Pearl Zhu's Blog, page 1422
July 14, 2015
The “Confidence” Behind Decision Making
It takes both "Thinking Fast (intuition) and Thinking Slow (analytics)" to gain enough confidence in making effective decisions.
One of the most important tasks for management is to make decisions, however, across the sectors, many business leaders fail to make effective decisions, Being decisive, getting to the root cause, defining problems are all important, but very few can get them all right, so what’re the mechanisms shall you use, or what is "confidence" in the world of business and where does it fit into the decision making frameworks of organizations?
Re-framing a problem: Any problem is essential if you're going to side-step the "but we've always done it this way" syndrome. Groundbreaking decisions require breaking new ground before the decisions are made. Reframing changes the idea-space you're confronted with, enabling the previously "unthinkable" to potentially present itself as "the only reasonable solution." From a business systemic point of view there are unplanned events that occur at random and whose frequency depends on the business' environment it operates in. You can view the events as opportunities to profit from, not just the risks for mitigation. So re-framing the problems by asking the right questions helps making effective decisions.
Statistical and “Gut feeling” confidence: It takes both "Thinking Fast (intuition) and Thinking Slow (analytics)" to gain enough confidence in making effective decisions. The decision maker’s "gut feeling" represents the ongoing sum of their experiences at (a) estimating the likelihood of a downside event occurring, (b) estimating the magnitude of the impact of the event which may occur on their plans; and, (c) knowing the tolerance of their enterprise for the resulting downside risk. Reliance on "gut feel" is more risky in new ventures where there is less of a track record and in today's markets and economic systems which do not always perform exactly as they have in the past. And there are two types of confidence in making effective decisions. Confidence in relation to statistical estimates is a quantification of the uncertainty remaining following measurement. Confidence in gut feel is a psychological sense of certainty in the face of unquantified uncertainty. Having engaged in some measurement for making decisions, you have reduced the uncertainty, but having quantified the degree of uncertainty remaining, managers do not feel psychological confidence. In contrast, having no measurement of the uncertainty, managers have no difficulty "feeling" confident. Ironically, investing in efforts to reduce uncertainty makes managers feel less confident, because such efforts make the remaining uncertainty loom larger than their sense of uncertainty prior to measurement.
Defining and highlighting uncertainty: One reason managers prefer gut feel is that they often measure what is easy to measure, or what they are required to measure, leaving the most important variables unmeasured except by gut feeling. Most risks are taken because decision makers don't know they are taking them. Investing in efforts to reduce uncertainty highlights the uncertainty which cannot be reduced. Defining and highlighting the uncertainties that cannot be reduced and the potential impact of these uncertainties allows for a better informed decision process and determination as to whether the uncertainty is within the risk tolerance of the enterprise to which the manager should be tuned. It also allows for the establishment of metrics and "early warning" triggers for downside risks, for which there might be contingency plans established.
Due to the complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability of business dynamic, it is not possible to make effective decisions via pure gut feeling or ivory tower approach, the digital decision making style is to think fast and slow, think independently and leverage multiple perspectives. analyze and synthesize for making the right decisions at the right time by the right people.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
One of the most important tasks for management is to make decisions, however, across the sectors, many business leaders fail to make effective decisions, Being decisive, getting to the root cause, defining problems are all important, but very few can get them all right, so what’re the mechanisms shall you use, or what is "confidence" in the world of business and where does it fit into the decision making frameworks of organizations?
Re-framing a problem: Any problem is essential if you're going to side-step the "but we've always done it this way" syndrome. Groundbreaking decisions require breaking new ground before the decisions are made. Reframing changes the idea-space you're confronted with, enabling the previously "unthinkable" to potentially present itself as "the only reasonable solution." From a business systemic point of view there are unplanned events that occur at random and whose frequency depends on the business' environment it operates in. You can view the events as opportunities to profit from, not just the risks for mitigation. So re-framing the problems by asking the right questions helps making effective decisions.
Statistical and “Gut feeling” confidence: It takes both "Thinking Fast (intuition) and Thinking Slow (analytics)" to gain enough confidence in making effective decisions. The decision maker’s "gut feeling" represents the ongoing sum of their experiences at (a) estimating the likelihood of a downside event occurring, (b) estimating the magnitude of the impact of the event which may occur on their plans; and, (c) knowing the tolerance of their enterprise for the resulting downside risk. Reliance on "gut feel" is more risky in new ventures where there is less of a track record and in today's markets and economic systems which do not always perform exactly as they have in the past. And there are two types of confidence in making effective decisions. Confidence in relation to statistical estimates is a quantification of the uncertainty remaining following measurement. Confidence in gut feel is a psychological sense of certainty in the face of unquantified uncertainty. Having engaged in some measurement for making decisions, you have reduced the uncertainty, but having quantified the degree of uncertainty remaining, managers do not feel psychological confidence. In contrast, having no measurement of the uncertainty, managers have no difficulty "feeling" confident. Ironically, investing in efforts to reduce uncertainty makes managers feel less confident, because such efforts make the remaining uncertainty loom larger than their sense of uncertainty prior to measurement.
Defining and highlighting uncertainty: One reason managers prefer gut feel is that they often measure what is easy to measure, or what they are required to measure, leaving the most important variables unmeasured except by gut feeling. Most risks are taken because decision makers don't know they are taking them. Investing in efforts to reduce uncertainty highlights the uncertainty which cannot be reduced. Defining and highlighting the uncertainties that cannot be reduced and the potential impact of these uncertainties allows for a better informed decision process and determination as to whether the uncertainty is within the risk tolerance of the enterprise to which the manager should be tuned. It also allows for the establishment of metrics and "early warning" triggers for downside risks, for which there might be contingency plans established.Due to the complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability of business dynamic, it is not possible to make effective decisions via pure gut feeling or ivory tower approach, the digital decision making style is to think fast and slow, think independently and leverage multiple perspectives. analyze and synthesize for making the right decisions at the right time by the right people.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Self-Leadership: How Critical is It?
"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes..." C. Jung
Leadership is all about CHANGE. With all the talk about leadership, there is relatively little about self-leadership, yet we each need to step up to ask: Who are we? Do we want to change things? Why aren’t we being the change we want to see? What’s stopping us from changing ? There's no advantage to trying to reshape things as there will be no success until people understand the big WHY and are willing to accept the change. Self-leadership: How critical could it be?
Self leadership proceeds leading others. To know oneself is necessary to understand the filters and the bias. It’s important to looking inward. All real change takes courage, as the old guard will always fight for the "Status Quo." The willingness to go full steam, straight against the tide, always requires a strong inner belief that something better will emerge, hence the revolution. Self reflection makes you more emphatic as a leader: Which quality makes you a strong leader? The advanced mindset or the exemplary behavior? The broad knowledge or profound wisdom? All our external battles have roots within us. All conflict starts on the inside and is projected outward. Therefore, it is necessary to love oneself before you can love others.
It's about being the change - and thus inspiring adaptability in others.The challenge is, if you want others to follow, you've got to adapt how you lead. Not just repeat what you've done before in other situations, but what's needed in this particular circumstance - with this team and their particular challenges. So do you have learning agility to continually update your knowledge? Of course new knowledge depends on previous knowledge, but this does not mean that what is new is limited by what came before. Some new ideas are a leap--a creative insight, not just a logical incremental step from what currently is. Yes it takes courage which few have, to advance an idea that is not commonly held or acceptable by the majority; this is likely why new bold ideas come from the edges and not the center. From strategic perspective, it's also planning matters. And leadership at present is the missing link in business planning. You would think that adaptation would lead us into a better model, and in time it will. If we do not adopt a new economic model based on “win-win,” the “Win-Lose” will make us all losers in the end.
