ActionMap Mission:
Accelerate Solutions Development
ActionMap’s vision is to accelerate innovation on a broad scale.
The trick, as they say, is to find the right leverage point.
ActionMap’s approach is to focus on a major bottleneck in business/technology process development, and to promote and deliver solutions to break through that bottleneck.
The biggest bottleneck in business/technology process development is the gap between
|
Separate knowledge and interests |
=> and <= |
Stakeholder alignment on detailed processes and plans |
The “on the spot” roles responsible for bridging this gap are:
- business systems analysts
- project managers
- pre- and post sales support reps
- complex sales reps
- business development reps
- product development managers.
The Pain Point
The main symptom of the bottleneck described above is long cycles of meetings and communications in which:
- process and planning information is gradually and often incompletely assembled and
- stakeholder alignment is gradually and often painfully built.
Does this sound familiar?
I maintain that these long cycles of meetings and communications are a major contributor to the 100’s of billions of dollars a year of waste in innovation and IT spending, in terms of cost, risk, error and delay, along with the matching frustration, conflict, and stress, stalled innovation and progress, and lost opportunity for improvement.
No Current Market Leader
While there are many products that bracket this gap, in terms of collaboration, decision-support, process modeling and project planning, there are no highly effective, widely used solutions for completely bridging this gap on the market today.
To test this assertion, ask “What is the name of the market leader?”
What About JAD Sessions, “Black Belts” and High Performance Teams?
Skilled individuals and focused methods and teamwork are helpful in overcoming the bottleneck. The challenges are that these capabilities are not highly transportable, flexible and/or adaptable, and in any case are not readily scalable.
How to Accelerate IT Development
I think IT development is great. It’s challenging and fun. It’s at the heart of progress and innovation. It’s capable of producing dramatic results.
I also believe it can happen faster, with less cost and more satisfaction and success, on a broad scale.
Where do we start?
A Problem without a Name
The first challenge is that the bottleneck and the gap described above, and the activity of bridging the gap, don’t even have names.
Again, I suggest calling this activity “collaborative solutions development”. While it may be a lot of syllables, it’s a very good fit. Also, it’s not overused at the moment (17 major Google hits, as of 10/7/2007).
The Opportunity
Collaborative Solutions Development is at a convergence point for several major trends. Accordingly, demand for capability in this areas will increase for the foreseeable future.
Just as business systems analysis is now a critical competitive competency, superior ability to accelerate collaborative solutions development is a major source of competitive advantage for both organizations and individuals.
ActionMap has developed a solution to address this opportunity. It’s called the ActionMap Toolkit. It’s described at http://www.actionmap.com.
However, I believe that the problem is so big, and that the market has become so used to it, that it needs a new product and service category.
Accordingly, the current goal of this weblog is to increase market awareness, attention and focus on the activity of collaborative solutions development, in order to establish that new product and service category.
One starting point is a scorecard for evaluating your organizations (and your own) readiness to increase capability for collaborative solutions development. It’s found at http://www.actionmap.com/050_ScoreSumm.html.
Another is the page at right “Collaborative Solutions Development - A Major Gap in the IT Tool Set”
More information on collaborative solutions development can be found at www.actionmap.com.