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Category Archives: awareness

Agile at Scale is bullshit by design

28 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by Martyn Jones in agile, agile@scale, All Data, Architecture, Assets, awareness, behaviour, business strategy, Creativity, Dogma, IT strategy, Strategy, structured intellectual capital, Value

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cropped-p4010326.jpgMartyn Ricard Jones

Bruxelles 28th May 2019

To begin at the beginning

To paraphrase the great Bob Hoffman. Just when you thought that if evangelists for Agile were to generate one more ounce of bullshit the entire fucking solar system would explode, what do they do? Exceed expectations.

And how did they do that? Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Agile at Scale with all the miscellaneous, spiced-up and vainglorious crap-on-the-side that accompanies it.

Continue reading →

Labour’s Brexit Strategy for Idiots

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by Martyn Jones in Assets, awareness, behaviour, Best principles, Brexit, ethics, goodstrat, Martyn Jones, Martyn Richard Jones, Offshoring, Outsourcing, Politics, Remain, statistics, The Guardian

≈ 2 Comments

big ben bridge castle city

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Martyn Richard Jones

Madrid, Sunday 23rd December 2018

What’s all this fuss about Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s Brexit strategy?

Despite Liberal Democrats, Blairites and most of the national media ramping up the righteous outrage about Corbyn stating the bleeding, bloody obvious (see e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/23/labour-remain-jeremy-corbyn-brexit  ) nothing has changed.

So, what are the facts?

Continue reading →

Consider this: Financial Crisis and Subprime

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in awareness, Banking, Consider this, disinformation, Dogma

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Tags

financial crisis, Organisational Autism, Risk, subprime

Consider this: Financial Crisis and Subprime.

Martyn Jones

This is a republication of a piece written in 2009 on the subject of the Financial Crisis and Subprime loans. As the spectre of overreach and unhedged risks raises its ugly head once again, the temptation to republish this piece was just too much to resist.


Oh dear, whatever happened here? After years of over-borrowing and under-saving, the plentiful supply of cheap and easy money, the enthusiastic recklessness of a number of financial managers, and the complaisance of governments, the inevitable happened, and panic ensued.

It has not been edifying to see political leaders – people at one time we might have considered intelligent, cautious and wise human beings, falling over each other, in the courageous rush to identify scapegoats, to nationalise bad debt and to prop up failing companies.

After cursory deliberation, the condemnatory finger pointed at short sellers and Hedge Funds, and this mendacity passed by with little comment. Thankfully, the new blame game does not seek to target a conspicuous group of people, such as Swiss gnomes, which is progress of sorts, but it is still only a marginal improvement.

So, what caused the financial crisis? Superficially, the answer is simple; it has been the collapse of the subprime market and its impact on underwriters of usurious lending.

There was a time when people with bad credit ratings, or no credit ratings at all, would have found it difficult to obtain a high street loan to purchase a second-hand car, and would have had no chance of obtaining a housing mortgage.

Cheap and plentiful money, overvaluation and the property boom, changed all of that.

Subprime allowed people with dodgy credit ratings to acquire mortgages, albeit with inflated interest rates and draconian small print.

For years, things worked quite well, as the number of people keeping up with their repayments well-exceeded analyst’s forecasts, which meant that profits from subprime lending surpassed expectations.

This led to two things. The further downplaying of risk in the subprime market, and a boom in the number of banks offering subprime loans.

Traditionally, banks lent out money that they held in the form of deposits, in exchange for timely repayments. In many countries, banks were constrained by how much exposure to risk they could assume, in order to ensure solvency and liquidity; so, even when money was at its cheapest, they could not legitimately expand their subprime business beyond certain levels, without getting creative and by passing on risk to third parties.

What happened next? Just as some banks had cashed-in on insurance brokerage, some switched to the role of subprime lending matchmakers. This meant that they were able to take the upfront brokerage fees, and then pass on the loan arrangements to another financial house, and in this way, they increased their fees whilst offloading the risks inherent in holding especially risky arrangements.

Of course, the actual underwriters of these loans also wanted to reduce their risk exposure.

It is a simplistic explanation, but what these companies first did was to create a way to allow for betting on the overall performance of collections of mortgages – the fewer defaults the higher the gains, in order to allow trading in bets.

Additionally, because of the perceived low risk of subprime and the continued overvaluation of real estate, these bets came with an irresistible added value-proposition. A triple A (AAA) risk rating. “Look Ma! Just like government bonds”.

Then, these companies sold slices of these composite bets to other punters, charging for the betting slips based on a combination of risk, time duration and return.

There are various forms of betting on subprime performance, the most common products being Collaterised Debt Obligations, Mortgage Backed Securities and Asset Backed Securities, the riskiest bits of which are toxic waste.

Now, the calculation of the value and the risks in these bets are horribly complex, and frequently inaccurate. So, just to push the envelope, some people came up with a way to take a bunch of already complex pooled bets, and to create a mega pool of pooled bets, which they would then sell on to the market, as another investment product.

