The fastest route to achieving operational excellence lies in re-mastering your enterprise DNA 'digitally' as a 3D data cube

Managers driving HR, compliance and performance initiatives need 3D (CUBED) federated data perspectives – but how do you get clarity when data is siloed in hybrid enterprise software applications? And why does it matter?

As an organizational designer I spend much of my week working with business owners and line-of-business managers leveraging people assets, reducing costs – and more recently installing more robust policy governance and growing performance.  One of the more challenging aspects of my role is helping non-IT people get their head around the importance and value of looking at data in multi-layered perspectives rather than on ONE flat view.

Consider process accountability for example:  All organizations have capabilities (things they do to create customer value and sustain their business continuity) supported by a cascading tree of mission critical processes, then sub processes, and process steps.  Each process step SHOULD have a matrix of role accountability, responsibility, things to be done etc.  From an organizational design perspective I need to know EVERYTHING about the fine-grained action that happens right at the bottom in order to make sure it happens, and that it happens right.  That means I want to look at each action from the perspective of being a customer (customer science), being  a shareholder,  its contribution to strategy (performance), how often it doesn’t happen and the consequence on customer value produced (Six-Sigma), the impact on policy governance and risk (compliance)….

…and today, in most businesses, you can’t do that. 

So what? Why is it so important to digitize the DNA of an enterprise?

With a 3D digitized view of your enterprise, decisions can be made through more useful insights.  Leaders and managers can ‘ask their own questions’ and be curious about how the business works. When things don’t happen as they should, it’s easier to spot.  NEW LEARNING that results from customer and stakeholder feedback can be directed to the right places in the enterprise where these lessons can be applied. Digitizing the enterprise is fundamental to understanding, is fundamental to operational excellence, compliance, performance, success!

All too often, business leaders want the outcome of projects ‘by tomorrow’ (quite understandable!) and so the last thing they ordinarily want to do is start at the very top of the tree formalizing a data model of the enterprise.  They’d rather pick the low hanging fruit.  They want to see the swishy dashboards - and they don’t care how the data gets there.  But, if you want accurate perspectives on data and you want to be able to examine topics (and answer new questions) then SOMEONE has to build-up the DNA of the enterprise into a reliable data structure.  When this preparatory work isn’t done it means consumers of the data are likely to misinterpret what they’re seeing.  This can lead to all sorts of bad outcomes and consequences. 

Invariably, taking these short-cuts can move things forward quickly to begin with, but every successive step takes longer, and the absence of a unified data-mart to interrogate means that every question requires a new report, a new spreadsheet, another new process… aaargggghh!

One time my satnav took me the quick way to Edinburgh late one week-day as I made my way to a conference from my home in The Midlands, England.  A little after 11pm I found myself cross a cattle grid on top of a wind-swept hill with cows watching my progress on all sides!  Some shortcuts are not worth taking.

What people do ‘get’

Appreciating how data works in cubes can be thoroughly mind-blowing, but what people do ‘get’ are spreadsheets.  Most business people work with spreadsheets – and as everyone knows, spreadsheets are great to use and very versatile for looking at data.  Whilst they can also be exploited and multi-layered using pivot-table features, most folk will use spreadsheets in a flat format where each spreadsheet compares ‘x’ data by ‘y’ data.  That’s great – to a level, but when you want to examine ‘x’ by ‘y’ from the perspective of ‘z’ spreadsheet skills start to separate the men from the boys.

Organizational Designers need software too!

I find that most enterprises don’t hold data in very useful ways.  IT systems are purchased from each department or discipline – and every application manages its own data in its own ways, under different labels.  That’s a problem for me as an organizational designer.

It’s not until you have a 6000 column by 8000 row spreadsheet that you realize, as an organizational designer, you’ve not got the tools you need to become ‘operationally excellent’.  Many stakeholders have a deep interest in data that describes an enterprise, what it does, how it delivers what it does, what it produces. Fundamental to Compliance, Governance, Risk, Performance, Human Resources Management and many other disciplines is the fundamental knowledge of:

• How is the organization structured (in terms of legal entities, organizational units, roles…)?

• What is its strategy?

• How is the strategy executed?

• What are the processes that are critical to its success?

• What ACTIONS must be done to achieve the plan and run the processes?

• What is the stakeholder value (particularly the customer value) produced?

All of the above requires landscape views of data that aren’t normally accessible to organizational designers because the data is not held in a form that lets you slice and dice the data.

