Service industry productivity is the current challenge for Europe

The term “post-industrial society” was first coined by Daniel Bell in 1973. He predicted things like the global diffusion of capital, the imbalance of international trade, and the decline of the manufacturing sector on the behalf of service industry. This leads to slow growth economies since services usually show less productivity growth than manufacturing. This is  the Baumol Effect which states that in labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing,education, or the performing arts, there is little or no growth in productivity over time.

A dreamed CIO life ?

Here is, below, some thoughts I exchanged with a consultant in the Paris metro, regarding CIO life. Does it match your knowings ?

Once you have stepped in as CIO, you are facing quickly to a lot of operational concerns which usually are managed by crisis meetings. Your people expect from you to take the harsh decisions they have not been able to take and they think they need, to be backed in their day to day work. You are trying a say about strategy, everybody hears you politely, but they all seem to think : “hey, guy shed your illusions ! Here, you will deal with the hard. only if such a thought may support the budget, it is worth to have”. Your team is expecting a change but nobody believe it is still possible.

To trust or to untrust ? A question which drives innovation.

Harvard Business School has published a survey which tries to identify what are innovation drivers and what factors quicken its adoption. It appears that managers who trust their suppliers are more reluctant to try new products coming from new suppliers than managers who untrust them.
Being trustful with his suppliers may be an advantage when you need to rely on them in a case of complex projects for example. But being less opened to innovation may led your company to be less agile and less quick to adopt new technology able to strenghten its business.
Something not obvious for a lot of us from my point of view.

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What is Enterprise Architecture ?

Is Enterprise Architecture the new buzz ? Everybody is talking about it as a way of providing response to most IT problems. But, what is Enterprise Architecture ?

An overview of IT processes show how they are coupled with  customer process.

The first point of coupling occurs when a solution is acquired and go through acceptance tests.  This is a loosely coupling since an event does not  directly impact operation processes.

The second point happens when solution is in production, and needs to be delivered and supported. This coupling is then tight since an event like a failure may impact directly operation processes.

Enterprise architecture enables to monitor business alignement along these two lines of coupling from the point of view of :

• business requirements monitoring
• IT risks monitoring
• IT value catering
• IT costs incurred

With respect to this extent, Enterprise architecture defines two groups of process :

• Enterprise architecture planning which contains target architecture definition, as is assessment, migration plan definition
• Enterprise architecture governance which define politics for architecture changes, change management, reporting

writely and may other friends

Google has just reopened the website of writely. It complements Google spreadsheet already in beta test.

We may legitimately wonder about a soon Web 2.0. presentation tool availability. If any, I am sure that Google will be keen to break its wallet. 

Anyway, what will be the Net surfers feelings regarding privacy if their personal data (mail, budget,…) are kept by a third party ? I won’t argue further on this, since we may pass lunchtime.

But, within a company, this drawback disappearing, more appealling pros remain.

First, architecture is a matter of views

When you consider the project to organize a simple room, often a single point of view is enough to decide which organization to settle and how to organize. Then, anybody is able to tackle the problem.

When you consider the project to design a full flat, you need to collect and concile the points of views of all people at stake : you, next occupant if you sell it, others sharing the same building,  housekeeper, people in charge of maintenance, and so on…

It won’t be only a matter of connecting all requirements, which is not often simple, you ‘ll also need to prove that your design give a response to each of them.

This is the Enterprise Architecture deal.