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The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

CorpExcellence.com - Wasim R

This podcast covers various topics on organizational excellence including topics on business agility, digital transformation, process excellence, program management and PMO, and other quality management topics.

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Top 10 The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices Episodes

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Design Thinking – The What, Why, and How?

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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10/14/19 • 22 min

In this episode we cover the topic of design thinking, which is a problem-solving approach used in the design and development of products and services and in solving other problems as well. In this episode, we will answer the following questions:

  • What is design thinking?
  • Why should organizations adopt this practice or approach for designing and developing their products and services?
  • How’s it being used in organizations and in the industry today?
  • What types of tools are used for design thinking?

The post Design Thinking – The What, Why, and How? first appeared on CorpExcellence.com.

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10/14/19 • 22 min

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(Part 2) Digital Transformation Maturity Framework (Operational Excellence and Organizational Culture)

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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05/15/19 • 16 min

What’s the role of operational excellence in an organization’s digital transformation journey? How important is the role of organizational culture in that journey? What are the elements of organizational culture that are linked to an organization’s digital transformation efforts?

In today’s episode, we will continue our discussion on the digital maturity framework. In part 1 we covered the first three elements of the digital maturity framework, which are innovation, market alignment, and customer centricity. In today’s part 2 of the episode, we will cover the remaining two, yet important elements, which have to do with operational excellence and organizational culture. So, let’s dive into both of those.

Operational Excellence

The fourth but critical facet about achieving digital maturity is that of achieving operational excellence.

Before jumping in to discuss how digital can help an organization achieve operational excellence, let’s first define the term and understand its impact on the overall performance of an organization. Operational excellence refers to successful execution of an organization’s strategy through lower operational costs and controlling various types of risks while delivering maximum possible value in terms of revenue and overall performance. So, from this definition, we can see that while the choice of an organization’s strategy ensures that an organization is heading in the right direction, operational excellence ensures that successful execution of that strategy results in maximum performance and value for the organization and its shareholders.

To get a better understanding of operational excellence, it would be better to review specific scenarios on how organizations work to achieve operational excellence as part of their digital transformation strategies.

  1. Operational excellence involves a redesign of an organizations’ business processes. As digital is enabling organizations to scale their business processes to handle more volume of transactions, growth in customers, online reach to varied audiences, and more, organizations work to redesign their business processes to scale and meet the growing needs of organizations
  2. Operational excellence is about process improvement. To increase efficiency and minimize waste, increase effectiveness, and overall value, organizations engage in various continuous improvement initiatives and attempt to instill that culture throughout the organization and its processes. Organizations are also looking holistically at all their business processes and finding opportunities where processes can be designed more effectively by bringing down silos and making the overall delivery process more agile.
  3. Operational excellence is about maximizing the effectiveness of an organization’s delivery pipeline. This involves establishing a project and program management culture, practices and processes, which ensure that an organization’s initiatives and projects are aligned to an organization’s strategy, that the right projects are selected for execution maximizing an organization’s investments, and maximizing the returns on projects that are selected for execution.
  4. Operational excellence is about optimizing an organization’s resources. Here organizations ensure that their resource allocation across the organization are optimized and result in the most bang for the dollars that they invest in resources.
  5. Operational excellence is about managing digital transformation and change effectively within the organization. As digitalization of organizations involves a major change within organizations, operational excellence practices ensure that these changes are well managed throughout their lifecycle.
  6. Organizations scoring high on Operational excellence measures have a strong and modernized technology platform. Such organizations are investing in digital technologies and modernizing their systems to help them become customer centric, reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve on other aspects impacting their overall performance.
  7. Operational excellence practices rely on a strong data and analytics Organizations that score high on operational excellence are increasingly investing in data analytics and Artificial Intelligence technologies to accelerate process enhancements and delivering more efficient operational results. The insights and intelligence derived from these analytics and artificial intelligence programs act as the driver to improve an organization’s overall performance.

These are some of the facets that organizations can work on to achieve operational excellence. In future episodes at DigiBizCentral we will cover more on the specific steps that orga...

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05/15/19 • 16 min

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(Part 1) Digital Transformation Maturity Framework (Innovation, Market Alignment, Customer Centricity)

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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05/10/19 • 20 min

Podcast transcription

Introduction

For all of you who are embarked on a digital transformation journey, how do you know you are on the right track? Are your digital investments upping your enterprise’s overall digital maturity? How can we assess an organization’s digital maturity?

