Your future service delivery model is simpler than you think
It’s good to be popular. Interest in technology and how it can help your organization continues to grow. There are increasing pressures on you and your team to respond to business change while also playing an active role in transforming the company. There is just one hitch – you need to be able to do this with a reduced budget.
This is not a new problem for CIOs. Each budget cycle finds your operational and capital costs robustly challenged. This dilemma – mounting business demand with a shrinking supply of resources – is not yours alone. It is a whole-of-business problem.
The opportunity for you is to use this dilemma as the basis to establish five practices which will allow you to do something that seems to defy logic – deliver more, of better quality, by doing less.
1. Refresh your city plan
In 2000 The McKinsey Quarterly published an article titled “The Paris Guide to IT Architecture” which used city planning as a metaphor for enterprise architecture . This concept was simple to understand and powerful as a communication tool throughout the business.
Like the city you live in, enterprise business systems have:
- History (legacy systems).
- Precincts (groups of solutions serving particular functions).
- Building codes (solution architecture standards).
- Preferred materials (the right technology for the right job).
When facing spending pressure refresh your city plan and use this as a conversation piece to discuss what parts need to be refurbished, reused or rebuilt. With this improved understanding of your organization’s existing solutions and services you will be able to lead an informed discussion on where future investments should be made.
2. Using scarcity and necessity to your advantage
Both scarcity and necessity are cited as drivers for creativity. The HBR Blog network published opinion pieces in 2011 arguing the case for each. This article states that “deliberately imposing scarcity” was a catalyst for creativity. However, a complementary view is that innovation is most likely to be effective when there is a clear problem to solve.
As a CIO the problems for you and your team to address are not always well defined. Your challenge is to make them clear.
Lead your team and C-level peers through cycles of refining demands and reducing these down to a discrete, achievable set of goals. Challenge your team to respond with solutions which use the technologies and capabilities already at their disposal. Take a leaf from the Apollo 13 playbook – figure out how to fit a round peg into a square hole. You will enable your team to deliver against a more focused set of requirements by leveraging existing investments.
3. Standardize your skill sets
Standardized work practices and continuous improvement are the basis of lean manufacturing. In manufacturing this leads to reduced task time, streamlined work sequences and reduced inventory. In a service delivery environment – such as IT – the opposite approach is more common. Efficiency improvements in IT often rely on the introduction of new technology, the creation of more complex processes, or the duplication of data. These “improvements” are costly to implement and maintain.
Take the lead offered by best practice in materials management and apply lean thinking to your IT service delivery.
Reduce the number of technology platforms you support by applying architectural principles that encourage reuse and identify single solutions for common business functions.
Consolidate the technologies underpinning your business, such as database, infrastructure and client solutions.
Refine the skills and capability of your team members so that you are giving them the best opportunity to excel in their tool of choice, instead of having to relearn a new way of delivering services each time.
4. Don’t be too efficient
In 1984 Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox published “The Goal” which told the story of a manufacturing plant manager facing an ultimatum – improve productivity and profit, or go out of business. While he makes good progress on improving material availability and eliminating bottlenecks, the protagonist encounters an unexpected problem. The removal of gaps and delays caused the equivalent of peak hour gridlock. Productivity began to slide and targets were missed.
This can also occur in IT services and project delivery.
If the space between changes is too small, your team members are constrained as their work is too tightly packed. There is no buffering between major projects, and the minor changes that slip in between them.
To improve the flow, create space between projects and major production releases. Give things time to settle down. Bundle associated groups of changes into their own release. The result will be a consistent flow of delivery work that doesn’t get tangled by being full to capacity.
5. Dining on elephants
How do you eat an elephant? Easy – one bite at a time. It’s a classic kids joke as well as being sound advice for managing large capital budgets in the grown-up world of business.
Future budgets for major projects will come in irregular waves and will be hard fought. There will be high expectations of the projects that support the business trend towards austerity and controlling your non-discretionary “MOOSE” (Maintain and Operate the Organization, Systems and Equipment) spend.
With limited investment in new and improved technologies your portfolio of major projects will be under close scrutiny. Your response should be to design an approach to funding and implementing projects in a tiered, modular manner.
Break your portfolio into three levels – long term strategic programs, medium term tactical projects, and short term operational response initiatives.
Be ruthless in the governance and decision making that drives which projects get funding and which get set aside.
Break the projects into smaller pieces; each piece should deliver a positive business outcome, and should build upon the piece implemented before it.
In this manner you can control three things.
- Your peers can see evidence of progress being made and value added with each release
- Your team is able to be flexible, adapting to a changing business environment as they go, rather than having a fixed, long-term goal set at the start of a major initiative
- Limited capital funding resources are more closely managed, with financial benefits being yielded earlier
Delivering more with fewer resources, and to a better level of quality, may seem an impossible goal. However, this is exactly what will be expected of the CIO of the Future, and all of your C-level peers.
As you lead discussions with your colleagues, bring with you these five talking points to share:
- What parts of our existing business systems landscape can we refresh, reuse or rebuild to get the job done?
