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The Title is Information Officer … Chief Information Officer

Love that title!  Ha ha ha!  What a great way to end John Bostick week here at thefuturevalueofbusiness.com.  I hope you’ve enjoyed the look back.  This last post comes to us from InfoManagement 09.2007.  Enjoy!

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Say the name Sean Connery, and virtually everyone who enjoys movies will think of his most famous line: “The name is Bond, James Bond.” Ian Fleming’s spy novels made the Bond character popular before Connery first played him onscreen in 1962. And five other actors have played Bond during the last 45 years. But it is Connery most of us see in our heads when we hear the famous musical riff from every film’s opening sequence. And Connery is the standard against which all other would-be Bonds – perhaps even all other secret-agent characters – are measured. Does the name George Lazenby mean anything to you?

Yet, of the 28 nominations and 12 awards recognizing his acting prowess, none were for his role as James Bond. Not only has he starred in dozens of films other than Bond flicks, he defied the bane of the acting world – typecasting. In fact, he won an Oscar not for playing a super-spy, but for his turn as Jim Malone, the aging, street-weary Irish cop in The Untouchables.

Connery’s secret? Transformation. He captured our collective imagination as the dashing British Bond, but he realized the role was ultimate a dead end. He made the tough decision to abandon the old role in his comfort zone at the height of its popularity in order to improve his long-term career prospects. He then used his box office appeal as leverage with the studios to give him the broader roles he knew were critical to his professional survival.

Today’s senior IT execs, and those who aspire to move up the ladder, can take a few pointers from Connery.

During the late ’90s, IT executives were the stars of many businesses, capturing the imagination of their companies and customers by leading them in new directions for information technology. E-commerce. Web services. Name a tech trend; the CIO and his/her senior staff were in the lead. But as the world moved from seeing technology on its own as a strategic advantage, and began making technology decisions based on the business value they were supposed to bring instead, the CIO and senior IT execs went from stars to bit players in their organizations. They were typecast as the tech geeks with no business sense.

New priorities have replaced the corporate IT “space race” of the last century in the minds of C-level executives: compliance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance and outsourcing. No longer impressed with IT’s nuts and bolts, CEOs, CFOs and COOs are more concerned with IT’s cost and its contribution to generating value. With little more to offer than gripes about interoperability and the shortage of IT workers, many CIOs risk losing their seats at the executive table.

Like Connery using Bond as leverage, today’s CIOs and other senior IT executives need to branch out from their traditional roles in order to become true information officers – the type who understand how technology applies to the financial, operational and competitive sides of the enterprise. Based on my experience of talking to CIO’s, IT executives and aspiring IT executives everyday, here are a few suggestions on how to fight the technology typecast.

Business First

Actors call this “sharpening their craft.” Business pundits call it “business/IT alignment.” What it means is understand the basics of your industry and your organization first. Know your company’s customers, suppliers, and competitors. Read broadly and deeply about business, to be perceptive about management, markets, global culture and accelerating change that technology is in large part driving. Know before your executive peers can blink that – the world is flat – the tail is long – the ocean is blue – and – the implications that the truth can be terribly inconvenient. Insert perceptive IT questions into your company’s customer satisfaction surveys and champion the insights. Try to get a seat at Board meetings as a participant, advisor, observer or guest. Develop IT buy-in with your executive peers make sure you have a clear IT governance strategy that the CFO and/or general counsel helped develop. This is the first step toward an IT vision that ties into business objectives, strategies and measurements.

Refocus Your IT Organization Away from Commodity Activities and Toward Business Value

If you want to increase your standing in the enterprise, you have to show more than mere competence at what’s expected. Here’s an example. Ben Stiller gets a lot of work in Hollywood. But he doesn’t command Connery money. That’s because he’s essentially playing one of the three Ben Stiller types in every movie.

CIOs and their organizations should emulate Connery’s ability to evolve with the times and changing needs of the “audience.” Departmental time management is an excellent example of adapting to dynamic conditions. Time and resources will always be finite. What will change is how those hours and resources are deployed. Identify IT activities that have been commoditized. Some may be critical and require world-class performance. But, they will still be commodities that offer no differentiating value to your company. Treat them as such. Outsource those activities to specialized providers, and then stack internal time and resources against objectives dictated by business strategy.

