Digital As Usual Themes

Looking into the current marketplace, there are three dominant trends in current digital exploitation:

• Exploiting Cloud Platforms

• Business Agility

• Value Based Management

Most commentators focus on either cost or scalability issues when discussing cloud platform exploitation, citing this as an uninspired approach to mechanisation of what is already there, which has been described as making caterpillars faster (as opposed to transforming them into butterflies). However, cloud platforms and SaaS applications are great for businesses wanting to standardise and simplify their businesses, either as a basis for performance improvement and automation or as a means of making integration of acquisitions (under M&A) easier. The latter often being a tool used to bring new products and know how into a business for further innovation.

Business agility is an evolutionary extension of not just Agile Development and Design thinking, but a full blooded extension of Lean approaches across Integrated Product Teams and DevOps styles of delivery to continuously experiment with opportunities and deliver new value at pace. If a business is not a start up and has not simplified its processes and applications, this can be difficult to achieve. In the end, though it is all about focusing on customer value.

Value based management has two strands of thinking; firstly it connects the dots between market insight, customer experience and business agility to focus on value; secondly it recognises that a digital business will spend proportionally more on digital and information technology than a traditional one, so it needs to understand how and why it spends the money (and other valuable resources) and then to make sure that it balances spend appropriately between maintenance, protection, enhancement and revenue or value streams, as well as innovation.

Would You Follow This Advice?

According to a recent Harvey Nash / KPMG survey, businesses are increasingly looking to CIOs to improve customer experience and to deliver capabilities which grow new revenue from both new and existing customers.

At the same time Gartner is touting a model of 4 strategies to do this, summarised in the diagram below.

However, I have a problem with this as a strategic tool. To my mind, it is very bottom up and not very illuminating beyond stating the fact that you can exploit various tools. It does not actually connect with business value or scenarios that businesses may find themselves in. It would appear to drive the kind of thinking which says "I've got 4 hammers, what size nail do I need to solve this problem", rather than "what is the real problem? do we actually need to do anything? what are our options? how would we best address this quickly, to appropriate quality (& value) and can we do it economically?" Digital Strategy should be about "how do we deliver new and unique value?" not about "here's some solutions, let's find a problem to fix."

Are Businesses Still Missing the Point About Digital Transformation?

The other night I was talking to the Head of Product Management for a company who run several Dating Site brands (facing into differnet market sectors: young, old, gay etc. and across over 50 countries). He was really keen on the term "Digital As Usual" (DAU), because it encapsulates the culture and thinking needed to sustain a Digital Business Model.

So I was quite disappointed to see Raconteur's recent article on Digital Transformation, which shows just how badly many companies are still addressing their move to a Digital Business model. The usual collection of issues showed up: It's an IT problem, its a siloed CDO problem etc. Though, to some extent I think that the authors and experts quoted in the article got it wrong too as they keep talking about Digital Transformation, implying that you get there in a relatively short period of time. The whole point is that you never get there. It is a continuous journey and requires the whole business to act as a team who enjoy voyaging. So instead of transformation programmes, they should think Star Ship Enterprise and understand that what they are really pursuing is organisational excellence and customer delight. Getting that right will move the dial on meaningful organisational measures of performance and deliver revenues and profits (or whatever relevant Value that applies to their organisation) as a byproduct of operating a successful Digital Business Model.

What was interesting in the article was the criticism of organisations who think about digital as just being IT. Whilst in Asia Pacific, a recent survey looked at Digital and IT Transformation. Companies in this region belivve that they are leading the world in digital transformation. Its finding was that where businesses had addressed IT Transformation, they were over 39 times more likely to make better faster decisions than competitors and 13 times more likely to complete application deployments ahead of time, whilst running their critical applications at less than half the cost of competitors (who had not transformed). This is despite the fact that IT leaders are less likely to be involved in critical business decisions that in other parts of the world.

