A long time ago, I did some work for a client that had an out-of-date and inflexible billing system. The software would send invoices and monthly statements to the customers, who were then expected to remit payment to clear the balance on their account. The business had recently introduced a new direct debit system. Customers who had signed a direct debit mandate no longer needed to send payments. But faced with the challenge of introducing this change into an old and inflexible software system, the accounts department came up with an ingenious and elaborate workaround. The address on the cust ..read more

A friend of mine shares an email thread from his organization discussing the definition of CUSTOMER, disagreeing as to which categories of stakeholder should be included and which should be excluded. Why is this important? Why does it matter how the CUSTOMER label is used? Well, if you are going to call yourself a customer-centric organization, improve customer experience and increase customer satisfaction, it would help to know whose experience, whose satisfaction matters. And how many customers are there actually? The organization provides services to A, which are experienced by B and paid f ..read more

In September 2005, we had reason to worry about the ability of a tightly coupled world to withstand shocks. At that time this included Hurricane Katrina and SARS. More recent crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have arguably outshocked these. In his analysis of the economic sanctions imposed against Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Simon Jenkins comments that the interdependence of the world’s economies, so long seen as an instrument of peace, has been made a weapon of war. As the global economy becomes more tightly coupled, the chances of one event h ..read more

@Jon_Ayre questions whether an organization's being data-driven drives the right behaviours. He identifies a number of pitfalls. It's all too easy to interpret data through a biased viewpoint Data is used to justify a decision that has already been made Data only tells you what happens in the existing environment, so may have limited value in predicting the consequences of making changes to this environment In a comment below Jon's post, Matt Ballentine suggests that this is about evidence-based decision making, and notes the prevalence of confirmation bias. Which can generate a couple of ad ..read more

My attention has been drawn to a company called Stockpile Reports, which provides a data estimation service for piles of material. As I understand it, the calculations are based on visual images of a pile of material, possibly obtained using either a drone or a handmobile phone app, from which a detailed 3D model of the pile is produced, allowing the volume, weight or value of the material to be estimated. I don't have any information about how good these estimates are, but they must be a lot more accurate than simply gauging the height of the pile, and I guess they are probably good enough fo ..read more

In this post, I want to explore some important synergies between architectural thinking and risk management.  The first point is that if we want to have an enterprise-wide understanding of risk, then it helps to have an enterprise-wide view of how the business is configured to deliver against its strategy. Enterprise architecture should provide a unified set of answers to the following questions. What capabilities delivering what business outcomes? Delivering what services to what customers? What information, process and resources to support these? What organizations, systems, technologi ..read more

Following the data is all very well, but how should we decide which data to follow?   Nate Silver argues that the total data are more important than the marginal data. There is more virus transmission in restaurants than in aeroplanes. The average American spends something like 5 hours per year on a plane. The mask mandate might be good or bad at the margin, but it is very unlikely to make a major difference in the overall course of the coronavirus. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 19, 2022 The average American eats at a restaurant about 250 times per year, whereas they travel by ai ..read more

If your #datastrategy involves collecting and harvesting more data, then it makes sense to check this requirement at an early stage of a new project or other initiative, rather than adding data collection as an afterthought. For requirements such as security and privacy, the not-as-afterthought heuristic is well established in the practices of security-by-design and privacy-by-design. I have also spent some time thinking and writing about technology ethics, under the heading of responsibility-by-design. In my October 2018 post on Responsibility by Design, I suggested that all of these could b ..read more

My 2012 post on the Co-Production of Data and Knowledge offered a critique of the #DIKW pyramid. When challenged recently to propose an alternative schema, I drew something quickly on the wall, against a past-present-future timeline. Here is a cleaned-up version. Data is always given from the past – even if only a fraction of a second into the past. We use our (accumulated) knowledge (or memory) to convert data into information – telling us what is going on right now. Without prior knowledge, we would be unable to do this. As Dave Snowden puts it, knowledge is the means by which we crea ..read more

Some good down-to-earth points from #ASPC20 @airpowerassn 's Air and Space Power Conference earlier this month. Although the material was aimed at a defence audience, much of the discussion is equally relevant to civilian and commercial organizations interested in information superiority (US) or information advantage (UK). Professor Dame Angela Mclean, who is the Chief Scientific Advisor to the MOD, defined information advantage thus: The credible advantage gained through the continuous, decisive and resilient employment of information and information systems. It involves exploiting informat ..read more