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.