So, when economies tanked, it was the subprime market, mainly in the USA, that took the hit for the increase in the defaults on loan repayments. Worse still, because the holders of these bets could not honestly state either their riskiness or actual value, they became as desirable as financial crap, which meant that other banks were no longer prepared to lend them money, and for Prime Brokers to be denied loans, is like turning off their life support?

As attractive as schadenfreundin might be, letting Prime Brokers go to the wall is not a sensible option, as the survival of other companies and many jobs are also at stake.

The subprime downturn led to the current predicament, but that is not where it started, preceded as it was by the follies and frauds of the dot com era, the artificial “good times” brought on by government overinvestment in the military industrial complex and the costs of war and occupation.

We are where we are mainly because of one thing, decades of government, corporate and personal imprudence.

Many thanks for reading this piece.


File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro

Big Data Robitussin

26 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Analytics, Architecture, Ask Martyn, awareness, Big Data, BS, deceit, governance

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

awareness, Behavioural Economics, Big Data, BS, crap, data analytics, deceit, enterprise data warehousing, history, hustlers, IT business, lies, Organisational Autism, Pimps, spin

Image2What does Big Data have to do with Robitussin?

I will explain.

Continue reading →

Oh, Superman! Oh, Mom and Dad!

18 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Ask Martyn, awareness

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Tags

advertising, apple, Behavioural Economics, consumerism, crass, creepy, cults, fetishism, hype, sects, style

appleGod

Steve Jobs was a great entrepreneur.

Clearly he was.

Jobs turned a dismal maker of a massive range of gadgets into a powerful and highly-focussed technology fashion and PR business.

The stylistic touches in Apple products carry the elegant and crispy palate of bourgeois minimalism, a fragrant bouquet of exclusivity and a delightful after-taste of subdued superiority. Continue reading →

Project Managers: Be less Dog!

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in awareness, project management

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Tags

freelance, PM, project management

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAn advert made for a telecommunications concern in Europe urged people to ‘be more dog’.

It was rubbish and achieved nothing.

Because it said nothing.

Continue reading →

Strategic Fit – Function Drives Form

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Architecture, awareness, Management, Strategy

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accountability, awareness, business analysis, constraints, Data Warehouse, modelling, opportunities, organisational awareness, Strategy

Strategic fit express the degree to which an organization is matching its resources and capabilities with the opportunities in the external environment.

The matching takes place through the practice of pre-strategy analysis.

That stated, it is very easy to fall into the trap of simplifying the high level concepts and overstating the intricacies and interdependence of strategic-fit factors. Continue reading →

The Leader, the Technologist and Their Accountability: Ten Lines of Enquiry

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in accountability, Ask Martyn, awareness, Best principles, governance, leadership, public, technology

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accountability, IT Strategy, leadership, Politics, Strategy, technologist

My sister Liz was part of a group that offered support to the striking miners of Wales, Scotland and England.

They organized a public fund raiser and invited the politician Tony Benn to speak.

The trouble was that none of the support group were Labour people, and they weren’t the greatest admirers of British parliamentary democracy and the Labour party.

So they sort of moved the problem up-stream.

They asked me if I would be Tony’s minder for the night.

They didn’t actually use the word minder, but that what it was mainly about.

Because they probably reckoned that as a long time Labour member myself with an unquestioning belief in Westminster democracy, we might actually be able to talk the same language.

I had dinner with Tony that day, just before he was due to speak.

The conversation came around to Tony’s book, Arguments for Democracy.

Well, actually I had pushed the conversation in that direction.

I mentioned that I had read it at least three times, and that I used some of the examples from the book in my work.

In particular the part dealing with the questions that an elected politician and Minister of State must ask any technologist who is proposing a new projects or programme.

I told him that I had applied these principles in a large US multi-national corporation called Sperry, notorious for its Republican hue, its affinity to the Department of Defense, intelligence agencies and Federal Government, and its alleged hire and fire culture – which somehow I managed to evade for almost thirteen years.

He found that quite funny, in a surreal way.

I said “over the last eighteen years I have often used the following questions, which you designed to indicate that the role of the elected representative and minister is not to seek to reproduce the expertise, which he or she could not do, but to see that the expert is subjected to rigorous cross-examination on behalf of the people”.

 Anyway, to cut a long story short, I shall now move on to the crux of the matter. 

But before then, a final comment. 

Because I have been using these lines of enquiry primarily in business I have replaced the role of the government minister with that of the Project Board and project stakeholders, and the role of the “people” with the role of the organisational stakeholders and the business community.

So here you have it. The leader must ask the technologist:

First, would your project, if carried through, promise benefits to the organisation, and if so, what are the benefits, how will they be distributed and to whom and when will they accrue?

Second, what disadvantages would you expect might flow from your work? Who would experience them? What, if any, remedies would correct them? Is the technology for correcting them sufficiently advanced for the remedies to be available when the disadvantages begin to accrue? 

Third, what demands would the development of your project make upon our resources of skilled manpower [I would include demands on all organizational resources in this context, and would also ensure to enquire about the availability of those resources]

Fourth, is there a cheaper, a simpler, and a less sophisticated way of achieving at least part of your objective and if so, what would it be, and what proportion of your total objective would have to be sacrificed if we adopted it?

