex stories brought in a quiet tone but prefer to support those who make a lot of noise and present a simple message. The consequence is that we won’t always make the best decision.<br />
<br />
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With the growth of the Internet and specifically social networking and mobile computing, we capture these days unimaginable large amounts of data (in the cloud). Where in the past writing text was something that people generally rarely did and was something for an elite few, these days the elite few are the ones who probably create less written data than the masses. The amount of twitter text, email messages, facebook updates, blog posts etc. is so vast and is created in such a high speed that we can hardly comprehend the numbers associated with it. Gartner calls the convergency of the current trends the "<a href="http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/nexus-of-forces/">nexus of forces</a>".<br />
<br />
We capture all this information in large databases and trying to generate information out of this. We call this concept Big Data. Companies and politicians will be interested in what the people think and say and will be making decisions upon the information obtained from Big Data.<br />
<br />
The problem with all of this is that this Big Data will contain a vast amount of nonsense information. The duplication of this information is also enormous. The same opinion, remark or thought will be copied many times. But it will still count in the statistics.<br />
<br />
<div>
So what will happen in the future when we make our decisions in society based upon a large amount low quality information? Will we improve as a society because we have better insight in what people think or will we slide back regarding the quality of our decision making because we will respond to the emotion of the day and of a large group of people who have basically no real knowledge of the subject? Or will the ease of access to more and better information mean that we are better informed and will this compensate for the natural low quality information that drives our daily communication?<br />
<br />
I see that the new mass media has many benefits and we are able to address issues in a way that was never possible before. Progress is dependent on education and availability of information. We are better informed than we were ever before. However we see also the flip side of this. Just take cyber bullying as an example.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Some reading regarding the future trends in information technology:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/nexus-of-forces/">http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/nexus-of-forces/</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/future-of-digital-slides-2012-11">http://www.businessinsider.com/future-of-digital-slides-2012-11</a></li>
</ul>
Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-64593711337980749032012-08-22T12:46:00.000+10:002012-08-22T12:46:38.158+10:00Why SharePoint is so importantIt is always difficult to define the business case for a SharePoint implementation. For most organisations it does not have a direct return on investment but an indirect one through improved communication, collaboration and knowledge management. In addition to these core items, SharePoint can be leveraged for application type of functionality such as workflows and integration with other business applications and as such will function as a portal. <br />
<br />
One of the key challenges with a tool like SharePoint is that you only achieve the benefits if the tool is <i>correctly implemented</i> AND that in addition <i>behaviour of people</i> in the organisation <i>changes</i> accordingly. So even if you have a good business case, it remains a significant challenge to realise the benefits.<br />
<br />
Even though it is difficult to quantity the benefits, it is costly to achieve it and there is a risk that you don’t achieve it, I have a strong belief that SharePoint is in most cases <i>of strategic importance</i> for organisations – specifically in Australia.<br />
<br />
Australia seems to have a <a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/australias-productivity-problem-why-it-matters-8584">productivity problem</a> and as I learned from economists, employees in the United States have more capital equipment at their disposal than employees in Australia. This is one of the reasons why for example the US is a major producer of hardware and software and is much more innovative in their production of those types of goods.<br />
<br />
The challenge for the business case is then the challenge to make the <b>vision </b>of how SharePoint can contribute and to make this visible to decision makers, who in most cases won’t be a key user of such a s system. The challenge is often already much closer to home. The CIO or IT manager might not have a clear detailed picture of how the tool will work in practical terms of day to day use. <br />
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You need to have a clear picture in your mind of how you can configure the tool and how people could or should use it. This goes into the details of how team sites will be setup, how the meta-data will be defined and used, the use of off-line capabilities and integration with MS Office to simplify storing documents in SharePoint and how the social capabilities can be used. Besides understanding how it could be used in ideal circumstances, you also need to understand the limitations of the tool and what will put people off and will make them avoid storing their information in the system. How will you transform the system into a strategic tool to create and manage knowledge that can be leveraged for productivity growth?<br />
<br />
<i>Knowledge management</i> starts with <i>gathering </i>and recording knowledge that is obtained by individuals to assure that this knowledge is not lost. Subsequently the knowledge must effectively be <i>used </i>which relies on making this knowledge available in an effective way to the people in the organisation to be <i>applied</i>.<br />
<br />
Traditionally the idea of capturing knowledge is for people to write a document. We see that many systems that are implemented to support this are geared towards managing documents and Intranet pages. It requires people to sit down, gather their thoughts write down the draft version, revise the formatting, store the document in a shared environment and inform people that the document is available. But once the initial newness of the document is over, we have the major challenge of using the information stored in the document in the future. How will you find the document in 12 month’s time and specifically how will people who do not even know that it exists find it when they need the relevant information? Will they have access to it? <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div>