- Which are the critical issues that we face right now, and how can we use existing resources to respond to them?
- How can we further consolidate, standardize and simplify our processes and systems to take advantage of our core capabilities?
- Where on our project roadmaps are we scheduling time to allow changes to truly bed down and become a stable part of our operations?
- Why don’t we break major projects down into realistic, achievable pieces?
In your experience what are the primary levers of doing more with less?
Are you expected to deliver more, with less? How do you go about this?
Why children (and adults) need to be on social media or get left behind
By Ross DawsonYesterday the West Australian newspaper began a five-part series on children and social media, beginning with a feature article introducing the topic.
The article’s title, Get online or ‘be left behind’ quotes an interview with me. It is very easy for journalists to focus on the negative when covering children and social media, so I’m very glad they took a more balanced stance.
The article began with an introduction to the issue, to the point of mentioning that English secondary school Eton has banned Snapchat. It goes on:
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Today Show: What to expect in the year ahead
By Ross DawsonEarly on January 1st this year, after a great New Year’s party and no sleep, I went into the studio to talk about what we should expect in the year ahead. The video is below
A few notes from what I discussed:
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Awesome video: we are building transparent machines of business exploiting society
By Ross DawsonThis fabulous video brings together a succinct telling of the privacy story of today with some exceptional 3D graphic animations and great sound. Watch it! (preferably full screen)
Transparent Machines™ from beeple on Vimeo.
In the Privacy section of our 2014: Crunch Time report we wrote:
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On the importance of energizing holidays for entrepreneurs
By Ross DawsonI have just returned from holidays in Jervis Bay, a stunning region set in a marine national park a few hours drive south of Sydney. It is one of those places scattered around the world that feels magical in some inexpressible way.
Image credit: Hadi Zaher
It was just a one week holiday, my first proper break in the last year, which has been perhaps the most intense year in my life. Victoria and I did take a little time off between this last Christmas and New Year but I ended having to do a some urgent client work and many interviews including Sunrise, Today, and Morning Show over New Year so it wasn’t a real holiday.
Switching off
During the holiday I was almost completely switched off from digital world, with limited connectivity where we were staying helping me avoid more than very briefly glancing at email or Twitter every day or so, though I did need to respond to a couple of enquiries.
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5 Tactics to Deliver More By Doing Less (and Doing Better)
By Alistair LloydYour future service delivery model is simpler than you think
It’s good to be popular. Interest in technology and how it can help your organization continues to grow. There are increasing pressures on you and your team to respond to business change while also playing an active role in transforming the company. There is just one hitch – you need to be able to do this with a reduced budget.
This is not a new problem for CIOs. Each budget cycle finds your operational and capital costs robustly challenged. This dilemma – mounting business demand with a shrinking supply of resources – is not yours alone. It is a whole-of-business problem.
The opportunity for you is to use this dilemma as the basis to establish five practices which will allow you to do something that seems to defy logic – deliver more, of better quality, by doing less.
1. Refresh your city plan
In 2000 The McKinsey Quarterly published an article titled “The Paris Guide to IT Architecture” which used city planning as a metaphor for enterprise architecture . This concept was simple to understand and powerful as a communication tool throughout the business.
Like the city you live in, enterprise business systems have:
When facing spending pressure refresh your city plan and use this as a conversation piece to discuss what parts need to be refurbished, reused or rebuilt. With this improved understanding of your organization’s existing solutions and services you will be able to lead an informed discussion on where future investments should be made.
2. Using scarcity and necessity to your advantage
Both scarcity and necessity are cited as drivers for creativity. The HBR Blog network published opinion pieces in 2011 arguing the case for each. This article states that “deliberately imposing scarcity” was a catalyst for creativity. However, a complementary view is that innovation is most likely to be effective when there is a clear problem to solve.
As a CIO the problems for you and your team to address are not always well defined. Your challenge is to make them clear.
Lead your team and C-level peers through cycles of refining demands and reducing these down to a discrete, achievable set of goals. Challenge your team to respond with solutions which use the technologies and capabilities already at their disposal. Take a leaf from the Apollo 13 playbook – figure out how to fit a round peg into a square hole. You will enable your team to deliver against a more focused set of requirements by leveraging existing investments.
3. Standardize your skill sets
Standardized work practices and continuous improvement are the basis of lean manufacturing. In manufacturing this leads to reduced task time, streamlined work sequences and reduced inventory. In a service delivery environment – such as IT – the opposite approach is more common. Efficiency improvements in IT often rely on the introduction of new technology, the creation of more complex processes, or the duplication of data. These “improvements” are costly to implement and maintain.
Take the lead offered by best practice in materials management and apply lean thinking to your IT service delivery.
Reduce the number of technology platforms you support by applying architectural principles that encourage reuse and identify single solutions for common business functions.
Consolidate the technologies underpinning your business, such as database, infrastructure and client solutions.
Refine the skills and capability of your team members so that you are giving them the best opportunity to excel in their tool of choice, instead of having to relearn a new way of delivering services each time.