Remember that the definition of an IT commodity will change over time and in response to market conditions. So, stay agile and flexible with staff and budget deployment. But also stay focused on the brainwork instead of the mechanical work, and you will provide greater value.

Want to know what practices work best? Keep in touch with your peers – their careers and their organizations. Outsiders have no political stake in the game and can provide insight and honest feedback.

Measure Results

Much like distribution doesn’t measure a film’s success – the box-office take does -activity in IT doesn’t equal results. Your staff may be busy doing something. But that something may not be moving the business forward.

IT managers focus on activities. CIOs and senior IT executives must focus on leadership, goals and results. Tie your department’s results to business objectives anchored by the business’ front-line results. For example, if the business missed its numbers for the quarter, you should consider IT’s role in that deficit and how IT can help put revenue back on track. Keep measurements simple and keep them aligned with executive priorities and operational plans. Measure IT in a business context rather than an IT-focused one and you will increase your prestige with other executives.

Nurture and Grow Business and IT Strategy Together

Some of the actors who followed Connery followed his successful strategy and parlayed a stint as 007 into more lucrative work. Some did not. You should expect the same experience with your IT staff. As you transform your role in the business, it’s important that your people follow that path as well. Encourage them to pursue the same kind of new education and awareness you are. Do what you can to provide growth opportunities for them. After all, you are a team, and you will only go as far as the team can take you.

For example, you can provide your team members with an “MBA career roadmap” instead of an IT-centric employee development plan. Get their buy-in that their careers have to be aligned with the business and not just tethered to IT. The more they understand how business works, the better prepared they’ll be to make valuable contributions to the organization.

Accept that not all of the team will follow this path. Some will – and should – remain focused on the nuts and bolts of IT. In fact, it’s your job as a leader to help individuals discover when this role fits and what value it delivers.

The rapid pace of change in technology and the dynamic nature of global business put CIOs and senior IT execs of all kinds, from midsized company to major corporation at risk of being typecast as a one-role actor. If you aspire to the executive suite, you need to ask yourself: Am I Connery? Or am I Lazenby?

Bond fans know what I mean.

– JB

Give Yourself Some Wiggle Room to Drive Innovation and Change

Originally shared in InfoManagement Direct on 12.21.2007, John share’s his thoughts on how Managed Services can drive innovation.

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Recently I came across a quote by the legendary Chicago Sun-Times journalist Sydney Harris who observed, “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same, but get better.” Nothing like a little paradox to reboot the brain and inspire a new look at the same landscape.

We want things to stay the same – only get better. Ain’t that the truth? There’s a lot of comfort in things remaining the same. We know what to expect, we can predict our reactions, nothing is going to catch us off guard and cause us pain or make us look bad.

We gain a sense of security in things remaining the same, especially over a long period of time. It’s like a baseball hitter who spends hours hitting off a pitching machine. The speed and location of the ball are predictable, so eventually, no matter how fast the pitch comes in, the hitter can whack it. He starts feeling good about himself. Then he gets into a game where the pitcher is changing speeds and location, and suddenly those hard line drives turn into soft pop-ups and groundouts. Without the predictability of the machine, hitting becomes a much tougher job.

Change by definition upsets the status quo. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s not. If it makes things better, then we love it. But because we only know the outcome after the change occurs, we hate the prospect of it, mostly because we’re afraid of losing what we already have. That’s human nature.

While I was in the process of wrapping my brain around this concept I was given a copy of a recent article by Geoffrey Moore from the Harvard Business Review.¹ The article has proved very helpful in understanding the power of this paradox – stay the same only better.

The always-insightful Moore pointed out that there are three terms or time horizons we work in. Normally we deal in the short-term horizon and the long-term horizon. But according to Moore, there is also the overlooked, often borrowed from and always-misunderstood middle-term horizon, which ironically is the only place where innovative ideas can gain traction.

Eureka! Paradox solved – or at least given clarity.

We are very comfortable in the short term, getting instant gratification for our immediate needs – be it food (hence the proliferation of quick-service restaurants), receiving a thumbs-up for doing a good job, making a quick sale, or achieving our quarterly quota, etc. Hitting a short-term objective is satisfying, although getting there can be difficult. Still, the shorter the term we’re dealing with, the fewer chances there are for the rules, the environment or the assumptions we’re working under to change. As Harris points out, we would prefer it if it were a bit easier.