If the information was considered important and central enough to the company’s operations, it might have been published in a central repository accessible via the Intranet. But if you do not only want to capture knowledge created as part of formalised processes but also want to capture insights of the day or week and if you consider the effort a person needs to go through to create and publish this information with little prospect of future use, you understand it is simply not happening. </div>
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A first SharePoint implementation usually copies the same paradigm of knowledge management from a file system to a web based solution. (see also my <a href="http://www.bouman.net/search/label/SharePoint#%21/2010/05/system-implementations-that-must-fail.html">blog post</a>) This is not surprising since the paradigm shift is huge and it requires time to adjust, besides the fact that the technology promises a lot but realises only part of the promise. SharePoint is growing along with the ability of people to adopt the change - sometimes faster and sometimes slower. In order to build a business case for a SharePoint implementation it is necessary to understand what you can achieve with a current release and a current implementation project but also have a vision beyond the current release and where technology and user paradigms are growing towards to.<br />
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SharePoint originally was ahead of the game. Moving away from folder structures, local or shared drives and introducing meta-data was a huge step for many users. Social networking, mobile and cloud computing have shifted the way people think and work. Slowly a paradigm shift is taking place while SharePoint currently struggles to keep pace. The acquisition of Yammer by Microsoft can be seen as a positive prospect for the future of SharePoint.<br />
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Mobile and cloud computing have created situation that information can be created and accessed instantaneously anywhere anytime. The advantage is that you don’t need to sit on your desk for this. You can access the information when on the road, in a meeting with your colleagues or when visiting a client. This significantly improves the speed and quality of decision making. It also has the advantage of creation of information that can be done during short periods of down time.<br />
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<i>With the emergence of social networking, people are more inclined to express their thoughts in written or visual form</i>. Much knowledge, experience and insights comes in short bursts. If you wait for people to sit down and write a coherent story, much of these insights are lost, besides the fact that many people wouldn’t do it.<br />
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You could criticise these concepts and point to the risk that with opening up all these social concepts within the business context that only a lot of noise is created. However one should consider that what is noise to one person, is relevant information to another. It is my opinion that the most difficult part of knowledge management is to get the information out of people’s heads and captured on media so that it can be re-used. This does not mean that the other aspects of managing and using this information as knowledge are easy. Transforming all this <i>noise </i>in usable knowledge is the other major challenge.<br />
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The memory of an organisation is kept in a wide variety of artifacts such as electronic information and this can be in structure documents purposely written to divulge the knowledge but also in operational documents, systems, processes, status updates or blog posts. One person complaining to another about something going wrong can contain critical information. If this was only verbal, this insight and knowledge is easily lost. We all know that often the knowledge of a problem of opportunity existed but this information was not properly passed on to the relevant people who could take action. What if this little complaint in a status update or personal blog, would be picked up by an automated process and brought to the attention of people who focus on improvement? All this electronic “<i>noise</i>” that is created must be analysed, categorised and filtered and brought into a form that people can digest this to assist with their work.<br />
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Another aspect to consider is that knowledge, at least at a global scale, is <i>growing exponentially</i>. So if your competitor or the rest of the economy is accumulating knowledge in a more effective way than you do or you start later than the rest of doing so, the gap over time is only getting bigger (see also my <a href="http://www.bouman.net/2012/05/cumulative-value-of-it-project.html">blog post</a>).</div>
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In order to be more effective in managing knowledge in an organisation, a paradigm shift needs to take place in the thinking of people while also technology will need to improve further.<br />
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So what is this <i>paradigm shift</i> that needs to take place?<br />
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There are many aspects to knowledge management within an organisation but there are three core processes from systems perspective: gathering, managing and using.<br />
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The paradigm shift that needs to take place will contain the following elements:</div>
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<li><i>Less silo thinking and more openness with respect to information</i></li>
<li><i>Less thinking in terms of location (folders) and more in terms of how information is used when creating and storing information</i></li>
<li><i>Moderate corporate wide internal communication less and allow people to express themselves more freely</i></li>
<li><i>Making it a routine for all staff in the organisation to capture insights and make this available to a wider group</i></li>