So, IT and lean capabilities are essential enablers, but the senior management team needs to work as a team and not a series of siloed prima donnas. However it is difficult to find anyone who works maturely across all aspects of digitalisation. The Head of Product Management that I talked to (above) freely admitted that his organisation, although growing successfully, does not put enough attention into data quality and avoiding technical debt. And the Strategic Busines  KPIs that they work to are not perhaps the best in optimising customer experience. However, they were very storng on identifying tangible market opportunities, product thinking and lean delivery, whilst enjoying a positive collaborative and innovative culture. They recognised that innovation does sometimes mean learning from failure, although they don't have a strict measure on how much failure is acceptable. But they were doing enought to prosper and continue to learn and grow on their journey. And that is the point.

Aligning Digital Exploitation with Operational Capability

All Enterprises Are Not the Same

One of the tenets of Digital As Usual (DAU) is that most businesses are not pure play digital organisations. In almost all cases there are operations and activities which are essential to either fulfilling service or delivering a product which need to be managed as well. The Digital Adoption Framework assumes an Industry Categorisation Model as illustrated below.

The Industry Categorisation Model identifies 5 Categories along a continuum of Industry Product Nature. At one end of the continuum are “pure play” digital organisations, whose products are Information and Content based. These consist of Market Platforms like eBay and Compare the Markets.com who provide a platform, through which other organisations and people sell their goods and services, as well as Publishers and Providers of Content who provide videos, e-books, podcasts, news, music etc. At the other end are Extractor and Grower type businesses, such as coal mines and cocoa growers who provide natural unprocessed products. Off course not all businesses fall neatly into just one category. A major energy company such as Shell or Exon may straddle several categories along an Upstream (exploration, drilling and extraction) to Downstream (transport, refining and distribution) activities.

So why is this important when thinking about digital businesses? Well each different type of business operates in different ways, has a different level of dependency on capital assets and has different opportunities for exploiting digital technology to augment its business model. Additionally, the whole concept of Lean Delivery via Design Thinking, Agile Delivery and DevOps may have different opportunities and constraints as well as nature of delivery in each category.

Some Examples of Exploitation

The diagram below looks at the potential for exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies according to Industry Category.

The “X”s in the table represent significant opportunity for exploitation against a generic type of Use Case. So for example AI technologies (machine learning, visual recognition, natural language etc.) can be used to provide insight and learning in every type of organisation, but there is very little opportunity for them to add to “customer experience” in say mining or farming. Again there is huge potential to build AI capabilities into consumer products, e.g. Alexa in Amazon’s Echo, but there is little opportunity to enhance a product such as iron ore or tree trunks produced from a Natural Product Extractor or a Grower. 

Alternatively for IoT, see diagram below, the opportunities are pretty limited for an Information publisher, but there are many areas where a farmer could use it to track livestock and monitor soil conditions and crop conditions, as well as control assets such as vehicles and trailer equipment.

This moves us onto exploiting iterative approaches within an organisation. The other night I was talking to someone from a major pharmaceutical company. Drugs take years of research to identify promising candidates for a problem and to test for efficacy and safety, as well as meet regulatory demands. There is little opportunity to exploit Iteration in this type of product development. But for the company overall, there are opportunities around internal processes and with Agile Marketing.

Agile Marketing is a growing area of adoption within industry and works well for consumer driven businesses. At its core is the use of small integrated product teams which focus on market research, product promotion, delivery of marketing and promotional materials, advertising and the information analysis systems used to support marketing data analysis. These teams tend to work in multiple sprints testing out marketing promotion hypotheses and rapidly identifying which approaches produce optimal results, to improve overall revenues. 

Iterative development also its quite different for delivering an oil tanker or a film, to the development used to support a consumer service. In the case of the former, iterative design, development and continuous testing techniques are used to deliver a single integrated complex product over a period spanning many months if not years. In the latter they are used not just to deliver the product, but to continuously keep it fresh, up to date and moving ahead of competition that is playing catch up.

So it's important not to adopt a one sized fits all approach, but to really get down to what can work for your organisation. This is part of what I talk about in my book.

