The first step in finding better solutions is to start asking better questions™


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Done this level

Picture credit: gnackgnackgnack

Picture credit: gnackgnackgnack

Should we get video game designers to shape the organizations of the future? I think our businesses might be more effective  and robust if we did.

This is not so crazy as it sounds, professional games designers know how to plan a resilient environment and define suitable roles. They also know a lot about sustaining player engagement, which is an eternal problem for most organizations – in the form of employee motivation.

Continue reading Done this level

An object lesson in transparency

usaitspendAwesome. No other word for it. I’m talking about the U.S. Government IT spending dashboard.

For sure, the dashboard is clearly in the very early stages of development and a lot of the data remains to be populated/ developed – but it is more than just a stake in the ground, it is a benchmark for the future.

Quite simply this is the global yardstick by which we can measure the transparency of Government IT spending.

Continue reading An object lesson in transparency

40 seconds: Out of the silo, into the silo

Picture credit: onlinewoman

Picture credit: onlinewoman

There is a danger that a poorly planned migration to so-called cloud computing will simply see organizations jump from one set of information silos into another.

My favourite blood sport in recent years was to invite a well-known pioneering purveyor of hosted data services (the company name escapes me but it might rhyme with racehorse) to discuss the real challenges of properly integrating their offering with a mature enterprise systems portfolio.

This was never a welcome question and usually led to responses given through clenched teeth. Which showed exactly why it was worth asking.

Book review: Burning the ships

Marshall Phelps has made billions of dollars for his employers and fundamentally changed the outlook of some very hard-faced businesses along the way. Burning The Ships describes how Phelps took the lessons he learned making a fortune for IBM and repeated the trick for Bill Gates at Microsoft.

Readers of this book get a no-holds barred perspective of Marshall’s magic – and an intriguing insight into the inner workings of the Redmond giant.

Anecdotes from within the fortress walls are always interesting but the big payoff from BurningThe Ships is a real learning opportunity for those people and organizations who want to share in the largely untapped value of their intellectual property assets. This book is a primer for better business, in any field not just technology.

According to Phelps and Kline, Forbes estimates the opportunity value of unrealised intellectual property at a trillion dollars, per annum; unrealised because many businesses have yet to work out how to really exploit their knowledge assets. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that action?

Continue reading Book review: Burning the ships

Realising potential

Picture credit: Im your pusher

Picture credit: I'm your pusher

Walking into a new job always brings new challenges, none more so than the preconceptions of others. So here is a powerful tip for getting off to a good start.

As an interim director I have often been preconceived by my new team as the axeman, brought in to turn around their – by cutting costs and people.

Motivating a team with such feelings is not easy so I have developed ways of dealing with the usual ‘welcoming’ comments from concerned staff, such as “why should we bother, when you’re going to sack us all anyway?

If I get such a question, usually in a one-to-one-meeting, I simply explain that my motivation is to help people realise their potential. I always stop speaking at that point, to see how the conversation will develop.

Most people immediately recognise the ambiguity of my statement and the next few minutes of our conversation often frames the months to come.

Continue reading Realising potential

Enterprise Aliens

Picture credit: watz

Picture credit: watz

Are aliens watching your enterprise? If not, I suggest that you get some pdq;  because every organization can benefit from regularly looking at its operation through the eyes of “the man from Mars.”

Continue reading Enterprise Aliens

Influencing adoption of IT systems BCS Event London 3rd July

Speakers: Dr Craig Shepherd, Nottingham University Business School & Dr Micky Kerr, Independent Consultant -’Factors influencing the adoption of IT systems: An interdisciplinary perspective’ Dr Natasha Papazafeiropoulou, Brunel University – ‘Taking the vendors’ perspective in IT adoption and diffusion’ Dr Giuliana Battisti, Nottingham University Business School – ‘The diffusion of IT related innovations: the economics of technological and organizational change’ Colin Beveridge, British Computer Society Elite Group – ‘The dynamics of organisational adoption’ Dr George Kuk, Nottingham University Business School – ‘The adoption of open source technologies’

CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS AND EVENT REGISTRATION

The dynamics of organizational adoption

Picture credit: raysto

Picture credit: raysto

Do we really know how our organizations adopt new methods, new technologies and new thinking?

I have been working on the dynamics of organizational adoption for several years and I have devised an insightful perspective of the challenge. Some of these insights will be presented at an event in London. (details)

Every organization is a complex adaptive system that participates in a dynamic environment, shared with other developing systems, and must routinely evolve to remain relevant in an ever-changing, interconnected and interdependent context.

But is the process of organizational adoption properly understood and managed? Continue reading The dynamics of organizational adoption

whereness

Nowadays, thanks to the web, we can be in more than one place at one time – sustaining multiple dialogues/ presence simultaneously.

Picture credit: JohnLeGear

Picture credit: JohnLeGear

I watched an intense conversation on Twitter the other day, between two people who had quite different concepts of whereness.

“Jack” believed that his whereness depended exclusively on his current physical location/ geography, whereas “Jill” believed that her whereness at any moment was simply a function of her current connectivity/ point(s) of engagement.

Continue reading whereness