DSM: A useful tool for process improvement efforts

Design Structure Matrix, or DSM in short, is a tool I frequently see during my year here at MIT.  It is often mentioned in "System Thinking" talks, as well as talks on designing complex system.  While the DSM's uses are many, my project team mates and I focused on process improvement and successfully used the DSM to help our sponsor company improve its processes.  Our sponsor company is a aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul business, and the process we focused on was the aircraft upgrading process, which spans from defining requirements for the upgrade, to drawing out the design, to implementation, to testing and finally to delivery.

How the DSM helped

1. Reduce long rework cycles - imagine the nightmare scenario where a project gets to almost completion, and then have to loopback to the beginning for reasons such as a major design error.  It is like the chutes and ladders game.  The DSM helps to reduce long reworks by reordering the tasks.  For example, in our project, initially there were four rework cycles that would set the project back by more than 20 tasks.  After the reordering, there were none.

2. Challenge the status quo task ordering, while respecting task dependencies - in the reordered task list for our project, we realized that a number of documentation tasks were pushed to the bottom of the list.  These tasks dealt with the development of internal test reports, flight manual and maintenance manual.

Initially, we thought that meant that the company should do those documentation tasks last.  However, on investigating further, we realized it was because no or very few other tasks depended on those tasks.  We thought about that further, and a revelation hit us: if no other tasks are waiting on those documents to be developed, does that mean that employees could develop those documents late and to the lowest quality but yet not affect the entire process in any way?  How can the company ensure the timeliness and quality of those documents?  Our sponsor validated that concern, and in the end, we recommended adding sign-offs of those documents to resolve this issue.

This is just one of the many examples.  The DSM challenged the status quo task ordering, in a way that respected the task dependencies, so the new ordering still made sense and provided ideas for how the current process might be done better.

3. Facilitate understanding of the current process
The DSM creation process required us to get our hands dirty into understanding the process.  We needed to think about what level of granularity we need to get down to, and what kinds of dependencies we should capture.  These activities helped us think more about the process, and thus added in our understanding.

In addition, the DSM also provided a visual map of the process.  At one glance, we could see which are the tasks that have many dependencies.

Additional Information about the DSM

For readers interested in finding out more about the DSM, I have included some basic information here.

DSM might seem rather technical and intimidating at first glance.  And that fear is well justified, as DSMs are matrices, a mathematical artifact that inspire fear into people's heart by the mere mention of its name.  However, if you spend 10-15 understanding how it works, you will find DSM a useful tool to include in your toolbox for process improvement projects.

Creating the DSM

To use the DSM (for the purpose describe in the article), we have to provide three main pieces of information:
1. The list of tasks in the process.  For example, in the design phase, creating the high level design would be a possible task, and doing preliminary design review would be another possible task.
2. The dependencies between tasks.  This information will specify that for Task A to start, what tasks would need to be first completed.  For example, preliminary design review needs to be completed first before detailed design can commence.
3. Possible loopbacks.  This indicates scenarios where rework need to happen.  For example, after preliminary design review, the proposed design might be deem unsuitable and the project will need to go back to high level design.

These three pieces of information can be visualized in a graph like the following:

Here, the tasks are represented by the boxes, the task dependencies by the black arrows and the loopbacks by the red arrows.  This graph is not needed for DSM creation, but is included here to illustrate information needed to create a DSM.

With the required information, a DSM can easily be created.  Using the same example, the DSM will look like this:

The DSM contains the same information as provided by the graph, but putting it in a matrix allow us to apply some tools that will help in our process improvement task.  Then, to do the task re-ordering, you just need to use a tool to "partition" the matrix.  Tools, such as PSM 32 and a DSM Excel Macro, can be found DSMweb.org.

The partitioned DSM will have the new ordering, like the one described in this article.  Analysis and recommendations can then be made based on the partitioned DSM.

Further Readings

• “Complex Concurrent Engineering and the DSM Method” by Yassine and Braha 
• "The Model Based Method for Organizing Product Development" by Steven D. Eppinger, Daniel E. Whitney, Robert P. Smith and David E. Gebala. 
• "Generalized Model of Design Iterations Using Signal Flow Graphs" by Steven D. Eppinger, Murphy V Nukala, and Daniel E. Whitney.

