About the Author
I’m Jim Johnson, a co-founder of ActionMap Inc. and the author of this weblog. I’ve been working in IT and business transformation in the SF Bay Area for over 25 years. My credentials include designing, selling and managing multi-million dollar business transformation/systems integration engagements for CSC.
I’ve had a passion for accelerating innovation since graduating from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont with a B.S. in Mathematics in the 1970’s. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Innovation is the path to the future, so let’s get on with it.
What could you do with a B.S. in Mathematics in the 1970’s? Computer programming, of course! I kept asking, though, “why are they paying me to write this code?” That led me into a series of project management, IS management, IT sales and management consulting positions, described in my resume at www.actionmap.com.
Also from early in my career I was acutely aware of the communications gap between business and IT, mostly in terms of “why won’t they let me write this code?” Information technology was clearly a major vehicle for innovation, and IT was held up by the difficulty of translating business problems into IT solutions. I wanted to understand “why?” and “what could be done about it?”
Those questions led to the development in the early ’90’s, with my partner and spouse Anne Johnson, of the ActionMap Toolkit. The ActionMap Toolkit (stand by for the elevator pitch) is “a powerful set of procedures for conducting energetic group sessions that produce highly quality process models and action plans along with strong stakeholder alignment about them” (more at www.actionmap.com.) It’s our answer for accelerating collaborative solutions development, as a key to accelerating innovation.
At the same time, I never strayed too far from the technology itself. This allowed me over the past few years to translate the ActionMap Toolkit into an online interactive software package. And with an eye to the business side, I also wrote three book manuscripts for motivation, training and applications around using the ActionMap Toolkit as a “whiteboard” skill.
So here we are. The business/IT communications issue, instead of being solved, turned into “business/IT alignment”, and has only become more important. And “accelerate innovation” is the phrase of the day.
My idea is that they are essentially the same thing, and that collaborative solutions development is the key to both.
Now what we need is a product and service category that will highlight that fact.
That’s the next part of my bio. I’m looking forward to reading it.