Sustainable change info graphic from Booz

Here is a link to a recent info graphic on sustainable change from the Katzenbach institute at Booz.

I find the numbers on the chart about success factors/inhibitors plausible and unsurprising, with one exception:

67% of those surveyed felt that corporate change programmes had a positive impact.

I find that remarkably high, given the level of scepticism that so many people have about such initiatives in my experience.

It gives support to the idea that people are more open to change than is generally assumed... As long as the change is culturally feasible within the organisation's context and comes with appropriate justification and explanation.

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Charity:Water talk at Stanford

Just listened to another good podcast from the Stanford Entrepreneurial Leadship series.

Scott Harrison, founder of Charity:Water gives an entertaining but thought-provoking talk on his path to setting up the charity and how to make things happen by communicating and thinking about things a little differently.

A timely reminder also on the size of the problem of access to clean water, given this weeks events in the Phillipines.

Here is a link to the talk.


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Factors effecting B2B brand image

I just read a really interesting article from McKinsey on the disconnect between the factors that B2B suppliers emphasise in their branding and what their customers care about.. so much for customer-centricity reaching the B2B space..

Checking it out here.

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Business survivors - BBC podcast

It has been a while since I posted; let us put it down to a summer break ;-).

Just a quick one this morning. Sitting on a bus in a traffic jam listening to Business survivors (link here), a thoroughly enjoyable summary of 25 years of Peter Day's "In Business" radio show.

I have listened to the In Business podcast for many years and almost always find it interesting - rather than taking a specialist view on a topic, he has a real skill at addressing even the most "innovative" topics from a layman'a point of view. In doing so he cuts through a lot of the crap by focusing on a basic premise; people serving people the best way possible to make money.

You can find the archive of
In Business with Peter Day here.


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Great map of most popular sites across globe

Great map of the most popular internet sites across the globe: here is the link


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McKinsey & use case points ;-)

It is a sad day when McKinsey delivers an article on transformation in application development effectiveness that has nothing to say beyond "use use cases and then estimate use case points as an output oriented measure / KPI."

I found nothing new in the article that reads like the standard fare from the late Nineties/early Naughties on this topic (and probably before to be honest) ...still, if nothing else, it is a sign of the maturity of a process in IT when it pops up on McKinsey's radar.

The full article is here.


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eCommerce statistics and outlook

That the UK is the most developed online market in some ways will surprise nobody, but this report nevertheless has lots of interesting statistics comparing countries. Here is the full report.


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"Infobesity" and decision making

A recent article by Bain caught my attention.

Admittedly, this was initially because of the dreadful term "Infobesity" (information overload), but the article makes a succinct case that in the age of big data most companies are missing the point and losing themselves in their data.

I think this is true to a point; though "big data" certainly holds much promise, it also has the potential to waste even more time of more and more people if not managed well.

This is especially true in the context of decision-making. More data can mean better decisions, but as often as not it just means more circles. To my mind, being clear about the decision process, being aware of the soundness of the underlying data and then making the decision and moving on is almost always better than analysis paralysis.

Good quality data, rather than massive volumes of data seems preferable to me ;-).

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Book review: Strategy maps (Kaplan & Norton)

Always on the look out for good ideas on structured strategy development, I have just finished "Strategy Maps" by Kaplan & Norton.
It is OK.
It is not great.
Although the book is full of examples and case-studies that feel genuine and are certainly informative, ultimately the core of the book seemed like a rehashing of well-known ground around the balanced scorecard:
Use the four facets of the balanced scorecard to build up an understanding of what is required from an organisation to deliver a strategy.
As far as it goes this is fine and certainly a useful tool. The book contains dozens of specific examples of one page strategy maps that do describe the complex interaction of the four facets and how the organisation should be measured to develop the capabilities required of a strategy. But in the end, they remained descriptive.
Do not get me wrong - I am a big fan of the balanced scorecard, but I was hoping that the book might do more to guide through the different flavours of strategies available and how to understand and evaluate the tradeoffs implicit to them (to ensure the balance in the card, so to speak).
I recommend the book if you are not already familiar with the balanced scorecard. Otherwise just google the summary!
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Lean startup in HBR

You know when a business idea has become mainstream, when you read about it in the Harvard Business Review!

In the latest issue, there is a solid article on various parts of what has become the lean startup movement.