Credits

This work is not solely of my own.  A lot of credits to my team mates Haibo Wang, Davit Tadevosyan and Kai Siang Teo.

Using Stories to Bridge the Attention Chasm

Using Stories to Cross the "Attention Chasm"

Many people believe that the attention of audiences follow a U-shaped curve, where audiences remember mainly what said first and last during presentations, leaving a significant chunk of presented material in what I call the "attention chasm".

Stories can help to bridge this chasm.  I recently watched the movie "The Lives of Others" (an excellent film by the way), and even though it was more than 2 hours long and was in a foreign language, I was amazed at all the details I remembered from the film!  And some of these details were not critical to the movie's main story, like what presents were given at a birthday party and what was eaten for dinner.

Why are stories able to accomplish this, and what does this mean for me?  It is not easy to answer the first question, but I feel that in short, stories are able to bridge the attention chasm mainly because they weave loose pieces of information together into a coherent trajectory.  Details are carefully chosen to reinforce the characters of people in the plot; similarly, events are carefully selected to "tell the story".  In comparison, presentations usually are looser amalgamation of information.  Moreover, stories appeal to human's inert curiosity to find out what happened in other people's lives!  (As such I thought the title "The Lives of Others" is an excellent choice from a film marketing standpoint)

For the second part of the earlier question, one answer that popped out at me is education.  Use stories to teach fact-heavy subjects such as history.  Instead of making students remember all the dates and events, have them watch related movies!  I can also consider using stories to bring together all the key points of a presentation.  It is a lot of work though, as I will need to think about the plot, the characters, etc.  Maybe airlines should consider using stories for the flight safety video!  It can be made interesting and humorous, and that would make life better for both the flight attendants and the passengers.

Stories' ability to help their audiences retain large amount of information is fascinating.  I hope I will gain more insight on how to leverage this capability.

Deliver late or less: best options for a behind-schedule project?

Delivering late: a viable option for behind-schedule projects?
(photo credit: marcp_dmoz)

Projects that are behind schedule are usually faced with the following options:
1. Add more staff to the project
2. Work longer hours, including doing overtime and burning weekends (Ouch...)
3. Work people harder, expect more out of the same number of hours.  Employees might do this by reducing interaction time with other employees, or some might cut corners, like do less documentation, testing.
4. Cut scope, i.e. deliver less
5. Do nothing and deliver late

A poll of 50+ mid-career professionals showed that in their workplaces, the preference is for option #1, #2 and #3.

However, research into this area showed that option #1-3 generate negative "side effects" that can develop into vicious cycles having major impacts on the project.  For example, by adding more staff, the average experience of the team is diluted, lowering the productivity of the team and also causing more errors in work done.

The key though is the vicious cycle, or in technical speak, feedback loops.  Continuing on the earlier example, the generated errors can create more errors downstream, for example think of the situation when software is implemented based on erroneous requirements.  Consequently, though there are more people in the team, the team gets less work done than before.  Similar arguments apply for the other two options.

Model showing "side effects" of various approaches to catch up on late schedules
Credit: Professor James M. Lyneis

Does this mean option #4 and #5 are the best options? i.e.  deliver the project late or deliver it with less scope?  Not always so, but my key thought is we need to give those options more considerations.  And to educate our project stakeholders that those are not cop-out options, especially when we bear in mind all the vicious cycle side effects presented earlier.

Designing flexibilities into systems and enterprises

Does your system or enterprise need a spare tire?
(photo credit: jbdenham)

In face of uncertainty and rapid pace of change, flexibilities like a car's spare tire can be useful for systems and enterprises.  An example of a flexibility is stronger beams in a parking structure.  A shopping mall might choose to build less levels of parking initially, but by putting in stronger structural beams, additional levels of parking can be easily added.  Another example of flexibilities is hiring contract workers.  Hiring in this manner makes future scaling back of operations less costly.

However, these flexibilities come at a cost.  Stronger beams cost more, and contract workers have hidden costs like long term commitment to the company.  How then can one decide what flexibilities are needed and how much of it is needed?

