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ADM - CMDB

ADM - Application Dependency Mapping - Remote Deployment, Hot Deployment, Application/ Site monitoring, Product/Project Launch Process, Enterprise Level Application Management

CMDB - Configuration Management Database

ITIL - IT Infrastructure Libraries

Configuraion Files, Device Level Management, Port Allocation Tables, Analyze and determine Application Dependencies

Security Aspects - Network, Corporate IAM (Identity Access Management), VPN, SecureID, Network Deployment

Network Management Tool to take care of certain level of business process and execute rule/state based transition.

Connect the dots between NMS, ADM, CMDB, ITIL, Security

Randy Pausch

In Memoriam:
Randy Pausch, Innovative Computer Scientist at Carnegie Mellon,

Launched Education Initiatives, Gained Worldwide Acclaim for Last Lecture
PITTSBURGH—Randy Pausch, renowned computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, died July 25 of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

Celebrated in his field for co-founding the pioneering Entertainment Technology Center and for creating the innovative educational software tool known as "Alice," Pausch earned his greatest worldwide fame for his inspirational "Last Lecture."

That life-affirming lecture, a call to his students and colleagues to go on without him and do great things, was delivered at Carnegie Mellon on Sept. 18, 2007, a few weeks after Pausch learned he had just months to live. Titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," the humorous and heartfelt talk was videotaped, and unexpectedly spread around the world via the Internet. Tens of millions of people have since viewed video footage of it.

Pausch, who had regularly won awards in the field of computer science, spent the final months of his life being lauded in arenas far beyond his specialty. ABC News declared him one of its three "Persons of the Year" for 2007. TIME magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. On thousands of Web sites, people wrote essays about what they had learned from him. His book based on the lecture became a #1 bestseller internationally, translated into 30 languages

Key Capabilties for mitigating Competency Trap

Excerpt from the meeting at BQF Innovation Unit to discuss issues of Competency Traps

The session was led by Richard Granger of Arthur D Little. He presented a comprehensive review of the topic and then facilitated a workshop where delegates assessed their organisational competence in 7 key areas. Competency traps are skills, attributes and things we are proud of, that constrain our thinking. They break down into a Vision trap, a Routinisation trap and Technology traps. Richard advised that the best way to combat these hazards is to open the organisation up to external stimuli. This led into a discussion of many aspects of open innovation and we reviewed what P&G, Rolls-Royce and Philips Research were doing in these areas.

Seven key management capabilities were identified:

1. Innovation Sourcing Strategy
2. Ideas Management
3. Business Intelligence
4. Relationship Management
5. Project Management
6. Competence Management
7. Innovation Culture


By ~ Paul Sloane

Radically Simple IT - HBR

Radically Simple IT - HBR

By designing and deploying enterprise systems in a different way, Japan’s Shinsei Bank turned IT from a constraint into a launchpad for growth.

by David M. Upton and Bradley R. Staats

Enterprise IT projects—both custom and packaged “one size fits most” systems—continue to be a major headache for business leaders. The fundamental problem with these systems is that for the most part, they’re constructed using what programmer and open source champion Eric Raymond dubbed a cathedral approach. Like the great edifices that Europeans erected in the Middle Ages, enterprise IT projects are costly, take a great deal of time, and deliver value only when the project is completed. In the end, they yield systems that are inflexible and cement companies into functioning the way their businesses worked several years ago, when the project started. Despite recent improvements in the flexibility of packaged software, companies often find it exorbitantly expensive and difficult to modify their enterprise systems in order to exploit new business opportunities.

Instead of building systems that are legacy from the day they are turned on, managers can and should develop systems that can be improved—rapidly and continuously—well after they’ve gone live. Over the past decade, we’ve studied the design and implementation of enterprise IT systems and assisted numerous firms with the process. Through our work, we have identified an approach that not only reduces a company’s costs but supports the growth of existing businesses and the launch of new ones. We call it a “path based” approach, because rather than attempting to define all of the specifications for a system before the project is launched, companies focus on providing a path for the system to be developed over time. The approach’s premises are that it is difficult and costly to map out all requirements before a project starts because people often cannot specify everything they’ll need beforehand. Also, unanticipated needs almost always arise once a system is in operation. And persuading people to use and “own” the system after it is up and running is much easier said than done.