DevOps 2018 Report

Puppet has published its 2018 State of DevOps Report. This year they have examined the premises on adoption and confirmed that most successful adoptions follow a project by project approach, with a single project pioneering the way and gradual cross poliantion of practice whilst it is matured.

The project focuses on 2 aspects of adoption:

• CAMS - Culture - Automation - Mearsurement & Sharing

• a 6 layer maturity model from 0 to 5, which broadly follows a simplify and Standardise Approach, Followed by Process Practices, then Automation and finally Self Service capabilities.

One of the themes of the report is the gap between teams practicing DevOps and Senior Management. It still appears that DevOps adopters continue to struggle with cultural aspects associated with empowerment and reporting.

Anyway, for anyone interested in the Lean Aspects of Digital Business Models, this is essential reading.

Agile CIOs

The ever changing role of the CIO is often subject to much debate. Opnionons vary from the challenge of "why do we need a CIO?" to "CIOs should be driving our innovation and vision".

 A recent article by McKinsey - How to Become an Agile CIO - is a typical example. The authors,  Santiago Comella-Dorda, Quentin Jadoul and Swati Lohiya, set out 3 main aspects of An Agile CIO's role:

• Architect / Technology Visionary

• Driver of Knowledge and Talent

• Problem Solver

Whilst they are obviously part of the role, I think that they do miss the point in a number of areas. The first is that the CIO should be taking the llead in helping build a positive business culture which avoids blame, encourages collaboration and focusses risk appetite around continuous innovation. This requires a good focus on the soft aspects of Employee Engagement, as well as some on providing supporting tools.

The second is on uniting the Senior Management Team and their teams in building common understanding of each other's problems and shared opportunities, as the basic pre-requisite for developing an Integrated Product Team approach, in which each IPT addresses the requirements, design and enhancement of End-to-End product processes (whether there are internal or customer facing products).

The third issue is being the corporate consience on balanced performance and investment; Businesses which operate as teams tend to be the best at developing and exploiting digital business models and sustaining a Digital As Usual ethos. This does require balanced investment and commitment of resources so that the orgnisation can not only address new business opportunities, but also improve exisiting products, maintain capability and protect itself (and its customers).

Ethics Takes Centre Stage

Last night I attended an event where Ann Roberts of Badoo and Nick Lisher of Nextdoor were discussing the meaning of enterprise values and their application to governance for Digital Platform based enterprises.

In the wake of the various regulatory issues that Facebook has had with Data Privacy legislation in Europe and Uber has encountered with employment law and regulation of taxis in a number of countries and cities, including London, this was a highly relevant discussion. It was pparticulalry refresshing to hear Nick Lisher say "I find GDPR liberating." as he went on to expound the fact that Nextdoor's values and approach meant that they had not had to alter or adapt their product at all to ensure compliance, which confirms assertions that I made in an earlier post that GDPR forces you to do the things that you should do anyway. It gives a great argument to persuade finance that it is necessary to pay for them.

All in all it boils down the the issue of running a digital enterprise as an ethical concern, which is a pre-requisite that I identified in "The Way of DAU", my take on how to adopt a Business as Usual business model.

Digital Business models amplify the concepts behind customer care theory. Traditionally this has proposed that 70% of sales are repeat sales to existing customers and that it is roughly 10 times cheaper to do something to keep a disgruntled customer, by addressing complaints positively, than it is to gain a new customer. Also if you manage to delight a customer, he or she will tell 10 people and sell your company. If you annoy them, they will tell even more and damage your reputation. Badoo's business model actually relies on this, because if you successfully match someone up with another person, Badoo may lose them as customers, but they will tell everyone that it was how they met and sell Badoo positively. Conversely, there have been significant backlashes over how Facebook uses people's data, and recent slow downs in growth and consequent loss in market value, are not the first time that Facebook has suffere significant customer defections.

