Big Data Initiative, One or Many?

There is perhaps no one size fits all Big Data solution; but you may craft a holistic analytics strategy.

Business leaders at all sectors are pondering weather they have data, capability and infrastructure ready to explore the big opportunities Big Data may bring up. The forward-look businesses will put a holistic and comprehensive Big Data strategy in place to ensure that they are getting the most out of their collective investment along with the necessary governance needed to execute the strategy across the organization. But tactically, will organization have on Big Data initiative or many?

The data analytics can apply to different business perspective: Analytics helps optimize various business management, directly or indirectly related to long-term revenue. Include traditional optimization, root cause analysis, and statistical analysis / machine learning / data mining to boost efficiency of marketing campaigns, price optimization, inventory management, finance and tax engineering, sales forecasts, product reliability, fraud and risk management, user retention, product design, ad spend, employee retention and predicting success of new hires, competitive intelligence leveraging external data source, guessing new trends based on automated analysis of user feedback and much more. And the role as an analyst is to understand the business context, leverage data, and come up with recommendations that can be acted on

Consolidation and integration is necessity, but there is no one size fits all analytics solution.     While the technologies applied may vary for a given problem, there is also a vast amount of shared architecture /infrastructure. It would be very unfortunate if the initiatives worked in silos, you never know what kind of insight can be gained from combining data and you never know what kind of BI/Analytic tools might need to be supported. On the other hand, the concept of a single one-size-fits-all technology solution for Big Data is a fallacy especially if you consider the three Vs of Big Data. If you consider the reason NoSQL technologies, for example, have become so popular due to the support of data "Variety", you can easily begin to understand that no one solution will really deliver on an Enterprise's needs

The evolution of the data pool into a centralized form that allows cross silo analysis is growing. The mechanics of that evolution seem to have many paths, some are definitely working better than others. Ideally, it would be great to be able to combine data from all corners of the business in new ways into new insight; abstract the way data is accessed in the company wide architecture to allow data-sources to support multiple access strategies. However, it takes time to mature analytics technologies. It is also the most complex and challenging as new methods and technologies are "integrated" into the existing estate. In addition, poor planning and coordination are organization and project management related, the nature of most big data projects requires the ability to read and rapidly process variety of data, high volume data sources, making coordination critical. Things get complicated very quickly as the structure of these data sources and the business needs continue to evolve.

There are many challenging pieces in Big Data. Analytics is effectively one piece; but it is only part of the equation. And analytics is multi-dimensional -engineering, art and management disciplines.From management perspective, keep the business end in mind by framing the right questions, enforce data governance, experiment to learn, and take the integral approach for building a solid long term analytics portfolio based on a cohesive Big Data strategy.

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How to Connect the Dots between Business Strategy and Process

Without process, strategy is a mirage; without strategy, process is in darkness. 

It's a common misconception that 'strategy' applies only to strategic business initiatives and longer-term direction (Strategic Business Plans). The elements of strategy (business goals, business risks, etc.) can and should be applied to business problems of virtually any scope and any time frame. What are the ends you are trying to achieve, and what are the means such as processes you will use to achieve those ends?

How do strategy and business process relate? Business process should actually be born out of a strategy, sometimes strategies are more or less taken up like a project, with temporary objectives. But long term operations, such as a processes for customer services, when applied strategically saves much cost, allows you to become more competitive to achieve business goals.

The elements of strategy can be used to guide and evaluate development of business processes. In that way, you get independent checks and balances for the overall business solution you are trying to develop. Many times, people in organization follow processes mindlessly, at times just because it becomes a need. How can you develop the best or most appropriate business process if you don't know the strategy (business goals at all) for solving the business problem? Therefore, it is important for a clear set of objectives, planning, communication and training goes in a proper systems or process implementation, further on, the expected outcome happens over a period of time. 

 Process is key component to implement strategy. Business strategy relates to the high level definition of an organization’s vision, objectives and the key initiatives that are required to pursue those objectives given a particular starting point. Processes define how basic and routine functions are executed consistently across the organization to implement strategy. Processes are operational. Clearly, any existing business function that is in conflict with a new approved strategy is an issue, and the processes associated with that function are therefore problematic. Similarly, a new strategic initiative that involves the development of new business functions will require the definition of processes associated with those business functions.

An agile and smart process should be rigorous to adapt to the changes. Changes in strategy are reflected in business policies. Changes in business policies are reflected in changes to business rules. The business rules should be externalized from the business processes. An agile or smart process is rigorous to adapt to the changes; it can handle ad-hoc and exceptional matter smoothly. A business process is "smart" when it accommodates controlled excursions away from what would otherwise be a rigid sequence of steps. A smart process follows process management principles, but encourages innovation as well. .

The right set of metrics can demonstrate how well the process does for executing business strategy. Business needs to define metrics to know if the process is actually working or working for their best interests (business goals or strategies). The metrics of process shall reflect the business outcome management care about. Like most other aspects of business, business processes must integrate with and support the final outcome to produce a product or service and generate revenue. To fully optimize these processes, a business must establish KPIs and use business intelligence tools like balanced scorecards and forecasting, predictive analysis, 'what if' analysis and sensitivity analysis to determine how changes to a process might negatively or positively affect the business, and how to optimize it for improving performance..

Process underpins business capability, and capability underpins business strategy, thus, process thinking needs to be a type of strategic thinking, holistic, end to end and with strong focus on business goals set by strategy.

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Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking is a foundational skill that wraps behind much other thinking.

Critical Thinking (CT), as defined by the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, "is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action".

