Getting value from data-wrapped products – it takes more than pretty packaging

Sep 27, 2024

data wrapping

The Data Wrapping concept was developed at MIT CISR, from research; it’s a great way to encapsulate a practice some of us are familiar with. But how to make it happen? Too often, organisations decide to follow a technology trend and then fail to account for the original context under which a process was developed. Read on, and may your data wrapping efforts bear more gifts than unpleasant surprises.

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Posted in Data, Product


Scaling Agile & Change: Principles, not Frameworks

Feb 12, 2023

an image of a person with principles

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


A Maturity Model for Digital Fraud Resilience

Mar 31, 2022

an image of resilience

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


Zombie Solutions — An Enterprise Nightmare

Oct 31, 2018

Don't ask why

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


The practice of digital transformation: four non-tech skills for introducing change and innovation

Oct 30, 2018

building blocks

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


Governance & Risk — Innovation Killers or Sound Strategy?

Sep 27, 2018

a GM advertisment

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


Slumlord Enterpise Vendors -- Are They Holding Back Your Transformation?

Sep 12, 2018

Don't Ask Why

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 Transformation Story - It's Time For A New Chapter

Sep 5, 2018

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