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Bupa’s 6 year journey with their Enterprise Social Network

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Bupa’s 6 year journey with their Enterprise Social Network

Del GreenGood social business case studies explaining the advantages of enterprise social networks over long term use are hard to find.  Bupa is a great example.   I sat down with Del Green, Internal Social Business Manager there, to hear about their 6 years of experience and what they are looking to do next.  Del has been involved right from the start and is one of the speakers at the Enterprise Digital Summit on 22 October in London where he will be telling more of the story.

As of today, one of Bupa’s primary ambitions is to become a truly digital business.

Offering health and care services to 29 million customers across 190 countries, it’s crucial that Bupa’s  80,000 employees around the world are constantly connected and have the ability to easily collaborate with one another, sharing ideas, successes, advice and much more.

BL Homepage 270715This is why Bupa Live was created 6 years ago – a multifunctional network enabling colleagues to connect with each other and bring leadership closer to the front line of the business.

With appox 60% of Bupa employees not regularly working with computers, Bupa Live can be accessed via mobile devices at any time.  It can be used in a variety of ways: to start discussions; create blogs; post polls; upload videos; network with colleagues worldwide; and much more.

It’s also used to support key internal campaigns around the business, such as Bupa Thanks, where employees are encouraged to thank their colleagues via e-cards. Thousands of employees have done just that across all of Bupa’s Market Units, highlighting the importance and benefits of collaborative networks such as Bupa Live.

By promoting campaigns internally on a global scale it ensures all colleagues share the same vision and feel as though they play an important part in Bupa’s growth moving forward.

What’s more, Bupa Live helps to bring leadership closer to the rest of the business.  For instance, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Fletcher is very active on the network, participating in discussions, hosting webchats  and getting a feel of peoples’ thoughts around Bupa.

Another example is how Chief Medical Officer Paul Zollinger-Read uses the network to host live webchats with the clinical community, as well as uploading podcasts and blogs on current global health issues – with World Health Day 2015 being a typical example.

Although Del believes Bupa is currently in a great place as it strives to become a truly digital business, he says there is always more to be done.  He said:

“We’re proud of what we’ve created with Bupa Live and it’s great to see thousands of colleagues using it to support each other, share successes and collaborate to help the business grow.  Digital is at the forefront of our minds at Bupa and it’s important we keep moving forward.”

Tools like Bupa Live enable the company to become a truly global, better-connected business.  Bupa operates all around the world, from the UK, Spain and Hong Kong to Australia, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia – and it’s never been more important to ensure its business growth is backed up by its digital offering.

If you want to hear more from Del and the Bupa story, he will be talking about all things digital at the Enterprise Digital Summit at the British Academy, London, on 22 October.   Go here for more details or to book a place.  We look forward to seeing you and we’re hoping Del can tell us more about what’s next for Bupa as well as what works and what doesn’t.

Of corporate dinosaurs, lipstick and pigs (digitally speaking) 

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Of corporate dinosaurs, lipstick and pigs (digitally speaking) 

Euan by AddersOn Wednesday night we occupied under the arches of the ICA’s cafe bar for one of our regular Combined Social Business Sessions London meetups.  Our main speaker was Euan Semple (@Euan on Twitter), well known keynote speaker on social business and collaboration as well as the author of Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do. Eaun probably wouldn’t mind being described as a catalyst for change – he’s been talking around his topic (which he would say is really just common sense, but covers everything from knowledge management through to digital transformation) with organisations large and small for around 14 years.  Wednesday’s meetup was slightly different to our normal format as we didn’t have a projector and screen – no PowerPoints and just talk, which made for a more intimate session with some enthusiastic, top quaity group discussion.

Drawnalism_EIP_Pig_and_Lipstick1Euan’s talk was based around 3 of his recent blog posts and was of (corporate) dinosaurs and Lipstick on a Pig – a phrase I love and use often.  Euan related stories from his recent camping trip to Exmoor wondering what Tess of the d’Urbervilles would make of modern farming or watching the corporate types normally hunched over their laptops now hunched over their steering wheels fighting through the holiday traffic to get away from their SAP or other corporate systems to the tranquility of Devon.  Like the farm workers of Tess’s time, todays firms and office workers are facing immense changes with jobs under threat from automation and all manner of disruption of the digital kind. Euan talked about his experiences with Senior Management in these big corporates and sees a shift happening.  The older demographic who were maintaining the status quo, marking time until retirement are now recognising change is happening on their watch and maybe they need to do something about it.  However, he worries if there is a desire for real change when actually the reaction is usually to start some initiative for employee engagement or developing leadership potential. Are these programmes put in place with a desire for real outcomes or just there to demonstrate being “busy”. That’s where the term “Lipstick on a Pig” comes in – are these social collaboration projects just for show, without enough commitment to make real change that helps the bottom line and changes the firm for the better.  Euan’s worried that he’s spending his career trying to resuscitate dinosaurs.  But those are his darker moments – as I said he’s been at it for 14 years and counting, and he’s still enthusiastic about making change happen.  Actually he believes it will happen from “small acts of disobedience”.  He prefers not to talk about top down or bottom up change management programmes, but more about people and their behaviours and encouraging the individual to take small steps, little and often.