We are comfortable in long-term thinking about the future, designing new products and services, opening new geographic markets and starting new businesses because we apparently enjoy a degree of accountability that is, shall we say, more fluid at the edges. The future is ripe with possibility, riches and romance; or as they say in baseball – all teams look good in spring training.

The other comfort with the long term is that if changes do sneak up on us, we will have time to react to them. Changes that face a long-term outcome aren’t nearly as traumatic, giving us the opportunity to try different things, regain our equilibrium and return to a state of nonchange before we reach the day of reckoning. Things may have changed in truth, but they don’t feel like they did as much because we have time to assimilate the changes.

“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same, but get better.”

What Moore gets right in his essay and that the Harris quote misses is that innovation is not actually a dilemma. A dilemma is a choice between two painful alternatives. Moore demonstrates that there is a third alternative, a middle horizon or a middle term, that incorporates the best of the other two. He says that in order to implement change, we need to create a space in this middle horizon that is free from the pain and rewards of the short-term horizon and also free from the open-ended “explore all options” thinking of the long-term horizon.
 
What’s needed, then, in order to implement innovation and alignment in the middle horizon, is a little wiggle room. I realize the term “wiggle room” isn’t listed in the glossary of the latest MBA textbooks – but it works for me. Wiggle room means there is flexibility in the business expectations of ROI and market share for new product and service innovations, making the prospect of change a less fearsome one; but it also means there are needed restraints that sharpen the focus. There is less of a tendency to push off concerns about the consequences of your actions on “future you” when the future is not as far off. Flexibility with restraint is the ideal environment to nurture innovation.

One of the ways to create an innovative middle horizon is to build both flexibility and structure into an IT organization through the use of managed services. On the flexibility front, managed services give companies two critical advantages – flexibility of capital resources and flexibility of human resources.

Innovation by its nature requires a large investment in human resources in particular. In most cases, it helps to have many minds brainstorming a variety of concepts from different points of view to nurture innovation. It also takes a fair amount of freedom from the restraints of day-to-day work in order to envision what does not already exist or is not already a part of the corporate culture. Yet it is difficult to achieve that free-thinking mindset when your best resources are bogged down in the day-to-day tasks involved in keeping the current business operating. Offloading the mundane tasks onto a managed services provider frees your experts to think in an innovative way. Reducing current cost and avoiding future costs also enables new products and services to attain more realistic maturity cycles.

Managed services address the structure part of the equation by making the costs of ideas real. In a typical organization, the cost of the day-to-day running of IT tends to be loosely defined, coming out of a central budget that can be applied conveniently. When working with a managed services provider costs are much more tightly controlled, with greater accountability across the board. Knowing this level of detail helps place a practical focus onto innovation, assuring that it is being driven by the needs of the business, not just innovation for its own sake.
In the end, business survival is about bringing innovation to market. Managed services are an often-overlooked yet critical tool in a CIOs portfolio for creating that little bit of wiggle room in the mid-term horizon for new products and services to find their potential. They can help take some of the fear and pain out of change by redefining roles in order to encourage it. While the individuals may not learn to love change unequivocally, they may at least learn to embrace it as a necessary step on the road to success. And that’s definitely movement in the right direction.

Reference:

1. Geoffrey Moore. “To Succeed in the Long Term, Focus on the Middle Term.” Harvard Business Review. July/August 2007.

– JB

The Reality We Can All Agree On

This post was originally shared on InfoManagementon 4.11.08.  Although JB focused on Wiki’s at the time (Twitter wasn’t much of a tool 2 years ago), his wisdom is spot on!

– Jodie

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For centuries, the encyclopedia was viewed as the single most reliable reference source for just about everything. Encyclopedia articles were written, edited, vetted and edited some more, until finally an article appeared that was as close to absolute truth as humans could make it. 

Then came the Internet, and shortly thereafter sites such as Wikipedia. Now, instead of content on a given topic being determined by the elite few, anyone can contribute their thoughts, ideas and points of view. How egalitarian. The other side to it is all of this collaboration has created what comedian Stephen Colbert refers to as “the reality we can all agree on.”