One possible approach is through the use of Excel modeling and simulation.  MIT Professor Richard de Neufville's class taught this approach.  Through not-too-complicated modeling in Excel, we were able to include into a standard financial analysis several flexibility designs.  For example, we were looking at the manufacturing of a product, and one flexibility we included was to produce more in years when production costs are low.  Then, through simulation, we were able to evaluate flexibilities for their effectiveness.  For example, as shown in the chart below, we found that we were actually worse off with one of the flexibilities as the Net Present Value (NPV) of the project was lower with the flexibility compared to being without.

This is a useful approach, though one key challenge is to come up with a good approach to compare different flexibilities.  In the above example, the NPV is used.  However, there are many other scenarios where there is no single number that can be used to evaluate the "goodness" of a scenario.  For example, in building public housing to meet the needs of citizens.  One design might house more people but cost significantly more than another design.  When then is a better design?  In addition, even in the NPV scenario, the outcome is a distribution of values, so the "goodness" of a flexibility often also depends on the risk appetite of the decision maker.

Lastly, a key insight I got from the class is that it is a mistake to think that including flexibilities in systems will be more costly than not including them.  If you compare building a parking facility with four levels, versus one with the same number of levels but stronger beams, which one would cost more?  Obviously the one with stronger beams!  However, this is not the correct comparison, and this is the key cause of the misconception.  The correct comparison should be to compare the stronger beam building against one with more levels.   Why?  Because the parking facility without stronger beams is built without any plans for future expansion, so it should have more levels to cater to growth in demand.

Modeling Enterprise Architectures using System Dynamics

System Dynamics model for adoption of a new product
(source: Patrhoue)

System Dynamics, a field invented by MIT professor Jay Forrester, was created by adapting engineering control theory into social-economic domains.  It was first used to solve supply chains challenges, then urbanization issues, then global sustainability issues, and now applied to many other fields.  At first glance, System Dynamics' approach to solving problem sounds similar to some approaches in Enterprise Architecture (EA).  It seeks to create pictorial representations of the situation to help stakeholders understand what is going on, providing a powerful decision support tool for decision makers and policy makers.  In EA, views of organizations are created to capture key elements of organizations to achieve impacts similar to those mentioned.  However, looking deeper, System Dynamics is not an alternative to EA, but can actually complement EA.  In fact, System Dynamics might one day become an indispensable tool for Enterprise Architects in understanding and communicating dynamics within organizations.

The key value System Dynamics bring to EA, in my opinion, is to provide EA with the missing third dimension for describing enterprises.

System Dynamics adds the missing third dimension to EA

EA views provide visibility into the major components in an organization (e.g. the main business processes and business data) and how these pieces depend and inter-relate with one another (e.g. linkages between business process and data).  However, it is not clear how the organization will behave when changes occur in the organization.  For example, how well does the current organization structure and human resource policies support the assimilation of new hires?  System Dynamics offer tools to describe such dynamics.

System Dynamics describes dynamics in systems primarily by identifying feedback loops.  For example, in the new hires example, one feedback loop at play is the "teach a man to fish" loop.  Here, as existing employees spend time mentoring new hires, the productivity of new hires increases and soon the new hires become more capable of sharing in existing workload.  The sharing of workload eases the burden on existing employees, giving them even more time to mentor the new hires. This becomes a positive reinforcing cycle that is very helpful to the organization.  In most organizations, there are also other loops at play that counter this positive dynamic.  The key value System Dynamics offer to organizations then is helping them identify such key loops in their organizations, as well as key levers for influencing those loops.  In the new hire example, a key lever would be the amount of work of teams where new hires are added.  My friend Kai Siang wrote an article that elaborates further on this new hire example.

System Dynamics also offer tools for understanding the dynamics of different future state designs.  By leveraging on computer simulation, System Dynamics is able to provide insights to decision makers on how different organization designs can impact the behavior of their organizations.

Furthermore, in reading System Dynamics materials, I found several best practices that are often heard in EA:

1. All models are wrong - don't strive to emulate reality, but think of models as tools to help human thinking.

2. Creating the model is not the end goal!  Skills in group facilitation, enabling organizational learning and getting the needed results are also very important.

