Agilization

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Back in the saddle
2008-06-04 22:27:00
I confess, I've not had time to look at my blog page for a number of weeks due to the number of plates we're all currently keeping in the air at NDMC. It's been a busy time organising the new offices, keeping the consulting projects rolling in and helping to establish Encanvas SA. Glad to see Anthony and the guys are really finding their feet now with Encanvas and closing their first deals.Promise to spend a bit more time in July blogging and catching up with what's been going on with my family whilst I've been chained to the desk. Is that.. 'sky' outside? Has it been there all along?Agilization is the new book from Ian Tomlin, theoritician and business management consultant. Ian is a co-founder of NDMC Ltd (www.ndmc.uk.com).
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My Web 2.0 Trip
2008-03-25 18:05:00
I went to New York for the first time in my life last week to attend a conference on Web 2 .0 called AJAXWorld08. New York was probably as I expected it. In some parts you could smell the money, whilst in other areas it was obviously lacking. Amidst the very thoughtful layout of streets organized into a grid system (almost Milton Keynes like in its logic) one encountered examples of transport networks that appear to have evolved organically, untamed by man.I have to say the conference was well organized. There was a rich tapestry of Web 2.0 speakers and a great many brave young start-ups. But the focus of the conference was deeply technical and appeared very light on corporate interest. Where were all of the end-users? It points to the fact that the IT industry is very good at convincing itself about the next big thing but can leave the business world behind. This absence of ?business context? left me naturally feeling like the proverbial square pin surrounded by round holes....
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Frictionless IT
2008-03-10 22:43:00
I like to spend much of my time in board rooms helping management teams to develop an understanding of their customer value and golden threads that will focus the energy of the enterprise towards its success. Through a series of workshops we will reach a small number of objectives and key performance indicators that will form the basis of a sustainable method of managing performance.When the time comes to try to find the data to populate these KPIs, it is at this moment for management teams that the challenges of getting information the last mile really start to hit. So we have a meeting with IT. They tell us that some of the information exists but it has never been brought together in that way before so it might ?be difficult?. They say that for some of the newer KPIs the data has never been gathered before. Then one of the department heads says that he has some of the information on a spreadsheet. Another department head says the same. Then as we finally reach the end of th...

McKinsey is still No.1
2008-02-01 08:47:00
I'd just like to pay a small tribute to the guys and girls at McKinsey that contribute to McKinsey Quarterly. I have been surprised how frequently the insights that NDMC has captured in Europe - and our interpretations of those insights towards market change and enterprise behaviors - so frequently get represented (and are often better described) in the content of the McKinsey Quarterly. I'd specifically like to draw your attention to Lowell L. Bryan who has been doing some great work in exposing the topic of organizational design and helping business leaders to come to terms with new market behaviors. Lowell has authored an excellent book on the topic and his endeavors encouraged me to finally get on and complete Agilization.Yet again this month, Nick Lawrie and I were delighted to read that McKinsey has been researching peer-to-peer collaboration and collective intelligence. Their Quarterly Report titled How Businesses Are Using Web 2.0 describes the findings of a global sur...

AJAXWorld Event
2008-01-30 09:38:00
I'm delighted to be attending the AJAXWorld event in New York and to meet some of the other thought leaders in the area of RIAs and Enterprise Mashups. It looks like situtational applications are finally getting some attention. My speech will focus on the work Encanvas has done in Europe to deliver enterprise applications without coding and I' m really looking forward to comparing notes with some of the other software companies that are driving change in USA.Agilization is the new book from Ian Tomlin, theoritician and business management consultant. Ian is a co-founder of NDMC Ltd (www.ndmc.uk.com).
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Situational Applications and Agilization
2008-01-20 19:58:00
I was delighted to have the opportunity to interview Nick and Andrew Lawrie of Encanvas. Here's the interview.The new 2.0 release of encanvas 07 ships in February and includes a host of new features. Ian Tomlin investigates how encanvas is stepping up its technology lead in enterprise situational applications software in the face of a growing pack of enterprise mashup and situational application software vendors.Long before people were talking about enterprise 2.0 and mashups the problem of enabling information workers to access and use information in ways that made sense to them existed. And before the hype-cycle of mashups started to rear its head in the United States, people around the world were working on practical solutions that would help to break down operating silos within corporations, make them more agile and finally give information workers the tools to serve themselves and become more productive. What has happened over the past 18 months is that the IT sector has be...
