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Mentor at IncuBus Ventures

IncuBus Ventures LogoI am delighted to have become a mentor at IncuBus Ventures providing hands-on mentoring to entrepreneurs, founding CEOs and their teams across a variety of industries especially around innovation, strategy, product development, technology, business development and investor relations.

IncuBus Ventures is helping get entrepreneurs and their startups ready for the world’s best accelerators and funding via our 12 week incubator programmes.
The programmes include skills based workshops, mentoring and access to workspace.
Learn more about the programme at www.incubuslondon.com

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The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2016

The toughest job in corporate America, says Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, is the CIO’s. While I agree with Hurd’s assessment, I also believe that business-minded, forward-looking CIO’s have an incredible opportunity to play leading roles in the digital/physical revolution that is transforming every facet of our lives.
CIO’s of the world, it’s time to jump into this revolution fearlessly and joyfully because your backgrounds, your perspectives, your expertise, and your imaginations are needed desperately by your companies as they attempt to engage deeply in this richly blended digital/physical mix—or risk slipping into a nonstop decline marked by unfixable difficulties, growing irrelevance, and, ultimately, oblivion.

As Oracle CIO Mark Sunday says, “This is the most challenging time in history to be a CIO, because in order to survive, organisations need to embrace new technologies at an unparalleled pace. But by the same token, CIO’s have never had a better opportunity to add value to their organisations—if they embrace the challenge.”

Welcome to the fourth annual list of the major challenges and opportunities global CIO’s will face in the coming year. In last year’s prognostication, we noted, “Throughout 2014, the CIO profession was subjected to a baffling series of apocalyptic forecasts and dire predictions that have proven to be laughably wrong,” and asked, “Where did all these distortions and misperceptions about the stewards of IT strategy and execution come from?”

And as we head into 2016, I have to say that those prophets of doom, who just 12 to 18 months ago were so doggedly insistent that CIO’s were about to take permanent residence next to the Dodo, have changed their tunes, rewritten their histories, and realised that the vectors of profound change in today’s global economy—cloud computing, the Internet of Things, mobile everywhere, social lifestyles blending with social commerce, and the blurring of enterprise tech and personal tech—point to nothing but a greatly enriched future for smart and aggressive CIO’s.

From our perspective, we see that future coalescing around four key activities or attributes that world-class CIO’s are embracing:

  • Creators of a new cultural outlook of aggressive possibilities, of new products and services, and of new capabilities, all of which are essential building blocks in their company’s digital transformation;
  • Evangelists for cloud computing and its transformative potential, for social business, for data-driven decision-making, and for digital-first thinking throughout the organisation;
  • Transformers of corporate culture as IT pivots from reactive responder to aggressive innovator; from “you’ll take what we give you” to “we’ll accelerate and enhance your initiatives”; and from analog paper-based processes to digital workflows and collaborative approaches driven by data;
  • Accelerators of everything from product development to procurement, and from decision-making to deployment of resources as the epochal shift to cloud computing liberates huge chunks of IT budgets and paves the way for truly customer-centric business.

 

Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2016

  1. Create New Revenue Streams. The digitisation of our everyday lives opens up huge possibilities for IT-inspired innovation in new products, new services, new data-as-a-product offerings, and other innovations that enhance customer engagement while also boosting revenue.
  2. Create a New Can-Do Culture. Cloud computing and the ongoing explosion of social/mobile services offer CIO’s superb building blocks for demonstrating to business units around the world that the IT organisation has permanently shed its “Dr. No” persona, with the initials “IT” now representing what the CIO’s team really stands for: innovation/transformation.
  3. Create Dazzling—and Relevant—New Apps. What percentage of the IT organisation is now focused on building customer-centric apps? How does that figure compare to last year? How much will it grow in 2016? World-class CIO’s will find ways to transform their teams into engines of customer engagement, with app creation at the centre.
  4. Evangelise the Business Benefits of Cloud Computing. Are you talking to the CMO about SOA, or about the lifetime value of customers? In the cloud, product-development cycle times are shorter, customer trends can be spotted more quickly, top performers can co-create career-development plans, and the CFO can stop being a historian. Are you telling these stories clearly and passionately?
  5. Evangelise the Power of Digital Business. As GE CIO Jim Fowler noted above, the marriage of digital capabilities with traditional products and services opens up big possibilities for creating new value for customers—new insights into how products are performing, which new services are most profitable, where to promote certain products at certain times, and which high-performing people are at risk of leaving.
  6. Transform Traditional Ideas/Silos of “What We Do.” Per the opening quotation of this article, wearable tech is starting to turn the medical field upside down, and we’re seeing digitally activated shelves in retail, intelligent sensors revolutionising preventive maintenance, ingestible medications, driverless cars, smart clothing, and much more. How can the CIO disrupt traditional thinking within her company by showcasing what already is, as well as what is possible?
  7. Transform Customer Engagement. A while back, the newly named CIO of one of Asia’s leading airlines described his company’s eye-popping realisation that top customers desired zero human interaction until they were actually on the plane. What customers really want is often greatly at odds with what we as businesses are accustomed to—or comfortable—delivering. In 2016, CIO’s must help lead the way in bridging this gap and driving customer-centric engagements.
  8. Transform Decision-Making from Gut-Level to Data-Driven. Think of the astonishing volumes of data residing within large organisations—and think how few of those valuable assets are being exploited to enhance the decision-making ability of employees at all levels of the company. CIO’s have a perfect opportunity to work with business leaders to unlock those data assets and put them to work in delivering real-world, real-time insights that create success for the business, for customers, and for employees.
  9. Accelerate the Reversal of the 80/20 Budget Trap via Cloud Computing. Before cloud computing, the #1 enemy of the CIO was the economic reality that about 80% of his IT budget would be consumed by low-value maintenance and integration. Because cloud computing pushes that burden over to cloud vendors, CIO’s can liberate huge portions of their budgets and reallocate them to projects centred on growth and customer engagement. The faster this happens, the better.
  10. Accelerate Deployment of World-Class Cybersecurity. The traditional IT operating model was a security nightmare because IT environments were made up of thousands of disparate components cobbled together, with each piece requiring its own unique security protocols. In the cloud, CIO’s have the opportunity to flip that model from thousands of vulnerabilities to a single, unified, top-to-bottom cybersecurity stack where the cloud vendor shoulders that burden. (Oracle believes security has to be built in at every layer of the cloud stack, and that’s become a competitive differentiator for Oracle Cloud.) And remember, cybersecurity is a journey, not a destination. As Sunday has said, “your cybersecurity capabilities need to evolve continuously in order to meet an ever-more sophisticated and ever-evolving threat landscape. Having world-class cybersecurity means having the ability to detect and remediate today’s threats, while maintaining the capability to morph to meet the needs of tomorrow.”

And as 2016 looms, best wishes to all you CIO’s out there for a year filled with achievement, excitement, engagement, and success. I hope it’s a year in which you get to flex those muscles that let you create, evangelise, transform, and accelerate in ways that dazzle and delight your customers, and bring opportunities and success to you and your colleagues. As Christopher Lochhead says, “Knock ‘em alive!”

Full credit for the article to Bob Evans, SVP and Chief Communications Officer for Oracle – Please share your feedback with him on Twitter at @bobevansIT

 

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The Innovation Dilemma

In todays commercial arena, innovation is critical to grow and position your company as a leader within its market(s), and position it above its competition but many don’t know where to begin nor how to foster and drive it within their organisation.

At a recent roundtable I ran, we discussed innovation and its use as a driving force for revenue growth. The roundtable attendees were IT leaders from a number of large enterprise organisations and hailed from all over Europe ready for an engaging discussion (no pressure!).
We started the discussion by going around the room asking everyone what the barriers to innovation were in their organisations.
There were a number of recurring points which weren’t surprising, such as who should own innovation across the organisation, and how do they foster and engage innovation within their organisations and prioritise the elements of it accordingly.

