How to Think About and Prepare for Hybrid Work

October 12, 2021 1 Comment

Over the last year-and-a-half there have been two priorities for digital transformation, with two different transformations that have happened in our organizations. The first was customer experience, and has largely proceeded well, with a few challenges. The other major change was in the workplace itself. Tellingly, the transformation of work has been, frankly, the harder challenge, and always has been.

First, the good news: I have been largely gratified to see that budgets and priorities for digital workplace and digital employee experience are higher than ever before. The reason is simple: The urgency is there like never before. But we’re still having significant challenges getting our organizations focused on meeting worker needs in this regard during the pandemic, even determining what those needs really are. Some parts of the near future are clearer however: By all indications, work is not going to go back to the way that it was.

Instead, the hybrid model is now generally agreed upon by most as the future of work, both physical and remote, but with a need for it to be as seamless as possible across both groups of workers. And ultimately, it’s the seamless part that will be the challenge, the hardest part to get right, and probably the most important part to address.

A return to the office is going to happen at scale soon, and is even now happening in many places in the United States and in the world. But for most, it will be next year, 2022, as the global return to the workplace for most of us. As it was during the pandemic, technology is still the best tool we have to address our problems, challenges, and opportunities with disruptive shifts to the the work environment. But the tech has to address human needs, first and foremost. So one of the big messages here is that success will require aiming at and achieving worker-centricity like never before.

Simply put, if organizations wish to attract and retain workers in these very trying times, where labor markets are so very tight, we have to design it around those same people. So as to be very adaptive to them, and to educate them, and to be focused on their wellness. There have been bold experiments in some of the efforts i’ve advised, where they actually monitor the mental and physical wellbeing of the workers in real time and provide assistance to them if they need it. While these tend to be large organizations that to do this, helping workers to be resilient and helping them to be effective during confusing and challenging moments will be vital. These digital employee experiences will be designed more deliberately not for one audience, not just for the office, and not just for remote work.

Last year I was on record saying that we should focus on designing for remote work-first, otherwise we’re going to underdeliver for the remote worker, the largest group in most organizations. But this year and going forward, we have really have to put in-office and remote workers on the same footing. I also see that most organizations are still unprepared for this. They want to do deliver on it, but they’re unprepared and they’re behind in applying the tools and concepts available to them. I’m hoping what we have now learned will help them get ahead.

Getting the Foundation and Values Right for Hybrid Work

And so in the visual below are the four major focus areas we must deliver on if we wish to be an enlightened organization that seeks to understand what they should best be providing in terms of their workplace and services with their workers in general. Hybrid workplaces — like all workplaces — need to be value-led, and that’s around mutual benefit as much as possible, with shared value exchange and co-ownership. This is already exhibited in many of the things that we see in the most modern collaboration tools: We are co-workers whenever we work together, we share together, we co-create together in a scalable but sustainable way. And it has to be responsible in our world as well, and in terms of creating trust, protecting workers, and their privacy and safety. To be environmentally conscious, ethical and fair trade. All those important aspects that we really value in ourselves and in our organizations. All of this has to be embodied deeply in the hybrid employee experiences that we create in order for them to be properly realized.

We must also be resilient now more than ever before, so ready for that future that is coming faster at us, more chaotically. Workers must be provided with a work environment that is very adaptable to the two main settings of hybrid work. These environments must inherently be harder to disrupt, since it’s increasingly clear that we live in a world that’s more easily disrupted now, and more frequently disrupted as well. And above all hybrid work must address what it means to be human, meaning it is fair and equitable, and genuinely cultivating our differences, because we are all different in our own way.

We must also be prepared to support the edge of our networks and organizations, for experiments and the eccentric but often useful new behaviors and ideas. I’ve spoken many times in the past about the companies that have lived the longest. They have tended to be very humane organizations that are very tolerant on the edge of eccentricities and innovation. As a result and due to fostering this, and providing support for the whole person, not just the worker part of the person, they have lasted the ag, through all disruptions so far.

Collectively then, this is the future of work, the motivations and aspirations that matter the most, as I see it, for enlightened organizations, which most of us aspire to become.

The Biggest Concern About Hybrid Work: The Divide

So if we look at what top leaders are seeking in hybrid work — I’ve spoken with dozens of CIOs since all this started and many CHROs as well — and if you look at their top goals, there’s a real concern about connecting office workers with remote workers. Connecting them together equitably is widely believed to be a very hard yet important challenge. Some organizations are in fact just saying, “we just can’t do it. We’re going to favor the office workers.” A lot are tacitly doing exactly that. And that will really be leaving behind some of their most valuable and most dynamic workers. But many would still prefer not to.

So there is real interest in maximizing the inclusion between office and remote workers. There are genuine challenges in achieving this: What do you do about key worker groups like agile teams, for example? Agile teams are supposed to be co-located so that information flows very quickly among them. I’ve had CIOs ask me how do we deliver agility during hybrid work? Do we keep Zoom calls open between the office workers and remote workers, all day long? While that’s probably not the answer, it’s an example of a central class of problems in digital employee experience that organizations seek answers to:

How do we properly rethink vital business processes that will be divided between two distributed groups of workers?

In general, what organizations actually want to know is what they should do that works? In other words, what are the overall best practices of hybrid work? However, I am sad to report that there mostly is no set of existing best practices yet. Fortunately, over the next year we’ll see the greatest number of experiments in hybrid work that we’ve ever had before. In the process, we are going to find the way, as we collectively learn from what’s really working out there. As part of this, I will gathering success stories, patterns that work, and I will continue to share them.

What’s the Immediate Goal of Hybrid Work?

Leaders also want to preserve the productivity dividend of remote work. Productivity is up in most organizations right now, when we are mostly remote. But now with hybrid, we want to preserve and continue this. And we want to sustain the engagement long term of remote workers themselves as employees. Most organizations I speak with are acutely aware that they have 18 months worth of new hires that many of them have never met. They’re not really connected to the mothership like the workers before. So how do we how do we do that, how do we address engaging effectively with remote workers?. And then how do we deal with all the disruptions that are yet to come? These are the three leading priorities in achieving a hybrid work model. We care about all the other motivators above too, but these stand out.

In fact, if organizations do nothing but address these three goals, they’ll be doing well next year.

The journey itself to hybrid work is now over halfway done. There are three phases that lead there: The pre-pandemic way of working, or the way life that was before, where in-office was dominant and a some of us had VPNs and we could work remotely. And while some did work remotely, but it wasn’t a very large audience. And now that has flipped. We’re still in that flip, with more remote workers than in-office. But people are streaming back now because people are starting to go back to the office. Next year we’re going to end up with that mix, that will average in the 60/40 range, though your mileage will certainly vary.

Key Organization Roles over Hybrid Work

Last year I began to receive calls for the first time from Chief Operating Officers (COOs.) I had never received a call from a COO before. The CIO is the leader that traditionally rolls out new technology solutions and the COO has to operate the company wit the tech the former provides. When they called me, they were saying “I need to be able to run the company with everyone remote. I don’t know what to ask the CIO and CHRO for in order to do this. So how do we do this? I don’t know how to run a company through a WiFi connection. Can you tell me what I should be asking for?”

The Three Phases of Work: Pre-Pandemic, Remote Work, Hybrid Work

And so know this of those in the COO role, they’re very operationally focused, and trying to get their organization through the turmoil of going remote, and now hybrid. Consequently, if you’re trying to drive change, the COO is a role you should be tapping into if you’re seeking to make realize hybrid work today. They’re in the middle of it, they want to do it now (and not in some theoretical future) and they’re willing to try anything to see if it works. So it’s a very exciting new role that we’ve learned that has been involved in trying to make all of these changes during the pandemic both effective and functional.

What Do Workers Need During Hybrid Work

The upshot is that we’re now at this moment in the rebirth of work. That the future is not the model of remote work that we’ve had over the last year and a half. Now is the time when have to start really becoming effective at hybrid work. And that means connecting two very different audiences and that’s really the challenge. To do this, we’ll need a target model for digital employee experience and the resulting engagement that we should be aiming for and can use as a cross-check. Something that we can use to layer our design into and ensure we are creating the right result. As a primary check, I have developed a model for digital employee engagement that is based on Maslow’s hierarchy that has been very well received.

For post-pandemic, this hierarchy is a view of our employee experience needs. If you look at the bottom of it, there are the fundamentals, which is mostly basic access: Getting people access to their devices and the Internet, to their documents, applications, and data, in touch with their colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers, and all the support functions that make them work. This basic access means being able to reach them.

Then the next step up is once you’ve provide access, it is to make the digital employee experience usable. And really because access actually doesn’t really provide that much value without usability, it has to be something you can actually deliver on. And so usability also covers having streamlined digital experiences, making business processes and procedures easily learned and usable, making sure your cybersecurity protections aren’t making the access too difficult. In fact, we still see cybersecurity practices are creating a lot of challenges for usability. Your overall digital workplace can suffer greatly if you don’t solve for easily usable security procedures and experiences.

An organization might have the best digital workplace capabilities in the world with a a wonderful design, but if workers are frequently having challenges just logging in and switching applications, struggling to use it on mobile devices and they’re always struggling to use it, then the rest of hierarchy doesn’t really matter. And so you really have to hammer down those sharp edges before you can get very high in this hierarchy.

