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Sun 19 Jun 2011

Two papers at Naples Forum on Service 2011

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Presentation , Article , Academic
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I just attended Naples Forum on Service 2011 in Capri, Italy, on June 14-17, where I presented two academic papers:

  • Explaining the Evolutionary Development of the Web (co-authored with Kimmo Karhu)
  • The Impact of Information Technology Enabled Services on Value Co-Creation (co-authored with Mikko Heiskala and Kari Hiekkanen)

In the first paper, we leveraged Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) approach to provide a meta-level account on the evolution of the Web. Drawing from the ecological notions of Adaptive Cycle and Panarchy (Gunderson and Holling, 2002) as well as a typology of agents (Verhagen, 2000), we constructed a tentative model with three levels of scale and four waves of development. We identified characteristic accumulating resources in each Web generation and discussed how they trigger an evolutionary leap to the next adaptive cycle. Our conclusions included that the control of service consumers over the service diminishes as the Web’s constituent agents increase in autonomy and that the content consumers at each generation tend to become the content producers at the next generation.

In the second paper, we discussed how information and communications technology impacts value co-creation in services. We argued that while IT enabled services eliminate human labor from direct interaction between the provider and consumer of the service in service fulfillment, human discretion is increasingly required at higher strata of work complexity: in handling exceptions and (re)defining service agreements as well as in designing and implementing service systems — i.e. in what we call service negotiation.

 

Sun 22 Aug 2010

The 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2010)

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Presentation , Event , Article , Academic
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The 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2010, took place in Lima, Peru on August 12–15, 2010. This year marked the first time the conference has been held in South-America. The theme of the conference, “Sustainable IT Collaboration Around the Globe”, also expressed the international nature of this year’s forum. In fact, over half of all authors of papers presented at the conference were from outside the Americas region. Over 800 participants of 43 different nationalities were represented.
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Fri 6 Nov 2009

ECMLG 2009

Posted by jjk under Science , Presentation , Event , Article
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The 5th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance (ECMLG 2009) took place in Athens, Greece, yesterday and today, on November 5-6. It was a small but great conference featuring some really inspiring and thought-provoking sessions, particularly on Leadership side. Reflecting our time of change, many of the presentations recognized the need for more authentic, more collaborative and more ethical leadership.

I had the great honor and pleasure to present a paper entitled “EA and IT Governance — a Systemic Approach”, in which my colleagues and I put forth a governance construct called Agile Governance Model (AGM). It specifies an abstract meta-level governance structure that can be instantiated for any type of governance, e.g. IT governance, data governance, security governance. In this paper, we called for a distinct definition of EA governance that addresses the strategic, forward-looking aspects of enterprise architecture, currently downplayed by IT governance, and used AGM to position the notions of IT Governance and EA Governance with respect to the IT-related decision-making in the organization.

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Wed 21 Jan 2009

Comparison of Open Source BPM Tools: Intalio BPMS and JBoss jBPM

Posted by jjk under Technology , Article
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Last fall, I had the great privilege of mentoring one of the student groups at Special Course in Information Systems Integration at Helsinki University of Technology. Together with the end client Logica, I was playing the customer role for the project, whose purpose was to devise a comparison framework for BPMS and then compare two Open Source BPM tools with the framework: Intalio BPMS and JBoss jBPM.

The group finalized its work last week and generously let me publish the resulting report. Well done, guys!

 

Sat 29 Nov 2008

Human Interaction Management and Sociotechnical Design

Posted by jjk under Technology , Organization , Article
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In his landmark paper “The Principles of Sociotechnical Design” (1976), Albert Cherns provides a basic framework for understanding and designing sociotechnical systems with consideration to human and social aspects. Building upon the notion of a participative process, he defines nine key principles of sociotechnical design.

I came to think how a collaborative business process supported by Human Interaction Management System would align with these principles as a sociotechnical system. At first glance, the principles of Human Interaction Management would be congruent with good sociotechnical design:

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Thu 13 Mar 2008

SOA Follows Strategy

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Article
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Today, my article “SOA seuraa strategiaa” (”SOA Follows Strategy”) was published in the Mediaplanet special annex of Kauppalehti on SOA. Herewith an English translation of the article.

