Business Ecology Initiative

Call for Participation: BEI Optimization for Innovation Conference

We just announced an exciting new Optimization for Innovation Conference program.  The inaugural conference, December 6 – 8, 2010, in Santa Clara, CA USA, is “Optimization for Innovation: Reset; Joint Business & Technology Actions for the New Normal”:

As the world economy emerges from a painful recession, organizations are confronted with the challenge of retaining bottom-line diligence, while pursuing market sustaining and gaining innovation, in an environment riddled with uncertainty, increased regulation, consumer reluctance and tighter credit. This is the “new normal.” To execute in the “new normal,” organizations are seeking new ideas and techniques to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

At the inaugural Optimization for Innovation conference, executives, senior-level practitioners, experts and thought leaders will share real-world experiences and pragmatic 90-day action items to harvest savings and trapped value from existing processes, resources and capabilities.

For more on the conference, visit the program site.  Save the date! December 6 – 8.

This morning, we issued a call for participation.  We are seeking proposals for the following program and tutorial topics:

Program Topics

• Optimization for Innovation Success Stories
• Business-Technology Reset: Optimization for Innovation
• Governance Models for the New Normal
• Business Analytics as Optimization Foundation
• New Normal Linchpins: Business-Tech Savvy Professionals
• Business-IT Alignment is a Dead-End
• Business Optimization Techniques

Tutorials Topics

• Instituting a Business Performance Measurement Framework
• Cyber Risk Analysis: Assessment, Policy, & Economics
• Business Process Modeling and Business Instrumentation
• Lean / Six Sigma in the New Normal

Presentations and tutorials proposed should be geared toward an audience comprising direct reports and senior staff of the COO, CFO and CIO. All presentations and tutorials  must include a 90-day action plan for attendees to pursue post-conference.

The submission deadline is August 13, 2010. Please note, submissions that are direct pitches for product or services will not be considered. Submissions should be prepared in English, containing the following information:

• Presenter name, title and affiliation
• Presenter Bio
• Session Title
• 2 - 3 paragraph description of proposed session
• 3 - 5 bullets on what attendees will learn
• Target audience characteristics: role, skill and industry
• 90-day action plan items

Submit abstracts as described above to Program Chair Brenda M. Michelson via e-mail.

Join us: Business Architecture Day, Sept 22, 2010 in Cambridge, MA

The Business Ecology Initiative is co-sponsoring a Business Architecture Information Day with the OMG’s Business Architecture Working Group.  The day features practitioner and analyst keynotes:

Capitalizing on Business Architecture in the Pharmaceutical Industry by Deb Boykin, Business Process Management, Director, Pfizer, Inc. 

Pfizer Inc. is a research-based global pharmaceutical company applying innovative science to improve world health. It discovers, develops, manufactures and markets prescription medicines for humans and animals. Pfizer markets its pharmaceuticals directly to health care providers and patients; with the majority of sales conducted through wholesalers including McKesson and Cardinal Health. At Pfizer, Business Architecture resides within the Business Process Management (BPM) group and is a critical component in delivering Business Process value. This presentation will first examine the approach used to develop a robust and agile Business Architecture structure and will then discuss how content is leveraged and sustained to ensure business value.

Trends & Emerging Strategies in Business Architecture, by Jeff Scott, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.

Business architecture's time has come. While EAs have talked about business architecture for years, not much has really happened. But now a confluence of events is driving renewed interest - and action - in the business architecture space. Forrester sees three significant trends driving this change: a shift towards business led IT initiatives particularly in social technologies, EA disintermediation in technology decisions as IT organizations outsource more of their role, and renewed interest in strategic planning as business models and organizations become more complex. This presentation will explore these trends and the challenges and opportunities they bring. Key takeaways include trends that are challenging the traditional EA model, trends in developing business architecture and challenges every EA will face on the road ahead.

The complete agenda is posted here. 

New BEI Podcast: Aleks Buterman on Decoding Business/IT Unity

Aleks Buterman, Principal and Technology Investment Management Advisor at SenseAgility Group, spoke on Decoding Business and IT Unity, at the March 2010 Business Ecology Initiative Symposium in Jacksonville FL.

