Port 80: Docks: management

Webcentric organizations need to be managed. Whatever the organization is making and selling, however it is organized, whatever its culture, the employees' activities need structure, direction, and purpose.

alphabet soup

CADCAM, PLM, LCM
new prod dev

ERP, KM, BI, CMS
workflow mgmt, document mgmt
issue, change, and risk mgmt

ERP -- enterprise resource planning

The Vocabulary of Management

what we could do

how the Internet is driving organizational change today in the context of how communications and productivity tools have driven organizational change for thousands of years

what we have to do

how to do it

plans: strategies and techniques for integrating the Internet into every business process

A comprehensive, integrated solution that delivers document management, collaboration, portal, and business process automation on an internet platform.

With iManage WorkSite, enterprises can efficiently manage their business critical content and collaborate with employees, customers, partners and suppliers across the extended enterprise. This results in significant improvements in communications and process efficiency, enabling faster response to changing business conditions and a rapid return on investment.

Their ROI Calculator (on home page, pull down Solutions menu, select Download ROI Calculator) has a Productivity worksheet and a Cost Efficiencies worksheet to help you:

Drive productivity and realize tremendous cost efficiencies through seamlessly connecting your employees, customers, suppliers and partners.

Accelerate time to market through greater transparency and cooperation across your value chain.

organizations

metaphors | the organization as ...

a machine to tinker with

a body to keep healthy

how do they communicate with other orgs? how to the people in them communicate with people in other orgs?

How do we organize our work?

This somewhat geeky article was cited by the owners of Netscape when they opened up their proprietary source code in January 1998 and then sold themselves to AOL a year later.

Ostensibly, the article describes software development. The bad news is that "software developer" includes you if you're contributing to and maintaining webs. Raymond describes two extreme management models for organizing work in the Information Age.

The Evolution of Wired Life: From the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip-How Information Technologies Change Our World by Charles Jonscher, 1999

The Control Revolution: How The Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know
by Andrew L. Shapiro

Do You really Want an Intranet?
Many organizations fail to notice that intranets support and encourage a definite management and cultural style, one that may not be compatible with their incumbent managers.

The Intranet Paradigm
An intranet causes changes in the organizational pattern that encourage us to alter our perspective on how we manage organizations, how we view and value our employees, and how we approach problems.

Big Ideas

The Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age
preamble | highlights on intellectual property, competition, and freedom

Technorealism demands that we think critically about the role that tools and interfaces play in human evolution and everyday life.

Understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship.

In a world driven by the flow of information, the interfaces -- and the underlying code -- that make information visible are becoming enormously powerful social forces. Understanding their strengths and limitations, and even participating in the creation of better tools, should be an important part of being an involved citizen. These tools affect our lives as much as laws do, and we should subject them to a similar democratic scrutiny.

For more than two hundred years, industrial economies were characterized by one overarching feature--the accumulation of barriers to new entrants.

"Utopian Visions of Cyberspace," by Laura J. Gurak, in the May 1997 issue of Computer Mediated Communications (CMC). The article begins:

I'm sure many of you have seen the recent television commercial from one of the major telecommunications companies touting the magical ability of the Internet to banish all social ills. "There is no race," someone claims, as a montage of faces flash by. "There is no gender," says yet another bright-eyed Internet believer.

How much will two bits be worth in the digital marketplace? Read The Information Economy by Hal Varian. The full text of this article originally appeared in the September 1995 Scientific American (p 200-201). It was then published in the January/February 1996 Educom Review (p 44-46), where I first read it. The expanded dead-tree version is called Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.

Extending existing copyright and patent law to apply to digital technologies can only be a stopgap measure. Law appropriate for the paper-based technology of the 18th century will not be adequate to cope with the digital technology of the 21st century.

Forecasting Innovative Technologies
and
Managing the Risks

how to forecast change and evaluate the risks that form the context for an integrated technology plan

forecasting innovative technologies, services, and products, especially those using networked and embedded computers

Readings

examine the historical results
evaluate the uncertain environment
optimize the decisions
repeat the process

Country Forecasts focus on the key factors affecting a country's political and economic outlook and its business environment five years ahead.

Global Outlook is a quarterly publication containing in-depth macroeconomic forecasts for the world economy over the next five years.

