Tags
complex event processing, energy, ETRM, introduction, IT business, Marketing, PaR, price curves, Risk, risk management platform, Risk Reporting, trading, VaR
03 Monday Nov 2014
Posted Analytics, Architecture, business, Risk
inTags
complex event processing, energy, ETRM, introduction, IT business, Marketing, PaR, price curves, Risk, risk management platform, Risk Reporting, trading, VaR
03 Monday Nov 2014
Posted accountability, Ask Martyn, Best principles, deceit, pain
inTags
accountability, aspiring tendencies in IM, ethics, good job, information management, Information Technology, IT business, Organisational Autism, organisational awareness, professionalism
“Anger is the enemy of nonviolence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.”
Mohandas Gandhi
The predominance of strength and innocence, better known as ignorance and arrogance, is undermining Information Management, and in turn is ensuring that many Data Warehousing and Decision Support initiatives are disappointments.
2015 will again give IM professionals the opportunity to regain some dignity and professional integrity.
First, by recognizing that there are grave problems within IM; then slowing down and halting the toxic trends, carelessness and bad practices; and then in subsequently, reversing, through intelligence, perseverance and integrity, the ingenuous and decrepit habits that still trouble the profession.
In the rush to the bottom we throw excellence in analysis, architecture, engineering and business understanding, under the bus. In IM as well as in many other branches of IT (Information Technology), mediocrity has become the new excellent, regular the new exceptional, and shoddiness the new normal.
Whether it is in Data Warehousing, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Decision Support or Data Integration, we see that professional integrity and ethical behaviour – already enough of a rarity in IT – is being repeatedly trumped by short-term expediency, wilful witlessness, and the cultivation and perpetuation of dogmas, dysfunctional behaviour and dubious doings.
The Information Management sector is rife with elaborate charlatanry, partisan expediency and wilful self-deception. There is not a day that goes by in which we are not submitted to an avalanche of contemptible claims from rogue IM evangelists, DW neophytes and unsophisticated opportunists, who chose to simply make things up as they go along.
It is in the best interests of IM to raise the profession out of the ditch; to reform the profession from the inside; to drive sea-change improvements in knowledge, quality and professional integrity; to ensure a drastic reduction in destructive hype, deception and dogma, and, to show the artless charlatans, chancers and snake-oil merchants the door.
Data Warehousing and Decision Support – if done right, and for the right reasons – can deliver tangible benefits to many organisations. Simply stated, if business information has a value in the realm of business and strategy then it should be treated as an asset, if it is an asset then it should be managed and nurtured as such, which means aiming to do the right thing right, first time, every time, whilst focusing on maximising confidence, availability and agility.
File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro
26 Sunday Oct 2014
Posted Analytics, Architecture, Ask Martyn, awareness, Big Data, BS, deceit, governance
in11 Saturday Oct 2014
Posted Management, project management
inTags
Behavioural Economics, Commercial IT, IT business, IT Strategy, Organisational Autism, project management, Risk Management
Peter Drucker once stated that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.
That is one of the guiding principles in my professional role as strategist, leader and coach.
I work in business and IT.
With engineers, administrators, managers and executives.
I occasionally read blogs and forum posts related to my areas of interests.
A question appeared on a popular forum for Project Managers.
It asked, when it comes to successful Project Management, “what is more important, the right people or the right process?”
You get a lot of questions like that in IT.
It’s probably the same for other jobs.
A lot of the replies to the question were terse, mind-numbing and vacuous.
Other replies read like concatenations of fortune cookie quotes based on someone’s idealistic and flawed notion of management.
There were answers in favour of people over process, process over people and others that put “right process” and “right people” on an equal footing.
I didn’t get the impression that people were addressing the question from a position of knowledge and experience.
No one asked any questions.
No even the hint of one.
Though the obvious questions were there, staring at them in the face.
But no one asked.
Everyone assumed that there was a common understanding about what “right”, “right people” and “right process” mean in a project context.
Because people didn’t ask the obvious questions, they couldn’t move on to the more subtle and substantial questions.
They couldn’t move upstream or downstream.
Wherever they stood their position was untenable.
They didn’t have the social skills, the creativity or the intelligence to step back from the question.
They were stuck in the trivial, the hackneyed and the simplistic.
They answered with clichés, vagaries and baloney.
So what we had, was a long-life thread of ill-informed responses to a vague question.
It was if you’d asked a group of unthinking patriots what was better for the country, “the right people” or “the right political system”.
But it goes deeper than that.
Politicians who are reduced to talking about rights and wrongs, without being able to pony up any rational explanations, are quite rightly derided for being shallow and removed.
In IT we think it’s a sign of considered professionalism.
But regurgitating motivational slogans that are well passed their use by date is not professionalism.
The unquestioning subservience to trite, populist and unrealistic management dogma is not professionalism.
Acting as if project management were some bizarre super-hero Hollweird invention is not professionalism.
Needing to break everything down into right and wrong, good and bad, black or white, etc. is the height of arrogant superciliousness.
What is worse than arrogance or ignorance, is when they go hand in hand.
It’s just not on.
If IT was an army, it wouldn’t be the professional modern army of today. But an army lead by well-meaning, socially inept and multiply-challenged incompetents. The sort of army that would march a battalion of the “right people” to their certain death, or the sort of people who would see instrumental reason as being the “right process”.
“Lions lead by donkeys”.
Students of European history – say from 1934 to 1945 – might make the connections.
If you can’t define what you mean by “right”, you may as well be discussing the sex of angels.
If some people can’t even ask the obvious questions, then what the feck are they doing managing projects?
Never mind, life is too short to fret the inadequacies and excesses of IT.
As Lucius Seneca was want to say “A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant”.
10 Friday Oct 2014
Posted Ask Martyn, awareness, Best principles, Big Data, business, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse
inTags
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