What did surprise me however were comments such as “what exactly is innovation?” and “is delivering new products, ideas or services that improve revenue just me doing my job well?”
I hadn’t expected to hear this but it really made sense and drove our discussion on to how do you measure innovation against doing your job well – not an easy task but if you are set an innovation target within your organisation be it revenue or service focused its a crucial one you will need to resolve.

This really highlighted to me that though every organisation is trying their damnedest to deliver innovation, what they are really struggling with is how to foster, engage with and measure it accordingly in relation to it adding tangible value.
How do you truly measure innovation? Is it through your product creation team delivering the right products to the right markets and capturing critical commercial momentum or simply altering an online process to make it easier for clients to register themselves?

The truth is that in any organisation where free thinking and entrepreneurial activity is encouraged, not stifled and is coupled with hard-working smart employees, you are going to get innovation.
You are also going to create a great working environment which will attract more smart, hard-working people who can create better products and services which create additional revenue and clear competitive advantage – what’s not to like!
Many of you will be thinking this is a brave commercial stance but you cannot argue with the results of those that do change their business strategy and working models like this. It may be hard work and anathema to some but the changing of the guard with relation to that of the traditional executive way of thinking is underway as millennial ideologies and commercial practices seep further into enterprise organisations as they rise up the executive ladder.

There are many ways in which larger organisations are trying to increase their rate of innovation such as creating innovation labs and associated teams to partner with start-up incubators like MassChallenge who do a fantastic job in this space and are non-profit.
JLAB at John Lewis is an excellent example of one such innovation hub where they are encouraging start-ups to come to them and compete to win unique access to John Lewis who will help them refine their products and their business models with the final prize being the opportunity of securing a contract with them.
Others such as UBS who are looking at new technologies which will disrupt their industry such as Blockchain and have set up labs and an open competition for entrepreneurs and technology startups around the world to compete for funding. These are fabulous opportunities for new and established start-ups to work with established corporates and really fosters the growth of innovation and entrepreneurship in our society and I am very much in favour of these efforts.

In today’s world where technology enables us to achieve so much of what we only dreamed possible a few years ago and most people now so attuned to it there really is no argument for not enabling and fostering innovation within your organisation. You now have to concentrate on changing your culture to incorporate, foster and grow innovation within your organisation. It will be hard work, but boy will it pay you back, and it might just be the best thing you’ve ever done.

 

This post has also been featured on the HP Business Value Exchange here 

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Transformation – What level of surgery do you need?

 

In a surgical analogy, a transformation programme is relative to ‘open heart surgery’ as it is one of the most important and powerful opportunities you can undertake to change the purpose and strategic direction of your organisation.
Transformation programmes are a blend of business, people and technology change including root and branch process review. They are mainly focused around improving customer engagement, commercial return and re-energising the customer experience.
In the planning of any transformation programme, its imperative you fully understand the objectives you are looking to achieve and that your board or leadership team are fully aligned with and agree on the prioritisation of its primary objectives. Everyone must agree that the results you’re looking for are not only achievable and affordable but necessary for you to progress as an organisation.

For any transformation to be successful you will need the full support and buy-in of your whole organisation. Not just key stakeholders but all affected parties including key clients and partners, so you will need to have a full and open communications strategy at all times.
You will need to work out through internal and external consultation the level of necessary change and thus ascertain the degree of transformational surgery you need to perform including the level of process change you can readily consume alongside any necessary new systems, platforms or infrastructure to support it.
It is imperative you keep this communications line open and a continuous dialogue with your key clients to understand what they want from your organisation, what products and subsequent features they use or need and how they wish to consume them (don’t forget to focus on mobile consumption as this will affect your design and performance criteria). You should also take this opportunity to learn of competing solutions and how your products rank against them, which will often give you valuable feedback.