3. Making mental models explicit might look trivial, but it is key to facilitating useful discussion!

4. People will have different views of what is the "correct" mental model.  Don't get too caught up with that, simply capture the conflicting views and move on.

5. People feel more comfortable to comment on the mental model drawn on a board or a piece of paper, as it is more seen as critiquing an object rather than attacking a person.

It would be interesting to investigate further the intersection between Enterprise Architecture and System Dynamics.  A quick web search revealed a 2010 paper that possibly address this area.  I will definitely welcome any pointers to work done in this area.

Five principles I use to plan my day

Make the day enjoyable!
Doing my work outdoor with a hot drink.

Have you ever invested a lot of effort to get into your dream college but then sloughed through it because there were just too many interesting classes and you ended up taking more than you had time for?  Or waking up feeling nervous because of the many items on your to-do list?  Or move from task to task with such precision in time planning that you felt like you were doing a combo move in a computer arcade game?

Well, if that is you, you are definitely not alone because that is me too.  Summer term has been pretty busy for me as class schedules are condensed to accommodate this shorter term.  Moreover, other demands for my time--like family, church, friends--added to the tension.

To make matter worse, I know that I should enjoy the journey and not be caught up with getting things done.  It can be really enjoyable to slowly mull over a topic taught in class, do the class readings in a park with a cup of coffee in hand, and then take time to reflect and blog about the topic.

The reality though is often different from this ideal.  Given the many things screaming for my time, my temptation is to squeeze as many tasks as I can into a day.  That makes enjoying the journey more difficult.  Moreover, sometimes when I do have free time on hand, I feel a nagging feeling that I am wasting time, and that I should think about what task I can complete next.

I feel the key to resolving this tension between getting things done and enjoying the journey is to establish some principles for planning my daily schedule.  This relates to my life architecture.  Here are the five principles I distilled after untangling my thoughts as I wrote this post.

1. First things first; some things will have to go.  I have finite time and energy, so I cannot have everything!  Don't fall into the greed trap.
2. Make the day enjoyable!  If it looks like a breathless schedule, then drop some tasks so that it is more achievable.  Don't be overly ambitious.  The journey will not be enjoyable ALL the time, there will be moments when it will be a mad rush.  My aim is to make them the exception rather than the norm.
3. Leave half of the day unplanned to leave room for the unexpected (this one is tough! I'm still working on it)
4. Minimise switching of tasks in a day...focus on at most 2 topics to minimize "memory thrashing"

5. Better planning, squeezing time from between events, multi-tasking can help me do more, but beware of making more room just so that it gets filled up with other busyness...

Where the CIO sits makes no difference to EA?

Photo titled "sit where you want".  Pretty apt for this article!
(photo credit: DorteF)

Enterprise Architecture deals with the blueprint of enterprises, so it might make sense that the blueprint function sits close to the Chief Executive Officer in the organization chart to ensure alignment between planning and execution. Is there a correlation between where the Chief Enterprise Architect sits in the organization chart and the Enterprise Architecture maturity of that enterprise?

Figure 1 shows the data from an interview of almost 20 government agencies that included questions about their EA maturity as well as the number of layers between their CEO and Chief EA.  No clear pattern can be identified from the interview data.  Some might even argue that having two to four layers between the CEO and the Chief EA is the best!


Figure 1 Relationship between Chief EA's distance to CEO and EA Maturity

In addition, my discussions with a researcher from Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the same finding: that there has been no support in data of correlation between an organization’s Chief EA’s proximity to the CEO and its EA maturity.

Does this mean that it does not matter where the chief EA sits in organizations? In many organizations, the Chief Information Officer is the chief EA, so does that also mean that it does not matter where the CIO sits in organizations?

Through the interviews, I noticed that the organizations who reported having mature EA roughly falls into three groups. The first group is made up of organizations with very influential CIOs who reported either directly into the CEO or to a direct report of the CEO. The second group has stories of their CEO believing strongly in EA, and pushed the EA agenda top-down. The third group consists of organizations that I was not clear why they reported high maturity for their EA. It might be a lack of understanding on my part, but I also suspect some of them are still early in their EA journey and thus not yet equipped to provide an accurate assessment of their EA maturity.