The answer IS NOT Business Intelligence 

Scale data analysis projects to enterprise data proportions and we have to deal with the thorny issue of data being held in silos of operation and ‘data silos’.  The last few years have seen many different forms of so-called ‘business intelligence’ software platforms enter the market to solve the issue of helping leaders and managers understand what’s happening in their business by interrogating back-office data silos.  The problem with all of these systems is they consistently fail to answer the ‘so-what?’ question.

You see, most things that leaders and managers want to know they don’t measure because they’re new questions (were they old questions then they’d already have systems and people in place to manage the process!) That means most actionable insights are answers to new questions. The problem for Business Intelligence tools is that it takes SO LONG to formalize the root and branch data structures needed to reliably get at data from wherever it’s being held that it becomes inflexible.

Moving forward

To make organizations BETTER BY DESIGN, business leaders and organizational designers MUST be able to understand how their organization works in 3D to deliver perspectives on operational activity that are needed to deliver optimal customer value, meet compliance expectations and drive performance.

It’s said ‘there are many ways to skin a cat’ but the solution we’ve developed here is to use a private-cloud platform called ENCANVAS to produce an adaptive lens across existing data repositories that removes the challenges of ‘getting hold of data’ and ‘organizing data into cubes’ through its built-in data connectors and transformation tools.  What gets produced is a personalized data cube that produces ‘always purified data’.  ENCANVAS also offers a suite of compliance, performance and operational analytics (reporting) tools to then allow senior managers and organizational designer to construct their own applications and views on data.

We’ve used the ENCANVAS platform to construct our own Organizational Design tools to facilitate the production of 3D cubed views of data for Human Resources Management, Performance and Compliance.

The reason ENCANVAS works when other systems don’t is because of the fact it works like LEGO® bricks and removes the need for IT projects or coding to produce the required outcomes.  It humanizes the process of shaping technology to do our will rather than the other way around.  You can ‘shape the bricks’ in workshops with stakeholders to make sure the outcomes work for the organization and the users.

Of course, a few rules apply:

Garbage in, garbage out – If your operational systems produce trashy data, ENCANVAS can purify and treat most of it, but if the data isn’t being captured (or captured correctly) that can become a problem.

Technology is never the answer – ENCANVAS, and platforms like it, are just tools; by themselves they never solve anything.  What’s needed are domain experts that fully know their processes and how the processes need to work.

Ian Tomlin is European Regional Manager for US Tech Solutions Inc. and advises on federated solutions for compliance and performance, customer science, actionable insights and organizational design.

Has Google got it's business model wrong? (What happens when you don't need a map of the Web anymore?)

Google's logo. One of the most familiar beacons of all that is good about the web - and the best story of what it takes to become a successful corporation in the 2000's.  Or is it? (It's a registered trademark by the way of Google Inc.)

There are some things that business people take for granted - new startups take longer to make money, cash is always king and Google is one of the best examples of a successful business. Rule-101 of business says that the ground you walk on is never as stable as you think it is - so has Google got it right?

It's my opinion that US investors are way off the mark on tech company stock values.  Recently Twitter launched and was greeted with enthusiasm, a little while before it was Facebook's turn.  But seriously WHERE IS THE VALUE?

As an enthusiast of all things social network oriented and web oriented you might think me a weird source of criticism for valuations of companies that in many respects fly the flag for our industry - but my origins are not in the technology sphere and so I guess I'm not a purist.  I've also been on the wrong side of investment discussions in tech-startups in the United Kingdom - a country that has absolutely no appreciation of how to value software (our government could make 'How not to make a software industry' a degree level subject-matter area).

The strongest commercial argument for web-community centric companies is that communities are places where advertising can happen and this is perhaps the future source of 'places to find new customers' which is an obvious draw for commercial organizations willing to invest in sourcing new business.  At the head of this crowd is Google.  The basic 'reason for being' of Google is to provide the people of the world with access to the content of the world.  It is the defacto search engine for the majority of western world surfers and stands alone in the quality of its search engine and its ability to find stuff online.

Makes sense then that Google should have a robust future - it 'owns' the map to the Web.

But what if you didn't need a map?

