Culture Shows Up Again as the Thing Driving Agility

Forbes Insights and the Scrum Alliance have got together to publish a recent report on Organisational Agility, drawn from interviews with over 1,000 C-suite executives from around the globe.

A key theme which runs through the whole report is how important Culture is to Organisational Agility. (Something which I emphasised in "The Way of DAU"). Additionally, there are some compelling findings about the benefits of organisational agility. Over 50% of respondents identified benefits in the areas of:

• Time to Market
• Speed of Innovation
• Employee Morale
• Ability to Attract Talent
• Competitiveness
• Financial Results
• Ability to Manage Across Geographies

To re-inforce these findings, the report focuses on the performance of leading Agile Organisations and Laggard Organisations. Whilst they represent similar proportions of the overall survey population (16% and 19% respectively), twice as many Leader Organisations enjoy annual growth of over 20% as Laggards do.

In all probability, the CxO community that the authors consulted, probably included a pool of organisation most interested in Agility, as an earlier report by McKinsey suggested that only 4% of organisations have completed an organisation wide Agile transformation.

The report looked at a number of things, including whether organisational agility was End-to-End or siloed in functions. Based on the opinions of the respondents, it appears that Operations and Technical Functions tend to be the most Agile (79% and 75% respectively), followed by the usual suspects in Sales and Marketing. Interestingly enough, Finance achieved a credible 64% vote of confidence, but HR was amongst the laggards with only 56% of respondents considering it an agile function. Considering that HR is often thought of as the "Guardian of Culture" this is a worrying gulf and should be a wake up call to HR to re-vitalise its mission.

One area that I would have liked more analysis on, was whether Leading Agile organisations already had positive innovative and collaborative cultures before they embraced Agile or had to focus on it as part of Agile Adoption.

Anyway, the take away is that all CxOs, irrespective of function, need to work on fostering the right culture.

The Chief Data Officer

Many organisations are experimenting with the concept of a Chief Data Officer. Although according to Raconteur most are struggling with the concept as well as making headway with the concept of managing data for value.

It seems that there are a number of problems:

• Business Understanding of the Role and Data Issues;
• Resourcing, Funding and Provisioning Data Initiatives;
• Current Starting Points for many Businesses with Poor Data Quality;
• Focusing too much on compliance and not enough on Value.

Personally, I would suggest that there is a value staircase for Data Management starting with Compliance and Protection on the Bottom Rung and then progressing through Quality, Integration, Sourcing (external data feeds), Insight & Intelligence to Adaptive Control (involving use of machine learning, experimentation and up to the minute data feeds to optimise control).

It is difficult howver to obtain value if a business tries to progressively work its way upwards through this staircase if it attempts to do everything in the first one before attempting the next step. The scope is too wide. Instead busnesses need to prioritise a business problem or opportunity and address a vertical slice down this value staircase to deliver value quickly. Progression can be achieved by addressing the next opportunities and reviewing what is needed in each step to improve overall capability as each increment is implemented.

However, probably the biggest issue is the role. What is the difference between a CIO, a Chief Digital Officer, a CTO, a CSO, a Principal Data Archiect and a Chief Data Officer? These all overlap and are often confused in scope. Many businesses are handing the Chief Digital Officer role back to the CIO, so it may be time to do the same with the Chief Digital Officer, because if they are separated the CIO's role is hollowed out to just look at the plumbing and not the value to the business.

It is also important to delegate data quality and integrity to business managers responsible for exploiting data in their day-to-day operations. IT may provide the policy framework, tools and measurement framework for managing data quality, but line management needs to take responsibility and include data quality in their personal objectives, just like they do with budgets. Otherwise value will never be achieved.

Digital Engagement Surveys

At this time of year, Nimbus 90 performs a survey into technology trends and issues concerned with adoption. This is based on the opinions of 100s of senior IT professionals working in the UK and is part of their symbiotic business model, research funded by suppliers and supplemented by knowledge sharing networking events.

I have just been looking at last years survey report which was interesting in how positive it was. There was a strong focus on re-inventing business models, with a high emphasis on customer experience and expectations.

The thing which really struck me was how few organisations saw a digital model as a cost cutting exercise. Although the number looking to improve operational efficiency slightly out stripped those looking to launch new products.

Key benefits anticipated included innovation, agility, customer engagement and better decision making. Though, quite sanguinely, expectations around customer loyalty were quite muted. Perhaps this was early recognition of the greater volatility of customer loyalty within the digital world when compared with traditional ways of doing business.

The one thing which did not come out was much use of AI or Machine learning. This has been a bit of a theme this year. So it will be interesting to see what comes out.

Also, sponsorship of Digital Programmes appears to be all over the place at the moment with CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs and CDOs all in on the act. Although surprisingly few COOs appear to be involved. Some of this is obviously diue to different corporate structures and sizes. but again it would be interesting to see what happens.

Harvey Nash's Tech Survey

Last night was the London Launch Event for the Harvey Nash Global Tech Survey Report - Race for Your Life.

The Report itself contains some obvious points, e.g. Younger Companies tend to be more innovative than established ones. However there were some surprising findings Construction and Engineering is the leading sector for innovation, with twice the preportion of respondents claiming their organisation is innovative than say Finance (which is investing heavily in FinTech). The FMCG  and Consumer led sector came bottom with less than 5% claiming any innovation.

Encouragingly enough the proportion of respondents who claimed that their organisation is innovative had also grown since the previous survey. Happily enough CTOs came out as more innovative than CIOs (which they should be, as its part of the job description), but CEOs also came a nose ahead of CIOs too.

As the survey is run by a recruitment specialist there is a focus on a number of recruitment centric issues. There are stong sentiments that Ageism dominates recruitment with adverse impact from your 40s onward. People still beleive that a human recruiter is far better than a machine at matching people with the right jobs. There is an increasing emphasis on completely refreshing skills every 5 years with many people investing personally in their skills.

In fact a lot of the panel discussion focussed on how organisations look at people, culture and mixed / diverse teams when building them. It seems that there is a frustration that older people cannot seem to get their CVs past recruitment consultants to the hiring manager. So what is the bottleneck there?

Close to 40% of people felt that automation would affect their jobs. Whilst this is quite high, considering that the last 30 years have been spent trying to automate IT people out of their jobs (without much success), it is probably quite necessary as there is a worldwide shortage of talent.

Two things struck me from the panel discussion however. One was positive, given that the panelists were from Tech start ups and Digital Model based companies; they all considered themselves to be the guardians of their business's appraoch to ethics. 

The negative was how much they failed to convey an understanding of innovation. They were seduced by the acquisition of technologies (by one means or another), but none of them mentioned how they empathised with customers to get at their real needs. There was no discussion of design thinking.

The other issue which came alongside this was how all of them were only just getting to grips with the idea of designing and operating to avoid technical debt. Previously, they had all been in too much of a hurry to just deliver something.

So in terms of how mature is the average operator in the new Digital As Usual (DAU) world. It's looking like 5 out of 10 to me.