To complement the Value Chain Maps or Wardley maps, I want to remind the details of these 3 steps, as they serve me to document in detail the situations and details related to the context:
Shadow IT is a non-ending story on companies where they have a centralized IT department. So CIOs and their teams have been working always on this topic.
Typically Shadow IT is seen as a nuisance, but there are other organizations that see it as a source of innovation as the business is implementing a solution for a given problem without the hurdles of the bureaucracy.
These sources change every single year, as the technology evolves and evolves.
20 years ago the main source of shadow IT came from a Visual Basic program, a Lotus Notes local application or an Excel. Now, the sources are infinite.
I’m looking for specific actions that IT department on a global company can do to limit and uncover Shadow IT. Not the traditional ones, but the new ones that comes from new and emerging technologies.
Any suggestion?
I have been working on a value proposition for a major deal where the customer is looking for a technological partner that enables them to unblock a set of challenges they are having on their data centers.
The customer’s main pain points are highlighted in red, the links between assets are drawn in blue, and the green lines shows the expected benefits for a given user.
All the improvements are implemented through a project, and in the business case there are some interim steps before to achieve the expected state.
This picture below was published by Simon Wardley in Twitter and clearly reflects how maps can contribute to do economic analysis of the situations you have in a given scenario.
I have done some similar exercise with a plain table in excel with 2 columns with the scenario AS-IS and TO-BE, but this graphical representation is nicer.
Another nice example:
Today I was learning about on solar plants, how the projects are funded, the assets are created, exploded and managed. The technology aspect of the solar panels is not the key focus today, it’s how the asset is managed into a regulatory environment that is evolving.
The asset management of major assets as oil and gas, eolic or solar plants is a very closed market, where you have to be very well connected to be able to grab a contract.
The main stakeholders:
The concepts on the map:
Around this industry a lot of companies have grown, some of the focused on the technology, other focused on the business. All of them with something in common: they are working with one or two investing companies.
Traditionally the energy market has always working on looking for the best synergies to understand how other players are contributing to the market with their energy (oil, gas, eolic, coal…). Ok, but what contribution?, for sure the one that influences the price.
The generation, transport and storage of energy contributes to the price of the energy and defines the futures market. New type of energies as solar and eolic that are starting to have impact in the major markets will also have to learn how to maximize their prices (in those countries where the regulation allow it).
For 2019-2020 some of the companies will be able to systematically maximize their efficiency analyzing the electric market prices and react according to the best “move”.
Someone could tell me, “well, we always looked to the energy market, analyzed it and try to react to the best move”.
I agree, the difference is I see machine learning making deeper analysis that enable to make decisions in a different way.
Reading the chapter “Better for Less ” of Wardley Maps I found a new concept to me: OODA loop.
It’s a strategy cycle that stands for:
Observe the environment, Orient around it, Decide your path and Act
The creator of this concept was John Boyd , which Wikipedia page is really interesting to read, the basis are represented in the diagram shown below:
Before run, just walkTo put in place a strategy cycle or continuous mindset is not easy and Simon’s suggestion is:
Think about an aircraft pilot who goes through the OODA cycle in the shortest time prevails because his opponent is caught responding to situations that have already changed.
Think about continuous decisions that needs to be done, continous changes on different aspects of the environment and the need to overcome them.
A basic squeme you are able to put in practice and repeat is something that can be useful, not just for an individual but for a whole organization that is able to adapt itself as a whole.
It points to the future of software development in a post cloud world.
The idea of “Serverless” is NOT about removing the servers completely (or you couldn’t use the internet at all), but essentially paying for services that mean that someone else manages the servers for you thereby reducing maintenance load.
Spend control is a necesary evil that enable the organizations to understand where they are allocating their resources. The allocation of the limited resources at the best place of the organization will enable itself to be more competitive.
Total cost of Ownership (TCO) enables to understand the end to end amount of resources that an visible element consumes at its whole lifecycle. When calculating the TCO, there are always assumptions required as not all costs are direct costs that clearly you can assign to a single asset.
Here is where serverless shows up.
The reduction in obscurity of cost through serverless will change the way we develop, build, refactor, invest, monitor, operate, organise & commercialise almost everything.
The idea is to move to a scenario where you are performing the billing per function, where you are investing as much as possible on visible value for your organization, reducing the OPEX as much as possible, and having understanding about where your resources are allocated.
Simon Wardley did a map that illustrates the case:
Source: https://serverless.zone/serverless-is-just-a-name-we-could-have-called-it-jeff-1958dd4c63d7
It is a free and open-source web framework written using Node.js. Serverless is the first framework that was originally developed for building applications exclusively on AWS Lambda, a serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of the AWS.
From the framework, it birh Serverless, that is a toolkit for deploying and operating serverless architectures. Focus on your application, not your infrastructure.
This is the Benefit per stock from 2007 till 2017 of the main utilities companies from Spain. This reinforces my bet on Red Electrica and Enagas.
I had a conversation with some friends that started with the following question:
Does it make sense to me to purchase a Diesel van or I should wait to the electric van?
To purchase a car/van is an investment to be analyzied, the disruption that is coming in terms of electric vehicles makes that some type of models do not make sense anymore.
This is specially important as the law is being adapted to fulfill the CO2 targets we have in the EU. Nobody wants to purchase a diesel van and 5 years later the valuation is zero because basically you cannot circulate in the city (there are local authorities applying this type of practices in big cities).
For cars the situation is different, the market already offers solutions and the trend is clear through the electric vehicles. The government is also promoting the procurement of electric vehicles through subventions, so these are things you can add to the analysis of cost.
are changing a lot, in my case, now we do not use the car at all during the week, and we only do it during weekends when we go out of city. I have jumped from doing 25.000 kms / year to drive just 11.000 kms / year.
In the city we live there are sharing car companies, so you can access to a car whenever you need.
We are asking ourselves if it makes sense to purchase a car or not.
EGVI is a is a contractual public-private partnership dedicated to delivering green vehicles and mobility system solutions which match the major societal, environmental and economic challenges ahead.
I have read the electrification roadmap defined for Europe which contains a lot of data related to:
The document answers a lot of questions about where we are going to, and there are so many other challenges that right now are still not known.
In a nutshell, if you want to purchase a van now, you can do it, it will be useful for the next 10 – 15 years. The electrification roadmap document details that for vans there are still so many technical challenges that they need to be resolved, and they give a pesimistic forecast that the peaks of high presence of new sold vehicles will be happening around 2030.
Two in a box model is an Anglo Saxon model that works well with Anglo Saxon people. They understand the grey area and they handle the positive tensions in the right way. Depending of the situation and the need of the organization each part of the box makes decisions and the things run with “back and forth” discussions.
Unique direct report is a Latin model, you report just to one person and there is an unique direction (wrong or right) to follow.
When you implement a “2 in a box model” on a mainly Latin organization, the situation is different. Generally, we try to find who in the “2 in a box” who has really more power, and then follow it. It takes time to understand how to articulate these tensions in a positive way so the organization advance properly.
I’m writing using the context of the “stereotypes”, so please consider that not every single person falls on it, it’s just a generalization.