Beyond these levels is proactive enablement: How do you ensure that you’re getting the actual work outcomes you’re looking for? That both professional and personal developments are taking place? So this view makes the worker the center, treating that whole person, wherever they are located. This makes sure that that a connection is being established between in-office and remote with effective collaboration that is regularly taking place between in-office and remote.

And if you do this well, then you can actually get to engaged workers. If you’re really connecting to people, and you’re helping them reach the outcomes that they care about, then they can get to and the organization can realize true engagement. That’s connecting with and responding to the mission of the company or the organization with coworkers and colleagues, with management team, and with the work being done. We want them to be engaged and if they are provided the layers below that, then organizations can achieve hybrid worker engagement.

And then the next step is really where, where we are today in many organizations: We don’t want worker drones just mindlessly carrying out processes. No, we can automate that now. Most rote standard work that’s routine can and will be automated. Instead, we need empowered workers that can think, that can innovate, that are able to make both local decisions that make a difference, and be able to influence larger decisions and the wider organization, and to make sure that they can do that easily. That’s empowerment and that’s where a lot of organizations are still trying to get to this point in time.

The next-to-last step in the hierarchy is full realization and autonomy, the ability to self organize, to direct the work. This is embodied in the famous Steve Jobs quote saying, “I hire really smart people, and then I ask them to tell me what to do.” The bottom line is if you have these layers properly realized below then you can get truly autonomous and strategically contributing workers that are engaged in the mission, who are able to then innovate and be able to direct that to an outcome. And so this all this leads to self actualization and the maximum potential of the worker, which we now have to take care to provide in a hybrid work environment.

While we can never reach our maximum theoretical potential, we should in fact be able to get pretty close to our maximum practical potential. So aim at this. This is a nice clearly laid out goal that will ensure that will help organizations prioritize how to create a human-centric workplace that will function both in a hybrid environment and in wherever else we find ourselves in the future.

We Must Go Faster and Better, Beyond Basics to Real Hybrid Worker Needs

Instead, what workers have today is not designed against a consistent model such as this hierarchy. Thus is has low usability, low access, and low empowerment. It’s often mostly a jumble of technology that’s not aimed at a coherent employee experience and it has very little overall design. And while we can never design all of it, we have to design a lot more of it today and now for our emerging world of hybrid work, particularly the important piece: The core employee experience. These are the prime activities workers carry out the most or are the most important. So we have this new worker journey, a more coherent digital experience. Today it is the whole worker journey, and we have all these things: The applications the devices, the data, our culture, our processes operations, and we need to design around that coherent experience so the beginning of the worker journey, the middle of their of their journey which is where they spend most of their time, and then finally the end of the journey.

Consider all this, what I’ve been encouraging organizations to do — and this is the next useful framework — is think about that journey and say how do you make, how do I make sure each step of that journey, supports the hierarchy that was just described. To ensure that it is a fairly simple cross check. I’m getting lots of feedback that basic cross checks helps focus on what matters most. And so what we want to do is get to a more orderly foundation for employee experience. So we want to take today’s current relatively random, grab bag of tools, technologies, files, and datasets and so on, and create an employee experience platform that’s better designed. One that’s better aligned aligned to that journey and delivering to that hierarchy of worker needs. So this view above is another key cross check that can make sure that organizations can get to hybrid work.

The result is still largely the same grab bag of workplace technologies but now better shaped into an experience platform that actually can help us achieve a true work-from-anywhere foundation and a true hybrid work foundation that’s proactively enabling, is adaptive and automated in terms of when they need support and help, and deeply personalized and contextual with all the technologies. What’s more, we have reached a stage of maturity of the ideas that we need to make this happen are already here. We just have to deliver on it, and we start with the core employee experience.

These then are all the pieces one needs to check to make sure they have everything they need for a next generation digital employee experience. This is the full strength vision. But the key is this: We have to have deliver two versions of our experiences now. The remote version and the in-office version. They’re often not the same. How people work, how people collaborate, or how they get onboarded as workers are different if they’re remote and different if they’re in the office. So we have to we have to reflect that in the employee experience. If you’re giving everyone the exact same employee experience, you’re leaving a lot of value on the ground and disengaging the worker it doesn’t serve well.

The result is going to be les fit to purpose and is going to be slower and not as effective for one half of your workers. And when we, when we need to be worker-centric, we can’t do that anymore. Thus we now have this bright dividing line in our holistic employee journey: The remote and the in-office worker experience, and bringing them together is hybrid work.

Seizing the Moment in Hybrid Work

This is a historic opportunity that many of us will probably never get again. We may never get the leadership attention, organizational priority, or the budget like we can today, or the ability to drive large changes in work like we have right now. Now is the time, while everything is still in motion to make a big change, a meaningful set of changes around the future of work. To actually succeed, we’ll need to use very clear methods. Let’s use this well-defined hierarchy and let’s use this mature worker journey, and let’s go through everything that we have and where it makes sense, let’s align to that. While you can’t change everything, you can change what matters most. That’s all we really have to focus on right now for hybrid work.

We now have to create now a hybrid working culture and mindset that’s gets our top executives and the line workers engaged as a whole in a distributed but very lumpy new construct. Many of you know that I’m a very big proponent of open collaboration, also known as mass collaboration, that best drives almost all the outcomes that we want to have and all the things I just described. There are ways of getting the organization engaged around the shift to hybrid work, and around what you’re doing and around the changes that you need to have in empowering change agents in your organization. In fact, of the things that we explored in our industry for the last decade and a half, how we collaborate and realize change is more important than ever.

Technology, and especially seamless and effective community and collaboration, are the fabric for how we’re going to achieve successful hybrid work. And so the end state is this open collaborative highly adaptive contextual, automated, and personalized employee experience on your evolving employee experience (EX) platform, directed at two distributed groups. One that really is designed not just for the moments that matter to the business but moments that matter to the worker. Put simply, if you want to attract and retain the best workers, that’s what you’re going to provide. You’re going to provide something that has the everything the business needs and everything the worker needs as well, no matter how they best work or where they are located.

End Note: This blog post is adapted from a keynote I recently gave at IOM Summit. It contains much of my latest thinking on hybrid work and references all the research I’ve conducted and some of the great many industry conversations I’ve had recently.

Call for Participation: If you are in a position to do so, please help me map the future of work. I will be closely tracking the many experiments of hybrid work over the next 18 months. If you wish to be part of this tracking and information process, please send me a note at dion@constellationr.com, and I’ll include you in the process so that we can all learn from each other. I’ll also be publishing snapshots of the journey so that organizations who cannot participate for whatever reason, can join along in the journey.

Additional Reading

My recent research on remote and hybrid work:

Reimagining the Post-Pandemic Employee Experience

It’s Time to Think About the Post-2020 Employee Experience

Research Report: Building a Next-Generation Employee Experience: 2021 and Beyond

The Crisis-Accelerated Digital Revolution of Work

Revisiting How to Cultivate Connected Organizations in an Age of Coronavirus

How Work Will Evolve in a Digital Post-Pandemic Society

A Checklist for a Modern Core Digital Workplace and/or Intranet

Creating the Modern Digital Workplace and Employee Experience

The Challenging State of Employee Experience and Digital Workplace Today

The Most Vital Hybrid Work Management Skill: Network Leadership

My 2020 Predictions for the Future of Work

Can we achieve a better, more effective digital workplace?

Filed under collaboration, Digital Experience, Digital Workplace, Social Collaboration, Strategy, The Enterprise, The Future of Work, Trends and Statistics

Why Microservices Will Become a Core Business Strategy for Most Organizations

September 7, 2018 1 Comment

As an industry, we have collectively returned to that eternal debate about what constitutes a largely technical evolution versus when an important digital idea becomes a full-blown business trend. This has happened before with Web sites, e-commerce, mobile applications, social media, and other well-known advances. It can be hard to remember that at first these were looked at as mostly technology sideshows. Yet they all went on to become serious must-have capabilities on the business side.

Microservices is now a current topic of this debate, as the overall approach is perhaps the most strategic technology trend that’s come along in quite some time. First, a brief definition: Microservices provide a well organized digital structuring of our business capabilities that are exposed to stakeholders who need what our organizations can do, and are usually accessed via open APIs. The concept is now poised to — sooner or later — become the primary digital collaboration fabric with all our enterprise data, IT systems, 3rd party developers, business parters, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

So, you read it here first: Microservices are how most organizations will eventually conduct the majority of their business, internally and externally.

Yet there is still considerable debate and confusion about whether microservices are merely just slightly more elegant network plumbing of our digital systems, of if they actually represent the primary conduit for operating our organizations. I fall in the latter camp, as this platform way of thinking in general has steadily emerged as the leading model for composing and integrating networks of systems and organizations. Don’t get me wrong: We had SOA, Web services, and APIs before — where I once posited that this would turn into a global service phenomenon, which it has — but these each had key details missing or not quite right. At this time, microservices does appear to be the best model we have, honed and culled from over a decade of thousands of organizations experimenting with various approaches.

I am now also clearly seeing from many of my CIO and IT contacts that developing a microservices strategy is rapidly becoming a key priority this year. Not sure that this is broadly the case? Just take a look at the recent JAX Enterprise IT priorities survey, which shows that microservices are currently the 3rd leading IT priority, nearly eclipsing the big trend on the block, cloud computing, one of the other hottest IT topics of recent years.