Hello everyone to another episode of DigiBizCentral podcast on organizational excellence. I am your host Wasim R. In today’s episode, we will attempt to answer these questions. But first, a note about this specific podcast.

The DigiBizCentral podcast on organizational excellence is focused on covering various aspects of today’s digital business particularly on business strategies as well as management methods and practices that drive organizational excellence. We encourage you to subscribe to this podcast to ensure that you are always getting notified on future episodes as they are published. Also, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes or whatever channel you get this delivered on. We highly appreciate your feedback.

In today’s episode, I will introduce a digital maturity framework, which organizations can use to assess their digital transformation maturity more holistically. The underlying idea behind this framework is that as an organization continues its digital transformation journey, it must pay attention to certain elements to ensure that they are addressed in their digital projects and initiatives. Defining a digital transformation roadmap with specific milestones and outcomes along the way can ease the transition and increase the chances of success. Before we get started, please note that I will cover this topic in two parts or episodes. As this is part 1, look for part 2 to be published immediately after this one.

So, let’s get started with Part 1 of this topic.

The world in general and organizations specifically have been going through a digital transformation for a number of years now. Digital transformation does not refer to one or two programs that an organization embarks upon at some point in time. Rather, over the years, most organizations have taken on various digital initiatives triggered by their business imperatives and since then have continued their journey, which continues until today and would for some time to come. Depending on when each organization started, they are at different stages of that journey.

But all this then raises the question that how does an organization know where is it in that journey of transformation and where’s it heading? Specifically, how can an organization know that it’s progressing and maturing as it goes through that journey? For example, does an organization that migrates its business applications to the cloud can be regarded as digitally mature? What about the one that actively uses social media to interact with its customers or the one that has established a blockchain system to manage its transactions?

The answer to that question is that unless those steps have helped your organization become more customer centric or improve on your operational excellence then the answer is no. The market doesn’t reward organizations for moving to the cloud, for example, unless those steps have helped your organization to come closer to your customers and made your organization more agile and nimble to respond to market needs.

The move to digital, therefore, must be more holistic in nature. In this fast paced economy, it’s important to ensure that rather than merely taking on a few digital products and services, an organization becomes digitally mature so it’s firing on all engines for it to be more effective. Band-aid digital solutions in this economy simply don’t work. We saw how GE, despite its numerous digital innovations, suffered serious setbacks due to not paying attention to its bloated internal operations and dropped out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index after being on it for more than a 100 years. We saw a similar fate of ToysRus, who despite launching major digital initiatives a few yeast ago was recently driven out of business. And there are other numerous examples of organizations, which were driven out of business due to their pursuing one off digital solutions rather than paying attention to all the necessary dimensions to keep them competitive.

As for the digital transformation maturity framework, it has five dimensions and they are:

  • Innovation
  • Market alignment
  • Customer centricity
  • Operational Excellence
  • Organizational Culture

It’s important to understand that achieving digital maturity related to these five elements that I just mentioned is not just about launching a project or two. For example, an organization can’t just become innovative by launching one innovation center. Rather maturity along these dimensions and getting these ingrained within the fabric of the enterprise require...

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05/10/19 • 20 min

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Strategic Thinking for Strategic Decision Making

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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05/02/18 • 8 min

In this episode, we will review the important concept of strategic thinking and its applicability in the business world and strategic decision making.

At work and also in our personal lives, we’re often asked to think strategically in order to improve our decision making. But what exactly is strategic thinking? Is it just another management buzzword, or does it really have any merit?

Before we try to understand strategic thinking, let’s first review the concept of its counterpart, which is referred to as conventional thinking. Conventional thinkers like to draw between the lines established by others. In other words, they stay inside their “boxes” and thus there is little in terms of creativity involved in thinking through conventional means. Within the context of our work in organizations, conventional thinking offers limited opportunities as improvements are mostly incremental. Based on the nature of the competitive environment that we have, we need something more creative and transformational in terms of how we think and create solutions.

And that’s where we get into the concept of strategic thinking. Strategic thinkers have a much larger, more creative, and forward-thinking framework. This type of thinking doesn’t just solve immediate problems: it also expands the organization’s possibilities and has the potential for more breakthrough solutions.

