Thursday, November 15, 2012

Proving the benefits of a model driven business application in an unsettled budgetary climate

"In the current budgetary climate it is getting harder and harder to prove the benefits case for a new business application to my organization."

Origin of this myth
At the officeI found this statement on several forums on the Internet. While software companies will do their best to persuade their potential customers in getting their latest software, for internal architects and analysts it is often a struggle to get things started within their own organization. In the current economic situation most CEO's and CFO's are not exactly waiting for big investments in new ICT systems, even if their internal specialists can come up with the right arguments. So how to deal with this?

The classic approach is to come up with a calculation of profit and cost, based on past experiences of other organizations in the same industry and the quick wins that you see within the own organization. A cost - profit analysis is - without any doubt - a necessity when proposing a new business application to the C-level within your organization, but will it - given the current economic climate - be enough to persuade them?

An alternative approach
What if you could prove the benefit of a driven business application to your organization by simply modeling one of your most complex processes? That would give your C-level management the opportunity to see what an effective business application will do in your organization and let them experience the promised improvement of efficiency, compliance and governance.

For software providers, like Be Informed, creating a show case with our software is something we often are eager to do. Be Informed uses the so-called "5-day challenge" to prove in a very limited amount of time and with a minimum of effort what their software could do in an organization.

The approach is as simple as it is effective. We create a draft business model for the organization and its products and create a model of it, resulting in a Target Operating Model. From this Target Operating Model we choose the most complex and inefficient case type or process. By choosing the most complex process and realizing a working and fully documented model driven business application for it within a couple of days, we have the ultimate prove for the benefits or our business application in your specific situation. With a team of maximum 5 people, typically consisting of an architect, two analysts/modelers, an UX engineer and a business consultant, we model the business application on location.

The result is an executable model driven business application containing the most complex processes and decisions, all fully documented, but with limited functionality.

With this approach you are no longer a victim of the current economic situation - waiting for changes to happen - but you are in fact using it in your advantage to get things done. During the past two years, Be Informed has performed approximately a dozen of these so called "5-day challenges". Despite the economic situation (especially in Europe), approximately 80% of these challenges resulted in a final go. The other 20% are still waiting for a decision, but chances are high that they will result in a project within the coming year.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Working with requirements

by: Kees van Mansom

"In engineering, a requirement is a singular documented physical and functional need that a particular product or service must be or perform. It is most commonly used in a formal sense in systems engineering, software engineering, or enterprise engineering. It is a statement that identifies a necessary attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a user."
Source: Wikipedia

During the Building Business Capabilities conference 2012 in Fort Lauderdale, we are going to develop a working model-driven business application, based on the input provided by the audience. And although this will be in a "lab" situation, we want to stay as close to a real life situation as possible. And then working with requirements is an essential element.

Both requirements and the Be Informed modeling artifacts (models, profiles, custom meta models) are aimed at the same goal: allowing the stakeholders of the system to describe what the system should do and capture it in a way that is understandable by the stakeholders.

Also, both requirements and Be Informed modeling artifacts share a common understanding on what good requirements respectively good modeling artifacts are.

The Be Informed method and tools provide extensive support for documenting requirements, based on our principle: “Model = Design = Application = Documentation”.

Traditional platforms/methods use several transformation steps to come from requirements to applications. Testing is used to evaluate if during these transformations everything went right.

In Be Informed the authentic source of the requirements is directly connected to the business model, making it possible to review them in the modeling environment. Testing is only used to evaluate if the transformation from authentic source to model/profile went right.

Our approach is to capture requirements as close to the model as possible. To do so we model the high level solution wide business requirements as requirement concepts. All other requirements are added to the models as content.

The requirements can be reviewed within the context of the business model:

So when you arrive at the Building Business Capabilities 2012 conference on the 30th of October, please make sure that you drop by in the Be Informed Lab at booth 102 to let us know what requirements you have. Don't hesitate to bring a Word file with you (max 1 -2 A4 due to time limitations) so we can add your requirements as content to the business model.

