Structure in Threes: Portfolio Management R&D

Not much progress to report on the Candlestick Charting application methods, but I have started to rough out the methodology in a PowerPoint deck. I started thinking “Seems like I’ve been here before”. Then as I was going through my achieve, there it was my notes, diagrams, spreadsheets, and presentations on applying portfolio management to the various investment payoff horizons. Including the same conclusions and gaps I’ve identified and researching to solve for IT Portfolio Management. The big difference now from then is abstracting levels of control and coordination (governance) from process definition and execution. Which was the approach I used to define the strategy and market planning processes before. However, at that time explaining the difference to management was a challenge. Ten years later I get an “of course” from everyone, back then it was a RCA Victor dog head tilt look.

Seems like most of my R&D work is always about ten years ahead of industry. What I need to do is find a forward thinking investor or company willing to set me up in a lab to explore and develop these concepts to the level where they can be commercialized. However when I explain what I’m doing to most, its a “I don’t see how it can make money” question on their faces. Even at Microsoft, when I put forward my instrumentation initiative within MS ITG I was a why and what good is it? Later the pieces became initial concepts for Active Directory. But even now AD has never reached the conceptual target of creating the digital nervous system I was proposing back in the 80s at IBM; at that time I was looking at SNA and a hierarchy of processing architecture –I labeled “appropriate level processing” to implement at Lockheed. Looking through my achieves for the slide deck to the CIM Architecture group that showed the initial concepts of using computers for management and control.

Below are some slides from my CIO Workbench proposal that showed the vision of the future using the IT Infrastructure to instrument enterprises back in the 80s and 90s. Some of these tools I prototyped back then (RiskCalc, CMDB, Project Portfolio Prioritization) and a few actually made it into limited use; Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) some concepts in MSF on strategic planning and some into MOF.

cio workbench Logical Architecturecio workbench applications

These past two months and the book to focus my attention have been great, as I’ve had time to rough out all the pieces again and start figuring how to fill out all the gaps from my vision back in the 80s. I hope when the book is complete the integration of all the disciplines into a working enterprise unit will become easier that today’s fragmentation of disciplines going off in different vectors.

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