Google used to have a great reputation when everyone believed in its "Do no Evil" credo, but is gradually losing mindshare with significant portions of people as a result of failure to translate this into a positive corporate culture where ethical concerns are addressed and seen to be addressed by the people who work there, its customers and increasingly EU regulators.

However, whilst we were discussing this and what happens in many traditional PLCs, a penny dropped. It's not just the the Leaders of a digital enterprise who need to be focussed on instituionalising ethics as a core of company culture, but also the shareholders. The llatter need to align themselves with the long term view and how value is created. There's too much emphasis on quick results and returns and not enough on long term value and scalability. Ethics needs to be seen part of a digital business's scalability, not just the architecture of digital products and operational robustness.

Way of DAU Release 2

Release 2 of the Way of DAU has been released via Amazon and is available as a printed version here  and as an electronic version here. 

This takes into account feedback received for the MVP version and is now in a handier physical paper format.

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to provide comments and feedback.

The LinkedIn discussion forum can be found here if anyone has any constructive comments, suggestions or criticisms to help refine the next release of the book.

Lessons on Innovation

Apparently Singapore has been ranked the 6th most innovative county in the world. Recently 8 innovation leaders in Singapore were asked to share their thoughts and secrets on what works.

One of the strong themes which came out was how much the culture, perceptions and mindset of business leaders affects the ability of a business to innovate.

They used a number of approaches to over come this, e.g. by trying to adopt a learning culture, by evisioning the "bank of the future" or focusing on key objectives and KPIs the business wants to achieve and working out strategies to "move the dial". One company tries to find a unifying principle by exploring key leaders aspirations, fears and "journey" to find something that they all agree to be the guiding principle for their strategy.

The other key theme which came across was how much they relied on experimentation, prototyping and piloting to help align people and test hypotheses, proving what works and learning from failures.

This is a great vindication of the approach set out in the Way of DAU or Digital as Usual,

Is HR Ready for the New Digital World?

One of the features of the future is that we are really bad at predicting it, So much so that we react late and often have problems catching up with the present. This translates into the essential behaviour of a Digital Enterprise of adaptivity. Since a Digital as Usual business needs to constantly innovate to stay ahead of the competition and innovation itself is fraught with missteps and corrections, resulting in the need for agility, design thinking and the need to know when to "pivot in the market".

At the same time Millennials apparently want to design work life around themselves, desiring to work flexibly, perhaps on several different jobs at once, whilst industry analysts who should know better are forecasting the end of jobs as AI robots automate everyone out of a job.

Anyone who has ever worked with a robot, knows that they need a lot of input to become effective and their flexibility is limited. AI bots are just as bad. They need a lot of teaching, can be fooled and have problems adapting quickly.

As I have argued in previous posts, AI and Machine learning fills a gap in process automation to help people become more productive and focus on higher quality work. so the nature of jobs may change, and some new types of jobs may be introduced, but in the end there will still be jobs.

So it was interesting to see this opinion confirmed by a recent survey by Willis Towers Watson which reinforced this opinion. What was most telling is the opinion that less than 5% of businesses believe that their HR functions are ready for this challenge. The have not anticipated the future and are having problems catching up with the present. At the same time, these businesses believe that they will be shifting more and more to contingent working with flexible contractors performing an increasingly important role in their work-forces. So perhaps the Millennial Dream will come to pass, but probably not in the way that we anticipate now.  

Are You as a CxO The Real Culprit?

Digital Impacts on Business

In a recent article in the Sloan Management Review, it was mentioned that 87% of executives think that Digital will affect their market place. Yet out of the 75% who thought that their enterprises are adequately prepared, only around 10% saw it as a potential threat to their business.

This is only one symptom of the many aspects of CxO behaviour which are affecting the success of organisations which want to adopt a digital business model. Overall, there is often a lack of realisation that the CxOs themselves are inadvertently sabotaging their organisations' efforts.

Executive Behaviour Can be a Problem

In many cases, in the same manner that many executives don't understand what it means to be a project sponsor, CxOs have failed to actually engage with the issue. They don't seem to think that they should spend the time to get involved in deep market analysis and identify real game changing opportunities. They just want to automate yesterday with some sexier technology.

