Email newsletters

"Is email dead?" asks @Graham_Walsh (via @nigelwalsh @leebryant ) noting that Ben & Jerry's are stopping their newsletters, and now using updates on Facebook & Twitter.

Email has always been a poor medium for broadcasting news, for several reasons.

Email is used for delivering many different kinds of content, ranging from important to rubbish. For most people, newsletters (even from companies we are interested in) are considerable less important than direct messages from customers, colleagues and friends, some of which may require an immediate response. Therefore even the most interesting newsletters are likely put aside for later reading.

Many of us receive hundreds of legitimate email newsletters - from an assortment of companies and societies and other organizations we have some vague association with - as well as loads of more spammy stuff. I have set up an automatic filter for the regular ones, which go into a folder called Newsletters, where they may sit for weeks or months before I find time to look at them. Many get deleted unread.

Traditional newsletters contain several items, but this is problematic on email. Most people won't scroll down beyond the first page without good reason. (This was a problem for a company I once worked for, which used to sell advertising space at the top of its newsletters to other commercial organizations, with the result that some readers only ever saw the advertisement and not our own content.)

There is also a design problem. Email clients are generally less sophisticated than browsers, and newsletters that look fine on one computer may be almost unreadable on another. As for reading a traditional newsletter on a mobile phone or handheld device - forget it. (Maybe the iPad?) So people end up producing text versions and HTML versions, and it just gets more complicated without actually solving the problem.

Finally, there is a problem with organizational innovation. Many people who claim to be leading-edge technologists seem mysteriously attached to email as a general-purpose communication mechanism, and reluctant to use the wide variety of alternative mechanisms that might serve a particular purpose more efficiently and effectively - not just when communicating with customers (who might be slow to adopt newer alternatives) but also with their own peers (who have no such excuse). Email becomes a regressive standard for all forms of communication, and there is little willingness to gather evidence about its effectiveness.

There is an expectation that corporate IT will drive innovation in matters technological. But in many large organizations I've worked in, it is the marketing department that is is more likely to drive this kind of initiative. The use of Facebook or Twitter may be a tactical initiative, adopted as an experiment and abandoned if the results are disappointing; but what I'd see as strategic for consumer-oriented marketing is having a flexible communication platform with strong feedback loops to support detailed customer analytics, and that's what I'd expect corporate IT to provide.

Or you could just stick to email, on the grounds that this is safe and familiar to all - business IT alignment interpreted as keeping IT inside the comfort zone of the business.

Device-Driven Business IT Alignment?

@LTucci suggests Using the sex appeal of the iPad to push BI reporting in the C-suite (Total CIO, June 2010). @rtolido glosses this as "looking for better business-IT alignment? Get your CEO an iPad".

Linda Tucci talks about "democratizing business intelligence software" and announces that "users can become masters of their own dashboards!" Although giving more power to CEOs is a curious kind of democratization, I can see that allowing CEOs to become masters of their own dashboards could be interpreted as a move toward some kind of business-IT alignment.

But I hope the reference to the iPad is intended to be satirical, because believing that the CEO would be seduced by some device, thus magically achieving business-IT alignment, would not only show fair contempt for the CEO but also trivialize the notion of alignment. This belief appears to be an extreme form of technology fetishism, christened the device paradigm by the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann.

For a similar kind of satire, see Newsbiscuit's proposal to give the UK Deputy Prime Minister a toy plastic steering wheel.

Business IT Alignment 2

Neil Ward-Dutton thinks I've missed something fundamental in my previous post on Business IT Alignment, and tells me "It's the Process Stupid".

Alignment may well be a process - a journey rather than a destination. But Neil still hasn't explained why it's a good thing. He merely provides a number of reformulations, apparently in the hope that I might understand one of them:

"bringing IT closer to how the business works ... synchronise movement ... minimise latency between movement ... synchronise the process of change management ... bringing these two timetables closer together"

I understand this agenda perfectly well; I just don't agree with it. If two processes have a different natural timetable, I believe it is usually better to manage them asynchronously than synchronously. Much of the work I've done in SOA and the service-based business is about the structural implications of loose coupling, and the opportunities for business transformation. (Perhaps some people haven't got this yet.)

I take my cue from the notion of Shearing Layers (>Wikipedia) pioneered in architecture by Frank Duffy and Stewart Brand. The basic insight here is that tightly coupled artefacts (and this includes such socio-technical systems as the Business-IT relationship) cannot cope flexibly with change - they shear themselves apart.

Clearly the CIO has to be able to respond to events in the business world (for example, a major take-over) as well as events in the IT world (for example, a major platform upgrade). But with a properly decoupled and layered IT architecture, these responses can be mobilized independently of one another. Surely that's better than being forced to align?

Business IT Alignment

Should IT investment be tightly coupled with business strategy? Yes of course, says the business executive. IT should be focused on delivering value according to the demands of the business.

Should business strategy be tightly coupled with IT investment? No of course not, says the business executive. That would be putting the cart before the horse. That would mean that the business strategy would have to be focused on extracting value from IT capability. That would mean we couldn't change business direction faster than the IT planning cycle. No way.

There is undoubtedly a problem in the relationship between business and IT. Many people are convinced that the solution to this problem is something called "business IT alignment". Challenged by a reader who suggests that this alignment is just more waffle, Neil Ward Dutton insists that alignment has three elements

• aligning IT investment with business strategy
• aligning IT delivery with business priorities
• aligning IT change with business change.

But the difficulty with this solution is that alignment connotes synchronization and inhibits innovation. Business and IT simply don't work to the same timetable. Alignment is symmetric - if you align A to B, this means B has to be aligned to A. That's okay if you don't ever want to change your business strategy (which many old-fashioned IT strategy planning methods assumed) or experiment with new forms of IT in advance of any business requirement. But it's hardly appropriate for the dynamic volatile world that IT vendors and consultants claim to support.

Perhaps we should be talking instead about business IT liberation - freeing business from the constraints of IT investment by decoupling the business from IT. In other words, the opposite of alignment. Isn't this what SOA is all about?

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Discussion continues at Business IT Alignment 2 (July 2006)
See also my Architecture posts on BPM and SOA.