Monthly Archives: November 2013

What is a Business Strategy?

This entry is part 2 of 31 in the series Defining words

If you are an Enterprise Architect then at some point someone will ask you to provide an “IT Strategy”.  I think stockholders or regulators have this on a checklist or something so business executives come asking for it right before it is due.  Sometimes the only clear requirement is “we need it fast”.

The good news is you can turn it right back on them!  IT Strategy, by definition, involves aligning the technology roadmap with the Business Strategy.  Hand it over, buddy!

Then one day IT Strategy pops up on your performance plan.  You don’t get a bonus unless there is a current IT strategy, complete, and signed off by a list of characters that you could never get to agree on anything.  And that brings you to the first issue:  You really do need to get your hands on a Business Strategy and–you guessed it–no such thing exists.  Or perhaps it is a 5,000 page document and you are not on the “need to have” list.  You are not sure what you need, but you need it fast!

So what are we really talking about here?  What is it exactly that we need?  And how do we align to it?

A Business Strategy is a fundamental pattern of present and planned objectives, resource deployments, and interactions of an organization with markets, competitors, and other environmental factors*.  Think…

  1. Scope – aka strategic domain.  Industries, products, market segments, etc.  The corporate mission statement should give a hint.
  2. Goals and objectives – Targets for volume/revenue growth, profit, ROI, market share, etc. for a specific time period.
  3. Resource deployments – Obtaining resources (i.e. funding) and allocating them across businesses, products, markets, functional departments, activities, etc.
  4. Identification of a sustainable competitive advantage – How will the business compete?
  5. Synergy – Making the various parts of the company complement and reinforce each other.

It gets more complicated.  See, there are different levels of Business Strategy that are different in nature:  Corporate Strategy, Business Unit Strategy, and Product-Market Strategies.  All three are key drivers for either determining what the IT Strategy should be or getting it funded.

Obviously, this is too big of an issue for a blog post.  But at least we have started to peel the onion on what a Business Strategy is!

A more concrete understanding of what we need from the Business Strategy (and why) will be important because we are probably going to need to explain it in the form of fill-in-the-blank questions.  Multiple choice questions are even better.

* I quote  and paraphrase from “Marketing” by John Mullins et al, which I obtained from Edinburgh Business School.

 

 

Lying to the boss

This entry is part 1 of 31 in the series Defining words

If an executive walks into the room and asks us what we are talking about then evasive maneuvers are in order.  Let’s say: “Oh, we are covering a number of topics.”  Or, if that doesn’t work then we’ll lie:  “We are brainstorming ways to do more with less.”

But please let’s agree here and now that we do not admit that we are arguing about the difference between a “lead” and a “sales opportunity”.  See, there is no time for “defining words” in the project plan.

And this is essentially why Information Architecture is most likely not the shortest path to the corner office.

My recommendation is to build Information Architecture to-do’s into other tasks.  If you have a WBS code (or even a task) for Information Architecture then that will raise an issue:  Sponsors don’t want to pay for that.  But don’t build it into “IT Strategy”.  They won’t want to pay for that either (until they are asked if they have one in a board meeting).

I recommend that you build Information Architecture into something named like “Integration”.  Sponsors are willing to pay for integration.  And what complicates integrating different systems (“makes it more expensive and take more months” in executive speak) is that those systems were built by different people–different people with different definitions for words.  But even sponsors and executives get hopping angry if it takes an inordinate amount of time to integrate parts of the same system because “no one was talking to each other”.

Similar issues arise when integrating people.  A discussion between people, I mean.  If they are speaking the same words, but with different definitions in mind, then a lot of time and emotion gets wasted.

That is why, before we talk about anything else, I want to talk about defining words.  That is the purpose of this series.

This is getting Series, Part 2, Organize Series

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series This is getting Series

This series is where I get serious about disclosing my wisdom on setting up a blogging site.

I think that for sites like mine (see part 1 of this series) there will be a lot of blog entries that get complicated (see my notes in WordPress for Dummies).  But who wants to write or read a long blog entry?  A blogger who also happens to be a recovering complicator (like me) needs to organize his blogs into a series!  Good news…There is a free WordPress Organize Series plug-in that does just that.  Read more on the Website.

