Category: Solution Architecture

Building an Effective "Council of No"

Organisations have various approaches to risk, for the most risk averse organisations it’s necessary to have an effective Council of No.

The aim of the council is to reduce all risk by minimising all movement because movement is a risky thing.

Building an effective Council of No can be a challenge so I thought I would give a brief guide to the members who you will need to give the appropriate level of restriction:

  • The Analysis Warlock – The role of the Analysis Warlock is to reduce risk by making sure that all possible analysis has been undertaken. The lack of a particular piece of analysis, no matter how irrelevant, is grounds to delay a decision and thus minimise movement.
  • The Accuracy Wizard – Accurate information is an absolute must for risk reduction. Any information that can be found to be in any way less than 100% accurate is too high a risk to enable decision making, 99.95% accuracy should never be regarded as good enough. Teams without the appropriate level of  accuracy should be sent away until they have the required accuracy. Remember, a delayed decision is as good as a No.
  • The Standards Overseer – Organisations have standard ways of doing thing. Any deviation from the standard way is in complete contravention of risk reduction and should be stamped out. Solutions should be made to fit with standards and it’s the role of the Standards Overseer to make sure that compliance is adhered to absolutely, any lack of compliance should allow a No statement to be provided. It’s also part of the Standards Overseer’s role to make sure that they find deviations from standards at the most detailed level.
  • The Process Bouncer – There is a process that needs to be followed, to the letter. Process is, of course, a vital tool to reduce risk, any misuse of or inability to follow the prescribed process is an easy No decision. The role of the Process Bouncer is to find the inevitable slippage in process rigour.
  • The Scope Coach – In every situation there are opportunities to inflate the scope.  Where opportunities or solutions do not have a large enough scope they should be encouraged to extend the scope. Once a scope has been extended to its breaking point it should then be reassessed by the Analysis Warlock and the Accuracy Wizard who are bound to find situations that are outside their sphere of comfort allowing a No position to be taken.
  • The Absent Gatekeeper – The role of the Absent Gatekeeper is, as the name suggest, to be absent but to be the only person with access to at least one of the locks on the door. The use of multiple locks on the door necessitates that all keys need to be available for a door to be opened thus enabling a persistent No statement to be maintained.
  • The Clarity Knight – There is always one more question for clarity that can be asked. While questions are being raised there is no need to move beyond a No position.
  • The History Repeater – It’s always possible to draw a parallel between a new solution and earlier poor experience. It doesn’t matter how tenuous the connection, the role of the History Repeater is to have enough history to enable those connections to be made. Raising previous poor experiences enables the addition of extra work for the Analysis Warlock and the Process Bouncer.
  • The External Person Advocate – There are always people outside the council who are going to be uncomfortable with the risk involved in a new solution, you hope. The role of the External Person Advocate is to know who those people could be in every situation and to raise those concerns within the council meetings. There is no need to check with the external person that they have the concerns that the Advocate is raising, the Advocate just has to be believable. These concerns are best raised in a situation where no clear route to resolution are identified. These actions will remove the ability for the council to close decision-making; a delay in decisions it as good as a No decision.
  • The Last Minute Alarm Ringer – If an opportunity or solution avoids all the road-blocks defined above the role of the Last Minute Alarm Ringer is to raise a concern of significant scale to enable a reset of the process and hence a restart of the revue cycle.

Please remember: without a complete team in the Council of No people will be able to get things done and that’s a very high risk approach.

 

Microsoft and the Surprising Strategic Play

I love to watch news pundits pontificate about how they see an organisations strategy and their predictions of the various steps in delivering that strategy. We love to feel like we are getting some insight that we could put to good value, but business isn’t a safe place where you do predictable things, it’s a place of competition where sometimes your best strategy is to be surprising.

Microsoft has pulled a few surprises for the pundits in recent weeks all of them revealing in practical terms Satya Nadella’s strategy of “mobile first, cloud first”.

For those of you not watching here were the “surprises”:

Dropbox Partnership

Microsoft have partnered with Dropbox to embed Office into Dropbox and Dropbox into Office.

Much of the growth of Dropbox has been driven by mobile users wanting to synchronise their data across multiple devices and with colleagues on multiple devices.

In so doing Microsoft cements Office into the working experience of Dropbox’s over 300 million users (May 2014), and more significantly improves on the experience of Dropbox and Google Drive together.