By now, the "playbook " is familiar:
- Business model, not business plan driven
- Interdiscplinary product creation teams, not strictly split business and IT project organisations
- Minimum viable product, developed and launched incrementally (and not just iteratively) and updated regularly, not multi-year product development with too many moving parts
- Customer co-creation focused around customer journeys, not market research alone...

All the parts have been knocking around for a couple of decades and more.

So why is it that, despite everyone's best efforts, such joined up approaches are so infrequent in practice outside the startup space?

It is not as if startups have the monopoly on great people, or great ideas - in my experience there are no shortage of either in corporations the world over.

No doubt, corporate inertia is part of the problem and, of course, the shear complexity of the businesses they are in that have evolved over long periods of time.

Equally, the natural conservativism of well established organisations will play its part. But people in the largest corporations see what is happening around them and understand these well-trodden ideas as well as the next person (in his lean-startup) - so much so that the willingness to apply the methods is often there (and indeed at all levels), in even the largest organisations.

Honestly, I think the answer lies more in the ability to select the 1,2,3 really important improvements/ customer journeys/ products/ services/ processes/ whatever within the organisation and then keep up the focus on them for long enough to really improve them before moving on to the next challenge.

Sounds like a job for commercially driven business architecture combined with a genuinely empowered cross functional SWAT team, seeding the organisation.

But then I would say that, wouldn't I?


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Excel rules

There is simply no getting around the fact that Excel is a spectacularly useful and powerful tool.

News of some simple miscalculations in the analysis of a couple of economists heavily referenced by politicians to justify austerity measures just serves to reinforce this: read the full article here and then remember to check those formulas properly before you publish!

Book review: "Civilisation: the 6 killer apps of western power"

So, the pilot has just announced a 15 minute delay before takeoff (let's not talk about the previous two hour delay this adds on to!); just enough time to get down a thought or two on the book I just finished reading, "Civilisation - the six killer apps of western power", by Niall Fergusson. 

To be up front, unlike most of my posts, this review does not have any particular business context.

I am a fan of the work of Niall Ferguson (see here and here for a couple of absolutely cracking books), so was definitely looking forward to this one, irritatingly populist subtitle notwithstanding.

Ferguson poses the question why "The West" has been more "successful" for the last 400 years than eastern civilisations. The answer to this question is not as banal as one might expect (luck and a few great renaissance innovations that positioned the west for Empire, followed up by ruthless exploitation, would have been my ill-informed answer).

The author suggests that the reasons are manifold (undisputed, I would say!) and that they stem from the complex interaction of the following "killer apps":

• Competition; European mercantile capitalism and competition in context of many small countries
• Property rights and the rule of law (particularly in US)
• Medicine and impact of health improvements across world from colonialism
• The consumer society and the demand driven innovation during the Industrial Revolution
• The work ethic - Western religions and impact on conscience et al.

This collection does seem to provide a robust collection of valid ideas, and the author has dozens of great examples juxtaposing the West with the East in each of the categories. However, I remained slidely disappointed with the overall book. 

I may be getting a bit simple with progressing middle-age, but Ferguson's argument would have benefitted greatly from a good cause and effect diagram, showing the interactions of these apps - without it, I have remained unable to properly understand whether his answer is complete, or indeed whether it stacks up.

This niggle notwithstanding, Ferguson provides a huge amount of food for thought, with literally hundreds of interesting references backing up his claims. And the topic is, obviously, very relevant at a point in which the tide seems to have turned irrevecorably against the West.

For those who do not want to read all 350 pages, Ferguson held a lecture at the Cambridge Union, in which he outlines the key points in an hour or so (posted on YouTube here). Enjoy!

How many things can you focus on?

I had hoped to be at the Exceed Expectations 2013 conference in Berlin earlier this week, but due to work commitments have sadly had to make do with catching up on the presentations vicariously through a colleague and via the blog buzz around the conference:

In this context, I stumbled across the "bare-bones" of Alexander Graf's presentation on his highly readable blog, kassenzone.de. The presentation itself is interesting - an appeal for us to try to see the business model opportunities left and right around us and the danger of focusing on one thing - but I like the embedded YouTube video even more. Try it out here (I won't comment on it, because that ruins the impact, but go ahead and try it before you read on!).




It has become a cliche that focus on one thing and doing it well is everything and yet at the same time we observe the necessity to be constantly aware of what is going on all around us.

How to handle this?

....I don't honestly know, so suggestions are most welcome ;-).