Utilizing a case study approach, Buterman spoke of classic and newly identified failure patterns associated with enterprise technology investment. Interestingly, Buterman's case studies extend beyond initial delivery, to focus on real-world challenges of product, program and business sustainment brought on by unanticipated customer and business unit demand, organizational change and insufficient architectural investment.

For preventive and corrective measures, Buterman advocates a capability portfolio approach to bring complexity to a manageable level. The capability portfolio approach considers four dimensions: business, technology, organization and risk. Buterman emphasized the need to apply business discipline, particularly risk assessment and management, throughout business-technology lifecycles.

Amplifying Buterman's findings was a special video conference guest appearance from a vice president at a large Fortune 500 Financial Services firm.

To listen to an audio recording of Buterman's presentation go here.

Fortune: Enterprise CIOs Leaving Drudgery Behind to Focus on Business Growth

The current issue of Fortune Magazine has an interesting article on the transitioning role of the CIO in the improving economy.

“After a year of hunkering down and slashing costs, many corporations are growing again -- and techies are leading the way. CEOs such as P&G's Bob McDonald increasingly view technology as a strategic tool for increasing revenue -- not just a way to make workers more efficient. A recent Gartner survey found revenue growth trumped cost cuts as CIOs' top priority for 2010.”

The article profiles Filippo Passerini, Global Services Officer and CIO at Procter & Gamble.  At the request of the CEO, Passerini and his team are shifting to a business advisory role, powered by business information and analytics. 

“Passerini's team of computing experts uses technology to analyze the $80 billion consumer giant's online shopping data -- like the shampoo/moisturizer connection -- to boost retail sales of P&G (PG) brands like Tide, Gillette, and Pampers. "We connect the dots with the information we have," he says.”

To make this shift, Passerini outsourced basic (commodity) tasks and repurposed his team:

“To free up resources -- and time -- for their new-found strategic roles, CIOs are farming out IT drudgery like server maintenance. P&G's Passerini has outsourced many of the basics to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), allowing him to cut $800 million from the IT budget over the past seven years while keeping roughly the same number of workers. What are those folks doing today? Passerini has repurposed IT guys as business-unit consultants who dream up ways to make better products and sell more of them.”

This is a great example of business-tech savvy contributing to strategic business outcomes.  Do you have others to share?

How are you exploiting your business-technology investments?  Are you operating in an optimization for innovation context? Or, are you mired in IT drudgery?

Event Processing Symposium 2010: Replays Available

The replays of last Monday’s Event Processing Symposium are now available.  The star packed program featured:

•    W. Roy Schulte, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
•    Opher Etzion, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and chair of the Event Processing Technical Society
•    Christopher Bird, Chief Architect at Sabre Airline Solutions
•    Paul Vincent, CTO Business Rules and CEP, TIBCO Software
•    Colin Clark, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Event Processing, Inc.

Check out the replays and join the Linkedin group. 

Profiting from Continuous Intelligence: Free, Virtual Conference on Event Processing – June 7, 2010

As I’ve mentioned previously, critical to Business Ecology success is the exchange of real-world stories, practices, lessons and insights amongst the adopter community.

In addition to active discussions at the Business Ecology Office and Core Practice level (see diagram), we have Communities of Practice for specific Business Ecology enablers, including BPM/SOA, Cyber Security, Event Processing and Green CIO.

Next week, on June 7th, our Event Processing Community of Practice is hosting a free virtual conference on Profiting from Continuous Intelligence.  We are featuring 5 top speakers in the Event Processing field:

•    W. Roy Schulte, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
•    Opher Etzion, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and chair of the Event Processing Technical Society
•    Christopher Bird, Chief Architect at Sabre Airline Solutions
•    Paul Vincent, CTO Business Rules and CEP, TIBCO Software
•    Colin Clark, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Event Processing, Inc.

In support of the conference, we’ve created a virtual hallway in Linkedin.  If you are interested in Event Processing, register for the free virtual conference and join our Linkedin group.