Asif Gill Blogs

Information or data strategy is a part of the overall corporate or business strategy. Information (including data) is an important strategic business asset. Thus, information assets should be managed and treated in the similar way as we manage other business assets. An actionable information strategy is required to for the effective handling of information across the enterprise, irrespective of their size, for achieving the business goals and reducing risk including compliance to regulatory requirements and standards.   This post provides and discusses a simple and practical template for defining the information strategy as a part of the business or cooperate strategy. Information strategy can be defined at the ecosystem, enterprise, business function, business area or capability level as appropriate to your context and needs. Information strategy has following key 8 elements (Figure 1): Mission & Vision, Levers & Value Driver, Goals & Objective, Strategies & T...

A Theory of Information Trilogy for Information Ecosystem by Asif Gill Information is/of Everything (IioE) We hear many definitions of information and related concepts such as data, information itself, knowledge and intelligence. Well, all these definitions seem useful from information probability, quantification, measurement, storage, processing and management perspective. We still wonder what is "it" and how to identity "it", which we call "information". This blog defines and describes nature ecosystem inspired definition of information, which is called here a "Theory of Information Trilogy" (ToIT).  This theory is defined with a view to define and identify information in complex and heterogenous information ecosystems.  This theory defines that the information is (1) matter and (2) energy, which has different (3) states or forms. Matter and energy flow in the natural ecosystem. Further, from natural ecosystem, these 3 matter, energy and their ...

Agile processes are often considered challenging to adopt in larger and formal project development and management environments. It may not be possible and need for an organisation to adopt a pure agile process for a large project. How can organizations adopt agile planning and estimation best practices within their formal and generic process lifecycle (GPL)? This article presents an agile planning and estimation model that can be used for large projects as a guide. Agile Process The core of the agile process is a collection of sprints or small increments. The agile process can be classified into three key categories or stages: ·        Pre-Sprint – focus on the analysis activities of the GPL ·        Sprint – focus on the planning and development activities of the GPL ·        Post-Sprint – focus on the sprint post-mortem and release activities of the GPL.   The agile process has ...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) could be considered a descriptive and/or prescriptive design of an enterprise. Traditional approaches to EA heavily  focus on the modelling and documentation aspects and tend to overlook the actual stakeholders and their needs, in particular, when dealing with complex and large digital innovation and transformation. This calls  for the need of an adaptive EA. Based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011, an adaptive EA is the fundamental concepts or properties of an adaptive enterprise service system or ecosystem: situated in its environment (e.g. political, economic, sociological, technological, legal and environmental),  embodied in its elements (e.g. interaction, human, technology, facility),  relationships (e.g. type and strength) to each other and its environment, and  in the adaptive principles of its secure design and evolution. The Gill Framework ® V4.0 Adaptive EA requires a fundamental shift the way currently organ...

Designing an adaptive enterprise or business requires fundamental design principles. This post discusses the six broad six categories of adaptive design principles (agility, design thinking, model thinking, resiliency, service thinking and systems thinking) as outlined in the adaptive design principles catalog from  The Gill Framework® . These principles can be tailored and applied in a particular context. For instance, these principles can guide the design of the adaptive enterprise capabilities, teams, processes, services, systems etc. Agility ·          Flexibility: built-in flexible response to changes ·          Leanness: built-in quality with optimal or minimal resources ·          Learning: built-in analytics-information for continuous learning ·          Responsiveness: design for (response) change · ...

Adaptive or agile architecture design [artifact] and practice [activity of design] involves storytelling. In this post, I would like to share some of my experience from recent projects in the form of a following Architecture Storytelling Viewpoint template. Context : Policies, Principles, Strategies, Environment, Business Model, Operating Model ... 1. [Stakeholders] It starts with subject or area of interest [ Who ]  i.e. Person, Role, Organisation, Department, Division. Here focus is on identifying, understanding, prioritizing, estimating, planing and classifying the [Who] stakeholders (the most important part of the architecture) with certain area of interest (e.g. Marketing, Sales, People and Culture, Finance). You can design stakeholders map and empathy map to elicit "Who" for a certain area of interest . This is really about stakeholders or customer-centric architecture as opposed to an IT centric architecture. AS a Stakeholder..... 2. [Concerns] This ...

Leadership is hard and success is even harder. It depends how you define leadership and success for your personal context? Over a period of last two decades , I worked with and mentored by a number of intelligent people. This post shares my personal reflections and learnings  so far in 5 principles, which are part of my persona and still evolving. Personalisation  Persuasiveness  Patience  Persistence Progressive Personalisation  Personal respect, recognition and  individualisation of interactions or dealings or transactions rather being rude or vague or too generic. Persuasiveness Being able to influence through reasoning and demonstration rather imposing or enforcing decisions. Patience Being able to tolerate, listen and facilitate rather being harsh and unhelpful while others are catching up. Persistence Being able to stay calm, steadfast and steady the ship in response to difficult or challenging situation.Roll the ball everyday. Pr...