....My amateur answer for myself thus far, however, is to try to compartmentalise my time, to focus during the week on the job in hand (whatever it might be) and then to very deliberately block time in my month (typically one Sunday afternoon, as this blog entry attests ;-)) to try to look around and reflect on what else is going on. I am finding that this time is enough to get a few impulses and the thoughts/ideas then gestate in the background during the rest of the month, without me really thinking about them.

How many things can you focus on?

Getting the Inbox under control

As long term readers of my blog know, I am a fan of manager-tools.com (even though I don't like the name, since it is as much about professional effectiveness as it is management, see also here for previous posts on their best podcasts).

In recent years I have found that the casts have gotten a little short on content - typically, the team have 1-2 key messages and get them covered in the first 5 minutes - but I guess this is as much a question of learning style (multiple reptitions). This week's cast (here) is a good one.

The messages are few and simple, but do make sense:

• plan to do your email at regular times only (and not all the time when you are at your desk) 
• budget time in accordance with the priority that you give to mail 
• work through all your mails in this time, even if that simply means creating an action for an email and filing the actual email away, or responding that you will respond once you have time 
• switch off the auto-download of mails 

These recommendations are completely in keeping the the GTD ("Getting Things Done") model and, in particular, the psychological impact of having a clear inbox (even if it simply means that the actions are in their appropriate lists) is definitely a winner for me.

I am constantly impressed by a smart colleague of mine that literally deletes all mails that she does not absolutely need (including her own sent mail) and saves key messages into her normal filing structure - she never needs long to find what she needs and in 6 years I have only once had to provide her with an email that she had overzealously deleted.

Too often keeping up with emails becomes a task in itself and it simply should not be. This is just good common sense.

In the interests of full disclosure - I have tried this several times over the last few years, but never managed to be this strict. Hopefully, practice will make perfect...

Maps That Explain The World

A fascinating set of maps, though quite cynical in places - here

Recent TED talk on managing life

Having shifted my holiday planning to an explicit priority driven approach to avoid the typical arguments around what we "absolutely have to do" in the timebox that is a two-week summer break (with appropriate sticky note visible backlog that is adjusted and burnt down daily ;-)), I can relate to this guy:

Latest Google Glass video

Although the latest video preview of Google Glass does not really show anything particularly new (video/pictures using Glasses), I have to admit I am really looking forward to the Glass launch - there are so many possibilities with this technology! Here is the video:

Most loved digital brands in UK...

Another nice looking visual @ eConsultancy.com; favourite UK digital brands: http://assets.econsultancy.com/images/0002/9076/brandlove.png

Integrated multi-channel experiences in retail and beyond long over due

Having done quite a bit of work in the online retail space over the past couple of years, I am always interested in reading about peoples' predictions for what is to come. But increasingly, it has to be said that the "future is already here".

Even a year ago, integrated multi-channel digital experiences that encompass the physical retail space were bandied around as visions for the future. But as a recent posting at eConsultancy.com reminds us, the imperative for action for many (if not all) fashion retailers is there today - the competition is already doing it (and, unsurprisingly those with a robust online customer experience focused strategy are finding it easier to innovate further).

The future is today! Retailers get moving, or die! Nothing new, but the clock really is ticking!

Here is the link:

http://econsultancy.com/de/blog/62052-why-should-fashion-brands-improve-their-multichannel-offerings?utm_medium=feeds&utm_source=blog

IIBA gaining momentum and finally mature enough to provide value

The IIBA continues to gather momentum in the business analysis and architecture community and is finally over its post-natal difficulties.

After earlier (perhaps over harsh) criticism from my side on the initial versions of the BABOK, I am finding real value in the community materials and (even more) the discussions.

I found the initial form of the practice to be at once too high-level and too "traditional" systems analysis focused for the increasingly varied role of the business analyst/ architect in organisations (see here and here). This was quite a feat since high-level and systems-level analysis do not always happily mix! It was descriptive, but not hugely insightful.

To see how this has changed, delve into the latest monthly newsletter or even better into the related online commnunities which contains a great range of interesting articles on topics as broad as developing business architecture to truly impact an organisation to BA handicraft (eg. handling constraints, assumptions, dependencies and risks and the definition of business analysis models). 

