Wow, I couldn’t believe that this is a real word.
Automagically.
I thought my colleague was using it as a gag.
But when I asked Dr. Google, there it was.
Automagically – Automatically + Magical
It refers to the use of computer automation and how when well-implemented it seems almost like the process is magical, ingenious, and oh, so easy.
So this is the goal for us that all our processes and efforts should be poof–automagically done and there it is! 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
So working in a place with scientific geniuses and even a history of Nobel Prize winners is serious business.
I see things that I don’t know what they are.
I meet people that I don’t understand what they do.
But in all cases, I am in awe of the smart and good people and the work they are doing to advance us.
Here was an example this week in randomly meeting someone and starting up a conversation:
Andy: Hi. I’m Andy. What do you do here?
Him: I’m [so and so]. I do neutron scattering.
Andy: [Gulp followed by big smile] I know absolutely nothing about that.
Him: Well, what do you do?
Andy: I’m doing process engineering and enterprise service management.
Him: [Smile] I know absolutely nothing about that.
Get the picture.
One for the books right.
In another instance, when asked what their group does, someone leans into me and goes:
“We fix sh*t.”
I could tell he meant it.
And you know what–I absolutely believed him. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
So change agents are some of the most sought after…yet most abhorrent individuals on this planet.
We all recognize that things can be better, and on one hand, we want someone to come and help us make it so…a change agent!
However, change is painful and frequently results in unintended and unwanted consequences, and so on the other hand, we hate change agents.
Many change agents may not just change things that need to get changed and fixed, but they may change a lot of things that were working just fine before, thank you.
Can anyone say reorganization?
Moreover, change agents may not be changing things for the right reasons like the good of the organization.
Instead they may be self promoters, control freaks who have to do things their way, or they may be serial job hunters–next stop change everything and get the heck out of Dodge!
Change agents may work with people to get requirements, input, and vet the issues and the solutions or they may just be paying lip service to others, only to really shove their or someone else’s agenda down your throats.
You see there is healthy change that is based on genuine learning, growth, and maturity, and then there is change that is destructive, diabolical, and selfish.
When you decide to change something, what’s your motivation and your goal–is it to right the wrongs in the organization, reengineer business processes, and introduce new technologies or is it to change for change’s sake alone.
Yes, we did something. Check the box. Tell the management committee. We earned our keep and oh yeah, then some. We changed something, anything. Hip Hip Hooray. Bonus time!
So either you’ll get an award and promotion or you’ll get asked accusingly and threateningly, “Who told you to change that?!”
Change which has no real support or merit is dead on arrival (DOA), and will be gone, gone, gone long after the change agent is gone.
So don’t freak out–the b.s. changes are either going to kill the organization or simply end up in Fresh Kills landfill.
The real changes may actually make you stronger. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Flowcharts have been used for quite some time for visualizing and organizing business processes and making them more efficient (e.g. business process reengineering).
Now flowcharts are being used to build and link reusable programming code.
NoFlo or Flow-Based Programming (FBP) simplifies application development by using libraries of pre-written code and then dragging and dropping them into your process flows.
This leverages objected-oriented programming (OOP) and uses modules of open-source code, which are linked together to create a full program that solves a business problem.
The flowchart helps to avoid spaghetti code by providing for a more organized, modular, object-based development environment.
These flowcharts can not only be a collaborative tool where developers can build or map code, but can also be part of the systems documentation that ensures a higher-level of understanding of the total programming solution.
NoFlo raised over $100K on Kickstarter in 45 days in order to advance this project from Javascript to iOS, Android, and Python platforms as well.
To me, this programming paradigm seems to have real legs:
– A process-based model for decomposing solutions
– Simple information visualization through a common flowcharting toolset, and
– Reusable object code from programming libraries in the cloud.
I’d say YesFLo–this makes a lot of programming sense. 😉
Paper has been around for approximately two thousand years, since it’s invention in China, and it has served as the medium of choice for recording and sharing information ever since.