This is getting Series, Part 1, Getting your blog online

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series This is getting Series

This series is where I get serious about disclosing my wisdom about setting up a blog site.   I am not going to create a decision tree that helps everyone decide everything, but if you are similar to me then this series should point you in the right direction.

By “similar to me” I mean:

  1. A technical professional that wants a convenient place to store and share your wealth of knowledge and ingenious ideas
  2. To (over time) create a personal brand that is more well-known and less embarrassing
  3. Flexibility to install plug-in’s, set up an e-Commerce site, sell advertising, or otherwise modify your site in the future (even if you don’t want to do it now)
  4. An independent place where you do not necessarily need to agree with your colleagues
  5. A portable place that belongs to you and that you can “take with you” on your winding path to riches and rockstardom.

#1 is easy and you can get it without much hassle or cost at WordPress.com.  WordPress.com is a popular hosting site for blogs that runs the blogging software provided by WordPress.org.  From what I read it sounds like WordPress is the way to go for blogging software.  However, I didn’t go with WordPress.com and I explain why below.

#2 is a longer and more winding path.  I will write on that more after I find all the dead ends and sand traps.

#3 is the most important critical success factor in the list.  You really need to host your own site if you are a technical professional and want to do fancy stuff, try to crash your blog, and find other ways to sink time into your site.  Even if you are just blogging and are moderately successful at it, hosting your own site is required to sell advertising, organize your blog the way you want, etc.  To host your own site you will need your own domain name, which takes us to #5.

#4.  I will let you find your own creative ways to limit your career.  But I do encourage you to think before you blog.

#5 is another good reason to get your own domain name.  I hosted my site with www.bluehost.com because they are inexpensive (less than $5 per month) and support a one-click install of WordPress.  They also give you a free domain name.  I am not sure if that is wise but I took the free domain name.  They do charge a small fee for hiding the private info that you need to hand over to set up a domain name.  That sounded like a good idea so I took that option.

Once you have your own site and learn how to set it up you will be very popular and become more good-looking.  Now you can set up blog sites for all of your friends for free!  However, they will also need their own domain name.  I got one for my wife at GoDaddy.com.  I looked at Network Solutions but they were a bit more expensive and didn’t seem to offer the option to protect your personal info.  After you buy the domain name you will need to go in and set the DNS server to point to your hosting company.  I found a good blog on that too!

Lastly, to have your picture show up next to your comments you need to get a Gravatar.  Just do it.  Comments without a pic are a little creepy.

 

Alan’s reading list: WordPress for Dummies

Sometimes I make things more complicated than they need to be. Blogging is beginning to be one of those things.

In the beginning I was just looking to store my reading notes in the cloud so that I could access them across devices.  Then, I thought that maybe I could generate some synergy by combining that task with learning how to blog.  I could blog to myself about any number of things!  Then I decided that if I am going to take the time to blog a lot of notes I should share them with my friends.  If I make it a bit polished and organized then maybe I will be rich and famous one day!  So that led me to thinking some more…I really need my own domain name.  www.alanstreet.net was founded!  And…if I am going to impress everyone one day then I am going to need to do all sorts of fancy stuff so I will definitely need to host my own site.  Finally, my wife wanted to create her own blog on my site–under her own domain name, of course.   I am guessing I have a week or so before my daughter wants to start blogging as well.

So once again, after promising to myself that I would simplify simplify simplify, things got complicated.

WordPress for Dummies explains how to set it all up simply enough.

 

Alan’s reading list: Business Analyst’s Handbook

Enterprise and business architects spend a lot of time documenting business capabilities. This book provides a description of many required tools such as process diagrams, use cases, activity diagrams, etc.

If you are reading my blog you are probably one of my friends who know all about these things already. Nonetheless, this is a great book to brush up on the details or provide as a reference to a mentee.

I usually refer to this book online via Books27x7 online or on my iPad using Safari. God bless IBM for subscribing me to these services!

Google turned up a link to the PDF here.

See the author’s blog here.