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 ...

I was talking to a couple of colleagues about how to change the culture of businesses the other day (as you do). Someone commented that they didn’t know how to make the culture of a client ‘digital’. His implication was that there needed to be uniformity of culture in order to succeed at making a transformation to a more productive operating model, which struck me as odd. Why would cultural uniformity be a good idea? What business actually has that today? What’s a 'digital culture' at all? Is also a good question. I currently describe it as something that’s outcome centric, that has hierarchy that serves to resolve areas of debate rather than for command and control and devolves leadership to everyone in the organisation based on philosophical alignment about what needs to be done. My description changes quite a lot, it’d be fair to say, but this is the June 2014 version. What about cultural uniformity, then? Well, I started to think about this and to be honest I could...

I’m in the process of developing some predictions for what will happen in digital in 2014 and thought that I’d post them here to get some wisdom from my readers! Some of these will be positive, some might be busting some myths about categories that have captured the zeitgeist. Now, more than ever, comments will be greatly appreciated.   Last time out, I wrote about the evolution of the digital camera market in 2014. On a somewhat different tack, here’s some thoughts about how a growing need to take a holistic perspective on digital will lead to large organisations moving into Shoreditch this year. My prediction By the end of the year, more than a quarter of companies on the FTSE 100 will have started or announced a dedicated digital team, based in or around Shoreditch. The digital journey Most large organisations have been on a 10 to 15 year journey with digital. This journey started out in the late 1990s, when businesses started having websites for marketing and t...

Verizon announced yesterday that it will launch an end to end digital video service that enables content creators and digital retailers to outsource the entire digital supply chain to them. This is the first such move by Telcos to get a cut of the maturing market in digital content delivery and differentiate themselves from the pure CDN players. By providing a large scale "utility" service for this increasingly non-differentiating part of the value chain, Verizon should be able to dramatically reduce the cost of streaming video and potentially further accelerate the demise of traditional TV (if one believes that the latter's demise is inevitable). I can't say much more as I've been involved in the launch of this service, other than I'm looking forward to seeing whether the market is ready for end-to-end delivery to be fully commoditised. Time will tell.