A leader’s individual journey is over the long haul and the goal should be to continually improve. It's a challenge and a responsibility of a leader to strive to do the right thing. Furthermore, if you remain open and keep reaching to learn more and positively impact as many people as you can, then the possibilities are limitless (sky's the limit). The lessons learned and remaining open have enabled you to understand that followers are able to do amazing things when given the opportunity and as a leader, you can help create this. Change happens where logic, education, and desire replace ignorance and hopelessness! Where creativity and innovation come together to promote self leadership, positive change equates to RESULTS! Thought-provoking ideas, ignite creative statements and using them to manifest new ideas, constructively challenging the limits of traditional thinking and exploring the reasons why we do the things we do. However, to do self-leadership requires taking risks and feeling fear because what you are then communicating to those around you comes from inside you, from the unconventional wisdom, or the invisible. This goes very much against millennium of evolution and most importantly tends to separate that person from their peer group. But this is also the very quality to be an authentic leader and a transformative change agent to drive changes.
Change, growth, self-leadership is the result and the ability to challenge oneself beyond the constraints of tradition. Self leadership based on self-reflection and self-evaluation empowers us to “be the change we want to see in the world and therefore enhancing our quality of life.” Taking this to the next level, leadership is needed now more than ever in all aspects of our world.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Leadership is all about CHANGE. With all the talk about leadership, there is relatively little about self-leadership, yet we each need to step up to ask: Who are we? Do we want to change things? Why aren’t we being the change we want to see? What’s stopping us from changing ? There's no advantage to trying to reshape things as there will be no success until people understand the big WHY and are willing to accept the change. Self-leadership: How critical could it be?
Self leadership proceeds leading others. To know oneself is necessary to understand the filters and the bias. It’s important to looking inward. All real change takes courage, as the old guard will always fight for the "Status Quo." The willingness to go full steam, straight against the tide, always requires a strong inner belief that something better will emerge, hence the revolution. Self reflection makes you more emphatic as a leader: Which quality makes you a strong leader? The advanced mindset or the exemplary behavior? The broad knowledge or profound wisdom? All our external battles have roots within us. All conflict starts on the inside and is projected outward. Therefore, it is necessary to love oneself before you can love others.
It's about being the change - and thus inspiring adaptability in others.The challenge is, if you want others to follow, you've got to adapt how you lead. Not just repeat what you've done before in other situations, but what's needed in this particular circumstance - with this team and their particular challenges. So do you have learning agility to continually update your knowledge? Of course new knowledge depends on previous knowledge, but this does not mean that what is new is limited by what came before. Some new ideas are a leap--a creative insight, not just a logical incremental step from what currently is. Yes it takes courage which few have, to advance an idea that is not commonly held or acceptable by the majority; this is likely why new bold ideas come from the edges and not the center. From strategic perspective, it's also planning matters. And leadership at present is the missing link in business planning. You would think that adaptation would lead us into a better model, and in time it will. If we do not adopt a new economic model based on “win-win,” the “Win-Lose” will make us all losers in the end.
A leader’s individual journey is over the long haul and the goal should be to continually improve. It's a challenge and a responsibility of a leader to strive to do the right thing. Furthermore, if you remain open and keep reaching to learn more and positively impact as many people as you can, then the possibilities are limitless (sky's the limit). The lessons learned and remaining open have enabled you to understand that followers are able to do amazing things when given the opportunity and as a leader, you can help create this. Change happens where logic, education, and desire replace ignorance and hopelessness! Where creativity and innovation come together to promote self leadership, positive change equates to RESULTS! Thought-provoking ideas, ignite creative statements and using them to manifest new ideas, constructively challenging the limits of traditional thinking and exploring the reasons why we do the things we do. However, to do self-leadership requires taking risks and feeling fear because what you are then communicating to those around you comes from inside you, from the unconventional wisdom, or the invisible. This goes very much against millennium of evolution and most importantly tends to separate that person from their peer group. But this is also the very quality to be an authentic leader and a transformative change agent to drive changes.
Change, growth, self-leadership is the result and the ability to challenge oneself beyond the constraints of tradition. Self leadership based on self-reflection and self-evaluation empowers us to “be the change we want to see in the world and therefore enhancing our quality of life.” Taking this to the next level, leadership is needed now more than ever in all aspects of our world.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
July 12, 2015
Is your Talent Acquisition Strategy Aligned with Your Business Strategy?
From gap identification to goal setting and measurement, talent acquisition strategy and talent development plan needs to be well integrated into business strategy.
Talent acquisition, management, and retention provide the backbone for any successful organization. It is imperative that companies understand people are the most valuable resource they have and it requires proper management, effort, and support to maintain a vibrant workforce, it requires a dynamic "pipeline" of talent. So is your talent acquisition strategy well aligned with your business strategy?
First step in Talent Acquisition process is to define what talent means to your company, division& department and individual roles. The question really is, how do you grow extra talent besides what's already in the market. This is an important starting point before you begin to identify and recruit talent. Not only skills and experience counts here, but more importantly "DNA," the business culture, motivational drives, learning ability etc. Skills can be improved on via training while traits are very hard to change. Upper management must be on board in the process. If an upper management is not connected in an organization, the morale is low and it is hard to bring people into that atmosphere.
It is easier to attract talent than to find it, the challenge for organizations is to attempt to become an "employer of choice." It requires outreach and constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to raise your profile where it can be most productive. Building an inspiring employer brand is a huge challenge for most companies. Especially, because an enterprise cannot only be built through an interesting website, but needs to be supported by happy employees and happy customers. Potential employees search for certain employers that meet their requirements. It's therefore important to correctly identify what kind of talent you need, what these potential employees are looking for in employment and probably brand yourself accordingly. The effective execution of an "employment brand" is a game-changer for recruiting and acquiring top talent in today's multi-generational workforce. So it is important for a company who injects an "employment brand/personality" into their recruiting messaging and efforts. An employer's brand stems from its internal company culture. Leveraging this in recruiting efforts is a great way to attract and retain top candidates.
Talent development is a continuous effort to groom the right talent for business’s long term prosperity. Talent acquisition includes people and skills development, aligning people to organizational vision and values, succession planning, engagement and retention strategies through enlightened leadership and management practices. Employee development plan should be done with employees and not against them. It should also be clear how the company will invest in developing their human capital since the organization will benefit with long term perspective significantly. It means sustainable and relevant skills that benefit the employees as well as the company they work for. The notion of “benefit to the employee,” is the essential starting point to engage employees in the greater "WHY" and the underlying motivation for engaging in an assessment process from the beginning.
From gap identification to goal setting and measurement, talent acquisition strategy and talent development plan needs to be well integrated into business strategy, and make continuous journey to create a strong business brand, attract, grow and manage talent more effectively.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Talent acquisition, management, and retention provide the backbone for any successful organization. It is imperative that companies understand people are the most valuable resource they have and it requires proper management, effort, and support to maintain a vibrant workforce, it requires a dynamic "pipeline" of talent. So is your talent acquisition strategy well aligned with your business strategy?
First step in Talent Acquisition process is to define what talent means to your company, division& department and individual roles. The question really is, how do you grow extra talent besides what's already in the market. This is an important starting point before you begin to identify and recruit talent. Not only skills and experience counts here, but more importantly "DNA," the business culture, motivational drives, learning ability etc. Skills can be improved on via training while traits are very hard to change. Upper management must be on board in the process. If an upper management is not connected in an organization, the morale is low and it is hard to bring people into that atmosphere.