Euan Dinosaur meetup discussion (1)

His talk flowed in to some lively discussion with the whole group joining in.  Those of us in the thick of new ways of working, the adoption of social tools inside business (as well as for external communication), or talking digital in its various forms are always expecting change to happen more quickly than it actually does. We’re in the middle of a shift as significant as Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press triggering the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment. Actually we’ve been talking digital for 20 years, and you add to that the current level of connectivity and how many of us now have smart phones.  We also need to remember the importance of more basic mobile phones and cellular networks facilitating banking and doing business in the third world. In discussing smart phones, somebody raised the importance of good design, shifting these devices from expert and geek use, to mainstream and easy, so that now over 3/4 of the UK’s adult population has them and uses them day in day out for internet access, apps, access to social networks (and occasionally phone calls).  We talked about Facebook and social networks.  We talked about the way things have developed from last decade when social media and social networks were more like villages, to their current urban sprawl and focus on content marketing with all of the associated noise.  Euan talked of his kids commenting on the nature of his online friends, but changing their view when they met them “for real” and face to face, maybe on a transatlantic holiday trip.  We talked of the value of these social media friendships and networks that we create, although we also talked of the importance of face to face contact and the extra triggers and understanding you get from more conventional networking and meetings.

Adam Tinworth (@adders on Twitter) live blogged from the event and took some great photos, and he’ll be doing the same at our Enterprise Digital Summit London next month.  Also in the run up to the Summit we plan to have another Meetup on 7 October – the atmosphere under the arches was so great, we will probably be back next month for the same style as this one.

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Changing Dinosaurs & Lipstick on a Pig with Euan Semple: Join Us at our Meetup

Meeting Sliver

As many of you know we host regular Social Business MeetUps in central London.  The idea is to provide a regular forum where we and others in the social business and digital transformation space can share ideas, experiences and models for helping organisations transition to new ways of working and, in doing so, create new connections that lead to community.

We’re really delighted to have Euan Semple as our main speaker to kick this month’s session off with his take on “Changing Dinosaurs and Lipstick on a Pig” in which he states: “Sometimes it feels like I am spending my career attempting to resuscitate dinosaurs and I wonder if it might be kinder to shoot them and move on.”  We’re looking forward to creating some lively debate around this theme! As many of you will know Euan is author of “Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do: A Manager’s Guide to the Social Web” and is a well known keynote speaker.

After Euan then anyone can speak for 5 minutes so if you feel like it then sign up by adding a comment here against the meeting.  Providing that it connects to social business, digital transformation or the future of work, it can be anything you fancy.  You can have a further 5 minutes for questions.

Our next session will be this Wednesday 9th September at the ICA on the Mall so if you’re interested then please sign up.  We’ll start at 6.00pm in the ICA Bar (in a reserved area located to the left of the Bar entrance under the arches).

Many thanks to our sponsors Kongress Media and we hope to see you there.

An integrated social workplace to connect at Vodafone

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An integrated social workplace to connect at Vodafone

Smart organisations want to make the most of their people.  Five year’s ago Vodafone’s leadership team recognised that their SharePoint based Intranet had too much one way communication, no real social element, was hard to use and things were difficult to find.  Their aim was to cut costs, share knowledge and help his people find experts to answer questions internally without having to go outside of the organisation.  Vodafone could see the social media sharing culture that was going on in the wider world and they wanted to bring that style of culture inside the company.  I sat down with Stanley Awuku, Vodafone’s Internal Digital Experience Manager, and one of the speakers at our upcoming Enterprise Digital Summit, to hear more about their story.

Stanley Awuku - VodafoneAlthough Stanley wasn’t around at the start of the project he has been heavily involved for the last 3 years and understands the journey that Vodafone have gone through.  They still have Hub, their official global Intranet for publishing corporate news, but they created an Enterprise Social Network they call Vodafone Circle.  This uses a software product called Beezy that sits on top of SharePoint but hides the complexity and gives a very easy user interface for people to find each other, connect with them, create public or private groups and workspaces so they can collaborate, manage projects, and interact.  Before Circle (and Beezy) this social element just didn’t exist, but now activity feeds from Circle are shown on the Hub home page and the social network has really expanded.  Vodafone have more than 90,000 employees spread across 22 countries.  Back in 2010 they started small with a proof of concept around what they call a “town hall meeting” for the senior managers to have a question and answer session with a group of employees online – similar to what IBM calls a Jam.  They’ve expanded from that simple use case, and encouraged more and more use over time.  They have heavy users of Circle in their legal department, the technology team, and in HR, but right across the organisation so that they now have over 80,000 registered users and regularly average 18-20,000 unique visitors per month.