Additionally, they don't get the need for acting as a joined up team or building a positive culture which supports experimentation and innovation. In fact, many executive teams don't seem to understand that innovation means doing something that no one else has done before, so there are bound to be a few issues along the way as a product team discovers what works and what does not.

David Snowdon provided a great framework with the Cynefin model to explain what is involved with emerging practice and chaotic conditions.

This is why the DAF (Digital Adoption Framework) places significant emphasis on cultural change as promoted in The Way of DAU. Culture is a known inhibitor to strategy implementation, as witnessed by the well known quote that Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. Culture change starts with the C-Suite and ripples down. So any CxO looking for digital success, should be asking whether he or she needs to reach out work with C-suite peers to build a better team. Otherwise, failure beckons.

Executives Need To Learn How to Promote Innovation

On another tack however, a research based article on innovation and executive behaviour published in the Harvard Business Review, outlines some personal behaviour characteristics of entrepreneurial CEOs and other top executives: 

• associating, 
• questioning, 
• observing, 
• experimenting, 
• networking.

Their observation was that CEOs in successfully innovative companies take more ownership of innovation, look outwards and provide leadership to the innovation process and get personally involved.

Enterprise Digital Adoption

Last Year's CIO survey by Harvey Nash and KPMG pointed to the resurgent role of CIOs in taking responsibility for driving enterprise digital agendas. This goes with rising acceptance and adoption of Digital As Usual (DAU) or Digital as the New Normal.

Yet a recent article from MIT Sloan business school (by Gerald Kane) pointed to the blindness that appears to exist in many large corporations. 4 times as many CxOs see the opportunities as those who recognise the risks that digital poses to them. They don't seem to recognise the competitive risks or the erosion of brand loyalty which is much more volatile amongst digital customers.

Interestingly enough, nearly 90% of CxOs appear to believe that digital disruption will affect their businesses, but less than 50% believe that their businesses are properly prepared to address the challenges.

So there is an apparent disconnection between CxO understanding and reality, when it comes to addressing digital challenges.

Another survey, this time from Deloitte, may provide some diagnostic context. This survey show that CIOs basically operate in 3 different modes: Trusted Operator, Change Instigator, and Business Co-creater. 55% are still locked into the Trusted Operator model, whilst a third claim to be operating in Business Co-creator mode. This number needs to double, if CIOs are genuinely going to help lead digital adoption.

In another diagnostic produced by the survey the top 5 priorities were listed (in descending order of priority) as Customers, Growth, Performance, Cost and then Innovation. Showing that priorities are starting to move towards a digital friendly model, but are not quite there yet. As TQM gurus such as Demming said, focusing on Growth and Cost above quality (which is not really mentioned) leads to higher costs and lower growth. Also, Digital Customers expect Innovation, Experience and Ethics above everything else. Note, previous surveys had put Customers lower down the priority list, so this does represent some gradual cultural progress.

Interestingly enough the survey identified a number of CIO capabilities as core to success: Strategic Alignment, Execution, Vision and Strategy, Innovation and Talent & Culture, which at least recognises the criticality of culture to positive digital exploitation.

Putting this together, what does it all mean. One diagnosis would be that existing enterprises will gradually learn to adapt, but they are not quite there yet. So whilst they will survive, they are still leaving room for innovative companies to enter their market places or create new market places and grow rapidly to become competitors. So the composition of the FTSE 100 and definitely the FTSE 250 is going to change significantly over the next few years.

Agile at Scale

In a recent report The State Of Agile 2017: Agile At Scale Forrester stated that DevOps adoption is beginning to drive Agile adoption and that many organisations are adopting both simuultaneously in large scale transformations, i.e. they are going Lean as suggested in the 3rd layer of the DAF Framework (see: The Way of DAU (including the DAF) ).

