Digital's Impact on the C-Suite

One of the interesting things about Digital Adoption and Transformation is the way in which it is impacting roles in the C-suite.

In some early adopters, the default leader for digital transformation was the CMO, as digital marketing initiatives picked up and marketing ran away with the ball.

In second wave adoption there has been a bit of a split between whether a specially appointed person, the Chief Digital Officer, should manage the business's strategic response and run all things digital. In others they have handed this to the CIO. Though occasionally the CEO has decided that this is too important and grabbed the reins him/her-self. The longer term trend does appear to gradually hand this back to IT and CIO (as discussed in previous posts).

However, there is a growing realisation, as discussed in a recent Forbes article, and in my book that culture is crucial to success. Culture needs to be aligned to a number of positives:

• Collaborative working across functional siloes
• Product and value focus
• Opex Thinking
• Tolerance of Experimentation and alignment of Risk Appetite with Value and Learning from Failure/Experience
• Customer Focus

Apparently, this is now leading to the situation where enterprises are beginning to appoint Chief Culture Officers.

Additionally, some are also appointing Chief Customer Experience Officers to reinforce the idea that the key value proposition of Digital is Excellent Customer Experience. Although in design led organisations this may be Chief Design Officers who are also interested in the customer engagement by design thinking.

One of the questions that we have to ask is how will this mature? at the end of the 19th Century as electricity started to be adopted, some organisations flirted briefly with Chief Electricity Officer roles, but they did not last long.

Will Chief Culture Officers be subsumed into Chief HR Office roles and will this change the face of HR for the better? will customer experience revert to the Chief Marketing Officer, or will CIOs hybridise and pick up aspects of these roles as part of the CDO element of their job as they delegate more technical aspects to CTOs. Or will CTOs have to become more human?

Whatever happens, CxOs will all have to rethink what their core attributes and operating models should be. Digital required disciplined team play, as well as skills and flair.

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.