Critical Thinking is an important skill to deal with the multi-logical situation or today's digital dynamic: Business are complex with many moving parts, or require multiple disciplines, or have multiple valid viewpoints. These are the types of situations that require Critical Thinking. The investment in Critical Thinking or the extent of effort in CT - has a lot to do with things like a) sense of urgency, b) impact of the decision, c) scope, d) who is being impacted, how important they are & how important the decision really is to them, and e) how likely the situation is likely to change or better information will become known

Critical Thinking is not automatic thinking, it takes extra effort to thinking critically: It requires one to interrupt the automatic thinking process. As humans, we are "wired" to operate on auto-pilot in order to navigate the physical world and make instant "survival" decisions. This type of thinking is deeply embedded and does not require the extra effort that "conscious" thinking and decisions require. The key question is - when do you have to move from auto-pilot to conscious, self-aware, self-correcting type of thinking, or in other words, think critically, as it does take energy and awareness to think well, to think deep and to think critically. So that self-conscious expenditure is extra work. 

Critical Thinking is a foundational skill that wraps behind many other thinking processes: “Critique thought processing" is a generous oversimplification for the concept of critical thinking. While you won't find one universally accepted the single-sentence definition of the concept, you will find that each definition includes common themes. Critical Thinking is a broad term that includes themes such as:

-Reflective Thinking
-Structured Thinking
-Methodological Thinking
-Disciplined Thinking 

-Strategic Thinking

-Collaborative Thinking

-Creative thinking
-Synthesizing, analyzing and evaluating evidence/information
-Recognizing assumptions
-Identifying patterns
-Identifying and eliminating bias
-Drawing a conclusion that follows the evidence collected/evaluated.  

Critical Thinking brings insight into the situation. Critical Thinking is contextual, both reality oriented and evidence -oriented. It involves induction and deduction continuum.  We grow a larger perspective.  We see or understand differently about the situation than previous. It would be wonderful if everyone applied CT most of the time to most of their work, but in what workplace / business areas is critical thinking most useful or most needed? The answer depends on the nature of the work. Does the task/activity require problem solving or decision making that has important or high-value outcomes? If so, then CT should be applied. Does the task/activity require influencing of other people's thinking, behavior, or decisions? Again, if so, then apply CT. What is the risk associated with the situation? The greater the risks are the greater need to apply critical thinking. Then again, it really takes critical thinking to identify situations that involve risk.

Management Tip for encouraging Critical Thinking: A pro-team style of management at the diversified workplace would be more beneficial to produce CT as it would reinforce staff members in the workplace to maintain CT while at work (Rotate roles to keep things changing, short shifts on tasks, more frequent staff meetings to discuss strategy, creating a team system of management to ensure everyone has applied for micro-managerial roles etc…)

At the individual level, as the say’s going: The quality of your life is given in the quality of the thinking you have done. In other words, what you are experiencing is the total sum of decisions you have made. If you're happy with your place in life and the world, then keep going on. If not, then it may be time to think differently for better decisions and outcomes. At an organizational level, the purpose of business is given in the quality of collective thought upon business vision and strategy, and how effective you can make decisions to move the business forward at today's digital dynamic. Thinking critically; Think creatively and think profoundly.    

Explore the Digital Mindsets: 

A Critical Thinking Mind

An Original Thinking Mind

An Architect's Mind

A C hangable Mind

A Cogitative Mind

"Out of Box" Mind

Design Mind

Multi-linguistic Mind

Intuitive Mind

Strategic Mind:

Agile Mind

Creative Mind

Complexity Mind

Flow Mind

Design Mind

Systematic Mind

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Agile Quality Attributes

Agility in working software and business system is more future-focused.

From doing Agile to being Agile, businesses are following agile principles and  pursuing high quality result it may bring to the organizations, as agility in working software is an aggregation of following quality attributes:

• Readability -Clarity, Understandability, Comprehensibility 

• Usability - Human factors, Documentation Simplicity: Aesthetics, Consistency 

• Reliability - Frequency/severity of failure, Recoverability, Predictability, Accuracy, Mean time to failure, Securability 

• Performance - Speed, Efficiency, Resource consumption, Throughput, Response time 

• Supportability -Extensibility, Testability,  Debugability, Adaptability, Maintainability, Compatibility, Configurability, Serviceability, Installability, Localizability, Portability 

• Modifiability - Resilient to change; Coupling + Encapsulation; Cohesion + Loose, Sustainability.   

• Producibility- Scalability, Deployability: How often you are going to be able to produce it, and how easy you can scale it, if needed 

Agility in working software is more future-focused. That near-term concerns (such as Usability) will take care of themselves but deliberate time & energy are required to support a long-term view. And Agile focus has more dimensions, by looking through these dimensions more closely, organizations can form its own formula to improve the quality factors best fit is own need and achieve high performance result.

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How Should CIO respond to endless internal customer demand for IT solutions?

 It is both the art and science to know when to say YES, and when to say NO to the customers. 

