Frank Buytendijk Blog

Issue #2 of the Journal of Management Excellence is out. You can download it here.

In this issue of the Journal, we discuss how to organize for management excellence. We focus on a modern organizational style called “Centers of Excellence”. But there are more angles to the subject. For instance, technology needs to be organized as well, and regardless of how you are organized, management processes need to be in place.

Many Oracle customers are looking for ways to prolong their success in business intelligence and performance management, and a BI or PM Center of Excellence (COE) is the best way of doing so. Going through all the articles, it appears there are different ways of setting one up. Some COEs are driven by the IT department, in which all needed technology competencies are combined. Think of a database administrator, business analyst and the necessary developers. They typically focus on the data warehouse and business intelligence technologies. Other COEs combine business and IT skills in order to create better business and IT alignment. A third type of competency center is emerging where not only the management information is governed, but also the management processes—as the BP case study explains. Dare we call a COE that coordinates both management information and management processes a Center of Management Excellence? In terms of Kaplan and Norton it is called the “Office of Strategy Management”.

I am extremely proud that the collaboration between Oracle and Palladium has led to Palladium’s contribution to the Journal of Management Excellence, an article about the Office of Strategy Management by Kaplan and Norton. This article shares the results of what world-class organizations have been doing.

The 3rd issue of the Journal will be out by the beginning of december. Given the importance of the topic and the number of articles that were submitted, it will be about “organizing for management excellence” again.

Would you like to submit an article for the Journal? Just let me know…

One of the blogs I got the most feedback on, was the one on jogging. I’ve been progressing – slowly – in the last year. Where last year I did the 4 mile run, this year I was doing 6 miles (10km). Here's a picture.

My end time was not too good, I was slow even according my own standards. 1:14:13. I ended as number 3762. But then again, with 5500 people in the race, it could’ve been worse.

My preparation wasn’t optimal. The run was two days after Open World, and the evening before we had a big dinner with friends, with a glass of wine (or two…). I really felt that during jogging the day afterwards, the last 3 kilometers were not easy.

While jogging, I had this thought about my previous blog on “Performance comes from Venus, and Management from Mars”. I explained that performance deals with matters of the heart (passion, endurance, teamwork, skills), while management deals with matters of the mind (rules, processes, control, discipline).

I learned an important lesson. There can be no performance without management. Passion is great, and I was certainly not lacking it, but without the discipline the result will not be great.

This is also true with other areas of life. You can only become a great artist if you practice, practice, practice. And wisdom comes from examining a few of your own scars once in a while.

I don’t think it is different in business. Performance management starts with discipline. Putting together good management processes, clear definitions, a collaborative working style. That should be the focus for most organizations. And putting in a little bit more jogging training needs to be my focus.

PS. In the meantime, I did another 10K run, the Maliebaanloop. What do you think of the following ways of describing it?
• I improved my personal record for the 10K (great!)
• … as no. 570 I came in last anyway (hmmm… not so great)
• … but the system didn’t register the people who gave up and never finished (at least I did!)
• I started front row, and came in last, so I must have seen every single runner (social indicator?)
You see, measurement can tell you everything you want.