Yet microservices are often conflated with concepts like APIs, for which there is indeed a considerably close relationship, and so can often be relegated to the ‘we’ve been here already’ bin.

Why the sudden popularity and interest in what appears to simply be a more refined technique to easily integrate and communicate between digital systems? For almost all the same reasons that the Business of APIs and the API Economy had their days in the sun: Microservices take so many of the lessons learned in creating more composable, reusable, and platform-centric version of our digital organizations, strips them down to their very basics in terms of design and consumption, and then places them at the very center of how our organizations operate. (Note: Not everyone would agree at the strategic level that microservices should be designed and offered at the business domain or architecture level but many, including myself, do.)

Naturally, the question is why would we do this, and why would it be just about the most important thing we could do to enable a host of vital business activities and outcomes? Put simply, microservices hold the promise of truly unleashing the greatly underutilized assets of our organizations, both strategic and tactical. These assets include everything from data to talent to innovation, and up until now, we’ve been doing it piecemeal and without a real enterprise-wide design (though I’m cautious about overly top-down efforts here as well.)

Microservices: Building Blocks of the Modern Digital Value Chain

Microservices, by virtue of offering a well-structured way to engage and integrate with the world at large in scalable, digital terms, now appear to hold the answer to enabling faster digital transformation, lowering our levels of of tight coupling and technical debt, and substantially increasing much needed levels of IT integration. More centrally to business impact and growth, they also make it possible for us to build and cultivate bigger and more robust digital ecosystems with our stakeholders. This includes 3rd party developers and business partners to our very own workers and customers.

For me, I first saw the writing on the wall several years ago when I was helping develop the API strategy for the CIO of one of the largest organizations in the world. We had just completed an all-day workshop studying the benefits of opening up systems and data more simply and easily to make them as consumable as possible. I stressed these key points: 1) Open APIs make it far easier to create and innovate on top of existing IT and data, 2) they make it easy to create additional value many times over through nearly effortless integration between systems, 3) they achieve this asynchronously and highly cost effectively by systematically designing a high leverage and productized point of global interaction upfront, instead of hundreds of expensive point-to-point integrations over time. Upon reviewing this, the CIO suddenly sat back, the light clearly having come on, and said, “I get it now. The logical conclusion of all of this is that we need to provide a URI for every piece of data in our organization.” He was exactly right.

Put simply, this means that every element of enterprise data would have a unique link to it through a well-defined interface, which anyone can easily find and use to (yes, securely) access it and update it if appropriate. As I’m fond of saying, civilization advances when formerly difficult things become easier. This is exactly the vision behind microservices: Build and provide an incredibly simple and straightforward way of exposing our businesses in a highly useful and constructive manner so that the effort to connect systems into value chains becomes essentially near zero in practical terms.

Mindset: What Would Happen If Anyone Could Build Anything On Your Business?

The question I then put to those still trying to understand all this is the following: If we could access all our enterprise data simply and easily and could then integrate systems together with just a few lines of code, what could we do this with power? Virtually anything we can dream of, with almost no economic, technical, organization, or political barriers to achieving whatever we — or, and this is the big key, others — could dream of doing with our systems and data.

Because once strategic microservices that enable this are operational, then anything is possible. That’s because virtually all of our enterprise data can be reached, it can be harnessed, analyzed, and it can flow through to wherever it needs to be to extend and empower the stakeholder/customer experience. In fact, it’s the most potent way we know of yet to create and capture shared value and to do this so efficiently that literally orders of magnitude more high value integrations, connections, and innovations will take place (see: How Amazon Web Services makes most of Amazon’s profit.)

So why hasn’t this happened except in organizations at the very leading edge of the digital maturity curve? Because it takes 1) an understanding of the vital — even existential — importance of doing so in order to rapidly gather around a vibrant ecosystems of app creators, integrators, partners, suppliers, customers, and stakeholders and 2) the pre-emptive removal of the aforementioned economical, technical, organizational, and political barriers to doing so. In short, creating microservices, though they themselves are profoundly elemental network-accessible business capabilities to our organizations, takes real work, much of it consisting of softer, non-technical obstacles in the realm of culture, mindset, inclination, and leadership.

We already see examples of this happening at the enterprise vendor level. A particularly compelling example of a global set of microservices that expose much of what an organization does is Microsoft Graph, along with their microservices-friendly Service Fabric. While some will quibble with whether MS Graph is a set of microservices in the pure sense, the point is this: Much of what Microsoft offers its customers via its products is accessible within a well-organized enterprise-class set of data services. This is strategic to the point that Sayta Nadella has even called Microsoft Graph their “most important bet”, for all the previously cited reasons.

Microservices are also well established at some of the leading organizations in the world, including Amazon, Netflix, Uber, and a good many others. Less clear is traditional enterprise adoption at the strategic level, though my personal anecdotal evidence is that this is now very much underway in a growing number of organizations. Another proof point of expected growth is that business consulting firms like Deloitte are seriously talking about microservices as enablers for open banking and other industry transformations.

Microservices and Business: The Future

However, in today’s extremely fast-moving world, coming to the conclusion through a largely accidental and piecemeal route that microservices are the future will simply take too long from a competitive standpoint. This will result in a very much less than optimal set of services for your stakeholders. Thus, my advice on microservices in the enterprise is currently this:

  1. Most organizations should now begin a concerted effort to create an enterprise-wide set of microservices. And do it as a part of an overarching business strategy.
  2. This effort should be decentralized but a centrally coordinated effort. To be used to identify and design needed microservices.
  3. A commitment must be made to be in the business of integration and dynamic digital value chain building. Half measures have long-doomed efforts at SOA, APIs, developer networks, etc.
  4. Use design thinking to understand the needs of microservices consumers, then meet them. Understanding what the needs are, and being deeply empathetic to key issues like ease-of-use, performance, and the right to build a 3rd party business on them is key.
  5. Operate your microservices like your core business. Because they soon will be. Invest in them, advertise them, evangelize them, encourage usage, support them, and generate revenue with them.

A growing number of organizations I work with, including most recently one of the largest federal government agencies in the U.S., are now fully cognizant that most of their business will soon be conducted through digital channels. That aforementioned agency is already doing over a quarter of its business through APIs, and expects it will be over half in the next few years. They believe moving from data-based APIs to business-oriented microservices is their next task to go to the next level. So should it be for most organizations.

For the enterprise, achieving success with microservices is certainly possible through a patchwork of department APIs that are designed and operated without an overall business strategy, design, or structure. Or we can adopt a holistic microservices approach to create a more uniform, rational, consistent, and contextual set of open digital capabilities that also forms the basis of business strategy and architecture for the organization. The story is unfolding rapidly, and as I mentioned, I’m seeing an all-time high interest in microservices at the most strategic IT levels. Now that story must be told, understood, and realized on the business leadership side as well.

Update on September 20th: A few commenters have noted that they don’t think that most organizations believe microservices and APIs are actually viewed as business strategy, much less core to it. However, supporting many of the assertions I make above, I recently encountered a recent study from Cloud Elements. Their 2018 integration survey (which included 400+ companies, 27 industries with 26 outside of tech including finance, communications, engineering, and transportation on 6 continents) reported that 61% found APIs to be critical to their business strategy, and 85% fundamental:

APIs (open access to microservices) is Essential to Business Strategy

Additional Reading

My current Astrochart for the New C-Suite: Microservices figures prominently as a key C-level technology and business strategy

A Discussion of the Past and Future of Web APIs with Dion Hinchcliffe | InfoQ

How can businesses keep up with tech change today? | ZDNet

Filed under Analysis, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Architecture, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

Dreamforce 17: Live Blogging the Benioff Keynote #df17

November 6, 2017 Leave a comment

I’m sitting here in the vast keynote chamber within Moscone Center in San Francisco again this year for Salesforce’s annual confab. Long since an obligatory pilgrimage for those in enterprise SaaS and cloud computing, Dreamforce remains the single largest business technology event in North America, and some say the largest software event in the world of any kind.

Dreamforce has once again taken over downtown San Francisco almost completely. The crowds are larger than ever and security is even tighter than last year, which was tight. With over 170,000 people here, the police presence is palpable this week, with some armed with what looks like automatic weapons. But the crowds seem more reassured than nervous about this, and frankly it’s a minor but notable shift in what has been an annual Kumbaya-style event that proactively celebrates diversity, equality, and social good just as much as the latest new technologies and products.

The Salesforce Economy Growth Projections Increase

The latest Salesforce econoy number are in as well. IDC estimates that Salesforce will 3.3 million jobs and contribute approxtimately $859 billion in new business revenue (yes, nearly a trillion dollars) by 2022:

The Salesforce Economy by 2022 (2017 Estimate by IDC)

A New Google/Salesforce Partnership for the Cloud

Salesforce has released a slew of announcements, especially around industry partnerships. The most significant is that Salesforce will integrate Google’s G Suite with multiple products and use Google Cloud Platform for international growth. The announcement is favorable for Quip, which will tie into Gmail, Hangouts and Google Calendar. Quip’s Live Apps will become embedded with Google Drive and Google Calendar with full Hangout integration. Data is shared as well with customer account details and information which can be used from Sales Cloud directly. More details on the Salesforce/Google partnership from Larry Dignan on ZDNet. Mostly, the announcement seems designed to head off Microsoft’s growing dominance in office productivity with Office 365, though there are some interesting analytics news as well.