Additionally, Forrester identifies major impediments:

• Culture & Behaviour,
• Availability and Commitment of skilled product owners,
• Effective Executive Leadership,
• Lack of project / programme frameworks

As key blockers to successful adoption which further re-inforces the Digital Adoption Framework principles and recommended activities for iteratively adopting a digital business model.

Anyone who wants to discuss can find the discussion group here on LinkedIn.

All constructive thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

Agile Business

A recent article in Raconteur discussed business agility and outlined some interesting case studies such as Lego and Volvo which are trying to pre-empt market trends by getting there first. It also mentions Google as the champion of "Failing Fast", without really getting into the ethos of innovation requiring experimentation and an appetite to learn from failure to either tune or abandon hypotheses on what will work in the market place.

It was also interesting that the article quoted a recent CA survey stating that:

87% of executives think that responding more quickly to new opportunities will give them a distinct advantage - whereas with DAU and the DAF, the belief is that you have to identify them and try to get there first. Responding quickly is only enough to keep up.

65% expect higher customer satisfaction and retention - which may be right about satisfaction, if their organisation has adequately focused on customer experience and design thinking, but kind of misses the point that customers are less loyal in the digital market place unless an enterprise maintains its innovation and keeps its image clean (through transparency, ethics, sustainability etc.).

58% expect higher employee satisfaction and retention - which again has some qualifiers around culture (collaboration, empowerment, personal development, communication etc.) design of work and eliminating frustrating nugatory tasks which are endemic in major corporations.

I also thought the author slightly got it wrong when reporting that Agile is chaotic. Agile is in fact highly organised, but it is a good way of coping with chaotic conditions. Anyone who has seen Snowdon's Cynefin framework would appreciate that.

Anyone who wants to discuss this can join the Way of DAU discussion group on LinkedIn.

Agile Portfolio Management

The Agile Business Consortium recently published its book on Agile Portfolio Management. See a recent article here AgilePfM .

Key things about it that are complementary with the The Way of DAU are the insistence of alignment with strategy and value, the emphasis on innovation and collaboration and the highly iterative nature of the activity.

It fits nicely into Layer 2 of the DAF framework.

A Day In the Life of a Product Manager

Getting up super early, Marjory K'Ting rushed her breakfast of extra strong coffee and a bagel so that she could catch the red-eye commuter train to Doontung where they were holding today's consumer workshops for the Zeting shopper app, MyWay. 

On the way she read through the latest KPI scores for the current version app. It was showing good overall trends, though she noticed that one of the target segments, for young professionals was not responding as expected to the app. What was going on here then?

On arrival she headed straight to the KafMeUp coffeeshop whose owners had agreed to let them run their workshop in am area set to one side.  There she found Zak, her super keen intern assistant lounging around outside just as KafMeUp's proprieter Ivan Blunt arrived to open up.

Inside they started to set up at their reserved area with signs inviting passersby to drop in and participate in exchange for a free breakast, paid for by Zeting. As they were doing this, Gordan Keek, one of the developpers and Susan Chain (the retail specialist) turned up and started to fill up on pick-me-up sized mugs of coffee.

Just as set up was complete, and KafMeUp's staff were ready to open up, the first customers came in. Zak's role was to meet and greet the customers and invite representative members of the public to take part in the workshop. Arty Tariq, the lead tester then arrived and joined the group, panting heavily as his train had been delayed and he had run all the way from the station to get there on time.

Gordan was their to demonstrate the current prototype for the next release of the MyWay app. Arty would capture their responses, helping refine detailed requirements, design features, usability concerns and identify appropriate test cases.

Marjory and Susan were going to review the current user experience, focusing on a couple of scenarios which had recently been identified as priorities from customer feedback. Before she started, she asked the team to see if they could explore the young professional segment issue as well.

