Tag: business transformation

5 Questions to Ask About Your Organization’s Innovation

The word “innovation” is often used in organizations to portray that they are somehow advancing their organization. But what really is innovation and who can and should innovate really depends upon who you talk to and what context and timeframes that person is referring to. Thus, it seems that innovation is something subjective but people do realize that it is something important and needs to be done at their organization.

But where to start? If you google “innovation” then you will get over 100+ million results! Those are a lot of results! The amount of time you would have to spend to sift through that information would be astronomical. On top of that even if you (or your Artificial Intelligence) have the time to read every expert (there are many) on innovation, you would still have to make innovation relevant and practical for your own organization. That is a tall order!

No worries! In this blog post, I will attempt to create a clear understanding of what questions you should be asking to assess your organization’s innovation efforts at different levels.

Let’s start with some baseline understanding:

  1. The importance of innovation at your organization is highly dependent on what are the end goals that your organization is trying to achieve
  2. Your organization is a unique composition of people, processes, products, services, and technologies
  3. There is a difference between being innovative at an organizational level versus being innovative at an individual level but they have to be aligned
  4. Culture can kill or flourish your organization’s innovation efforts

At its core, innovation is about new ideas, devices, and/or methods but it is also about improving existing ideas, devices and/or methods. What this means is that the opportunities for innovation are abundant within and outside your organization. Due to this abundance, organizations struggle where to start first. Keeping in mind that innovation is the lifeline of your organization, let’s start asking the following questions about innovation efforts at your organization:

Strategic Perspectives on Innovation:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who is incentivized at the executive level to lead the innovation?Who should be incentivized at the executive level to lead the innovation?
2.What governance structures are in place for the flow of innovative ideas?What governance structures should be in place for the flow of innovative ideas?
3.Where is the technology used to help in innovation?Where should technology be used to help in innovation?
4.When and how often innovation needs are clearly stated?When and how often strategic objectives should be communicated?
5.Why external and internal views on innovation matter for strategic objectives?Why should external and internal views on innovation matter for strategic objectives?

Tactical Perspectives on Innovation:

 Today

Tomorrow

1.Who is incentivized at the middle management level to call B.S. on perceived innovation gains?Who should be incentivized at the middle management level to call B.S. on perceived innovation gains?
2.What business units, functional areas, and teams are included to do innovation?What business units, functional areas, and teams should be included to do innovation?
3.Where technology hinders innovation processes?Where technology might hinder innovation processes?
4.When is innovation alignment to strategic objectives communicated?When should innovation alignment to strategic objectives communicate?
5.Why innovation processes are critical to achieving tactical objectives?Why innovation processes should be critical to achieving tactical objectives?

Operational Perspectives on Innovation:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who sees innovation as a disease or a cure?Who might see innovation as a disease or a cure?
2.What business processes and cultural considerations provide views on the organization’s actual vs. perceived innovation?What business processes and cultural considerations should provide views on the organization’s actual vs. perceived innovation?
3.Where is the technology part of your organization to introduce innovation?Where should technology be a part of your organization to introduce innovation?
4.When were you informed about the innovation pursuits and feedback needs?When should you have been informed about the innovation pursuits and feedback needs?
5.Why having innovative ideas about your daily tasks is important?Why anyone beyond you should care about innovative ideas about your daily tasks?

By starting to ask the above opening set of questions, you will start to decipher where efforts are concentrated (e.g., people, processes, products, services, and technologies) within your organization and what you could do to connect the dots. You will begin to understand if innovation is just a buzzword in your organization or something more. You will begin to understand if there are biases and barriers to innovation within your organization. You will be able to understand if your organization actually learned its lessons from previous innovation efforts and if new innovation efforts included improvements from previous failures. And lastly, you will begin to understand if failure for the sake of innovation in your organization is really an option.

5 Questions to About Your Organization's Innovation

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5 Questions to Ask About Your Organization’s Strategy

If you have a strong understanding of how culture affects your organization’s strategy then you have better ideas of creating strategies that are truly transformative for your organization. Having said that, most organizations don’t take the time to strategize about strategy development processes and thus are not fully aware of the intended and unintended effects of their pursuits. The three main reasons for this lack of awareness are:

  1. The fallacy that strategy should always be top-down
  2. The lack of a holistic approach to strategy development and feedback
  3. The half-baked idea that strategy can only be created by a few people

An organization’s overall strategy is a combination of policy and plan of action that is intended to improve the making, buying, or selling of goods and/or services for the customer. Thus, it becomes imperative for organizations to keep the customer at the center of what they do and create customer experiences that make their lives easier.