The Salesforce Google Quip Partnership in 2017 #df17

The keynote will begin at 3pm PT and I’ll be live blogging is right here.

2:54pm PT: Will.i.am is doing a preshow on conversational interfaces.

3:07pm PT: Still getting in Ohana spirit as the usual Hawaiian commencement of Dreamforce begins…

Ohana Ceremony at Dreamforce 2017

3:09pm PT: Opening video roles. “The next wave is building. Digital and physical worlds are blurring. We’re in the 4th Industrial Revolution (also known as Industry 4.0). Revolutions never change the world gently. That innovations may only help a lucky few. We see another way. At Salesforce we live values of trust, growth, integrity, and equality of every individual in the world. The world is going to be changed by Trailblazers.”

3:11pm PT: “Welcome to Dreamforce. Let’s blaze a trail together.” Voice over now introduces Marc Benioff who comes out onto stage.

3:12pm PT: “The biggest job I have here today is to say thank you to our customers” say Benioff. “We are deeply grateful for all that you do for us.”

3:14pm PT: Now Benioff is talking about the 4th Industrial Revolution, which is apparently the theme for this year’s keynote. “I see it happening all around me. Incredible new tech like 3D printers, CRISPR, autonomous vehicles, and generation manufacturing.”

Marc Benioff Keynoting Dreamforce 2017

3:18pm PT: Now Benioff talking about luxury brand companies are becoming “so deeply connected to our customers. Coca-Cola is another great story. They have these incredible coolers. The next-generation of these coolers has a camera.” They can tell when the cooler needs to be replenished. “They are going through incredible transformation using this new technology. “Everywhere I go, I see this transformation. I recently stayed at Marriott. I’m a member of their loyalty program. But loyalty is dead. Now we’re on journey. Customer journeys, transformation journeys. They can even give me my key on my phone now.”

3:20pm PT: “That’s what all of us are doing, trying to connect better with our customers.” Now cites Ducati’s new connected motorcycles (see their CIO Piergiorgio Grossi’s vision for IT here at Dreamforce, a inductee to the Business Transformation 150 that Ray Wang and I selected this year.) as a new type of next-generation product. “Are these technologies united us or dividing us? Are we more connected or somehow less connected.”

3:23pm PT: “We have 2,700 sessions over the next few days” says Benioff.

3:25pm PT: Benioff continues to go over the major guests at Dreamforce including Michelle Obama, Ashton Kutcher, Kasper Rorsted, CEO of Adidas, and Ginni Rometti, CEO of IBM. Here’s the full list of major speakers at Dreamforce this year.

3:28pm PT: “Over 3,000 companies have adopted the Salesforce 1:1:1 model. And will do more than $12.5B in revenue next year. Thank you for what you have created. Business is the greatest platform for change.”

Salesforce Economy 1:1:1 at Dreamforce 2017 #df17

3:31pm PT: “It’s about the equality of every human being. When we see discrimination happening anywhere in the world, Trailblazers came forward and help change it. We’re committed to diversity and equality. We have to look at our boards of directors, management, and employees.”

3:32pm PT: “We are the largest net zero cloud company in the world. This is happening through all of you Trailblazers. We are the Number 1 CRM in the cloud. #1 in service and marketing. The fastest software company ever to grow to $12.5B in revenue. How did this happen? Because of you.”

3:34pm PT: “It’s amazing what you do with our platform every day. You’ve created that. And you’ve created this, the Salesforce economy. $859B in GDP impact by 2022, $1B in social impact, and 3.3 million jobs. Building communities, sales, collaboration, and industries. Trailhead is this tremendous educational environment. Einstein with artificial intelligence, Lightning, an incredible productivity environment for creating apps. Analytics in everything, and AppExchange with thousands of apps. So thank you for that. For inspiring us to build this.”

3:37pm PT: Now rolling video of Salesforce MVP Stephanie Herrara, on the power of Traiblazers. Now Benioff is up on stage with Stephanie, talking about her Salesforce Saturdays.

Marc Benioff with MVP Stephanie_Herrera at Dreamforce 2017 #df17

3:41pm PT: “Our platform gets bigger and stronger every day.” “Now I want to take a moment to talk about something new that you’re doing to see at Dreamforce this year. Our development teams have been working on creating tremendous next-generation capabilities. If you’ve been over to Moscone West to see that first floor on Trailhead. You’ve embraced Trailhead. It’s an amazing community in so many ways. 4 million badges have been issued so far.”

3:43pm PT: Benioff is now unveiling myTrailhead, “exactly for you. It’s Trailhead with your brand and your content. To make Trailhead exactly for you. This is your Trailhead. It’s the learning cloud, it’s the enablement cloud, and community cloud all in one. With myTrailbead, you can create Trailhead for your company. You don’t have to be a coder or programmer. You can create with clicks, not code.” This is one of the reasons I put Salesforce on my low code platforms ShortList recently.

3:46pm PT: You can deliver your own mobile apps without code. One last thing Trailblazers want to do, it to take all those things (coolers, motorcycles, and other physical objects) that they’re doing is to plug it into the Salesforce Customer Success Platform with (the just-announced) MyIoT. We want this as one single integrated CRM platform, that we can integrate declaratively without code. This is the more personalized and integrated Salesforce that you’ve always wanted. We want to show you in this keynote what this platforms looks like.”

3:54pm PT: Now Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris is up on stage talking about Salesforce and Heroku, claiming that they are the world’s largest platform-as-a-service (by what criteria I wonder, as AWS is certainly the largest overall.) “Employees can created ‘trailmixes‘ (which are described as ‘custom learning paths you create from your favorite trails, modules, projects, and superbadges’) and create their own education and playbooks.”

3:56pm PT: “Instead of having to hire new employees, you can send them to Trailhead instead” says Harris. Now talking about how Einstein will provide predictive forecasting. What if you could be a data scientist and create a custom field in Salesforce? What if you could build a smart custom field? We’re going to use Einstein prediction building to predict customer attrition. This can’t be generically put into the product, as it is very specific to your company. A beautiful new component. The Einstein platform is doing all the machine learning for you. Creating the scores and creating the insight. We’re going to get you dynamic layouts with dynamic Lightning Components.” A huge yell comes out of the crowd, as this is something that’s been sorely lacking up until now.

4:03pm PT: Harris continues to demonstrate mobile Salesforce experiences with T-Mobile. Wraps up all the news about the platform and hands the keynote back to Benioff.

4:04pm PT: “Salesforce technology has some incredible assets. One of them is strategic partnerships. Such as with companies like Amazon to deploy in Australia and Canada. And IBM, and Kone, with their CEO Heinrich and his talking elevators. So many companies are using the incredible capabilities of Watson. We have so many great strategic relationship. Today it’s my dream to introduce to you a new strategic partner: Google. You’re going to see an amazing new Salesforce capabilities in G Suite and running on the Google Cloud Platform. And you’re going to see customer insights like you’ve never seen them before, as we’re integrating Google Analytics in Salesforce for the first time.” Google execs come on stage to talk about it.

4:09pm PT: Continues telling the three customer stories. T-mobile story already told, now doing Adidas. Video: “We have to be able to respond to new consumer expectations immediately. If you’re not meeting their expectations at the first point, you’ve lost them right away.”

4:13pm PT: Now Stephanie Buscemi has come out asking if the 4th Industrial Revolution is bringing us together or driving us farther apart. Announcing 1-to-1 personalized journeys for customer using a tool called Journey Builder, whatever your preferred channel is: Mobile, e-mail, social, whatever. With Einstein Social built-in, Adidas is able to detect pictures of their product in social streams. “What all of you want is what Adidas needs to know in order to be successful. We made a really big bet last year. its called a DMP (Data Management Platform, a good background on DMP by Jack Marshall here.) It’s important to know and a game-changer in marketing. It captures Web online behaviors marries it with CRM data, and can then deliver personalized experiences.” Unfortunately, only ads apparently for now. My analysis: The DMP goes a good bit of the way towards mastering the critical “50 first dates problem” in engaging with and providing digital experiences to consumers today in an pervasively omnichannel world.

Stephanie Buscemi shows off the Data Management Platform in Salesforce at Dreamforce 2017 #df17

4:18pm PT: “Einstein bots are changing the world of service today” says Stephanie. Showing the DMP experience and how it’s unified across all customer experiences. Again, it seems about advertising right now, and not meaningfully customized consumer journeys.

4:27pm PT: Now the CEO of Adidas, Kasper Rørsted, is on stage showing off some 3D printed shoes that he’s wearing, which could theoretically print the custom size 14 show that Marc Benioff needs. “We see 1.2 million pairs of shoes a day. The more we can customized them, the more revenue we can produce, and the happier our customers will be” says Kasper.

4:30pm PT: Kasper says “we are opening an Adidas app today. We think by cannabalizing our industry we can completely change our industry.” Now Benioff is introducing the new customer story, of 21st Century Fox. Video rolling.

4:35pm PT: Now Leah McGowen-Hare is on stage talking about 21st Century Fox’s Salesforce journey, calling them a Trailblazer. They are using Quip, the “team collaboration platform”, with over 20,000 Trailblazers at the company. “Companies like 21st century fox have massive, highly engaged audiences. With Community Cloud they can share their enthusiasm and have a stronger connection with the brand.” See my analysis of Community Cloud here, which is one of the more underrated community platform in the industry. Now showing a highly customized Salesforce Sales Cloud that’s completely skinned for the company and called the Global Theatrical System (GTS) replacing Excel and e-mails.