We are offering the unique experience to experience yourself how we enable BPM teams to become super productive and overcome the possible frictions and inefficiencies of your current way of working. Your input - consisting of requirements, products, processes, rules... - will be modeled out on the fly, resulting in a working model-driven business application within minutes.

The development of this model-driven business application can be followed in this blog and on Twitter: #BPMsuperpowers.

Hope to welcome you at the Be Informed booth 102 on the Building Business Capabilities conference. Also see blog entry How we help BPM teams develop superpowers.
The interactive demonstration can be viewed online via http://join.me/beinformed.

How we help BPM teams develop superpowers

by: Kees van Mansom

From October 30 - October 31, 2012 I will be at the Building Business Capabilities Conference in Fort Lauderdale in Florida to demonstrate how BPM teams can develop superpowers.

"What does this have to do with effective information?", I hear you think.

Well the truth is that information is in the core of every BPM solution. And that is exactly what I am going to demonstrate during this co-called 2-day challenge. Visitors of the conference can assume the role of stakeholder, business analyst, process specialist and perhaps even modeler and feed me with the information needed to get a super-effective, super-streamlined, super-documented BPM solution in a super-short time.

During these two days I will show how our tools and methodologies enable BPM teams to become super productive and overcome the frictions and inefficiencies of their current ways of working.

I will start with an almost empty workspace with just enough concepts to have a working application:

The picture above shows in the upper window the modeling perspective with a case called "Product request" and two activities, related to a registration object (blue) and a decision (orange). In the lower part of the picture you see the Target Operating Model for this business application, with two portals, one product, two cases and a registration. This minimal setup is enough for a working solution:

Based on YOUR input this will develop during the conference into a full blown model-driven business application.

You can follow the development of this model-driven business application on Twitter: hashtag #BPMsuperpowers.

Hope to welcome you at the Be Informed booth 102 on the Building Business Capabilities conference. Also see blog entry Working with requirements.
The interactive demonstration can be viewed online via http://join.me/beinformed.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Be Informed Team Assemble! - Microsoft Industry Solutions University at Rome 10-11th Oct 2012

Be Informed’s team were out in force at the Microsoft Industry Solutions University at Rome last week. The team flew in to showcase our latest Public Sector Solutions and some of the new Microsoft Integration work. It was a great event to advertise Be Informed products and what our partners could accomplish with us.

The Be Informed team’s stand was very busy throughout and had plenty of interest from all around the Europe Middle East and African regions in the fields of Justice, Welfare and Government Services. Partners had a specific interest in our “The mouse that roared” story. They were enthralled to learn how Be Informed managed to beat out Microsoft, SAP, IBM and Oracle for the UWV (The Labor and Welfare Agency in the Netherlands) bid and what it meant for us to win such a momentous victory against four mammoth companies. The sequel to David’s story is more impressive than the original, especially when he defeats three brothers as well as Goliath. A point our partners couldn’t fail to miss.

Geert Rensen and Gordon McKenzie gave an informative and entertaining presentation on ‘How we can learn from the Dutch’ as Netherlands is at the top end of the UN eGovernment charts. Rob Tuinte took charge of showing off our award winning Environment Online Solution. Which has been rated by top analyst company Gartner as a best in class example. Those visiting the stand and attending the presentation where captivated by the adaptability, versatility and practicality of Be Informed’s software. For many it was the first time they had heard of model applications driving processes and solutions in the public sector. Partners showed great interest in learning how they could benefit from this new and innovative product and how it works.

Following this we then highlighted some of the Windows 8 User Interface Solutions for the model store and also the new UI for our Multi – Benefit Solution (MBS). The Be Informed team demonstrated the capabilities of the model store on Microsoft’s very own Windows tablet. This accentuated the ability to integrate Be Informed’s products with Microsoft platforms. With many of our Partners currently using Microsoft solutions this was a huge plus.

All in all a terrific event, with great exposure and discussions about future prospects of Be Informed. However, now is not a time to rest on our laurels. We must use this momentum to help propel Be Informed to the global stage.