Due to its scope of being deep and broad, strategic thinking involves targeted research, large-scale thinking, and forces on to step out of the box to bring fresh perspectives.

Strategic thinking is typically used as a corporate management tool for formulating promising long-term strategies. Its benefits in a corporate setting are obvious because of the complex problems where its usually used. It requires a joint effort from different experts from multiple domains. But although it’s traditionally associated with corporate planning, strategic thinking is equally useful for smaller organizations, especially in situations where more rigorous, creative thinking and targeted action are needed to solve the problem. Relying solely on conventional thinking and techniques will probably not yield optimal results in such cases.

Aside from solving problems, strategic thinking can result in key insights that can then result in intelligent organizational decisions, which in turn can lead the organization into new and promising directions. Business literature contains many ideas on this type of thinking, but for those of us who are unfamiliar with it, here’s a simplified model that’s relevant to all levels of organizational planning and problem solving. You can use these following 4 steps to think strategically and use the ideas to advance your business.

  1. Define the strategic problem or issue– In business and organizations, we are all required to work on and solve strategic problems. A problem is strategic in nature if it prevents you from achieving your desired business outcomes and benefits. In cases like this, it’s best to resist the temptation to use conventional thinking, which really means that instead of jumping in and automatically trying to devise potential solutions, try taking a step back and first define the problem. This will not only help to give you a sense of the scope of the problem but will also highlight any underlying complexities. Whether the issue involves a company division, a particular department, or a specific program, clearly defining the problem goes hand in hand with imagining your desired outcome before you can take the action steps needed to create the future condition and results. The output of this step is a clear definition of the problem and any other constraints that stand in the way of your desired outcome.
  2. Formulate your problem’s ecosystem– Once you’ve defined the problem, the next step is to map out its ecosystem. The ecosystem is the world in which your problem lives and may include the organization’s value chain such as sales, operations, IT, and other departments, or it could be even bigger in scope and may cover business partners, customers, competitors, and other entities. In case of programs and projects, these may include stakeholders, users, external project customers, or internal departments.

Mapping out the ecosystem helps to provide the context of the problem, including its background and it can prevent you from developing a tunnel vision. If you think about it, how many times have you really been in a situation where an idea that looked promising at first sight turned out to be not so great when considered from other angles? So, a 360-degree view of the problem allows you to see the problem from all angles, i.e., in the context of the overall picture, before examining the different solutions.

The output of this step is that you have defined the problem in much more detail and it usually involves a detailed map or model of the proble...

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05/02/18 • 8 min

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Learn Five Lessons from Amazon.com’s Business Success

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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04/23/18 • 14 min

This podcast focuses on lessons from Amazon.com’s success based on its recent performance results and a few lessons and takeaways that can be beneficial to others. Now a lot has been talked about over the years on how Amazon has excelled in both customer experience as well as operational excellence. But as the company continues to improve and excel year after year, we are compelled to revisit the topic and its performance. Just recently, Amazon and Jeff Bezos released the annual shareholder letter describing the organization’s performance. That’s what we will discuss today.

We can learn a number of things from this report especially about how an organization like Amazon has achieved its current stature and position in the industry. In general, reports like these can be very useful in understanding the psyche of the organizations, what drives them to do better and excel, and then see the impact of that in the results and outcomes.

So, in this podcast, I will go over some of those points that Jeff Bezos has highlighted in that report and what others – both businesses as well as individuals – can learn from Amazon.

Key Facts

First, I would like to highlight some important facts that Jeff Bezos mentions in the opening of his letter. And that has to do with Amazon being ranked as number one in various customer surveys. Amazon it seems was ranked as number one in the American Customer Satisfaction Index for the 8th year in a row – it was also ranked number one for the 5th year in a row in the U.K. Customer Satisfaction Index, which is put out by the Institute of Customer Service – it was also ranked as the #1 business on LinkedIn’s 2018 Top Companies list – and it was number one for 3rd year in a row on the Reputation Quotient, which is released annually by the Harris Poll. For those who don’t know, Reputation Quotient issued by the Harris Poll quantifies the reputation ratings for the 100 most visible companies and they have been doing this for the last 19 years or so. Additionally, Amazons’ India site – Amazon.in – has become the fastest growing marketplace in India, and the most visited site on both desktop and mobile, and also boasts the most downloaded shopping app in India in 2017.