That may be bad for pure academic research. Not to mention students trying to write their term papers with as little effort as possible. But it could be the way of the world for IT executives in the future. Forty-four percent of those surveyed by CIO Insight in November 2007 agreed that technologies that “gather and present the wisdom of crowds” will be among the most important technological developments in 2012 to 2017.¹ So perhaps the “wiki way” will not be so bad for the business world.

For years, when organizations would outsource applications or services, they pretty much had to take whatever the supplier offered. And just as with the politics Colbert skewers on a regular basis, sometimes the choice wasn’t that you wanted option A so much as you really didn’t like option B, and wouldn’t use it/vote for it in a million years.

The wiki mentality has the chance to change that. Rather than settling for a hard set of capabilities based on the knowledge and abilities of the supplier’s internal development team, taking a wiki-like approach means using a much larger set of brains to create an application or service that is more flexible than in the past. This flexibility gives it the ability to satisfy a much larger set of demands, and to do it without waiting for the next major revision.

Take infrastructure management services, for example. A decade ago outsourcing the management of the data infrastructure at all was considered heretical. It was an organization’s strategic advantage, and thus not to be trusted to outsiders. Today, we’ve come to realize that the data (and our ability to analyze it) is the strategic advantage. The infrastructure is merely the vessel that holds it. It’s just like the difference between gold bars and a vault. One has intrinsic value, and the other is merely there to contain and protect that value.

Because of that, organizations are finding less and less reason to keep (and manage) the infrastructure inside their own walls. Perhaps the one thing holding them back is finding an infrastructure management partner that will do things the way they want them done.

With a wiki-style approach, that will change. The suppliers will become used to taking and incorporating customer input not only to satisfy the needs of a particular customer, but also to benefit their entire customer base. In other words, the ideas/improvements that Company A wants to implement are seen by other customers, and together the customer base helps drive the way the infrastructure is managed. The business model then becomes the reality the customers can all agree on.

This wiki mentality is also being used in areas such as product development. Open source software is doubtless the best-known example. Open source applications are constantly being improved upon by the people who use them; more importantly, as users develop improvements they are morally and contractually obligated to share their innovations with all other users. It doesn’t take long before one person’s great idea becomes the reality all users can agree on.

This idea is now being expanded into other product areas. Communities are springing up to help organizations tap into a much wider range of brain power than they’ve had access to in the past. Here’s how they work:

Suppose Company A has an idea for a product or service, but isn’t quite sure how to make it work. They can go to a community site and look for individuals or other organizations that may have the expertise they need, or they can post a notice of their needs on the community site. Company A and interested members of the community can then brainstorm the concept, divide up the work and ultimately share in the rewards.

One of the advantages of this community-based approach is that it removes many of the old limitations of business, such as geography and budget. Organizations are free to seek out talent wherever it happens to live and can review solutions from several providers – while only paying for the one they ultimately accept. The end result is the sum of the knowledge of all who contribute to it, which is certain to be greater than the knowledge of any single individual or organization.

Therein lays the opportunity. Rather than relying solely on our own knowledge and experience the way the old encyclopedia-makers did, the wiki approach allows organizations to leverage a much broader range of knowledge and experiences than they could ever afford to develop internally. Sure, some of that “knowledge” might elicit a smirk from Stephen Colbert. But it won’t take long before the cream rises to the top, as it always does. And at that point, the business reality truly will be one we can all agree on.

Reference:

1. CIO Insight. “The Technologies of Tomorrow.” CIOInsight.com, December 12, 2007.

-  JB

Hire Specialize Suppliers to Ensure Best Performance

Originally published in the August 2008 edition of Database Trends and Applications, I think it’s still relevant today.

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Psychologist Philip Zimbardo once said, “Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so than we recognize or acknowledge.” That certainly appears to be true when we look at how we work with people who provide services to us in our personal lives versus those who do it in the business world. In our personal lives, we tend to hire specialists. We look for people who have an expertise in a particular area, and count on them to do that one thing. You wouldn’t ask the company that takes care of your lawn to provide daycare services for your children. You don’t ask the plumber to build custom kitchen cabinets. You wouldn’t think to ask the person who fixes your car to tailor your suit or clean your house. Yet, in the business world we always seem to want to take the “holistic” route, i.e., find that one supplier who can do everything for us. We’re hoping that a company will come in, get to know our business, and then start solving problems and/or removing burdens for us.