Country Risk Service measures the political, economic policy, economic structure and liquidity risk to activities in 100 emerging markets over a two-year forecasting horizon.

HVR Risk Tools - "Your one stop site for all your risk management software solution needs"

Managing Risks, Managing Measures: Decision Support Methodologies in Business
Part 1: Guidelines | Part 2 : Decision Aids
by Edward S. Robins
TechnologyEvaluation.com, February 28, 2002

When it comes to making decisions using some tool that purports to measure value, it is wise to know something about the tool and what it is measuring, as well as why. Poor measurement methods contribute at least in part to project failures and corporate inefficiencies that can take off millions or more from bottom lines and poor technology selections alone have contributed to tens of billions of dollars of unnecessary costs. Methodologies implicit within decision aid tools can bring out value for the users, but the question is if these values are really representing what the stakeholders think they are being shown or need. This article provides some guidance into these issues, and how a manager may avoid making an expensive mistake.

The Revolution Inside

A strange and interesting thing is happening within many of the larger organisations throughout the world. A counter organisation is developing outside of senior management's direct control. In fact, many senior managers are not even aware of what is happening.

The Formal and the Informal

I had an interesting discussion with a senior executive from a large corporation before Christmas. He was very enthusiastic about the Internet but admitted that many of his colleagues were being left behind. He talked about how more and more decisions and strategic development were now happening through rapid fire email where people would discuss an issue back and forth and then decide to do something. He mentioned how a number of senior managers had not taken to email and how they were now being increasingly being left out of the loop, not through any deliberate policy but rather because they were not participating in the growing email debates.

With the rise of eBusiness, rapidly evolving Internet technologies are now playing a central role in business strategy. But to accurately interpret the implications of Web-related technologies for the marketplace, eManagers need to be smart about the technology. eBusiness doesn�t require turning managers into technologists, but it does mean that leaders will have to develop a new understanding of this central strategic resource.

This research note (the third in a series on critical eManagement skills) examines six indicators that can help you begin evaluating whether you and your firm�s management have the technology IQ needed to make good strategic decisions in the eBusiness environment.

What makes emerging technologies a "different game"? Higher levels of uncertainty and complexity, accelerating speed and competency-destroying change are among the characteristics that make managing emerging technology businesses distinct from managing established technology firms. Managers who want to succeed in this environment, therefore, need to take innovative approaches to issues such as technology assessment, strategy, marketing and organizational design.

Xerox and the PC
It�s Not the Toner, Stupid!

Most business disasters occur when corporations� eagerness to act outstrips their ability to predict the future (see Iridium). In contrast, Xerox saw the future ... and ignored it. The gearheads at its Palo Alto Research Center not only designed the graphical user interface and the laser printer in the early �70s but also invented the PC. �And not just the PC in isolation that you had in the early �80s,� says Douglas K. Smith, co-author of Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. �It was the network of computers. It was 90 percent of what we experience today.�

But stolid Xerox had already blown nearly $1 billion on SDS, a small computer company that had faltered; and besides, Xerox made copiers. �Their manufacturers didn�t know how to produce it; their salespeople didn�t know how to sell it,� says Smith. �They were finance driven, focused on profits, profits, profits. Maybe this stuff would�ve been profitable in the future, but you couldn�t think about it on a quarterly basis.�

As we watch Xerox teeter because of its inability to embrace change, the lesson here is obvious: If you�re going to do research and development, you�d better have strategies in place for moving on your discoveries. �If you don�t,� says Smith, �you might as well just skip the R&D.�

Now that the cold war is history, intelligence pros are turning their black-bag wizardry toward corporate targets�maybe even the likes of you.

paradigms

The modern study of paradigms began in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 and has been continued in the books and videos of Joel Barker. A paradigm, according to Barker, is theory or dogma that establishes boundaries and regulations. Paradigms filter data and, as a result, often prevent anticipating new developments that come from outside the paradigm.

"What today is impossible to do in your business, but if it could be done would fundamentally change what you do?" asks Joel Barker. This is crucial to understand because of Barker's "going back to Zero Rule": When a paradigm shifts everyone goes back to zero, your past success guarantees nothing. The Swiss invented the quartz movement watch, yet their paradigm for what a watch should be caused them to reject the new design. As a result, their market share fell from 80% in 1968 to less than 10% today. Their past success blinded them to the future of watch-making.

