Links for August 12 2012
- Balancing the IT Budget – OCDQ Blog – Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality by Jim Harris
Quote: Although it’s impossible to completely balance the IT budget, and IT debt doesn’t cause an overall budget deficit, reducing costs associated with business-enabling technology does increase the potential for a surplus of financial success for the enterprise.
- What is Agility? | Jim Highsmith.com
Quote: Some people mistakenly assume that agility connotes a lack of structure, but the absence of structure creates chaos. Conversely, too much structure creates rigidity. Complexity theory tells us that innovation—creating something new in ways that we can’t fully anticipate—an emergent result—occurs most readily at the balance point between chaos and order, between flexibility and stability. Scientists believe that emergence, the creation of novelty from agent interaction, happens most readily at this “edge of chaos.” The idea of enough structure, but not too much, drives agile managers to continually ask the question, “How little structure can I get away with?” Too much structure stifles creativity. Too little structure breeds inefficiency.
- Everything Will Be Connected, Everything Will Be Hacked – Bright B. Simons – Harvard Business Review
Quote: Clearly, there are only two inevitabilities: EVERYTHING you own or use will be connected to the “info-grid” and EVERYTHING will be hacked. The only way to break this inevitability cycle is to stop being competitive, innovative and responsive. Which is the same thing as asking you and your company to close shop and pack off to a deserted island.
- Stop Fighting Your Culture – Jon R. Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline Kronley – Harvard Business Review
Quote: Because deeply embedded cultures change slowly over time, working with and within the culture you have invariably is the best approach. The overall change effort will be far less jarring for all concerned. Simply put, rather than attacking the heart of your company, you will be making the most of its positive forces as your culture evolves in the right way.
- Marketing Is Dead – Bill Lee – Harvard Business Review
Quote: Traditional marketing may be dead, but the new possibilities of peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing, hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.
- The Marketing/IT Tug-of-War
Quote: It’s vital, then, to understand the sorts of objections a CTO will make to marketing technologies, and how to address these concerns. By meeting these objections when (or even before) the objection is raised, we stand a substantially better shot at deftly moving the process forward and being seen as a solution that is easy to work with.
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