Our future has a habit of following the past.  The closest parallel we have to the future of the community-centric 'social' web is the 19th Century evolution of coffee houses in London.  When coffee houses were introduced they quickly became 'a place to meet' for any type of community that wanted to gather somewhere (sound familiar?).  What happened next is particulalrly interesting; specific communities began to gather in SPECIFIC coffee houses - 'Lloyds' coffee house was where the insurance folk would meet,  'Rainbow' was where the poets, actors, politicians and other luvvies would meet, and so on.  News soon went around that if you want to meet other like-minded people talking about YOUR area of interest, 'this or that' coffee house was the place to be.  The evolution of coffee houses led to the formation of Lloyds of London, the London Stock Exchange and, some might argue, was the instrument that eventually to our free press.

Let me know bring this diversion back to topic.  When I use the web, YES I do use Google to find things, I use twitter to share things and I take advantage of these sites.  But I don't pay anything for the services I use. What I don't do is USE the adverts that are regularly placed on these sites.  They don't influence my buying decision.  Why not?  Because when I want to buy a car I go to Autotrader.com, when I want to find a hotel room I go to Hotels.com, a flight? Opodo, a house? Rightmove... and if I want to buy anything else I go to Amazon.com.  These are the market-places I trust and I return to time and again.  So how often do I search for things that I want to buy?  Answer: Much less than I used to and the number of searches I do is shrinking as days go by because I know where to find what I need - 'I KNOW THE COFFEE HOUSES'.

What does this mean for US Tech Stocks?  In my opinion, it means they're resting on shifting sand and are highly unlikely to return the values their stock valuations might suggest.  In the last quarter Google's own stock dropped.  I expect it will not be the last time this happens as advertising incomes fail to show their promise.

The winners of the battle for hearts and minds (and advertising spend) in the future will be those sites that become synonymous with a TYPE of community, a genre of buyer.  There will always be coffee shops, but there is only one Lloyds of London, only one London Stock Exchange.

Sorry Google, you've got it wrong.


I.

China tech is on the rise - so will we be returning to the English Language?

The tech market in China has been growing and growing but so far it's been pretty well hidden to Westerners that don't travel across to China to find out for themselves how modern and sophisticated China has become.
We live largely in a world dominated by US brands such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Linked-In, Amazon, ebay and Twitter - and just assume that some day the entire world will be using these platforms.  Why? Because for years, the USA has dominated global markets.  Its movie making, music and software industries have bled successfully across the Western world - and it would be of no surprise today that the music and films you see in Spain, Cape Town or Germany are broadly the same as you'd find in New York and Boston.

The article attached describes the eye-openig experiences of an ex-Google employee that found out first hand what it's like to live and work in China with one of their rising tech-star companies.  His presentation on the rise of China's tech scene is a 'must-see' for anyone that plans to be in the software industry for the next couple of decades.  It evidences that China is by no means behind when it comes to innovation and consumer tech.

In the 19th and 20th century, Britain gained its Great title through science and innovation - and trade.  It's ability to trade and harvest the rewards of so many different continents supported its huge empire of the day. English language benefitted hugely from this period of expansion.  Today it is the unrivalled language of business across the globe because it is the greatest leveller. For businesses that want to trade globally they need people to speak English.  But what has this got to do with the China tech scene you ask?

My thought is that one day the 'things that China does well' in technology - including their consumer and business software brands - are going to grow BEYOND China and become household names around the planet.  The article attached shows just how close that horizon truly is.  When they do this, the apps won't be in Kanji or Hanzi - they will be written in English.  I suspect they will be written in 'proper English' rather than the American version that has been served up by the US software industry for the last 30-years - because the rest of the world does its business in English, yep, good 'ol English as written by the folks in blighty.

Will this see a resurgence of paragraphs untainted by z's in every other word, and a slow-down in the sad demise of 'u's in such beautiful words as colour?  I hope so.  It would be nice to write a page in English and not have to re-edit it again for the American market.

Ian.

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-the-chinese-tech-industry-is-like-2014-1?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business%20Insider%20Select&utm_campaign=BI%20Select%20Weekend%202014-01-12&utm_content=emailshare

To anyone and everyone that has taken the time to read my blog articles over the past few years - Thank You!

As we begin a new year I should like to take a moment to thank the 11,446 people that have taken time-out of their busy schedules to muse over my articles in recent years. Never did I imagine that anything I produced would get seen by 11,000 people. Wow!  You never did show up in my teens when I was playing my electric guitar. (But there you go.)

Thank you even more to those who have reached out to me to give encouragement or let me know how they've applied some of the learning lessons I've documented about organizational design, business and IT that I have myself found useful.

I hope you all have a special 2014.

