Endorsements for Churchill’s Adaptive Enterprise

Introduction
Once, a prestigious, national corporation was in trouble. The company was a leader in the aviation and military hardware industries. It  was a loose conglomerate of independent companies, including manufacturing  facilities, transportation companies, distribution hubs, and support centers.  Corporate headquarters was a separate organization, as was sales and marketing.

The company faced many critical challenges. Raw materials  were scarce and expensive, driving up the costs of production. There are many product failures in the field. The company was overly dependent on a few critical suppliers, including incredibly some that still worked out of garages. There was little information shared among partners, employees, or customers. Worse, the competition had a larger product line, was much better capitalized, and was more efficient in its manufacturing. And, it was now invading into local markets.

Adding to the dim prospects for the company was the poor state of its IT systems. As a result, senior managers had little insight into the day-to-day operations of the business. Without timely data, there was minimal understanding of the marketplace - how the product lines should be designed and what products should be built. Customer demand was growing month-to-month, but in spikes, with different products eagerly awaited in different locales, overpowering the IT systems for planning, manufacturing, and distribution.

A new CEO was brought in to turn around the  company.  After a period of study, he began to change the way the business  was run and the way IT supported the business operations. He made a series  of urgent mandates. He specified the need for a real-time, federated information system integrated  among all business units and critical partners. He required  that senior managers  have access to daily reports on demand levels and manufacturing  throughput.  Key suppliers also had to be contacted daily with critical inventory  information  and demand forecasts.

 
He initiated the development of a highly optimized and fault tolerant supply  chain that utilized just-in-time inventory management  and standardized  processes spread across hundreds of large and small suppliers.  In such a lean operation, even aircraft parts from the competition's product   line were sourced, and smelted or recycled for new product manufacturing.

Information was also collected on the competition and its activities in order to stay one step ahead. This was integrated to a sophisticated early warning system and an executive dashboard driven by events. This allowed leaders to select how to counter competitive moves and with what resources.

The company quickly turned around. And not only did it survive, so did the whole nation.

In addition to being a case study of corporate modernization and streamlining, the following details are also true: the business units were government organizations, responsible for conducting war. The location was Britain, under relentless siege by the German Luftwaffe. At risk were not market opportunities or profit margins, but the survival of the British population under the German air attack and desperately assembled defense that became known as the Battle of Britain. Narrowly thwarted was a planned invasion of the British homeland.

Lessons from History
"Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise" is Mark Kozak-Holland's second book in his compelling "Lessons from History" series. This series takes a fresh approach: it matches the challenges encountered when managing the design and development of large corporate IT projects with a thorough analysis of relevant, historical case study. In "Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise", Kozak-Holland mines lessons learned in Britain during the Second World War and applies them to the twin challenges of information management and business process streamlining within the modern business world. Specifically, the book addresses the challenges of modeling the collective knowledge and business processes within any modern business and developing a strategy for maximizing competitive advantage through a modern federated solution infrastructure. The use of an engrossing and detailed historical case study reinforces the book’s business and IT recommendations.

"Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise" examines how an earlier generation faced the business process challenges of their day. Even within a pre-Internet era, companies and governments realized the value in streamlining all activities with external suppliers, eliminating wasted cycles within the supply chain, and delivering what the customer (in this case, Winston Churchill) needs. The result was a single, real-time view of the entire demand chain, from production facilities to targeted bombing sites. Of course, in 1940, the market needs were probably more "mission-critical': e.g. fighter aircraft and armaments to defend the homeland. Throughout this book, lessons from 1940s Britain are applied to today's competitive business environment, with surprisingly relevant results. As a result, the book makes for a fascinating read, and includes business recommendations that are backed up by its exhaustively detailed case study of multiple British organizations working to achieve a common goal.

This book is written for business managers responsible for leading the design or implementation of process optimization through solution architectures. Companies must follow best practices methodologies when building a process-oriented solution integration framework. Obviously, the style and technologies of solutions built back in the early 40s do not resemble today's integration solutions, but the business analysis, development planning, and process modeling needed are exactly the same. The stark disparity of the underlying technical systems only proves the point that the technology "doesn't matter", and is in fact always evolving. In one sense, leveraging case studies this far removed from today's environment offers a far more timeless and pertinent series of parallels, rather that case studies based on technologies from the last few years, which are too familiar and in many cases just as obsolete. Therefore, this book, like the first, will age very well.

Portal projects are the "sine qua non" in the development of a successful Adaptive Enterprise. At the same time, they represent some of the most underestimated and poorly forecasted e-business efforts. In large part, this is because the principals involved in any portal project can easily visualize the end-result: a single set of dynamic reports that integrate and present actionable, real-time information that can be used by executives, business managers, and others within the organization to make better and faster business decisions. However, true portal projects involve federation (distribution of control among users and contributors), workflow, application integration, information integration, messaging, and much more. Therefore, in order to achieve success with solution efforts, companies must have both broad corporate consensus and architectural consistency - both very difficult to achieve without proper planning. "Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise" is a detailed roadmap designed to help with exactly these challenges.