4:40pm PT: Leah showing how AI, analytics, and Sales Cloud can accelerate sales for the new movie Deadpool 2. We get a confetti drop as well.

4:46pm PT: Marc wrapping up the keynote talking about how tech can divide or unite us. “Dreamforce and all of you are more important than ever before. The inspiration is in our own hearts, and where you’re going to take us. Welcome to Dreamforce 2017.

That’s a wrap for the Dreamforce 2017 main keynote, I’ll post my analysis of where Salesforce is going next on ZDNet shortly.

Additional Reading

Relevant for Trailhead: The digital transformation of learning: Social, informal, self-service, and enjoyable

Assessing Salesforce’s platform and ecosystem

Vital Trends in Digital Experience and Transformation | Dreamforce (34K+ views)

Filed under Analysis, Events, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

It’s Time to Transform ERP into a System of Engagement

January 12, 2017 Leave a comment

The IT industry has steadily been moving beyond its roots in data management and record keeping for a few decades now, approximately since the advent of corporate e-mail. As I’ve tracked over the years, this trend is more broadly known as the shift from systems of record to systems of engagement. Over the years, we’ve witnessed how the value of IT systems grows dramatically when they focus as much on connecting people and systems together with as little friction as possible, as they do on storing and retrieving information.

We’ve also collectively learned as an industry that one-size-fits-all technology, especially in the enterprise, often ends up fitting the needs much fewer people than we expect. Put simply, despite all countless industry lessons learned, enterprise systems are still far too unwieldy, adapted poorly to individual users needs, difficult to use, and an impediment towards value creation, especially at the edges of our organization, where key business activities such as sales, marketing, service delivery, and customer care take place.

Today’s Successful Enterprise Systems Engage Effectively

In recent years, new highly personal forms of digital engagement have demonstrated a new path to us through the large scale global success of social media, use-anywhere smart mobile devices, and consumer apps that are essentially effortless to acquire and use.

When I look at most enterprise IT today however, it’s clear that the buyer is not the end-user but IT departments and other stakeholders who won’t have to use the systems themselves. The traditional ERP system, which runs much of the mission critical infrastructure, is possibly the worst offender and most in need of remediation in today’s era of highly consumable personal IT, which runs rings around most enterprise technology when it comes to usability, personalization, fitness to purpose, and responsive design.

The Contemporary Enterprise: Systems of Records and Systems of Engagement

Certainly, enterprise systems often have a very different set of goals than consumer IT, including much higher levels of security, more rigor in data structure and quality, complex operating requirements, and other factors that consumer IT simply doesn’t have to contend with. I’d argue these are, however, just not valid excuses for meeting the standards of modern IT systems when it comes to improving productivity, usefulness, and effective results in our organization. As I’ve long argued, we need to unclog the arteries of enterprise IT for competitive reasons as well as basic employee retention, given trends I’m seeing in end-user expectations of how IT systems should work.

At this point in IT industry evolution, I’d argue that the nature of the enterprise procurement process, along the roles of those typically charged with IT acquisition each conspire against the kinds of systems that users — and the business itself — would find more useful and productive in getting their work done. Plenty of evidence now shows that usability and accessibility have large benefits when it comes to getting results from enterprise IT.

An actual data point from the respected Nielsen Norman Group serves to make the point here: Allocating a mere 10% of the budget of your IT system to usability will approximately double the quality metrics for the system. Yet few projects allocate anything like this amount, especially to off-the-shelf systems.

Modernizing the ERP for Engagement by Augmenting It

So how can we overhaul the poor effectiveness of today’s ERP systems and bring the latest advances in today’s systems of engagement to bear to increase the poor usability of ERP systems that Jon Innes famously lamented back in 2010.

Given the slow rate of change in the usability and reach of ERP systems over the years, I’d now argue that we’re not going to see a major improvement in the design of ERP systems themselves. Instead, I now see that enterprises, which have invested enormous amounts in their existing enterprise systems, have little choice from most of the leading vendors. Instead, the typical ERP system should instead be augmented with the capabilities that will provide the full measure of value creation that was originally hoped for.

To this end, I’ve authored a new white paper that lays out my analysis that we’re about to enter a new era of enterprise IT. One that is not just more consumerized and highly usable, but focused on both the needs of the business and end-user both. By augmented ERP with effective systems of record, most organization can now take the power of today’s sophisticated ERP systems and extend them to wherever they are needed in a far more personalized, dynamic, and focused way.

As a new generation of IT thinking emerges, I now see that this will be the pattern of ERP and most enterprise IT systems, in that they will become a fusion of capable foundational systems of record and systems of engagement. The latter will either be purpose-built or developed by a new generation of enterprise IT companies that understand the new generation of IT, consumerization, design thinking, and usability on top of traditional IT requirements.

How ERP Will Become the New Systems of Engagement White Paper by Dion Hinchcliffe

Credit: I’d like to thank Capriza for making my time available for the research and analysis that went into this white paper, which is freely available for download.

Filed under Analysis, CoIT, Digital Experience, Strategy, The Enterprise, The Future of Work, The Modern CIO, Trends and Statistics

Vital Trends in Digital Experience and Transformation in 2016

October 12, 2016 1 Comment

This year I was invited again to come to Dreamforce in San Francisco and present on the latest developments in digital experience and digital transformation for the conference’s Emerging Tech Trends track. Surprisingly well-attended given the satellite location of the track at the Hilton Union Square, having to prepare this session is always a good opportunity for me to go over my research in the last year and map out what’s likely going to happen next.

For myself at least, it’s clear that human change has become closely linked to and as important as digital change, so I have divided up the trends list in the last two years into a tech dimension and a human dimension.

The bottom line: How we think, work, and react as people has tremendous impact on the usefulness and effectiveness of emerging technology. It’s what separates the digital native from those who are just beginning the journey. For example, those not inclined to share information won’t get much use from the technologies and techniques of social business, nor will those who are uncomfortable and unused to spending time in virtual worlds be able to take advantage of the rich opportunities of virtual reality. And if we’re not changing our leadership skills to be more network-centric as opposed to hierarchy-centric, then much of the business value of digital experience and engagement is wasted on us. The list goes on.

What’s more, not only are we co-evolving with our tech, but we need to understand how we need to change just as much as the technology is changing. This is required in order to a) understand the art of the possible and b) to be able to access technology’s unique and historic new value propositions.

What's Next in Digital and Social Experience and Digital Transformation in 2016

Another point I make early in the presentation is the technology is changing exponentially right now and has climbed into a rather steep part of the curve, yet our organizations just don’t change on the same curve. Instead, we change far more linearly, at best logarithmically (see slide 8.) That’s not to say that that enterprises can’t organize themselves to change much faster, but in order to do so we must employ fundamentally new ways to transform organizations. Certainly, some organizations are adapting faster and digital transforming more sustainably (see data on slide 4.)

Sidebar: I’ve recently been exploring what these new models for sustainable yet highly scalable models for digital transformation, even proving them out on client projects I’ve been working on over the last few years. The key seems to be a more network-based, decentralized, and emergent approach I’ve called a Network of Excellence.

Emergent Tech Trends Inputs

For this year’s round-up of emerging tech trends, in addition to original research, I used as inputs several items:

Major new additions to the list include digital assistants/bots/chatbots, blockchain, omnichannel, workplace app integration, and collaborative EMRs, along with significant tweaks in a variety of the existing trends.

You can see the whole deck with an overview of each trend on Slideshare. I’ll post any video that is produced as well.

Also, in other Dreamforce news, you can review my live blog of the main Dreamforce keynote as well as my current assessment this week of the Salesforce platform and ecosystem.

Additional Reading

Digital priorities for the CIO in 2016 | ZDNet

The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation: Community, Tech, Business Models, and a Change Platform

Filed under Analysis, Digital Experience, Digital Transformation, Digital Workplace, Social Business, Strategy, The Enterprise, The Future of Work, Trends and Statistics Tagged with , , , , ,

Restructuring the C-Suite for Digital Business: The Future of the CMO, CCO, CIO, and CDO

April 24, 2016 2 Comments

I’ve noticed lately what appears to be an emerging trend in marketing and communications leadership in some large companies. Specifically, the positions of chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief communications officer (CCO) are sometimes being consolidated into a single role, even in very large enterprises. Such consolidation has already happened at PG&E, Walgreens, and Citi, and I’ve recently encountered other notable instances as well. This might seem odd at first glance, as specialization of roles is usually emphasized in large entities as expansive purviews tend to be harder to manage.

It actually turns out, for several key reasons, that examining this closer is an interesting — and both useful and practical — thought exercise in how the single vast continuum of digital is putting growing pressure on the traditionally separated functional silos that have comprised most of our organizations for over a century.

This trend, and another like it I’ll propose we’ll see soon, is actually an apparent reversal of what organizations have been doing lately to better organize for technology, which is moving to the very center of how our organization operate and create value. In fact, the proliferation of C-level stakeholders for the rapidly expanding world of digital business has continued unabated in recent years, as chief data officers, digital officers, community officers, experience officers, analytics officers, and other similar C-level tech roles emerge and grow rapidly.