Barker's books and videos explore many examples of the paradigm effect, including the airplane, telephone, radio, and xerox machine. These ideas were developed by people who were open to new concepts and new ways of looking at the world. As Joel Barker says in the conclusion to his video The Business of Paradigms:

Those who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it.

http://gt.clickz.com/cgi-bin/gt/cz/cz.html
While the established old-timers are trying to determine the price points at which grocery delivery becomes a profit center, the newbies are out in the marketplace gearing up to eat Safeway and Kroger for lunch. (better for 600?)

planning for the future

risk

Countering strategic risk with pattern thinking
How to identify tomorrow�s profit zones before the competition
by Adrian J. Slywotzky, James A. Quella, and David J. Morrison

http://www.marshmac.com/views/99sum.evans.shtml

innovation

A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn.

The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration. ...

Mature companies talk the talk of innovation, but rarely if ever seem to manage to breed organisational cultures that identify, nurture and reward creativity. Again and again, they restructure, downsize, upsize, rightsize, bring in a new management team, cut the fat, discover quality assurance or best practice or the ouija board, tip the hierarchical pyramid on its side or upside down or inside out. But, bureaucracies are notoriously resilient and if the leaders who support innovation are replaced by those who favour control, their processes do not appear to have a sufficiently independent life to survive the change.

innovation

* Clear innovation strategy. A plan must reach across departments and divisions so that individuals march towards the same goal.

* Smart Resource Allocation. Many innovation ideas get adequate funding, but inadequate personnel support. Remember that any great idea needs an investment of human capital and work hours.

* Focus on Gaps. Look for soft spots in your portfolio and aim your innovation efforts in that direction.

* Solid Technology Management. Strong internal technology talent will help a company spot a hype machine and steer clear of immature concepts.

* Open Culture. Perhaps the greatest help to an innovation strategy is a culture that supports and encourages thinking outside the box. Promote an atmosphere in which staffers are comfortable taking a chance.

managerial styles and corporate cultures

management styles

With your MBA, you just may get the chance to find out. What kind of boss will you be?

Managing By Walking Faster Than The Employees

These kind of managers you will always see in the corridor, ten steps away. "We'll have to talk," you can hear them say, just as they have disappeared around the corner.

What techniques and behaviors are conducive to managing change? To managing online? To managing the virtual office?

Do you manage proactively in anticipation or reactively from crisis to crisis? How do you manage conflict and compromise? How to you manage success?

Dimensions of style

How is performance evaluated? How is it measured? What's important? How are mistakes and failures evaluated?

For example, if you work on a team with colleagues from the division in France or Taiwan? For another example:

From managing across oceans, to appointing a board made up of children, these women have employed their own personal styles in achieving success in their organizations. Do women have a unique, leveragable management style? Learn what has been most effective for our panelists, and what is their advice to other potential and current leaders.

diffusion curves

In addition to the fundamental business skills of industry knowledge, functional expertise and leadership, top Internet executives also have "Web DNA," a set of characteristics critical to success in the Internet economy:

Recognize opportunity

Radiate vision

80/20 mindset (better to be 80 percent right today than 100 percent right tomorrow)

Get the "right stuff" done

Organizational improvisers

Learning-obsessed

Growing organizations move through five relatively calm periods of evolution, each of which ends with a period of crisis and revolution.

Each evolutionary period is characterized by the dominant management style used to achieve growth, while

Each revolutionary period is characterized by the dominant management problem that must be solved before growth will continue.

Advice for managing wannadots

The Ten Deadly Mistakes of Wanna-Dots
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard Business Review, January 2001, p. 91.

1. Make a major company-wide push to link and integrate your online presence.

2. Commit resources, both staff time and appropriate leadership.

3. To start, do something ambitious; rebrand the organization or change a core process.

4. If you must out-source the project, choose a vendor who knows your business and can work with your off-line brand.

5. Be prepared to question whether anything you do off-line will work on-line and be prepared to reinvent processes if not your whole business.

6. Break the rules if you have to, including the traditional corporate metrics, hierarchy, and standards of cost controls, quarterly accountability, human resources, and purchasing.

7. Integrate your online presence even if it means integrating your offline presence. That is, let the internet drive your organizational architecture.