Vodafone Circle _communityAs well as the workspaces and groups they’ve added a video portal called  Vodafone Tube, their own internal version of YouTube and mHub, a mobile application that gives employees access to Circle from their mobile devices.  Stanley speaks regularly at employee induction sessions and talks about Circle as if it’s a bank.  He tells new starters that, just like a bank, the more information you invest in the system, the more you get out in the long run.  Stanley will be telling more of the Vodafone story along with their best practice and key lessons learned on 22nd of October at the Enterprise Digital Summit in London. Go here to find out more or to book a ticket to hear this and our other great case study stories.

(Disclosure – Beezy are a main sponsor of Enterprise Digital Summit London)

Crossing Chasms and Digital Waves

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Crossing Chasms and Digital Waves

The Chasm

I came across this rather hopeful blog post from 2010, about how Enterprise 2.0 (remember that) had crossed The Chasm (The Chasm) being the gap between an early adoption technology and one that starts to go mainstream in a Technology Adoption lifecycle (see above diagram). Most New New things crash in the Chasm, however, survival rate is quite low. Broadvision’s Pehong Chen wrote a more considered piece in 2011 in Forbes, noting that for Enterprise 2.0, the Chasm was far from crossed:

Consequently, platform of engagement participants must thrive to be proactive, engaging in multiple activities in parallel to reach maximum geometric scalability, such as:

  • Assemble and sustain a critical mass of active members across and beyond the enterprise.
  • Build out an ecosystem of networks and communities by these members, for these members.
  • Establish meaningful social business connections amongst themselves.
  • Integrate fully into all aspects of systems of record.
  • Maintain a reputation economy so that everyone is incentivized to contribute ideas and share knowledge at all times.
  • Follow all relevant activities by anyone, from anywhere, at anytime.
  • Zoom in on any actionable items timely and collaboratively.

For platforms of engagement to succeed is to transform everyone’s entrenched work habits from reactive to proactive and from linear to geometric, which is not a trivial feat by any means. But only when we cross that chasm can our platform of engagement be adopted as the essential second element in our workplace.

By 2012 Enterprise 2.0 had been re-branded Social Business (always a worrying sign, normally that a Chasm flight has been attempted and failed) and, fast forward to early 2014 and the Dachis group, which had bought up many of the emerging first wave Social Business players, had shut up shop, and it seemed the Chasm had claimed yet another New New Thing.

Or had it?

Digital Transformation

The Chasm has another name, garnered from (if I mix metamodels) the  Gartner Hype Curve – it is the Trough of Disillusion that signifies the fall of the overhyped object. What is also interesting is that the Gartner model shows what happens after the crash into the Chasm – that the components are re-assembled in new ways, those that didn’t fly are rejected, new components are inserted and a new, more useful approach emerges.

In Tech, this re-shuffling often comes with a name change, and Enterprise 2.0 became Social Business. However, it also became increasingly clear that these technologies are part of a larger emerging IT infrastucture layer, which some call the SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) stack. It has been apparent to us for some time that all these technologies are stronger if combined, we are seing for example the increasing need for mobile and analytic elements for social tools, and clearly the ability to provision them via cloud services increases flexibility.

This overall stack is incraesingly being termed Digital Transformation, but we think that is a slight misnomer as Technology itself never drives Transformation. Transformation is a s much a human process as a Technoogy one. To effect Transformation requires addressing of the “Hard” and the “Soft” processes in the entity being transformed. For this raeson we have long adopted the McKInsey 7S model, as it looks at both the “hard” business ares – strategy, systems, structures and the “Soft” ones – Skills, Staffing & Style and recignises the whole approach is underpinned by the common culture and goals that allows co-ordination without continual reference to high level decision makers – the Shared  Vision.

The Digital Wave

Transformation does not happen in a vacuum. Transformation happens in the context of greater forces. In terms of Techology, it normally creates new ecenomic fault lines, which are arbitraged by new plays. This in turn drives social, buisness and regulatory reactions.  Some believe these changes happen in waves (like Kondratieff) some see change happens in cycles (e.g Schumpeter), some in a combined form of the two (eg Perez). We are agnostic as to whether you call it a waveform or a cycle, but we are certain that something extra and different is happening now.  We’ve been used to technology disruptions happening in regular cycles, but a number of things are coinciding to increase the amplitude – multiple technology disruptions happening together, and those are sitting on top of global economic factors that are changing the supply chain and business models as well.  The “Digital Transformation” people are talking about is happening within the context of this bigger shift that we call the “Digital Wave” (see a summary of our thinking on this over here).

The view from the Summit

All this brings us to explain why the themes are what they are for our London Digital Enterprise Summit on October 22nd, see details over here.

We will also be running a workshop the day before the Summit where we will spend the time looking at the detailed components of what is happening in the Digital Wave, and what an Enterprise should do to surf it rather than be rolled under by it. Key issues to understand include areas such as:

The underlying technologies driving the digital wave

  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Analytics
  • Social
  • Localised production

The overlying economics and sociological drivers

  • Human capital – ageing OECD, youthful Developing world, an era of migration
  • Offshoring vs Re-shoring
  • Where’s the money – literally. Changes in funding and financing

The Future of Work

  • Full Time vs Part time
  • Restructuring Organisations – efficiency vs responsiveness
  • The Office of the future – will it exist

We’re covering all of these themes and more in the Workshop and Summit with some great speakers and case studies  and we’d love you to come along and join the debate.  Signup here.

