Rethink
Ric Merrifield, led the development at Microsoft of what has become the Microsoft Business Architecture Service offering. He is also a coauthor of mine on “The Next Revolution in Productivity”, a June 2008 Harvard Business Review article focused on case studies that highlight needs of the organization and the opportunity to rethink business operating models before making major technology changes. Under Ric’s leadership, I was a significant contributor to the development of the Business Architecture offering and performed several of the projects that serve as case studies in the HBR article. We have spent a lot of time together over the last five years and he is a really smart guy and a friend of mine.
The concepts we have been leveraging revolve around using capabilities to help organizations clearly connect their business model to customer value. Typically, executives don’t have a good view of this except through their intuition. Organization charts are about the chain of command. P&L’s provide a historical view but a limited in what to do to improve performance. Process charts are too granular and change frequently. Technology architecture doesn’t help clarify how the business model connects to delivering customer value. Using the capability model based approach we can describe “what” a business does and “why” it is important without getting tied up in “how” they do it. This approach overcomes the limitations of the current views most executives have.
This is important stuff to be talking about and I have been harassing Ric for several years about getting online because we need to have a broader discussion around the concept of capabilities or “hows”. Ric finally signed up for Twitter about three months ago, you can follow him at ricmerrifield.
He has also written a book “ReThink: A Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation” coming out in May (I am mentioned in it so ;-D). The book is endorsed by guys like Jim Champy, Robert Scoble, and David Anderson so you know it’s good. The book guides readers through a strategic re-think to efficiently set priorities, achieve goals, reduce costs, and unlock hidden value in today’s challenging business environment and set a course tailored for them. I will let you know
And now, Ric has launched a blog at http://ricmerrifield.com/blog/. This is an important concept and it matters to business leaders, project managers and technology agilists. We need to get involved in this conversation and help shape it and spread the work. Rick has his first two posts up. Please go read them and add Ric to your blogroll.
