Tuesday, November 7, 2006

Emergent Knowledge

Chunka Mui
Business Advisor and Co-author, "Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for
Market Dominance."

Business competition turns on knowledge; those with better information slaughter those with less. In this keynote presentation, Chunka Mui argues that emergent knowledge, knowledge that was previously impossible or impractical to utilize on a regular basis but now made feasible by advances in information technology, is changing the strategic context in which companies manage their organizations, products, customers, and markets. Leveraged well, emergent knowledge about product and process conditions, customer preferences, and other environmental factors could spark powerful innovations. Innovation might come in the form of cost reduction and incremental revenue due to increased visibility or decreased risk. Or the innovation might be more radical, such as the creation of enterprise platforms that enable killer apps and business models. This presentation explores different kinds of emergent knowledge, the competitive opportunities they are yielding, and the challenges of taking advantage of them in the context of enterprise architecture.

Chunka Mui

Chunka Mui is an independent business advisor on strategic issues at the intersection of business and technology. He is also a Fellow at Diamond and chairs that management consulting firm's prestigious network of external advisors. Chunka is the co-author of the best selling book, "Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance" (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), which The New York Times called a "practical and persuasive guide" to the dramatic changes being wrought by technology. The Wall Street Journal recently named the book one of the five best books on business and the Internet. In addition to his research and writing projects, Chunka assists organizations on strategic business and technology programs. The focus of his consulting efforts is innovation, organizational change, and customer communities of value. He helps clients structure the form and content of their strategies in the context of today's technological and market turmoil. His homepage is at chunkamui.com.

Wednesday, November 8, 2006

The Strategic Role of EA: Applying EA to Identify IT
Financial and Investment Opportunities

Robert Benson
Principal
The Beta Group

This presentation demonstrates how Enterprise Architecture can and should play a critical strategic role in the financial management of IT. This role emphasizes bottom-line opportunities for new investments and critical opportunities for improving IT's performance in on-going "ights on" operations. By playing this role, EA complements its contributions to the financial and business arenas.

Key Issues:

• The role of EA in managing the on-going "lights on" IT spend
• EA Participation in investment and budget decision-making
• Business and technical risk, alignment, performance
• Expense reduction - doing more with less - and investment prioritization
• Assuging that EA provides the value, risk, performance, alignment insights
• EA Interactions with the key IT financial and governmental processes

Bob Benson

Bob Benson is a principal with The Beta Group. His consulting features business value, effective IT application development, consulting methodology development, IT infrastructure planning, and facilitated planning. He has been instrumental in the development of Information Technology Investment Evaluation and The Business Value RoadMap, methodologies based on Information Economics used by companies and consulting organizations around the world.   He has conducted executive seminars on these subjects throughout the world, and has taught graduate courses in schools of business and engineering in Holland and the US.

Mr. Benson is Affiliate Professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Computing and Communications for twenty years.

Thursday, November 9, 2006

Execution and Success Factors for EA

The good news is many enterprise architecture projects are being initiated by business executives who understand the need for governance and architecture. We are seeing wholesale acceptance of the concepts of architecture. The bad news is once the data enterprise architecture deliverables are completed there still is a tendency to °∞fade to black,°± and downstream activity to actually execute, implement and break down real barriers to successful utilization of enterprise. At the root of all of the superficial reasons for the EA effort running out of gas is that the organization responsible for sustaining the enterprise information architecture has trouble executing.

The final keynote of this conference will specifically address the root causes for failure to execute and present some practical guidelines to help your teams be successful.

• Understand why smart people fail to follow through
• Implement specific tactics to address roadblocks to success
• Explore the personal obstacles you may confront when leading the EA program

John Ladley

John Ladley is an internationally known information management practitioner and a popular speaker on information and knowledge management. John is widely published and has several regular columns. John is a Director with Navigant Consulting. Prior to Navigant's acquisition, John founded KI Solutions, an information and knowledge management strategy company. John was Senior Program Director of Data Warehouse strategies and a Research Fellow at Meta Group. Mr. Ladley is an authority on information architectures, business performance measurement architectures, knowledge management, collaborative applications, and information resource management.