Everyone’s talking Digital and it’s Dangerous

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Everyone’s talking Digital and it’s Dangerous

Everyone’s talking digital – either disruption or transformation and it’s dangerous.  Plenty of books with digital in the title and that’s dangerous.  Plenty of events around the digital topic and that’s dangerous too.   It’s dangerous because this is too important a topic to be diluted by being overhyped.  We’re actually talking about business survival in a World where the only constant is change, and that change is accelerating.  So where are we at and what can you do to make sense of the hype?

First, we’ve been talking digital since Nicholas Negreponte published Being Digital and Don Tapscott published The Digital Economy 20 years ago, but things have really come together over just the last few, and the disruption and transformation messaging has got loud in just the last one.  Loud enough so that John T Chambers, who is about to step down from Cisco after taking his company through another major reorganisation, told the 25,000 attendees, customers and prospects at his last big event:
“Forty percent of businesses in this room, unfortunately, will not exist in a meaningful way in 10 years,”
and then telling them 70% of companies would “attempt” to go digital but only 30% of those would actually succeed.

That matches up with Brian Solis highlighting the digital transformation divide in his review of the year back last December:

Banners_and_Alerts_and_infographicthe2014stateofdigitaltransformationaltimetergroup-141020120910-conversion-gate02_pdf__1_page_
Around about the same time, Ray Wang of Constellation Research (who has written one of the essential, recent books on the topic – see later) started a blog post:
“The stage is set for Digital Transformation to be one of the hottest trends for 2015.  Market leaders and early adopters have already embraced the movement.  Yet, massive hype is coming soon as digital transformation hits mainstream awareness by late 2015.”
And let me add something from a diginomica piece by Stuart Lauchlan from last week.  He reported on Jack Ramsay, Global Technology Delivery Director at Accenture Digital Business Group, who delivered his own digital strategy in a keynote during London Tech Week:
“What I still see is a lot of companies saying digital is going to be important. My point is is that digital is not going to be important, it’s going to be everything. If you don’t get that and you don’t get that quickly, then it’s going to be a problem.”
Put all of this together and something very dramatic is happening, it’s accelerating, and it’s being hyped.  How do we make sense of it?  How do we pull all of these threads together and figure out how to compete, how to create value, how to ride the wave of these forces?

You need to get educated, you need to figure out what works, and what doesn’t and you need a plan.  To get educated, here’s a definition of digital transformation, and out of the many books around the subject I’d like to recommend 2….

Leading Digital by George Western, Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee.  They highlight how large companies in traditional industries from finance to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals are using digital to gain strategic advantage.  We need to get practical, and these ideas help.

Disrupting Digital Business by Ray Wang where he explains how we should focus our attention on experiences and outcomes. Check out his sequence of articles that summarise the key messages in the book and you’ll want to buy it to learn more.

Then to help you figure out what works, what doesn’t and to formulate a plan, we’ve put together an event with our friends at Kongress Media.  On October 22nd we are co-producing the 2nd edition of the Enterprise Digital Summit London at The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace.  We will be addressing the mindshift required and the management challenges of making this digital transformation work end to end in your business.  We will cover the  digital topic and social collaboration techniques, but our emphasis will be on the employee, customer, partner and stakeholder behaviours you need to encourage and the issues of management and corporate culture that you need to address to put these new technologies to use.  Let me talk through some of the great speakers we have on the agenda.

The opening keynote will be from Stowe Boyd.  Stowe’s a futurist, researcher,  a bit of a maverick and describes himeself as an edgling.  He has been helping us make sense of technology and how it affects the world of work for decades.  He coined the term “social tools” in 1999 and the term “hashtag” in 2007.  We are delighted to have his insight kicking things off.

Our second keynote is from Vlatka Hlupic, Professor of Business and Management at Westminster University.   Last year she published a book called The Management Shift on her research from over 20 companies who have been using her approach and leadership model. They are from small to large, in various sectors and include a FTSE 100 Company.  She’ll be presenting her model of 5 levels of emergent leadership.

We have practical case study stories from Vodafone and Pearson, and a great collection of industry speakers and commentators.  Along with those speakers there will be some great panel discussions, and the chance to participate in a number workshop sessions around  transformational change management, digital workplace management, community management and adoption of social tools.

If you are interested in joining us, cutting through the hype and broadening your mind around digital, then go here for tickets and full details.  All this talk around the “d” word may be dangerous, but it’s essential.

 
(top image from Altimeter 2014 State of Digital Transformation images on flickr)

What is Digital Transformation?

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What is Digital Transformation?