However, enter the age of information technology and we are now able to capture, process, and store far more information, quicker, cheaper, and more efficiently than we ever could with paper.
Combine that with the environmental impact and the need to conserve, and we have numerous federal laws calling for the reduction or elimination of paper, to the extent practical.
1) The Paperwork Reduction Act (1980) calls for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to regulate collection of information and establish information policies to reduce the paper handled by the government.
2) The Government Paperwork Elimination Act (1998) mandates the use of electronic forms, filings, and signatures for official business with the public.
3) E-Government Act (2002) requires use of the Internet to improve citizen access to information and services.
All three are a recognition of the need to move from costly paper-based processes and the management of maintenance of mountains of paper records to instead leverage information technology to re-engineer and improve the way we perform information management.
It’s funny, but for me it’s almost become a personal crusade to make better use of information technology to perform our mission and business of government more effectively, and I personally keep as little paper records, as possible–instead choosing to manage predominantly online–and it’s great.
Aside from having a cleaner office–no paper files, I enjoy all the benefits of electronic filing, search, and the ability to quickly share files with others in the office without having to rummage through a stack of papers 3 feet deep!
Working in some areas that are still paper intensive for case management and so on, I have taken on the mantra, which I frequency cite of “I hate paper!”
No, I don’t really hate it, but in order to change decades old manual and paper intensive processes, we need to exaggerate a little and tell ourselves and other we hate it, so we can help change the inefficient and costly status quo.
You can only imagine how surprised I was to read in The Atlantic (20 April 2012)–that “Paper: [Is] The Material of the Future.”
Essentially, the article touts the new developments with paper using nanotechnology to make it water-proof (although you can still write on it), magnetic, fluorescent, and even anti-bacterial.
Imagine paper that you can stick to your file cabinet, spill coffee on, light up the room with, and even keep you from getting sick–yes, that’s fairly impressive!
However, while these new features are wonderful indeed and will increase the usability of paper as well as improve records management of them, I do not want to see us get complacent with reducing our use of paper and making better use of technology.
Even with these cool nano-tech improvements to paper coming our way, I am still going to say, “I hate paper!”
(Source Photo: here with attribution to Earthworm)
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I am fascinated by unusual uses of technology. And in fact, that’s what I love about technology—is that it literally applies to every aspect of our lives.
In a sense, I think of technology as one of G-d’s precious gifts to mankind to better the world—when it’s used for good—such as for improving communications, curing illness, and inventing new materials.
(Of course, there has been so much focus on technology being used to create “bigger and badder” weapons that can destroy the planet, but hopefully, we are spared from such morale and intellectual insanity and hatred.)
So now technology is striking again… but in an area that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
Wired Magazine (July 2010) has an article called “Canada Sucks: Montreal’s vacuum system will make taking out the trash a breeze.”
“In 2012, Montreal will unveil an $8.2 million [4 mile] tube network to service a downtown arts district.” The trash system called Envac is already operational in other cities such as Barcelona, London, and Stockholm. It incorporates separate inlets/chutes for waste, recycling, and compost; sensors that relay load information to system operators; large industrial fans that can crank up from 45 mph to gale force to flush obstructions through a subterranean slipstream; and automated software that directs the trash to appropriate dumpsters in central collection facilities for transport to landfills, recycling centers, and composting plants; And the Canadian system will be controlled remotely from Envac headquarters in Stockholm 3600 miles away.
I was surprised and excited to see such an innovative use of technology for such a seemingly mundane task as garbage removal (i.e. I wouldn’t normally associate garbage and technology, but this article gave me a new reason to think more broadly on this topic).
Truly, technology is a game-changer. And we can think about everything we do, question it, reinvent it, and make for a better future.
The only condition is that we look beyond the surface of how we do things do things today and envision them anew for tomorrow.