4. Don’t be too efficient
In 1984 Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox published “The Goal” which told the story of a manufacturing plant manager facing an ultimatum – improve productivity and profit, or go out of business. While he makes good progress on improving material availability and eliminating bottlenecks, the protagonist encounters an unexpected problem. The removal of gaps and delays caused the equivalent of peak hour gridlock. Productivity began to slide and targets were missed.
This can also occur in IT services and project delivery.
If the space between changes is too small, your team members are constrained as their work is too tightly packed. There is no buffering between major projects, and the minor changes that slip in between them.
To improve the flow, create space between projects and major production releases. Give things time to settle down. Bundle associated groups of changes into their own release. The result will be a consistent flow of delivery work that doesn’t get tangled by being full to capacity.
5. Dining on elephants
How do you eat an elephant? Easy – one bite at a time. It’s a classic kids joke as well as being sound advice for managing large capital budgets in the grown-up world of business.
Future budgets for major projects will come in irregular waves and will be hard fought. There will be high expectations of the projects that support the business trend towards austerity and controlling your non-discretionary “MOOSE” (Maintain and Operate the Organization, Systems and Equipment) spend.
With limited investment in new and improved technologies your portfolio of major projects will be under close scrutiny. Your response should be to design an approach to funding and implementing projects in a tiered, modular manner.
Break your portfolio into three levels – long term strategic programs, medium term tactical projects, and short term operational response initiatives.
Be ruthless in the governance and decision making that drives which projects get funding and which get set aside.
Break the projects into smaller pieces; each piece should deliver a positive business outcome, and should build upon the piece implemented before it.
In this manner you can control three things.
Delivering more with fewer resources, and to a better level of quality, may seem an impossible goal. However, this is exactly what will be expected of the CIO of the Future, and all of your C-level peers.
As you lead discussions with your colleagues, bring with you these five talking points to share:
In your experience what are the primary levers of doing more with less?
Are you expected to deliver more, with less? How do you go about this?
Launch of 2014 Crunch Time report: 14 domains hitting the crunch and responses
By Ross DawsonAt the end of each year we share some thoughts about current trends and what to expect next year and beyond.
Some of our past frameworks include Trend Blend 2007+, Trend Blend 2008+, Map of the Decade: 2010s, Zeitgeist 2011, 12 Themes for 2012, and 2013 – Life Next Year and Beyond: Appearing and Disappearing.
Today Future Exploration Network launches our 2014: Crunch Time mini-report. It explains why we are reaching Crunch Time, the implications, descriptions of 14 domains in which we are hitting the crunch, and how we need to respond.
The graphic slideshow of Crunch Time is embedded below. You can also read the full text in one page at 2014: Crunch Time on the original posting on the Future Exploration Network website.
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Top 3 Priorities for the CIO of the Future in 2014
By Marco OrellanaDigital business leadership and increasing business productivity
Editor’s note: This article is the submission to our CIO of the Future – 2014 Project from Marco Orellana. We are delighted to get a global view from a Latin American perspective, given CODELCO-Chile’s role as the world’s largest copper producer.
From Technological Information Manager to Digital Business Leader
The CIO is becoming a business digital leader and his journey is based on the following points:
Provide Real Support to Increase Business Productivity
Make the New Technology Wave Run The Business
Timeframes for the future of work: trends and uncertainties in this decade and beyond
By Ross DawsonI recently ran an internal workshop on the future of work for a large company. In the next couple of years it will shift its headquarters into a new building and adopt Activity Based Working across the organization.
The key executives understand that in their planning they need to engage with the broader issues of how the world of work is changing, and not just the immediate issues of office space and workforce structure.
In the first phase of the workshop, before delving into the specific issues for their business, I used my Future of Work Framework to provide a big-picture view of the forces of change and the major shifts in play.
Click on the image to download the full framework.
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Why predictions are dangerous and organizations must be well networked
By Ross DawsonThe article focuses on my thoughts on the value of predictions. I’ve written before about why predictions usually have negative value, as an important way of framing how we think about the future.
I am quoted in the article:
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Not just Bitcoin: How will multiple digital currencies compete, succeed, and fail?
By Ross DawsonBitcoin surpassing a valuation of $1,000 yesterday is a real landmark, giving the currency a market capitalization of almost $12 billion and 75-fold growth in value this year.
However Bitcoin is not the only digital currency, simply the most prominent. As Bitcoin’s value has soared, partly driven by a positive response from Senate committees last week, participants have looked further afield to see whether there may be other alternatives that have not risen by so much already.
The second most prominent currency is Litecoin, with a market capitalization of over $1 billion. After that Peercoin and Namecoin currently have capitalizations of close to $80 million, followed by a number of others from $20 million and down in a long tail, with the 23rd ranked currency, Goldcoin, still valued at over $1 million.
Litecoin is over 10 times its value from just 10 days ago, with Peercoin growing 4-fold and Namecoin 12-fold in value over the same period.
The following chart is a snapshot from Coinmarketcap, which provides real-time information on digital currencies. The table shows the largest currencies by market cap, with the chart on the right hand side showing growth over the last 90 days.
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