Free Office for iOS and Andriod

Microsoft now gives away Word, PowerPoint and Excel for Android and iOS users. People have previously had access to read-only capabilities without an Office 365 subscription but these limitations have now been taken away.

The result was that Office Apps for iPhone and iPad sky-rocketed to the top of the AppStore most downloaded list with Word at #1.

Again a Microsoft strategic play for mobile customers and providing linkage to cloud services without mandating their use. Rather than making access to Word, PowerPoint or Excel a reason to move to Office 365 they are choosing to extend the capabilities of Office 365 with benefits such as the newly announced Clutter, or the extended Groups experience.

Per User Licensing for Windows

Licensing of Microsoft software is a mixture between science, art and chaos theory. Mostly it’s done on a per device basis, it’s further complicated by rights to use licenses on multiple devices in some circumstances depending on the connection method and the ownership of the devices itself. This type of licensing made sense in a world where people were given a device from their employer, with licensed software from their employer, and they did everything on that device. But that’s no longer how people work; people want to use their own devices, they want to be able to connect from anywhere and they want to be able to use virtual desktops if required.

Microsoft has made evolutionary changes to the licensing regime to recognise this. The latest change is the provision of per user licensing for Windows.

Perhaps not as significant as the other two surprises, at first glance, this move licenses a whole set of mobile devices to connect to Windows virtual desktops. This, in turn, clarifies the licensing position for many BYOD scenarios where people want to get access to Windows applications from their own devices. It removes risk and friction from organisations wanting to deliver virtual desktop experiences.

.NET Core now Open Source and Visual Studio Community for Free

One of the driving forces for the explosion of Open Source has been open source development frameworks. Now Microsoft has joined them by moving .NET Core to an open source model extending support into Linux and Mac OS-X at the same time.

Visual Studio has been a popular IDE for a long time (over 17 years) growing and morphing as different development capabilities have been required. The new free Community edition has similar capabilities to the Professional edition so it’s no neutered basic starter edition.

To quote the blog post announcing these changes:

With these releases, we are broadly opening up access to our industry leading platform and tools to every developer building any application in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world. No matter if you are a startup, a student, a hobbyist, an open source developer or a commercial developer, and no matter the platform you are targeting or the app you are creating, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Online, .NET and Azure will help you be successful.

Another strategic play to reach out to the development community to make Microsoft the chosen starting point for mobile and cloud projects.

Strategy and Surprises

Commentary on each of these surprises is a mixture of defensive strategy and offensive strategy. The best strategy comprises both.

Office Speak and Buzzword Density

A few things came together the other day:

I was looking at some of the statistics on this site and found that a post I created back in 2009 on Buzzword Density had recently become popular again. This post contains a cartoon that goes like this: “Mashups are SOA in the Cloud” – “3 out of 6 not bad”. It made me smile to realise that two of the buzzwords in this illustration had lived there life and were now mostly superseded by other terms.

This was followed by an email in which there was a sentence that had 32 words in it which is a problem in its own right but 13 of the words were buzzword. In a Gunning Fog Index this sentence scores 23 (for reading by a wide audience you’d normally aim for an index of less than 12, and less than 8 for universal reading).

In my normal reading I came across this article in the Atlantic: The Origins of Office Speak subtitled What corporate buzzwords reveal about the history of work (and what a corporate-buzzword quiz reveals about you).

The article starts by highlighting the famous Dilbert Buzzword Bingo cartoon from 1994.

According to this article there are a number of classification of buzzwords that have grown up through our history since the war and the influence of different groups:

  • The Self Actualizers
  • The Optimisers
  • The Financiers
  • The Marketers
  • The Disruptors
  • The Creatives
  • The Life Hackers

It’s interesting to see the history behind some of the phrases that we take as axiomatic.

Like most people I know I have had a love-hate relationship with buzzwords and office speak for most of my working life. The Atlantic article concludes like this:

But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it, but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it. As Nunberg said, “You can get people to think it’s nonsense at the same time that you buy into it.” In a workplace that’s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are.

I’m off now to sync-up in a disruptively agile way as part of a scrum of innovative thought leading passionate entrepreneurs, circling back and downloading so we can drill down and mind-meld about an ideation event looking for low-hanging-fruit (Gunning Fog index = 22).

It’s not just in offices where cliché becomes a problem though:

Learning of an Architect

I’ve worked with and near my friend Steve Richards for many years now and his insight has been helpful on many occasions.

Following a hiatus for a few years Steve has reinvigorated his blog with daily writing.

His recent posts give a lot of insight to the system integration projects and programmes that we’ve both been involved in for many years now.

