In memory of Steve Jobs…

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

-Steve Jobs

 

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Five Essential Pillars of Technology Strategy

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Technology is a key resource for businesses. As technology managers, our job is to direct technology activities to serve the business and its customers. This requires coordination and integration of technology activities with all functional areas of the firm.

“The ultimate purpose of Strategy: a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining goals and results using the right amount of effort.”
Integrated Strategy Development: Unsurpassable Advantage by Binnur

Technology strategy is shaped within the context of the business. Typically focused on the 3-5 year horizon, its goal is to capture the intent and behaviors for proper utilization and exploitation of technology for the long-term success of the organization. With that, here are the five essentials that need to be addressed in our technology strategy:

  1. Technology is the root of the business: So say we All!
  2. Technology operates as a system: Resistance is futile
  3. We need habits and rituals: Life is a pilgrimage
  4. Building our tribe, our ecosystem
  5. And finally… Establish technology commandments

For additional ideas on developing technology strategy also check out Your 2011 Technology Development AgendaContinue reading

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Integrated strategy development: Unsurpassable advantage

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Forgive me, as it has been a long time since I blogged… But, I have been lured to the exotic world of iPhone and Mac programming, and learning kept me challenged, focused and engaged, not to mention, distracted from writing…

Before I fall back to the temptations of programming, let’s dive into my article. I will be discussing strategy and the importance of building an integrated, interweaved, interdependent strategic system to create an unsurpassable competitive advantage, one that Sun Tzu would be proud of.

Unfortunately, as an over used term, strategy can also be seen as strategy soup: technology strategy, product strategy, portfolio strategy, brand strategy, HR strategy, market strategy, service strategy, IP strategy, operational strategy, social media strategy, sustainability strategy, … However, it is the integration, interweaving and coevolution of all these pieces that create strong strategic positioning for your company.

“Those who win one hundred triumphs in one hundred conflicts do not have supreme skill. Those who have supreme skill use Strategy to bend others without coming to conflict.”
— Sun Tzu, Art of Strategy

Sun Tzu saw the world as a complete and interdependent system that must be preserved. For him, brilliant strategists would rarely go to battle, as they would achieve their objectives well in advance of any confrontation: “For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

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Technology Management: A Brief Introduction

Prezi is a great presentation tool that enables you to creatively capture, associate and highlight your ideas. And, makes the process of creating fun!

The Kitetail blog is about the many facets of Technology Management. Using Prezi, I put together this brief introduction to Technology Management. For more information on this topic, please check out:

As always, I appreciate your comments. Let me know what you think!

Note: Click “play” (the triangle) to load the presentation. You can step forward/back using the right/left arrows, or select Autoplay under the ‘More’ menu.

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Injecting Empathy Into Your Engineering Team

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“Don’t ship the org chart.”

—Steve Sinofsky

It is not uncommon for engineering focused teams to release products that are neither usable nor user friendly. It happens, and I have been there as the program manager… The important thing is to learn from it and fix it for the next set of products.

While usability refers to the ease of achieving desired goal(s), user experience encompasses the overall perception the individual gathers while using your product and service. It is never the intent of teams to produce unusable products with poor user experience. However, lack of understanding, priorities and ownership, coupled with deadline driven processes will be sure to deliver this undesirable result.

To combat this, especially with established teams that already have products in the market, you need to inject customer empathy into the organization. For this, four activities are critical: increase customer insight, make everyone responsible but one accountable, adopt and adapt to accommodate shift in the mindset, and walk the talk.

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