It is easier to attract talent than to find it, the challenge for organizations is to attempt to become an "employer of choice." It requires outreach and constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to raise your profile where it can be most productive. Building an inspiring employer brand is a huge challenge for most companies. Especially, because an enterprise cannot only be built through an interesting website, but needs to be supported by happy employees and happy customers. Potential employees search for certain employers that meet their requirements. It's therefore important to correctly identify what kind of talent you need, what these potential employees are looking for in employment and probably brand yourself accordingly. The effective execution of an "employment brand" is a game-changer for recruiting and acquiring top talent in today's multi-generational workforce. So it is important for a company who injects an "employment brand/personality" into their recruiting messaging and efforts. An employer's brand stems from its internal company culture. Leveraging this in recruiting efforts is a great way to attract and retain top candidates.
Talent development is a continuous effort to groom the right talent for business’s long term prosperity. Talent acquisition includes people and skills development, aligning people to organizational vision and values, succession planning, engagement and retention strategies through enlightened leadership and management practices. Employee development plan should be done with employees and not against them. It should also be clear how the company will invest in developing their human capital since the organization will benefit with long term perspective significantly. It means sustainable and relevant skills that benefit the employees as well as the company they work for. The notion of “benefit to the employee,” is the essential starting point to engage employees in the greater "WHY" and the underlying motivation for engaging in an assessment process from the beginning.From gap identification to goal setting and measurement, talent acquisition strategy and talent development plan needs to be well integrated into business strategy, and make continuous journey to create a strong business brand, attract, grow and manage talent more effectively.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Innovation Measurement: How to Do it Right?
The measures should be oriented to justify innovation organization is needed.
Innovation is the light every organization must pursue now, but most of innovation initiatives fail to achieve the expected result. Druck is credited as saying: “We can only manage what we measure.” What is stopping you from measuring top line impact from innovation, how much revenue is generated by innovations launched in the last 5 years? Are innovation failures caused by the time lag, inefficiency of financial systems? Is your innovation process not so clear with limited information on what has been done, or something else for ineffective innovation management, like a fuzzy or not well communicated strategy goals? And innovation measurement, how to do it right?
The measures should be oriented to justify innovation organization is needed. The problem is often that the initiative is not well defined. Without well defined goals, you won’t have the effective plan and enough time to generate results. So, it is difficult to measure the impact without taking time to generate impact. The approach is that the impact is generally equitable to the size of the problem the innovation is addressing. The larger the challenge, the easier it is to see the impact. Better look at what the results were prior to implementing the innovation and after. Of course there are other dependencies, which one must assess more clearly. Asks key questions around innovation strategy, capacity and discipline such as:Strategy - Do we know "Why Where When" to innovate?Capacity - Do we have the Processes - People - Resources to drive ideas to commercialization?Discipline - Do we have the Leadership- Behavior- Metrics to finish what we start?The set of questionnaires help a great deal to outline the total system at work in an enterprise that accomplishes new product innovation. Without this system perspective, it is difficult to identify the most critical performance indicators, and the likelihood of sub-optimizing various parts of the system is high. When this occurs, the risk of actually degrading overall system performance is very real.
There is no best practice solution which fits all cases. Normally organizations look for KPIs measuring business results generated by innovation efforts. But it takes quite some time for a new innovation drive to produce those measures. One of solutions is to define process KPIs, which demonstrate the growing capability of the organization to deliver more innovation with business impact in the future. You choose those KPIs by deciding which are seen as critical to make progress on in order to deliver more innovations. The fewer the better, but they have to be credible and relevant also in the eyes of the stakeholders. For example, culture is a perfect (sometime it gets even too complicated) metric system to measure impact of innovation on the business in order to unleash more successful, transformational innovations.
The impact of innovations on enterprise performance ranges from effects on turnover and market share to changes in productivity and efficiency. The productivity effects of innovative activities has been one of the most challenging issues in empirical economics for several decades. The majority of studies on the relationship between innovation and firms’ economic performance uses the production function approach, where different measures of firm performance (mainly productivity) are explained by several independent variables such as physical capital, human capital, R&D and other innovation-related investments as well as firm size. The innovation studies in recent years showed that the innovation success rate is not proportional with the amount of R&D investment, which means the more money or resource you pour into the innovation initiative does not guarantee the higher ROI from innovation effort.
Setting guidelines for developing a customized suite of innovation metrics. Select the few (3-5) KPIs, to keep the measures simple and understandable. There are good reasons to focus on top line vs bottom line. The innovation metrics in the context of business impact include such as, % of revenue from new products introduced. You could also change the variables and create something like % of profit from new ideas implemented. Some choose innovation process KPIs, process KPIs could link to strategy, to make progress on the percentage of projects in the total innovation portfolio which contained a major part of external innovation. You may compare, focus on high growth markets with high margin solutions before and after implementation of new innovation process. You may need a simple portfolio management tool and process to achieve this. The share of wealth is another interesting one to measure the change in company market value during past year divided by the change in the total industry’s market value. You may consider your company as innovative, but what about your competitors/ rivals/ new entrants if they are more innovative. The goal for measurement is to create new revenue, and drive early success to create a positive spiral. The change in the value of innovation projects portfolio (value of your development pipeline) and distribution of your portfolio in terms of incremental vs disruptive, local vs global, core vs far from core industry, small vs big investment, offering- production- delivery- customer experience, competitive (own resources) vs. collaborative (partners) etc., is depending on your strategy. The increase in the contribution of partners in your portfolio is the main goal of an open innovation initiative. And some say, each successful innovation needs at least nine failures - measure the failures. If the organization allows these nine failures - it will be successful in innovation!
All innovation initiatives, hopefully, are started to achieve some business result directly or indirectly. Just measure that result. To better align innovation management with strategy, organizations must develop a Scorecard to justify the initial investment in the program and the initial results (intangible and no concrete, of course) more than to measure financial results. And always keep the measurement simple, understandable and understandable.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Innovation is the light every organization must pursue now, but most of innovation initiatives fail to achieve the expected result. Druck is credited as saying: “We can only manage what we measure.” What is stopping you from measuring top line impact from innovation, how much revenue is generated by innovations launched in the last 5 years? Are innovation failures caused by the time lag, inefficiency of financial systems? Is your innovation process not so clear with limited information on what has been done, or something else for ineffective innovation management, like a fuzzy or not well communicated strategy goals? And innovation measurement, how to do it right?
The measures should be oriented to justify innovation organization is needed. The problem is often that the initiative is not well defined. Without well defined goals, you won’t have the effective plan and enough time to generate results. So, it is difficult to measure the impact without taking time to generate impact. The approach is that the impact is generally equitable to the size of the problem the innovation is addressing. The larger the challenge, the easier it is to see the impact. Better look at what the results were prior to implementing the innovation and after. Of course there are other dependencies, which one must assess more clearly. Asks key questions around innovation strategy, capacity and discipline such as:Strategy - Do we know "Why Where When" to innovate?Capacity - Do we have the Processes - People - Resources to drive ideas to commercialization?Discipline - Do we have the Leadership- Behavior- Metrics to finish what we start?The set of questionnaires help a great deal to outline the total system at work in an enterprise that accomplishes new product innovation. Without this system perspective, it is difficult to identify the most critical performance indicators, and the likelihood of sub-optimizing various parts of the system is high. When this occurs, the risk of actually degrading overall system performance is very real.
There is no best practice solution which fits all cases. Normally organizations look for KPIs measuring business results generated by innovation efforts. But it takes quite some time for a new innovation drive to produce those measures. One of solutions is to define process KPIs, which demonstrate the growing capability of the organization to deliver more innovation with business impact in the future. You choose those KPIs by deciding which are seen as critical to make progress on in order to deliver more innovations. The fewer the better, but they have to be credible and relevant also in the eyes of the stakeholders. For example, culture is a perfect (sometime it gets even too complicated) metric system to measure impact of innovation on the business in order to unleash more successful, transformational innovations.
