These posts covers the challenges faced by businesses in this increasingly disruptive world.
Variables are the new constants It’s no surprise that the current annual dream-plan-execute model of organisational strategy is no longer fit for purpose. To work, it necessitated a world where there were many constants and few variables. Today, there are very few constants, so those who operate their organisations in this manner might as well […]
Data day business Unless you lead Amazon or one of the major data-guzzling market titans, your business is in one or three states: Being digested by Amazon. Been obliterated by Amazon. Wondering when either of the previous will happen to your business / sector. Amazon has played a long game. They have smartly focused on […]
Customer is king? From time to time, we are reminded that the customer is king. Some of us may have graduated from induction programmes designed to etch this into the neuronic landscape of our brains. There is strong economic logic underpinning this assertion; customers pay our salaries and thus fund our lifestyles / keep a […]
The transition to the digital economy is changing the rules of the game for most organisations. If your platform does not appear to be burning, I suggest that if you look more closely you will see traces of smouldering. The business mantra of ‘disrupt, or be disrupted’ is accurate. You could blithely proceed with your […]
In my preparations to deliver the closing keynote at Intel’s Business API event (link) last week, I considered how I could entwine my theme of the future of work/humanity with that of the event. Despite the seemingly ‘under the bonnet’ nature of application programming interfaces (APIs) I realised that this was a theme that is […]
Many organisations are process-oriented. Their service delivery is industrialised and whether it is a factory or an office the people are more often than not organic cogs. Such organisations are selling efficiency and ultimately are judged on cost. Of course as the market opens up to the wider world, the cost play becomes a race […]
CxOs will continue to ask the CIO to fix their laptops if they perceive the CIO as the person in charge of the people that fix laptops. So the first step for the CIO is to appoint an IT manager to do the job of IT management. And then to behave as if they were […]
According to Harvard Business Review business and society are careering towards hyperspecialization. This is Adam Smith’s ‘division of labour’ taken to the extreme. I can see that as a possible evolution in work design, but it would need wondrous task design and impeccable task management. If it is successful then much of your organisation’s head […]
Earlier this week I was a guest keynote speaker at the Gartner Outsourcing and IT Services Summit. Given the market, I was amazed at the number of senior IT executives in attendance. My presentation, entitled ‘Does the IT Department have a Future?’, was well received. It could have gone either way as I chose to […]
