Versatile Amphibian

I thought it'd be useful to write a little about a little framework we've started to use quite a lot in Digital Strategy to categorise digital activities in an organisation's portfolio. The background to this is in the work we do to align executives on what digital means in their context and where they have capability gaps. We tended to find a couple of common issues: No one leader has a complete view of what digital ventures were being taken across the business There are rarely enough truly innovative projects... ...and those that there are tend not to be directed at specific corporate goals Organisations lack a means to take the lessons from innovation and apply them to optimise the main business In my experience about 70 percent of the energy (capital, time, attention) of a business should be directed on optimising the core activities. These are pure return on investment (ROI) calculations where a simple business case can be created. At the opposite end, te...

A non-trivial amount of the work we do in Digital Strategy at the moment is focused on the design of digital operating models. I don’t particularly like the name, but the sentiment is about designing a business fit for the New Machine Age. As I’ve mentioned before, this philosophically means that it ultimately needs to become outcome- rather than process-centric. Making that happen means applying some new organisational and operational concepts to the business, one of which is an idea we’re beginning to talk about a lot: cadence. Cadence basically means the rate at which you do things. Businesses always have them. They’re part of the culture. In a PLC, they are quarterly to match the reporting cycle. In the public sector they’re often annual. In digital startups they could be as fast as weekly, to correspond with the tempo of an agile delivery ethos. Usually though a business has a natural speed and struggles to operate outside of it. The public sector struggles to act outside of ...