I’m not going to comment on each post here because I think you should go over to Steve’s site and contribute there.

These are some of my recent favourites:

Factors of the Productive Workplace – Introduction

Prior to the Christmas and New Year 2013 break I spent some time considering the reasons that Bring Your Own is transforming the equipment that we use to do our work, particularly in the knowledge-worker** environment.

The primary drivers are a desire by people to be more productive, creative and collaborative. There are, of course, many factors that influence these things beyond just the tools being used. The major factor, I suspect, is the place itself.

I have overheard many statements that go something like this:

All I need to be productive is my MacBook and a Starbucks.

and

I’m much more productive at home.

I don’t think I have ever heard someone say:

I am most productive at my desk in the open-plan office.

I have heard:

I spend a couple of hours working at home to get something useful done; then I come into the office.

Why is that? Why do organisations persist with offices at all; if these statements are true?

Why are some organisations clamping down on home working if that’s where people are productive?

Why are so many people sat in open-plan offices with their headphones in (like I am now)?

What makes an organisation create a workplace like this:

Or like this?

Or like this?

Is this really a great place to work?

Why did we move away from offices like this?

How did we end up with offices like this?

Or like this?

What makes someone create a personal home workspace like this?

Or this?

There are hundreds more here.

If humour is best when it’s based in reality why is the cubicle such a rich source of comedy for Dilbert?

In short: What are the factors that go into creating a productive, creative and collaborative workplace? And how large an influence is the place itself?

I don’t know the answer to those questions at the moment, I haven’t done enough research, but I have some ideas.

This is just an introduction after all.

** I’m looking for a new term to replace knowledge-worker because I don’t think it really describes the new types of work and the skills required.

Privacy Degradation by Degree

I’ve recently got a new phone and as such I’ve started afresh on the round of configuring applications and connecting to networks.

Jimmy is backAs I’ve created each connection I’ve been conscious of the things that we are expected to give away to get something for free; an email address here, my date of birth there, my mother’s maiden name somewhere else. I’m always expected to give away my email address and normally my home address too.

Each transaction over steps, just a bit, the information that they require to achieve their purposes. None of them request all of the information, but each of them requests something different.

The net result is sets of my personal information littered across databases, servers and storage.

It wouldn’t take much to extend the access information from one system into access to information from another system, and from that access to information from another system. That, in turn, would provide access from low security systems into ones where I regard security as paramount – such as my bank account.

It’s a high price to pay for some free WiFi.

BYOD and Personal Knowledge Management

Not so long ago people would go to work at a set time and work exclusively on equipment and applications provided by the employer. At the end of the day they would go home and do whatever they wanted to do using their stuff. But now the line between work and life is now a complete jumble for many.

Wintry Walk on Fare Snape Fell(I am going to refer to work-and-life in this post as if they are two distinct things as a way of contrasting the challenge, but that whole concept is also going through significant disruption which I may cover at a later date)

Personal knowledge management used to be similarly straightforward with work stuff in one place, life stuff in another place. Take diaries as an example, I used to run a home diary and a work diary. If truth be known, Sue used to run my home diary and I would focus all of my energy on the work diary. This situation was only complicated when either the work requirements or the life requirements would break into one of the other’s area. School plays during the day would require a special entry in my work diary to make sure I was there. Likewise overnight business trips would need a special entry in the life diary.

This situation was never ideal, but worked quite well with few issues. One of the huge advantages of this situation was the people at my employer could see my availability and schedule meetings with me because my availability was visible to all.

In a BYOD world it would be, just about, acceptable to make both my diaries available on all my devices, but that’s not really resolving the challenge or addressing the changing culture. Running multiple diaries has never been ideal and leads to all sorts of issues when things clash.

The real requirement is for me to see a single diary, I don’t mind whether it’s made up of a number of diaries, but I need to see it as one. That diary needs to be embedded into my mobile experience so that I can use all of the functions of my mobile device. Portions of my availability need to be visible to different interested groups. I need to be able to set parameters on my availability for those groups because I don’t want a completely blended lifestyle where I’m available to everyone 24 by 7. I want event information from one group (project team) to be available to another group (family) so that sensible decisions can be made. In other words I want a completely blended diary experience which has been personalised to my requirements and way of working.

I could just opt out and run a single personal diary with no visibility to others but that would not be very helpful to people who want to schedule time with me. I used to have a boss who did that and it was impossible to schedule anything with him, particularly as the only diary that he regarded as truth was the paper one in his hands at all times.