This mouse is not done roaring!

Friday, October 5, 2012

The Be Informed Philosophy - The Way We See It

As humans, our ability to create and use technology is one of the things that make us intelligent beings. It is also a key part of our humanity. Technology and devices help us compensate for all the things we don't have or can't do.

However, the way we have used technology has varied through the ages. Up to the 18th century, we see the craftsman's paradigm of technology, i.e. knowledge being passed from father to son. Craftsmen had a deep understanding of how technological artifacts worked, and were expert users of them. In today's terms, we would say this technology paradigm effected individual productivity.

With the advent of the Industrial Age, the technology paradigm developed into an engineering philosophy. Technology was geared towards full automation, often redefining the role of humans. In this way, technology achieved economies of scale and optimized business operations on a global level.

Now, in the 21st century, we are amidst the next technology paradigm, combining the craftsman’s view and the engineering paradigm. Today’s technology is supposed to augment human capability, on a global scale.

One of the most notable distinctions between the two paradigms lies in who is driving them. Technology has mostly been business-driven. Today, many technology innovations, and certainly the way we perceive the usefulness of technology, are people-driven. We want our business applications to be as simple and engaging as our gaming computer, we want to be mobile, and we want to be able to personalize technologies. We just want it to work for us.

Compare and contrast
To obtain a better understanding of the two paradigms, let's compare and contrast the traditional view of technology with the Be Informed view (with a focus on business operations).

Traditional view Be Informed view
Problem-solving Identify best practice, automate, optimize and replicate Technology is geared towards finding the optimal approach for each single case
Functionality Value the functions and features as such Also value capabilities to flexibly meet changing user requirements, and interact with other people and systems
Transparency You should be able to understand the inner workings of the system The system should explain its actions proactively
Programming style Prescriptive (describe all details) Declarative (describe boundaries)
User experience Lots of options everywhere Just showing relevant options
Training Train users to use the system Train the system to support the users

Table 1: Characteristics of the engineering and humanistic paradigm

In Be Informed's view, today's technology paradigm abandons the traditional "one best way" doctrine in favor of determining "best ways for each and every one of us".

How does Be Informed realize this?
The Be Informed business process platform is based on semantic technology. Semantic technologies are the next wave in web-based computing, sometimes also referred to as 3.0. Semantic technologies help give meaning to data, typically through highlighting relations(1). This is also how Be Informed works.

Be Informed is completely model-driven. This means that business analysts, strategists and policy-makers do not have to formulate requirements, which, through a number of intermediate steps, are ultimately translated into code. Instead, they can model them in Be Informed, see the results both visually and in near-natural language, simply "declare" this to be the application, and run it.

Be Informed continuously determines which possible activities bring you closer to the goal, thus completing the transaction. This means there is no predetermined sequence of steps or workflows that restrict free interaction with customers. And when the case information changes, there is no need to start all over again, as the next set of possible activities is determined on the spot.

There has been a long-running debate between system-centric BPM that tries to automate processes to run "straight through" and human-centric BPM that supports knowledge workers with complex tasks. The Be Informed philosophy should not be confused with being human-centric. In fact, its semantic technology allows processes to be automatically configured in real time to achieve a much higher straight-through processing rate (STP) than the traditional approach of predefining business processes.

Results
There's no point adopting a new paradigm if it doesn't bring significant benefits. Just a few percent improvement is often possible within the old way of working. We have seen remarkable improvements in bottom-line cost-savings as well as in top-line improvement.

Bottom-line improvements, such as higher productivity, higher STP and higher first-time-right percentages regularly lead to more than 30% lower operating costs. From an IT perspective, running multiple processes through the same system while having a single model to maintain regularly, leads to TCO savings in excess of 60%. Perhaps the most striking improvement can be found in the time-to-change, where a 90% reduction is not uncommon.

Bottom-line improvements only get you so far. Improving the top line offers even greater leverage. We have seen fivefold the conversion compared to industry standards. Moreover, because with Be Informed all products and services are going through the same process (instead of having their own processes), cross-sell and up-sell capabilities improve significantly.