The impact of innovations on enterprise performance ranges from effects on turnover and market share to changes in productivity and efficiency. The productivity effects of innovative activities has been one of the most challenging issues in empirical economics for several decades. The majority of studies on the relationship between innovation and firms’ economic performance uses the production function approach, where different measures of firm performance (mainly productivity) are explained by several independent variables such as physical capital, human capital, R&D and other innovation-related investments as well as firm size. The innovation studies in recent years showed that the innovation success rate is not proportional with the amount of R&D investment, which means the more money or resource you pour into the innovation initiative does not guarantee the higher ROI from innovation effort.
Setting guidelines for developing a customized suite of innovation metrics. Select the few (3-5) KPIs, to keep the measures simple and understandable. There are good reasons to focus on top line vs bottom line. The innovation metrics in the context of business impact include such as, % of revenue from new products introduced. You could also change the variables and create something like % of profit from new ideas implemented. Some choose innovation process KPIs, process KPIs could link to strategy, to make progress on the percentage of projects in the total innovation portfolio which contained a major part of external innovation. You may compare, focus on high growth markets with high margin solutions before and after implementation of new innovation process. You may need a simple portfolio management tool and process to achieve this. The share of wealth is another interesting one to measure the change in company market value during past year divided by the change in the total industry’s market value. You may consider your company as innovative, but what about your competitors/ rivals/ new entrants if they are more innovative. The goal for measurement is to create new revenue, and drive early success to create a positive spiral. The change in the value of innovation projects portfolio (value of your development pipeline) and distribution of your portfolio in terms of incremental vs disruptive, local vs global, core vs far from core industry, small vs big investment, offering- production- delivery- customer experience, competitive (own resources) vs. collaborative (partners) etc., is depending on your strategy. The increase in the contribution of partners in your portfolio is the main goal of an open innovation initiative. And some say, each successful innovation needs at least nine failures - measure the failures. If the organization allows these nine failures - it will be successful in innovation!
All innovation initiatives, hopefully, are started to achieve some business result directly or indirectly. Just measure that result. To better align innovation management with strategy, organizations must develop a Scorecard to justify the initial investment in the program and the initial results (intangible and no concrete, of course) more than to measure financial results. And always keep the measurement simple, understandable and understandable.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
July 11, 2015
How do you Assess an Organization is Ready for Change?
An organization is on the road to success when change is part of its nature.
Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is accelerating. However, adaptability and resourcefulness -the response to change are woefully underrated by business as keys to sustainability and success. How do you assess an organization that is ready for change? How can you measure change readiness? How do you engage with today's management and make them change themselves into the role needed today for modern Change Management? What is needed to be done in order to execute a successful change when you have different level of leadership quality? And what are the further aspects in managing change successfully?
Vision, boldness and decisiveness is crucial to introduce changes in the marketplace. Businesses that wait for demand to change are starting behind the curve. High valued businesses are the ones listening to the wildest desires and needs of their potential customers. There is the critical need of active and supportive leadership nowadays and especially in change processes. It also requires special team members from marketing to sales, to operations, to customer services and after sales, to accounting and finance, etc. Thus, there is no room for functional silos and narrow specialization. It takes vision, boldness and decisiveness via cross-functional communication and collaboration, to make proactive changes and radical digital transformation.
An organization is on the road to success when change is part of its nature. Overcoming resistance to change in an organizational culture is key to moving the ship’s direction. Successful organizations see the changes coming and with preplanning to overcome the resistance before it even manifests. The ONLY certainty leaders of organizations will have is that their business will change. It is only a matter of time. Therefore, those who prepare their employees to cope with all coming change, will be the companies of the future with a future. Corporate agility--the very ability to adapt to the change, is an interesting topic especially when contrasting large and small companies. Large ones are often thought of as slow and full of inertia while small ones have speed for innovation. This is true to a degree, but the most innovative large companies are constantly challenging their own ability to transform, as bellwethers in their industry, they can make huge impact to transform their vertical sectors as well.
Change readiness can be determined via a validated instrument, the change profile-scan. Too many organizations are mechanistic, control and command hierarchies. If you organization fits the description, get out fast or initiate change within. It's not change that needs management. It's management that has to change its paternalistic view and give space to what the professionals they hired for the works. Companies don't think about change. People in companies do, from different positions. Mostly the management wants to see a different (better) result of all combined efforts. So methods or people held responsible for those results 'has to change.' Dynamic and changing organizations cannot operate with stable unchanging people. Most people are quite willing to put effort in change. What they don't want is 'to be changed by others'. That calls out for resistance. So let them be part of the direction, speed and way you are heading. If people are used to take action of their own, and are also responsible for it, you can move mountains. An important trend observed so far is the adoption of Agile method into the organizational structure of a company. The change must come in removing the political power struggle within a company. With continuous changes, business can only be built on the belief of serving personal growth and providing tools or enabling frameworks that allow employees to become better, or more capable persons, or to have the organization as a whole become more agile and mature. The management and staff need to be working as high performing and creative teams, having both internal and external beliefs around how the business is a movement for ennoblement and improvement. Building the expectation for the next step and commitment that will follow. Those who cannot learn and change will get left behind.
Closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients and employees are evolving naturally. Change Management therefore should be an adequate, logical, and systematic effort to any environmental shift. Business will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their change capability. That being said, after objective change-readiness assessment, it requires a plan and strategy, and most importantly the execution. Well planned execution will greatly reduce and practically eliminate the fear of change that derails good or even great intentions. Change becomes an ongoing business capability to achieve high performance and high business maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is accelerating. However, adaptability and resourcefulness -the response to change are woefully underrated by business as keys to sustainability and success. How do you assess an organization that is ready for change? How can you measure change readiness? How do you engage with today's management and make them change themselves into the role needed today for modern Change Management? What is needed to be done in order to execute a successful change when you have different level of leadership quality? And what are the further aspects in managing change successfully?
Vision, boldness and decisiveness is crucial to introduce changes in the marketplace. Businesses that wait for demand to change are starting behind the curve. High valued businesses are the ones listening to the wildest desires and needs of their potential customers. There is the critical need of active and supportive leadership nowadays and especially in change processes. It also requires special team members from marketing to sales, to operations, to customer services and after sales, to accounting and finance, etc. Thus, there is no room for functional silos and narrow specialization. It takes vision, boldness and decisiveness via cross-functional communication and collaboration, to make proactive changes and radical digital transformation.
An organization is on the road to success when change is part of its nature. Overcoming resistance to change in an organizational culture is key to moving the ship’s direction. Successful organizations see the changes coming and with preplanning to overcome the resistance before it even manifests. The ONLY certainty leaders of organizations will have is that their business will change. It is only a matter of time. Therefore, those who prepare their employees to cope with all coming change, will be the companies of the future with a future. Corporate agility--the very ability to adapt to the change, is an interesting topic especially when contrasting large and small companies. Large ones are often thought of as slow and full of inertia while small ones have speed for innovation. This is true to a degree, but the most innovative large companies are constantly challenging their own ability to transform, as bellwethers in their industry, they can make huge impact to transform their vertical sectors as well.
Change readiness can be determined via a validated instrument, the change profile-scan. Too many organizations are mechanistic, control and command hierarchies. If you organization fits the description, get out fast or initiate change within. It's not change that needs management. It's management that has to change its paternalistic view and give space to what the professionals they hired for the works. Companies don't think about change. People in companies do, from different positions. Mostly the management wants to see a different (better) result of all combined efforts. So methods or people held responsible for those results 'has to change.' Dynamic and changing organizations cannot operate with stable unchanging people. Most people are quite willing to put effort in change. What they don't want is 'to be changed by others'. That calls out for resistance. So let them be part of the direction, speed and way you are heading. If people are used to take action of their own, and are also responsible for it, you can move mountains. An important trend observed so far is the adoption of Agile method into the organizational structure of a company. The change must come in removing the political power struggle within a company. With continuous changes, business can only be built on the belief of serving personal growth and providing tools or enabling frameworks that allow employees to become better, or more capable persons, or to have the organization as a whole become more agile and mature. The management and staff need to be working as high performing and creative teams, having both internal and external beliefs around how the business is a movement for ennoblement and improvement. Building the expectation for the next step and commitment that will follow. Those who cannot learn and change will get left behind.
Closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients and employees are evolving naturally. Change Management therefore should be an adequate, logical, and systematic effort to any environmental shift. Business will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their change capability. That being said, after objective change-readiness assessment, it requires a plan and strategy, and most importantly the execution. Well planned execution will greatly reduce and practically eliminate the fear of change that derails good or even great intentions. Change becomes an ongoing business capability to achieve high performance and high business maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Employee Engagement Strategy: Does it Work
At the age of digital, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to build engaging workforce.
Statistically, less than one third of employees feel engaged in the work, what’re the root causes to the low employee engagement, and what’s your strategy (that actually works) to do something about it?
The top culprits on low employee engagement are: (1) poor communication, from the top down. (2) perceived absence of development opportunities or career prospects and (3) lack of healthy culture such as fairness, innovation, learning, etc. There are obviously variances, but the pattern is similar. (4) lack of great leadership. Often top down command-control management fails, because lacking methods for helping front line managers perform better as leaders. Without such methods, too many of the unprepared and untrained front line managers will "do their best" and fail as they've always failed, through no fault of their own.
So management needs to value engagement over empire-building. Hopefully the implementation includes sufficient room for innovation to reflect the real needs of the organizational systems. Have you considered or experimented with handing the problem to the team and letting them figure it out? If you want a bottom up solution, ASK for it. Managers at all levels need to have integrity for this to work, be truly committed to their team’s success, and be willing to let their teams do the work. This comes from the top, the communication regarding integrity and commitment to the people starts at the top. Though trust is the two way street to build relationship across all parties.
The bottoms-up engagement of personnel should be part of your annual strategy review. Whichever strategy mapping tool you use (such as the balanced scorecard), this creates an annual opportunity to ensure personnel is not only being engaged, but their focus on energy aligned with the organizational strategy. It offers not only the opportunity for the intended bottom line performance improvements, but also better performance management because of performance review with employees based on the business needs and strategy. Because they feel part of the business intelligence and solution, it creates better buy-in and overall employee satisfaction.
Reimagine the fundamentals of how organizations work. Leadership who listens well and provides ample room for the job development and a leadership who actively partners with HR to develop and promote a clear, simple plan for career progression sounds almost too simplistic, but it is indeed the most efficient and inexpensive route to higher employee engagement. Also the reality is that the organizational structures and relationships with and between employees were designed for a very different age. It's not just a leadership/ management issue; most organizations are grossly dysfunctional, despite often noble attempts at change by the leadership team. More often, workers are asked to be "engaged" inside and outside the company environment, at the same time, many companies don't have the mechanisms or interest in engaging employees outside the work environment to enable personal growth, and implementing a methodology that teaches people how to use their strengths, and the strengths of others in the organization is necessary to get employees engaged.
At the age of digital, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work and well tune the structure to build engaging workforce. Don’t make the rules or structure too restrictive, and leave the room for management innovation, to strike the right balance between orders (structure) and "chaos (sparking innovation), between team setting and cross-functional communication and collaboration; between "old way" and new way to do things, in order to improve employee engagement and overall business maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Statistically, less than one third of employees feel engaged in the work, what’re the root causes to the low employee engagement, and what’s your strategy (that actually works) to do something about it?
The top culprits on low employee engagement are: (1) poor communication, from the top down. (2) perceived absence of development opportunities or career prospects and (3) lack of healthy culture such as fairness, innovation, learning, etc. There are obviously variances, but the pattern is similar. (4) lack of great leadership. Often top down command-control management fails, because lacking methods for helping front line managers perform better as leaders. Without such methods, too many of the unprepared and untrained front line managers will "do their best" and fail as they've always failed, through no fault of their own.
So management needs to value engagement over empire-building. Hopefully the implementation includes sufficient room for innovation to reflect the real needs of the organizational systems. Have you considered or experimented with handing the problem to the team and letting them figure it out? If you want a bottom up solution, ASK for it. Managers at all levels need to have integrity for this to work, be truly committed to their team’s success, and be willing to let their teams do the work. This comes from the top, the communication regarding integrity and commitment to the people starts at the top. Though trust is the two way street to build relationship across all parties.
The bottoms-up engagement of personnel should be part of your annual strategy review. Whichever strategy mapping tool you use (such as the balanced scorecard), this creates an annual opportunity to ensure personnel is not only being engaged, but their focus on energy aligned with the organizational strategy. It offers not only the opportunity for the intended bottom line performance improvements, but also better performance management because of performance review with employees based on the business needs and strategy. Because they feel part of the business intelligence and solution, it creates better buy-in and overall employee satisfaction.
Reimagine the fundamentals of how organizations work. Leadership who listens well and provides ample room for the job development and a leadership who actively partners with HR to develop and promote a clear, simple plan for career progression sounds almost too simplistic, but it is indeed the most efficient and inexpensive route to higher employee engagement. Also the reality is that the organizational structures and relationships with and between employees were designed for a very different age. It's not just a leadership/ management issue; most organizations are grossly dysfunctional, despite often noble attempts at change by the leadership team. More often, workers are asked to be "engaged" inside and outside the company environment, at the same time, many companies don't have the mechanisms or interest in engaging employees outside the work environment to enable personal growth, and implementing a methodology that teaches people how to use their strengths, and the strengths of others in the organization is necessary to get employees engaged.
At the age of digital, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work and well tune the structure to build engaging workforce. Don’t make the rules or structure too restrictive, and leave the room for management innovation, to strike the right balance between orders (structure) and "chaos (sparking innovation), between team setting and cross-functional communication and collaboration; between "old way" and new way to do things, in order to improve employee engagement and overall business maturity.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Which Comes First – Goals or Strategy
Strategy without vision is “blindness,” strategy without goals is “emptiness,” execution without strategy is "busyness."
If vision is the destination your organization need to travel to, strategy is the compass to navigate through the journey, and the goals are like the mountains you should climb over, or the rivers you have to get cross through. So in order to manage the journey smoothly, which comes first - goals or strategy? Strategy first; goals second generally. So based on the metaphor above, the answer is obvious. It has generally been vision or purpose for existence first, and then strategy or strategic plan to set the goals next to achieve it. The goal is "the mountain the company wishes to climb," in order to reach the VISION - "where you want to go," “the trophy you want to win.” The strategies are about "how you to climb the mountain" or "how they will win the games necessary to win the trophy," or in journey terms, the "road you will travel." The all important link no matter what terminology you use to relate to your associates is the tactics with specific action plans, due dates, and responsibilities for every team member to support the goal and the strategies to achieve the goal. So the winners focus on the clipboard (where the strategy is written) and then the score (the goal) is a natural byproduct. If the strategy is right, the goals and performance will come on its own. But if you only look at the scoreboard, nobody will know what to do to get there.
Sometimes, innovation requires a goal to get started, solving an emergent problem. Most businesses start with a vision and establish a set of strategies to achieve it, but the ever-changing marketplace has a way of impacting your original thinking. As a result, the best managed companies, and those that achieve long-term success, nearly always evolve their vision/mission/strategy/goals with the changing times and market conditions. Plus, competitive response impacts this equation terrifically, and often in unexpected ways. The only way to make this work over the long haul is to continuously monitor the pulse of the marketplace and trim your sails accordingly. No vision or business strategy lasts forever, even if it's not broken, be open to change. This mindset often leads to even greater results. Sometime, strategy before goal seems reactive. Innovation requires a goal to get started, solving an emergent problem. Innovating to create something new or boldly solve something big requires that proactively responds to the ongoing changes, and sometimes means the goal first statement. Multiple strategies can then be weighed.
