Are bloggers internet terrorists?

I think a good frame of reference for this question is propaganda during WWII. When information was more heavily regulated, it was easier for Hitler to control his message. Blogging provides an easy medium for people to disseminate information, good bad or otherwise. 

The important distinction, here is that propoganda took advantage of the fact that people had no access to other sources of information with which they could verify or discredit what they heard. Today, we have unlimited access to good information and it is our responsibility to verify what we read in a blog. 

Bloggers are only internet terrorists if people let them be. That is, bloggers only harm those who are willing to put faith in the information they hear from a less than credible source. 

Godengo - where is it going?

I wonder about Godengo's business model and if they run the risk of going the way of other online services consulting firms. For my strategy class we are reading the case of Razorfish, a consulting firm that saw its revenues skyrocket in the late 90's, early 2000's and then saw a dramatic drop in demand for its services as its clients began to build internal capability for the services it provided. 

As the magazine industry moves towards a much stronger online presence and much smaller print circulation, I would not be surprised if magazines begin to develop the capabilities in-house to publish and manage their online content. The recent trend in new journalism ventures has been to skip right over the print phase and go directly online (politico.com, slate.com, etc.). Since print is such a losing proposition, it is hard to believe that any firm would outsource the capability to manage a huge part of its revenue base to a consulting firm when they could manage it internally.

Time will tell...

Lean and SOA - can they be friends?

I'm still struggling with the different strategies I'm hearing from different professors about process management and improvement. While lean production calls for a reduction in technology in order to simplify the process, SOA seems to improve the process by optimizing technology solutions. I can see the benefits of both, but I'm not sure that they can work together as well as Doug was saying they could. The point of lean is to expose the waste in the system and make it visible to the users of the system. Implementing a technology that requires user to input information both adds a step, and hides the information from the users. Lean is decidedly anti-technology solutions for this reason. 

SOA, on the other hand, automates decision-making processes. I think there is a time and a place for this, but I don't think it is always the right way to go about optimizing all processes. 

The constraints of the BCM

I have a few criticizms of the BCM and heat map. In studying strategy, we learn about core competencies. We learn that it is important to evaluate the core competency of your organization and to protect this competency and to enhance it ahead of your competitors. It is the thing you have that your competitors do not. It is complex and inimitable and it might not fit into a grid or be something you can put into words. But it is essential that you make decisions around it, you expand with it in mind, and you never outsource it.  

The BCM requires you to break down the components of your business both vertically and horizontally. It ignores the relationships between departments and the interconnectedness of the tasks and responsibilities. The heat map assigns priority to certain areas based on their potential to affect revenues, costs and how differentiated they are as a competency. 

While I can see where this is a useful exercise, I think it over-simplifies the structure of the organization too much. Targeting one business component at one level of accountability ignores the fact that a competency is not necessarily as neat and clean as the BCM might suggest. It segments parts of the business as if they function alone. I believe that corporations create a competitive advantage not based on how they carry out certain tasks at certain levels and how responsibility and accountability are measured, but rather how they structure and interconnect the different departments and levels of their organization in a way that gives them an edge on their competitors. 

IT delivery

One might think that a software development company would have a firm handle on what IT delivery strategy to pursue. At my old company, this was not the case. The company struggled with where its core competencies could best be employed. The prevailing attitude was, "we are software engineers first and foremost, and we know our business best. Therefore, we will always be able to develop a software solution internally better than any contractor ever could." Unfortunately, this attitude became crippling when we needed solutions to problems and did not have the appropriate resources to address these problems. Ad-hoc systems were developed and they did not talk to one another. Additionally, we purchased a few software programs that could not integrate with our in-house system. There was a failure to recognize future needs in programs that were developed early on in the company's life, which created serious issues when it came time to upgrade and change the system. 

On the surface, it might look like these software engineers simply did not know what they were doing. In fact, these engineers were very talented, but their skills did not transfer well into database management, HR, acounting and CRM software. They were highly specialized engineers who created a niche market software to help individual investors and investment clubs learn about investing and manage portfolios of individual stocks. 

The conclusion I draw from this example is that it is important for a company to recognize its competencies when it decides on an IT delivery platform. Don't let pride get in the way of good decision-making and know when to say that someone else probably has a better solution to your problem than you do. 

AutoCAD...not good enough?

It is pretty incredible that with all of the technology tools available to them, architects have not come up with a system like Mortenson has any sooner. It's frightening to think that, without an integrated review of the plans, the Twins' stadium would have been off by so much. Perhaps architects (and bridge builders?) should look to this industry leader to see what advantages they could gain by employing a system like the one Mortenson uses to truly integrate the myriad of electrical, plumbing, architectural and structral plans in a building project.