Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Worth based development

Butler Group's master class was better than I hoped for. Tim Jennings and Martin Butler gave some interesting presentations on IT value, measurement of value and in general what is wrong with our industry - too much focus on cost, with no clear measureable value.

The content was similar to a discussion group I had a Foo camp last year.

Take home messages were

1. No correlation between IT spending and business value.
2. No correlation between IT spending and cost reduction.
3. Strong correlation between knowledge capital and business value.
4. IT in general is focusing on cost and automation, where it should be focusing on knowledge capital.
5. Big gap between Executive and IT in general.
6. In general there are no clear measurement of business value in IT projects.
7. Difference between Competitive advantage, Cost of doing business and Transition of projects.
8. Focus should be on worth first (or as I would say what's important to users).

and much more. Overall great.

Today the duck count was up to 8.

Hacking DNA and all that jazz

Recently returned from e-Tech (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etech/) and have been fascinated by the remixing DNA concepts proposed by Drew Endy.

It is a new approach in my book, and I'm torn between using my spare time for :-

A. hardware hacking (hardware hacks from the far side - James, see http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050314/pf/050314-14_pf.html)

B. DNA remixing (see http://web.mit.edu/endy/www/scraps/talks/03.15.05.ETech/)

C. 3D fabrication (manufacturing via inkjet like technology).

D. Living.

E. Beer.

Choices, choices, choices.

Away tomorrow to a Butler Group symposium on measuring IT value. Could it be that finally people are catching on to worth based development (WBD)? A move away from the flawed fixed price or hour charging mechanisms which pervade our industry?

A fair dollar for a fair dollar.

Open source and XP (agile not windows) have made headway, everyone is catching onto commodity pricing of IT as a service (salesforce.com and all the web services being setup etc). Maybe soon those few project which are of competitive advantage will use WBD?

Internal venture capital mechanisms to fund new IT projects and a focus on value where value is important and cost where it is cost of doing business?

I've high hopes for tomorrow. Expect ranting soon.

Today I had 6 ducks left in my pond.