If you want the strategy to be something that is shelf-ware that looks pretty on an executives’ file cabinet and it is cool to the only talk about it then don’t read ahead. For those, if you want the strategy to be more than just an exercise then I would invite you to ask the following questions about strategy and strategy development processes within your own organization:

Strategic Perspectives on Strategy:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who is incentivized at the executive level to create a strategy?Who should be incentivized at the executive level to create a strategy?
2.What governance structures are in place for transforming how strategy is created?What governance structures should be in place for transforming how strategy is created?
3.Where is the technology used to help strategy?Where should technology be used to help strategy?
4.When and how often strategic objectives are communicated?When and how often strategic objectives should be communicated?
5.Why holistic strategy development processes are critical to achieving strategic objectives?Why holistic strategy development processes should be critical to achieving strategic objectives?

Tactical Perspectives on Strategy:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who is incentivized at the middle management level to give feedback on strategy?Who should be incentivized at the middle management level to give feedback on strategy?
2.What business units, functional areas, and teams are included to develop a strategy?What business units, functional areas, and teams should be included to create a strategy?
3.Where technology hinders strategy development processes?Where technology might hinder strategy development processes?
4.When is the start and end of meeting strategic objectives communicated?When should the start and end of meeting strategic objectives communicated?
5.Why strategy development processes are critical to achieving tactical objectives?Why strategy development processes should be critical to achieving tactical objectives?

Operational Perspectives on Strategy:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who sees strategy development processes as an obstacle?Who might see strategy development processes as an obstacle?
2.What business processes provide views on the organization’s actual vs. perceived strategy?What business processes should provide views on the organization’s actual vs. perceived strategy?
3.Where is the technology part of your understanding of the organization’s strategy?Where should technology be a part of understanding the organization’s strategy?
4.When were you informed about the strategic objectives and strategy development processes?When should you have been informed about the strategic objectives and strategy development processes?
5.Why strategic objectives are critical to achieving your daily tasks?Why strategic objectives should be critical to achieving your daily tasks?

To be clear, strategy and strategy development affects everyone inside and outside your organization which includes executives, middle management, front lines employees as well as the customers you are trying to acquire. Thus, your organization’s strategy development processes should be robust enough that they take long-term holistic views but also flexible enough to cater for bumps and take advantage of technological advancement.

5 Questions to About Your Organization's Strategy

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Business Agility and Digital Transformation

What is Business Agility?

  • Business is “the activity of making, buying, or selling goods or providing services in exchange for…”
    • Corporations –> Money
    • Non-profits –> Social Causes
    • Education –> Knowledge
    • Government –> Citizen Services
    • Military –> National Defense
  • Agility is the “ability to move quickly and easily.”
  • Business Agility is the ability to move quickly and easily to:
    • Make products and services
    • Buy products and services
    • Sell products and services
    • Provide products and services

to employees and customers along with the ability to effectively and efficiently collaborate with partners and vendors.

What is Digital Transformation?

  • Digital is “electronic and especially computerized technology.”
  • Transformation is “an act, process, or instance of transforming or being transformed.”
  • Digital Transformation is the process of transforming:
    • How things are made
    • How things are bought
    • How things are sold
    • How products and services are provided
  • through electronic and especially computerized technology.

What are the Relationships between Business Agility and Digital Transformation?

  • All organizations are digital in one way or another. Some are more digital and some are less but fundamentally they utilize a mix of the following to achieve their desired outcomes and capabilities:
    • People who use technologies
    • Processes enabled by technologies
    • Technologies to capture and synthesize data
  • In order for your organization to survive and thrive in today’s hyper-competitive business environments, your organization should have:
    • People who can quickly make decisions on how products and services are created, bought, sold and provided
    • Processes that reduce the time between data capture to informed decision-making
    • Technologies that capture, manage and disseminate data quickly to decision-makers

Note that without Digital Transformation, achieving Business Agility is a hallucination!

Understand your Today to Create your Tomorrow

  • Do an honest and comprehensive analysis of how business is done currently
  • Holistically understand how current people, processes, technologies, products and services (business and technical) are affected by Strategies, Politics, Innovation, Culture and Execution (SPICE) factors
  • Determine if current capture of KPIs, SLAs and other metrics (e.g., employee incentives) are just for collection or are these measurements truly bringing change within the organization
SPICE Factors

While it is great to imagine and document your future, but any shortcuts you take in the assessing your present will come back to haunt you in the future!