It partly comes down to a left-brain/right-brain issue. If you are analytical and data-driven, then of course you do the strategy that then helps define the eventual goal. On the other hand, global thinkers set the goal first, then decide how best to reach it. Neither of these approaches is static, so they apply in any marketplace, as Covey said “begin with the end in mind.” It is also true once you embark on a journey of goal and strategy, it generally turns into a circular path versus linear way, in the sense that execution of strategies invariably point to new goals which require strategies to be updated and so on. Last but not least, involve every employee to have a clear business vision, and to participate in the development and execution of the goals strategies and tactics. Publishing the score, recognize and celebrate success, build a lessons learned and applied culture (celebrate the learning and applied learning from failure), and make course corrections along the way as needed.
So generally speaking, strategy without vision is “busyness,” strategy without goals is “emptiness.” Organizations need to have a sound strategy to laser focus on the destination, but be agile to adapt to the emergent change circumstances, or be flexible for enabling innovation via setting alternative paths to achieve the goals, or ultimately realize the vision.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
If vision is the destination your organization need to travel to, strategy is the compass to navigate through the journey, and the goals are like the mountains you should climb over, or the rivers you have to get cross through. So in order to manage the journey smoothly, which comes first - goals or strategy? Strategy first; goals second generally. So based on the metaphor above, the answer is obvious. It has generally been vision or purpose for existence first, and then strategy or strategic plan to set the goals next to achieve it. The goal is "the mountain the company wishes to climb," in order to reach the VISION - "where you want to go," “the trophy you want to win.” The strategies are about "how you to climb the mountain" or "how they will win the games necessary to win the trophy," or in journey terms, the "road you will travel." The all important link no matter what terminology you use to relate to your associates is the tactics with specific action plans, due dates, and responsibilities for every team member to support the goal and the strategies to achieve the goal. So the winners focus on the clipboard (where the strategy is written) and then the score (the goal) is a natural byproduct. If the strategy is right, the goals and performance will come on its own. But if you only look at the scoreboard, nobody will know what to do to get there.
Sometimes, innovation requires a goal to get started, solving an emergent problem. Most businesses start with a vision and establish a set of strategies to achieve it, but the ever-changing marketplace has a way of impacting your original thinking. As a result, the best managed companies, and those that achieve long-term success, nearly always evolve their vision/mission/strategy/goals with the changing times and market conditions. Plus, competitive response impacts this equation terrifically, and often in unexpected ways. The only way to make this work over the long haul is to continuously monitor the pulse of the marketplace and trim your sails accordingly. No vision or business strategy lasts forever, even if it's not broken, be open to change. This mindset often leads to even greater results. Sometime, strategy before goal seems reactive. Innovation requires a goal to get started, solving an emergent problem. Innovating to create something new or boldly solve something big requires that proactively responds to the ongoing changes, and sometimes means the goal first statement. Multiple strategies can then be weighed.
It partly comes down to a left-brain/right-brain issue. If you are analytical and data-driven, then of course you do the strategy that then helps define the eventual goal. On the other hand, global thinkers set the goal first, then decide how best to reach it. Neither of these approaches is static, so they apply in any marketplace, as Covey said “begin with the end in mind.” It is also true once you embark on a journey of goal and strategy, it generally turns into a circular path versus linear way, in the sense that execution of strategies invariably point to new goals which require strategies to be updated and so on. Last but not least, involve every employee to have a clear business vision, and to participate in the development and execution of the goals strategies and tactics. Publishing the score, recognize and celebrate success, build a lessons learned and applied culture (celebrate the learning and applied learning from failure), and make course corrections along the way as needed.So generally speaking, strategy without vision is “busyness,” strategy without goals is “emptiness.” Organizations need to have a sound strategy to laser focus on the destination, but be agile to adapt to the emergent change circumstances, or be flexible for enabling innovation via setting alternative paths to achieve the goals, or ultimately realize the vision.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
July 10, 2015
What is the Future of Software Engineering?
As more people are born into this technology centered world, coding, and use of technology will become a fundamental skill today.
The twentieth century had a new science - Computer Science. In searching for the scientific basis of Software Engineering, Computer Science has been seriously attempted. Computation was to become one of the most important disciplines of the sciences. This is because it is the science of how machines can be made to carry out intellectual processes and capabilities. We know that any intellectual process can be carried out mechanically and performed by a general-purpose digital computer. Business starts to think intellectually, with value delivered continuously.
Software engineering is a branch from computer science which is a branch from mathematics. So engineering is the practical application of principles and practices constrained by the laws of the domain. Software engineering with about half century history is still a young discipline. Current agile movement is simply a reverse of its evolution from its scientific phase back to artistic stage, but with higher level of maturity. The difference between engineering as art and engineering as science is that objectiveness of requirements/design specification. With engineering as science, different people specify requirements/design you get the same results, and different people read the resulting specifications you get the same explanation. With engineering as art, the more people specify, the more versions you get. Once written, the more people read it, the more explanations you get. This is because both specification and explanation are based on science for mature engineering while they are based on opinions for immature engineering. But at high mature level, the scientific side of engineering is for automation, reliability and continuity; and the artistic side of engineering is about imagination, innovation, and invention, etc.
What is the future of Software Engineering? Some say “Software is eating the world.” The answer is in the history of engineering where you can see mature fundamentals of design common to all engineering, the concept of engineering science, and how engineering science is emerged by solving theoretical problems (the roots of practical problems) for each engineering branch. If we do not learn from history, we will repeat it. The future of the IT industry is on higher and higher levels of development and increasing stratification of code, vs middleware vs end user developed packages. Many predict that the applications we work on will: -Be more user-centric, the user will do the programming and the programmer will build the systems and infrastructure to enable this.-Applications will become more interrelated as we move to a world of systems-of-systems where constraints govern how and what we develop.-Machines, tools and environments that programmers use will become more powerful, easy-to-use and knowledge-base.
Agile is emerged as a major principle and methodology to manage software development. Life of IT is made considerably easier as there is no need to make Agile work in a Waterfall thinking world. Agile is about adapting to rapidly changing context, including requirements. If your problem domain does not suffer from such changes, then you can imagine that "engineering" the requirements is a perfectly good way to proceed. But, the problem is changing. So instead of natural selection, how about adaptation. Methods need to grow and adapt to address the problem at hand. So agile in the future, will have to change to address other changes like constraint-driven programming, etc. What this means to the Agile manifesto is that you will need a way to synchronize multi level, interdependent groups of development. Agile is a fantastic single team development model, but it does not provide enough guidance for large software initiatives involving several development teams, sometimes at different levels of the coding schema. So the next thing for Agile is to scale up, and to make this culture change stick. Addressing enterprise behaviors and moving to an outcome focused, outside-in organization; leaders act as coaches; and applying new technology and innovative ideas to the way of working as soon as they stay ahead of their competitors, and have fun doing it.
