I named this blog “Too Early” for two reasons. Firstly, the time of day I created it and secondly and more importantly my habit of proposing solutions ahead of time. One might think that being ‘ahead of the curve’ is a good thing and may well be lucrative in certain professions, but in mine, this has become somewhat of a frustration.
I’ve come to realise that whilst I enjoy what I do, I need to construct a consistent delivery and realise the realistic time frames for delivery early on and work to them.
One recent example is based around the team I created and the solutions I aimed to deliver. Two years ago, I formed a team called Strategic Architecture. Senior management liked the idea of the team but were not keen on the name, primarily because of the lack of understanding of what an IT architect actually does. I don’t blame them as this is defined differently everywhere you go, however, having recently dissolved the team internally, senior managment have decided to create a Strategic Architecture group!
One of the initiatives I set out early on was the importance of capitalising on internal intellectual property (IP) and the ability to turn data > Information into a competitive edge for an orginisation. To achieve this I detailed a plan that involved a foundation of Enterprise Search and collaboration technologies built upon it with a presence backbone.
I believe that to achieve this competitive edge we could unlock the knowledge pools and break down the knowledge silos within the Enterprise in a similar way to the way Wikipedia achieves this across the globe, but with tacit knowledge being the value add through presence.
I’ve been working on this for two years and so far have managed to secure the funding to build the foundation of Enterprise Search. The rest of the building blocks are of course based around Enterprise 2.0 where boundaries are broken down and communities are built up as it is in a Web 2.0 world, external to the Enterprise.
I aim to pursue this goal, but external factors are hindering the process. Factors such as the crisis in the capital markets causing the lack of further investment into innovation particularly in the financial sector. For that reason I see a lull and for that reason I’ve decided to take time out and work aggressively on what I recognise as my weakness in pacing myself against long term time scales.
Too Early 