The Consolidation of the CMO and CCO for Digital Transformation

Too many cooks in the kitchen, some might say, but I pointed out last week on ZDNet that digital disruption — a wildly overused yet still quite apt phrase of our times — is now anticipated by most executives within the current planning cycle. The counter argument that is made for proliferation is that we need a lot more leadership on deck to more rapidly adapt our organizations to digital and head off disruption. The imperative is that we now have to a) think more like venture firms and startups, in other words our digital efforts have to move out of the quarter earnings cycle and become long term, while shifting to experimenting and failing fast until finding what works and b) our organizations require digital change capacity that is matched to today’s exponential cycle of technology evolution. Without both, we can’t maintain a sustainable pace matched to the market or reach a successful future state quickly enough.

In fact, what’s often hampering us in fact functional silos, both in our org structures and in our technology. We saw this very painfully with social media and social business a few years ago, and now we are witnessing it writ large as our customer experiences, the vital journey of which is the very lifeblood of our organizations, becomes ever more fragmented and divided across digital channels and our organizations’ operational silos. Customers get thrown over the wall to disorganized and inconsistent experiences as their journey takes them through our marketing departments, sales teams, customer service staff, and product development groups. Increasingly, our attempts to engage with companies as a customer is just ignored as we use new digital touchpoints that is obviously so much better — to us, but still unfamiliar to companies. In short, as organizations, we don’t have the capacity to be everywhere we are expected to be in the customer journey, and as organized today, don’t have a way to get there.

So how does the convergence of top-level roles in communications and engagement solve this problem? By removing a key silo while also adding the responsibility for both internal and external comms. Internal comms in particular is a critical addition, and is a key part of what a corporate communication officers oversee, as they are often the sponsor for the corporate ESN and intranet, essential platforms for organizing change at scale. As gaining holistic and integrated oversight and control of experience management — across customers, business partners, and employees — has become paramount, this merging of roles gives us a way to prevent it from fragmenting across projects, initiatives, technologies, tools, and digital channels. No more dividing internal and external engagement, giving us less inconsistent messaging and responses. In return, we can achieve better internal scale, more unified platforms, policies, and governance. We have one role for primary engagement.

One Likely Outcome of Digital Transformation: A Refactoring of the C-Suite

In other words, with CMO and CCO consolidation, we will have a single top-level org structure that is substantially better suited to oversee engagement across the single continuum of digital. We used to think that digital/social centers of excellence were required to bring together a consistent response to technology. This may be a better answer.

We will see how this trend plays out — and there are still open questions about where secondary engagement such as customer care and product development fit in — so I have begun tracking the industry data in LinkedIn to see if we can confirm a real trend based on my and others anecdotal experience. But from an critical thinking standpoint it makes sense why organizations are doing this.

The Fall of the Chief Digital Officer Too?

Which brings to my second trend, which is that we’ll likely see the same consolidation of function happen with the chief information officer (CIO) and the chief digital officer (CDO). I was initially bullish on the CDO a few years back — and still think they have an important combined innovation and P&L role to play, but as some like Theo Priestley have observed, the role is already under pressure and it’s time is likely to come to an end, at least as a top-level role. It will still exist of course but in this consolidation, would appear under the CIO purview. It now seems likely that many CIOs will merge CDO functions back in for all the same arguments that the CMO and CCO purviews should be combined.

Following this argument, removing silos in our organizations so that we can remove them from our digital products and experiences makes sense on its face. It can eliminate friction, make it possible to scale better, reduce poor execution, and create more shared value. I should point out however, it’s only part of the story for organizing better for digital. While other related topics like the bi-modal/multi-modal conversation seems to have hit a fever pitch, with McKinsey even joining the bandwagon, I think it’s vital that we also carefully consider simpler “digital hacks” to our organization that should be far easy to implement, but would in practice have significant impact.

Consequently, the consolidation of top digital roles into a chief marketing and communications officer (CMCO) and chief information and digital officer is — I now believe — a practical response to the proliferation of C-level digital roles to create the consistency, coherency, and effectiveness we need to change. However, this centralization will be an improvement as long as — and only as — such consolidation is properly balanced by bottom up and grassroots digital change programs, like a network of excellence powered by decentralized change agents, or a formally supported Shadow IT and marketing technology program. Without realizing both C-level role consolidation and networks of change together, sufficient digital scale and capacity will simply not exist for converged leadership to cultivate and guide.

Additional Reading

How Should Organizations Actually Go About Digital Transformation?

The digital transformation conversation shifts to how | ZDNet

Filed under Analysis, Digital Experience, Social Business, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

How IT and the Role of the CIO is Changing in the Era of Networked Organizations

May 21, 2015 1 Comment

As I’ve examined the case examples below, and talked with many top CIOs about how they were operating their departments over the last several years, it’s become clear that the contemporary IT organization — at least ones that are successfully leading their organizations into the future — is now wielding a new kind of power.

I don’t mean power in the traditional, hierarchical sense through departmental mandate, titles, and the org chart. In fact, those don’t seem to mean nearly as much as they used to, as I hear more and more concerns about the growth of shadow IT and the lines of business increasingly going their own way with their budgets, all with minimal formal IT involvement.

Yet, looked at another way, these very trends — worrisome as they should be for most CIOs — might actually represent vital asset pools and change capacity that we could actually tap into and guide, as Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon strongly suggests.

Instead, I mean power in the sense of genuine, highly effective influence through trusted collaboration, proactive enablement, orchestration of bottom-up change agency, and new forms of digital leadership. We know that as our organizations update how they operate in today’s digital world, which has fundamentally different rules and highly effective new ways of working, the way we manage and achieve large-scale group outcomes is by leading through new networked models.

In other words, moving from inefficient hierarchies to self-organizing communities to deliver IT.

Legacy IT versus Next-Gen Contemporary IT: Change Agents and Networks of Enablement

The need to greatly augment our IT ‘metabolism’

Some would say that grassroots models of business change have always been with us. They would be right in a strictly literal sense, as the actual means and methods are different now. In my analysis this is clearly a new phenomenon in in terms of how new forms of influence are actually employed, how easily they can be scaled, how much fewer resources are required to marshal change, and how constituents can be cultivated, shaped, and self-organized more rapidly than ever before.

In the era of mass technology proliferation, with millions of new apps and billions of always connected devices and customers, the IT department in many organizations has become a tiny and badly outnumbered island of routine automation and application delivery. We’ve learned that such a small capability can’t possibly keep up with today’s truly vast digital change.

IT has also long been the primary guardian of data and infrastructure, along with its collective operational continuity and governance. Together all of these functions, given the nearly flat increases — or even declines — in IT spending for 2015 in a time of the all-time greatest amount of tech change, tend to wag the dog, making it very hard to focus on what IT needs now most to do: Lead the company through the increasingly urgent generational imperative for digital transformation and innovation.

Related: Is it IT’s last chance to lead digital transformation?

Blazing a new IT trail: Internal competition and change agency

Recently we’ve begun to see CIOs, and this includes CTOs with the same responsibilities, work with their organizations a very different way. We started to see it when Graham Holding’s Yuvi Kochar willingly decided to compete as an ordinary — albeit a highly informed, invested, and aligned — service provider to his own stakeholders using a lightweight and highly maneuverable cloud portfolio of solutions, instead of an iron-fisted controller of corporate technology pushing aging and difficult-to-maintain legacy on-premises systems:

As a result, I have structured my corporate technology team to be a service provider to our businesses. To ensure flexibility and agility required by our M&A strategy, I am pursuing a 100 percent SaaS technology portfolio. We acquire SaaS services, value add them with high-caliber functional support and project management and offer them as a service to the primarily functional teams at our businesses. We keep overhead costs to a minimum. Our businesses prioritize the agenda for our services by paying only for the ones they want and use.

It also happened when David Bray, the highly-respected and effective CIO of the FCC, needed to overhaul an increasingly complex technology landscape with antiquated applications. Bray’s open approach to the FCC’s IT strategy ended up with him listening to and then backing local change agents closer to the situation who suggested their own solutions, which ultimately led to considerably cost savings, faster deployment, and lower maintenance overhead. It wasn’t easy however, as this is not the way technology bureaucracies — especially in the public sector — have traditionally sourced ideas and direction. It was an struggle at first to work this way, says Bray:

There were a lot of skeptics to this new approach. Several who wanted to not make the change or even wanted to follow the much more expensive approach. My role was digital diplomat and ‘human flak jacket’ to help deal with any friction because this was a new way of doing things. With the SaaS approach, the data was not going to be kept onsite. We would be leveraging code and security provided by a cloud-based vendor. And in the end, it came together.

There are similar efforts in the queue with the Commission’s change agents for 2015. Working together, they demonstrate daily that positive change agents can transform how the mission and technology of the FCC best serve the public.