By mid morning, they were exhausted. They had spoken to 50 or so shoppers and office workers who stopped by the coffee shop on their way to work and had a pile of material to analyse. In the taxi, on the way back, Marjory spoke to the team and got their gut feel response from the morning's work. Overall, it seemed that the work had confirmed a lot of their initial research and assumptions, but that there was a perception problem around the app with young professional who did not feel that it catered to their ethical concerns or help with finding green sourced and sustainable products. Also there was a lack of coverage of certain classes of lifestyle service and product which they liked.

She was going to have to address that soon. Which meant another meeting with the solution architect, the analyst and the project manager to see what could traded against these new requirements. Arriving at the office she quickly called up her diary and scheduled a meeting to discuss how to accommodate this within the forthcoming release.

Slipping down to lunch in the nearby deli-cum-eatery she started to think through the implications. Retailing would need to research and add lines. She would have to update the targeting and messaging of the marketing campaign for the new release. The media company used would need re-briefing and she would probably have to present an update to the Integrated Product Team and then she would have to re-forecast the numbers for the current release's performance, the costs of the new release and the anticipated uptake and revenue for the re-defined release. The product road map would also need updating and Oh! she needed to do a quick first impressions adjustment to the forecasts for this afternoon's operating plan review with the CFO and the CMO.

A few adrenalin filled  hours later she had, survived the monthly operating plan review, but with new actions to confirm her gut feel projections with more definitive estimates. Although, it was not all bad, if they met the young professional consume segment's needs and got the message through to them, then there could be a revenue boost of anywhere between 10 and 30%. They just needed to execute well.

Back to planning again, she added all her new tasks to her to do list and went downstairs to see what was going on in the Integrated Product Team's End of Day wash-up. Progress was good, and most of the issues raised appeared to have a doable action, but the bad news was that young Kendra, their graduate app developer had accepted a job offer from GitYrRox and would be leaving next month. 

Now she just had to survive the evenings drinks at the local cocktail bar whilst the ceremonially on boarded the new operations team lead Justin into the team and took pictures of him wearing a funny hat for the internal magazine. She hurriedly, phoned to leave a voicemail for her partner, asking him to leave a snack out for when she got home later that night and headed off into the social fray. ...

This is a mythical story about a product manager in an integrated product team. The aim is to convey a little of what is involved, but also how important collaboration is across the end-to-end process of developing and delivering products, whilst innovating iteratively in a customer focused manner. It's all part of The Way of DAU

Digital Patterns

Most software developers are familiar with the concept of a pattern. They use them to describe types of programming problems which can be solved in the same generic manner.

This was originally developed to support the indexing of re-usable code and trading in 3rd party off the shelf code components, with the idea of improving overall development productivity and quality. The quality aspect arising from the assumption that such code would be designed to be flexible and robust in many scenarios.

The idea was not actually that novel as it replicated the concept of group technology in manufacturing, where a group technology code defines the shape, size and manufacturing characteristics of 3D parts or components. The idea being that groups of machines could be set up to manufacture families of parts more quickly than traditional methods where machines were grouped functionally and work meandered all over a factory between the functional groups of machines. 

Anyway, patterns have become such a useful metaphor that developers will often describe what they are doing in terms of what the pattern is and therefore what tools and approach they are using. Consequently, the concept of patterns has also been adopted to describe aspects of solution architecture and encourage design re-use within enterprises.

So I have been struck recently by the fact that going digital or adopting a Digital As Usual model might be facilitated by certain organisational patterns.

For example, Lean and Agile solution development is usually product and product team based. The product team integrates the viewpoints of several functions involved in developing and exploiting the product typically including users, product owners, analysts, developers, testers and DevOps engineers. This might be called the Product Team Pattern.

Some approaches to delivering digital products also look at mass customisation via standard features. The principle being that a product is constructed from a number of features for which there may be a number of standard options. The product is then tailored to a customer's needs by selecting which features and which options the customer wants. This then gives a tailored product experience with most of the benefits of a bespoke product, but better economics and more consistent quality because each feature and each option is standardised. This might be called the Adaptive Product Pattern.