Modern IT needs to both take care of internal customers by meeting their needs, and to delight end customer by optimizing digital touch points; it has to both map out the strategic projects, but also to keep the light on. How should CIOs prioritize the limited time and resources to ascend IT maturity, and how should CIOs respond to endless internal customer demand for IT solutions? Most of IT organizations fall into the following three types of  mentality:

• Butler (or Victim): IT is obligated to support the business counterparts, so, even with 20 other projects, IT leaders may just take on one more unfunded project. with the mantra to ‘do more with less’; well, even it’s a ‘humble’ attitude, but that approach is sometimes a lose-lose situation as you end up committing to projects that you cannot successfully deliver without additional budget, so now you bolster a reputation in the company that "IT can't deliver”; or, most of IT projects are fixing the symptom, but not cure the root cause, IT may still not get respect from business, with the risk to lose accountability, to run IT as a reactive cost center; not a proactive value creator. Or sometimes the environment is such that there is no governance around who initiates and implements technology leading to the rationale, IT leaders say 'Yes' to everything not through the heart to heart agreement, but due to the fears of uncertainties: "If I say no or not now, or I don't have the resources, then the SVP will take his/her discretionary budget and go find a contractor to replace the system -- without my involvement. So I better say yes so that the situation doesn't spawn more 'shadow IT' projects I have no control over." 

• Command-and-control: In some well-established organizations, IT is the controller with a bit ‘arrogant' attitude, without doing enough to engage business in collecting requirement and setting priority. Such management style would cause the warmth of the firefighter feeling, the desire to dominate, running IT as technical challenges, not business solutions, and the vanity of entitled gratuities. The improvement is to set solid IT governance discipline and practices: A good place to start is by trying to get all parts of the business on the same process for proposing, justifying and prioritizing projects - including IT. If people see IT as part of the same process, getting some projects now, having to defer some, just like them, that goes a long way gaining credibility when it comes to arguing that the surprise new thing will impact the company’s agreed priorities, and not just mean longer hours for the overworked and ever-whining IT staff. 

• Partnership: The intimate Business-IT partnership is the ultimate status for IT to deliver better fit, right-on and cost-effective solutions. Even you cannot fulfill all business’s demands, but you deliver what you promise, and you do what is best fit for business’s strategy and goals. And you are humble enough to listen to customers; but confident enough to say 'NO,' with the fair reasons. Start to build personal capital with the executive peers so that when you go to them and say you would love to deliver this new initiative, and want to work with them to agree how it will be prioritized and funded, they will not immediately assume that you are falling all the way back to "victim" or "whining" modes. 

IT leaders can also become the champion for improved governance at the C-level: The better scenario is that you should always be working with the C-suite closely to drive governance and mature prioritization processes that gain the oversight of strategies and resources. Yes, it takes time, especially in organizations with very dysfunctional behaviors in this area, but it is worth the effort. Without a challenging and well-governed environment, personalities can overpower the agenda and subsume what is organizationally necessary to what is personally desired.

Yes, it is both the art and science to know when to say "YES," and when to say "NO" to your internal customers, as the old adage may still be true, "you have not because you ask not." Sometimes IT staff and leaders become so conditioned to a presumed ‘order-taker’ role that they stop asking or don't ask because of past failure to get what they asked fulfilled, and also because of the culture being driven by the top leadership team. But still, IT has to take more proactive ‘order co-maker’ role, to work closely and strategically with the business for achieving the common business goals and delivering the high-performance business result.

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Is Digital IT Extraordinary

IT is a Holistic 'Digital Brain' of Organization. 

3/12 is the World Wide Web’s 25^th birthday, now about half of world citizens are also ‘net citizens’ to connect, create and share content online, it becomes the very foundation of all digital activities and the very fabric of digital business and world. As an IT leader, what’s your perspective on the future of Information Technology, is digital IT extraordinary or ordinary?

Digital IT should add more strategic advantage: IT can either make or break a company, IT strategy now becomes an integral component of business strategy, as more often than not, technology is the driver for business innovation. And history reveals that IT needs to be understood and harnessed by all stakeholders— to fulfill its potential and strategic importance as a differentiator of companies. For example, there are a lot of business success factors including culture, and IT can be the most effective and the least expensive option to reinforce high-performing culture. The trend of IT consumerization indeed provides unprecedented opportunities for IT to get more touch base with end customers, and empower employees as well, IT acts more as an ‘orchestrator,’ to conduct an information-mature, customer-centric digital organizations.

Digital IT focal point: The focus of IT needs to get back to its root--the big "I" as Information, Intelligence, Innovation, Integration, and Improvement, in order to improve its maturity. It means IT should spend more resources on crafting unique business capabilities and capturing business growth opportunities, beyond "keeping the lights on." In this regard, digital IT should gain more strength as an innovation engine and governance champion. IT organizations need to focus on value and capability building. It will mean that the enterprise view, customer contact, GRC and vendor management are the most important elements of an IT organization. Both information and technology become the key ingredient in building business capabilities that differentiate the company from its competition in supporting the company objectives.

IT as a holistic ‘digital brain’ of business: Metaphorically, IT is more like organization’s "brain," at the industrial age, IT is perhaps more like "left brain" only, rational, machine-like, and a bit isolated, it is easy to get disrupted by digitalization, while digital IT needs to become a whole brain, to embrace right hemisphere's color, creativity, and connection, to unleash the technology potential and capture the business's "Eureka Moment” –the growth or innovation opportunities, and help build a more creative and productive working atmosphere for today’s digital workforce.  

Cloud IT is not cloudy: Cloud provides the leverage for IT to optimize strategy and execution and brings significant opportunity for business to leap through digital transformation. IT is not going away, rather there are opportunities for IT to deliver solutions faster via enablement by viable cloud solutions, and hence faster means more business solutions can be solved in the long run. The use of a cloud solution is one of many choices that an organization should consider in using information and technology to manage digital transformation for the long term; at the implementation level, IT provides important structure and framework to streamline business processes and enable the digital transformation

 CIO leadership goes to ‘plus’ or ‘beyond’: CIOs as a C-level business leader, do need shift mindset to become a business strategist, not only draw the solid IT roadmap but also co-create the business strategy, to see things differently either via architecture, customer, process, or disruptive innovation lens. to fill the gap at the big table and contribute to business planning. IT talent should take an extra mile with intellectual inquisitiveness to understand more about business, and forward-thinking organizations should empower their CIOs and IT to unleash their potential. with the end goal to achieve a high-performance business result,  as more often than not, technology is a creative disruptor for the upcoming opportunities for business growth. 

