La classe du futur

School of One

The seating arrangements are compared to airport traffic patterns. The student schedules are called playlists. And lesson plans are generated by a complicated computer algorithm for the 80 students in the class.

Intrapreneurship et innovation

Deux concepts qui vont de pair.
Comment les favoriser est une grande question.

IBM

Tel que discuté ici, IBM se lance dans des projets globaux : les infrastructures et les systèmes d'information.

Cette vision s'applique aussi au transport ferroviaire, avec entre autres, l'inauguration d'un Global Rail Innovation Center à Beijing. L'Université du Michigan est un partenaire dans ce centre et donc, le CN aussi indirectement.

Leadership

Les 100 premiers jours :

Setting the right tone.
Getting organized.
Building relationships.
Getting or keeping things moving in the right direction.
Figuring out ways to become and stay appropriately informed.

What makes a great leader ?

Skilled or gifted (The Guild CIO)

L'avenir de la presse écrite

En vrac, quelques idées sur le sujet.

Le micro-paiement, solution pour la presse ? (Nicolas Langelier)
Le journalisme survivra (Nicolas Langelier)
Ensemble, c'est tout (Nicolas Langelier)
Why micropayments won't work for the NYT
Dear NYT, please charge me more than $5 for your website

Nuages représentatifs

Les nuages de mots des discours inauguraux des présidents américains.
Ça en dit beaucoup.

Analyse vs. synthèse

The 18th century German philosopher Hegel introduced this idea in a very easy to understand way. The current situation of anything is called the ‘thesis’. The current situation has its advantages and its disadvantages. But it will always lead to a reaction, towards the opposite, the ‘antithesis’. It solves the disadvantages of the old situation, but also introduces new disadvantages (probably the opposite of the previous advantages, if you still follow me). It takes time to combine best of both world, which is called the synthesis. The thesis and antithesis fused into a higher level.

An example: organizations often centralize, because they were too decentralized. Then they decentralize, because they were too centralized. If you keep on doing this, you’ll never really solve the problem. It is when you realize that ‘standardization’ is the synthesis of both centralization and decentralization, you have progressed. When processes, systems, ways of working etc are standardized, it doesn’t matter anymore if you are centralized or decentralized.

Where analysis focuses on working within the boundaries of a certain domain (taking one big thing into smaller pieces), synthesis connects various domains. Why is everyone so obsessed about analysis?

(tiré de ce blog)

Être et demeurer CIO

Une fois en poste, comment demeurer CIO ? Facile si on suit ces étapes.

Succession Planning
Legacy Technology Transformation
Enterprise Software
Data Integration
Empowering the Business
Consultant Power

Rigueur

If a curriculum lacks intellectual rigour, students never realise how little they really know. The arrogance propagated in business school may well have contributed to the financial crisis. I agree this presents an opportunity for business schools—students should get more rigour, and more humility.

(à propos des programmes MBA, tiré de The Economist)

À trop vouloir bien faire

Les checks and balances qui peuvent tuer l'innovation.

For good programmers, one of the best things about working for a startup is that there are few checks on releases. In true startups, there are no external checks at all. If you have an idea for a new feature in the morning, you can write it and push it to the production servers before lunch. And when you can do that, you have more ideas.

At big companies, software has to go through various approvals before it can be launched. And the cost of doing this can be enormous—in fact, discontinuous. I was talking recently to a group of three programmers whose startup had been acquired a few years before by a big company. When they’d been independent, they could release changes instantly. Now, they said, the absolute fastest they could get code released on the production servers was two weeks.

This didn’t merely make them less productive. It made them hate working for the acquirer.

Le père du Knowledge Management

Ikujiro Nonaka

“Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don’t understand how human beings learn and create,” he says. Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional “inputs” into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. “It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another.”

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Un article de McKinsey dans la même lignée.

Strategy / Execution

Dans leur article The Office of Strategy Management, Kaplan et Norton discutent du disconnect existant entre la stratégie corporative et l'exécution de cette stratégie.

Two-thirds of HR and IT organizations develop strategic plans that are not linked to the organization's strategy. This is extraordinary.

Seventy percent of middle managers and more than 90 percent of front-line employees have compensation that is not linked to the strategy.

Most devastating, 95 percent of employees in most organizations do not understand their [organization's] strategy.

MBA + IT

Point de vue de SAS

There is a trend toward staffing IT departments with non-technical employees or “hybrids” (e.g., MBAs with some tech background). More and more, the pervasive thought of CIOs seems to be “I can teach the technology. But getting staff who understand business drivers and speak the same language as the business side of the house is harder to come by.”

[...]

The exec pulled the IT guys from those projects and has actively sought to staff his team with that rare, but highly-sought-after creature – MBAs with some background in technology.

[...]

So if you’re replacing the technologists with those hybrid business types, isn’t it logical to expect an IT backlash? I mean someone has to get down and dirty with the technology to make it all work. At some point more than a cursory knowledge is required, and no amount of business savvy can replace that.

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Article de Fortune, abordant le même thème avec l'angle du CIO.

There was a time when the geeks who keep a company's tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. You called the chief information officer when you needed a server upgrade, not a strategic plan.