Strong leadership is required during any transformation programme so that it stays true to its principles and delivers its agreed objectives whilst staying open to internal and external client feedback throughout.
The leadership team will need to control the direction and pace of the transformation so that business as usual operations are not interrupted or allowed to veer off track (an obvious but often overlooked dilemma).
It is imperative the leadership team understands both the technology and business goals and how decisions in either can have a knock on effect in the other. Managing this critical symbiotic relationship will not only ensure adherence to the project plan but also limit costs and surprises along the way.

Most transformation programmes will require fine tuning and subtle alterations through their lifetime as not all necessary objectives will be deliverable without some form of tweaking.
Some objectives may not act as desired once in development or testing and require reworking, postponing until later in the programme or removal. This is where strong leadership and a firm hand on the tiller is imperative.

A full training, implementation and internal/external support plan is a major but often overlooked component of any transformation programme. Skip this stage at your peril as it will cause your transformation programme to fall spectacularly and very publicly at the last hurdle.
Transformation programmes of any size are major surgery on your organisation and subsequently need constant follow up and handholding of both internal staff, partners and external clients to make sure all of your implemented objectives are delivering as planned. This will allow you to make any necessary amendments and fine tuning whilst showing proactivity and desire to deliver the best possible results you can.

Transformation is an important process in reengineering an organisation and ensuring it stays relevant in how it operates, making sure its products and services are commercially relevant as well as improving the strength of the customer experience it delivers. It should not be taken lightly but when done well it can give you an enormous competitive advantage, re-energised staff, revenue generating products and an engaged client base.

 

This post has also been featured on the HP Business Value Exchange here and here on the IBM Middleware site in my position as a member of the IBM VIP Influencer Programme

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BCS Digital Leaders 2015 E-Book

I was delighted to be asked to submit a piece to the 2015 BCS Digital Leaders e-book, which you can read on page 130 here.
As a fellow and chartered IT professional of the BCS, I think its important to contribute and add value when I can to the societies publications.

Digital Leaders is a publication written by IT professionals for IT professionals to help them influence their organisations away from using outdated practices, governance models and structures to a more cutting edge world, but without depriving people or communities.
Aimed primarily at C-level managers and senior decision makers, Digital Leaders can enhance any organisation’s IT strategy – visit bcs.org/digitalleaders for related articles and blogs.

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The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2015

Throughout 2014, the CIO profession was subjected to a baffling series of apocalyptic forecasts and dire predictions that have proven to be laughably wrong.
Where did all these distortions and misperceptions about the stewards of IT strategy and execution come from?

Well, times of extreme change and disruption in the business world—and 2014 surely qualified in spades for that designation—always breed lots of theories about what caused all that upheaval and where it will lead.

And since the CIO profession and its attendant IT organization have always been among the most misunderstood siblings in the corporate family, it’s not surprising that their decline, downfall, decimation, and demise were so grandly forecast and greatly exaggerated. Here are a few of my favourite crackpot theories:

  • The CMO would kill the CIO: The CIO and the CMO, we were told, were locked in a Texas Cage death match from which only one would emerge alive. Because CMOs have begun to embrace marketing automation technology, this theory went, the CMO would inevitably be in mortal opposition to the CIO.
  • Mobile technology would kill the CIO:The CIO and the entire IT organisation would become wards of the CFO as superb mobile technology rendered many/most traditional enterprise systems obsolete. According to this yarn, only core financial apps would require the rigour of traditional enterprise systems, so the CIO would be tucked deeply under the CFO and become little more than a mechanic wearing a green eyeshade.
  • Cloud computing would kill the CIO:In this daydream, the CIO and the entire IT organisation would join the woolly mammoth for a nice long dip in the tar pit, as the rise of cloud computing would eliminate any need for businesses to retain deep business-technology vision and strategy.
  • Big data and its data scientist masters would kill the CIO:The rise of the omniscient data scientist would lead to a Borg-like collective mentality that would know everything about everything, making IT irrelevant.