The traditional IT at the industrial speed --the one only keeps the light on is perhaps shrinking, however, digital IT should be more robust and anti-fragile than ever. The digital world is so data-driven and so information-intensive, technology needs will only expand, and most likely expand hyperbolically; IT should play even more crucial roles as a service broker, value-creator, digital orchestrator and governance champion. IT just needs to adjust to the digital speed, wired (or wireless) to change and take a leadership role in navigating digital transformation.

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Which approach to High Performance is your Organization Pursuing?

Every digital business is hunting for its own 'Magic Formula' to achieve the high-performance result! 

Digital businesses become overwhelmingly complex to run, different organizations may take a different approach to pursue high-performance result. The fact that in many organizations, there is no clear direction simply illustrates the importance to make such differentiation or point out the correlation of key elements in an organization. Should you improve performance through people, systems or innovation, and what are the best approaches and practices to optimize the performance result?

People: Today’s digital business are people-centric, and the digital businesses are serving customers, also run by people, but people are perhaps still the weakest link in it. As more often than not, if the strategy has not been communicated clearly from the top down, people might not have a clue what objective and KPIs are, what are the better processes or tools could be used to make continuous improvement to achieving their performance outcomes.Talent needs to be empowered and enabled to unleash their potential and fulfill company's vision.  

Systems – Think of well-established organization: The complexity of its operations requires the establishment of a clear strategy, based on objective, outcomes, structured around initiatives. People come and go. Therefore if a system is not in place, their roles are not defined, they don't understand the purpose of their roles, it will be very hard to run the business effectively & earn the profits. PTI - People, Technology, and Innovation are required for improvements but again this is managed by systems & well-defined processes. 

Innovation – Many businesses are driven by branding decisions. Coming up with new collections which resonate with the marketplace is the main driver for performance. But, more often, there is no system in place. The brand is on the surface, and without systematic support, it won't last long. Thus, innovation is not just about brand designing, it has to permeate in every function of business, touch broadly from process to capability; from communication to culture, and from products, service to the business model. 

Surely, a combination of these three approaches is ideal and many organizations would like to think of themselves as doing a bit of each. However, a dominant approach should be evident upon close examination. The measurement system has to be one commensurate with such complexities. A combined approach of people driving systems and process, but supported by simple and practical tools to help embed the changes in behavior required to establish continuous improvement in the fabric of the company.

The secret is to keep it simple, use KPIs to look forward and create alignment from the top down, but support problem solving and providing solutions from the bottom up. People are engaged, have ownership and there is a certain level of transparency over who does what when and how. The better approach is perhaps to create your tailored ‘magic formula’ with the right mix of people, process, and innovation for getter high-performance outcomes.  

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Can you Impose a Culture of Innovation

 Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, habit and brand!

Innovation is the light every forward-looking organization is pursuing now, but how to cultivate the culture of innovation is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today, can you impose a culture of innovation, or shall you build, cultivate, or foster it, and how? What are key elements in fostering culture of innovation?

Culture is an ongoing process and continuous journey. Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, habit and brand, you can not impose your own thought or habit to someone else instantly, however, you could make an influence, to inspire and cultivate an innovative culture. The word "build" implies a project with a beginning/middle/end. Every culture must be passed down to new generations, and reinforced to existing ones. Words like "cultivate" or "foster" work much better than "build", because "build" implies project, management often think they can manipulate the project, cultivating culture is a process which is ongoing, and a continuous journey. You may also influence the culture through the rapid learning which stands on its own as a separate point of influence. Especially where there's reluctance in an organization, trumpeting learning as an internal process, is a powerful way to build proof and followers.

Tie the innovations and the innovative culture to the organization's strategy. This ensures that innovations will be supported by management and by all stakeholders. Lacking a positive strategic intent towards innovation in large mature organizations can become an issue; well define innovation as a key ingredient in business strategy, and the three managerial tools for creating a culture of innovation are policies, programs, and structures. Get these steps right, and you will be a world-class innovator with a strong culture of innovation. Get any one of them wrong, and your results will be sub-optimal. There exists evidence that companies who have successfully tied innovation to their strategy have actually got much better ROI the ones who did not.

Values are a no-brainer. Innovation is valued or it's not. If not, any talented innovators probably had a short tenure with the company and went to the other pastures. This is pretty much a self-selection process. No amount of HR speaks or innovation vernacular will move the needle. When innovation is valued, the hiring and talent acquisition process reflect it and there is usually a history to point to when recruiting, and the innovation culture will reveal itself to the candidates. Since innovation is typically won by the most persistent and passionately motivated, the typical descriptors for success need to be morphed to success descriptions that acknowledge what is learned (what doesn't work) and is further enhanced by well-defined product or project performance and design parameters that create the target for what success looks like.

Innovation leadership and talent: Culture change is pushing the really big boulder up a hill. Cultures have inertia. Inertia is so much easier to sustain than to alter the course of the already moving mass. Even within progressive, "innovation-friendly" organizations, amazing ideas can diminish on the vine when the passionate Innovator reaches "the point of approval" - their manager, supervisor.... If the innovation process leading up to this point is not well-developed, these managers will lack sufficient history and emotional bond to the innovation to swiftly approve it or to avoid trenched conflict as the discussion escalates with the passionate Innovator. The spirit comes from the top, the innovation leadership can set the right tone to foster and encourage an innovation culture.