In our research, we discovered a standout among the companies applying the path-based method: Japan’s Shinsei Bank. It succeeded in developing and deploying an entirely new enterprise system in one year at a cost of $55 million: That’s one-quarter of the time and about 10% of the cost of installing a traditional packaged system. The new system not only served as a low-cost, efficient platform for running the existing business but also was flexible enough to support the company’s growth into new areas, including retail banking, consumer finance, and a joint venture to sell Indian mutual funds in Japan.

The path-based principles that Shinsei applied in designing, building, and rolling out the system—forging together, not just aligning, business and IT strategies; employing the simplest possible technology; making the system truly modular; letting the system sell itself to users; and enabling users to influence future improvements—are a model for other companies. Some of these principles are variations on old themes while others turn the conventional wisdom on its head.
Born of Necessity

Shinsei came into being when Long-Term Credit Bank, founded by the Japanese government to assist in the rebuilding of the country’s industries after World War II, went bust in 1998 with nearly $40 billion in nonperforming loans. The firm was nationalized, then sold in 2000 to Ripplewood Holdings, a U.S. private equity fund, and renamed Shinsei, which means “new birth.” Ripplewood executives coaxed Masamoto Yashiro, the former chairman of Citibank Japan, out of retirement to lead Shinsei. In addition to deciding to revamp existing commercial-banking operations, Yashiro formulated a plan for revolutionizing retail banking in Japan by offering a value proposition that was unique in the country at that time: high-quality products and services provided on a convenient, easy-to-use, low-cost basis. The strategy called for Shinsei to offer services that were then uncommon in Japan, including ATMs available 24/7 free of charge, internet banking, online foreign-exchange trading, online bilingual banking, and quick service supported by real-time database reconciliation (meaning customers’ accounts were updated immediately after each transaction).

Yashiro felt that the bank needed to move quickly to seize the opportunity in retail banking. However, the firm’s existing IT systems were antiquated and could not even support the bank’s existing corporate business adequately. To address these issues, Yashiro hired his former colleague Dhananjaya “Jay” Dvivedi, who had led IT operations at Citibank Japan, to be chief information officer. Upon taking the job, Dvivedi quickly surrounded himself with a talented core team, most of whom had worked for him previously. Since the recovering bank had limited investment funds, Yashiro gave Dvivedi the mandate to revolutionize IT but with the understanding that his team needed to do it “fast” and “cheap.” Recognizing that they could not fully know what the retail operation would need, the two men agreed that the goal should be to build a system that could scale with growth and adapt to new opportunities that the dynamic business would create.

The conventional choices for building a major enterprise system were two: the “big bang” approach of replacing the current system with an entirely new system and processes all at once or the incremental method of improving or replacing the existing system one small piece at a time. Dvivedi and his team were leery of taking the big bang route, believing it was too risky given the bank’s cash constraints and knowing all too well the problems endemic to such projects. The incremental course, however, which would probably take three to five years, would be far too slow. So they decided to blaze a third path. They would put into place a new, modular infrastructure that at first would function in parallel with but eventually would supersede the current infrastructure. According to traditional IT thinking, this was madness. Much bridging software would have to be developed to span the old and the new, which would require an enormous effort.

But Dvivedi knew from his prior work and his conversations with other CIOs that technical problems were almost never the reason that new IT systems flopped. Human problems were. People typically resist adopting new systems, often because the cost (the effort) outweighs the benefits. To address this, Dvivedi used simple but innovative technology solutions to avoid the wrenching go-live experience. For example, by mimicking the old system’s look and feel at least for a while, Dvivedi and his team were able to speed adoption of the new system.

Mastering the Management System - HBR

Mastering the Management System - from HBR

Successful strategy execution has two basic rules: understand the management cycle that links strategy and operations, and know what tools to apply at each stage of the cycle.

by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

Not long after its successful IPO, the Conner Corporation (not its real name) began to lose its way. The company’s senior executives continued their practice of holding monthly one-day management meetings, but their focus drifted.