Analysis

Today (Where you are)

  • Create a list of roles and responsibilities for everyone in your organization, partners, and vendors
  • Map hybrid business processes that show people-technology interactions
  • Determine what data is being captured, managed and disseminated during people-technology interactions
  • Determine the relevancy of the data for informed decision-making
  • Assign a cost to each business process
  • Assess how quickly and easily your organization can respond to employee and customer needs
  • Determine the various obstacles that result in poor execution of strategy
  • Understand organizational and individual biases

Tomorrow (Where you want to be)

  • Eliminate overlapping and redundant roles and responsibilities that don’t provide value to your organization
  • Create governance, functions, teams and business processes that optimize the use of data across people and technologies
  • Create metrics that result in effective decision-making and lessons learned to improve those metrics
  • Communicate effectively to eliminate any preconceived notions of your transformation journeys
  • Create test labs for all employees to test business models, enhance current capabilities and new capabilities
  • Create a new culture through norms, standards, communications, and incentives and know that not everyone is motivated by the same things
  • Continuously self-evaluate your maturity level and make use of lessons learned

Asking Questions

  • Strategy
    • Who is affected by transformation?
    • What siloed/outdated/imaginary/undocumented processes are affecting strategic execution?
    • What technology and non-technology tools are used to make a strategic decision?
  • Politics
    • Who is distorting transformation communications?
    • What processes and data are leading to transformation easily being vetoed?
    • What technologies’ decisions are empowering transformation?
  • Innovation
    • Who is assessing frontline employees, external customers, similar industries and different industries to bring innovation to the organization?
    • What processes are in place to raise people’s ability to contribute?
    • Are there technologies to test out new capabilities and business models?
  • Culture
    • Who is motivated to participate in transformation journeys?
    • What kind of processes are in place to encourage culture change?
    • What kinds of technologies are used to assess culture and changes?
  • Execution
    • Who is setting the expectation at all levels for the transformation journeys?
    • What processes are in place that obstructs strategic execution?
    • What technologies are in place that obstructs strategic execution?

Transitions

  • Organizational Structures
    • Optimize organizational structures based on a mix of functions, products, services, and geography
    • Create formal and informal strategic linking through processes and coordination
  • Governance and Processes
    • Create governance structures and processes to evaluate how data can be captured, managed, modeled, assembled and deployed
  • People
    • Find people from top, middle, and frontlines to champion transformation journeys
    • Show how transformation actually makes people’s lives easier
  • Program Mission
    • Views transformation journeys as an investment portfolio of multiple projects and operations
    • Connects business and technical operations to business capabilities and outcomes
    • Measures relevant metrics and abandon irrelevant metrics that cannot be connected to business value
    • Creates alignment of IT with non-IT functions (e.g., Accounting, Administration, Business Development, Customer Service, Finance, HR, Management, Manufacturing, Operations, Productions, R&D, Sales, etc.)
    • Creates effective feedback loops across the organization

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5 Questions to Ask About Your Organization’s Politics

Politics in an organization is about influencing others by using official and unofficial power. Official power comes from management titles while unofficial power comes from peers, juniors and even outsiders. Every day in organizations official and unofficial power is used to (1) frame problems, (2) influence changes and (3) make/guide decisions. This power can affect organizational structures, business processes, technologies, and even innovation. Thus, it becomes imperative that organizations understand this power and how this power can affect organizational cultures. However, despite the strong relationship between politics and culture, most organizations are unaware, unwilling and/or unprepared to address it. The three main reasons politics is not directly addressed is because of:

  1. The inaccurate thinking that politics is always negative
  2. The fallacy that politics only happens at an individual’s personal level
  3. The inability to understand how politics can destroy/enhance capabilities

An organization’s politics is the total complex of relationships between people inside and outside of organizational boundaries. What this means is that people play politics even if they are unaware of it. While these people might have the best of intentions but their experiences/biases may or may not be best for the entire organization. By not keeping this in mind, organizations might not be able to self-assess if the IT vs. Business tension is a myth or reality, if the most optimized and continuously improving processes are present, if the correct technology is being selected for collective efficiency, if the right people are asking the right questions and if questioning the status quo is just a checkmark. In order to understand politics, the following questions need to be asked:

Strategic Perspectives on Politics:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who is incentivized at the executive level to understand politics?Who should be incentivized at the executive level to understand politics?
2.What governance structures are in place to address holistic vs. specific unit/function/team strategic needs?What governance structures should be in place to address holistic vs. specific unit/function/team strategic needs?
3.Where is technology being affected by politics?Where should technology affect politics?
4.When and how often political motivations are revealed?When and how often political motivations are revealed?
5.Why political understanding is critical to achieving strategic objectives?Why should political understanding be critical to achieving strategic objectives?