Yet, we shouldn't fall into the pit of the engineering paradigm, and only think of optimizing operations. Technology needs to augment human capabilities. Most importantly, working with Be Informed provides administrative professionals with autonomy, mastery and purpose(2). Autonomy, because administrative professionals are liberated from inflexible prescriptive processes. They can focus on working with the customer or citizen. Mastery, because Be Informed allows professionals to focus on knowing their business, instead of restricting them to having to know the system. Purpose, because Be Informed allows administrative professionals to focus on the goal of administrative processes: making the right operational decisions, instead of following the flow of the system. And that's what ultimately drives business performance.

Interested in finding out more about the way we see business process technology? Please contact us at info@beinformed.com.

(1) Take, for instance, photo tagging in the consumer space. Someone can post a photo taken with a mobile phone, including a geo-tag stating that the picture was taken in Paris. Based on recognition algorithms, the system can determine that Stuart is on the picture. When you click on Stuart, you'll see other pictures of him. Semantic technology then can automatically infer that Stuart must have been in Paris, and offer targeted advertizing – all without anyone specifically having instructed the system that Stuart was in Paris.

(2) Based on "Drive" by Daniel Pink


Be Informed is an internationally operating, independent software vendor. The Be Informed business process platform transforms administrative processes. Thanks to Be Informed’s unique semantic technology, business applications become completely model-driven, allowing organizations to instantly execute on new strategies and regulations. Organizations using Be Informed often report cost savings of tens of percents. Further benefits include a much higher straight-through processing rate leading to vastly improved productivity, and a reduction in time-to-change from months to days.

More information: www.beinformed.com

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

A Tonic For Troubled Families – lessons from the Lowlands

by Gordon McKenzie

The laudable initiative to do something about the social and financial cost of supporting vulnerable families in the UK is a symptom of challenges facing government agencies over the world. In the Netherlands, it is estimated that up to one third of funds to support this challenge are consumed by inter agency collaboration, pulling all relevant facts and information together - this is a massive cost but one that highlights the issue that many agencies face, its not that the processes are broken in themselves, more that the gaps between then do not reflect the reality of life in a family struggling to deal with difficult issues. It’s a human problem, not suited to today’s systems and often ownership of the problem, or even detecting that there is a problem is a challenge for today’s silo oriented systems.

Just like a recent project we became involved in ‘Regizorg’, meaning regional care was designed to address this issue in Deventer in the Netherlands. Inspired by a visionary community leader, Be Informed used a set of knowledge models to create a way of identifying troubled families, making a risk assessment of their status, and then creating a treatment plan to help them recover under the care of the local government agency and its partners in the wider community including central agencies, private companies and local charities. The power of using knowledge models for such a solution is that they are ideally suited to cross agency information sharing and analysis, and can also ‘learn’ as new patterns or symptoms can be added readily to the system.

More information: Be Informed’s Troubled Family Solution.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

What we could learn from the Dutch, more than Total Football

by Gordon McKenzie

Director of the New Local Government Network Simon Parker’s recent article called ‘Tinkering at the margins will not kick civil service vices’ this week suggested that the UK Civil Service could learn from the Dutch and other more compact democracies in streamlining decision making processes and cutting out bureaucracy. This prompted me to consider how some of our own customers have taken advantage of radical changes in service design to reduce costs and improve their services by using a more innovative approach and new technologies. Take one example, the butt of many jokes about government services – the planning service. Like the UK the rules governing what you are allowed to construct and get permission for in Holland are complex and highly diverse, from recycling plants to railways – garden sheds to loft extensions, each has a set of rules governing the process that can enumerate many thousands of individual permits fora complex application. Also like the UK planning is and remains primarily a local government responsibility, and with such a complex set of policy rules to implement, the service levels and quality of information delivered were to say the least highly variable –so something had to be done, and was.

