Soft Statements vs Hard Reality

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If your company is like most, your mission statement and set of corporate approved values portray your company as being very compassionate. The picture painted is that people who work at your organization are more like family members than employees. The family will take care of itself and protect itself from all those not part of the family. While these words sound very "Mafia-esque" the messaging demonstrates that your organization is a great place to work.

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Leveraging Your Ecosystem for Better Peripheral Vision

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In an IT organization, peripheral vision is needed. The technology field is moving too quickly and has too much business impact to be ignored. At the same time, the amount and degree of activity which is squarely in front of IT leaders demands a very large amount of attention. What is needed is a mechanism to give the IT leadership peripheral vision - understanding what is coming up on them external to what is capturing their immediate attention.

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How Healthy is Your IT Ecosystem?

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As we have all learned, in nature a healthy ecosystem benefits all involved. When any part of the ecosystem is in ill health, in time all other aspects of the ecosystem will suffer. An IT organization operates in a similar manner. When all aspects of the IT ecosystem operate in harmony it operates much more effectively and efficiently.

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Physics of IT - Force of Headwinds

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We never really begin any of our endeavors in an organization from a point of total calm. There are many forces at play, internal and external, which cause us fight headwinds in all that we do. In physics, we can calculate the net force in effect through vector arithmetic. From this set of calculations we learn that forces compound in both direction and magnitude resulting in the net force in play.

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Physics of IT - Acceleration

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Acceleration is defined as the change in velocity (velocity is equivalent to rate of change). In practical terms an object which is moving at a given velocity can increase it's velocity with an external force being applied (pressing an accelerator). The velocity can also be reduced with an external force being applied (pressing a brake). In our swimming pool example, if we were to increase the temperature to heat in the water in the pool, or move more water to heating elements (external forces) we can accelerate the rate of change

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Physics of IT - How Massive is my IT Organization?

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As we have moved from an industrial to informational mindset, the pendulum has swung somewhat. While capabilities are still paramount, the bulk associated with what is required to provide these capabilities (assets and headcount) is no longer seen as necessarily being required. Over the last several years being nimble has been a mandate (spoken or unspoken). Use of external labor and business process outsourcing is seen as a way of providing capability while shedding mass (becoming more nimble). Cloud computing, similarly, is seen as a way to provide assets to an organization without directly adding mass to the organization.

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Physics of IT - Mass (of Capabilities)

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While certainly not as straight forward as inventorying people or assets, the capabilities of the IT organization provide is another form of mass. Capabilities add process processes to the people and the technology (Vaughan Merlyn has a great post on differentiating capabilities from processes) and in so doing provide a business perspective of the scope of value provided by the IT organization. By cataloguing the capabilities of an IT organization it is possible to assess the mass this set of capabilities provides.

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