But a funny thing happened on those roads to CIO extinction, and here in 2015 we find that the best CIOs are not only alive and well and far from endangered, but are indeed creating more business value than ever before by collaborating eagerly and openly with those supposed forces of opposition. World-class CIOs and IT organisations have never—ever—worked in isolation, and in today’s dizzying high-change business environment, the collaborative approach is paying huge dividends.

In 2015 and beyond, as the full impact of digital disruption takes hold across all industries, the winning organisations will be those in which the CIO engages relentlessly with the CMO, the CFO, the chief revenue officer, the CHRO, the heads of product development and manufacturing, the data scientist, the heads of service and support, and every other line of business leader to help conceive and create the digital enterprise.

 

Because without that type of collaboration, without that infusion of strategic business-technology capability into every facet of the organisation, businesses will simply be unable to keep pace with the rapidly shifting and escalating wants and needs of customers, whether consumers or businesses.

In that context, I’d like to offer my “Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2015.” And I’d like to begin by sharing my Top 10 lists from the two previous years to offer a sense of continuity and perspective that, in combination with the 2015 list, reveal a profession and a corporate asset that are more relevant, more valuable, and more strategic than ever before.

The Top 10 Strategic Issues for 2013

  1. Simplify IT and Transform You’re Spending: Kick the 80/20 Budget Habit.
  2. Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-Enabled Enterprise.
  3. Unleash Your Company’s Intelligence: Create the Enterprise-wide Opportunity Chain.
  4. Embrace the Engagement Economy: Merge the Back Office and the Front Office into the Customer Office.
  5. Future-Proof Your IT Architecture.
  6. Upgrade “Cloud Strategy” to “Business Transformation Enabled by the Cloud.”
  7. Transform Big Data into Big Insights, Big Vision, and Big Opportunities.
  8. Preside over a Shotgun Wedding: Systems of Record Marry Systems of Engagement.
  9. Lead with Speed: CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer.
  10. Bend the Value Curve: More Innovation, Less Integration.

Next, The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2014 

  1. Drive Customer-Centric Innovation Throughout Your Organisation.
  2. Why the Internet of Things Will Turn Your Business Upside Down.
  3. Shatter the Legacy Model of IT Budgeting and Expectations.
  4. Dazzle Your Customers—Make Them Love Your Company!
  5. Who’s on First? It’s a Mobile-First, Cloud-First, and Social-First World.
  6. Blending Art and Science: Why Product Development and IT Must Collaborate.
  7. Don’t Fight Tomorrow’s Wars with Yesterday’s Technologies.
  8. Embrace Your Ultimate Metrics: Customer Loyalty Moves to the Front.
  9. Tie IT Compensation to Knowledge-Worker Productivity.
  10. Design and Deliver the Transparent Enterprise.

Clearly, all of those initiatives from 2013 and 2014 need to continue into 2015 and beyond, but for this year’s top CIO imperatives, I’ve broken the list into four categories that reflect the multifaceted capabilities the modern and business-driven CIO must have, and the wide-ranging responsibilities such executives deserve to have.

As you’ll see below, those four subsets are Business Transformer, Customer Expert/Advocate, Business-Technology Visionary, and Culture Warrior.

Here’s the 2015 Top 10 list, followed by an overview of each item.

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2015

The Business Transformer

1) Be the joyful digital disruptor, not the hesitant and befuddled digital disruptee.

2) Accelerate insights, decision-making, and operations: function as the Chief Acceleration Officer. Yes, this is the same as #9 on the 2013 list, but it not only bears repeating, but deserves a promotion up the list.
3) Forge strategic and deep relationships with the CMO, CHRO, CFO, and beyond.

The Customer Expert and Advocate

4) Harness the enterprise-wide power and potential of customer-centric big data and analytics.
5) Unlock insights and capabilities that let every employee contribute to customer loyalty.

The Technology Visionary

6) Modernise and simplify: Exploit cloud computing to help achieve each item on this list.
7) Re-imagine your security strategy as globalisation and mobility redefine privacy and risk.