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I was on vacation in Miami last week and had the opportunity to spend some time (when not on the beach and in the pool) in one of my favorite off the beaten path bookstores, where I spend some time perusing “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle.
Some fascinating points that stuck with me:
– Focus on the now—to achieve peace and happiness—and not on the past or the future, because the past carries with it all sorts of baggage and the future weighs on us with anxieties.
– The focus on now can be viewed as more important than the past or the future, even though the past provides us our identity and the future with the hope of salvation.
The emphasis on now is an intriguing viewpoint for me, because by nature and profession, I am a strategist, architect and planner—I look always to the future to make things better than they are today. I routinely ask how can we use technology or reengineer our business processes to surpass the now.
I also do this based on my religious upbringing that taught me that our actions—good and bad—affect our merit for the future—in this world and “the next.”
In both cases, “the now” is but a steppingstone to the future. So while, I think living in the now can certainly help us wall off the mistakes of the past and worries about the future, I do not really see it as fulfilling our mission of learning from the past and growing into our futures.
While it may be simpler, more enjoyable or just more comfortable to focus on the present, it seems a little naïve to me to ignore where you come from and where you are going.
Maybe Eckhart Tolle doesn’t care what is in the future and he is blissfully happy in his ignorance, but I for one am more comfortable focusing on the future (except when I’m on vacation in Miami Beach).
I guess what I’m saying is, I love the now in that it refreshes and rejuvenates me. But I also think of it as ultimately leading toward a desired future state, and I think it’s more productive to focus on what can and must be done to make the world a better place tomorrow.
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Improving organizational performance is often grounded in identifying bottlenecks (constraints) and fixing them, so that the firm runs better, faster, cheaper than before and at an advantage to it’s competitors.
Enterprise architecture helps us to locate the bottlenecks through an understanding of our business processes, information flows, and systems and then facilitates our reengineering these though business process improvement and the introduction of new technologies.
Harvard Business School (HBS) put out a working paper in February 2010 called “The Strategic Use of Architectural Knowledge by Entrepreneurial firms,” by Carliss Baldwin that describes how “an entrepreneurial firm can use architectural knowledge to unseat a larger incumbent.”
The premise is that knowledge is a firm’s most critical resource, “including knowledge about how to assemble resources to pursue an opportunity.”
We can architecturally disassemble and assemble our resources and processes whereby we—“isolate the bottlenecks” and then “alleviate the bottlenecks.”
This process is grounded in modularity theory, where we use architectural knowledge to modularize (or breakdown) a complex system into its functional components as well as address how these components are related (through their interfaces).
Once we decompose the firms business, data, and systems into its modular components, we can then “remodularize” (or assemble) them into strategically more effective systems for doing business.
Moreover, the paper suggests that the firm “insources bottleneck components and outsources non-bottleneck components,” so as to focus resources (and innovation) on the trouble spots—the areas that are potentially a source of competitive advantage.
Fixing bottlenecks can produce valuable differentiators for a company that we would not want shared with those outside the organization and made available to competitors.
In my opinion, bottleneck functions can also be outsourced, whereby we decide to “let the experts handle it,” when the functions are not strategic in nature. For example, many companies outsource things like payroll and basic call center functions, and it enable the organization to focus its energy and efforts on its core mission.
The notion that enterprise architecture itself is a strategic differentiator for organizations that know how to wield the architecture knowledge is critically important. Through decomposition and assembly of processes and enabling technologies, we can create stronger organizations that not only reduce bottlenecks, but also drive improved decision-making in terms of what to invest in and how to source those investments.
While many organizations treat architecture as a compliance only mechanism and reap little to no benefits from it, those that understand EA’s strategic significance can use the knowledge gained to their organization’s competitive advantage.