The Dutch government therefore initiated a new act (the so called Wabo Act) to simplify this situation. The act enables members of the public and companies to use one transparent procedure to apply for licenses for activities that have an impact on the physical environment to one competent authority. The new act has replaced around 25 separate licenses and 1.600 application forms for matters such as construction, demolition, spatial planning, listed buildings and the environment by a single one-stop-shop license covering all activities. With the new act, the complexity of the situation is the government’s problem; when someone applies for a license, it’s the responsibility of the government to sort things out. Citizens no longer need to be experts in how the government operates. The Wabo and its accompanying processes and systems came into force on October 1st, 2010, which is supported by the Be Informed Public Service Platform.

Benefits of the solution include:

  • Annual cost savings for citizens (€ 6 million) and companies (€ 53 million);
  • Government will save € 96 million administrative costs in the first year;
  • Single point of contact offering more simplicity and transparency;
  • One procedure and one license for all permit types;
  • Digital communication through the internet; saving time and costs;
  • One procedure for appeal; stakeholders present their objections in one instance;

The plea by Maude’s office to become ‘digital by default’ is to be lauded and should be seized not only by individual departments but across whole service areas, by following the Dutch example here, we can learn not only on the playing field with Cryuff’s ‘Total Football’, where every player is involved but also in government transformation to create ‘Total Service’ where every party in the service comes together to improve the overall experience for the citizen.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Socrates Reloaded: In Search of Wisdom

by Frank Buytendijk - @FrankBuytendijk

We have enough intelligence, what we need is more wisdom. Perhaps a discussion on wisdom feels a bit esoteric for this forum, but I think it makes sense to understand a little bit more about wisdom, for a number of reasons:

  • It is a humbling experience to experience that with all our analytical skills, we can't really define a term such as wisdom. Obviously there are limits to our business skills...
  • Wouldn't many of us want to be seen as wise within our profession? That people turn to us for advice?
  • But most important, with all the intelligence that systems are offering, we need guidance on how to use that. The goal of data is to provide information, information is the fuel for intelligence and knowledge, and wisdom provides guardrails for intelligence.

In the first article in this series, I introduce the topic of wisdom, and point out how hard it is to even define it. This first article also miserably fails doing so, but there is a point to that.

In the second article, I explain why we failed in our analysis, we simply used the wrong toolkit. Business analytical skills don't solve all problems.

Lastly, in the third article, I show the business relevance of this whole discussion.

More wisdom, anyone?!

frank

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Continuous consent

by Hans Bot

Continuous integration - the next step

Since the time Martin Fowler introduced the concept of Continuous Integration the software industry has come a long way. Originally, the concept aimed at the early detection of software integration problems, but soon it grew into one of the pillars of Agile Software Development movement. Development teams experiencing the power of daily builds soon grew accustomed to the practice. Other teams grew anxious to implement the practice too. In short: the software integration problem got solved in many different ways over the recent years.
More: Continuous Integration - Martin Fowler

The most elegant way in which it was solved is undoubtedly with Model Driven Engineering. Working jointly around a shared model banishes the integration problem altogether. In traditional development environments, the compilation of code by it's nature is a batch process. Eliminating the compilation as part of the development cycle therefor is a fundamental solution to the integration problem.
More: Model driven engineering - Johan den Haan

More recently, the thought leaders at ThoughtWorks upped the ante with the concept of Continuous Delivery. This seemingly small step has an important implication - it offers the client the option to be more closely involved into the development cycle. This is no small thing - the sooner mistakes and misinterpretations in the development efforts are caught, the cheaper it is to correct them. Again, with model driven engineering this practice is simple to organize.
More: Continuous delivery - Jez Humble

Now it may be the right time to go the extra mile. After all, Continuous Delivery is no goal in itself, it is a means to an end. In my opinion, at least, delivery is only the start of the dialogue with the client. And it is the outcome of the dialogue that is of the essence: a common understanding about the progress of the development effort. In other words, the objective to strive for should be full transparency into the development process. I propose to name this concept: "Continuous Consent".

How will Continuous Consent enhance the development process?

