Performance and Transparency – 2gether 4ever

Really liked this performance measurement and transparency at Home Depot.

Here are their store performance measures prominently displayed.

Not a high-tech solution, but every measure has its place and metrics.

– Looks at friendly customer service.

– Tracks speed of checkout.

– Measures accuracy of transactions.

This lines up well with the management adage that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Some pointers:

– Identify, collaboratively, your key drivers of performance

– Determine whether/how you can measure them efficiently (i.e. qualitatively, quantitatively)

– Set realistic, stretch targets for the organization

– Communicate the goals and measures, 360 degrees

– Regularly capture the measures and make the metrics transparent

– Recognize and reward success and course correct when necessary

– Reevaluate measures and goals over time to ensure they are still relevant

Wash, rinse, repeat for continuous improvement. 😉

(Source Photo: Dannielle Blumenthal)

>Andy Blumenthal Presents User-centric Enterprise Architecture

>Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Andy Blumenthal Presents User-centric Enterprise Architecturehttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=ea-brief-102308-cio-forum-blumenthal-1245369312-phpapp01&stripped_title=andy-blumenthal-presents-usercentric-enterprise-architecture-1605994

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>The Ostrich Effect and Enterprise Architecture

>From the financial and credit crisis, to soaring energy prices, job losses, foreclosures, and run-away inflation, people’s investment portfolios are looking pretty darn gloomy these days.

The Wall Street Journal, 13-14 September 2008 reports “Should you Fear the Ostrich Effect?”

What’s the ostrich effect?

“Behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University coined the term, ‘the ostrich effect’ to describe the way investors stick their heads in the sand during lousy markets.”

Forget the letter opener when your financial statement arrives and stop looking up the value of your investment portfolio online, because “if you don’t know for sure how your portfolio did, you can always retain the hope that it somehow did better.”

This is a way for people to hide from the reality of their losses. “Turning yourself into an ostrich doesn’t make your losses go away, but it does enable you to pretend they aren’t there.” What a wonderful defense mechanism for our psyches!

Reading and thinking about this ostrich effect, I realized that it applies not only to the way people deal with financial losses, but all sorts of bad news they don’t want to hear or deal with.

I believe in Freudian terms, they call this DENIAL!

Just put your head in the sand and whatever it is you don’t want to deal with isn’t there, right?

We all know that hiding from problems doesn’t make them go away. Yet, this same phenomenon in people’s personal lives is ever present in our enterprises!

How many of the executives in your organizations follow this prescription of sticking their head in the sand when they don’t want to hear about or acknowledge problems in the workplace—competitive, technical, regulatory and so on?

Unfortunately, many of our leaders close their eyes and ears to the problems that afflict our organizations in spite of all the reports, briefings, metrics, dashboards, and subject matter experts they consult.

Why do our leaders ignore bad or challenging news?

I suppose similar to the investor who doesn’t want to face the negative returns and shrinking balances on their account statements, executives often don’t want to or are unable to deal with the harsh reality in their organizations and in the competitive environment. It’s so much easier to pretend problems and challenges don’t exist and continue to report stellar results and returns to their boards, stockholders, stakeholders, regulators, and oversight authorities.

In this election season, there has been a lot of banter of “putting lipstick on a pig.” Sounds a little like how ineffective leaders pretend to lead, by putting rosy colored lipstick on a pretty awful looking pig.

The best leaders will use all the information available to face reality and raise the performance of the organization and its people to meet the challenges head on and truly grow and excel.

The average and worst leader ignore what’s going on around them and see only what they want to see and report up and out what they believe others want to hear.

Where does enterprise architecture come into play with this?

Enterprise architecture is a vital source of information for our CIOs and other leaders. The wise ones see the strategic value of enterprise architecture, commit to it, champion it, and invest in it, using it to identify gaps, redundancies, roadblocks, and opportunities to innovate and improve the business and technology of the organization. I urge all CIOs to avoid being like the ostrich, and take this approach.

>User-Centric EA Framework

>

User-centric EA guides all facets of the enterprise architecture. It starts from the capture of the information, which is based on a strict value proposition of improving IT planning and governance, and moves forward to a process that is collaborative and structured, to one that provides users with information views that are facilitated by principles of communication and design. The User-centric EA further affects how we manage the architecture, using metrics, configuration management, and a single information repository. It also affects how we enforce the architecture through policy and governance.

>Performance Metrics and Enterprise Architecture

>In User-centric EA, we are focused on delivering value to the end-user, and to do this we measure and track our performance results to ensure that we are meeting EA program and end-user goals.

In general, you can’t manage, what you don’t measure.

In User-centric EA, we measure both program and product metrics.

• Program metrics—measures of the major program areas in EA; these include development, maintenance, and use of architecture products and governance services. Examples of program measures includes: information products developed per time period, total information products under maintenance (‘the maintenance burden’), and under usage—EA system reviews conducted at the agency, Product and Standard reviews conducted at the agency, end-user information requests fulfilled, departmental decision requests supported, external data call responded to, EA website hits, and so on.
• Product metrics—measures of the amount of data (functions, information objects, systems, technologies, etc.) and their attributes in the EA products and repository; this is used to understand that breadth and depth of the architecture information being provided to end-users and to ensure that it is the ‘right’ information in terms of its scope to enhance decision-making. Additionally, the product measures help understand the general complexity of the information areas, and the challenge of maintaining them and keeping them relevant in terms of currency, accuracy, and completeness.

One of the perspectives or views of information in the EA is performance measures for the enterprise. EA is not only the repository for those corporate measures, but EA itself develops and uses performance measures to ensure that it is meeting enterprise goals and end-user requirements.