This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Michael Cote. Original Post: Workplace for Business Strategy Execution? Feed Title: Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc. Feed URL: https://cote.io/feed/ Feed Description: Using Java to get to the ideal state. Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Michael Cote Latest Posts From Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc.

IBM released an enterprise app called "Workplace for Business Strategy Execution," or WBSE recently. It's supposed to take corporate strategy, and break it out into tasks employees can use. And, of course, there's dashboards so that "leaders" can keep track of progress on those tasks.

Here's more from an article:

Users can take a business strategy, such as delivering a new product, and divide it up into a number of objectives. Each can then be assigned to a specific end user, or role, with a customized interface that displays the data that end user needs to execute and track their responsibilities within the overall project.

...

The WBSE interface includes four main concepts that are implemented using software from partners. Scorecards monitor not only overall progress for higher-level executives, but also overall progress per user/role within the overall strategy. A dashboard provides the individual user with relevant information on a day-to-day basis.

There's also a snazzy video to go along with it. It's a whole new way of business and computing! Make more workers more productive! IT does matter! Yay!

Agile Bid'ness

So, the big question is: what is this stuff?

From what I can tell (mostly from the video), the theory is something along the lines of applying Agile thought to business, and the software is a project management tool for managing that. So, you have "corporate strategy" (themes) that're broken down into stories and tasks. The workers can see how their stories and tasks fit into the over-all themes, and everyone can track progress on those stories and tasks on dashboards. I mean, this is enterprise software: you gotta have dashboards, baby!

Good luck!

BSM for People

An earlier article from last month has an interesting take on WBSE, that it's a sort of BSM/systems management for people:

The move is really an attempt by IBM to dumb-down performance management, which shares a similar goal of linking strategy to operational execution. Of course performance management is simply more than just rolling out a set of dashboards; the hard work goes on at the back-end. But what's interesting about IBM's BI dashboarding solution is the real-time linking of collaboration and other context-sensitive tools to drive real-time responses and actions based on objectives directly from business user desktops without having to get IT involved

The Single Pane of Glass

Also, check out one of my posts from May of this year for a vaguely related "shit you need to do today" thing with Greasemonkey. If anything, keeping a simple to do list in mind is a good point of reference for decoding the meaning of "Workplace for Business Strategy Execution" and other large phrases.

Tags: agile, biz, bsm, enterprise, ibm, peopleware, prjmgmt, sysmgmt, wbse.