Being customer centric is key. If the notion of "customer-focused development" is the successor of Agile, and then most of organizations fail miserably at being agile. That is, agile development is (or at least should be) client focused at its core. That's the whole point of short iterations, etc. Put another way, if you're not already client focused, you're not agile. From IT management perspective, when it comes to Enterprise IT, optimizing coding has huge economies in time, testing, tuning, re-working, integration etc. generally IT leaders want fewer software platforms and the ones they invest in, they want to adapt over time without frictional IT costs. They don't want to build themselves into a corner with coded proprietary solutions or have to glue many different software tools together that each cost time and money to maintain and support. This is what agile development is about - embedding software app authoring and iteration skills into change teams so that companies can continue to evolve their ideas and processes without any frictional IT cost. Also you need to incorporate Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) into the codeless agile methods and enable customers to participate in workshops to develop applications 'across the desk' by removing coding from the applications authoring process. ODI recognizes that customers don't always know how to articulate the outcomes they seek (and how unmet needs translate into applications designs). ODI enables the emotion to be removed from prioritizing unmet needs, that's why so many innovation experts encourage its application in product innovation methods. Agile needs to be made successful with all those aspects that challenge / contradict the manifesto. That said, the complexity of making agile work bring yet new twists. For starter, building for sustainable, evolutionary architectures so they are always fit for purpose and never require re-platforming projects without delivering business value. Hence, before thinking beyond Agile, there is still much pondering how you make Agile work well, such as multi interdependent workflow, fix time delivery, fixed scope or fixed objectives, distributed delivery with travel limitations. That's the reality that many business stakeholders impose.
As more people are born into our technology centered world, coding, and use of technology will become a fundamental skill in much the same way math works today.This is combined with the simplification of programming tools and proliferation of “DIY” - doing it yourself interfaces, we will see the product owners become self-sufficient and able to execute their vision of the project nearly immediately and without the specialization of an IT Department. Additionally, crowdsourcing is a fast growing segment since last decade. This now introduces the concept of external development teams as a possible source for code segments which can be incorporated into finished design. Agile provides limited guidance on capitalizing or managing these new resources.
Software is eating the word, Software Engineering is no longer just an isolated discipline only a few geeks work on it,, but a common practice everyone has the chance to play around it, it has permeated into every business in every location, and it underpins the business capability and brand of every digital organization today.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
The twentieth century had a new science - Computer Science. In searching for the scientific basis of Software Engineering, Computer Science has been seriously attempted. Computation was to become one of the most important disciplines of the sciences. This is because it is the science of how machines can be made to carry out intellectual processes and capabilities. We know that any intellectual process can be carried out mechanically and performed by a general-purpose digital computer. Business starts to think intellectually, with value delivered continuously.
Software engineering is a branch from computer science which is a branch from mathematics. So engineering is the practical application of principles and practices constrained by the laws of the domain. Software engineering with about half century history is still a young discipline. Current agile movement is simply a reverse of its evolution from its scientific phase back to artistic stage, but with higher level of maturity. The difference between engineering as art and engineering as science is that objectiveness of requirements/design specification. With engineering as science, different people specify requirements/design you get the same results, and different people read the resulting specifications you get the same explanation. With engineering as art, the more people specify, the more versions you get. Once written, the more people read it, the more explanations you get. This is because both specification and explanation are based on science for mature engineering while they are based on opinions for immature engineering. But at high mature level, the scientific side of engineering is for automation, reliability and continuity; and the artistic side of engineering is about imagination, innovation, and invention, etc.
What is the future of Software Engineering? Some say “Software is eating the world.” The answer is in the history of engineering where you can see mature fundamentals of design common to all engineering, the concept of engineering science, and how engineering science is emerged by solving theoretical problems (the roots of practical problems) for each engineering branch. If we do not learn from history, we will repeat it. The future of the IT industry is on higher and higher levels of development and increasing stratification of code, vs middleware vs end user developed packages. Many predict that the applications we work on will: -Be more user-centric, the user will do the programming and the programmer will build the systems and infrastructure to enable this.-Applications will become more interrelated as we move to a world of systems-of-systems where constraints govern how and what we develop.-Machines, tools and environments that programmers use will become more powerful, easy-to-use and knowledge-base.
Agile is emerged as a major principle and methodology to manage software development. Life of IT is made considerably easier as there is no need to make Agile work in a Waterfall thinking world. Agile is about adapting to rapidly changing context, including requirements. If your problem domain does not suffer from such changes, then you can imagine that "engineering" the requirements is a perfectly good way to proceed. But, the problem is changing. So instead of natural selection, how about adaptation. Methods need to grow and adapt to address the problem at hand. So agile in the future, will have to change to address other changes like constraint-driven programming, etc. What this means to the Agile manifesto is that you will need a way to synchronize multi level, interdependent groups of development. Agile is a fantastic single team development model, but it does not provide enough guidance for large software initiatives involving several development teams, sometimes at different levels of the coding schema. So the next thing for Agile is to scale up, and to make this culture change stick. Addressing enterprise behaviors and moving to an outcome focused, outside-in organization; leaders act as coaches; and applying new technology and innovative ideas to the way of working as soon as they stay ahead of their competitors, and have fun doing it.
Being customer centric is key. If the notion of "customer-focused development" is the successor of Agile, and then most of organizations fail miserably at being agile. That is, agile development is (or at least should be) client focused at its core. That's the whole point of short iterations, etc. Put another way, if you're not already client focused, you're not agile. From IT management perspective, when it comes to Enterprise IT, optimizing coding has huge economies in time, testing, tuning, re-working, integration etc. generally IT leaders want fewer software platforms and the ones they invest in, they want to adapt over time without frictional IT costs. They don't want to build themselves into a corner with coded proprietary solutions or have to glue many different software tools together that each cost time and money to maintain and support. This is what agile development is about - embedding software app authoring and iteration skills into change teams so that companies can continue to evolve their ideas and processes without any frictional IT cost. Also you need to incorporate Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) into the codeless agile methods and enable customers to participate in workshops to develop applications 'across the desk' by removing coding from the applications authoring process. ODI recognizes that customers don't always know how to articulate the outcomes they seek (and how unmet needs translate into applications designs). ODI enables the emotion to be removed from prioritizing unmet needs, that's why so many innovation experts encourage its application in product innovation methods. Agile needs to be made successful with all those aspects that challenge / contradict the manifesto. That said, the complexity of making agile work bring yet new twists. For starter, building for sustainable, evolutionary architectures so they are always fit for purpose and never require re-platforming projects without delivering business value. Hence, before thinking beyond Agile, there is still much pondering how you make Agile work well, such as multi interdependent workflow, fix time delivery, fixed scope or fixed objectives, distributed delivery with travel limitations. That's the reality that many business stakeholders impose.
As more people are born into our technology centered world, coding, and use of technology will become a fundamental skill in much the same way math works today.This is combined with the simplification of programming tools and proliferation of “DIY” - doing it yourself interfaces, we will see the product owners become self-sufficient and able to execute their vision of the project nearly immediately and without the specialization of an IT Department. Additionally, crowdsourcing is a fast growing segment since last decade. This now introduces the concept of external development teams as a possible source for code segments which can be incorporated into finished design. Agile provides limited guidance on capitalizing or managing these new resources.
Software is eating the word, Software Engineering is no longer just an isolated discipline only a few geeks work on it,, but a common practice everyone has the chance to play around it, it has permeated into every business in every location, and it underpins the business capability and brand of every digital organization today.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
July 9, 2015
Is your Big Data “Good Data or Bad Data”
QUALITY Data is needed, the imperfect, but good enough data to transform into business insight and bring value for business growth.
Big Data is both an opportunity and risk for organizations. Aimless gathering of data has no benefit, data analysis has to add value in business decisions. Data Quality becomes one of the significant challenges for businesses to overcome in order to abstract real insight based on “good data.” So is there such thing as “bad data,” and is your Big Data good or bad?
