In a recent article in Computer Weekly by Tony Collins 

Defra defends Accenture over “flawed” £350m IT system (excerpts below) there are clear examples why a process based approach to capture requirements are the ONLY way to make sure that the system you develop will meet the business need

 

Defra is a Government agency, and UK Government hits the headlines regularly with failed IT systems.  This is another painful, no pitiful example, or taxpayers money being flushed away.

 

But it could be so much simpler. Use a rigorous process mamangement tool to map the requirements as a series of end to end processes, attach supporting information and then give that to Accenture to build a system.

 

For more information read how ING Bank used this approach successful  or read Common Approach, Uncommon Results. Read the summary. If you like it I'll send yo a copy of the book.

 

So if it is so much better approach, why didn't Accenture recommend they work this way? Simple.  Do what the client wants  in the way that they want it and even if iit goes wrong they will pay you and defend you......

 

Read the article and weep.

Defra defends Accenture over “flawed” £350m IT system

Top civil servants have defended Accenture after it helped to deliver a "fundamentally flawed" £350m IT system to pay EU subsidies to farmers.

Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), told MPs yesterday: "The people responsible for the fact that the IT system was not as good as it should have been were the people who commissioned it as much as Accenture."

The defence of Accenture came when the House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee (PAC) met to question Ghosh and Tony Cooper, chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency, on the Single Payment Scheme.

Labour MP Alan Williams asked Ghosh and Cooper whether Accenture should pay compensation for a disastrous system that pays subsidies to farmers under the Single Payment Scheme.
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Cooper said that officials had so poorly specified the system that it had no facility for changing the entitlements for each farmer.

Statements are sent to farmers each year which set out the amounts they are entitled to. The rates in 2009 are higher than 2008 entitlements.

Cooper said that something "pretty fundamental was missing from the original specification".

He added: "When the system was delivered out of the change programme in 2005/6 it did not include the functionality to be able to change entitlement or to transfer entitlements, and that is a fundamental aspect of the scheme. We therefore had to invest to retrofit that functionality into the system."

Ghosh, who as head of Defra has overall responsibility for the Rural Payments Agency, said that one main problem with the IT was that Accenture delivered what it was asked to deliver. "What they [Accenture] were asked to deliver was the wrong thing."

full article
 

Great entrepreneurs do not necessarily make great leaders of corporations.  Most entrepreneurs start companies expecting their baby to grow and be a significant force.  I certainly did when we lanched Nimbus 12 years ago.

 

But as Nimbus has grown can the leadership team make the necessary transitions from start-up to an established business?  I believe so, partially because several of us in the leadership have come from working in large corporations and understnad what it is like, but most importantly we understand and expect it a transition.

 

That said there are leaders in large companies who are just BAD.  Here are some of the traits. After scrutinizing 360-degree feedback data on over 11,000 leaders and evaluating the 10% considered the least effective, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found the 10 most common leadership shortcomings.

 

In a recent Management Issues article  here Max McKeowan gives examples of comnpanies constantly innovating or reinventing its products.

Toyota says that everyone's job is to "Improve 1000 things by 1% continuously".  Apple works to make sure that its own products obsolete its current range rather than be obsoleted by its competitors. So this is product innovation.

So why is there not the same focus on process innovation? The approach of constantly striving to improve the way people do things. To be fanatical about driving our non-value added activities. But this needs to be done in a controlled, managed and governed manner or a company will fall foul of regulatory compliance.

At Nimbus (www.nimbuscontrol.com) this is our driving passion. Our software is the ‘operations manual’ helps companies in every industry constantly improve.

The results are staggering. Carphone Warehouse can see an additional £55m of revenue from the 800+ UK stores purely by getting standardised, consistent information to staff on all the core activities in a store.  Watch the video

Lockheed Martin improved its win rate from 30% to 100% when bidding for big systems implementation projects.

Why? Because most projects use MS Powerpoint or Visio and whilst you can visualise some improvements, you can make them stick. “Sustainable improvement” is the goal.

This is discussed in my book Common Approach, Uncommon Results.  Read the book summary at www.ideas-warehouse.com  and if you like it I’ll send you a free copy.

Following on from my blog - "Force.com - CIOs dream or nightmare' Silicon.com has started talking about 'citizen developers' in a recent article (which is below) and here.

 

This echoes the other articles I've written about the challenges the CIOs. So the challenge for the CIOs is can they make a shift in the minds of the business users from 'The man who loves to say no'  (the anti-Del Monte man) to the coach, trusted advisor and mentor to the business.

 

No there is an idea for a TV program - "CIO Makeover".

 

By Natasha Lomas

 

We've had the 'citizen journalist', blogging from war zones or capturing breaking news on their cameraphone. Now step forward the 'citizen developer' - an individual set to play an increasingly important role in creating business apps, according to analyst house Gartner.

 

BT & Salesforce ran an event this week to help educate CIOs on the Cloud at the BT Tower, in London.  So a few informative series of sessions in the morning.  Lots of discussions about the Cloud.

