The secret to enterprise change -- scaling agile, for instance -- isn't in a framework, a book, or an agile methodology. I spent the last decade investigating successful technology change across multiple efforts to modernise and introduce agile practices. We did formal research along the way and discovered that successful leaders in this area shared a set of internalised principles. These Principles helped them to introduce and navigate change ... to _be_ agile rather than worry about how to _do_ agile

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Posted in Agile, Transformation

Why a maturity model for digital fraud resilience? Because identifying and preventing fraud in digital services requires collaboration, and successful collaborations require a common language and understanding of how to act on knowledge, along with a map of the landscape. A model, if you will.

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Posted in Data, Governance

John’s team has been chosen for greatness. The opportunity: to facilitate their client’s customer service modernisation. The problem to solve: the customer service department needs to be able to “see what their customers see” in order to maintain a high level of quality. They explain that their old content platform had a mirror platform customer service agents could use to click through all the screens — to “see what the customer sees,” but with the new system, that feature is gone.

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Posted in Transformation

Introducing change and innovation at large organisations can be a daunting task. Solutions that seem clear at a high level can get messy when you get into the details. There are lots of stakeholders, they all have their own take on the problem, and so you get varying degrees of support depending on what angle you take at any given moment. It can quickly spiral out of control into the feeling that “everything is related to everything,” making it hard to get going.

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Posted in Data, Governance

For many executives and leaders, extending transformation success beyond the tech space can present a challenge. That’s because successful transformation isn’t just about looking forward, it also requires that you understand a bit of history. If you’re trying to move forward, it’s imperative that you get your hand on My Years with General Motors, the autobiography written by GM’s first CEO, Alfred P. Sloan. It’s resonated deeply with our transformation work because it gives crystal clear insight into the fact that many of the problems we’re dealing with today were, in fact, solutions — once upon a time.

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Posted in Data, Governance

Here’s a story I hear a lot lately: A company is undergoing a transformation and have reached a place where they’re thinking about end-to-end service design. That’s when they remember that they’ve outsourced a lot of operational systems, meaning key bits of data that are required to run a responsive, agile business are owned by an outside vendor. When they go to the vendor to retrieve this data, little information is forthcoming free of charge, and it’s expensive just to get an estimate for data retrieval. Eventually, it turns out to be too expensive to move forward, so nothing is done. The transformation limps along wounded, and leadership blames “the agile” instead of taking a hard look at the vendor.

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Posted in Data, Governance

The digital transformation story is well known by now, and many of us have had a lot of success with it. But what about when things go wrong? To understand what happens when things go wrong, you have to think about what's been successful. Up until recently, digital transformation has  concentrated on introducing a combination of lean and agile practices and various accompanying technology innovations, for example:

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Posted in Transformation