Analyzing the mature organizations gives the following thought: where the chief EA sits is less important to an organization’s EA maturity than EA’s mindshare among senior managers. If the CEO believes in EA, the organization is more likely to have mature EA. If the CIO is influential and believes in EA, it is more likely that he can influence the CEO to think the same. The challenge though is that it is difficult to measure EA’s mindshare among senior managers, but this does reinforce an often-repeated EA best practice on the importance of gaining top management’s sponsorship to achieve successful EA implementation.

Feedback loops: the central tool for understanding everything around us?

Loops, loops, loops.  How much do we understand, how much do we not, and how much more understanding do we need? (photo credit: wolfpix)

Heard an excellent talk by MIT Professor Jay Forrester this week.  He is the founder of Systems Dynamics, a growing field offering powerful tools and frameworks for understanding complex systems such as organizations, urban cities and healthcare systems.

A key idea Professor Forrester shared, is that everything that changes through time is controlled by feedback loops.  And that means that we can understand things around us better if we understand feedback loops better!  City growth, spread of infectious diseases, stagnating profits, misbehaving children, you name it.  Even a simple task like filling a glass with water is controlled by feedback loops, as shown in the diagram below:  as water is being poured in the glass, the level of water in the glass goes up, and that prompts the pourer to slow down the pouring.  You can even use feedback loops to better understand the popular children story "The Lorax" (see "Studying The Lorax with Feedback Loops")!

However, most of us are not accustomed to feedback loop thinking.  Professor Forrester said that we are more used to "open-loop thinking", instead of "closed-loop thinking".  This means that usually we look at a situation, think about possible actions and consequences, decide an action, and then move on. Rarely do we think about how our actions result in ripple effects in a larger context, and somehow comes back to impact the originator.  It feels as if we need to worry about how the fluttering of wings of a butterfly in China could create a tornado in the United States.  How does one even start thinking about impacts like these?  It is too complex for most people to handle, or to have an interest in.  Feedback loops (or more accurately System Dynamics) seem to offer tools to help us manage such complex analysis, and avoid the pitfalls of open-loop thinking.

Professor Forrester envisioned that the world will be a better place if more of us are trained to analyze situations with feedback loops.  He pointed out three ways in which the world would be bettered if people are trained:

1. We would make better citizens

Many national policies are bad because they are made with open-loop thinking.  Those policies focus on short term gains, at the expense of creating long term burdens.  But why are policy-makers still making them?  It is because the general public is better at identifying the short term gains.  But when citizens of countries are able to tease out short term and long term impacts of policies using feedback loops, they would be more discerning of short-sighted policies and provide the necessary support for long term investments that have less short term gains.

2. We can learn faster

Professor Forrester shared how one Masters student was able to very quickly get to the research frontier of a new field using feedback loops to do his analysis.  In the same way, he believes that all of us can benefit from the power of closed-loop thinking.

3. Our children can learn faster

A very interesting project that Professor Forrester is pushing now, is teaching feedback loops to K-12 children, and helping them using this tool learn better.  From literature to math to science, it is quite unbelievable how broadly this tool is targeted to be applied.  I am excited to try this out myself and evaluate its effectiveness in educating children and helping them gain better analysis skills.  Check out Creative Learning Exchange for more information on this initiative.

I am currently learning more about feedback loops.  Definitely hope to share more about it as I learn.

The Journey from Visibility to Governance to Standardization to Reuse

Firms need to have a single picture to guide their efforts, to build a “foundation for execution” as described in Enterprise Architecture as Strategy[1].  It is not enough to have a single picture of the vision, mission and strategies of the firm.  Firms will need to decide what business processes need to be standardized and what data need to be integrated.  There is no right answer, but not having a common picture will mean that different parts of the firm will be building to their own visions.

However, I noticed through my interviews with CIOs that not many companies had this single picture.  In fact, on probing further, some of them were not able to provide a high-level, organization-wide view of their organizations’ processes.  As such, I postulated that organizations must mature through two stages before they can get to the standardization (and integration) stage. 

