Blog Archives
The Creation of Insegni Centre
It’s been a busy few weeks since I ventured back out into being an entrepreneur and started my own consulting company, hence the lack of blogging. Besides being busy, it’s been incredibly exciting and I look forward to getting back to blogging to share technology and strategy insights with you. Stay tuned as well for some interesting announcements over the next short while!
Insegni Centre was created out of the idea that in order for companies to truly realize the value of technology, they need to approach it strategically. By starting with business goals & objectives and assessing where in the technology spectrum a company falls, the Insegni Approach to strategy will allow organizations to experience the rapid realization of value from their IT investments.
The word Insegni is Italian for “teach” and that is the crux of our approach, where members from our client teams teach us about their business and we in turn bring knowledge & resources for technology usage. Our goal is to learn quickly, foster mutual learning between our clients and our team, and to ultimately create innovative strategies for leveraging technology. It is a client-centric approach where we integrate members of the client team and the Insegni team so that an intimate understanding of the business is coupled with the best practices of strategic IT. The Insegni Approach delivers the rigor of classic strategy, coupled with a nimbleness and creativity that organizations demand in today’s dynamic marketplace.
As I said earlier, stay tuned for some follow-on exciting news including a new joint-service offering in the area of social media and business intelligence, the launch of an upcoming strategy book and the creation of an innovation centre where clients can come onsite and participate in our unique strategic workshops to create breakthrough innovation strategies for their use of technology to create new advantages in their businesses.
Thanks to everyone who have been so supportive and enthusiastic about this new venture!
Question of Change Management
I have an exciting blog post about the do’s and don’t of change management as it relates to IT projects. Before releasing that post, I’d like to get some input from you regarding your experience of the effective use of change management to ensure the success of IT initiatives. I appreciate the feedback/input.
Mitigating Identified IT Risk
You may recall that I wrote a piece back in September titled Identifying and Managing IT Risk. That article was well received and sparked some good discussion both here on the blog and amongst my clients. I also polled readers and found that 10% of them had a risk strategy for IT in their organizations, while another 10% had the strategy and were in the process of implementing. Even more encouraging was 30% of respondents who were in the process of developing a strategy now. One of the key points of feedback I got from the 40% that were still in the strategic phase/just starting implementation, was how to get their arms around the long list of risks that had materialized. As I’d suggested pulling together a risk inventory, many of them had done similar exercises, but were now faced with the daunting task of figuring out “where to start”. Time, budget, and resources are all limited and not everything can be started at once. Through the strategic process people begin to ask “What steps do I take in mitigating identified IT risk?”
That’s a great question. It ensures you don’t just run off and start at the top of your list or worse, in some reactive fashion just focusing on the latest fire. In today’s blog post I will provide you with a way to take your identified risks and do some analysis on them.
Time For Actionable Strategy
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Actionable Strategy: How IT Transforms Traditional Strategic Planning which focuses on the changing nature of strategic planning in light of the disruptive technologies that permeate every industry.
It has been my experience that strategic planning has always gotten a bad rap. Strategy has often been viewed as a theoretical exercise, a make work project, that yields a lofty plan that is placed on a shelf to collect dust. The sad reality is that in many respects, strategic planning has earned that bad rap. I’ve been inside numerous organizations where past strategic attempts have results in exactly that scenario. From an IT perspective, which is where I’ve focused most of my strategic engagements, grand plans have often been developed only to find no foothold within the organization to begin adding any value. I started asking myself the question “why” many years ago. Why is it that strategic planning seems to yield so little result in many circumstances? About 6 six years ago, I realized that IT strategic planning was missing an important element, namely, a solid connection to the business it found itself in. There was often a disconnect between the business and the IT group. Any strategy produced in this kind of silo approach was doomed for failure.
At the time, I refined my approach to delivering strategy to ensure that it began and ended with the business and the goals of the business. I took the huge cookie cutter approach methodologies and created a series of tool kits that were rooted in understanding an organization and its business. I called my approach at the time Business First Strategy to reflect the mindset that IT could not be viewed strategically, until a solid understanding of the business needs were established and supported. In time, I refined my approach to take into account a new dimension that began to emerge back in 2008. Strategic planning exercises simply took too long. The longer the time frame, the higher the risk that the strategy would fail. This was true for a number of reasons:
- stakeholder would come and go. Organizations changed and often you’d have to deal with different people.
- the business environment changed before you could finish the strategic planning exercise and people would get discouraged that they were dealing with a moving target
- the cost to deliver a big bang approach strategy was difficult to justify and if such an exercise did begin, the strategic objectives needed to provide huge ROI to justify the process in the first place
Taking those factors into consideration, my approach to strategic planning for IT built off of my previous work, but endeavoured to chunk planning done into smaller pieces of work. Each piece of strategic work would have to standalone and produce value on its own. That value, if proven to be true, would drive further future strategic engagements. I called this approach Rapid Strategy, which allowed me to deliver strategic IT plans to organizations within a 90-day period. This was a real breakthrough moment for me and the many client’s I was privileged to work with. It allowed me to take my initial toolkit approach and find ways (processes and technology) to accelerate the process. It’s a “do it fast” and “uncover surprises fast” and “make adjustments fast” and “realize value fast” approach.
Now in 2011 it seems that the strategic planning approach needs to evolve once again. It’s a natural evolution that has been occurring, but has now been accelerated because of the environment we are finding ourselves in. The progression has been to take strategic planning from a step-by-step cookbook approach, first to an approach rooted in business needs, then to an approach that was faster and now, for the next step in strategy, to transform it into an approach that retains the value in the first two iterations but added a much-needed third component. What is that component?