In my view, Continuous Delivery has already bridged the gap between the development team and their client. But this bridge is designed as a one-way road only. We simply need to add a lane for the traffic from the client to the developers to deliver them the feed-back necessary to further improve the process. Just imagine: delivery of instant feed-back as a standard functionality of the system under development. Report anomalies and requests from within the very system you are reviewing. Why not? What is the advantage of using a separate system? Why shouldn't we integrate that function in order to improve the mutual communication?

This is not the only improvement I envision. If we've got the dialogue running smoothly, it is a small step to use this radically change the way we develop. In my mind, this revolution is long overdue. The software development process is still mimicking the way buildings are constructed: we take a number of months or years to design, engineer and build until everything is ready. Then we "go live" - sometimes in a big bang, sometimes more gradually - after which we morph into the maintenance phase. Among other things, this brings the Continuous Delivery to an abrupt end.

With modern technology like model driven engineering, this need not be anymore. We can - and in my humble opinion should - change the process in a way that will closely align the system development with the way the business itself develops. I propose a mechanism in which an initial operational capability is delivered as early as possible in the development cycle. Ideally within weeks after the start. Simply because there is no better feed-back available than the one from practical usage. It will focus the efforts of the developers to the real needs of the user population and - maybe even more important - it will facilitate the ongoing continuation of the dialogue throughout the entire life cycle of the system. Sure, it will be necessary to rescale the development effort from time to time, but the Continuous Delivery should end no sooner than the end of life.

At Be Informed, we use the term "Grow Live" to pinpoint the phase of the system's life cycle after the Go Live of the initial operational capability. Grow Live together with Continuous Consent will someday revolutionize the system development process. Because we can - and because we should. The sooner, the better.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Laws of the digital world

by Alcedo Coenen

Many of us live our lives increasingly in what I would call the "digital world": we meet in social media like facebook and google+, we read our news items in twitter, we exchange ideas in forums and blogs, we shop online, and last but not least, we communicate large parts of our business through emails, documents, spreadsheets and databases. The objects of communication may be of physical nature (ourselves, machines, supplies, clothes etc) but also these objects turn out to be of digital nature increasingly: I think of ebooks, software, games, money, contracts, data. You could therefore say, in my opinion, that we are creating a 'digital world' next to our physical world. With 'world' I mean an environment that has its own characteristics, and that has its own boundaries and restrictions. These restrictions are highly important and have a significant influence on our behaviour. I would like to explore this in this blog.

Natural laws in the physical world
In the physical world we know these restrictions as 'natural laws': we daily experience the law of gravity, the law of speed, the law of Ohm, etc. We mostly quite unconsciousness recognize these laws, untill we break them and get injured or get something broken. The law of gravity (Newton's law of universal gravitation) is a fundamental one, which has such enormous influence on our way of living, that we don't realize it anymore. The way we put things in our rooms, how we build our houses, how we move to other places, all these activities are highly restricted by the law of gravity. It is the fundamental bevahiour of "things" in the physical world that restricts and enables our being in the 'physical world'.

Natural laws in the digital world
I'm wondering what the natural laws in the 'digital world' are: what is the behaviour of "things" in the digital world that restricts and enables our being in the 'digital world'?

Here some of them which I can think of.

