Douglas Allen

Now is the time to invest.  As organizations enter the planning stages for their key 2012 initiatives, it is time to invest in the ingenuity that enables companies to continuously strive for the ever-elusive competitive edge.  It is time to invest in innovative processes and insight that creates lasting business value for customers and shareholders.  It is time to invest in the advanced technology that provides the foundation and tools for the people and processes to meet their true potential.  This means investing in the organizational construct known as a business technology Center of Excellence (CoE). The general concept of a business technology CoE has occasionally been incorporated into everything from a skunkworks-oriented IT research & development team to a full-fledged enterprise architecture organization.  Corporate enterprise IT R&D teams are typically as... (more)

Hunting Down the “Herbies” In Your House

Recently some colleagues and I were discussing applications of the Theory of Constraints to various process and financial management scenarios.  In our current  economic environment in which organizations are constantly being pushed to new expectations of efficiency, the effective use of all available resources is absolutely critical to the success of an organization.  As we were considering some of the themes from Eli Goldratt’s classic business novel “The Goal” (right around the first anniversary of the author’s passing, coincidentally), I began to see the applicability of Gold... (more)