At first, bringing in that big company works because they’re hired to perform a specific task or function. When we initially hire an outside supplier, we carefully vet several contenders until we finally select the one we believe has the greatest expertise in whatever it is we need done.

Once the supplier is on board and solving the problem we hired it to solve, either we start asking the team to do other things for us, or the team starts looking for other things to do for us to expand their “web of influence.” Or both. It doesn’t take long before we’ve strayed far from their core area of expertise and are now settling for less than optimum solutions – often merely for the sake of convenience. Proximity, or already being on the approved vendor list, becomes one of those “situational variables” Zimbardo mentioned. And that’s just not right.

In today’s business world with all its complexities and nuances, specialization in operational tasks is really the better way to go. Every operation requires so much specific knowledge that it’s impossible for any one person or even one organization to possess it. While taking a holistic approach may sound good in theory, in practice it tends to lead more to frustration and disappointment than success. When that happens, the business almost always suffers – and often a very good supplier for certain things winds up getting judged more for what it can’t do very well than what it can.

The other negative that comes out of trying to adopt a holistic approach in an era that requires specialization is that organizations become fatigued trying to get more out of a supplier than that supplier is capable of providing. The result is the enterprise gives up on demanding excellence and instead ultimately settles for mediocrity.

Hiring specialized suppliers of operational tasks and services avoids putting organizations in a state of “supplier fatigue.” The specialists tend to yield a higher level of performance across the board, because their knowledge is an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around. Specialized suppliers have the time, interest and resources to become experts in their specific area, and as long as they stay within that area they can provide a higher level of continuous service. Bringing in as many of them as is needed tends to raise the organization’s expectations the way a rising tide raises all boats. It sets a standard of excellence across the entire organization. And if the need arises to find a different supplier due to performance issues, that one segment can be excised without affecting the entire operation.

It’s really about portfolio management. Think of it this way: It is without doubt easier to manage a single stock than a diverse portfolio. But it’s also a lot riskier. In addition, a single stock only answers part of a savvy investor’s needs. It can be aggressive, conservative, poised for growth, capable of protecting gains, etc. – but it can’t be all of them. Smart investors select the best stocks to accomplish all of their investing goals. That’s what smart organizations do, too – select their suppliers based on specialties and required outcomes, then manage that portfolio scrupulously.

A holistic approach to outsourced services may seem solid on the surface, but when you dig deeper you’ll see it’s really laden with holes. Creating a tightly managed network of specialty suppliers assures you get the best each has to offer rather than having to settle for both good and bad.

Don’t get psyched out. Avoid allowing situational variables to dictate your behavior. Instead, use the same approach to hiring business suppliers as you do with suppliers in your personal life. You’ll find your results greatly surpass your expectations.

– JB

The Power of Dashboarding

Each day, the first place I visit on the web is this blog.  I’m the admin…the person behind scenes.  I’m the one that removes the spam (like taking out the trash really), edits tags, makes sure that the posts are tweeted and ensures that the post tagging is consistent.  The other thing that I do is look at how people get to our site.  I look at the keywords that they used and the sites they left to get here.  One thing I noticed this morning is that “John Bostick” was a hot topic.    As a matter of fact, one of the searches led me to an article on another site that I did not realize John had written.  It got me to wondering, “What else has John written that we haven’t posted here?”  I decided at that very moment to go searching for John’s other material and provide links back here.  I’ll be doing it all week.  I hope you take a look.

SEGUE

Speaking of Dashboarding…what is your corporate dashboard doing for you?  Are you learning new things about your services and products?  Does it help you to manage things differently?  You read above how thefuturevalueofbusiness.com dashboard helped me to manage my posts differently.  I’d love to hear your stories of how your corporate dashboard caused you to change how you managed your business.  Share them below!

In the meantime…I hope you enjoy John’s posts this week.

– Jodie

Using OLAP to Improve Organizational Effectiveness – Part 2

This is the second in my series of 3 posts on using OLAP tools to improve the effectiveness of organizations.  In Part 1 I discussed some background concepts and terminology.  In this part, we’ll talk about some specific examples of how OLAP can have an impact in this area.