Another alternative is to run two diaries and to copy everything from one to another. The natural choice for doing this would be to make the life diary the master and to copy everything from the work diary into it, but that just leads to another challenge, what to do about data privacy. Would my employer really want my family to have access to a report with sensitive financial information in it? A diary entry isn’t just about the scheduling information; it’s also about all of the associated content.

My purpose in this discussion is to use diary information as an example of the complications of running any form of personal knowledge management system in a world where work technology and life technology are the same, and where the separation between them is a complete jumble. The same challenges apply to to-do lists, note taking, reading lists, document stores, and all manner of personal knowledge management techniques.

These challenges are multiplied when we want others to collaborate with us in our personal knowledge management system.

We are going to see many ways of resolving these challenges that break the current paradigms and move us to a far more personal way of working. Doodle is an example of a different way of thinking about team scheduling that works across personal diaries. There are many people thinking about the to-do list and note taking most of which are being delivered as cloud services built to interact with personal applications. This continued shift to personal is going to significantly change the way that individuals and teams interact, collaborate and do work. As always the technology shift is the smaller part of a much larger cultural shift.

As a person I’m the one who is enabled and approved for access to all sorts of data. In the future I am expecting to be able to have a personal life assistant which is going to need access to all of my sources of data to enact upon them, but that’s another challenge requiring another paradigm shift.

BYOD Concept Map (Version 1)

Continuing the theme of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) I wanted to capture some of the thinking that was going on in my head.

One of the ways I use to bring my thoughts together are Concept Maps.

Here’s the one I produced for BYOD:

Bring Your Own Device Concept MapThese maps are useful because the highlight, challenge or re-enforce things. Here are some things I observed:

  • It re-enforced my view that it’s not really about the device hardware, or even the operating system. As such BYOD is not the correct name, but I’ll stick with it for now because that’s what others are using and it wouldn’t be the first thing that’s misnamed.
  • It highlighted the dangers of restrictive controls and their impact on the overall benefits of BYOD. If the real value is derived from personal choice and, in particular, application choice then restrictive controls that remove these freedoms crush the overall value.
  • It challenged my lack of thinking about the broader changing cultural. Are the millennial changing the way they work because technology is enabling it, or would that change be happening anyway? What is the best way of approaching different generations that work in different ways?
  • It also challenged my lack of thinking about the increased creativity and increased collaboration aspects.
  • It re-enforced my view that the high focus on operating system security is misplaced and we should really be focussing on applications and data, particularly the security of data when stored in data stores embedded in applications. What do you do when someone leaves an organisation? Is it no longer realistic to expect that they will remove all of the data that they have access to from their personal applications?

As with all Concept Maps it’s limited in scope and complexity to help in understanding, hence it’s a work-in-progress, but I’m calling it Version 1 because it’s good enough for now. Some of these things are likely to change as I think about them. I’m happy to be challenged on any of the elements within the map if you think it can be improved.

If you prefer a PDF of the map it’s here: Bring Your Own Device Concept Map.

 

Concept of the Day: Learned Helplessness

While discussing some work related issues the other day a colleague used the phrase:
Castle Stalker

Cultural change isn’t easy – especially when we’re operating in an environment where learned helplessness appears to be prevalent

He pointed to this link on Wikipedia.

That got me thinking: What is learned helplessness? Is it really prevalent in the context that we were talking about?

The first question took me on a journey of discovery, this is what I found:

First, a definition from the Wikipedia article:

Learned helplessness is the condition of a human or animal that has learned to behave helplessly, failing to respond even though there are opportunities for it to help itself by avoiding unpleasant circumstances or by gaining positive rewards

To bring it closer to our normal experience, it’s the choice not to respond when we see the opportunity to do something for a third, or forth time having failed on all previous attempts. Or the choice to avoid something because of a previous traumatic experience even though that thing might be very good for us.

Thinking about my life, I know that there are certain things that I don’t do because of previous poor experiences. Some of these experiences happened a long time ago and I’m a different person now, but I still haven’t returned to give it another go.

So from purely personal experience it would appear that learned helplessness is a real phenomenon, and there also appear to be quite a lot of evidential support for it too. The Wikipedia article is quite well referenced including 42 different items and there are numerous articles on reputable sites across the Internet.