<li><i>Understand that active governance and management is required to change noise into valuable knowledge</i></li>
<li><i>Understand that modern fast paced technology provides opportunities for necessary productivity growth – that they are not just nice to have but are of strategic importance</i></li>
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Reducing the silo thinking is a first step. Much information in SharePoint implementations is locked into team sites to which others don’t have access. I suggest thinking carefully if you really need to protect this information. <i>Why not give read access to everybody in the organisation by defaul</i><b>t</b> and only restrict this for selected pieces of information? <br />
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But why <i>do we need to so many team sites</i>? Consider reducing the number of team sites and use meta-data to group documents and information. It is easy to create multiple libraries or web-pages all within the same site. As soon as you see that people make copies of a document within SharePoint system you have an indication that you can optimise the design. Team sites are in my opinion, from document management perspective, just a super folder. <i>Changing sites and folders into meta-data increases collaboration and improves efficiency</i>.<br />
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Take as an example the documents you create during an IT project that is also required later for ongoing support. Not all project documentation has relevance post project closure but some have. A support team wants to have access from system perspective and not project perspective. So what happens in many cases is that relevant project documentation is copied to a data structure required for support. An alternative approach would be to use meta-data in the first instance. During the project team, the initial filter will be via the “project name” while post project, the support team will filter by “system name”.<br />
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But you should expand this consideration across the organisation. In a larger organisation you will have different business units or offices and within those offices people covering a variety of professional disciplines. Team sites will be setup according to the <i>natural hierarchy</i> but say an electrical engineer in London might just as well be interested in information created on the subject in Sydney. A search, a filter or an alert on a specific subject across the organisation can bring this Sydney based information to the employee in London.<br />
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The above can only be achieved if meta-data is effectively captured. <i>However documents and other information will only be stored in the system if it is easy to do</i>. You need to remove all barriers for people to contribute their information. This will rely on the technology provided such as integration of SharePoint with MS Office, allowing the use of the information through off-line and mobile capabilities and reducing the total number of steps involved. Capturing meta-data requires extra steps. To reduce the amount of meta-data that people need to enter, you can <i>consider automation tools that derive meta-data from the content and the context</i>.<br />
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I can strongly recommend you to look into a tools from Recommind to automatically add meta-data to your information through its self learning engine. <br />
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If you have made it easy for people to contribute information, you need to<i> remove the non-technical barriers</i>. Many documents are created as part of the normal work process. But much knowledge is lost because it is not captured in writing. People complain usually about inefficiencies or identify options for improvement. Too often many of their suggestions are lost in an email between one or two people. Allowing people to capture this information more freely in a blog post, wiki or list of ideas allows you easily to collect this information when you take an initiative to make improvements. A culture change is required to allow for open communication.<br />
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If this has been achieved, you will find that you can make it <i>a routine for people to capture their insights</i> and knowledge on a weekly or even daily basis. Once you have achieved that, you will see that your knowledge base will grow exponentially and from pure document management perspective, you will see that people will store their documents in the system by default. No more storing on the desktop, shared drive or “My Documents” - and a significant reduction of Email as the document repository.<br />
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There is however another critical factor that is required before people will actively contribute knowledge to the system and that is that <i>it needs to be used</i>. People will need to see the benefit. The information needs to be easily accessible and there needs to be a value for the audience.<br />
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If much more information is available to people and people create much more information, you will need to start managing the noise. A simple search returns so many results that you might not find the information you were looking for. The meta-data in combination with free and canned search features becomes critical. Canned searches are in first instance the views that will replace site and folder structures to provide a browse capability (to certain extend similar as the folders). In second instance they can function as subscriptions and alerts.<br />
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In order to achieve optimal use of meta-data you will need to design this on a system wide level to make sure your London based engineer will be alerted to a new piece of information made available in a team site in Sydney. You might find that SharePoint in its current form has its limitations and you would want to use added technology such as those form Recommind (<a href="http://www.recommind.com/">http://www.recommind.com/</a>) for automatic generation of meta-data and the provision or <i>powerful contextual search</i> and browse capabilities.<br />
