Wasting Management Time

According to the Harvard Business Review, fully 90% of managers waste their time on ineffective activities. Only 10% of managers use their time both effectively and wisely.

The job of managers is to move the organization forward. The manager is paid to change the direction of the enterprise, not to maintain the status quo. The secret to achieving this is to apply focus and energy.

A large number of managers have neither focus or energy, they are what are termed the procrastinators. These managers are paralyzed by fear of failure, and therefore fail to take action. These managers are a real problem, and require special care, because otherwise, its difficult to get any useful results from them.

Another large group have energy, but no focus. They spend their time jumping from activity to activity, but this group, mistakes action for results. To handle these managers, its important to keep the number of tasks assigned to them small. Overloading these managers with more than a few tasks will lead to lots of apparent activity, but very few results.

Yet another group, has focus, but no energy. These are the disengaged. They are capable of excellent work, but have become discouraged and therefore approach their work in a half hearted fashion. These managers may have started with both energy and focus, but have been discouraged by a stifling organization culture. These managers can be rehabilitated, through a little encouragement and attention.

Purposeful managers, have both energy and focus. They don't get distracted by unimportant issues, they focus on things that count and they commit to moving things forward. These are the people that get things done and are the real source of competitive advantage in companies.

As an individual in the organization, ally yourself with purposeful managers for two reasons. First, these managers get results and being associated with them will cast a positive halo on you. The second reason, is that associating with purposeful managers helps you in turn to become purposeful, which will usually result in both attention and promotions.

Business Models and the Scientific Method

In many respects, creating a business model is like creating a scientific theory and performing experiments to prove or disprove the theory. If our theories are correct, the experiment will turn out as we expect, and the business will prosper. If not, then the theory has to be adjusted to reflect the results of the experiments. The scientific approach can therefore yield real benefits and results when creating a business, as opposed to a trial and error approach based on luck.

For example, let's say that we think customers will be willing to pay a lot more for 'green' hybrid cars. This is the bet that Toyota is making with the Prius. To verify that we are right, we would need to figure out what channels to use, who to sell to, how to market the vehicle, how to price it, etc. There are a lot of things that we could do, and only through disciplined experimentation, can we really be sure what will work.

In many ways we see an explosion of experimentation in business models today. It's not just Web 2.0 companies, but companies such as Walmart, Southwest Airlines, Netflix, Costco and many others which have experimented with their business models and come up with winning formulas. This trend is likely to continue, since globalization is creating both more opportunities and more players. The real work of innovation is to find, create and adopt winning business models and adjust them continuously so that they continue to deliver results.

Adjusting the Business Model

One of the things that successful companies understand is that a business model is seldom perfect when it is first formulated. It may work in one country, but not in another. It may work with one set of customers, but not with another. Borrowed and proven models may not have this problem, but then the challenge often becomes dislodging established competitors.

A plausible model may overlook several factors and make reasonable, yet untrue assumptions. For example, EuroDisney assumed that European consumers were essentially like American consumers, but they weren't. The result was many years of losses, until they adjusted their business model. Sometimes luck will reveal a totally unforeseen opportunity. For example, when Ford built their first SUVs, they saw it as an opportunity to make a small profit, but the Ford SUV factories turned out to be the most profitable in the whole company.

It's wise to adjust the business model as circumstances dictate and not get wedded to the initial model. Business models should be flexible and built for change, especially in volatile industries.

An effective strategy needs to accompany the business model. For example, Microsoft has a great business model, but a new entry has essentially no viable strategy to successfully adopt the same model. On the other hand, there are viable business models and strategies that allow a company to compete in the IT consulting market.

What is a Business Model?

An Enterprise Architect needs to understand the business model of the enterprise in which they are involved. The business model will often constrain what type of systems will be built and how they will be used. For example, an airline which offers low fares, frequent flights, no food and operates only point to point will have quite different IT needs than a full service airline that uses hubs, manages a complex logistics chain and offers air miles to their customers.

A good business model is the cornerstone of a successful enterprise. The business model answers the question, who is the customer, what does the customer value and is willing to pay for and how is money made from that customer?

The most powerful business models create whole new demand because they produce value in a way that no other business does. The source of value is either in the product itself, or the way in which the product is built or delivered to the customer.

For example, the Local Area Network created whole new categories of demand. It was a new product when it first became available and created demand for something that hadn't existed before.

On the other hand, companies like Walmart take an existing product set and revolutionize the way in which the product is delivered. Walmart makes money by among other things, running a highly efficient supply chain.

A company that is introducing a new business model, usually does not have the time to optimize all the elements of that model, they need to act fast to head off competitors. This means they need to build IT infrastructure that works fast, but may not be very good architecturally. The EA needs to recognize this and get a solution that satisfies the immediate needs without becoming an albatross at a later time.

In most cases, the Enterprise Architect will be asked to incrementally improve the operation of the business model. For example, a system that was created quickly in a prior era to address an immediate business opportuinity, may now be a serious drag on productivity. The EA needs to recognize this and replace an imperfect system with a much better one.

Dependency Inversion and Mocking

Any non-trivial routine or class usually has two type of interfaces the incoming interface and the outgoing interface. The incoming interface is part of the class definition, and therefore well understood. The outgoing interface is not formally defined in the class interface, and it consists of the methods a class calls on other objects. A poor job on the outgoing interface will create poor code, even if the incoming interface is well designed. To avoid this, the code should use dependency inversion.

Dependency Inversion is defined by Robert Martin as

1. High level modules should not depend upon low level modules. Both should depend upon abstractions.
2. Abstractions should not depend upon details. Details should depend on abstractions.

Mocking is a useful technique for helping to achieve dependency inversion.

Much code development starts bottom up, with the definition of small classes with limited scope. The classes are then composed into larger classes. This tends to create kitchen sink classes, with many capabilities, since the needs of high level classes are not really known in advance.

With mocking, you start with with classes that have large scope and start testing the design with interfaces rather than classes. The interfaces can be mocked and left unimplemented until the design is perfected. Only when the design is proven as useful, do you implement the interface in a class. This type of design process ensure that your classes remain lean, because you build them only to fulfill the needs of real clients with known requirements. One danger though, is the proliferation of small classes with small interfaces. Ideally you should aggregate interfaces to create one class that implements several related interfaces.