Jeff Bezos then goes on to highlight three elements that in his view drives this level of performance. He highlights them as unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence.

So, let’s look at Amazon’s performance on various fronts.

Before we get into the potential reasons for Amazon’s success, let’s briefly review its performance over the last year.

First, its prime membership has grown to exceed 100 million subscribers. That means 100 million subscribers consider it worthwhile and of value to pay the $99 annual membership fees. More than that, this membership has now expanded to include more countries outside the USA.

Second, Amazon’s cloud platform called AWS or Amazon Web Services has grown to provide thousands of cloud based services making it easier for cloud developers to build digital systems and applications. Also, the fact that it’s annual conference on cloud computing services exceeds 100,000 attendees and participants, says a lot about the popularity of its cloud computing services.

Third, Amazon marketplace that enables third party sellers to sell on Amazon has grown substantially. Although the actual number is not known but it is in the millions and just in 2017, 300,000 businesses started selling on the Amazon platform. That’s a staggering number of businesses and shows the power of the platform. If the sellers on the platform has reached such a high number, this naturally would attract even larger number of shoppers.

Fourth, Amazon has also started to venture in the brick and mortar business, something that is new for the organization. For example, it has launched a new store called Amazon Go that requires no checkout. It uses a number of technologies including computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning, which all come together to create a Just Walk Out shopping experience for customers. Also, Amazon has acquired Whole Foods in an effort to making high-quality, natural and organic food available for everyone. They are also offering these products for delivery to prime members in certain markets. Amazon is also identifying in store Whole Foods shoppers who are prime members and have begun to offer special benefits and services to them.

Amazon also continues to excel in the area of Prime Video. For example, in 2017, Prime Video Direct secured subscription video rights for more than 3,000 feature films and committed over $18 million in royalties to independent filmmakers and other rights holders. Again, by bringing in more sellers and content producers on the platform, Amazon in a way is guaranteeing a wider adoption and use of its digital video me...

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04/23/18 • 14 min

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A CIO’s Top 5 Priorities for Digital Transformation

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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04/21/18 • 10 min

In this episode, we will cover five key priorities that an organization’s CIO or CTO should focus on to smooth their organization’s digital transformation efforts.

  • Creating a vision for the new digital platform: As CIOs play an instrumental role toward an enterprise’s digital transformation, accordingly they should also define the vision for their new digital-enabled enterprise. We know, for example, that more than offering one off digital products and services, a digital organization is realized through a larger digital ecosystem, which extends beyond the walls of the enterprise to include customers, suppliers, government regulators, and other stakeholders and partners. This ecosystem is built on digital platforms that in turn is built through various digital technologies. Building this larger ecosystem through the integration of internal systems and other digital platforms sometimes can take years and thus requires a coherent vision that the CIO must define and communicate to all parties. The vision of this platform should be sound and far reaching to support adoption of future technologies as well. Also, as the number of mergers and acquisitions have become common to adopt new business models, an organization’s digital platform should be versatile to absorb such changes.

In the context of building the right vision for an organization’s digital platform, we know that in today’s economy and digital markets an organization either creates its own digital platform to deliver digital services for its ecosystem members or uses an external digital platform to deliver its services. For example, GE has built its Predix platform to provide maintenance for its equipment that it sells to customers worldwide. It’s able to use that platform to provide services and has proved to be a major source of value for the organization. Other organizations such as Amazon have built a retail selling platform that it has opened to businesses to enable them sell their products and services through the Amazon platform. Thousands of businesses are successful due to selling on this platform. Similarly, almost every industry has organizations that have built successful digital platforms to provide services to their customers. So, part of defining a digital vision for its organization, a CIO will have to define their organization’s vision for either the development of new digital platforms or integration with ecosystems and the organization’s future position relative to that ecosystem and digital platform.

To ensure that the vision doesn’t sound as a wish or a dream, CIOs must embark on a transformation program and create and communicate a roadmap that shows the planned and progressive realization toward the new digital enterprise. The transformation roadmap should focus on all three dimension of people, process as well as technology along with working with all other stakeholders.