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Last week, there was a 13-year-old boy, with Asperger’s syndrome, who ran away from home and rode away in the NYC subway system for 11 days undetected!!! The boy went missing with $11 dollars in his pocket. “According to CNN, the boy’s mother says he survived on fast food and candy he purchased in the subway system. He spent the majority of his time riding the trains. He wore the same clothes for the duration and lived underground, sleeping in subway cars and using underground restrooms.” Many people were out looking for this boy, including the police, but neither the searchers nor the extensive surveillance apparatus in New York picked him out. Apparently, no one on the trains reported seeing this kid riding endlessly around 24×7, and the boy was invisible to the myriad of hardworking transit workers and officers who are all over the transit system, until day 11 when finally one officer recognized the boy from his missing picture. How can a boy be there for almost two weeks, but be seemingly invisible to the thousands of riders and workers passing thru the subway system and what can this teach us about leadership and organizations? Information Overload—This is truly the information age. We have morphed from not having enough information to being flooded with it and not being able to process it. With the missing boy on the NYC MTA subway system, he was literally lost amidst the more than 5 million riders a day and 468 stations. This is a common situation these days where we have access to stores of information, on databases and through the Internet, yet we frequently struggle to find the golden nuggets of information that really mean something. Post 9-11, our military and intelligence communities are being flooded by sensor information from a vast network of resources, and the challenge now is to find innovative ways to process it quickly and effectively—to find the proverbial “needle in the haystack” and to stop the next potential attack. Our organizations in the public and private sectors need faster, more accurate, and finely tuned systems to find the dots, connect the dots, and see the picture. Process Matters—According to Digital Journal, “the disappearance was reported to police immediately, who treated it as a runaway. After five days had passed, it was being treated as a missing persons case.” The police were following their processes in handling this little boy, but it resulted in five days passing without the assumed more intense search that occurs with a missing persons case. Lesson to note is that having standardized, documented business processes are important in efficiently managing operations, but we should not get so caught up in the process that we become rigid and inflexible in handling cases according to the specific situation. While I am not an expert in this, the question does come to mind, whether the search for a child with a known disability may have been escalated/elevated sooner? And the point, I am really trying to make is that we need to keep our organizations and processes agile and responsive so that we can act meaningfully and in time.
Break through the Apathy—Having been a former New Yorker (and I suppose, it never truly leaves your blood), I am well aware of the accusations and jokes made about rudeness and apathy from people in the “city that never sleeps.” NY is a tough town, no doubt. The people are quick and sharp. They work and play hard. They are good, productive people. But living in a city with 8.3 million people in one of the most dense urban centers of the world can take a toll. Even with major clean-up efforts in recent years, NYC still has its fair share of crowding, pollution, and crime and this can take a toll on even the best people. I remember daily sights of panhandling, poor and ill people, aggressiveness not limited to the yellow cabbies. I suppose, one disabled boy could get lost amidst the city chaos, but the challenge is to break through the apathy or callousness that can easily overtake people and continue to care for each and every person that needs our help. This is no small challenge in a city with a 21.2% poverty rate (US Census Bureau 1999), let along in a world where 1 in 4 (or 1.3 billion persons) live on less than $1 a day. As leaders, we need to push for caring over apathy and for seeing and acting versus blinding ourselves to the pain and misfortune of others. Could we have found this little boy sooner? Maybe. Could it have ended a lot worse? For sure. While this missing persons situation is now over, we need to prepare ourselves for future events and contingencies. We can do this by continuing to create better systems and mechanisms to process information better, faster, and cheaper—it’s not longer just the quantity of information, but the quality and it’s timeliness and relevance; by reengineering our business processes so that we are alert, nimble and responsive—rigid processes lead to hard and fast rules that serve no one; and building camaraderie with one another—seeing that we are more the same, than we are different—and that everyone matters—even a kid underground in a subway system spanning 656 long and winding miles. And lest anybody think I’m giving New Yorkers a hard time, believe me when I say – it is “the city” that has given me the street smarts to navigate the Beltway and challenge anyone who says that something can’t be done! |
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