The meetings’ agenda called for a discussion of operational issues in the morning and strategic issues in the afternoon. But with the company under pressure to meet quarterly targets, operational items had started to crowd strategy out of the agenda. Inevitably, the review of actual monthly and forecast quarterly financial performance revealed revenues to be lower, and expenses to be higher, than targeted. The worried managers spent hours discussing how to close the gap through pricing initiatives, capacity downsizing, SG&A staff cuts, and sales campaigns. One executive noted, “We have no time for strategy. If we miss our quarterly numbers, we might cease to exist. For us, the long term is the short term.”

Like Conner, all too many companies—including some well-established public corporations—have learned how Gresham’s Law applies to their management meetings: Discussions about bad operations inevitably drive out discussions about good strategy implementation. When companies fall into this trap, they soon find themselves limping along, making or closely missing their numbers each quarter but never examining how to modify their strategy to generate better growth opportunities or how to break the pattern of short-term financial shortfalls. Analysts, investors, and board members start to question the imagination and commitment of the companies’ management.

In our experience, however, breakdowns in a company’s management system, not managers’ lack of ability or effort, are what cause a company’s underperformance. By management system, we’re referring to the integrated set of processes and tools that a company uses to develop its strategy, translate it into operational actions, and monitor and improve the effectiveness of both. The failure to balance the tensions between strategy and operations is pervasive: Various studies done in the past 25 years indicate that 60% to 80% of companies fall short of the success predicted from their new strategies.

By creating a closed-loop management system, companies can avoid such shortfalls. (See the exhibit “How the Closed-Loop Management System Links Strategy and Operations.”) The loop comprises five stages, beginning with strategy development, which involves applying tools, processes, and concepts such as mission, vision, and value statements; SWOT analysis; shareholder value management; competitive positioning; and core competencies to formulate a strategy statement. That statement is then translated into specific objectives and initiatives, using other tools and processes, including strategy maps and balanced scorecards. Strategy implementation, in turn, links strategy to operations with a third set of tools and processes, including quality and process management, reengineering, process dashboards, rolling forecasts, activity-based costing, resource capacity planning, and dynamic budgeting. As implementation progresses, managers continually review internal operational data and external data on competitors and the business environment. Finally, managers periodically assess the strategy, updating it when they learn that the assumptions underlying it are obsolete or faulty, which starts another loop around the system.
Sidebar IconHow the Closed-Loop Management System Links Strategy and Operations

A system such as this must be handled carefully. Often the breakdown occurs right at the beginning, with companies formulating grand strategies that they then fail to translate into goals and targets that their middle and lower managers understand and strive to achieve. Even when companies do formalize their strategic objectives, many still struggle because they do not link these objectives to tools that support the operational improvement processes that ultimately must deliver on the strategy’s objectives. Or, like Conner, they decide to mix discussions of operations and strategy at the same meeting, causing a breakdown in the strategic-learning feedback loop.

In the following pages we draw upon our extensive research and experience advising companies, as well as nonprofit and public sector entities, to describe the design and implementation of a system for strategic planning, operational execution, and feedback and learning. We present a range of tools that managers can apply at the different stages, most developed by other management experts and some of our own design. (See “A Management System Tool Kit” for further reading on the tools discussed.) We will show how these can all be integrated in a system that links the management of strategy and operations.
Sidebar IconA Management System Tool Kit
Stage 1: Develop the Strategy

The management cycle begins with articulating the company’s strategy. This usually takes place at an annual offsite meeting during which the management team either incrementally improves an existing strategy or, on occasion, introduces an entirely new one. (Our experience suggests that strategies generally have three to five years of useful life.) Developing an entirely new strategy may take two sets of meetings, each lasting two to three days. At the first, executives should reexamine the company’s fundamental business assumptions and its competitive environment. After some homework and research, the executives will hold the second set of meetings and decide on the new strategy. Typically, the CEO, other corporate officers, heads of business and regional units, and senior functional staff attend these strategy sessions. The agenda should explore the following questions:

The Experience Trap - HBS INSEAD

The Experience Trap - HBS INSEAD

As projects get more complicated, managers stop learning from their experience. It is important to understand how that happens and how to change it.

by Kishore Sengupta, Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove

If you were looking for an experienced manager to head up a software development team, Alex would be at the top of your short list. A senior manager, Alex has spent most of his career running software projects. His first responsibility was developing scientific software for NASA, and since then, he has overseen ever more complex projects for commercial enterprises and government agencies.