8. Anticipate competition from insurgents, both start-ups and those from seemingly other industries.

9. Allow for changes throughout your organization and include lots of ongoing training.

10. Make your online presence an opportunity to listen better to your customer.

How do we organize the workplace?

Open or closed
One work setting or multiple work settings
Fixed or flexible
Uniform or customized
Designed by experts or designed by workers
Shared or dedicated resources
Devoted to work alone or devoted to life in addition to work
Centralized or decentralized
Mixed or homogenous neighborhoods
Hot or generic locations
Transparent or opaque

Since problem solving applies to basic writing courses, it also applies to any course that requires basic writing. For example, on Jim Brace's assignment for his child welfare course, he reminds the students to "arrange your ideas so that they are easy to follow" without any elaboration. Why should he elaborate? It's a social work course, not a writing course. However, a link to the Exercise Machine would refer the students to the appropriate material and increase Jim's chances of getting presentations that are easy to follow.

The biggest challenge of getting employees to work together online isn't a technological problem�it's a cultural and organizational one.

kinds of systematic thought

narrative thinking

rational thinking

systems thinking

What systems is this problem part of? Which are most applicable to your interests?

What other systems affects it / does it effect?

What policies, rules, or laws affect this problem?
ex: who are the bosses' bosses?

What current social forces or trends affect this problem?

How long has this problem been going on?

What historical trends affect this problem?

Over the years, what other people have tried to solve this problem or improve this situation? What did they do? What happened?

Warning: circular reasoning

Resist stating your problem as the absence of a solution you've already figured out. If you use such circular reasoning, it's easy to ignore contradictory evidence because you've already jumped to conclusions. While common, this begging of the question makes a mockery of the process.

problem solving process

define the problem

mental maps

metaphors

determine the causes

evaluate the alternatives

plan the strategy

decision-making process

A spa tries to create life as it should be lived: get enough exercise, relax, eat right, and feast the senses. In academia, we call this stuff the Liberal Arts: solve problems, think clearly, know what's going on, make things look good.

Tip | Regardless of what they say, organizations don't usually reward independent thinkers.

research

analysis

While individuals' concept maps may be highly personal and ideosyncratic, some conventional tools have been accepted to simplify them and make them comparable.

The folks at Mind Tools have some terrific summaries of a standard collection of management analysis techniques that have proven successful in many organizations.

Grid Analysis - Making a Choice Where Many Factors Must be Balanced

Decision Tree Analysis - Choosing Between Options by Projecting Likely Outcomes





Customhouse concepts and buzzwords	Charthouse trends and currents	Boardwalk people and communities
Lighthouse information and research	Shoreline issues and policies	Docks systems and processes


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modified: September 25, 2001 by Douglas Anderson \| toLearn.net http://RicciStreet.net/port80/docks/management/index.html

on Port 80: the harbor at the end of Ricci Street

Welcome to Management

alphabet soup

ERP -- enterprise resource planning

The Vocabulary of Management

what we could do

what we have to do

how to do it

organizations

How do we organize our work?

Big Ideas

Forecasting Innovative Technologies
and
Managing the Risks

Readings

paradigms

planning for the future

risk

innovation

innovation

managerial styles and corporate cultures

management styles

Dimensions of style

diffusion curves

Advice for managing wannadots

How do we organize the workplace?

kinds of systematic thought

narrative thinking

rational thinking

systems thinking

problem solving process

define the problem

mental maps

metaphors

determine the causes

evaluate the alternatives

plan the strategy

decision-making process

research

analysis

on Port 80: the harbor at the end of Ricci Street

Welcome to Management

alphabet soup

ERP -- enterprise resource planning

The Vocabulary of Management

what we could do

what we have to do

how to do it

organizations

How do we organize our work?

Big Ideas

Forecasting Innovative Technologies and Managing the Risks

Readings

paradigms

planning for the future

risk

innovation

innovation

managerial styles and corporate cultures

management styles

Dimensions of style

diffusion curves

Advice for managing wannadots

How do we organize the workplace?

kinds of systematic thought

narrative thinking

rational thinking

systems thinking

problem solving process

define the problem

mental maps

metaphors

determine the causes

evaluate the alternatives

plan the strategy

decision-making process

research

analysis

Forecasting Innovative Technologies
and
Managing the Risks