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The <i>governance </i>of the whole system should not be underestimated. It requires active management to manage the sites, meta-data and the quality of information which needs be done in close relationship with the technical support team to constantly improve and adjust to the needs in an agile fashion. In addition, you would want to setup knowledge centres where people actively follow information created to combine, structure and transform it so knowledge is generated that is directly applicable. For example, you can have collected many pieces of information about a certain subject and you need someone to combine this into a single coherent piece of text. The internal scientific writer and process improver.<br />
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So how do you explain the<i> benefits of a SharePoint implementation</i>?<br />
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On the one hand you aim at efficiency improvement. But it will remain difficult to translate a 2 to 5 minutes time saving per person per day for finding information into a dollar value. You won’t actually save this money but it will go into productivity improvement. <br />
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Or what is the value of actually finding the right information that you before would not be able to find? It could lead to a million dollar deal, but how do you know that you would otherwise not be able to win this? Or if you would have avoided a major manufacturing disaster? If you have statisticians in your organisation you might want to ask them for advice to quantify these benefits.<br />
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Another benefit is that you give your people better tools to do their work. This makes people happier and therefore more productive. It also assists with reducing dissatisfaction and reduces the chance that qualified people leave for greener pastures. If you give people second grade tools, you will end up with second grade people and a second grade organisation. <br />
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In the end, you create an asset and you need to deal with this similarly as you deal with many other assets in your organisation.Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-14940918454832271712012-07-25T17:32:00.000+10:002012-08-17T15:09:50.482+10:00The future of ITThe IT work landscape will change radically in the near future due advancements in cloud solutions, consumerisation of IT, standardisation of business processes and networking. As predicted years ago, we IT people are the cause of our own demise and we to need become more adpative and more business and information focused - something we said years ago we should do. After the current peak, IT outsourcing providers will face a period of decline in demand.<br />
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When you take into account:<br />
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<li>Bring Your Own Device and consumerisation of technology</li>
<li>Continuation of standardisation of business processes and increased use of off-the-shelf-solutions</li>
<li>The trend to build applications web-based or as rugged downloadable apps</li>
<li>Cloud computing, Software as a Service including office applications such as provided by Google Apps or Office365</li>
<li>Outsourcing and offshoring and commoditisation of IT support and IT infrastructure</li>
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<li>Improvements in network capabilities, ubiquity of Wi-Fi access and roll-out of 4G wireless networks </li>
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Devices and associated operating systems are becoming significantly robust. The IOS devices are a typical example of this. The device just works. If it there is a problem, it can be only one of two things: a user problem or a device problem. The resolution of the first will be to show the user what the problem is and this must be done in very simple terms for someone with two left hands (the extreme cases) and probably cannot easily be done by IT support staff over the phone. If it is something with the device – we know what Apple’s approach is. Throw it away and replace it with a new one. In a <a href="http://www.bouman.net/#%21/2012/01/bring-your-own-device-byod-mutual.html">previous article</a> I explained how you can virtualise your SOE so it can run on any OS. When the BYOD movement continues to take up, the primary responsibility for the hardware and the native OS will not be with the IT department anymore.</div>
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If applications are further brought to the web or are even provided as a cloud application such as with Office365, the requirements on the OS on the device are getting less and less. With increased mobility requirements and advancements in networking wired or wireless, people expect the same data to be available on any device they have and use. This can only be achieved when thin client solutions are provided where all data is stored centrally on a server.</div>
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The consequence is that there will be minimal support required for the desktop which has traditionally been one of the major headaches of IT departments and is now a primary revenue stream for offshore IT service providers. </div>
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Where at first advancements in technology caused the commoditisation of technology which led to offshoring of the desktop support, further advancements will take this almost completely away.</div>
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ERP vendors have progressed in the capability of their systems and standardisation of business processes have led to less custom development and more application integration. With the commoditisation of infrastructure and applications, we started a trend of offshoring application integration and application support - specifically now that applications are web based or run in a JVE. It also allows for Software as a Service. When selecting Oracle, SAP or Microsoft for your primary applications, you already lock yourself in with that vendor. In that case there is no problem to use their cloud offering. The choice for the original vendor as the cloud provider is therefore the most obvious one. You are interested in the application and the underlying infrastructure should not be of concern. The problem of moving away from SAP and start using Oracle is with respect to data migration, configuration work and the associated business change is the same. The thing you don’t want is the change of the re-installation, purchase and management of the associated infrastructure including the application foundation such as performance tuning and scalability issues. Leave that to the one who is specialised in it. Of course you still need someone to maintain the configuration of the application.</div>