  • Use of analytics for business insights: The use of analytics within the enterprise has evolved to become a vital strategic tool and its use for getting business insights and making critical decisions is expected to exponentially increase over the next few years. The challenge for CIOs will be to use data and analytics effectively in all areas of the enterprise and to identify new customers and new sources of revenue, as well as understand existing customer needs and organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses. All in all, strategic use of analytics can transform the complete chain extending from customer facing systems to backend systems and processes. In fact, the use of analytics in all aspects of the enterprise will be so widespread and integral to an organization’s success that CIOs should define the vision for a larger analytics ecosystem and platform that can enable business insights at all levels of the enterprise. When defining the larger platform for analytics, CIOs not only should define and communicate the specific use cases but also link those use cases to specific business outcomes. To build such an all-encompassing vision, CIOs have to tackle a number of issues related to data quality, analytics governance, and potential applications of machine learning, and scaling the solution so it can extend beyond the enterprise to the larger ecosystem.
  • Digital platform and ecosystem Integration: As a CIO when you start building digital applications, systems, and platforms, one of the biggest challenge you may face is to ensure a smooth integration of the overall internal and external systems. This integration is vital not only to ensure that your overall ecosystem facilitates agility of processes but also ensures that your customer experience integrates smoothly with your backend systems. So, as an example, the frontend e-commerce systems that serve the end customer will integrate smoothly with the backend order fulfillment customer service...
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04/21/18 • 10 min

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Five Habits and Best Practices for Today’s Managers and Executives

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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04/12/18 • 10 min

In this episode, I will cover five habits that you as a manager must adopt to stay competitive in today’s digital markets and economies. We know that competitive pressures have been building up in today’s marketplace and digital disruption has created a fast-paced environment that is challenging traditional business models and requiring organizations to transform in order for them to remain viable. Effective team leadership in this new business environment demands that managers find fresh ways to help create both business value and a rewarding experience for colleagues and team members. To do this, you as an executive and / or manager must adopting new habits to help your teams and groups achieve the flexibility required to tackle the headwinds of this new competitive climate.

Here are five of those habits:

Define Success in Terms of Business Outcomes

Whether overseeing large projects or smaller tasks, managers need to define their department’s work in the context of overall business outcomes. Examples of business outcomes are growth in sales, improved customer experience, increased productivity, and reduced process cycle times. A problem that some teams face is that they get so bogged down in addressing lower-level requirements that they lose sight of the company’s overall target outcomes. One way to fix this is to implement trace-ability mechanisms that will track the relationship of lower-level activities to larger business outcomes. This can help you to align your department or group to the organization’s overall objectives and keep your teams focused on delivering business value.

Many organizations use quantitative metrics such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help their departments and managers stay focused on delivering the desired end results. However, improperly defined KPIs can have the reverse effect by obscuring the team’s ability to attain business value that’s relevant to the company’s larger goals. In such cases, you as a manager need to bring your teams back into focus by putting business outcomes in the context of overall business value. Doing this will help team members to think on a larger scale.

Thinking and communicating in terms of business outcomes also brings managers closer to their customers and stakeholders, ensuring that the department’s delivery is in line with their expectations and preventing any surprises in the future.

Create a Healthy Culture for Optimal Performance

A healthy organizational culture is a prerequisite for achieving optimal organizational performance. An organization’s culture depends on the mindset and behaviors of its employees, who take their cues from the leadership’s core beliefs, values, and practices.

As a manager, your potential for building a strong cultural foundation for your department gives you considerable influence. Among the ways of inculcating a positive culture are improving communication between team members, communicating core values to employees and practicing them yourself in your daily work, appreciating and valuing your team members’ input and efforts, and encouraging risk taking. Investing in your department’s culture will help employees feel personally fulfilled and also build trust and respect, all of which lead to a more motivated and creative staff. The positive impact on the thinking and performance of your department can only benefit the company as a whole.

Foster an Agile Mindset

Demands for speedy delivery are pushing managers to reduce cycle times across all levels of the organization. Methods such as lean and agile have proven useful in software development, manufacturing, and other organizational functions. But effective managers recognize that, more than a methodology, agile is a shift in mindset that embodies principles of incremental and iterative development, better customer alignment, and the use of feedback loops to improve products and services.