From this, and the stories below and other sources, we can begin to piece together a new mindset for modern IT and what I’ve previously called the New CIO Mandate:

Legacy IT Approach Next-Gen IT Approach
Impose tech decisions as faits accomplis Pro-actively collaborate on tech decisions
Lead all technology efforts Support tech leadership across the company
Sole source technology provider Confidently compete as a service provider
Hold stakeholders at arm’s length Collaborate with stakeholders on their turf
Wait for change champions to approach Actively seek out change champions
Occasionally listen to change champions Actively supply change champions with resources
Bureaucracy Diplomacy
Constrain IT to strict standards Enable local innovation within bright lines
Chokepoint for IT realization Coach and ombudsman for decentralized IT realization
Service delivery Learning and change delivery
Strategic initiatives, Center of Excellence Network of Excellence
Single or Bi-Modal Tri-Modal and beyond
Waterfall, ALM Agile, DevOps

Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways:

  • AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus on behavior, be bold, and build their networks. People rely less on curated information, he explained, and more on networking and learning what other businesses are doing.
  • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The incoming CIO Brook Coangelo had to rebuild the entire IT brand from the ground up. Central to this was including internal customers closely in the process of technology change, often taking their lead, using an internal culture he calls Nimble.
  • Etisalat. Francisco Salcedo, senior vice president of Digital Services, at the telecommunications firm reports they have begun to “provide IT services within the organisation in new ways as opposed to traditional methods, and become a business growth enabler, rather than a bottleneck.” Key to this process: “Focus on adding value to the business, while leveraging IT expertise of partners to support business experts in generating new revenue streamlines.”
  • IBM. New IBM CIO Jeff Smith says that for him, “clarity is more important than certainty, course correction is more important than perfection, self-directed teams work better than command and control, and innovation is for everyone, not just the select few.” How does he enable next-gen IT? One key way: Smith created an internal Kickstarter-like crowdsourcing platform called ifundIT. With it, anyone can formulate a project or problem that needs to be solved, and raise internal funding to get it accomplish. I think this is a terrific example of how to use internal networks — social and otherwise — to rapidly engage, then actively enlist, change champions and supporters.

All of this certainly represents considerable and difficult changes for many IT organizations, yet the benefits are clear: A rate of internal change that more properly matches today’s operating environment. But there will be bumps, as with what Tony Hsieh has dealt with at Zappos in fundamentally remaking the organization into a holacracy — a somewhat comparable change to what is described here, but org-wide, well beyond technology — some creative destruction is almost inevitable.

However, as with almost everything with technology change and transformation, the CIO has an absolutely key role to play today, and can be a leader or a follower as the business has to move now and seize opportunity in today’s challenging markets. As Adobe CIO Gerri Flickinger recently said, we are entering a new golden age of IT, if you’re ready to move to the next level.

Additional Reading:

Going Beyond ‘Bolt-On’ Digital Transformation

Closing the gap between executives and digital transformation

Filed under Analysis, CoIT, Peer Production, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

Unified Collaboration: How Social Business and Other Forms of Digital Engagement are Intertwining

November 12, 2014 1 Comment

The rich history of digital collaboration in the last 30 years has been a long and winding one. Fortunately, it’s also been a highly rewarding story that has led to literally historic advances in workforce productivity and efficiency for most organizations. Along the way, many of these advances have led to and made possible entirely new and powerful types of work scenarios.

However, I find that many organizations still treat digital collaboration as 1) a largely tactical activity that doesn’t require much deliberate enablement, structure, or process 2) mostly separate from digital engagement in general and 3) a needed capability to be solved primarily through deployment of technology, rather than from the point of view of enabling activities between people. These three tendencies alone lead to much of the shortfalls I’ve seen when new collaboration efforts sometimes underperform.

The Intertwining of Unified Communications, Lightweight Collaboration, and Social Business into Unified Collaboration

The three new categories of digital collaboration

As collaboration has evolving during the rise of the social and mobile era, I’ve found that the last decade in particular has lead to some of the most significant and increasingly disruptive refinements in the practice:

  • Social Business (internal). This is the high concept rethinking of how we work together to be more community-centric, open, and participative. It consists of a varied set of practices — depending on whose model you are following — that typically consists of business processes redesigned around new social tools such as enterprise social networks, content/document management platforms, online communities, or even enterprise microblogging services. Needless to say for those of us who have been involved, a tremendous amount of energy and thought across the collaboration industry has gone into how organizations can achieve numerous benefits if they can reorganize the way teams and even entire companies can better work together using the potent model of social media. Techniques typically include Working Out Loud, the redesign of business processes to be more participative, and all the other activities involved in large-scale social business transformation.

    Organizations have seen results across the spectrum with their social business efforts, though there have been common pitfalls, especially when the notion of ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’ has been the goal, instead of solving urgent business problems (like trying to resolve poor collaboration between specific internal groups, or making certain key processes more transparent and efficient) The general consensus however is that there is a 25% enterprise-wide benefit in terms of productivity. Lately, the drum beat on social business has taken a bit more of a back seat to full-spectrum focus on digital business transformation in many organizations. Social business has continued to evolve however, and we’ve just now reached the end of the beginning in my opinion.

  • Unified Communications. Rarely considered at the same time or in conjunction with social business initiatives, unified communications has been making steady inroads into the corporate world, despite some fairly rocky evolution over the years. The unified communications industry has attempted to sort out and make consistent the various digital communications channels within the enterprise, but has often missed major developments in the industry. The most inexplicable oversight was that unified communications vendors missed the social media revolution almost entirely, though that has now been partially addressed in some of the leading platforms now, though it took years to resolve. This meant unified communications was sometimes anything but. The issue continues to persist as new and emerging enterprise collaboration channels such as mobile apps, the explosion in enterprise file sync and sharing such as Dropbox, and even legacy content/document solutions are often still left out in the cold by unified communications solutions. Despite these additions — and I think the continuing rapid rise of new collaboration channels will remain the top problem for the approach — unified communications has become increasingly capable of delivering a core set of well integrated solutions for chat, voice, video, and presence, and now finally e-mail, social, and mobile.

    Notably, unified communications has taken nearly the opposite approach of social business. Instead of a fundamental rethinking of work in digital/social terms, it’s a much more workman like approach to providing handy new digital communication toolkits to the worker that can be used for collaboration. In the final analysis, however, the unified communications approach has been slow to deal with the important strategic issues that social business aims to address: The unfortunate “evaporation” of digital knowledge in older tools, poor visibility and participation (not enough eyeballs) in legacy collaboration methods, and the still pervasive inability to find knowledge or people in most organizations, to name just a few. Despite all this, the market for unified communications, particularly in the cloud, is now poised for a major wave of growth.

  • Collaboration suites, next-gen intranets, and lightweight collaboration apps. Recently, a number of new collaboration approaches or digital methods have emerged, some full collaborative toolkits, others just filling in still-unaddressed or just emerging point needs within organizations, or both, a strategy Google is increasingly following with their cloud offerings. These are not as comprehensive or one-stop-shop solutions for collaboration or re-imagining how workers interact with each other and produce value, but organizations are broadly considering them in general as white spaces emerge, often without considering their collaborative workplace strategy as a whole.

Given these three rough buckets of new collaborative focus within the enterprise, most of which happen in isolation from one another in the average organization, it’s been interesting to see how they’ve operated either as genuine silos or as so-called ‘frenemies’, working together a little but competing for each others user bases. But, gratifyingly in my view, some organizations are increasingly no longer so accepting of these fragmented efforts, and are proactively trying to do something about it.

The emergence of unified collaboration

I’ve been spending most of 2014 looking at what large organizations have been doing to evolve their collaborative environments and I’ve noticed several distinct trends:

  1. A strong drive for meaningful integration between collaborative silos. I’ve noticed there has been a sharp drop in tolerance for collaborative processes to be stuck in one place, platform, or audience, and not searchable or visible elsewhere. For example, I’m seeing that organizations are now seeking to connect intranets, enterprise social networks, and content/document management systems in much more meaningful ways. As Alan Lepofsky has observed recently, mail and social networks are starting to merge as well. Unified comms is also getting embedded everywhere and within many applications. I now believe we will witness considerable investment in the next couple of years in creating bridges between collaborative silos and meaningful presence for collaborative tools in business applications in general.
  2. Development of a true enterprise-wide view of digital collaboration strategy. Organizations are increasingly getting their act together and making sense of their collaborative efforts well above the level of the technologies themselves, putting together more purpose-driven plans that eliminate confusion, fragmentation, and inconsistency with collaboration technology while updating worker skills and shifting company culture to take better advantage of the possibilities. This includes, as Stowe Boyd has noted, the measurement and quantification of the collaborative environment in real-time, which I’ve found has been vital in producing feedback to guide a collaboration strategy in flight towards impactful results.
  3. An advanced notion of unified collaboration. As a direct results of the first true trends, I’m seeing the organic emergence of an important concept I’ll call unified collaboration. This is the strategic knitting together of plans, the full portfolio of collaborative technologies, and business objectives enterprise-wide into more cohesive whole. It stands out from mere unified communication by being much more overarching, contextual to the business, scenario-centric, and goal-oriented. It also reflects the understanding that there is more to collaboration than just the next big thing (aka social business), and that collaboration in all its many forms must be better and more comprehensively supported, reconciled, and enabled.

I think these trends — along with important ones like enterprise-wide knowledge streams — herald great things in the enterprise when it comes to collaboration and represents a sort of maturity proof point. I’ve begun collecting industry examples of these trends and will share them soon. Please send me your stories and case examples if you’d like me to add them.