Summary

Everybody’s talking Digital Transformation!  The term is very definitely being hyped by some, and is in danger of becoming as diluted in meaning as the “cloud” term as it becomes a catch all for almost anything associated with our new connected, social media oriented world using emergent technology. However, we believe it’s an important idea and so this post examines the term and tries to come up with a succinct but all encompassing definition of what it is – better than the many others currently available. Finally we point to the various resources available, mostly from consultancies that we compete with, but that’s the nature of the new, open mindset that is vital to succeeding and transforming in the 21st Century business landscape.

Everybody’s Talking Digital Transformation!

When we launched Agile Elephant in January 2014 we positioned ourselves as a Social Business consultancy. Within six months we had changed the messaging on our website so that the narrative was around Digital Transformation. Something happened in 2014. Suddenly everyone was using the term, from insurgent consultancies like us, to the marketing agencies that were active in social media marketing, to the big firms like PWC, Deloitte and Accenture. Back a year ago in February 2014 at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris most of the talk was around Social Business. By our London edition in November 2014, and then two weeks ago at the 2015 Paris conference, more people’s slides had Digital Transformation as the headline than Social Business or any other language. During 2014 a shift happened. We all changed our narrative, and in part this is because the core idea is becoming a mainstream necessity for businesses to succeed, and so the way we talk about it has to mature so that the average business person or executive in the C- Suite can understand it, as a first step towards living it.

The Evolution of Terminology

We’ve actually been talking digital for 20 years, but changes like these take time. Back in 1995 Nicholas Negroponte collected together his articles for Wired in to the book Being Digital, as the World Wide Web took hold.  He was talking about moving bits instead of atoms.  I actually started blogging in 2005, and joined in the emerging London social media scene (where I met my Agile Elephant colleagues).  I learned the term Web 2.0 that was popularised by Tim O’Reilly with his conference late in 2004.  The 2.0 bit was about a second version of the Internet.  It was technospeak, using a programming metaphor to say version 1.0 of the Internet in the 90s was all about static brochure websites, but moving in to the new century the web got interactive. This new “release” of the web was all about conversation and user generated content. Reviews on eCommerce sites. Comments on blog posts. Forums where I could ask questions and get answers. Wikis where we could co-author documents in real time, or crowd-source expertise like Wikipedia – stuff that changed the World!  10 years ago this month some guys started a video dating site, then pivoted a couple of times and realised that the “loading and sharing video” part of what they had was a vital service we all needed.  Everyone’s smart phones were shooting video that needed a home on the web as well as on our personal hard drives.  And so YouTube was born and became another vital part of our new communications infrastructure.

Around about that time, fellow Enterprise Irregular, Andrew McAfee started to popularise the term Enterprise 2.0 with his blog posts and articles of spring 2006 and a seminal book. This was 2.0 applied inside business as well as external to the consumer.  An upgrade to rigid, structured legacy enterprise business systems. His idea was all about using these emergent social software platforms, blogs, forums, wikis and more, with or in place if the company Intranet so more conversations happen, with more working out loud and more ideas being generated.

Just around about this time the idea of microblogging started.  The Twitter bird opened its eyes in 2006, early adopters started using it, I jumped on board on 14 February 2007, and then things really took off when it was used as the back channel of March 2007’s SXSW event – the social media crowd jumped on board with a vengeance!   We were all experimenting with this new way of communicating, and it was the crowd that turned it in to something that has become another integral component of today’s connected World.  Twitter only incorporated as a company in September 2007.

Towards the end of 2009 Stowe Boyd blogged about the Enterprise 2.0 term being too corporate, and then he and others started to use the term Social Business. The complication with that is that the term had already been coined by Muhammed Yunus to mean a business with a social purpose, although many people tended to also use Social Enterprise for that.  In any case, it became a more accepted term and so we all started to use Social Business, and often had to explain that we meant using these social collaboration tools inside and outside the organisation to get more things done (rather than the Yunus thing).

Then to complicate matters a little, in 2011 Salesforce, the born on the cloud CRM company, made a big push with their Chatter and other collaboration tools. Marc Benioff and their conference headlines that year announced “Welcome to the Social Enterprise”.  They even tried and failed to trademark the term!  But by 2012 their messaging had moved on, although the concept is an integral part of their value proposition.

In 2013 Chris Heuer proclaimed Social Business is Dead!  That generated some conversations!  His post also talked about employee engagement, things like Adam Pissoni of Yammer developing his story of what he calls the Responsive Organizations, or about the business agile enterprise (we like that!), and about where we should be heading with this topic.  Let’s add in other terms like the digital workplace, digital disruption, open business, and working out loud.  We can also add in ideas about organisation change, with traditional hierarchies becoming wirearchies, or organisations shifting to cross functional teams, or choosing to change the organisation chart radically or to begin as self-organised, team based lattice structures.  Actually all of these different ideas are overlapping subsets of a whole concept.

