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Thursday, February 26, 2009

Perspectives

I have come to view perspective as a (if not the) key to success. Before I can discuss perspective, though, I guess I had better define what I mean by success.

Success means
  • the achievement of some agreed-upon goal or
  • demonstrable progress toward a defined objective.

In life, success means doing the above while remaining within your vision. If you don't have a vision--some ideal that guides your decisions--then you are allowing others to define success for you.

In order to achieve success, then, it's important to understand who else is involved. If no one else need be involved in your achievement, then we're talking about a PR (personal record) and one of those is irrelevant to anyone other than you. Now, if you establish a trend of new PRs or if your PR is also a WR (world record), then others will take notice and may want to become involved. Let's leave aside these kinds of individual achievements for now because they are individual and the definition of success that we are using calls for "agreed-upon" goals or "defined" objectives. That implies more than one person is involved.

So who else is involved? There is a commonly used term, stakeholder, that labels a relationship between a person and a goal or objective. People who are stakeholders have an interest in this particular success (positive or negative). There are many experts on identification and management of stakeholder relationships, so I'm going to leave further discussion of stakeholders up to them.

My conviction, developed from years in the trenches and awareness (a combination of observation + curiosity + caring + reflection), is that perspective may be the single most important dimension affecting success.

For one thing, each of your stakeholders will have a perspective and it will be what you need to understand in order to bring that person into your team. But beyond stakeholders, there are still perspectives that must be discovered and managed. If we miss a particular perspective, we may miss or misunderstand entire classes of potential stakeholders.

A perspective may be based on a functional role. For example, there is a perspective associated with "father" that is different from that of "husband". We are all capable of juggling several perspectives--that's what we refer to when we say things like "on the other hand..." They are also based in part on prior experience. The father of four has a different perspective than the father of one or the fater-to-be. The best outcomes (successes) come when we are able to include as many perspectives as possible AND avoid excluding any that shed critical light on our effort.

What are the perspectives that must be part of a business intelligence success?

1 comment:

  1. I have found that the word "perspectives" many times have been used as a excuse for not doing the correct Business/IS/IT Architectural solution.

    One example i ran into just a few years ago was a very highlevel(not high competence) busniess architect who told me. This company has so many perspectives that we can't work with a Enterprise Model, we can't even work with a Enterprise Architecture.

    It all came down to his lack of competance. When people start talking about "we have to many perspectives to work with a EA soloution, you can be pretty sure you work with someone who doesn't know what they are talking about.

    I was able to push the highlvl architect(cudos to him that he wanted to learn)through the hoops of generic structures and busniess models and modeling views and the fundamentals of EA. Now he is standing on the barricades and defending EA in every forum that disagrees within the company.

    To be able to work with Perspectives is a fundamental requirement for all Architectural Design.

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