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04 Dec 09

AGILE TO ADAPTIVE

  • In his book, Adaptive Enterprises: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond

    Organizations, Stephan Haeckel argues that it has become almost impossible to

    predict and plan in advance for customer problems and opportunities, especially

    with information-based products and services. Haeckel states that successful

    organizations must, instead, become adaptive; to learn how to continuously

    identify and understand these problems or opportunities as they occur and respond

    to them quickly and appropriately, customer by customer. Successful adoption of

    this adaptive mode of operation, he suggests, requires that an organization install

    the capabilities and management context of what he calls the Adaptive Loop,

    which shows the flow between the Sensing system, of sense and interpretation,

    into the Response system, of deciding, and acting. It enables people on the line

    to continuously receive information from customers, understand what it means,

    decide on and take appropriate action and, then, repeat the
  • In their books, both Haeckel and Pfeffer and Sutton point out that achieving

    organizational adaptability and agility usually requires a substantial change in the

    culture of an organization and its people, moving from an analyze-plan-deploy at

    the center-of-the-enterprise model to a see-know-commit-act at the edge-of-the-

    enterprise basis and changing its orientation from company-out to customer-back

Banks Starting to Embrace Concept of Financial Supply Chain Management by Bank Systems & Technology

  • Financial supply chain management is an outgrowth of the long-established concept of the physical supply chain in the trade business. Rather than dealing solely with the actual physical/logistical aspects of trade, however, financial supply chain management, as the name implies, covers the payments side of trade, from the moment a purchase order is cut, to the time of settlement and everything in between.
21 Nov 09

The Limits of Business Intelligence: An Organizational Learning Approach

  • By the time a user of the BI suite accesses information in the DW, he/she is already two levels removed from the actual phenomena that are being viewed through the lens of the BI suite. Depending on the preconceptions of the BI user, there may be additional levels of distance from real-world phenomena. These preconceptions have been termed mental models by Peter Senge in his management classic, The Fifth Discipline, and termed occupational cultures by Edgar Schein in his work on organizations. (2,3) They are the cognitive lenses through which users individually and collectively view and manipulate information. For example, if managers hold a view of the business as separate products and/or organizational "silos," they may not be receptive to information from the BI suite that shows that customers experience the business as a single entity and expect a consistent experience across all contact channels. In short, a BI system is an abstraction of the reality it is designed to analyze, and the preconceptions of its users can further cloud this abstraction if they are not aware of them.
  • In addition to its distance from the actual business reality that the DW attempts to model, there is the consideration of its ability to capture the complexity of real-world phenomena. A real-world business involves many elements and relationships, interacting dynamically. The philosophical idea behind this is that there may be one real world "out there," but there are many possible descriptions of it ­ some of them useful and others not so useful. This distinction is relevant because both organizations and individuals interact with the real world on the basis of their internalized descriptions of it.

ViewYonder » Toyota Production System for IT

  • f building an IT service is akin to building a car, then why can’t IT work the same way as the Toyota Production System?  IT workers long for creativity and problem solving, so surely it is ideal for them?


    The first objection I get from IT staff is that building an IT service is more complicated than building a car.  Really?  Bear in mind that one Toyota Production Line builds different models to different specifications (inefficient to have one line for all permutations of models and specs, right?), and that each car is made up of hundreds of thousands of parts, how can building IT services be complicated?


    Well, I agree IT is more complicated (not the end product, but the system) because the framework that the Toyota staff have doesn’t exist in IT, so every piece of work is custom and in effect IT is building the production line as they are also building the product. That is certainly more complicated, not because of numbers of components, but because nobody has a co-ordinated plan of what to do.  Without a co-ordinated plan, I think two people working on one piece of work would struggle, never mind hundreds working on thousands.

23 May 09

Business Processes – The Neglected Asset | ARIS BPM Blog

  • First, organizations are centered around functional silos. Whether in a bank, at a retailer, a hospital or a university, the focus tends to be on functional excellence. This is the main area of expertise, this is the cluster in the organizational chart that falls under the responsibility of well defined positions. In a hospital, medical expertise is the key asset. At the Department of Justice, it is legal expertise. At an university it is academic expertise. Processes are the critical glue between the owners of this expertise, but typically secondary. This first issue is related to process awareness. Process awareness typically results out of urgency. A City Council looks into business processes because they are seeking a contemporary specification of their requirements before they engage in a very large IT project. One of the large Australian banks trained more than 650 people in business process modeling due to the need to comply with a US legislation called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
  • Second, there is a plethora of alternatives that compete with a process-centered view. Attention can be as well given to customers (passengers, patients, students, citizens), to products, to locations, to systems, to regions, to policies etc. With other words, process management faces tough competition when it comes to gaining a seat at the table of managers’ attention. It is not sufficient to have a few individuals who are convinced of the benefits of process management. This issue is related to the relative advantage of process management in comparison with other approaches. Process management does not replace any of the other views. Instead, it is an additional view.
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