OLAP’s Impact on Organizational Effectiveness

How can an OLAP tool help improve an organization’s performance as measured against its objectives?  Answering this question requires a greater understanding of how strategies and tactics are implemented within organizations.  I’ll use a model of organizational effectiveness developed by Michael Beer to illustrate the implementation of strategies and tactics.

The picture below shows a simplified version of a model of organizational effectiveness developed by Michael Beer (Note on Organizational Effectiveness, 10).  Business goals and strategy influence and are influenced by top management.  Management determines and implements the proper organizational design to achieve the organization’s goals.  The design of the organization, in turn, influences human resources attributes of the organization.  Finally, these HR attributes directly impact organizational effectiveness.

This simplified version of Michael Beer’s model is presented again below.  Added to the model though, is the position of an OLAP tool in improving organizational effectiveness.  OLAP technology exerts its influence on organizational effectiveness in three sections of the model:

• Management
• The Measurement and Reward Systems aspects of Organizational Design
• The Coordination aspects of Human Resources.

While the impact of OLAP technology in each of the areas above is slightly different, each is related and shares a common trait: improvement in communication.  Utilizing OLAP tools to improve communication requires a broad audience for their utilization.  OLAP tools are traditionally utilized by analysts and managers.  In this model, front-line employees become critical users of the tool as well.  The wide-scale availability of web-based OLAP tools makes such organization-wide implementations cost-effective.

Business Intelligence in Utilities

A few weeks ago I posted some thougths on the future of Smart Grid and what it meant to the consumer.  In essence, my observation was that it may be BI for BI’s sake.  My musings were based upon a post from Bart Thielbar of Sierra Energy which were posted in Intelligent Utility.  He and I started trading some email, which led to a discussion on how Business Intelligence initiatives were being led at utility companies.  I’ve had some experience at FirstEnergy, Duke Energy (formerly Cinergy), AEP, and Southern Company.  Bart had just finished a survey of utility execs on BI.  Here’s what he found:

We compared notes and were both pleasantly surprised to find similar results.   Click here to read more about his findings.  Click here to see his post that started all of this.

(Note:  if you aren’t engaging in dialogue around the Net, you should.  You’ll meet some fabulous people along the way and gain more insight!)

Follow me on Twitter:  @LUCRUMinc

-  Jodie

New Partner: TARGIT!

Have you heard of TARGIT?  TARGIT is a suite of BI Tools geared toward getting you to BI “in the fewest clicks”.  LUCRUM has always been a big believer in doing BI..Faster!  This suite of tools is a great tool in our toolbox.  We encourage you to learn more:  http://www.targit.com/Products/TARGIT_Suite.aspx

Using OLAP to Improve Organizational Effectiveness – Part 1

OLAP tools have been widely available for years and are in use in a large number of organizations.  They are typically deployed as speedy, easy-to-navigate reporting tools.  With a little creativity though, this class of software can also be utilized in a very different manner.

As organizations struggle to communicate their objectives to employees and to align the activities of those employees with the objectives of the organization, they can get help from these same OLAP products.  OLAP software can help by providing the capability to:

1. Improve management’s knowledge of progress on objectives
2. Improve employee coordination on efforts to achieve objectives
3. Communicate the link between employee effort and performance
4. Communicate the link between employee performance and reward
5. Improve employee performance feedback.

In this series of three posts, I’ll talk about the role OLAP tools can play in each of the areas above.  But first, I’m going to start out with an introduction to the concept of Organizational Effectiveness.  This introduction will give us a structure to frame the rest of the discussion.

I am not going to spend any time defining OLAP.  If you’re interested, check here and here for some background and definitions.

Organizational Effectiveness Defined

Effectiveness is defined as simply having the intended outcome.  In an organizational context, the intended outcome is the goal of the organization which is usually expressed in a mission statement.  The Hierarchical Definition of Strategy provides a framework for defining and explaining these concepts and I am going to use it extensively in these posts.

Hierarchical Definition of Strategy

Explaining organizational effectiveness requires a discussion of business strategy and the Hierarchical Definition of Strategy provides a simple framework for this discussion.  The Hierarchical Definition of Strategy is built on the concepts of Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics (Barney, 10).  I’ve drawn a simple figure below to help explain this model:

An organization develops its objectives based on its mission while strategies and tactics provide specific details regarding the attainment of these objectives.  In the Hierarchical model, the effectiveness of the organization can be determined by simply comparing actual performance to objectives.  Michael Beer summarizes organizational effectiveness in this manner:

“An effective organization is one capable of implementing its strategy … A strategy is implemented effectively when people and groups in the organization work in a motivated, skilled, and coordinated manner on the appropriate tasks.” (Note on Organizational Effectiveness, 10)

In other words, the effectiveness of the organization is determined by its ability to achieve its objectives.

