Monthly Archives: July 2014

Doing Strategy: What’s in a Strategy?

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Doing Strategy

In my Defining Words series I take a position on what certain words mean because I believe using these words correctly is foundational to having an intelligent discussion about strategy, design, operations and technology.  After all, we are not really exchanging words–we are exchanging concepts.

But what we are left with is still a mess of concepts that can be difficult to get our arms around.  First of all we need to pick a context because words are frequently used differently in different contexts to represent different concepts.  For this series, the context is doing strategy in the financial services industry.

Then we need to create an ontology.   To describe all of the relationships between our concepts I will model our ontology in analysis level UML.  Obviously, the below diagram is both incomplete and flawed.  For example, does the strategy not track trends directly, irrespective of any forces?  But if I wait until I get a diagram like this perfect then I would never post it.  Feel free to post your comments about it…

StrategyOMv2

The key concepts in this diagram are: Strategy, Corporate Strategy, Business Unit Strategy, Shared Service, Operating Model, Force, Trend, Business Model, Customer Segment, Customer Relationship, Channel, Value Proposition, Activity, Resource, Partnership, Revenue Stream, Cost Structure, Required Business Capability, Business Capability, IT Capability, and Strategic Technology.

 

Strategic Technology: Mobile Device/App Mgt (IBM Fiberlink MaaS360)

This entry is part 14 of 33 in the series Strategic Technologies

Fiberlink MaaS360 allows clients to address their BYOD challenges by offering cloud-based mobile device management (MDM), Mobile Application Management (MAM) and secure containerization; giving organizations the building blocks to separate data and content in personal applications from data and content in enterprise applications on mobile devices.

The following products are available in MaaS360:

Strategic Technology: Mobile Messaging (IBM Xtify)

This entry is part 13 of 33 in the series Strategic Technologies

Mobile messaging provides an SDK that applications use to allow messages to be transmitted to the app according to customer preferences and user characteristics.  This provides a single messaging platform instead of different message channels across mobile ecosystems.

IBM Xtify, IBM’s recent acquisition, helps marketers engage with customers through broadcast, narrowcast, and one-to-one mobile messaging.

Strategic Technology: Mobile Test Tools

This entry is part 12 of 33 in the series Strategic Technologies

In many cases, to be practical mobile app testing must be automated with tools that have some sort of record/replay functionality.  One enabler for this capability is the IBM Rational Workbench Toolset.

Another approach is a cloud-based set of services named Mobile Quality Assurance Facility.  You crowd source testing by uploading your app to the cloud and allowing people subscribe to test it.  Crash reports and other information is gathered in the crowd and the cloud.