Alex was typical of the several hundred project managers who participated in our research initiative on experience-based learning in complex environments. We invited him to test his skills by playing a computer-based game that entails managing a simulated software project from start to finish—making the plans, monitoring and guiding progress, and observing the consequences. We set goals for him: finish on time and within budget, and obtain the highest possible quality (as measured by the number of defects remaining).

Alex’s decisions and outcomes were representative of the group as a whole. He started with a small team of four engineers and focused mostly on development work. That tactic paid off in the short run. The team’s productivity was high and development progressed quickly. However, when the size of the project grew beyond initial estimates, problems cropped up. Because Alex still chose to keep the team small, the engineers had to work harder to stay on track. Consequently, they made many mistakes and experienced burnout and attrition. Alex then tried to hire more people, but this took time, as did assimilating the new hires. The project soon fell behind schedule, and at that point Alex’s lack of attention to quality assurance in the early phases started to show up in snowballing numbers of software errors. Fixing them required more time and attention. When the project was finally completed, it was late, over budget, and riddled with defects.

After the game, we asked Alex to reflect on the simulation. Did the project’s growth take him by surprise? Was he shocked that the number of defects was so high or that hiring became difficult to manage? Alex—like most of his fellow participants—replied that such surprises and shocks have, unfortunately, become regular occurrences in most of the projects in which he’s been involved.

Quality and personnel headaches are not what most companies expect when they put seasoned veterans like Alex in charge of important projects. At this stage of their careers, they should know how to efficiently address problems—if not prevent them altogether. What we discovered in our experiments, however, was that managers with experience did not produce high-caliber outcomes. In our research, we used the simulation game to examine the decision processes of managers in a variety of contexts. Our results strongly suggest that there was something wrong with the way Alex and the other project managers learned from their experiences during the game. They did not appear to take into account the consequences of their previous decisions as they made new decisions, and they didn’t change their approach when their actions produced poor results.

Our debriefings indicated that the challenges presented in the game were familiar to the participants. We asked them to rate the extent to which the game replicated their experiences on real-life projects on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 meant “completely.” The average score was 4.32, suggesting that our experiments did accurately reflect the realities of software projects. So, though the managers had encountered similar situations on their jobs in the past, they still struggled with them in the simulations. We came to the conclusion that they had not really learned from their real-life project work, either.

In the following pages we’ll identify three likely causes for this apparent breakdown in learning, and we’ll propose a number of steps that organizations can take to enable learning to kick in again.
Why Learning Breaks Down

When anyone makes a decision, he or she draws on a preexisting stock of knowledge called a mental model. It consists largely of assumptions about cause-and-effect relationships in the environment. As people observe what happens as a result of their decisions, they learn new facts and make new discoveries about environmental relationships. Discoveries that people feel can be generalized to other situations are fed back, or “appropriated,” into their mental models. On the face of it, the process seems quite scientific—people form a hypothesis about a relationship between a cause and an effect, act accordingly, and then interpret the results from their actions to confirm or revise the hypothesis. The problem is that the approach seems to be effective only in relatively simple environments, where cause-and-effect relationships are straightforward and easily discovered. In more complex environments, such as software projects, the learning cycle frequently breaks down. In the experiments we carried out with our study participants, we identified three types of real-world complications that were associated with the cycle’s breakdown.

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time - From HBR

The science of stamina has advanced to the point where individuals, teams, and whole organizations can, with some straightforward interventions, significantly increase their capacity to get things done.

by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy

Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.

Wanner’s experience is not uncommon. Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which inevitably take a toll on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. That leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of distraction, high turnover rates, and soaring medical costs among employees. We at the Energy Project have worked with thousands of leaders and managers in the course of doing consulting and coaching at large organizations during the past five years. With remarkable consistency, these executives tell us they’re pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up and increasingly feel they are at a breaking point.

The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible.

To effectively reenergize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated—and able—to bring more of themselves to work every day. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.

