brenda m. michelson 's Public Library

"I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have."

Business hbr christensen

Governance: "good governance is about making everybody smarter about IT. "When setting up governance, most companies start with IT investments when they should start with implementation reviews," says Ross. "Companies with the best governance are constantly assessing whether projects are realizing their business case.""

Purpose: Ross. "Quarterly financial goals are destroying us. IT is about the long-term strength and agility of the business. Let somebody else worry about quarterly goals; the CIO should focus on making the company great forever."
That doesn't mean IT can ignore all quarterly pressure, but CIOs should discourage investment that is driven by short-term thinking. "This is UPS's genius," Ross says. "They understand that they need low package-delivery cost and high reliability. They use those metrics to set goals, and they build systems to operationalize their business." CIOs must push back, she says. "If we measure IT the way we measure the last advertising campaign, we're in trouble."

cio governance entarch

I owe a follow-up on James' excellent article. In short, I believe we need to embrace the mindset of Product Managers, who continually evolve a solution, rather than try for all-at-once perfection. 

"In businesses that are themselves complex, there are tremendous efficiencies to be gained by the smart application of IT. That element of the enterprise architect's role doesn't go away.

What does change are the skills needed to evaluate how business applications, data sets and services are going to interact-and survive-in a complex, adaptive systems environment. If developers are the DNA of software in the cloud, the enterprise architect becomes the immune system, encouraging the growth of systems that help the business thrive, and killing those that would cost the business.

In this sense, my friend Brenda Michelson, a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture, put it best: the role is no longer one of enterprise architect, but rather one of the enterprise product manager..."

cloud computing enterprise-architect entarch

“Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it. Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.” — Sameer Patel

bigdata

"Here are just a few ways to get started in achieving minimum complexity:

Think end to end.  Simplicity relates to the entire customer experience, from how you handle pricing to customer support.
Say no.  Kill features and services that don’t get used, and optimize the ones that do.
Specialize.  Focus on your core competency, and outsource the rest--simplicity comes more reliably when you have less on your plate.
Focus on details.  Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.
Audit constantly.  Constantly ask yourself, can this be done any simpler? Audit your technology and application frequently.
The next thing to understand is that simplicity is a relative, moving target. The accelerating speed of innovation ensures that you’re never the simplest solution for long."

simplicity

"You can actually become more creative by changing your mind-set. Anyone can innovate, if they choose to. Disruptive innovators do it by choice, not chance. Their everyday actions swap out an "I'm not creative" mind-set for an "I am creative" one. And then magical (not mystical) things unfold.

The magic materializes as people engage unique innovation skills (what we call their innovator's DNA) on an everyday basis. For example, by asking provocative questions, observing like anthropologists, networking with people who see the world in 180-degree opposites, and experimenting with intensity, innovators obliterate the "I'm not creative" brain barrier and, more often than not, break out from the pack."

innovation creativity mindset christensen

creative badass manifesto

creativity

Provocative view. Lots of good linked content.

"It's an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.

Then there's another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, "It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.""

internet neal-stephenson innovation

Massive scale measured in business terms: trillions of $

"$12.5 trillion. That's the amount of customer money for which Benjamin's half of Citi is responsible. About a quadrillion dollars worth of transactions flow through his system every year."

scalability citi

"[Thiel's] lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows."

Now think about the competitive environment that confronts the most fortunate people today and how it undermines those mind-sets.

creativity economics competition

""Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well," Hamming says. "They believe the theory enough to go ahead; [but] they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory."

This is perhaps the most important advice from among Hamming's many suggestions. The path to excellence requires this balance between confidence and doubt, and though this balance is challenging, it's tractable so long as your recognize what you're facing."

expertise talent

"WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved."

sherryturkle technology society

"The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the taking of source code by Sergey Aleynikov was not a crime under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets because the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law because it was not physical "goods" or "wares" or "merchandise." He had taken high-frequency trading computer code from Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank where he worked, as he was about to start a new job at Teza Technologies, a startup in the same business, according to the Chicago Tribune.
In particular, the code did not "become" stolen property even when Aleynikov saved it to a flash drive, a tangible device, noted Waters Technology.
In addition, because the software was used internally rather than sold to other people, that meant it could not be subject to laws regarding interstate commerce, noted the New York Times."

legal code goldmansachs

"We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment.

It wasn't just that the improvement was marginal, but that Netflix's business had shifted and the way customers used its product, and the kinds of recommendations the company had done, had shifted too. Suddenly, the prize winning solution just wasn't that useful -- in part because many people were streaming videos rather than renting DVDs -- and it turns out that the recommendation for streaming videos is different than for rental viewing a few days later."

bigdata kaggle contest

"From Amazon’s perspective it’s easy to see why the marketplace idea was so appealing. Letting users launch fully configured versions of popular products in a single click is a compelling feature, especially for complex software that isn’t easily deployed in the cloud (or at all). For its software-vendor partners, AWS Marketplace represents an opportunity to do SaaS without having to build a SaaS business or infrastructure."

cloud computing amazon

It'll be interesting to see if SCOTUS determines if (a) the complexity of the entire law makes it impossible to strike down the mandate; or (b) if the mandate is deemed unconstitutional, thus sinking the entire complicated law. 

Is it too complex to fail? Or, too complex to stand?

"The justices focused on the complexity of the law to debate what happens if they find some parts unconstitutional, such as the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance. Can the rest of it stay, or must it all fall, and the political branches start on health-care reform from scratch? And how could the court practically pick and choose, given the law's great length and complexity?"

"Perhaps ObamaCare will be remembered as the breaking point for top-down planning. There is not enough information available for the government to micromanage a system as complex as health care, which represents more than 15% of the economy. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote some 50 years ago about the "pretence of knowledge," meaning the conceit that planners could know enough about complex markets to dictate how they operate. He warned against "the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess."

complexity healthcare scotus

"The Internet of Things could have a mind-boggling 24 billion devices connected by 2020 and that means there will be more than three times the amount of connected devices as people on the planet by that time. So, how will the world power all of these gadgets and machine-driven devices? The answer, beyond plugging all of those devices into the grid, will include farming tiny slices of power when available, from sources like the sun, vibrations, mechanical energy, heat and more."

cleantech green internet-of-things

"...outsources what he calls “run-of-the-mill coding jobs” to India, said there are plenty of positions for enterprise architects, data integration architects, and business analysts. Such jobs include all of the” thinking work” that ends up in code and can’t be done offshore because it requires core understanding of each individual company, Leader said.

Recent college graduates could fill core project management and business analyst positions in IT, he said. Leader himself hired project managers, an enterprise architect and business analysts. Many other jobs, including enterprise and integration architects, require strong skill sets that cannot be filled by students fresh out of college, forcing companies to compete for those applicants. “We cannot find people to fill these jobs,” Leader told CIO Journal."

wsj entarch integration IT business_analysis

I'm working on a healthcare exchange related project. Well, at least for now...

"Today's the day. The Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments as to the constitutionality of various provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Note that phrase: "Various provisions." The Supreme Court is not looking at the act as a whole. Rather, it’s considering four separate questions related to separate parts of the law. Here's my colleague Sarah Kliff with a primer of what they are, and why they matter."

scotus healthcare