Hierarchical Definition of Strategy – Example

An example will help to clarify these concepts and make them a little more concrete.  Dell Inc.’s Mission Statement is:

“Dell’s mission is to be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve.”

The high level nature of the statement, though necessary, makes it difficult for individual employees to apply it to their daily efforts.  At the next level of the strategy hierarchy, Dell management has likely developed Objectives that will lead to the achievement of this mission.  For instance, we can imagine that Dell has defined an objective to “Provide customer support with a customer approval rating of over 90%.”  This supports their mission of “…delivering the best customer experience…” and provides employees with a tangible performance target.

The final two levels of the hierarchy are related to execution.  Strategy is a means to accomplish an individual objective.  Continuing with our imaginary Dell example, the strategy developed might be “Deliver the fastest, most accurate technical support in the industry.”  This supports their objective in the sense that a firm delivering the fastest and most accurate technical support would very likely receive high approval ratings from customers.  Tactics are execution oriented and exist at the lowest level of detail.  In the Dell example, a tactic may be a requirement that all customer support personnel complete a certain set of technical and communication skill classes.

In the example developed above, Dell’s organizational effectiveness can be determined by comparing actual appraisals of their support services with their objective of a 90% approval rating.

Next Post…

Now that we’ve laid out some concepts and terms, we can move on to the heart of the discussion.  In Part 2, I’ll dive into the details and talk about how utilization of an OLAP tool can help an organization become more effective.

Reducing Eye Strain While Programming

Do you spend 8-12 hours a day pounding on a computer? Do you have headaches, irritated eyes, blurry vision or fatigue?  Then you could be suffering from eye strain.

As a programmer, I spend a lot of time on the computer at work and at home. I was having lot of problems with my eyes. They hurt all the time and I always felt drained. The glare of the lights in the office was painful. My solution was to create a pair of computer glasses. I’ve been using them for 8+ years and could not be happier. I don’t wear glasses, but I want to keep my eyes protected and healthy. I went and had an eye exam and told the doctor about my problems. I worked with him on creating a pair of glasses tailored to my needs. He had a computer in his office and a kit that let him build test glasses with different lenses. I sat at his computer while trying different lens combinations. I chose lenses with a slight magnification to them. This allows me to use a smaller font to view more code on the screen, but it appears larger which helps my eyes. I also added an anti-glare coating to protect my eyes from the glare from lights and the monitor. The first time I put on the glasses I was amazed at how my eye instantly stopped hurting.

Since my first pair I have had another pair made. Since I am older, I needed a slight prescription, but they still work very well. I also added scratch resistant lenses since I carry them around a lot. I also wear my glasses in meetings since the glare from the light hurts my eyes. The glasses are not cheap (about $200), but well worth the money. Here are some other suggestions from around the web on reducing eye strain: 

1. Take a break every hour to stretch your legs as well as your eyes. Look out a window and focus on far away objects. Close your eyes for a while.
2. Keep your eyes hydrated. Dry eyes leads to irritation and strain.
3. Get your eyes check annually to check for problems or if you need a prescription correction.
4. Use high resolution LCD monitors. Adjust the brightness and contrast to a comfortable level.
5. Use dual monitors and place them at different distances so your eyes have to refocus as you look at each monitor.
6. Adjust your font size and type to one that is clear to you. Change out white background to a light shade of blue or other light color. White backgrounds are very harsh.
7. Change the viewing distance of your monitor. Sitting to close causes eye strain. Move your monitor back and increase the font size.
8. Don’t work with all the lights off. Can cause I high contrast between monitor and room. Dim lights if you have trouble with bright lights
9. Use a TFT and enable Clear Type (or equivalent technology). Ensure it is also correctly tuned for your system using the Clear Type tuner.
10. Limit your computer screen time when not at work.

Remember to take care of your eyes and happy coding. 

 - Jeff Rollins

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