  • The law of reproduction. While copying things in the physical world always leads to loss or inevitable differences with the original (think of copying a woorden chair, or photocopying an original document), in the digital world copying can be achieved lossless (think of copying music or software). The copy has the same qualities as the original, and in many cases cannot be differentiated form the original. One of the consequences of this behaviour is that copyright is very difficult, maybe impossible, to maintain in the digital world, because the concept of copyright is based on the supremacy of the original and the original author. Another consequence is that digital information can be used on many (phyiscal) places at the same time, without traveling restrictions.
  • The law of semantic distance. While traveling in the physical world is a geographical transition, going from position A to position B, with a direct relation between distance and time-to-travel (dependent of the traveling method), traveling in the digital world is a semantic transition, going from domain A to domain B. Although you could take time of the transition into consideration from URL A to URL B, restricted by the physical properties of the network to pass through, this is not the significant part. When we look up something in the digital world, e.g. by using a search website, it is the semantic distance that takes our time: looking for a good picture of a "rule", e.g., brings us in many different semantic worlds before we see the one we originally meant (figure 1). Semantic distance can graphically been displayed as physical distance (figure 2). A consequence of this law is that we need to take "travelling time" into account when searching digital objects over semantic domains.
  • The law of semantic erosion. While memorizing and keeping things in the physical world are directly related to the erosion characteristics of the used material (you can keep things in rock much longer than wooden objects), digital objects do not erose or deteriorate, unless its physical barriers (hard disks e.g.) do. Digital data can become useless, however, in two ways: or the data are not accessible anymore in a meaningful way because the software/algorithm to access it is lost (think e.g. of encrypted data), or the data refer to concepts that are passed or considered useless (think e.g. of a database field that sets the customer's fax number). In both ways the semantics are eroded, while the data still exist. Erodition time in the digital world is releated to semantic relevance.
  • The law of logical derivation. In the physical world we have the concept of “power”, setting things into “motion”. What are “motion” and “power” in the digital world? I think that logical derivation is the basic “power” of the digital world. It sets digital objects into motion. “Motion” is information change. The well-known coding structure “if … then …” illustrates the basic behaviour of digital systems quite well: digital systems are capable of processing data and change them into new data on a set of conditions. That is actually what happens all the time in the digital world. When we upload a photo on Facebook, we actually change our digital status, and Facebook takes that as input for putting advertisements on the page. When we click such an advertisement, many other status of data has been changed and causes other actions like showing the page of the advertiser.

Fundamental laws
What is the digital equivalent of the law of gravity? What is the fundamental law, that sculptures our behaviour in the digital world more than anything else? What law can break things? I can think of two candidates: the law of reproduction, or the law of logical derivation. An example of “breaking” with the first is unintential spam: copying a digital message that copies itself to many others, is an example of breaking the law of reproduction; because the copy is not deteriorating, the reproduction is endless. This law enables us to work at home, to watch television online and to collaborate simultaneously with collegueas on documents.

The best candidate for being fundamental, however, is the law of logical derivation. An example of “breaking” this law is designing systems as if they were logistic systems. Information systems, or better business operation systems need to be designed as logical derivation machines, not as procedural logistic processing systems. Otherwise the system looses its power. Logistics is a domain that has its relevance in the physical world, because it deals with the inertia of physical objects and the time that is involved. In the digital world objects have the lowest possible intertia because there is no gravity, and time is negligible. Therefore, in the digital world the procedural, logistic approach is suboptimal, and needs to be replaced by the state machine approach. In fact, our digital world is one big state machine. Which means that the equivalent of our physical gravity law may be found in the derivation law for the digital world.

Breaking the law
At Be Informed, we're not only looking for laws, we try to break them too. And to create new laws.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Monday, February 20, 2012

The Great Philosophers on IT Governance II

By: Frank Buytendijk (@FrankBuytendijk), chief marketing officer

Some time ago, I started a new series of articles on IT Governance.

Topics I covered in the first article included: Why is IT Governance such an important issue in most organizations? What is the task of senior management? How should budgets be managed? In fact, Plato commented elaborately on these issues.

Then, in the next article, we move to a second topic: Power. And who else to consult than Machiavelli? Decision-making is not always based on facts and objective analysis. There are many more factors affecting strategic decisions. Why? How? Machiavelli contradicts Plato in a number of cases. The "kings" aren't philosophers at all... Machiavelli is supported by an even older philsopher and strategist: Sun Tzu. How is "The Art of War" related to governance?

In the third article, I'll reflect more on what Plato, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu had to say, and will relate governance to leadership and particularly organizational behavior. For those of you who know my work, you know this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I'll turn to Confucius for some wisdom, and will describe not only how to govern, but focus on a topic equally important: how to *be* governed. We arrive in the philosophical twentieth century, where I discovered a school of thought that I feel somewhat connected with: communitarianism. No, that is not like communism, but is in short a view on the world in which we don't look "up" for problems to be solved, but look at our
peer group. Enterprise 2.0!