Good data comes from how do you understand the business process. It is impossible to ask the data collection system to provide what data you want. You have to reorganize and clean the data before your named big data analytics. Enterprises do have big data. However, most of them do not collect the big data or they do not know how to collect big data. Problems need to be identify and resolve at the source. Take into consideration validation rules and applied appropriately. “Bad Data” exists due to lack of knowledge in business problem solving, clear business goals, mission performance tracking and resulted bad data fail to solve the problem by integrating into strategic decision analysis for problem, solving creating values
One of the big problems is different mind and goals of business and IT. So they are working like together, but really separated. Wherever you go, you need to understand your data. There are no bad data, just like there are no bad kids. It's on you to deal with it and extract the value. Your success is a reflection of your skills. Same data can be good or bad, it all depends on what question you want to answer. Business context is indeed a very important perspective. You can walk through all the various dimensions of data quality such as accuracy, consistency etc, but business context is indeed a very important perspective. Data can be accurate, consistent, timely, but data can also be shared among many different business groups, it can be transformed, aggregated, derived for various business needs, each with possibly their own views on what the expected definition and quality of the data should be.
There is quality data, but there’s no “perfect” data: By “quality data,” it means clean, organized, actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. No matter how "clean" your data is, it suffers from the limitations of chaos theory on its accuracy and applicability to the "real world." You might have very clean data on your customer profiles, but necessarily that data is incomplete. The accuracy and compromise will continue to coexist across the span of information management. Hence, Big Data Quality efforts need to be defined more as profiling and standards versus cleansing. This is better aligned to how big data is managed and processed.
So QUALITY Data is needed, the imperfect, but good enough data to transform into business insight and bring value for business growth. It is also important to leverage data quality and cost/benefit analysis, keep the end (business goals) in mind in order to achieve the value of analytics and build smart digital businesses.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
Big Data is both an opportunity and risk for organizations. Aimless gathering of data has no benefit, data analysis has to add value in business decisions. Data Quality becomes one of the significant challenges for businesses to overcome in order to abstract real insight based on “good data.” So is there such thing as “bad data,” and is your Big Data good or bad?
Good data comes from how do you understand the business process. It is impossible to ask the data collection system to provide what data you want. You have to reorganize and clean the data before your named big data analytics. Enterprises do have big data. However, most of them do not collect the big data or they do not know how to collect big data. Problems need to be identify and resolve at the source. Take into consideration validation rules and applied appropriately. “Bad Data” exists due to lack of knowledge in business problem solving, clear business goals, mission performance tracking and resulted bad data fail to solve the problem by integrating into strategic decision analysis for problem, solving creating values
One of the big problems is different mind and goals of business and IT. So they are working like together, but really separated. Wherever you go, you need to understand your data. There are no bad data, just like there are no bad kids. It's on you to deal with it and extract the value. Your success is a reflection of your skills. Same data can be good or bad, it all depends on what question you want to answer. Business context is indeed a very important perspective. You can walk through all the various dimensions of data quality such as accuracy, consistency etc, but business context is indeed a very important perspective. Data can be accurate, consistent, timely, but data can also be shared among many different business groups, it can be transformed, aggregated, derived for various business needs, each with possibly their own views on what the expected definition and quality of the data should be.
There is quality data, but there’s no “perfect” data: By “quality data,” it means clean, organized, actionable data from which to extract relevant information and insight. No matter how "clean" your data is, it suffers from the limitations of chaos theory on its accuracy and applicability to the "real world." You might have very clean data on your customer profiles, but necessarily that data is incomplete. The accuracy and compromise will continue to coexist across the span of information management. Hence, Big Data Quality efforts need to be defined more as profiling and standards versus cleansing. This is better aligned to how big data is managed and processed.
So QUALITY Data is needed, the imperfect, but good enough data to transform into business insight and bring value for business growth. It is also important to leverage data quality and cost/benefit analysis, keep the end (business goals) in mind in order to achieve the value of analytics and build smart digital businesses.
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How to Well Tune the organizational Structure for Breakthrough Innovation
Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve its business value. However, for most of organizations, innovation, especially breakthrough innovation, is still a serendipity. From organizational structure perspective, how can you get well organized for managing innovation more effectively?
The right structure is one that allows the right mentality and culture to bloom. There are both official structure and unofficial structure. If there is a strong mentality of invention and innovation, will a rigid official structure be just ignored in favor of an unofficial structure? Or shall you strive for an aligned official structure to enable innovation, rather than relying on people establishing unofficial structures? Structure carries inherent capabilities as to what can be achieved within its frame. A misaligned structure can reinforce a non-innovation friendly climate, and though a strong mentality may be able to overcome it, it will certainly require both dedication and effort. Within an aligned structure, that dedication and effort may be spent on innovation efforts rather than overcoming organizational hurdles and pushing against structural boundaries.
The official structure and unofficial structure co-exist harmoniously: It’s no surprise that unofficial structures always exist. The question is only whether the official structure and the unofficial structure co-exist antagonistically or harmoniously. A poorly designed official structure can increase the likelihood of antagonism between the two. An unofficial structures may always exist to some degree, and for good reasons, but would not go as far as to say that the question is only about alignment, because it would imply that a strong unofficial structure is as desirable as a strong official one. So given the opportunity, establishing a formal and enabling structure in line with your ambition and desired direction, and nurturing a culture within it, is preferable to relying on individuals and groups to overcome the hurdles of existing within a structure that inherently is not designed for the innovation.
The different organizational models have different inherent capabilities; and as such ease efforts towards certain directions, respective to each model. There is a limit to what an unofficial structure can structurally accomplish. The challenge is that an unofficial structure may spread cynicism in the organization. At the same time, it may be strong ally in innovation and change. It is necessary to identify the unofficial structures and take them along on the journey of innovation and change. Also establishing some of the more advanced models will certainly require top management awareness, involvement, dedication, and can by no means be unofficial. Because different models carry different capabilities, the choice of model will impact your ability to execute on your defined innovation strategy and direct efforts towards strategically prioritized targets.
Ideally the unofficial structure that has emerged over time is the formal structure you should have. Change can only happen in a context that takes heed of current culture and unwritten rules and identifying how to change is very much about identifying where you are now. After all, where you presently stand determines the path you have to take to get to where you want to be. As such, present official and unofficial structures are certainly part of a change journey. So organizations should incorporate and leverage what official and unofficial structures one might have into the journey's end-state, but only as long as they are useful to where you want to go. Ideally the unofficial structure that has emerged over time is the formal structure you should have. But, not all unofficial structures are helpful in this sense, in that they have been formed in response to an incumbent formal structure and strategic context, so they carry legacy and lack relevance within a new formal structure and context. Going forward, it may well require changing both official and unofficial structures into a hybrid structure that can support an innovation journey in the direction you are heading, rather than where you have been.
An organizational structure supports innovation; a process allows innovation to turn into value. Innovation is undirected and ineffective without some kind of structure. Invention and thus innovation is based on creativity. Creativity is subversive, because it challenges the status quo. Rules are about safeguarding the status quo. Consequently, too rigid rules, will stifle creativity and thus innovation. The innovation challenges the status quo and that is important in a healthy, innovative organization. An organization that has a lightweight process which allows creativity and innovation to get protected, channeled and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process.
You need to change the mentality. And that is not easy. What needs to worry is the danger of a company adopting a couple of simple rules without doing the difficult work to change the mentality. Because such an approach won't have any favourable effect. It might even have an adverse effect in feeding cynicism in the company. Resistance to change is then often camouflaged by talking about experience. The organization has to be open to innovation and rules can't change that. Rules alone will not allow innovation to be productive. A framework is needed for innovation to be successful. Part of putting a framework in place is getting senior leaders to recognize that innovation is important and needs to be supported. Senior leadership support (or at least a change champion) is required for innovation to be successful (create value for the organization). This has to include the tolerance of failure, because innovation is a learning process, and in learning failures occur. These failures are tolerable and even valuable, if people learn from them and use what they learnt in their next project.It is really hard to be a consistently innovative company, it requires both well tune the organizational structure and culture (the collective mindset) that nurtures new ideas and is able to profitably execute on those ideas. This is not easy, and companies that strive for innovation must experiment and learn to organizing for both breakthrough innovation and continuous improvement and build innovation capability cohesively.
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