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Taking applications to the cloud means again less IT effort required maintaining and running the applications and this specifically applies to those tasks that we have been able to outsource in the first place.</div>
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So what remains is the direct partnership with the business, understanding business strategy and business needs and participating in developing those strategies and finally implementing the required solutions. The implementation of those solutions can be a commoditised solution. It can also be a solution that uses commoditised components such as Software as a Service but where there is intense business consultancy required to design and configure the solution. And finally it can mean a solution that needs to be developed completely from scratch and this will be the case when standard components or applications are not available - when you want to do something unique.<br />
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The implementation approach must be adaptive to the situation and therefore agile. Agile does not per se mean that you don’t have a clear picture (requirements or even design) of the final outcome, but that parts are created in close cooperation with the business and pieces are delivered as much as possible in increments. Speed of delivery becomes even more a prominent requirement for success. Don’t forget that all the other IT can be delivered lightning fast: users buy their own devices, a virtual server is just 1 click away and another SharePoint farm will be available in days if not hours.<br />
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The final consequence is that one of the jokes made years ago when I was still attending Uni is becoming reality – we IT people are making ourselves obsolete. We’ve proliferated over the years and are now feel that offshoring is taking our jobs away. But trend will continue and will also impact the outsourcing providers offshore. Larry Ellison might finally fulfil his dream and become the sole all-encompassing provider for his business applications.<br />
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As in economic forecasting, the forecast is probably reasonable accurate but the timing is probably off. The only thing I can say about that, is that changes are coming increasingly in shorter cycles.</div>
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Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3665333919884629248.post-7572485572519205362012-05-23T21:30:00.001+10:002012-05-23T21:30:36.888+10:00Cumulative value of an IT projectOrganisations constantly face the question whether they should execute a project now or defer it to later. One of the aspects that should be considered is the cumulative value of the solution over time.<br />
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Certain systems grow in value over time such as an effectively implemented SharePoint system for communication, collaboration and document management. The combined value can be an effective knowledge management solution. Effectively used knowledge stimulates the creation of more knowledge and this facilitates growth of the organisation.<br />
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Other systems and technologies have more or less a constant value over time. Take for example a communication system. Say you have a variety of solutions for voice communication and have the option to implement a Voice over IP (VOIP) solution. Though you can achieve cost savings with the VOIP solution and potentially make certain tasks easier for the user, the value today of this will be the same tomorrow. Without VOIP you still can make phone calls. Say, if the value of the solution is today 10, then tomorrow it will still be 10 and again the day after it will still be 10.<br />
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However, with a knowledge management solution the value of the system grows with the amount of knowledge accumulated in the system.The more knowledge you collect in the system, the more people will consult the solution to make decisions. The more it is used, the more effort people will put in it to record their knowledge. So if the value is today 10, tomorrow it will be 15 and the day after 22.5.<br />
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As you can see, the decision to defer the implementation, upgrade or improvement of your knowledge management solution has over time a significantly bigger impact than the VOIP example given earlier.<br />
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<i>Knowledge not recorded today might be knowledge lost forever.</i> That is why I think SharePoint implementations or improvements have an urgency factor to be considered. The longer you wait, the bigger the knowledge gap.<br />
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Of course the decision to execute a certain project needs to consider multiple factors such as total cost, ease of execution, risk, alignment with strategies and many more. However, I found that it is often difficult to explain why a SharePoint implementation, upgrade or improvement project is necessary and this is one of the arguments that can help with building the business case.<br />
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Knowledge is a business critical asset that requires nurturing to achieve competitive advantage. Knowledge creation facilitates economic growth.<br />
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Besides that knowledge can be stored as content in a system, for example in a document stored in a SharePoint site, knowledge can be incorporated in the business logic of a business application. In this case the incorporated knowledge does stimulate further growth of knowledge but it assures consistent execution of tasks and has the benefit that processes and procedures are enforced. When staff change, the system will still be there to assist with correct execution of the tasks. You have moved some of the smarts from the people into the systems. <a href="http://www.bouman.net/2010/04/money-must-roll-information-must-flow.html">See also this blog post</a> about my view on making information flow.<br />
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<br />Hein Boumanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09543110818680861065noreply@blogger.com0