Category Archives: Strategy
Do You Have A Risk Mitigation Strategy in Place?
Based on some of the questions being emailed to me from this morning’s post on Identifying IT Risk, I thought I’d create a quick poll to get some realtime input from readers. So the question is “Does your organization have a risk mitigation strategy in place?”
Identifying and Managing IT Risk
There is no doubt that we live in a world of high risk especially when it comes to the technology that we use in our businesses. I often encourage clients to take steps to manage and mitigate risk so to avoid costly and disruptive issues in the future. I am preparing for a presentation in November where I will be speaking about risk in IT and thought I’d share a few thoughts here.
The first step in beginning to manage & mitigate risk is the ability to identify risk. There are three key areas or categories that you should consider when assessing your own IT environment, which is comprised of people, processes and technology (don’t just focus on the tech or you will undoubtedly miss important risk areas).
What Should RIM Focus On?
By now you’ve heard that RIM performance has again fallen short of expectations. If their performance wasn’t bad enough, 
it also seems that the overall brand is also taking a serious hit – so they are losing market-share and mind-share. Not a good combination of market dynamics.
A post I’d previously written about with regard to building an Ecosystem has had some good discussion and I got numerous emails from readers that sparked some thoughts for me. In that article I spoke about the need to create a strategic core access point (SCAP) and referenced what others had done. People in the discussion thread asked a good question, “what would RIM’s SCAP be? push email? security?”
I would say that what RIM should focus on is their Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). You can’t built an ecosystem from a device. Pinning all hopes on QNX powered phones or some version 2 of the Playbook will yield the same results as we see today. What RIM should do is leverage the SCAP that they and they alone control at this point. That is the BES. IT departments are falling out of love with RIM phones but the BES still remains a key enterprise strength. Of course if RIM’s market share continues to drop, there will be little to no need for a BES in the coming years. What RIM should do and do quickly is open up their BES to all the handhelds. That is their SCAP. From there they can build an ecosystem. They can drive security measures to Android and iPhone devices. They can fend off the threat that Microsoft is sure to present shortly with the update to the phones and the partnership with Nokia. From the BES they can begin to build an enterprise ecosystem. To do otherwise will only continue the downward trend they’ve found themselves over the past 12-18 months.
Social Media is About Conversation
It came up in conversation twice in the month of August the discussion of social media and its use in the enterprise. In both instances the people I was having lunch with were telling me about the social media strategy their respective organization had put into place. As 
I listened it dawned on me that the discussion was entirely about the tools being used.
“This is what we’ve done with Facebook” “
This is how many Tweets we are doing each day.”
“This is why we aren’t blogging.”
After a while I asked each of them the same question “What was the overarching objective in your social media strategy?”
The first person I asked replied “Well we didn’t really put together a strategy, because we knew what we wanted.”
The second person I asked two weeks later replied “Our strategy was to start using social media!”
After I’d had these two lunch conversations I sent emails to each of them and thought it would be worthwhile sharing some of the themes in this blog post. Quiet simply, social media is about starting & nurturing a dialogue with your audience (customers / prospects / employees / potential new hires / vendors).
mip’s scan Podcast: The End of The Week Update
Welcome to episode #2 of The End of the Week Update here on mip’s scan. For your listening pleasure this week I’ve got three segments to today’s show.
- Google Plus: how does Google’s latest entry in the social networking landscape look now that I’ve been using it for some time?
- Strategic Perspectives: a new segment I’ve added to the mix that will look at the strategic perspective of emerging trend. This weeks Strategic Perspective looks at the changing role of IT departments within organizations.
- Evernote: a long time favourite tool of mine, I thought I’d share some thoughts on it prior to a detailed blog post coming out next week on this amazing service.
I hope you enjoy today’s show. As always, join the conversation! Something you want to have discussed, drop me a line via the comments.
To listen to today’s show, find the recording below.
Better Business Intelligence Equals Better Business Results
Inside organizations today there is an extremely valuable asset that is locked away and unrealized for its full potential. I’m talking about data. Gigabytes upon gigabytes and on to terabytes and petabytes…you get the idea…there’s a lot of data out there. This data is trapped inside silo corporate systems, Excel spreadsheets, various standalone reports and scattered across file servers within organizations. The unfortunate thing with this mess of data is that there is a dual cost you are experiencing:
- you pay to store all this information; spinning disk within servers is not free. As databases grow and spreadsheets proliferate throughout the organization, you are paying for that storage
- there is an opportunity to cost for not having used any of this data effectively. You are paying to save it (see point one above) but then losing out on not using it!
We are in a business climate these days where you can’t really afford not to try to leverage this data. It can drive better business decisions. This data is your competitive advantage; nobody else has it so don’t squander the opportunity to unlock its potential value.
To me, having been in strategic consulting for years and years I have always known and seen in my client work that when you have the correct inputs for your business then you realize greater success. When I assist organizations with their IT strategy, that strategy is always crafted with an underlying understanding: help the business get to where it wants to go. The IT within an organization must be an enabler.
The same is true for business intelligence efforts inside organizations. The data locked in so many systems and massaged & manipulated in so many Excel worksheets is there to enable the business reach its strategic objectives. Like IT resources though, that data needs to be strategically used. In setting an IT strategy, we start with a “vision”, in setting a business intelligence strategy, we start with questions. Key questions you need answered in order to make good strategic decisions. Don’t start with the technology alone; systems and software don’t unlock data value – they are a means to an end, not the end itself. I’ve seen too many initiatives where business intelligence work is being done for the sake of business intelligence. The true value is rarely realized through that approach and it becomes a missed opportunity in driving better business decision-making.
Start with a strategy that is led by the business, then move on to the technical implementation. Now that sounds intelligent to me!
Build an Ecosystem
When I migrated to my new blog, as per my initial post, I wasn’t able to easily/successfully bring past posts with me (still working on some options). Since then, I’ve received a number of comments and dozens of emails asking for a copy of a post I’d written previously about developing an ecosystem. So I thought I’d re-publish that post, with some minor edits to take into account things that have transpired over the past 8 months since it was originally published. So let’s dive right in….
When you look at nature and the environment, why is it so important to save an area of wetland? Why is it important to save a type of wildlife? The reason is balance. An ecosystem is a delicately balanced environment. If you are missing an animal, then other elements of the ecosystem suffer as well. When there are gaps in the ecosystem, in short, it stops working.
This concept applies to business as well. Why has Apple been successful? Is it because the build top-notch quality products? In part yes, but not entirely. Is it because they deliver products that met the users’ needs better than any other product? In part yes, but not entirely. No, the real reason that Apple has been so successful is that their products and services are part of an ecosystem that they’ve developed. Tied together beautifully, that ecosystem just works. It is that element, that it just works, that really has been the reason Apple has been so successful. It’s also the reason why other competing companies have failed to develop any type of Apple-product-killer. As a competing company you can’t build a product that will kill anything! You might build a product that is better than any single competing product from Apple, but without the ecosystem to tie it all together, to balance everything, to make sure that it all just works – without the balance, competitive products are fighting an uphill battle.