I.

The beginning of a New Year: A good time to BONSAI your organization design

Do most business leadership teams think deeply about the design of their enterprise? Generally no. The design and internal behaviors of organizations develop organically over time as an enterprise grows.  If you believe that organizational design is a bi-product of good management and effective leadership, you could argue that OD is an unnecessary profession.  Certainly, some organizations work exceptionally well WITHOUT teams of consultants, HR and Change Management practitioners running all over them with measuring sticks and psycho-analysis tool-bags.

I often find myself debating whether it's better to have an enterprise that flies by a 'seat of the pants' management method or alternatively adopts 'systematic management' methods.  The great joy and challenge of understanding how organizations work is their a unique blend of science and creativity, of systems and people, of tools and culture.

Getting the best out of an enterprise usually comes down to a blend of everything.

But how do you get the blend right? Even when organizations are led by great leaders, and have great people in them doing the right things, it doesn't hurt for everyone to know 'what the plan is' and 'how they contribute to it'.  And there's the rub.  When organizations aren't thoughtfully designed, they grow in an unkept way. They grow 'slack' in their processes, theifdoms build, budgets grow, resource pools become ever larger and unkept.  Department managers grow their teams based on departmental needs. But what of the big picture?  What if markets and customer needs are changing?  Focusing on department needs and priorities, resources and plans could simply be encouraging wasteful practices to be repeated.

Most people will be familiar with Bonsai; the Japanese art form using miniature trees grown in containers. The main reason for the pastime lies the opportunity to contemplate the world by performing a slightly trivial task. The result of the activity is a more aesthetically pleasing tree design.  But the ACT itself, of nurturing an attractive tree design through a constant vigilance on the part of the practitioner, has huge parallels to the role of an Organizational Designer.

Businesses require a ROLE that is constantly monitoring the health and growth of the enterprise - an Organizational Design practitioner. Think of it as the person that monitors the BONSAI and makes sure it grows in a healthy way.  Without this role to shape the growth of an enterprise into a thoughtful design, it soon becomes unkempt.

Organizations work better when resources are aligned in the best possible way to the things that need to be done to achieve stakeholder outcomes.  Designed well and the people working in the enterprise will produce more with the least resources - i.e. You get more growth for your feeding and watering. (Ask business leaders to state what proportion of the activity that happens in their enterprise contributes directly to strategic goals and you'll be surprised by the answer.  If they say any more than 65% they'd be very lucky.  And that's a lot of someone's energy being wasted on things that don't really sum up to very much value at all.)

Organizations CAN be designed to work in an optimal way.  Partly it's about agreeing on a smaller number of agenda items that REALLY will make a difference to the success of the enterprise: Most organizations (and management teams) try to do too many things.  But it's more about ALIGNMENT: aligning strategy to stakeholder needs, aligning customer value with stakeholder value, aligning processes to outcomes, aligning roles to processes...

As an Organizational Designer, trying to make sense of all the data needed to comprehend how an organization is designed and how to adapt it can be mind-bending.  Many-a-time I have blown up my spreadsheet owing to the volume of data that needs to be brought together and understood!

Like most professions, Organizational Designers require tools to harvest data, build it into logical structures, maintain it and make sense of it.  The key areas are:

• INSIGHTS: Data that describes and evidences the drivers that underpin the decisions made on strategy.
• PERFORMANCE AND STRATEGY: Data that describes the strategy of the enterprise, how it plans to achieve the stated outcomes and what progress is being made.
• POLICIES AND PROCESSES: Data that describes how the enterprise operates to produce its outcomes.
• ROLES AND ACCOUNTABILITY: Data that describes how duties are divvied out to people and resources.

The good news is that unlike the BONSAI owner, you don't need to go buy your tree!  This means you only need to think about where to start trimming and nurturing your design.... NO!

The first job is to make sense of the existing design (what's the point in Change Management if you don't know what you're trying to change into?).  Few organizations have a clear picture of what their strategy is, who does what and why, what processes and policies exist and how they dovetail together. That's where an Organizational Design Tool-Kit comes in.  As the name suggests it's a tool-kit for Organizational Designers: a relational database-powered system that helps OD practitioners to make sense of the big data that defines how an enterprise works.

Using an OD Tool-Kit, it's easy to bring the large quantities of data together and articulate the design of the enterprise.  Then you will see the BIG PICTURE of your BONSAI.  Only then should you consider your first trim ;-)