Monthly Archives: April 2011
New Look and Feel to my Blog
For some time now I’ve been considering the merits of moving my blog off my previous platform, Posterous. Posterous has been a great platform that has given me the shove I needed to quickly and easily start blogging. Now however I need something that offers me better features and also offers my readers better features. WordPress.com is my new platform of choice. Some of the features it offers were included in Posterous, but not in my Posterous template of choice such as navigating posts by tags. Other features were simply not available such as the ability to integrate my Twitter within the blog, which you can see to the right of this post. It also allows me to use more universal features such as Gravitor for my profile and I can establish links to other blogs through the pingback mechanism.
I’ve migrated the existing content from my previous blog to this one. Previous email subscribers who wish to continue an email based subscription will have to subscribe on this blog.
Building on the Investment Logic Map for More Rigorous Front-End Programme Evaluation, An Article by Aaron Doty
For some time now, I’ve been interested in the Investment Management Standard produced in-house by the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance. I’ve found that using an Investment Logic Map is a valuable, light weight way of mapping the logic for a business case and have posted about my use of it in the past. The Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance have released a new version of their standard which includes several different sub-types of Investment Logic Map depending on whether an investment is pitched at the organisation level, a programme of investment or an individual investment. The latest standard can be downloaded in PDF format or in Microsoft Word format.
An evaluation of the Investment Management Standard has been published in the Evaluation Journal of Australia, a refereed journal, titled “An examination of the value of the
Victorian Government’s investment logic map as a tool for front-end evaluation of investment proposals”. This article evaluates both the theory behind the Investment Logic Map and whether it actually achieves its aim. Although it is based on a previous version of the standard, the faults identified nontheless hold true in this latest version. The article evaluates how an Investment Logic Map (ILM) is an integral tool to the Investment Management Standard as it serves as both a planning and evaluation tool. The main criticisms in the article of the ILM approach is that it has “a very short chain of causality”. The article explains that while there is value in creating the ILM as a quick assessment tool, a more rounded assessment and evaluation of the programme logic should be undertaken later on to test the assumptions made within the ILM. The article gives a detailed example of “building confidence in the causality” by extending the programme logic through intermediate outcomes and their associated assumptions.
This is an article that is very worthwhile reading. I encourage you to download it.
Source: Evaluation Journal of Australasia, Vol8, No. 1, 2008, p38
Building on the Business Motivation Model
One of my favourite standards from the Object Management Group (OMG) is the Business Motivation Model (BMM). I believe that this standard is crucial to be incorporated into frameworks for extracting value from IT-enabled investments because it shows what and how a business goes about achieving its aims. Nick Malik, one of Microsoft’s Enterprise Architects, has provided some very interesting commentary on the shortfalls of the Business Motivation Model that he has identified while undertaking some projects for Microsoft.
Malik has made some good observations on the shortcomings of the BMM, which he admits he doesn’t have all the answers to remedy. Those concerns are:
- Bizzarre Assumptions
- The choice of SWOT as inappropriate
- Incompleteness for large enterprises
Malik’s analysis is available on his blog.
Australian Government Releases its Draft ICT Strategic Plan for Comment
In the interests of keeping this blog ticking over with posts, I’ve decided that in addition to posting my usual longer posts, I’ll start to post some shorter ones.
The Australian Government has started to engage the public in a much more interactive way recently. It is slowly learning to use social media to promote not just information dissemination, but to create interactions with the public. This is a trend that we can only expect to increase. There have been a number of new initiatives recently to get public comment and to promote information re-use.
Recently the government released its ICT Strategic Plan for public comment. The plan is available in a number of formats such as Word, PDF and RTF. Comments are open till Monday 16th of May and can be accessed through the AGIMO website