A recent article in the SLOAN MIT Management Review, Is Your Company Ready for a Digital Future? described a "Future Ready" pattern, in which it identifies a combination of Customer Experience and Process Efficiency capabilities as delivering this type of pattern resulting in low cost innovation, superlative customer experience, modular agility and the ability to exploit data as a future asset. Whilst this complements the thinking in "The Way of DAU", it struck me that perhaps there are other patterns out there which need to be identified. 

Any thoughts anyone?   

The Way of DAU - The best a business can be

Just to let you know, The Way of DAU is now available from Amazon as a paperback. (click on Amazon to see) and the e-version should be available soon. 

This is a deliberately simple book on the quite complex subject of how to adopt a sustainable digital business model. It was inspired by my personal frustration with incomplete models and advice available for Digital Business.

Digital operations have now replaced traditional Business As Usual business models. The Way of DAU promotes 10 basic principles, an iterative Framework (the DAF or Digital Adoption Framework), and positive cultural values to achieve the behaviours needed in successful digital businesses.

The book is based on a mixture of personal experience (in an organisation struggling to reinvent itself) as well as collected best practices. The current edition represents an MVP version. I hope to collect constructive feedback via a LinkedIn Group to drive future releases of the book. (see: The Way of DAU Group ).

Integrated Product Teams - Digital Organisation

IPTs Are Not as New As You Think

I first came across the Integrated Product Team concept in the most traditional of environments, the Defence Industry. Their adoption was one of the major hallmarks of an attempt to revolutionise UK MoD procurement in recent times.

Benefits of IPTs

The best aspect of the IPTs, was not just that they were multi-disciplinary and therefore great at surfacing all the dimensions of a problem, but they also helped break down the barriers of distrust that exist in the Defence Industry. This is highly significant because, the industry has traditionally had a huge gulf separating the MoD and its contractors, due to the insecurity that is encouraged by the Treasury in its pursuit for what it thinks is Value For Money. The Treasury usually takes the stance that the costs are too high and the public sector is being ripped off by rapacious private sector companies, encouraging a general sense of insecurity in the public servants (in the MoD) who are dealing with them. This then leads to relationship problems and behaviours which inevitably stretch out acquisition projects, impact the quality of what is acquired and often results in increased costs. It is a situation which Demming (one of the grandfathers of the Total Quality Movement) would have predicted. As he advocated focusing on quality (driven by customer needs) and continuous improvement, with the philosophy that improved costs and value would follow.

Design Thinking And Agile

The concept of Design Thinking (see for example the UK Design Council's Double Diamond Model for product development) also relies on a similar multi-functional teams to get at what is the real customer problem to address, and then what is the most appropriate product design option for delivering it, supported by iterative design and prototyping to develop a right quality product.

So it is no surprise that the Agile Movement, building on traditional Rapid Application Development techniques of user-centric prototyping, has gradually moved to a Product Team based approach, particularly when the market driven influences of digital companies such as Amazon and Google are taken into account.

IPT Case Study

So I was really interested when SLOAN research into the adoption of an IPT based approach at a major bank was published recently. See: What to Expect From Agile. It has some great practical insights into some of the considerations to take into account if your organisation is thinking of adopting an agile or digital business model.

Digital As Usual - Is Progress Stalling?

Attending a number of exhibitions this year, I have been struck by how little things have changed since last year. Indeed many of the suppliers at their stands have been quite muted in their messages and there has been little indication of much innovation. Overall the impression has been one of "more of the same" and a little "me too" in terms of what they have been promoting.

This year's State of DevOps Report showed increasing adoption of overall Lean (Agile and DevOps) practices and moved the emphasis to leadership as Digital becomes more embedded as a Digital as Usual practice.

The World Quality Report also showed higher demand on QA and testing, but a shortfall on budget and resources. Although it did express the anticipation that budgets would increase soon.

Both reports indicated maturing of accepted practice rather than new or radical changes in approach, or further innovations.

So, although technical progress may not be advancing much, adoption is definitely becomming mainstream.

This I take as confirmation that Digital is firmly mebedded as the new normal.