Agility in today’s environment, for example, means preferring rapid and incremental delivery of products and services with limited functionality, rather than waiting longer for hefty feature releases. In the new paradigm, failing quickly and learning from your mistakes is at times considered more desirable than engaging in extended (and sometimes indefinite) planning and analysis cycles. Managers who embrace these principles understand that being agile can help not only with working around complexities, dependencies, and uncertainties but also with ensuring rapid delivery to the marketplace.

Encourage Your Team to Think Differently

Departmental processes certainly help an organization to meet various performance objectives, but standard processes and predefined scripts cannot guarantee the successful achievement of all performance goals. Many tasks and situations require out-of-the...

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04/12/18 • 10 min

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Gartner Hype Cycle – A Tool to Drive New Technology Strategy Decisions

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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04/12/18 • 10 min

Watch the video below to learn more about Gartner’s Hype Cycle Tool
Authored by: Wasim

As a technology executive, you are constantly expected to embrace new technologies and trends to help your business gain a competitive edge in your industry. How do you make those decisions, especially when the technologies in question are still new and have a greater risk associated with their adoption?

Let’s take some recent trends. A lot of enterprises are testing the waters to potentially adopt emerging technologies such as machine learning, smart robots, cognitive computing, etc. How can one get a perspective on the maturity of these technologies within enterprises in general and their future potential?

To help with these decisions, Gartner introduced its Hype Cycle tool a few years ago and is currently used by many organizations to drive their technology strategy and investment decisions. The Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of how technologies progress from conception to maturity to becoming mainstream. This tool helps technology professionals get insights on the maturity levels of various technology innovations and the market adoption path that a technology may take in the future.

Each year, Gartner releases more than 90+ Hype Cycles related to various domains. Some of the recently released Hype Cycles relate to domains, such as Emerging Technologies, Midsize Enterprises, Data Management, Digital marketing and advertising, Internet of Things (IoT), and others. An example of a Hype Cycle diagram is included below in this article. You should note that the diagram is included as part of a detailed report that Gartner issues to its members only and is not available in the public domain.

The Five Phases of the Hype Cycle

The Hype cycle (presented below) is a graphical representation that shows a new technology’s progression through five distinct phases before reaching a ‘plateau of productivity’, where it is considered mature and mainstream. The Innovation Trigger is the first phase, when a technology breakthrough creates early excitement in the market and starts to become popular. At this phase, the adoption amongst a select few early adopter organizations picks up pace. However, the products related to the technologies in this phase are still not mature and are not widespread.

The technology then reaches the next phase of Peak of Inflated Expectations, where the market’s expectations peak, and the market slowly starts to lose interest, perhaps due to the technology not living up to the hype or other reasons. As Gartner states, the only enterprises making money in this phase are conference organizers and magazine publishers. From here, due to lack of meaningful results and accompanying negative coverage, the interest and adoption slow considerably, and the technology slides down and hits the Trough of Disillusionment. Although one would think that most technologies would die in the trough, an interesting thing happens, and the interest in certain technologies starts to pick up again. This may be due to focused experimentation by some organizations that leads to a true understanding of the technology’s applicability. This is where the technology enters the phase known on the Hype Cycle as Slope of Enlightenment. From here, the benefits of the technology are widely understood, tools mature in the market, and the use of technology stabilizes and enters the phase of Plateau of Productivity.

The Use of the Hype Cycle Tool

The Hype Cycle is a useful tool, as it can help technology managers get an informed perspective before rushing to adopt new innovations or abandoning them as those technologies fail to live up to earlier touted expectations. In general, the tool can help technology executives get a perspective on the following:

  • For a given technology domain, the Hype Cycle shows multiple technologies (or items) providing a good overview of the overall domain. In many cases, this may expose managers to other innovations that may be more relevant to them and that they had not known earlier. For example, in the figure below, Gartner’s Hype Cycle for data management shows 30+ technologies.
  • Understanding the maturity state of technologies and other items on the Hype Cycle graph (emerging, adolescent etc.)
  • Reasons for which a technology is in a certain phase
  • Market penetration levels of the technology within the target audience
  • Technologies highlighted in earlier years in the Hype Cycle that may be going obsolete. Although there are no rules when this can happen during the Hype Cycle, this usually happens within the first three phases before it reaches the scope of enlightenment phase.
  • Timeframe before certain technologies are expec...
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04/12/18 • 10 min

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Best practices for establishing an IT Steering Committee Function

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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04/10/18 • 6 min

To download free reports on IT Alignment and best practices on steering committee’s role in shaping an organization’s governance framework, enter your E-mail below. You will learn the following:

  • Business strategy formulation and role of committees
  • IT strategy and IT Steering committees
  • Corporate and IT alignment issues
  • Role of steering committees in organization’s strategy formulation
  • Best Practices in establishing IT and other Corporate Steering Committees
  • and more

In this episode, we will review some best practices related to establishing an IT Steering Committee function. An IT steering committee ensures alignment of IT and business and thus is a crucial function that is needed in organizations.