NYC et Google

Un autre exemple de transparence du processus gouvernemental, venant de NYC avec la maire Bloomberg en tête cette fois. Définitivement, ça bouge du côté gouvernemental aux États-Unis. Peut-on en dire la même chose de ce côté de la frontière ?

According to the Mayor, “the more accessible we make it [city government], the more accountable we make it.”

eGovernment

Déjà discuté ici, le gouvernement britannique continue sa démarche vers l'ouverture des données.

De plus, W3C's own eGovernment Interest Group has also been actively building an international network of support to work with governments on issues of transparency, accountability, and efficiency through open data.

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Dans le même ordre d'idées, un extrait d'un article de HBR intitulé 'Put Your Data to Work in the Marketplace' qui liste 9 stratégies afin de ce faire.

Plein d'idées

50 syllabus de cours d'administration, de sciences, d'art et de technologies. Curieux de savoir s'il existe du open-source semblable en français.

Le dashboard de Vivek Kundra

Superbe IT dashboard que vient de lancer le gouvernement américain pour permettre au public de suivre les dépenses dans les projets TI (l'article du NY Times). Un autre exemple d'ouverture des données.

Mise à jour 14 sept 2009 : le site semble avoir quelques détracteurs et quelques problèmes.

Vivek Kundra, CIO du gouvernement, 34 ans, est à la tête de ce projet. Cet homme semble avoir une très bonne tête et une perspective fort intéressante selon cette entrevue.

I usually point to three areas in terms of what we are doing here. It starts with a shift in philosophical thinking, but there are three pillars. First, there is the question of how you lower the cost of government operations by moving toward consumer technologies rather than technologies focused within the enterprise. What I mean by that is, for too long the public sector has thought for some reason that it's so special that it must have custom applications, it must have radios for the public safety unit that cost $6,000 a piece, it must have applications targeted for the enterprise. And the government chooses to pay for things that it can get for free.

Second, there is the question of how you drive radical transparency in the public sector. We are doing that by democratizing data and opening up the warehouse of government information to the public so people can innovate; they can slice, dice and cube that data to create amazing and creative applications for citizens and government.

And the third big pillar has to do with how you fundamentally rethink IT governance. What I'm doing with IT governance essentially is simplifying it, getting away from complicated methodologies, and getting more focused on process rather than outcome. Here we've moved to a simple "stock market" model where every technology project is treated as a publicly traded stock.

Creating Shared Responsibility

Ce n'est pas révolutionnaire, mais les points listés dans cet article du BI Network s'appliquent autant au domaine de l'intelligence d'affaires qu'à n'importe quelle gestion d'équipe.

Le far-west de l'Asie

Malgré les incidents des derniers jours, je maintiens que j'irai un jour visiter le far-west de l'Asie, Urumqi en tête de liste.

Du management

Article du Harvard Business Review qui date d'octobre dernier, traitant de la profession de manager. Drucker en a parlé abondamment, mais il est encore temps de considérer ce travail comme une avenue en soi.

Les Chinois veulent nos ressources

Rien de nouveau, mais la Chine est toujours en mode acquisition en ce qui a trait aux ressources naturelles canadiennes et australiennes. Le dernier investissement en liste : la minière canadienne Teck.

La lecture selon Google

Qui a lu cet article jusqu'à la fin ?

Avoir un PLAN

Intéressante entrevue avec l'ancien CEO de Continental. Alan Mulally, CEO de Ford, semble suivre la même stratégie.

Q. What do you consider the keys to effective leadership?

A. The most important thing is that you treat everybody incredibly well and lead with a bit of humility. I’ve found that when I go into a company to lead it’s important to have a plan and to make that plan a simple one that everybody can understand. So even before I go into a company, or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, “What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?” Then what I do is take that and put it into a one-page plan.

I learned back in the days when I was consulting at Bain & Company — and before that when I was at Harvard Business School doing case studies — that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, “What are the two or three things that really matter?” And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back.

Quart-arrière vs. Professeur

Qu'ont en commun le recrutement d'un quart-arrière au football et l'embauche d'un professeur ? Malcolm Gladwell prétend que dans les deux cas, il est très difficile de faire une bonne évaluation permettant de savoir si on est en présence d'un cancre ou d'une vedette. De plus, le choix aura de grandes conséquences directes. Un championnat ou des années de misère dans le cas du football. Et un système d'éducation pour ce qui est du professeur :

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Les Chinois et les trains

Sans contraintes régulatoires comme en Amérique du Nord et sans limites de budget, la Chine construit dans le domaine ferroviaire.

Construction on the 29.68-billion-yuan (US$4.34 billion) Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed railway started yesterday at Fengjing area in Shanghai.

Construction started in July last year on the 300km Shanghai-Nanjing rail line at a cost of 39.46 billion yuan. A 251km rail link between Nangjing and Hangzhou is also under construction at a cost of 31.3 billion yuan.

BD voyage

Lu et même relu dernièrement, deux excellentes bandes dessinées à conseiller à tout amateur de voyage. Tout d'abord, Shenzhen de Guy Delisle qui dresse un portrait de la Chine. Puis, Le Photographe de Didier Lefevre, une histoire tout à fait invraisemblable qui se déroule en Afghanistan.