The Culture Warrior

8) Be the strategic evangelist for turning social from tactical sidelight to strategic growth engine.
9) Embrace new HCM outlooks and tools to make your department—and your entire company—a high-demand destination for world-class talent.
10) Transform the IT organisation and reputation from no to yes, from SLAs to revenue growth, from obstacle to accelerator, from passive to opportunistic.

To carry on reading this piece, please visit the original article here.

Full credit for the article to Bob Evans, SVP and Chief Communications Officer for Oracle

 

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Insights on the evolving role of the CIO in the age of digital disruption

I was asked by Samsung to give my insights on the evolving role of the CIO in the age of digital disruption.GartnerSymp2014Samsung
These insights have been included in a marketing piece which Samsung has released in relation to the key take aways for CIO’s coming out of this years Gartner Symposium in Barcelona.
Click here to read my insights.

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The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2014

CIOs have never had such a glorious—and challenging—opportunity to deliver significant, enduring, and transformational business impact and customer value as they do today.

But it’s not a job for the faint of heart. Any CIO pining for a return to the good old days of bonuses based on server-uptime and SLA enforcement should consider swapping out the CIO title for a new one: senior director of infrastructure.

Continue Reading →

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Review of the Gartner Symposium European IT Expo 2013

Gartner 2013 SymposiumI attended the Gartner Symposium IT Expo 2013 in Barcelona last week along with 5000 others.
It was an intriguing event with lots of excellent speakers, sessions and content.

Some of the main themes being pushed out by Gartner were:

  • The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – A nexus of converging forces is building upon and transforming user behaviour while creating new business opportunities
  • Master the six essential elements of a digital strategy – 60% of organisations report they have no effective digital strategy. As uncertainty recedes, the digital future emerges
  • The function of IT in business is changing and Gartner believes the best way to cope is to establish two-speed IT, where innovation can be separated from operational IT
  • Gartner describes three types of IT function: systems of record, systems of differentiation and systems of innovations
  • Innovation will require IT to become more agile and work differently, changing your primary suppliers and lots more partnering with smaller, leaner IT companies
  • The Internet of Everything – How the Internet of Things is reinventing industries and driving new usage and business models
  • CIO’s have to master power, manipulation and warfare – they must become comfortable with the idea of power, gathering it, and using it as an essential leadership tool
  • By 2017 smartphones will be smarter than people – not because of intrinsic value but because the cloud and the data stored in the cloud will provide them with the computational ability to make sense of the information they have so they appear smart

There were a couple of things, which caught my eye that I wanted to lift out:

IT Leadership Roles in 2020: The keynote at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo raised a number of interesting points but something that leapt out at me were the references to what IT leadership roles they see will be in play in 2020.
Interestingly and in a different twist to what others are saying, they see the CIO role continuing and the CDO role coming to an end having played its significant part.
They see the CDO role as a transformation and change agent who will lead the digital transformation and implementation of a digital leadership culture within the organisation between now and 2020 before bowing out gracefully with a job well done.
You can view a more in depth piece about this on my blog here.

Who Will Be Your Primary Suppliers in 2017? In confirmation of what I have noticed in recent months is a distinctive trend emerging whereby CIO’s are switching from larger, well-known suppliers to smaller vendors who are leaner and more agile.
This was backed up by the feedback in the sessions and the CIO’s who I spoke with at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo.
This is an interesting and positive trend as it allows the market to thrive with more up and coming vendors allowed to pitch for and win contracts by showing real innovation and enthusiasm to get the job done where they may have previously been frozen out at the RFP stages through staid supply chain processes.
To further highlight this shift, Gartner stated in their keynote session that their recent CIO survey showed that the majority of CIO’s would change their primary suppliers by 2017.
You can view a more in depth piece about this on my blog here.

The Gartner Symposium European IT Expo is a very worthwhile event for CIO’s and IT leaders to attend with excellent networking potential.
Couple this with a great location, excellent local restaurants and warm sun in November and you can see why it’s such a popular event.

This piece has also been posted on:
The Business Value Exchange in my position as CIO ‘Thought Leader’ and Featured Contributor

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