The Evolution of Enterprise Systems

Digital Enterprise Wave simpleMost of us have grown up with legacy, rigid and structured technology based business systems.  Process oriented and mostly built around repeatable steps with a Taylorist, production line view of business.  Those core things, like raising invoices and paying suppliers and worrying about inventory, still need to be done, but the technology explosion that has been happening over the last 20 years changes everything.  It happened slowly for the first decade, but it is getting ever faster, and particularly over the last 5 years.  We call it the Digital Enterprise Wave.  It is the combination of economic and technological forces that have changed the World and disrupted whole industries, or businesses like Kodak, or Blockbuster, or Blackberry (actually, nobody is safe).  We now live in a World of instant communication and feedback, where the supply chain has changed forever, and where our reaction time has to be just as fast, or we could go out of business.  Andrew McAfee’s core idea of taking enterprise systems to the next level, making use of new and emerging technologies is still valid today.  We need to recognise that it’s not just about adding great social collaboration technology to existing legacy systems, but about evolving the whole system end to end, and doing it at the same time as changing the organisation itself.  For most organisations it isn’t easy, it’s like upgrading the London Underground or the Paris Metro – we have to make structural changes and dramatically improve things, whilst still keeping the trains running, but it has to be done.

Digital Transformation Defined

What I do know is that your business model is under threat.  Some smarter, nimbler competitor is just about to overtake you with a more innovative approach, or better use of data or clever use of technology and take your market.  Business as usual almost certainly won’t be good enough, although it may take a while for you and your balance sheet to realise that.  You need to transform, and the transformation incorporates a number equally important ideas.  For us, the definitions you can find for digital transformation don’t cover the whole story.  They don’t recognise that the transformation needs to be both end to end in the organisation, and about much more than just technology.  Here is our definition:

Digital transformation is the process of shifting your organisation from a legacy approach to new ways of working and thinking using digital, social, mobile and emerging technologies.  It involves a change in leadership, different thinking, the encouragement of innovation and new business models, incorporating digitisation of assets and an increased use of technology to improve the experience of your organisation’s employees, customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders.

We’ll be evolving this definition and responding to feedback, so feel free to challenge us and help us refine it and get clarity.

Further Agile Elephant Posts on Digital Transformation:

Transaction Costs in the New Economy

Towards new Organisation Structures

What is the (real) future of Work

Other Resources

Digital Transformation is a big topic. As well as our own blog and resources, here are some other places you can go to get a deeper understanding and other viewpoints on what’s important.  We approach this with an open mind and we’re always looking to challenge our thinking, so we’re connecting you with what the other’s think also.  That’s the mindset you need in your particular business, sector or area of expertise too!

Accenture’s insight on Digital Transformation

Altimeter on Digital Transformation

Capgemini Consulting on Digital Transformation

Constellation Research’s Elements of Business Architecture for Digital Transformation

Econsultancy on Digital Transformation

Forrester – Accelerate Your Digital Business

IBM on Digital Transformation

McKinsey Digital

PA Consulting’s Digital Innovation Hub

PwC’s Digital IQ Survey and more

Sameer Patel (of SAP) – This Transformation Feels Different. Disruptively So.

Esteban Kolsky – The Foundation Components for Digital Transformation

Greg Verdino – What is Digital Transformation, Really?

Denovati Group on Digital Transformation of Organizations

Or better still take a look at the Agile Elephant viewpoint – read our blog, and contact us!

(top image from Altimeter 2014 State of Digital Transformation images on flickr)

8 Strategic Building Blocks to enable Digital Transformation

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8 Strategic Building Blocks to enable Digital Transformation

This is the blog post version of my lightning talk at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT Paris. My script for 43 slides in 10 minutes, PechaKucha style, and I finished ahead of time! My purpose was to do three things:

  • Spend five minutes giving the Agile Elephant view of the current complex and disruptive digital landscape. There is a wave of change affecting every business and some key issues to be understood that are driving the need for digital transformation in every industry, every style of business.
  • Then spend another five minutes presenting 8 strategic building blocks to enable transformation, with the emphasis on practical things you can do, and specific areas or factors that your organisation needs to address.
  • Lastly, leave you with a core message that is vital for the 21st century enterprise.

First I need to start with this quote from Alvin Tofler, well known author of Future Shock:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

the_elements_of_digital_business_2015That idea of continuous learning is a taster for the core message, but highlights the dramatic changes that we are living through. Let me start by trying to explain the digital business landscape. We’ve been talking about it for 20 years. It was back in 1995 that Nicholas Negroponte collected together his articles for Wired in to the book Being Digital and talked of moving bits and not atoms. That is the basis for the digitisation of business that we have been living through for two decades. It affected the world of media and retail first, and then the music business and the film & TV business, but now it’s reaching every part of the business World. Fast forward to 2012 and Marc Andreesen wrote about software eating the World, and then last month my friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Dion Hinchcliffe used this graphic to explain the complexity and many ingredients of Digital Business.

The one thing that is certain – your business model is under threat. Some smarter, more agile business is aiming to sneak past you and take your market. What are you going to do about it? Well, there is a great saying that necessity is the mother of invention. That means that when your back is to the wall, you will find a way to make it happen. Well I want to subvert that phrase and turn it in to the mantra:

“Reinvention is the mother of necessity.”