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composite application frameworks come of age
2007-08-15 21:38:00
Gosh is that the time!It has taken me a while to get back to blogging. Some really good reasons for by blogging holiday. I finally finished the book AGILIZATION which managed to get listed in Amazon and WHSmiths websites even before the ink had dried. At NDMC we've had a really busy time launching our new website at www.ndmc.uk.com that we're really happy with - and we've launched IT Directions too, which is a breakfast club for IT leaders across Europe that helps IT manufacturers and suppliers to get a better understanding of the European IT market - particularly at SME level.And with all of this going on we've been putting the finishing touches to the 2007 edition of encanvas. And we are SO excited about the new multi-sourcing capabilities and the new-look interface.When we first trialled encanvas in 2005, few IT people had heard the term composite application framework. Even fewer had come across mash-ups! But suddenly, with media interested fanned by the huge investment...
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Does enterprise 2.0 mean that time is up for Microsoft Vista?
2007-03-17 19:27:00
BI 2.0, CRM 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 - read most IT journals and you would be left thinking that every area of IT is trying desperately to re-invent itself. If you were a cynic, you would probably put this down to software companies seeking to re-launch acronyms that never really lived up to expectations first time round. But the 2.0 'thing' goes deeper than that.Hype-curves might be the bread and butter of IT marketers, but there is something genuinely different and somewhat more transparent about what's happening to corporate IT at the moment. It's nothing less than a user-driven revolution. You see, in most medium-to-large organizations, there is an enormous gap between IT departments and the business. This is not a new problem either - it goes right back to the dawn of business computing. On one side of the page, development managers feel like they're constantly chasing moving targets set by line managers that don't understand what they're asking for. At the same time, the...
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The emergence of the widget software industry has to be seen as a paradigm
2007-03-07 13:56:04
It didn?t really matter where in the world you lived in the 1990?s, you always knew that the place people made films was Hollywood and the place where people made software was Silicon Valley. But times in the software industry are changing and commercial markets for software are about to turn another corner.The software industry has always been centred on people that understood how ?to programme?. These clever individuals that have the skills to type characters into a script and then see the script magically create user interface screens, business logic rules, reports, visualisations (etc.) have consistently got better at serving up tools that non programmers could use to input data and produce documents.But whatever tools programmers produce, they never appear able to meet all of the discerning demands of modern information workers. The world of competition is simply moving too fast. And this creates a very expensive and ?high risk? short-fall in the ability of the creatives, the h...
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Hats off to Nicholas Negroponte and his $100 laptop
2007-03-07 13:56:04
Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) http://www.laptop.org established to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves. OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte with a core of Media Lab veterans, but quickly expanded to include a wide range of exceptionally talented and dedicated people from academia as well as industry, the arts, business, and the open-source community.The scheme is hoping to put low-cost computers into the hands of people in developing countries. Ultimately the project's backers hope the machines could sell for as little as $100 (£55). Test machines are expected to reach children in February as the project builds towards a more formal launch.Ask any primary school head in any corner of the world and they will probably tell you that?s a good idea. Like Nicholas, I think the idea that school children are still being encouraged to learn through Microsoft products is ...
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When Capitalism Was Cool
2007-02-23 07:50:04
When I look out of the kitchen window to over-filled refuse bins that are brimming with the often unnecessary packaging of our food and consumer products - it?s easy to forget that at one time capitalism and the consumer society was cool!Consumerism was great fun in the 1950?s with snazzy kitchenware, pink Hoovers and cars for the average Jo. Industry in the UK was already starting its slow decline but the advertising sector was finding its feet. The 1950s was the age of the consumer. The post-war boom meant that in 1950, average household income was double or triple what it had been in 1935 and this brought massive changes in the home; it was out with the old and in with the new. Open-plan living was introduced, and the fitted kitchen with its brand new appliances was every housewife's ambition.The ?VIP? worldDid you ever see the great 1961 blockbuster film comedy featuring Rock Hudson and Doris Day called ?Lover Come Back?? Rock and Doris are rival advertising executives with dif...
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Double Loop Learning
2007-02-23 07:50:04
Double loop learning is really important in business. As Dr. Martin Vasey, Knoweldge Director at EY would say, "It's about doing things differently, not just doing things better."Academics describe these two concepts as single loop and double loop learning:?Suppose an organisation manufactures a product X. When the employees of that organisation detect and attempt to correct error in order to manufacture the product X, that is single loop learning; but when they begin to confront the question whether product X should be manufactured, that is double loop learning, because they are now questioning underlying organisation policies and objectives.? Sourece: Argyris, C. (1977). Double-loop learning in organisations. Harvard business review, 55(5), 115-125. Whilst single loop learning makes improvements possible, double loop learning provides the opportunity for step-change which is a fundamental characteristic of successful 21st century businesses.Agilization is the new book from Ian To...