Fifth, what new skills would have to be acquired by people who would be called upon to use the product or project which you are recommending, and how could these skills be created? 

Sixth, what skills would be rendered obsolete by the development that your propose, and how serious a problem would the obsolescence of these skills create for the people who have them?

Seventh, is the work upon which you are engaged being done, or has it been done, or has it been started and stopped in other parts of the world, and what experience is available from abroad [elsewhere] that might help us to assess your own proposal?

Eighth, if what you propose is not done, what disadvantages or penalties do you believe will accrue to the organisation, and what alternative projects might be considered 

Ninth, if your proposition is accepted, what other work in the form of supporting systems should be set in hand simultaneously, either to cope with the consequences or to prepare for the next stage and what would the next stage be?

Tenth, a final and very important question. If an initial decision to proceed is made, how long will the option to stop remain open, and how reversible will this decision be at progressive stages beyond there?

Later that evening I had to drive Tony to the station to catch his train to Oxford.

We were late, it looked like we would miss the train.

In the car I asked Tony if he would care to sign my copy of Arguments for Democracy.

He did.

Trouble was, in the rush he didn’t pick up anything to read on the train and he hadn’t brought anything with him.

So I gave him The Chomsky Reader. Which just happened to be on the back seat of the car.

As one would.

Anyway, off we rushed. Hell for leather through the empty streets of Worcester.

We arrived at the station in time to catch the train.

Job done.

The IT Circus and the Infinite Loop – Part 1

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in Ask Martyn, awareness, Best principles, Big Data, business, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Big Data, business intelligence, Commercial IT, Corporate IT, Data Warehouse, IT business, IT Strategy, Pimps, Pundits

The IT business suffers a malaise, it also affects other businesses. In IT, like in other lines of business, much of what has been made is eventually side-lined and forgotten. If it was ever on the radar in the first place. Continue reading →

Operational awareness isn’t for wimps! So, get it right

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by Martyn Jones in awareness, Big Data, business, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, operational, pig data, Strategy

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Analytics, Banking, Behavioural Economics, BI, Big Data, Business, business analysis, Strategy

I frequently include the term Operational Awareness in talks.

I think it’s important for strategy.

So I wrote a piece that tried to convey what I mean by the term.

But first, a diagram:

Image1

Figure 1 – Operational awareness

This is a simplified high-level example of business data objects found in certain organisations. In the above diagram I have reused an industry example of nine business data objects to represent operational data[1].

For completeness and to maintain rationality in this section here follows a summary list of the nine key groups of business data needed to have a coherent and cohesive operational awareness (these data groups are also frequently referred to as business data objects):

  • A: Party embodies all of the participants that may have contact with the organisation or that are of interest to the organisation and about which the organisation maintains data. This includes data about the organisation itself; data about external organisations; data about external and internal individuals; and, data about the roles of involved parties.
  • B: Arrangement represents a prospective or existing agreement, between two or more individuals, organizations or organizational units that provides and affirms the rights, rules and obligations associated with a transaction between parties.
  • C: Condition describes the specific requirements that pertain to how the business is conducted and includes information such as prerequisite or qualification criteria and restrictions or limits associated with the requirements. Conditions can apply to various aspects of an enterprise’s operations, such as the operational parameters of a resource item, the sale and servicing of products, the determination of eligibility to purchase a product, the authority to perform business transactions, the assignment of specific general ledger accounts appropriate for different business transactions, the required file retention periods for various types of information kept by an enterprise and the selection criteria for a market segment.
  • D: Product/Service describes the services, merchandise or facilities that can be offered, sold or purchased by the enterprise, its competitors and other Involved Parties during the normal course of its business. This concept also includes goods and services that are of interest to the enterprise such as supplies for manufacture.
  • E: Location covers a place where something can be found, a destination of information or a bounded area, such as a country or state, about which the enterprise wishes to keep information.
  • F: Classification is used to organize and manage specific business information by defining structures that represent classification categories. Classification also organizes and manages groups of business concepts that apply to multiple concepts.
  • G: Business Direction/Organisation Direction refers to and records expressions of a party’s intent with regard to the manner and environments in which it wishes to carry out its business. Business direction items contains, keeps data about, and is used to support the enterprise’s business and financial plans, policies, procedures and schedules.
  • H: Events describe a happening about which the organisation wishes to keep information as a part of carrying out its mission and conducting its mission.
  • I: Resource object includes and describes any value item, either tangible or intangible, that is owned, managed or used by, or of specific interest to, the organisation in the course of accomplishing its mission.

The key facets of operational awareness detailed above constitute a potential of fundamental importance in the formulation of organizational strategy.

Timely, accurate and appropriate data at this level can temper ambition with the facts on the ground, with operation insight, and with the effectiveness of time and place utilisation.

But take care. In most organisations there will be a spread of attention to the key facets illustrated here, and they will be treated with varying degrees of intensity relative to their overall contribution to strategy formulation. In addition, organizational specific facets may also be introduced where needed in order to complement the overall set of operational awareness facets described here.

[1] IBM’s IFW/BDW.

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