The metrics and reward system. The measurement of innovations must be in place to support funding of innovation work, create positive environment and culture for innovation. After you get the management tools right and build a culture of innovation, you can benchmark your progress on the way to sustain the world class culture on these three parameters:
1) The company's definition of innovation is known and understood throughout
2) The company dedicates sufficient human and financial resources to its innovation programs and structures
3) The company's innovators use the latest and best innovation tools and methods

Practically you can not impose a culture of innovation, but definitely, you can influence and putting the right innovation elements into your strategy and execution. Above are good foundational elements. Further, these elements should be tailored for each organization. There is no one-size-fits-all set of policies, programs and structures as well, organizations have to keep exploring, experimenting and adjusting for fostering the culture of innovation. 

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How to Measure Agile Maturity

Measuring Agile Maturity through both Macro Level and Micro Level.

Agile is not about free thinking or doing without structure, Agile does not take less discipline, but needs more engineering and management discipline, thus, how to measure Agile products or team maturity is both science and art.

It's more about the effective result, not just an artificial "maturity" metrics. Much of Agile is a reaction to the one-size-fits-all attitude of maturity models, which can be satisfied without real improvement. From an organizational perspective, making sure that the right software is developed is far more important than figuring out if the software is developed right. Way too many companies become fixated on the team metrics and making sure that "development is fixed", rather than looking at the product team's behaviors and making sure that appropriate lightweight process to help with the decisions of what software to develop are planned strategically, and the resources are available to make the organization achieve "the best bang for the buck."

The 'C' level executives may like to know something about ROI at macro level upon building the right products and culture. Each organization is different, and even within the same organization, and even if they do better by "being Agile", there is no way to remove the confounding factors (such as luck entering a product space or better market conditions). But this will not stop an organization from measuring components of things that are measurable and will lead to favorable outcomes. At the macro level, Agile should be about how to ensure building the right product and portfolio on value, on time and on a budget.   

-Agile Mindset and Culture
- Business IT alignment
- Portfolio Management
- Portfolio governance

At the micro level, it is more about building the product right, an agile transformation is about - setting up an incubator to groom software development managers who can steer the team in developing complex application continuously by adding value to users and business stakeholders (continuously), these are things matter:
- Predictability of the team delivering to their commitments
- Continuous Improvement mindset exposed via retrospectives and how they are followed through and
- The level of Innovation ( the realm of Unknown Unknowns) the team can generate sprint on sprint.
-Team engagement: Measure people’s comfort level to using Agile and their engagement

-Team adaptability: Record the number of stories prior to starting iteration 0 then at the end of the project record the number of implemented stories (split by original to additional). Find the percentage of change in stories over the project from this.

- Productivity: Ratio of Lead time vs. Cycle time, How quickly can you on board a new resource (0 to 100% velocity)
- Quality: Ratio of defect detection vs. defect prevention

Performance comparison of current process vs. former process: To measure your former process, you would need to have established baseline data with comparable or translatable metrics for comparison. If you don't have that, then you're probably limited to measuring the ongoing improvement of your new process approach. Financial measures are the area where you're almost guaranteed to have prior and comparable data. Performance and satisfaction measures depend on how much you focused on these things before.

The most meaningful measure of Agile success is customer satisfaction. If customer or end-user satisfaction with the software improves after the successful implementation of Agile, then you've likely built a high-quality product that is more focused on customer needs. And the agile maturity measurement needs to say something about being truly agile, not just a lot of saying about doing Agile activities, there are the right mix of strategic (macro) metrics and tactical (micro) metrics needed in measuring things really matter.

Agile focuses on three Is: Iteration, Interaction, and Improvement. agile maturity means both effectiveness- to build the right products with customer satisfaction and efficiency – and to build them right and on time and on a budget. 

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Which Department has Greater Impact on Customer Experience

Organization needs to think in terms of building cross-functional business capabilities to WOW customers.

In majority of traditional businesses structured with functional silos at industrial age, customer service or experience seems to be only related to a few customer-facing departments such as marketing or customer service. When more and more organizations are at the journey of digital transformation for becoming more customer-centric, which department has greater impact on customer experience? What are best practices in making these functions to understand each other and work together? And what’re the best strategy and tactics to optimizing customer experience.

 Each function has a different and entirely valid role to play in delivering on a customer experience strategy. What is more important is that it is a committed whole of business strategy and then each of the functional expertise areas understand clearly the part they play in this and specific responsibilities to deliver, with all KPIs, all key staff measures, clear objectives and actions required, part of board reporting, part of management speak, then regular management reporting and meetings will review progress of the objectives-reported by the responsible functional areas of each initiative or project. Best practice of the collaborative working relationships - between all functions or any other expertise, is surely about clear responsibilities, regular, honest and timely communication.