Like all concepts and many theories though it isn’t a 100% cause-and-effect explanation, the initial experiment that was undertaken by Martin E.P. Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania on a number of dogs only resulted in learned helplessness in two-thirds of the animals involved. Some animals and some people respond in a different way. He also went on to link learned helplessness with clinical depression and other related mental illnesses.

The opposite of helplessness is, apparently, optimism, which Seligman later researched and wrote about, coining the phrase learned optimism. This involved the challenging of negative self-talk and numerous other positive psychology techniques. Seligman is still around and talking about a new era of positive psychology, but that’s a set of thoughts for another day.

Here’s my conclusion. Some people, in some situations, will behave with learned helplessness and that has serious consequences. We need to think very seriously about the situations that we create that induce helpless feelings. We also need to think seriously about the tools that we give people to help them respond to these helplessness situations as they inevitably occur.

I’m not going to answer the second question because that would need me to talk too much about the context. It is suffice to say that my colleague’s insight was quite revealing.

A couple of really interesting videos about Learned Helplessness to finish with:

Can We Induce Learned Helplessness?

Description of Learned Helplessness

Being Present: Downside the App

How often do you get to meet a bunch of friends only for everyone to spend all of their time distracted by their phones.

Well now, as the saying goes, there’s an app for that. It’s called Downside and it turns the challenge of staying in the present into a game:

Acronyms: BATS

In the early days of email my manager referred to it as BATS by which he meant Blame Allocation and Transfer System.

When he first used the phrase I wasn’t sure what he meant but over the years I have had many reasons to refer to email as BATS.

Chatworth with the FamilyAnyone who has been involved in email for any period of time has seen the situation where someone sends an email to a whole host of recipients for the sole purpose of CYA (Cover Your Ass).

In later discussion on the subject the sender says – “well I sent you an email about it”. The sending of the email is regarded as the ultimate seal of the transaction. This is often done without discussion or agreement, lack of decent it regarded as agreement.

This behaviour drives a culture where people are petrified of getting behind on email just in case someone has sent a BATS that they didn’t notice and now find themselves responsible for. This, in turn, leads to a culture where people find themselves attached to email 24 by 7.

Poor behaviour is driving poor culture which is driving poor behaviour. It’s about time we kicked the BATS habit because it isn’t doing any of us any good.

Perhaps it’s time to go without email completely – some people already have (almost)?

Business Mobility and the Work/Life Balance Paradox (or Contradiction)

The following is an extract from this report: Next-Generation Knowledge Workers – Accelerating the Disruption in Business Mobility by Cisco:
Jimmy does BlackBerry

The revolution in business mobility is ongoing and constantly changing, and we are in the middle of what we see as a four-stage process (“Forming,” “Storming,” “Norming,” and “Performing”). Each phase has been driven forward by changes in “DNA,” all of which are driving us toward the next phase.

An indication of business mobility’s importance in the current “Storming” phase can be seen in the following: 40 percent of our respondents believe that without their devices, they could not function more than one hour without their jobs being impacted. And approximately 50 percent of mobile-enabled workers have seen productivity gains in the past two years.

As work responsibilities become ever more demanding and time consuming, many people fear an encroachment on their home lives and free time. Looking ahead, our survey respondents see mobile technology becoming increasingly important as they continue the everyday battle to achieve work/life harmony. More than 50 percent see mobile devices as a way to improve their work/life balance.

As for increased freedom and mobility, more than 30 percent of our respondents currently work from home regularly. Another 30 percent expect to be working more from home in the future.

A key element in the juggling of work and life is time. More than 30 percent of our respondents believe that they have been working longer hours; yet more than 40 percent feel they have more control over how, when, and where they work.

I’m sure that these results are what people told Cisco, but what an intriguing set of paradoxical, or even contradictory, views.

Paradox: A seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.

Contradiction: A combination of statements, ideas, or features of a situation that are opposed to one another.

Paradox or contradiction? Mobile business technology enables improvements in productivity, but has facilitated a culture that is dependent upon immediate responses effectively tethering us to our mobile devices. But reactionary working is rarely productive working. Other people propose scheduled periods of disconnection in order to find a place to ‘reset the soul’.

Paradox or contradiction? Mobile business technology has improved our work/life balance, but has facilitated longer working hours from people who believe that they have more control over how, when and where they work. Long working hours are linked to depression, which can’t be good for anyone’s work/life balance, and how real is that control anyway? People regularly speak of manager mis-trust and feeling like they are ‘out of sight – out of mind’. Yet telecommuting is consistently ranked high on people’s list of job requirements with some preferring it over salary.