The rituals and behaviors Wanner established to better manage his energy transformed his life. He set an earlier bedtime and gave up drinking, which had disrupted his sleep. As a consequence, when he woke up he felt more rested and more motivated to exercise, which he now does almost every morning. In less than two months he lost 15 pounds. After working out he now sits down with his family for breakfast. Wanner still puts in long hours on the job, but he renews himself regularly along the way. He leaves his desk for lunch and usually takes a morning and an afternoon walk outside. When he arrives at home in the evening, he’s more relaxed and better able to connect with his wife and children.

Establishing simple rituals like these can lead to striking results across organizations. At Wachovia Bank, we took a group of employees through a pilot energy management program and then measured their performance against that of a control group. The participants outperformed the controls on a series of financial metrics, such as the value of loans they generated. They also reported substantial improvements in their customer relationships, their engagement with work, and their personal satisfaction. In this article, we’ll describe the Wachovia study in a little more detail. Then we’ll explain what executives and managers can do to increase and regularly renew work capacity—the approach used by the Energy Project, which builds on, deepens, and extends several core concepts developed byTony’s former partner Jim Loehr in his seminal work with athletes.
Linking Capacity and Performance at Wachovia

Most large organizations invest in developing employees’ skills, knowledge, and competence. Very few help build and sustain their capacity—their energy—which is typically taken for granted. In fact, greater capacity makes it possible to get more done in less time at a higher level of engagement and with more sustainability. Our experience at Wachovia bore this out.

Competency Trap : Stanford GSB

The Agony of Victory
Why a company's greatest peril is often its own success.
Business 2.0 Magazine
By Jeffrey Pfeffer, Business 2.0 Magazine columnist

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- While dissecting the Democratic party's landslide victory in November, many pundits have criticized the Republicans for making strategic and operational mistakes leading up to the midterm elections.

There were plenty of both, I'm sure, but what I see when I look at what happened last fall is one of the most intractable problems to beset corporations, nonprofits, and even pro ball clubs: falling prey to what's known to management scholars as a "competency trap."

The concept is deceptively simple. Organizations try things. If what they do succeeds, they "learn" that what they have done breeds success. So they persist, becoming ever more focused in what they do, and ever more specialized in the skills they acquire.


How to succeed in 2007

But two things invariably happen to undermine success. Competitors soon learn how to do the same thing, and conditions change, so that what worked in the past no longer applies. Companies have trouble adapting because they often build competencies that don't advance new products, markets, or strategies.

Hence the phrase "competency trap."

Chrysler, for instance, virtually invented the minivan during the 1980s and made a fortune from it. Then came SUVs and hybrids and more recently the spike in gasoline prices.

America's car-buying tastes changed, but Chrysler's factories had been configured to produce a particular style of car, and innovation had, of necessity, been narrowly focused on improvements in minivans. In the meantime, other car companies got into minivans, increasing the competition.

Under pressure, Chrysler (Charts) merged with Daimler-Benz.

There are plenty of instances of competency traps playing out in professional sports. Bill Walsh is credited with inventing the "West Coast offense" made famous by Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s and '90s. But when defenses figured out how to respond, and imitation by other teams eroded the advantage of this particular strategy, the 49ers lost their dominance.

Avoiding getting trapped by our own skill and success is a difficult, almost impossible, task. That's because one common recommendation - to keep innovating and doing things differently - has its own set of problems.

It's costly, and it can be just as prone to failure. But three strategies can help avoid competency traps.

The first is to avoid excessive specialization. Toyota has never put all its eggs in one basket - it makes high-quality trucks, minivans, even hybrids. By building a broad range of competencies and knowledge, Toyota can react quickly to changes in market conditions.

The second is to develop peripheral vision, which entails following Andy Grove's advice that "only the paranoid survive." Markets don't change all at once. Pay attention to the facts, not to what you want to believe.

Finally, understanding that a company's greatest strength can become its greatest weakness when circumstances change can help build a mind-set of continuous learning and vigilance.

No company, team, or political party can be equally good at everything. But understanding how success breeds its own problems, and acting on that knowledge, can help mitigate the problem.

Business 2.0 columnist Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.