 

Based on the lively Q&A there is a great deal of fear, doubt and uncertainty. (Can't see the video.  click here )

 

 

But the Clouds cleared as we travelled at 7.5 m/s up in the lift to the restaurant at the top of the tower and we were greated by stunning views over London.

 

 

Sounds like the start of a bad Christmas cracker joke.  Talking of Christmas, I’ve already had the first ‘Festive discount’ email from a supplier.  I thought there was an unwritten rule that we had to get through Halloween and Fireworks night before they started promoting Christmas.

 

Cloud Computing seems to have struck a chord a way that ASP, OnDemand, SaaS and all the previous incarnations never have. Every analyst is blogging and tweeting about it, there are multiple conferences, there are books that have been written   - in fact I’ve co-authored 2 Thinking of.. books on the Cloud. One aimed at buyers and the other for software vendors looking to migrate.

 

But what is interesting is that it has reached the mainstream press – hence the joke.  It is no longer something that IT folks talk about in terms that baffle the rest of society. Now most business people have heard of ‘the Cloud’ even if they don’t understand it, and more critically the implications.

 

So business people are embracing the ideas of Cloud Computing. Why? Because they can see immediate value from the applications and services being offered.  But there are ‘unknown unknowns’  There are corporate, security and reputation risks that they don’t even know that the consider. That is the role of the CIO to coach, mentor and support the business as they look at the Cloud.

 

So do CIOs need a ‘make over’?  Certainly in the eyes of most of the business.

 

But unfortunately the Cloud has driven an even greater rift between business and IT.  It is being used to show how smaller nimbler suppliers are delivering far faster than the internal IT department. But there is a good reason.  The IT department is spending 80% of its time and effort ‘keeping the lights on’ and the remaining 20% on providing new solution that are robust, scalable, secure and integrated into the core applications. How many of the ‘new’ Cloud providers are truly enterprise ready?

 

Which is we wrote Thinking of.. Buying a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions. It has many, if not most, of the questions that you should be asking of yourself and your Cloud supplier.

 

A man goes into a shop and says “I’d like to buy a Cloud Computer”  So rather than buying a Cloud Computer, maybe he needs a copy of our book?  What a great idea for a Christmas present for CIOs for all their business managers.

 

Having sat on a panel session at BPM Europe on "BPM & Cloud" even the panelists found the discussion decidedly cloudy.  The issue was both BPM and Cloud are poorly defined so together it was difficult. 

 

The key issue was BPM & Cloud could be

 - BPM tools offered in the Cloud or

  - BPM operation in the Cloud.

 

Still not clearer.  So lets understand the options:

First you can define your business operation in terms of process descriptions / maps with links to supporting information (systems, forms, documents, metrics).Good practice whatever you intend to do with the Cloud.

 

Lets call this the Intelligent Operations Manual (IOM), and this can be provided to end users real time in a system.  You also have the underlying execution systems (BPMS, ERP, CRM).

 

This short (3 min) Carphone Warehouse video of what an Intelligent Operations Manual looks like to an end user and example of BPM in the Cloud.   Nimbus hosts the process system and that is all.

 

 

 

 

Then have several choices

 

-    You can give it all to someone else…  people, process system (IOM), execution systems, responsibility  = BPO   eg EDS, Accenture using

 

-    You can get someone else to run the process system (IOM), execution systems but keep the people and ownership = BPM applications in the Cloud  eg Nimbus, Appian, Lombardi, Salesforce.com

 

-    You keep it all

What you can’t do is give it all to someone else before you have defined your business operation.

Clearer?

David Rowan wrote a great article called Crowdsourcing back in 2006.  It very astutely identified a trend where individuals will happily work for pennies or even for free - all made possible by the internet and central exchanges.

 

An example is stock photography. In the old world, if your magazine or corporate brochure needed a few images a conventional picture library would charge you £100 for each pic. Suddenly, that has all changed. iStockphoto has cut the price to as low as 60p. The secret? The over 25,000 amateur photographers who between them have uploaded 4m royalty-free pics to the site. The photographers earn a few pennies, the customer gets a bargain. And in the middle, iStockphoto makes a margin.

 

But that is an example of financial gain. 

 

How about this - the 24 hour book. The authors are going to write a book on Saturday drawing on ideas from people like you and me  - and the book is printed on the following Monday.

 

But in the world of 100% altrusim there is Wikipedia. Who maintains Wikipedia. We all do. Why? Because we care about the content. 

 

So why do we all care so little about our corporate information?  The DNA of the business.  Its business processes, procedures and work instructions.  We even get paid to maintain it - and we still don't do it.

 

3 Simple reasons !!! 

- They are BORING (but a necessary evil),

- Poorly presented - unintelligeble flow charts which are not described in the context of an individuals role

- Difficult find hidden on some dusty corner of the intranet.

 

Here's a video of an alternative approach..and in action at Carphone Warehouse