Action!
I first began to realize that something was missing when I observed what happened to strategy I’d done after I’d delivered it to an organization. In some cases, I stayed involved at the organization’s request and we observed that real and expected value began to be realized from the strategy. In some cases I remained with organizations through to the completion of the implementation of strategic plans, and again, there was value. There were instances, however, where I was not involved in the implementation of strategy, only to find out later that the organization hadn’t realized the value they’d hoped for.
mip’s scan Podcast: The End of The Week Update!
Good morning everyone! Give a listen this morning to a short podcast where I hit on 2 areas of discussion:
- Windows 8 – I’ve had a chance to install the beta release and wanted to give some thoughts as to what I’ve seen
- IT Risk – expanding on a post I’d done earlier this week on risk and in preparation for an upcoming presentation I am giving on the topic, I discuss briefly this morning the importance of identifying and dealing with risk as it relates to technology within organizations.
I hope you enjoy today’s show! To give it a listen, simply click the link below.
What Should RIM Focus On?
By now you’ve heard that RIM performance has again fallen short of expectations. If their performance wasn’t bad enough, 
it also seems that the overall brand is also taking a serious hit – so they are losing market-share and mind-share. Not a good combination of market dynamics.
A post I’d previously written about with regard to building an Ecosystem has had some good discussion and I got numerous emails from readers that sparked some thoughts for me. In that article I spoke about the need to create a strategic core access point (SCAP) and referenced what others had done. People in the discussion thread asked a good question, “what would RIM’s SCAP be? push email? security?”
I would say that what RIM should focus on is their Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). You can’t built an ecosystem from a device. Pinning all hopes on QNX powered phones or some version 2 of the Playbook will yield the same results as we see today. What RIM should do is leverage the SCAP that they and they alone control at this point. That is the BES. IT departments are falling out of love with RIM phones but the BES still remains a key enterprise strength. Of course if RIM’s market share continues to drop, there will be little to no need for a BES in the coming years. What RIM should do and do quickly is open up their BES to all the handhelds. That is their SCAP. From there they can build an ecosystem. They can drive security measures to Android and iPhone devices. They can fend off the threat that Microsoft is sure to present shortly with the update to the phones and the partnership with Nokia. From the BES they can begin to build an enterprise ecosystem. To do otherwise will only continue the downward trend they’ve found themselves over the past 12-18 months.
Better Business Intelligence Equals Better Business Results
Inside organizations today there is an extremely valuable asset that is locked away and unrealized for its full potential. I’m talking about data. Gigabytes upon gigabytes and on to terabytes and petabytes…you get the idea…there’s a lot of data out there. This data is trapped inside silo corporate systems, Excel spreadsheets, various standalone reports and scattered across file servers within organizations. The unfortunate thing with this mess of data is that there is a dual cost you are experiencing:
- you pay to store all this information; spinning disk within servers is not free. As databases grow and spreadsheets proliferate throughout the organization, you are paying for that storage
- there is an opportunity to cost for not having used any of this data effectively. You are paying to save it (see point one above) but then losing out on not using it!
We are in a business climate these days where you can’t really afford not to try to leverage this data. It can drive better business decisions. This data is your competitive advantage; nobody else has it so don’t squander the opportunity to unlock its potential value.
To me, having been in strategic consulting for years and years I have always known and seen in my client work that when you have the correct inputs for your business then you realize greater success. When I assist organizations with their IT strategy, that strategy is always crafted with an underlying understanding: help the business get to where it wants to go. The IT within an organization must be an enabler.
The same is true for business intelligence efforts inside organizations. The data locked in so many systems and massaged & manipulated in so many Excel worksheets is there to enable the business reach its strategic objectives. Like IT resources though, that data needs to be strategically used. In setting an IT strategy, we start with a “vision”, in setting a business intelligence strategy, we start with questions. Key questions you need answered in order to make good strategic decisions. Don’t start with the technology alone; systems and software don’t unlock data value – they are a means to an end, not the end itself. I’ve seen too many initiatives where business intelligence work is being done for the sake of business intelligence. The true value is rarely realized through that approach and it becomes a missed opportunity in driving better business decision-making.
Start with a strategy that is led by the business, then move on to the technical implementation. Now that sounds intelligent to me!
Build an Ecosystem
When I migrated to my new blog, as per my initial post, I wasn’t able to easily/successfully bring past posts with me (still working on some options). Since then, I’ve received a number of comments and dozens of emails asking for a copy of a post I’d written previously about developing an ecosystem. So I thought I’d re-publish that post, with some minor edits to take into account things that have transpired over the past 8 months since it was originally published. So let’s dive right in….
When you look at nature and the environment, why is it so important to save an area of wetland? Why is it important to save a type of wildlife? The reason is balance. An ecosystem is a delicately balanced environment. If you are missing an animal, then other elements of the ecosystem suffer as well. When there are gaps in the ecosystem, in short, it stops working.
This concept applies to business as well. Why has Apple been successful? Is it because the build top-notch quality products? In part yes, but not entirely. Is it because they deliver products that met the users’ needs better than any other product? In part yes, but not entirely. No, the real reason that Apple has been so successful is that their products and services are part of an ecosystem that they’ve developed. Tied together beautifully, that ecosystem just works. It is that element, that it just works, that really has been the reason Apple has been so successful. It’s also the reason why other competing companies have failed to develop any type of Apple-product-killer. As a competing company you can’t build a product that will kill anything! You might build a product that is better than any single competing product from Apple, but without the ecosystem to tie it all together, to balance everything, to make sure that it all just works – without the balance, competitive products are fighting an uphill battle.