Tactical Perspectives on Politics:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who is incentivized at the middle management level to understand politics?Who should be incentivized at the middle management level to understand politics?
2.What business units, functional areas, and teams are included to bring forth political implications?What business units, functional areas, and teams should be made aware of political implications?
3.Where technology hinders understanding politics?Where technology might hinder understanding politics?
4.When is the start and end of political motivations?When should be the start and end of political motivations?
5.Why political understanding is critical to achieving tactical objectives?Why political understanding should be critical to achieving tactical objectives?

Operational Perspectives on Politics:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who sees politics as an obstacle?Who might see political understanding as an obstacle?
2.What business processes provide views on the organization’s power plays?What business processes should provide views on the organization’s political boundaries?
3.Where is technology part of your understanding of the organization’s politics?Where should technology be a part of understanding the organization’s politics?
4.When were you informed about the political objectives?When should you have been informed about political objectives?
5.Why political understanding is critical to achieving your daily tasks?Why political understanding should be critical to achieving your daily tasks?

Politics and culture are two sides of the same coin and each lurking in the shadows or showing in broad daylight to change the direction of the organization every day. To address this, (1) be transparent, (2) create an atmosphere of trust, (3) be genuinely helpful across business units, functional areas, and teams.

Politics-Culture

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5 Questions to Ask About Your Business Transformation

Business transformation is the process of transforming (1) how things are made, (2) how things are bought, (3) how things are sold and/or (4) how services are provided. It has been pursued by organizations ever since the first organization came into being and would continue to be pursued in the foreseeable future. It is the way for organizations to know their current state (i.e., know where they are), their future state (i.e., know where they want to be) and their transition (i.e., what steps to take) by considering the people, business processes, services, products and technologies that can help them achieve their objectives. To be clear, business transformation is not merely a “business” only pursuit but rather it is an organizational pursuit that encompasses Information Technology (IT) and digital transformation journeys as well.

While the promise of business transformation is great, it is still something that organizations consistently struggle with. There are multiple factors that can lead to failed business transformation efforts but the number one reason seems to go back to a typical conversation within organizations. In the 21st century, technology for organizations is not just an enabler but paramount to their success. But how many times have you said or heard someone say, “business” wants this and “business” wants that and that “business” does not understand that systems cannot be developed overnight. Ingrained in this sort of thinking is the idea that somehow IT is different from “business”. Somehow there is this “us” vs. “them” mentality.

It is time to change this “us” vs. “them” culture. It is time to think about IT as not something that is outside of “business” but is part of “business”. To have this conversation there has to be a mutual understanding that neither should downplay the importance of the other. This requires an understanding that all technical and non-technical aspects of the organization are there to support the end objectives of business transformation and that collaboration works much better than just mere animosity.

When organizations’ bread and butter business models are shattered in light of the new digital and sharing economy, “business” and technical folks have no one else to blame but themselves. As such it becomes imperative that organizations don’t get lost in complacency and infighting. These organizations should view business transformation as a holistic endeavor by paying enough attention to people, business processes, products, services and technologies that directly and indirectly affect them otherwise business transformation is just a pipe dream. In order for organizations to figure out their own business transformation journey, they need to ask the following questions from internal and external perspectives:

 

Today

Tomorrow

1.Who is helped by business transformation?Who should be helped with business transformation? (E.g., management, employees, customers, shareholder, etc.)
2.What does business transformation teach us?What should business transformation teach us? (E.g., better internal communications, governance, standardization, discipline, branding, etc.)
3.Where does the business transformation start?Where should business transformation start? (E.g., IT, marketing, operations, customers, vendors, partners, etc.)
4.When is business transformation considered?When should the business transformation be considered? (E.g., customer-employee conversations, competitors’ disruption/re-imagination of business models, new innovations, new methods, etc.)
5.Why is business transformation is being done?Why should the business transformation be done? (E.g., optimization, cohesiveness, long-term value, positive societal ripples, etc.)

When you ask the above questions, keep in mind that without effective and unbiased feedback loops most business transformation journeys would be just nearsighted one-time initiatives and not something that would make organizations self-improving entities. Smart organizations have realized this and are taking advantage of not only technological changes but also setting themselves up for the future before they themselves get disrupted.

Business Transformation 5Ws

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