Kozak-Holland's first book "On-line, On-Time, On-budget, A Manager's Guide to Delivering a 24x7 Business", focuses on another fundamental business challenge - the project management of e-business technology initiatives. Since most e-business projects implemented today exceed cost or schedule projections (or both), this is a pertinent topic for businesses interested in reducing or avoiding failure. Kozak-Holland, appropriately enough, examines the archetypical example of failure from history - the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic on April 14-15, 1912. He correctly identifies that project management is built upon the foundations of risk analysis and planning for failure, and so manages to illuminate the arcane topic of project management (sometimes considered a hopeless cause best left to IT) as a relevant and manageable business concern. The parallels he draws with perhaps the most famous failure in history dramatically reinforce the need for a consistent approach to managing projects.

In his second book, Kozak-Holland recounts in detail the preparations leading up to the Battle of Britain. He exposes the reader to a wealth of historical facts while narrating the storyline of how Churchill streamlined disparate organizations in order to combat an enemy force that was equipped with vastly superior numbers of equipment and personnel. The author traces the interrelationships between Bletchley Park, which monitored and collected enemy intelligence, Bentley Prior, which managed the force response to enemy attacks based on this intelligence, the Storey's Gate command and decision center, and Whitehall, responsible for the manufacturing supply chain. These agencies were connected through a federated and highly secure information management and workflow system.

“Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise” Overview
The book takes an iterative approach in building its roadmap and making it business recommendations. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on defining the problem domain, whether it is Britain's need to understand its enemy's strengths and weaknesses in order to mount a successful defense, or the needs of each modern business to understand the competitive landscape. The author sets up each challenge and begins drawing parallels right away, raising interesting questions to be answered later. In the second chapter, the concept of a solution is explained as a critical bit of infrastructure as important in the 1940s as it is today. The business lessons drawn are extremely important, as today's business need to unify disparate organizational units and bring together IT and business managers.
    


The next two chapters focus on developing and refining a solution architecture. Chapter 3 introduces some of the technical design aspects of a solution architecture, derived from business requirements and driving a macro-level design. A five-step process is enumerated that takes these requirements and helps the organization begin to build an overall architecture to the point of embarking on pilot projects. Business processes are modeled as actions within the organization and between suppliers and customers. In drawing from historical parallels, Kozak-Holland describes the organizational challenges faced by Churchill. The British prime minister correctly decided, among few options, that only through air superiority could Britain withstand the German assault. Therefore, many diverse organizations had to adopt their business processes to interconnect in order to meet this objective.

Chapter 4 in particular focuses on further refining this design work through further iterations and through collaboration among all interested parties. This "micro design" includes important work for user interfaces, content management models, federations, and workflows. The primary point of consensus is centered on the technical prototype discussed in the previous chapter. This stage is extremely important; the true nature of the complexity of solutions may be discovered, warranting changes in design or in expected outcomes. In a fascinating case study, Kozak-Holland discusses in much more detail the technical solutions put forth by the British in order to build and operate an air defense system. Broken down into useful best practices, the case study serves as an interesting and illuminating example of how to develop an adaptive enterprise around an emerging technology infrastructure for your company.

Continuing with its business recommendations, the next two chapters discuss important best practices for project management, release management, testing, and deployment. A truly fascinating amount of historical detail is put forth, describing how simulations and testing were used to develop the real-time processes that would be used during wartime. A memorable example is the use of attack simulations to test radar and reporting simulations, with unsuspecting operators unaware that these raids were by "friendlies" to test the overall system. In today's environment, after the initial solution deployment, a company must manage how increasing numbers of business units leverage the solution. The use of independent acceptance teams and contract-based guarantees is described.

Chapter 7 examines a frequently overlooked phase within the development and deployment of integration architectures: how do you measure project success, describe business impact, and formulate a return on investment (ROI)? The book distinguishes itself further in this area, making concrete recommendations for measuring the success of integration projects by accounting for a combination of hard and soft benefits. Businesses must focus on project reviews, outcome statements, customer feedback, and impact assessments in order to answer the question: Was the integration project considered a technical and business success? Here in the book the historical perspective becomes an important illustration of the derivation of ROI, as Churchill must analyze the steps that led to an air victory over the Germans in October 1940. These lessons would prove critical for future operations at Normandy and beyond. History records that Britain's Royal Air Force was only 24 hours from total defeat in the Battle of Britain, but through superior intelligence and decision-making, the British were able to inflict losses at a 3:1 ratio until the Germans finally retreated. The next year, all plans by the Germans for an invasion of the British Isles were put on hold for good - a far cry from the conventional wisdom a year earlier at the near-disaster at Dunkirk.

The last chapter wraps up the book with a review of the four major challenges (and also potential benefits) of a solution architecture: sensing and responding to business events through informed decision making, achieving organizational buy-in to company-wide integration projects and technology recommendations, ensuring that business problems are being addressed to the satisfaction of the user community, and encouraging the centralization of an entire company's business practices around a federated solution framework. Through the best practices described in the book, Kozak-Holland has led the reader through the entire management life cycle for the discrete stages of design, development, and deployment of solution integration frameworks.
      
Summary
Is this book a business management book with a healthy dose of historical case study, or a history book with recommendations for IT best practices? In truth, the book deftly handles both points of emphasis. It is best viewed as the former, written with the heavy reliance on use cases and case studies - all of which just happen to have been true. Like any good book with compelling subplots, the reader keeps turning the pages.

And in conclusion? The reader is returned to Britain, where the author describes the final outcomes of Churchill's integration efforts, as judged by history. Perhaps in the future your efforts to streamline and modernize your business will be looked upon with equal favor.

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