AUSTRALIA: Jeff Smith at SunCorp

I liked this article in The Australian.

FIVE years as the head of IT at some of Australia’s largest businesses have helped give Suncorp CIO Jeff Smith a reputation in the industry as a lover of leading and bleeding edge technologies.

Suncorp CIO Jeff Smith takes a radical view of IT governance

He professes an interest in Web 2.0 and has publicly stated his intent to explore open source systems, such as SugarCRM, as Suncorp pursues a $200 million information system overhaul.

Mr Smith is also looking to shake up project management at Suncorp as he snubs traditional practices in favour of more radical techniques that ask governance to take a back seat.

“I get more questions about governance than I do about how work’s going to get done. How are you going to govern that project? Who’s going to be involved? What’s the governance model?’ Who cares,” Mr Smith told participants at last week’s Future of Banking and Financial Services Conference in Sydney.

“Governance is not the key. The key is your underlying delivery mechanism and making sure we provide the most productive environment for people to give them a fulfilling role. The governance is secondary.”

Mr Smith urged businesses to consider dumping the dominant waterfall system of project management, which relies on heavy-duty governance structures, linear phases and gating. (READ MORE HERE)

Ever wondered what BETA means when you see it shoved onto Web 2.0 sites? Flickr made a joke out of it, with a GAMMA version. Basically it means that it’s live but changing -much like Beta access is to product and services development. Every month, a new little widget or change is made to the site. Very cool for marketing – no longer static services so you have to come back all the time to see what’s changed.

On the issue of governance – the governance cycle looks quite different for Web 2.0 and TOTALLY different for Web 3.0. A month or so ago, I spoke with Regulatory Affairs people but it was challenging for them to understand that the online community will simply take over the management of some of these issues without even realising they are doing it.

Iterative development has been around forever – we used it at Cisco Singapore 7 or 8 years ago and, in project management terms, it was called something like “crashing the schedule” or “crashing the timelines” – anyone remember the exact term? I heard a rumour that Jeff Smith blogs – does anyone have the link please?