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Culture and digital transformation

Having shifted to Twitter as my medium of choice for quick updates on interesting insights from the world of digital, it has been a while since I have posted to justanotherblog.

As a result, I have a bit of a backlog that I hope to work down over the coming months (a few book reviews, a piece or two on omnichannel design and the illusive nirvana of multi-speed for large corporates, challenges with social enterprise collaboration adoption and quite a few more).

As an easy re-entry into the blogosphere, I thought the most straightforward thing to do would be a couple of light entries on some favourite recent articles on by far the most difficult part of digital transformation in large corporates - the culture shift:

An article on HBR - The Company Cultures That Help (or Hinder) Digital Transformation (here) - is a great summary of some typical pitfalls and contains some interesting thoughts about how to approach them.

Having worked with companies, supporting them along this transformation journey, I recognise many of the patterns that the author, Jane McConnell, describes well, but the one from her research that I find the most telling is, in many ways also the most frustrating, because it is so obvious: "Too much focus on technology rather than willingness to address deep change and rethink how people work."

Anyone who has worked on practically any transformation initiative knows this to be true. And yet we still too often continue to focus on the black boxes that are "going to transform the way we work".

I work in a company with a heritage of transformative technology implementation, so I am a fan of and believer in the effect that digital technologies can have on building competitive advantage, great new engaging experience for our clients' customers and the insights that can be gleaned from the masses of data that can now be harnessed to find new and interesting insights into your customers behaviour.

HOWEVER, this only happens when the right people are enabled to make it happen.

It is clarity of business vision and purpose, experience in and a willingness to invest in people development and the right organisational structures that will help an organisation to do great things with the technology.

From my perspective, it has always been this way and probably always will be... unless the robots do take over the world, of course.

Digital is a way of doing things, a minefield, but also a mindset. So, thinking about the why first and getting the right people in place to drive a transformation, may be obvious, but it still happens too infrequently.

In short, a thoughtful article with some no-nonsense, yet hugely challenging approaches, that are too often go unresolved.

Ignore them at your peril!


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Tenure, engagement & performance

As someone who spent most of his career in organisations with strong loyalty and longer employee tenure than most, this HBR article surfaces familiar organisational challenges around engagement and performance, but also some simple and thought provoking advice.


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Pithy presentation on flavours of digital transformation...

... Nice 30-second take on different perspectives on what digital transformation is meaning for companies today:

Flavours of digital transformation


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Augmented reality advert that almost makes the visiting Oxford Street worthwhile...

Just follow this link to a great augmented reality advert from Pepsi.

Let's hope there are more of these to come!...

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Analysis trends 2014 from Modern Analyst

As previously posted, I rather like Modern Analyst as a resource for keeping up to date on what is going on in the business analysis and design community.

Their trends for 2014 are refreshingly down-to-earth and straight forward (see this link

Good - some point soon, this area of software engineering (and beyond) might even finally mature into the profession it needs to be!


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15 things cheaper than WhatsApp!

Here is a great perspective on the WhatsApp deal;

http://www.policymic.com/mobile/articles/82945/15-things-that-are-cheaper-than-whatsapp

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Remarkable population migration visualisation tool

Having failed to achieve my new year's resolution last year, I am not going to make any further public resolutions until I have fulfilled last year's!

The following link is to an amazing online tool - I am constantly delighted by what is being put in the public domain online and was reminded very much of Hans Rosling and gapminder.org (see here for a link to his best TED.com talks - if you have never come across him, check it out).

I am only just getting the hang of the usage, but the site basically allows you to map population migration to historical events. Completely off topic for my site, but quite simply, brilliant stuff! Try it out here.

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!