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Google's $10 computing revolution
2007-02-23 07:50:04
Google, the fastest-growing company in the history of the world, announced late in 2006 that it was inviting subscribers to register for a personal domain at a flat $10 per year. Whilst it?s not uncommon to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that will provide you with a domain for $10, with Google you get much, much more. Infact, the Google offer represents a virtualized data center built for one.And what do you get for your money?For starters you get a web-site hosting, web-based IT infrastructure, a personalised portal and intranet, an email service, instant messaging, calendar and scheduling software, web-site design software; and, by utilizing some of the other free Google services you can also obtain web-site analytics, word processor and spreadsheet software along with all the necessary storage, data backups, security and maintenance you would expect from a corporate service provider. And this is no pipe dream. At the time of writing, Google has a market capitalization...
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How Encanvas could have saved Nationwide £980,000 in a single day
2007-02-23 07:50:04
It must be ?gutting? to the customers of Nation wide to find out that they will be soon forking out close to £1 million to the FSA as a financial penalty for a lapse in the company?s data security that they had nothing to do with. ?Doubly gutting? after being told that their personal information is now somewhere in the ether because it was being held on a laptop stolen from an employee's home in August, 2006!Those that live outside the corporate world must be thinking how on earth something like this could possibly happen with all of the alleged security protocols that corporations are being encouraged to adopt. How on earth could the personal information of 11 million customers find its way onto the hard-drive of a laptop that could be so easily lost?I suspect there are many business people upon hearing this story will have a wry smile on their face in the knowledge that holding business strategic data on hard drives is not so uncommon. They probably see the practice going on ins...
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A new day, a new blog
2007-02-15 19:47:02
I've got a few blogs running around the WWW but this one is dedicated to the subjects that I cover in my latest book - Agilization - that gets published by MB2000 in October 2007.Here I'm going to introduce some of the key topics over the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the site for changes. It promises to be a busy year!Ian.Agilization is the new book from Ian Tomlin, theoritician and business management consultant. Ian is a co-founder of NDMC Ltd (www.ndmc.uk.com).
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When society influences business
2007-02-15 19:47:02
I started to write the book Agilization, not because I originally intended to write a book about how organizations can become agile (after-all why should they need to?); I wrote it initially to put down on paper the impact that individualism and the participative society is likely to have on corporations - and therefore, what they could do about it.So, I'll start by describing these two concepts.Individualism is about how new generations expect to be able to assert their individual personality on their life-choices, who they work for, what they buy, who they are friends with.The term participative society describes how technology is making it possible for individuals to share their thoughts and experiences in an always-connected digital environment that makes it easier for a single voice to have global influence.There you go, didn't even take a page to cover it!This is an excerpt from chapter that didn't make it into my book 'Agilization' because it explains in almost too much ...
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In order to agilize, western world corporations must be able to develop 'th
2007-02-15 19:47:02
I?ve described in this document why having the ability to 'throw away' applications is critical to business agilization and the regeneration of competition in western world corporations.Any artist will tell you, for every master-piece you?ll find a pile of canvases on the floor that didn?t work. The nature of creativity is that in order to learn you have to make mistakes. But until now, this iterative learning process has been a nightmare for IT people. Simply put, it?s almost impossible to be creative and not make mistakes. The thought of hard-coding a software application only to throw it away in a couple of weeks?!! That?s why we need throw-away applications.I suspect Encanvas is the first of many software products designed to liberate the every day human being from having to become a programming geek in order to develop new ways of gathering, sharing and using information. It?s definitely one of the first commercial products to encourage the creative process of building light-...
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Just in case today is one of those days!
2007-02-15 19:47:02
With sincere thanks to Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital, for allowing me to use this thoughtful sound-bite for my book 'Agilization'. It has provided me with the necessary confidence to keep going on those days when you just feel like you're pushing elephants up the stairs![Entrepreneurialism]?It?s about having the confidence to persist in a vision of the market and your contribution to it, which is not widely understood in the early stages. I have learned to trust my inner knowledge, but one must have patience and not be swayed by what others think.? Agilization is the new book from Ian Tomlin, theoritician and business management consultant. Ian is a co-founder of NDMC Ltd (www.ndmc.uk.com).
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