The Merchant Stand a blog by Bob Williams

Conquer the antagonist

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Bob Williams Posted in Business Process Management, Ideas Leave a comment

Yardwork reflections. I often use yard work as a time for self-reflection because what else is there to do while drawing shapes with a lawn mower? Sometimes I reflect on personal interactions and plans, but I also use the time to consider business activities. As I edged the lawn this week, I wondered how was it possible that some business leaders are able to leave behind a successful blueprint for the philosophy and culture that drive and define an organization. This isn’t a new question, but it’s a thought many business leaders go through on their professional journeys. Jim Collins spent an entire book on the subject in Built to Last. He discusses how companies find enduring success. More on that in a minute. The antagonist. As if by fate, I read a story tonight on NPR.com about implicit egotism that links to a study published by the Harvard Business

Finding Felix

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Bob Williams Posted in Technology Leave a comment

It all started with a tweet. Last week my local public library tweeted “GCPL has the solution to your quest for genealogy information….#HeritageQuest”. Squirrel! The message captured my interest and before I knew it, I was hooked on a modern day treasure hunt for information on my family lineage. 25 years ago I did some basic family research at the state archive building and found census records back to 1910. With the Heritage Quest tool from the library, I was able to view my father’s family line in the census records in every census back to 1840 (except 1890 because most original records were destroyed by fire). Time travel never felt so real. Digitization of records. The big win is the census records are now digitized with metadata. Unlike 25 years ago, when I was searching Microfilm, I was able to complete a wide array of searches very quickly. I

Do more with what you have!

Posted on May 7, 2017 by Bob Williams Posted in Business Process Management Leave a comment

We need more people. We don’t have enough resources. Every week I hear about the conflict between the number of employees in the organization and the amount of work to do. The underlying presumption is the organization can accomplish more by adding more people. The problem with this rationale is it takes the focus of solution delivery off the processes used to deliver solutions. Adding more people to a team is complicated: It adds more strain on inter-team communication. Whatever inefficiencies exist in the current team environment will become more apparent with more people. It creates the need to train and develop new people in the culture, business, and process flows of your company. It moves the process bottleneck to another departmental team. For example, if you add more developers then you need more business analysts for requirements documentation. It values urgent things over important things. The right process will

Got Password? Can Microsoft simplify?

Posted on April 23, 2017 by Bob Williams Posted in Technology Leave a comment

Who makes the rules? Hackers love them. Security auditors like to engineer them. The average person hates them. IT support teams use them for jokes. Our computer passwords have an identity crisis! Do passwords protect us or are they just a nuisance to our everyday lives? I find weekly articles about how hackers can crack most passwords in minutes. For some thieves, cracking a password isn’t enough fun, so just steal them. It seems the value passwords bring for protecting information is diminishing. Industry experts created password complexity rules we should all follow to make the passwords more secure. That makes it a little harder for hackers to crack a password but does not make them theft-proof. Unfortunately, it also drives many people without a password system to write down their password on paper. Who can remember words with all those special characters and capitalizations? In essence, to get the

Mapping software development to Lean IT.

Posted on April 18, 2017 by Bob Williams Posted in Business and IT Alignment, Business Process Management Leave a comment

The right process will produce the right results. A core concept of the Toyota Production System is the right process will produce the right results. The “right process”. What exactly is that? Software development practitioners spend entire careers in search of it. Everyone has ideas and rationale to support various methods including Waterfall, Agile, and Hybrids. But there is more here than a methodology match. As I consider how to adopt and grow Lean business principles in IT, I face a classic dilemma; how do I influence standardized tasks and visual controls into a software development process? Software developers are a different breed of office worker. Many of them have personality traits which make consistent processes quite a challenge. Are software developers rule followers? Here’s what I know about guys and gals that write code for a living: They are puzzle solvers They are inspired by writing code not documenting