To build the customer-centric business, organization needs to think in terms of building business capabilities. A silo and disconnected organization could not deliver value effectively to its customers. A business capability is an ability of an organization to perform a particular type of work and may involve resources such as people with particular skills and knowledge, the effective process, defined practices, operating facilities, tools, software and equipment which work together for a defined purpose. Basically, a business capability encapsulates all intangible or tangible resources, functional or cross-functional processes to perform a certain value added activity for customers. Use business capability modeling techniques to align strategy with value proposition and to the business capabilities of the organization and ultimately creating a capability driven roadmap for transforming enterprise from silo organizations to customer centric organization

Experience is moved by everybody in the organization, It might be useful to the discussion to break the customer experience into parts and different stages. Customer experience comes from all touch points, yet organizations are structured by departments and it hinders company’s ability to create value. All departments have impact on customer experience, regardless if they realize this, or not and the important scenarios of delivering great experience to customers may include the following steps:

1) To craft the holistic customer experience digital strategy (Senior Management)

2) To know what is the experience customers are willing to pay for (marketing)
3) To sell the products/service to the potential customers (Sales)

4) How to digitalize touch points in customer experience, researching, proposing and implementing the tools that contribute to deliver outstanding customer experience (IT)
5) Ability to align all people around the customer experience strategy (HR)

6) Budget assignment (Finance)….

7) Customer retention (Contact Center/Customer Service)

As the customer goes through these “phases”, there is multiple touch points in which the customer’s experience is built and value is created. These customer touch points can potentially be with up to almost all areas in the organization: Sales, Marketing, Operations, Customer Service, Finance, IT. Analysis and improvement of these touch points can involve radical transformations in organization, end-to-end processes and systems, in order to build the right business capability.

VALUE DRIVERS with 3C: Close, Clear, Can. Value is very situational and contextual. So, “values” associated with a one product may be different for another product for the same customer segment. since they reflect what customer care about - The WOW factor. Values are only important to businesses if they generate VALUE to customers. When we know as an enterprise what our customers value, we can take it as our own VALUES and focus on maturing business capabilities in order to drive what's valuable to the customers through! So the titles and responsibilities of departments in a business are less important than the customer focused vision that drives the business. It drives through the silo issue and ensures that all structures, processes and strategy align around an excellent customer experience and a resultant profitable business. NPS is a good KPI to measure value. However what is the most important is to connect NPS with a question to customers WHY? Combination of quantitative NPS and qualitative WHY, brings really powerful results. 

 Change management is in many cases totally related to Customer Experience! In fact, any performance improvement process, whether related to customer experience or employee experience or whatever else, in order to be executed, requires at least basic change management practices. Senior management and talent management inspire change, looks for alliances inside the organization, push for customer-centric culture” ... One common element in all these areas involved in creating the customer experience is people, and how people interact with customers and how proactively and promptly they solve their needs, the effective change management effort can convert many departments from rather inward-looking organizations to having an external focus and customer-centric approach.

The organization needs a holistic customer-centric approach encompassing all functions, the strategy should be from the top (Executives) and permeate the entire organization. In order to build a customer-centric business, it takes cross-functional collaboration and cohesive business capabilities. The strong brand needs to well orchestrate processes and resources; all come out from strategy and are supported by talent employees. It is every department’s business, either you are at vertical function or operate horizontally. The purpose of a business is to create value and manage people, who are customers and employees. Companies are in the people business. 

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Self-Organizing Agile Team

The Goal of Agile is to Deliver the High Quality Software, Self-Organizing should be Vehicle, not a Destination.

There is no doubt Agile is becoming mainstream, however, 'within' or 'of' Agile, it still takes time for getting matured from structure, methodology or mechanism perspective. How to build a high performance agile team is the other hot debate in Agile community: Should Agile team self-organizing or self-organized? Does Agile team need a manager? What are the characteristics of an self-organizing Agile team?

Self-organizing should be a vehicle, not a destination. The goal is to deliver the high quality software on value, time and schedule. Also, it's not a binary on/off setting; the calibration is analog so dialing-in the right amount of self-organization is the tough part. Each member of the team simply needs to be given a role and they need to fully understand what is expected of them. It is extremely important that the product owner keeps a steady stream of succinct requirements and allows technical  information flowing into the team (which can be communicated to the group by regular stand up meetings, grooming and constant re-prioritization of the product backlog). Teams in their "Storming" phase should also be monitored.

Self-organizing team effectiveness test: To ensure that your team is self-organizing, you need to leave it in a middle of a project. Real self-organizing team will be more likely successful. The team should be mature and cohesive both personally and professionally
- management should have the courage to trust the team
- trust is made easier by a track record, built up either during the project or as a result of re-using teams that have proven themselves in previous projects. 

Benchmark measurement: If the goal is to assess the efficacy of an Agile initiative, then you should establish assessments around benchmarks that track innovation, software quality, productivity, consumer response, and etc. If the goal is to give continuous feedback to team members so they can improve, then link that feedback directly to those same things or whatever it is, the team values about the software being produced.

Assess the team adaptability. The team capable of self-organization is probably also better at adapting to change. Observe whether the team is solving problems and forming decisions together. Are they respectfully resolving interpersonal conflicts? Do they keep each other informed of their work, so that the team can deliver working software according to their plan? Are they becoming a more cohesive team rather than simply a group of individuals who were assigned to do a job? And you need to have a project tracking tool providing real-time status reports and supporting team collaboration (very important for virtual and remote teams)

Building great software should be the goal. Focus on delivering the quality software, it's better to put attention on the parts of Agile that directly influence software and give less of attention to things that will ultimately take care of themselves in a high-velocity culture, as.achieving team maturity takes time and effort, and you may not be well-served by making self-organization a top-tier goal, and that should be evident in the feedback to developers, the measurements, the reports to senior management, and in the project results.  From team perspective, either self-organizing or not, it is about how to stimulate energies to cultivating innovation, creativity, and the skills required to develop awesome software.

By very nature of Agile, it’s about experimenting, exploring and adapting, from team structure to best practice, and agile team plays pivotal role in developing the next generation of digital organization.