Even star war troopers need mirrors!
photo credit: Kalexanderson

Firstly, they need to firstly establish an organization-wide, regularly updated view of the current situation in their organizations.  This is akin to individuals looking into the mirror to decide what to change about their appearances.  Similarly, organizations need visibility into their current state before they can decide what to standardize and what to leave alone.  This is not a trivial exercise, especially in large organizations.  Creating a current view from scratch can take months; keeping the view updated as the organization changes is an even bigger challenge.

Can you tell if something is out of line?
photo credit: chekobero

Second, organizations also need to have strong governance processes in place, so that changes to existing processes and data are channeled through a common approval body.  How can any organization standardize unless all changes and new initiatives are checked against standardization requirements?  In many of the organizations I studied that had mature EA practices, the organizations had strong governance in place.  The Enterprise Architecture team was involved in approving new business initiatives, to ensure that the initiatives are not deviating from the organization’s standardization and integration vision.  Without such a governance framework in place, standardization is just talk that has no teeth to be realized.  It is possible for organizations to have strong governance first before having visibility.  However, as mentioned above, organizations will need to establish visibility before they can move into the standardization stage.

Re-use seems to be a long way off for many organizations.  Or is it?  Maybe a iterative approach with fast and short iterations will work?  I will be keen to hear from your experience of standardization and reuse.

[1] Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill and David C. Robertson    

Five gamification ideas to better engage your audience

Can you captivate your audience?
(photo credit: apogee photography)

Gamification has been all the hype for me in the past months, as it got prominently mentioned in several of the classes I took.  Are there anything valuable one can take from it after digging past the marketing hype?  My classmates and I worked together over the past few months to formulate five recommendations for a financial firm, on how it could use gamification to better engage its customers in the use of its financial planning tools.  The company loved our recommendations, and we felt that the same recommendations can be applied in many different settings.  So here they are for you to try in your own settings.

#1 Focus on the first minute

The first minute a new user interacts with the tool is extremely important, as it decides if the user will continue using the tool or if he will go somewhere else. The firm thus needs a clear idea of what it wants new users to experience during that first minute.  In the first minute, the user should not experience long, boring instructions.  He should not experience painful registration processes, or hard-to-understand terms and conditions.  Instead, he should experience the core experience of the tool.  If the core experience is fun and interactivity, he should experience it.  If the core experience is easing his financial planning tasks, he should experience it.

The challenge for delivering the experience is that there are no definite points on the firm’s website where users will enter. Users can come in through the company’s main webpage, or to the planning tools’ landing page, or even directly to one of the planning tools. How then can the firm deliver consistent first minute experience to first time users? One idea is to have a prominent button on all webpages that will take first time users to a starter page. Another idea is to focus on the navigation menu on the side or top, since it shows up on all webpages.

As part of the first minute experience, the website can ask meaningful questions to help users navigate the sea of content available. One possible question is “What are you planning to save for?” and the choices can be “Buying a car”, “Getting married”, “Buying a house”, “Children’s education”, “Retirement”, etc. Based on the user’s choice, he can be taken to content that is most relevant to what he is trying to accomplish. These questions can be asked proactively (e.g. via a pop-up questionnaire) or passively (e.g. as a section of text on a webpage). 

#2: Leverage on users' current concerns

We interviewed 25 users on their financial planning priorities, and many of them were more concerned with near term goals like “buying a car” or “getting married” than they are with long term goals of retirement planning. These life-stage events present precious windows of opportunity that can be leveraged to deepen users’ engagement with the tool. Minimally, users will grow more familiar with the tool’s user interface. More importantly, relevant user information (e.g. amount to save each month) can be collected, which increase the chances of them coming back in the future for other related financial planning tasks.

Games implement this idea through “Challenges and Quests”, like FourSquare’s badges and Farmville’s ribbons. Through challenges and quests, users are focused on smaller and more immediate tasks, and they might use the system for tasks even though they are not interested in the system (yet…). 

#3: Provide feedback using a progress bar

Business networking site LinkedIn has a visual indicator telling users how complete their professional profile is. If a user only provided his education information, his profile might be tagged as “20% complete”. If he has included his work experience, it might be “50% complete”. This progress bar is very helpful in helping users know how complete their profiles are, and it taps on inherent motivations in humans to complete tasks.