To explain the current, disruptive business landscape we think of it as a Digital Enterprise Wave. You can ride it, or go under! There is a set of economic, technological and human factors including an ageing population in the OECD countries, outsourcing, offshoring and low cost manpower in Eastern European, South & Central American, or Far Eastern countries. Add to that we can begin to access almost everyone, everywhere in our connected World, and then add entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing, and our millenial generation which is growing up digital. Together these provide the ideas underpinning books like Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, or Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. That’s the foundation of the wave.

Next comes the triple disruption of Cloud, Social and Mobile. For the last 5 or 6 decades we lived with Moore’s Law driving ever increasing computing power and a technology disruption every 5-10 years. We moved from mainframes, to minicomputers, to the Personal Computer. Then we networked PCs together, then we had the era of client/server computing, leading to the first version of the World Wide Web, followed by the dot-com boom and bust leading to a more interactive Internet that we called Web 2.0 for a period. During each of these disruptions large companies failed and new companies emerged from nowhere. Smart businesses thrived and made use of the new paradigm at each transition, but others couldn’t live with it and failed. However we’ve never had more than one technology disruption happening at the same time…. until now. Now we are living through a time where all IT is moving to the Cloud, at the same time as the explosion of Social Media, at the same time as the shift to Mobile. Most of the world is connected on mobile phones, and a significant proportion of us are walking around with the Internet in our hands with smart phones, iPads and tablets. The confluence of cloud, social and mobile changes everything – technology can now form a major component helping just about any type of business you can think of. We’re not in Kansas any more… this forms the middle layer of the wave.

But there’s more!  We have emerging technologies – the Internet of Things, Big Data and the associated Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Printing.  We are in the early stages of each of these, but each one of them has the potential to change things dramatically yet again. For example, when 3D Printing comes of age, the World’s supply chain will suddenly be disrupted. Predicting even the near term future of how these things will develop is incredibly difficult. These emerging technologies form the top of the wave.

All of these interrelate and combine to form what we call the Digital Enterprise Wave and they present a formidable challenge for every type and sector of business.

In the face of the Wave, business as usual has little or no future. Legacy systems of record won’t be able to cope with these new demands. Adding a dash of social on top of your conventional apps won’t cut it either. You will have to think differently. We need Digital Thinking for this Digital Transformation – that’s where the 8 building blocks come in.

But before we get to that, let me quote our great hero of business management Peter Drucker:

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

Next I want to highlight a book from 2013 by Jaron Lanier called “Who Owns the Future?“.  It looks at the impact of this digital disruption we are experiencing.  I tried to find one sentence from the book which encapsulates its thesis:

“At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

Lanier’s book highlights some key sociological and business issues around our new connected 21st Century. The way companies are now valued, the new business models and the way we are using increasing levels of technology is squeezing the middle class more than any other demographic. If content like news or music or films are “free” how do the writers and artists and their surrounding industries survive?  Those changes were just the beginning as new “sharing economy” companies like Uber and Airbnb are demonstrating.   Added to that there are what Lanier calls Siren Servers who want your data, and provide you with “free” services in return. We want those services, but if we don’t pay for them, suddenly we have become the product. This is the technology landscape and business world in which we are trying to find customers, create value, reduce costs and make a profit.

Yet another dynamic is what our friend Professor Vlatka Hlupic of Westminster University calls The Management Shift, in her book of the same name. She has researched companies who have been tackling these big shifts over a number of years. She references more than 20 companies using her approach and leadership model. They are from small to large, in various sectors and include a FTSE 100 Company. She has categorised their management styles in 5 stages or levels from Traditional to Emergent. The smart, successful companies have an emergent management style characterised by an unlimited mindset, strong team cohesion, unbounded culture, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and a passion for the work. These are the characteristics we need in our 21st century leaders and managers.

I’d also like to recommend Leading Digital by George Westerman, Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee. It is one of the best books published around the digital business topic in the last 12 months. It has a wealth of good case study examples and categorises the topic in two dimensions. One is your company’s digital capability – the “what” of using digital technology to transform the business, and the other is your leadership capability – the “how” of successful transformations, where managing the change is much more important than the particular technology involved.

Putting all of these aspects together tells the story of the complexity of the Digital Enterprise Wave that we are facing and the resulting business turbulence that we need to surf through. How do we do it? We believe there are 8 strategic building blocks that you need to invest time and effort and resources in to enable successful digital transformation. Let’s go through them.

Culture

Peter Drucker supposedly said Culture eats Strategy for lunch. In truth your company strategy is very important too – this isn’t an either or situation. However, in transformational change the company culture is a vital factor. Successful companies have a strong identity. The founder knew their “why”, their reason for being, the core purpose of the venture they started. He or she may still be involved or they passed on the values to the new leaders, in to a set of behaviours and beliefs (or maybe they didn’t). In carrying out digital transformation you need to work with the company culture to enable change, or begin to change the culture in the right direction if it isn’t aligned to the digital shift that you need to take. In all of the companies we’ve with worked with, or the case studies we’ve seen, culture is one of the primary building blocks.