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Global Thought Leadership

Digital creates the new demand and dimension for leadership.

 3/8 is the International Women's Day, to amplify the symbolic meaning of such day, perhaps it is also the time to walk through the collective progress the human can ever make and to contemplate the global leadership as the whole, both for male and female; senior and young. The world is moving from industrial age to digital era, it is the age of discovery and mastery. Now, the desert, the mountain, and the sea will no long separate us, still, there’re barriers in people’s heart and there’re silos in human’s mind. There are many international businesses around, but there are very few truly global companies; there is a lot of international managers, but there are even fewer truly global leaders. What are the future trends of digital leadership and what’re important traits in global leadership.

Authenticity –The ability to think differently, independently and innovatively.

Being authentic means to be original, positive, progressive, courageous, conscious, creative and curious, and to adopt mindsets of not knowing, challenging convention, maximizing diversity and being willing to experiment, as a basis for then being able to think differently and independently.

At the age of digitalization, ‘being who you really are as a global leader’ is more critical than ever, as your digital footprint is omnipresent, the working life is converging with personal life. You have to be real and true to yourself and others. This will translate and distill into believability throughout your entire organization and beyond. You will be seen as a person and leader who can be trusted not just by your employees but also by your customers or clients.

An authentic global leader can see the world with 'fresh eyes', to create thresholds for possibilities that can result and expand into innovative thinking. They are more purpose-driven and compete with uniqueness. The high mature global leadership is more about inspiration, not just aspiration; unification, not division; collaboration, not just competition; influence, not just power; substance over style; to abstract principles, not just setting rigid rules. An authentic leader is someone who leads the way, shows the path of what is possible or make impossible possible, and what can be done if people work together. 

Empathy –The Ability to Connect the Minds via Multi-disciplinary Touch Point  

Empathy is one of the critical ingredients for contemporary global leadership. The empathy is the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person's feelings; or the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. We all have bias due to the culture or environment in which we grew up, the media or books we select to follow; or the information we digested, as late Steven Covey well put, the world we see depends on which lenses we use and what we see or perceive.

Therefore, compared to regional or local leadership, global leadership does not mean scaling up or expanding out only; being a multi-linguistic leader or culture master would help build empathy, but it’s still not sufficient; it is about such set of capabilities to see the world via multi-dimensional lens; to understand and solve problems through multi-disciplinary approaches; and to manage multi-folded complexity through multi-faceted practices. The empathic global leaders are good at shifting from one leadership style to another, but keep the leadership substance on check; they are good at identifying and articulating paradigm shifts, setting trend, not fad; and they are good at molding leaders that go out and promote changes in people's mindsets and paradigms and make influence through vision and insight.

Balance –The ability to Bridge the Difference and Create Harmony

The world is neither white nor black, it has a full spectrum of colors and themes. Balance means to raise your consciousness, bridge the difference, recognize the cognizance between left and right brain, between head and heart, and cooperate with others to adapt and manage.

The solution to Balance is in the Tao, in nature, and its overarching intent, which is to continue to adapt, to evolve, sometimes incrementally, sometimes transcendently. Mimic nature, adopt change as a constant. Leaders need to cultivate the culture of balance, with the collective mindset about how they do things here and balance the diversified viewpoints, creativity, and discipline; opportunity and risk. The balanced leadership promotes collaboration and partnership to focus on 1) Positive feelings of being together 2) Combining complementary knowledge, skills, values, efforts 3) Mutual inspiration, motivation, enrichment 

The balanced leader is transformational to create a vision of a new reality and inspire others to move towards the creation of this "reality". Therefore, they are able to transform the environment and the individuals via both pushing and pulling. They are open from what's not optimal, and seeing all the limitations and blocks to a more inclusive and balanced view of people, life and the planet as a whole. And such transformational leadership transcends the issues of business strategies and professional development and creates paradigm shifts.

 Leadership is Influence. The global leader’s influence is not only about his/her expandable horizon, but more about his/her very intention or effort to capture insight; or the vision and wisdom to look forward. Whether you are a business leader or political leader, male leader or female leader, senior leader or younger leader, digital creates the new demand and dimension for global leadership. And the leader’s influence is based on the courage to inspire, confidence to assert, wisdom to negotiate, and uniqueness to bridge.

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Knowledge vs. Imagination

 "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, and imagination encircles the world. “ -- Albert Einstein

Perhaps it is another chicken and the egg debate: Knowledge vs. Imagination, which one is more important? There is no imagination without knowledge, and there is no knowledge without imagination. Putting information in a human memory is not similar to data storage, as you have to sort through,  transform it into the knowledge, and abstract the insight or recreate the new knowledge at the advanced level.

Creativity is part imagination and part knowledge: Though creative imagination is more intuitive than intellectual-it has capacities of intelligent and imaginative associations and applications of ideas and information bits with diverse functionality and approaches. In fact, during creative moments, one may need to have the capacity to freeroll based on unconscious and rather unbridled mind activity; while knowledge brings back so often to rationalism and concrete thinking and reasoning.

Imagination is the seed to grow innovation. Imagination leads to discovery. Discovery is both an event and a process. Knowledge is fundamental. But without the imagination to "believe in the possible," innovation may not happen. Sometimes it is not possible to "see" the facts because they exist in different planes. And until you deal with facts from different sources that relate essentially to the same matter, the patterns are not apparent. To put the other way, innovation starts with an idea. Imagination can be seen as helping one expand the initial idea and building a set of hypothesis about how the product of the idea will look like, and how the customers will react to the product. But will things actually happen as we have imagined? Not certainly... We need knowledge of the various engineering domain related to our product, and knowledge of our customers' actual needs and behavior in order to validate the hypothesis about the outcome of our innovation. 