Additional Reading:

How to Deliver on a Modern Enterprise Collaboration Strategy

Realizing Effective Digital Collaboration in the Enterprise

Rethinking Work in the Collaborative Era

Finally, I’ll be talking about this topic and others later this month at my afternoon keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2014 in London. It would be great to meet you there.
Dion Hinchcliffe will give the afternoon keynote at theEnterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in London

Filed under Analysis, Events, Social Business, Social Collaboration, Social Media, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics Tagged with , , , , ,

Going Beyond ‘Bolt-On’ Digital Transformation

May 28, 2014 3 Comments

Much has been made recently of the imperative to fully transition our businesses into the modern digital world. It now hardly needs to be said at this point. There is even some encouraging news for traditional enterprises: The latest data from Forrester shows that companies are indeed at long last making digital transformation a top priority, with 74% of executives saying that they currently have a strategy to get there.

Yet “having a digital strategy” can also mean just about anything, depending upon who you ask. At this point however, there are basically two main forks in the road to digital for most organizations:

There is the ‘bolt-on’ strategy, which typically means adding a few new digital channels to existing touchpoints — typically social and mobile — and maybe creating an associated but minor sideline business with some digital revenue.

Then there is the ‘digital transformation’ approach to digital. It’s a full-on, meaningful reconception of the business, often using a startup or incubator model, with the intent to re-imagine a digital native organization with all that it entails, from new business models, culture shifts, remodeling of the structure and processes of the business, and rethinking of the very foundations of the enterprise across the full spectrum of digital possibility.

Enterprise Digital Business Transformation

Unfortunately, the latter approach also has many of the characteristics that corporate leadership tends to avoid: a) The big bang initiative which has a high likelihood of failure, b) cross-silo involvement, meaning it will encounter numerous bureaucratic and political obstacles, and b) the likelihood of of success being dependent on securing rarefied talent with scarce expertise that crosses the domain of the business, the world of strategic emerging technology, and next-generation IT.

The reality is that both forks have real risks: The bolt-on approach is too little and too incremental to have the requisite strategic impact, though it’s certainly a valid interim approach (as long as it’s not the only one.) On the other hand, the full digital transformation model entails a major investment and commitment across the organization with a seemingly all-to-uncertain outcome.

Yet, the latest data tells us unequivocally that the act of doing nothing — or just too little — is also sure to fail. The march of technology is wiping out traditional companies faster than ever before, and the pace is only accelerating.

Another way of putting it is that the CEOs, CIOs, COOs, and CMOs — the four roles most directly responsible for guiding this transformation — will secure rewards for their organizations that are directly commensurate with their commitment to drive broad digital adaptation and change. For the data is unambiguous: Those that don’t fully align with the state of the marketplace will be absorbed by those that do.

Forrester Digital Business Strategy Not Yet Business Strategy
Many industries even today are resistant to digital. Source: Forrester

Thinking Like a Digital Business

What can organizations do if they are serious about their responsibilities to lead the business into the future? Several clear options are emerging:

  • Seek out digital change. Avoid having it imposed. Successful next-generation enterprises — see the start of my 2014 NGE target here — won’t wait until adopting new digital channels, tech, and business models are unavoidable. They will pro-actively seek them out, learn them early on, experiment, and be ready to grow when they mature. Even fast-followers will be at risk if they don’t avidly seek out new opportunities. Dave Gray has previously pointed out research from Shell showing that the longest-lived companies are pro-active seekers and explorers of new markets. What’s more, digital change is now nearly continuous, and the organizations must establish long-term processes that tap into and pull these changes into a new “digital metabolism” that makes incorporating strategic innovation both routine and sustainable. Organizations that only respond to change will always be several steps behind those that are change-seekers. Finally, be bold it seeking out these changes. As the latest McKinsey report on digital transition notes, the winners will “be unreasonably aspirational.”
  • Cultivate capabilities to support multiple operating models. As John Kotter pointed out this week, there is now “an inseparable partnership between hierarchy and network.” We will have two and probably more major operating models in our organizations going forward, at least the legacy and the digital. We must operate and exploit each of these systems to their fullest — and together — to produce competitive and effective results today. To get there, successful leaders will strategically enable the shift of hierarchy into much more network-centric models, while cultivating the strengths of both simultaneously. Since most organizations currently have significantly underdeveloped networked operating models, this will require special investment and integration into the digital transformation process.
  • Understand and absorb the new competencies of digital across the organization. If one thing stands out clearly when I look at digital transformation efforts, is that they are often led by those who are experts in the existing business, who often don’t have the competencies in the digital space. It’s not that it can’t be learned, but it is a fast-growing and already enormous field. The profound difficulties that many transformation efforts have encountered, despite the vast on-hand resources including thousands of workers and millions of customers, has been to the distinct boundary of and very different rules for success between legacy business and digital business. I recently summarized what many business leaders don’t quite get right in their mindset and assumptions when it comes to digital transformation, but it boils down to deeply understanding and emulating what those successful in digital have done to get there. Understand the power laws of digital business, deeply absorb the concept of engaging with and co-creating new products and services with digital ecosystems, and wielding powerful new ways to scale innovation.

This is not to say that businesses have not already extensively digitized. They have, but as Sameer Patel recently pointed out, they generally have not transformed. The single biggest obstacle to successful digital transformation is a broad shift to a ‘native digital’ mindset that will consistently inform broad action. I’ve come to believe that traditional companies can make this transition, but only if they decentralize tech innovation that is coupled with a supportive new network operating model, while carefully controlling downside (typically security, data control, etc.).

So, while bolting-on a digital mindset may lead to some short-term successes, it will certainly stunt the future of your organization. Instead, employ internal and external networks to create a naturally-supportive environment where digital change is far more scalable, emergent, adaptive, and continuous.

Additional Reading:

The New Top Level Operating Models of Business

Digital diaspora in the enterprise: Arrival of the Chief Digital Officer

Filed under Analysis, Crowdsourcing, Enterprise Architecture, Peer Production, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

Designing the New Enterprise: Issues and Strategies

April 5, 2014 5 Comments

I’m looking forward to traveling to Paris, France the week after next to provide the opening keynote to the Intersection Conference. Intersection is an intriguing new multi-disciplinary event organized by Milan Guenther that’s intended to explore how we should design our organizations for the future. Milan also wrote a terrific book by the same name, which I urge you to read as well. The write-up for the conference itself says it best:

The role of design in economy and society is shifting. We see disciplines such as Service and Interaction Design moving beyond individual services and their digital components, to tackle experiences between enterprises and their audiences.

Enterprises and entrepreneurship are everywhere, playing a vital role in our lives. They are ubiquitous in the mass of organisations of all sizes we are in touch with as consumers, employees, investors, or in other roles.

This event is about designing the new enterprise, making it less awkward and more humane. We will explore how to design enterprise-wide brand experiences, social organisations, and digital businesses. To do this, design practitioners, consultants and architects combine methods and models from Service and Experience Design, Information and Enterprise Architecture, Systems and Design Thinking, to drive innovation and transform complex enterprise ecosystems.

Those who’ve followed my most recent musings on how our organizations are trying to change to adapt to a rapidly transforming world, and being changed even more by external forces outside their control know this has been a prime focus of mine. Technology in particular is the author of so much of what is reshaping markets, communities, corporations, and even our cultures. The growing question is whether our organizations will break under the loads of so much change, or are there paths we can navigate and steps we can take to transition more gracefully?

Additional Reading: What is the Future of Work?

Business Architecture: Change and Designing for the Future Enterprise

It’s very clear that most companies feel an imperative to update how they operate to match the current state of the marketplace. But as I pointed out in ZDNet recently, the data shows that the average lifespan of the enterprise continues to drop steadily, due to poor adaptation to the latest marketplace conditions.

In addition, to make matters worse, due to misalignment between our constituents’ respective goals, we also see that most workers in the typical enterprise are generally are poorly engaged. Only 40% of workers are ‘well-engaged’ according to recent analyses. This is a unacceptable state of affairs, but we’ve really only ourselves to blame. I believe we can do better.

How do we adapt sustainably to constant change?

The big question is there an intersection between change, the role and function of businesses, and the future of work that will allow us to adapt more readily? Can we still do this while creating an environment that enables far better and more satisfying work and outcomes for everyone, including employees, customers, and yes, even shareholders? What skills must be brought to bear to realize a fundamental restructuring — in the face of the many major new modes of work — for how we absorb, adopt, and manage the external march of change facing us — and therefore frequently imposing serious business challenges — that we are encountering at an ever accelerating pace?

Personally, I believe getting to equilibrium between our organizations and external change will require a specific set of modifications to the core of most of our organizations. First, achieving this will require a much-more pragmatic and decentralized view of business and enterprise architecture. It will also require that we honestly look at technology and how we metabolize and assimilate it into the way we work and then seek ways to reconcile with it. We’ll also need to cultivate workers that have effective skills in design thinking, which they can use within and across the organization to locally redesign it for current realities. And finally, we need to update how we collaborate in a fundamental and more focused way, and by that, I mean all modes of collaboration between all stakeholders.

These then are the issues I’d like to explore in Paris in just over a week. I hope you will join me. Milan has assembled an all-star cast for this discussion, including corporate strategist, author, and futurist Chris Potts, branding, innovation, and design expert Erik Roscam Abbing, and the lead designer for Dassault, Anne Asensio, to name just a few of the leading thinkers who will be speaking and collaborating there. Either way, I encourage you to join this vital conversation.

You can view the deck for my keynote talk at Intersection 2014 here.

For more background, you can also view my Slideshare profile with sampling of my latest keynote decks on this topic.

For More Information:

Intersection Conference - Paris, France - April 16-17, 2014

Filed under Analysis, Enterprise Architecture, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

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