Keynote at TDWI World Conference, Las Vegas 2012 by Frank Buytendijk
Monday, February 27, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
The Great Philosophers on IT Governance II
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? 
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.
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 30, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
The Great Philosophers on IT Governance I
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...
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...
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Free the people!
Shortly after my encounter with Confucius, I met the fourth philosopher at the Be Informed headquarters: Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). His quote: "Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos.”
Liberty and freedom
In Dutch, we use the same word for liberty and freedom: vrijheid. Yet there is a subtle difference. Freedom (free will) is the ability to make choices without constraints. For example, a domino’s movement is completely determined by laws of physics, it does not have any freedom. Liberty is to be able to govern yourselves, to behave according to your own free will, and take responsibility for your actions. So I wondered: do we want liberty or do we want freedom?
Children vs. parents
Children want a lot of freedom, as any parent will confirm. But children not granted many liberties: children are not allowed to travel on their own, to drink or smoke, to decide what to eat, to go to bed late, etc. So many rules, their live must be hell on earth..! (And it does not get better at school, where they give out homework on top of all the rules.) Yet most children stick to their parents. I remember running away as a child, only to find myself stuck 40 meters from home: I was not allowed to cross a busy road.
So how come children are happy with little liberty? Easy: they are getting a lot of freedom! Parents go out of their ways to lift any constraint their precious crop might come across. Children like this. A lot. And they sure don’t want the responsibility that comes with every liberty. Besides, they receive benefits like love, security, free food and clothes, Xmas presents, etc. Why should they rule themselves?
When the Occupy movement took over a square in Amsterdam, anything went in the beginning. A colourful bunch camped in the open, living their dream and changing the world. But suddenly, after a few days, a guy was in control of the food distribution. Then an other guy was arranging security and a third guy was speaking to the press, etc. A mini-society developed and ironically, that society was very similar to the one they were protesting against.
The occupyers still had a lot of freedom, but were willing to give up liberties and hand over responsibility to others. They made rules. This applies to any organisation, being a community, a state or a nation. Whatever system a country is run by, people agree on rules for the greater good. The thing people most want is freedom.
Knowledge workers vs business processes
In business, most business processes are charactarized by little liberty: they are fully predefined. Variations either become a new process or are added to the business process, creating a more complicated version. As a result, business operations become stagnant. The opposite, instructing people to simply rule themselves and handle situations as they see fit, is also counterproductive. It would bring chaos, inconsistency and a high business risk.
Having business rules is not a problem, it is the way we arrange work. Like we saw earlier, knowledge workers are perfectly willing to agree on rules and have less self-government. What they demand is freedom. They not just want to carry out instructions, any machine can do that! They want to act with as little constraints as possible.
Free the people!
Be Informed helps to arrange that. With our declarative approach, there is no predefined process, just the possible relationships between various activities. These are the actual rules. Every transaction can have a unique path, chosen by the customer or worker, within the guidelines. Then, there is neither chaos nor stagnation.
And best of all: both customers and workers have the maximum of freedom. Which makes them very happy.
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