Knowledge is path-dependent. This means that to discover an opportunity, you should have previous knowledge in the field to be able to get recognized. Imagination is also needed to be able to apply this previous knowledge to a different context. Knowledge doesn't necessarily mean to be an expert in a field, but to have some experience on this. It is also true that if you have too much knowledge on a topic, you will be bounded by this knowledge, hampering being more imaginative about other things. While imagination helps us expand our idea, knowledge helps us refine our idea to what is economically feasible. An entrepreneur may not have all the domain knowledge that required transforming an idea into a product, but he or she needs to be able to coordinate the resources from the different knowledge domain required to transform the idea into a product and market.

Is imagination the key that transforms knowledge from folly to wisdom? As with so many human behaviors, there is a gradient at which there is a threshold or tipping point where thought materializes into action. When our imagination is slightly engaged, our impulse to act is low. The higher the level at which we are engaged and stimulated to imagine, the more likely we are to take action. At the highest level of imagination engagement, we become driven to leverage our imagination into creative or innovative results. 

Both imagination and knowledge are key ingredients in innovation, imagination has wings and knowledge flows; imagination leapfrogs mankind; knowledge empowers people to make progress.

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CIO Succession: How to Pass the Baton Smoothly?

How smooth the executive transition is going reflects the maturity level of the C-suite and the organization as a whole. 
 

When the new CIO takes the position, what might he or she do to get off on the right footing? How shall he or she take the ‘inherent’ responsibility more confidently? To put it simply, how to manage the smooth transition between the previous CIO and the new CIO? 

Never blame the predecessor. Each "leader" has certain objectives and goals to achieve. These may be right for that time period or situation the organization finds itself in. The new CIO should come in, understand the issues, and define long-term objectives related to business goals and take action accordingly. Of course, there is no harm in praising your predecessor for the good he or she did either, and get as many support from him/her as possible. Indeed it should be a matter of principle to do so. Although it sounds like a cliché and probably is, one should always treat others as one expects to be treated.

A gap analysis would be a logical step to take on. Coming into any role, your focus should always be to identify the current state and start defining and planning for the future state that you will own or at least should own for better or worse. The new CIO may treat the first few weeks like a consulting assignment; his/her goal is to identify problems that need correcting. And don't ignore the report writing part of the consulting gig. Then treat the next few weeks like another consulting job to identify strategies to deal with the problems identified in the first report. Again, write it up. Now use the two reports to make the rest of senior leadership team to be aware of the issues and to get the resources necessary to fix things.

It is a rare opportunity for the new CIO to establish himself/herself with fresh eyes and an open mind. The opportunity comes with higher responsibility and hence higher risk too.The new CIO, need to take the opportunity to establish myself by doing the following: 

1) Get to know your team and begin to work on building mutual trust and respect and

2) Identify Strength Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of the current state.

3) Have a clear view of what needs to be done
4) Create options and phased plans with clear timelines to tackle problems

The business and the team should be the focus. The strategy, therefore, should be centered on the standardized apps, robust integration, and common architecture to maximize longevity, supportability, and ultimately business outcome in the long term. The Strategic Plan and the enterprise architecture should then be the focus to articulate and capture the current state of the environment, and the areas of focus progressively replacing, enhancing, updating and consolidating into a roadmap for the division. This will be your guiding vision document to drive your budgets, priorities, resource levels and resource compositions and new engagements with an almost singular drive to achieve those targets. And this is as real opportunity for an incoming CIO to influence and underpin the IT functions well into the future. 

How smooth the executive transition is going also reflects the maturity level of the C-suite as a whole and the organization. In immature organizations, the tendency on the part of the executive leadership is to attack problems in silos and take the shortest and least costly route to address the symptoms. Over time, you end up with a technology architecture that is a hairball that has grown from short-sighted projects that can't sustain long-term performance or support company growth. The new CIO is responsible to mature the organization by constructing effectiveness frameworks and mechanisms that help the C-suite make decisions around technology as a means to unleash new business capabilities and thus, be seen as a long-term value investment rather than short-term cost hole.

It all depends on the size and complexity of the problems left behind. It is up to the new CIO to identify the issues, corporate policy and develop a plan to both get in compliance with corporate and keep their users happy. The opportunity is not without challenges as relationships must be built and credibility must be established quickly. The CIO must also garner the support to put the right people on the team to make the transformation happen. If the CIO can gain the support needed, effectively communicate the value of the roadmap and demonstrate value through quick wins, he or she will make it through the transition.

In all cases, the CIO needs to build relationships with the executive team and key business leaders as well.  Every CIO inherits a different technical environment, a workforce, and existing IT/Business relationships. What you definitely should try and get from your predecessor is a list of lessons learned, which can be very valuable and can help you avoid some pitfalls. This list should, however, be intelligently assessed, bearing in mind that everything is subject to individual perceptions. When the new CIO takes on the job, then you also take on the challenges of the job previous or new, it's, all the same, they need to get sorted. It doesn't matter who, when, what, where or how it happened just that it exists and it is impacting the business and need resolution. It does no one any good to bad mouth a predecessor and it doesn't fix the issues.
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That all being said, it is important to manage a positive and smooth transition, there is not much value in placing blame, understanding how you got there and understanding as a team where you go is important. CIO’s job is challenging, which is perhaps a very reason you’d like to be a CIO, the new CIO needs to grasp the opportunity, stand at the right position and do the best for the company for long term.

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