So, first, let’s take a look at what is an IT steering committee and the benefits that it serves to the organization. After that we will review some best practices related to establishing this function within an organization.

(Join our mastermind group for your professional development by clicking here)

IT steering committees bring key IT and business stakeholders in a common forum to discuss matters related to strategic planning, program planning and project and program approvals. A typical steering committee usually includes the CIO, other key members of IT management, and executives from various Lines of Businesses such as Finance, Marketing, and others. When instituted correctly, programs are strategically planned and approved mutually between both parties, and thus one can expect IT and Business alignment.

Although a number of organizations have IT steering committees in place, only a number of them are really effective. In fact, a research conducted by the Info-Tech Research Group highlighted that 88% of CIOs believe that their governance structure and processes are not effective. As IT steering committees serve as an important glue in the overall IT governance process, they can encapsulate a number of critical decision making processes and activities, especially those related to the review and approval of key technology related initiatives. Due to the criticality of this organizational function, it’s prudent therefore that organizations should invest in improving the effectiveness of these committees.

Best Practices

Here are some best practices that an organization can follow to improve their effectiveness.

  • Ensure Executive Support – One of the most important factors that contributes to the success of IT Steering committees is to ensure that they have the full backing from the CEO and LOB senior executives. Obviously, if the committee’s main function is going to be to mutually review and approve an organization’s key projects and initiatives then it must have that high-level support for it to be effective. This also ensures that both IT and business become accountable for their decisions rather than having one group blaming the other for failed IT projects and initiatives.
  • Establish a Committee Charter – One of the reasons that committees usually fail is the lack of an appropriate structure and definition of key processes that are needed for the ongoing execution of the committee functions. Therefore, one of the important steps when initiating a steering committee is to document its charter. The charter helps shape the overall governance structure, processes and roles of the committee and ensures that the committee continues to be effective. The charter should provide details such as the purpose of the committee, its scope, key roles and responsibilities of the committee members, details on various processes such as those of project approvals, ongoing deliverables, governing documents, etc.
  • Integrate committee with the organization’s PPM processes – Some organizations have Project and Portfolio Management or PPM functions in place that provide a vehicle for ideas and initiatives to be evaluated, and prioritized. The selected projects are then put through a project execution framework. In such cases, the organization should ensure to effectively integrate IT steering committee processes with the organization’s project portfolio management or PPM processes and ensure that the functions are not duplicated or missed and that the overall framework is properly defined.
  • Establish Project Prioritization and Selection Criteria – One of the most important IT and business alignment functions is that of project evaluation, prioritization, and selection. This ensures that only those projects are selected for execution that are properly aligned to an organization’s strategy. In this context, the steering committee that is made up of key members from both the...
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04/10/18 • 6 min

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A Harvard Business Review (HBR) and Oracle Study on IT Business Alignment (Podcast)

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices

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04/08/18 • 6 min

In this podcast episode, we will focus on the importance of the partnership between IT and business and why this partnership is quite critical for continued innovation within an organization. Although the industry has been discussing the need and importance of this partnership for a few decades now, the reality is that it continues to [...]
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04/08/18 • 6 min

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FAQ

How many episodes does The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices have?

The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices currently has 18 episodes available.

What topics does The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices cover?

The podcast is about Management, Podcasts, Technology and Business.

What is the most popular episode on The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices?

The episode title 'Design Thinking – The What, Why, and How?' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices?

The average episode length on The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices is 14 minutes.

How often are episodes of The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices released?

Episodes of The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices are typically released every 1 day, 22 hours.

When was the first episode of The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices?

The first episode of The Podcast on Organizational Excellence - Digital Business Best Practices was released on May 4, 2017.

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