I can only encourage people involved in any facet of business analysis (from financial engineers, business architects, demand-managers, business strategists, management consultants, process, business and systems analysts to software engineers) to get into this community. Business analysis is a great blend of soft and hard skills that requires an incredibly broad often conflicting capabilities from the practictioner/consultant and this is reflected in the contributions to the IIBA online.

On a slightly geeky note, my favourite article this month is, in fact, one on BA-handicraft rather than any strategic contribution - the author argues that the best way to handle "CADs" (Constraints, Assumptions and Dependencies) is to basically convert them to risks or requirements and manage them accordingly - that is, to give them priorities/impact values and probabilities. The author argues that this will result in a more meaningful discussion of these items (which too often get lost in projects) and shift the discussion to a dialogue rather than a "cover your arse" list of things that were "signed off" on. 

I could not agree more and - as many of my colleagues would, I hope, attest - I have been pushing this approach (and in particular the use of impact/ probability/ maturity/ certainty) in our eBusiness practice for years. This stuff is - obviously - not rocket science, but discipline and rigour in this space are so crucial to success in projects and increasingly business in general, that I believe it is worth emphasising again and again!

Study - Facebook Page Post Ads generate 14% higher ROI for retail sector than Marketplace ads

I am not at all surprised that Page Post Ads are more effective than side-bar/marketplace ads in Facebook, but I am genuiinely surprised the the cost-per-click is also lower --> I would have expected the higher potency to have been factored in to the pricing from the start... here is the source.

Seth Godin's blog: Eleven things organizations can learn from airports

Given my numerous postings from the airport, I can definitely identify with some of the findings in Seth Godin's recent posting on learnings from the airport for organisations.
That said, having spent a reasonable amount of time around airline/travel professionals I do have to say that Mr Godin is perhaps stretching the negativity of the airport experience a little bit... at least until I next visit spend some time at Heathrow Terminal 1.
Here is the link.

The enterprise is the story

A smart collegue pointed me towards Tom Graves as an Enterprise Architecture consultant, who "gets" the need for the application of different methods to make Enterprise Archtiecture a meaningful function/activity within an organisation (story, emotion, direction, not just TOGAF et al) - the presentation here (http://www.slideshare.net/tetradian/the-enterprise-is-the-story) gives a feel for his work.
I like it and it resonates very much with my own thinking on narrative/stories as the heart of any larger initiative to develop an organisation - it feels like some of the valuable assets that architects bring to the table could actually be harnessed for the enterprise by the application of some of these ideas (rather than just getting put on a shelf in the IT-architecture department) - and will certainly be reading some of his books - reviews to follow....

A more fulsome commentary?...

Another year, another 40 or so posts. Time for a brief reflection, perhaps?

I have been writing this blog for several years now. It started as a cathartic opportunity to write on topics that interest me largely for my own pleasure (see here for my list of favourites), but fairly swiftly developed into a method for sharing interesting resources and information with clients, colleagues and the casual observer - curation, I guess in the current jargon. By nature, this has meant that the entries have become shorter, often just a short comment and a link (Twitter-like, really though I hate to admit it ;-)).

 Earlier this week a casual observer, who by chance is also a rather smart cookie, complained that this means she has to go out and read the "primary source" too. My glib answer was "yup and a good thing too - read and reflect", but this, on reflection myself, was perhaps a little harsh; as such, I am going to try to get back to writing some more editorial/commentary.

So, in the tradition of my public new year's resolutions (see here), I will try to get out at least one commentary a month in parallel to my normal regular roundup/links collation.

As many bloggers will agree, this will, I fear, be more challenging than it sounds, but I will give it a go. Wish me luck!

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Service Design Tools resource

http://www.servicedesigntools.org is a great set of nicely presented introductory tools for use in service design. For experienced CE professionals there is nothing really new here, but it has been put together beautifully and there are some good examples/case-studies that are always excellent food-of-thought!

Some great social media statistics

The imagery on visual.ly is getting a little homogeneous, but is still full of content. The graphic below contained sufficient statistics for me to consider it worth posting in full - it seems as a male pinterest user I am in the minority! On a more serious note though, if you ever needed any justification for getting moving on operationalising your company's social media strategy, look no further than these stats and what they mean for you and your competitiors in 2013.

Responsive design vs mobile sites

A short article on the decision (given limited resources) related to mobile optimised, responsive design based or app-based investment. Mobile first? I am not so sure, but the author has some valid points... http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/11413-are-you-responsive-mobile-or-app-based?utm_medium=feeds&utm_source=blog