The tool can take on similar concept: tag users as “20% complete” if he provides his monthly savings goal, “50% complete” if he adds his current assets, and so on.

LinkedIn also frames this concept using a different idea. It includes an “Improve your profile” button on users’ profile pages, and when users click on the button, it shows a number of “To-dos” that users can do to improve their profiles, highlighting the first to-do task. This is an excellent way of focusing users to the next bite-size task they can focus on to improve their profiles. 

#4: Give more free rewards, more often

It is very hard to motivate people to plan for something that will only happen 40 years later. It is said that people spend more time planning for their vacations than they do for retirement, and it is not hard to believe that, because 40 years is a very long time! It is also very easy for other tasks to take precedence since in comparison; all other tasks are more urgent.

One way around this challenge is to help users break down their long financial planning journey into “levels”, and reward users each time they attain a new level.  Thus the concept "more rewards, more often".  For example, a user might promote into the next level when he has setup an investment plan, or if he has re-balanced his portfolio at least once in the past year.

The reward can be monetary, based on the firm’s estimation of the lifetime value of such a customer.  But there are also many other "free" rewards. The book "Gamification by Design" laid out four categories of rewards strung together by the acronym “SAPS”. Figure 1 lists the four categories along with some examples.

Reward Category	Examples
Status	Badges, Levels
Access	Lunch with CEO or celebrity, Access to the firm’s clubs, Priority queue at banks
Power	Moderator on a forum, more say in what new features to include in the tool
Stuff	Freebies

Figure 1 Four Categories of Rewards

#5: Define an engagement score

How can the firm know the impact of its gamification efforts unless it measures it? An engagement score should measure more than just the conventional page views or number of unique visitors. It should also measure how much time users spend on the website, how often they return to it, if they have registered accounts, etc. A good way to create the engagement score is to think along five dimensions: recency, frequency, duration, virality and ratings (detailed in the book "Gamification by design").

With a good engagement score, the firm can measure where it is at before it implements gamification, and later have a clear way to assess the effectiveness of the gamification efforts. In addition, the score will also be useful for incremental calibrations, as the firm experiments with tweaks in its engagement efforts.

References

[1] Gamification by Design, “Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps” By Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham
[2] Lee, H., Schlossberg, E., Seelhof, M., Teo, K. S., & Wong, M. F. (2012). Fidelity Engagement and Gamification. MIT.

One of my classmates who worked on this project also wrote about the project on his blog, check out his article "Are You Game?".

Telltale Signs of Organizations with Strong EA

Footprints on fresh snow
(photo credit: dru!)

Walking on fresh snow is one of my favorite activities, as I enjoy leaving the first footprints in the soft, fluffy snow.  My impact on the snow is evident to those that come after me.  What impacts should EA have on organizations?  What do EA's footprints look like?  Here are answers from three authoritative sources, on tell tale signs that an organization has effective EA.

1. Clarity on Long-term Plans

The book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” believes that enterprise architecture help organizations focus on building strategic capabilities, instead of constantly being distracted by immediate needs. It does that by providing a long-term view of an organization's processes, systems and technologies [1].  This clarity works hand-in-hand with strong governance to help organizations achieve future states they desire.

Following on this point, EA should also enable organizations to have clarity on current capabilities.  Without this clarity, organizations end up building capabilities that they already have, or capabilities that are not supported by their existing processes, systems and technologies.

2. Strategic, Responsive and Cheap IT 

CIO.com sees that enterprise architecture makes IT cheaper, more strategic and responsive, and help promote alignment, standardization and re-use of IT assets [2].  This builds on the clarity mentioned in the previous point, such that IT works on what matters, is positioned for the future and designed to maximize reuse and reduce duplication.

3. Agile

Gartner sees enterprise architecture as a change enabler by "by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution." [3]  In a way this is similar to #2, but this brings the impact beyond IT to the entire organization.

Other Impacts?

What other impacts should EA have?

References

1. Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson
2. Enterprise Architecture on CIO.com, http://www.cio.com/topic/3020/Enterprise_architecture
3. Gartner's Definition of Enterprise Architecture, http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/enterprise-architecture-ea/