Let me know what you think...

Monday, February 6, 2012

Plato and numbers

By: Dick van Mersbergen
Last week there was a meeting in the Plato room at the Be Informed headquarters, a good chance to check out his quote. It read:
A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Numbers are a boy’s best friend
From a very young age, I loved numbers. You can’t argue with them and they never lie. Fortunate enough, I had some talent for maths. This not only made life at school a lot easier, I was able to play with numbers. I was constantly adding, deducting, multiplying and deviding. Numbers were my best friend. (Don’t worry, soon I discovered sports, music, arts, girls and much more). So what is Plato’s problem with numbers?
Scoreboard journalism
Plato reminded me of a Dutch football coach, Co Adriaanse. After a heavy loss with AZ (1-5 at home against Roda JC), has a true Platonist, he said that judgement based on the numbers alone is “Scoreboard journalism”. In his opinion, there is much more to a game. Maybe he meant that journalists need more football knowledge, just like Plato. But what is knowledge?
Knowledge
Bertrand Russell's "Theory of Knowledge" reads: "knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true". We don’t know what knowledge is! This is no surprise to me because I play manager games.
Manager games
As a lover of numbers and sports, I like manager games. This is about managing a virtual sports team. You pick a squad and they will then score points for you, based on statistics. This is being organized in many sports, but my focus is on cycling and football. Every year in july, my cycling team is competing against thousands of others in the Tour de France and during the football season I manage a virtual team in the Dutch league; both with variable success.
Of course, numbers and knowledge are very important in these games. I collect statistics in two giant spreadsheets and I read all I can about teams, transfers, tactics, personal incentives, etc. Everything is relevant, for example: cyclists perform significally better just after they became a daddy - really! With all this knowledge, how can I possibly fail?
Wisdom & luck
Unfortunately, others read the papers too and I suspect some to use spreadsheets. The margin between the winner and runner-up is not explained by knowledge. It increases your chances, but crucial decisions need more. You need what the Germans call fingerspitzengefühl, a combination of wisdom and luck. Just like the sportsmen themselves.
Wisdom is “a deep understanding and realization of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions in keeping with this understanding”.
Plato gave us insight in the limits of knowledge as well. Some time ago, we discussed this in the story on Plato’s Cave: true wisdom is realising you are looking at an image of the world.
Wise decisions
And there is the link with Be Informed: by modeling your business in Be Informed, your model (your picture of the world) follows the changing world. You can rely on the system to manage the data and providing knowledge, and thus create the basis for your knowledge workers to make wise decisions.
I wish you all great wisdom. And good luck.

Monday, January 23, 2012

The Great Philosophers on IT Governance I

By: Frank Buytendijk (@FrankBuytendijk), chief marketing officer

I've started a new series of articles, this time on
IT Governance.

Topics I cover in the first article include: Why is IT Governance such an important issue in most organizations? What is the task of senior management? How should budgets be managed? In fact, Plato commented elaborately on these issues.

Then, in the next article, we move to a second topic: Power. And who else to consult than Machiavelli? Decision-making is not always based on facts, and objective analysis. There are many more factors affecting strategic decisions. Why? How? Machiavelli contradicts Plato in a number of cases. The "kings" aren't philosophers at all... Machiavelli is supported by an even older philsopher and strategist: Sun Tzu. How is "The Art of War" related to governance?

In the third article, I'll reflect more on what Plato, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu had to say, and will relate governance to leadership and particularly organizational behavior. For those of you who know my work, you know this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I'll turn to Confucius for some wisdom, and will describe not only how to govern, but focus on a topic equally important: how to *be* governed. We arrive in the philosophical twentieth century, where I discovered a school of thought that I feel somewhat connected with: communitarianism. No, that is not like communism, but is in short a view on the world in which we don't look "up" for problems to be solved, but look at our
peer group. Enterprise 2.0!

Let me know what you think...