 

Sat 2 Feb 2008

David Linthicum on SOA consulting

Posted by jjk under Technology , Business , Article 2d17
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In his recent article, David Linthicum criticizes big consulting organizations of how they generally sell, plan and deliver SOA solutions to their clients.

He maintains that many projects quoted as SOA references are actually JBOWS projects (just a bunch of Web Services), merely service-enabling existing systems without due consideration of architecture, agility and changeability. Reminding that SOA should be more about architecture than technology, Linthicum attacks the “SOA-in-a-box movement” where predetermined technology is force-fit with the problem, resulting in a suboptimal solution. He also calls for a specific approach that addresses the unique nature of SOA and emphasizes the importance of planning that is often overlooked.

Linthicum does not hold SOA consulting in very high regard:

“Consultants who succeed with their SOA initiatives have a wide range of skills, a good understanding of architecture and the value of SOA, and all of the good work that needs to occur to make it work for the client. However, I don’t see many out there who fit that bill, and the amount of bad advice is becoming a huge issue. Unfortunately, many of their clients won’t figure this out until it’s too late.”

What Linthicum does not explicitly point out is that System Integrators are used to occasional integration projects in their large client companies. It is not in their immediate best interest to change this modus operandi and plan more resilient and reusable architectures. It is the small SOA boutique houses with specialized architecture skills that will be of most benefit for businesses, while waiting for the big ones to pick up on speed.

 

Mon 8 Oct 2007

BPM 2007 Conference in Brisbane

Posted by jjk under Technology , Science , Presentation , Event , Organization , Article
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The Fifth International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2007, was held in Brisbane, Australia, on 24-29 September. I attended the main conference on 25-27 and the co-located event on BPM Governance, WoGo 2007, in which I gave a presentation of my paper “On the Lookout for Organizational Effectiveness — Requisite Control Structure in BPM Governance”.

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Mon 6 Aug 2007

From Choreography to Jamming

Posted by jjk under Technology , Article
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I wanted to publish this English translation of my Tietoviikko article on Human Interaction Management dating back to May ages ago on bpmg.org, but as the site went down unexpectedly in early summer, this was forgotten. But here it is now.

 

Wed 20 Jun 2007

How to find the requisite structure?

Posted by jjk under Organization , Article
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The latest issue of Integral Leadership Review featured no less than three articles on holacracy: “Organization at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy” by Brian Robertson, “Mapping Our Decision-Making” by Gareth Powell and “Holacracy in Action” by Jessica Safran and Bob Huff.

Robertson’s account of how holacracy was institutionalized at Ternary Software is very interesting. He explains how the founders of the company paid very conscious attention to organizing and governing themselves: “But we refused to turn to the usual solutions. We refused to lessen the pain of an ad-hoc approach by adopting solutions we knew would be helpful but partial. Instead we held the pain and let it wash over us — we’d carry it, feel it and dwell in it. We’d walk a razor’s edge between letting the pain kill us and mitigating it too early with the typical solutions.”

Even if they succeeded in building agile organizational steering from the ground up, the immediate question that arises is whether something similar can be established in a legacy? organization that is pathologically messed up. If such an organization has a naturally ideal or ‘requisite’ circle structure, which ‘wants’ to emerge, as holacracy suggests, why does it not? Does the top-down, predict-and-control autocracy forcibly resist this dynamics? Can the associated? dissipation be attributed to what agency theory calls agency costs — costs pertaining to the principal-agent relationship that accrue from measures to mitigate conflicts of interest in co-operative behavior?

Moving the organization towards its requisite form — its telos — seems to require what Robertson calls dynamic steering: making small workable decisions rapidly, and letting the best decision emerge over time. This continual incremental adaptation brings about “significant efficiency gains, higher quality, more agility, increased ability to capitalize on ideas and changing market conditions, and, perhaps most ironically, far more control”. The problem in most organizations is “analysis paralysis” — in the face of fluctuating circumstances, attempting to predict the best path and then controlling to follow that path strictly is doomed to fail. The remedy? Speeding up the decision-making; making the decisions where the information is. Easier said than done.

It would be interesting to see case studies of how sociocratic/holacratic principles have been applied in organizations that are “far from” their requisite form.

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