Leadership

To transform your company you need strong leadership, but it has to be the right kind of leadership. The digitally savvy companies have leaders with vision who promote a mindset encouraging teamwork, explaining their purpose with clarity, and promoting an environment of openness and sharing. The particular organisational structure that you have is less important than getting the culture and leadership to encourage the right behaviours of your managers, team members and other stakeholders. You should be looking for the emergent leadership characteristics we discussed earlier at all levels of your organisation.

No One Size Fits All

There are no one size fits all solutions. Every company is different. Every company has legacy systems, to a lesser or greater extent, that you’ll need to work with because that’s where the current, vital business data and intelligence resides. There aren’t any panaceas, or a particular social & digital business platform that has all of the answers and works well for most types of business. Actually there are a plethora of platforms, from complex to lightweight which are usually very good at a few things, but not so good at others, and as of today none of them do all of the things you’ll need. In any case you will need to integrate to data in existing systems and link the new digital approach directly to existing business processes. You need to assess the business, look for where you can generate most value, and plan to adopt new platforms and system enhancements accordingly.

End to End Solution

You need to think in terms of an end to end solution. Adding a social business platform or new digital business components on top of existing systems can provide some help, and even give short term benefits in key areas, but to really transform you need a holistic approach. We use the McKinsey 7s framework because it’s been tried and trusted over decades. It works. It covers both the hard factors and the soft factors of your business. You assess the business in terms of Strategy, Structure and Systems, and then Staff, Skills and Style, as well as looking at the Shared Values (which these days is increasingly called culture) of the company to get a complete picture. Following this approach leads us to consider all of the factors you will need to address to add value, find efficiencies and make a real difference. You don’t have to use this particular framework, there are many others you could use, but you must think end to end.  Focusing on organization structure, or people, or culture, or systems on their own is not going to work.  Focusing on one bit of the value chain won’t either.

Continuous Reinvention

In the 80s and 90s we focused on quality management and quality circles and talked continuous improvement.  For digital transformation we want you to think Continuous Reinvention.  As we said before, your business model is under threat.  If you aren’t thinking about new business models you are in danger of losing out to a smarter, more agile competitor.  Innovation has to be at the heart of your approach to your business.  You should be reinventing the business and competing with yourself to do better, and then rethinking again.  I started this post with that quote about learning, unlearning and relearning – you need to open your mind and think Continuous Reinvention.

Get Creative

In a world where there is a perception that information is free, new ideas are the weapons that add value.  In a world where your competitors can harness cheap resources, or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online crowdsourcing marketplace, or Artificial Intelligence to automate processes, how do you compete?  All of these techniques started with the particular skill of a person and that skill has been automated or sent to the lowest cost of production.  Somebody made the first widget or carried out the first translation, and then their process was automated.  To compete you need to change the game with new ideas and different thinking.  You need to get creative.  But creativity shouldn’t be confined to some product design department.  It shouldn’t be a one off, quarterly or annual brainstorming event.  We are living in, arguably, the most disruptive time of technological change ever – we’re living with the Digital Enterprise Wave and it’s getting closer!  The last comparable time was the early industrial revolution, and that wrought huge transitions.  To compete you need creativity to become an everyday thing in your company, applied to every part of what you do.  You should encourage it and make it part of the DNA of your company, but also recognize that not everything will work.  Your approach needs to involve experimentation and recognize that some of the ideas will fail, and that’s perfectly acceptable, because others will succeed.  Innovation and idea generation should be an acceptable part of everyone’s daily work-flow.  To do that you need to be promoting thinking skills in your company. You need mechanisms in place to encourage people to speak out about doing things better.  You need tools to help you capture those ideas and the creativity of your workforce. Look at the smart companies – that’s what they do.  Change your approach and get creative.

Balance – Inside and Out

If you look at the material on digital transformation from a lot of the key consultancies, service providers and analysts you will see a lot of talk about the customer experience, omni-channel marketing, digital touchpoints, and customer facing use of digital tools.  All that is important but you have to get the balance right.  Your transformation approach needs to look inside the company as well as out.  You need to be enhancing the experience and the digital journey of not just the customers, but your employees, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders that support your business too.  We use the term “business as a social object” – unless business is as fluid as the outside world it will flounder.

Design Thinking

It’s not enough to optimise your current business.  The best way to survive the future is to invent it yourself.  For effective Digital Transformation you need to encourage Design Thinking.  Some of the building blocks we’ve already covered are key components in that mindset, but you need to pull them together in your end to end approach. Wikipedia says Design Thinking is defined as combining empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context.  It is a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result.  You need to apply that thinking not just to the product, but to all of the processes supporting your company.

The 8 Building Blocks of Digital Transformation - Agile Elephant

And finally – the Core Message

So these are the 8 building blocks which you need to work with to create a coherent, holistic, end to end strategy for the digital transformation of your organisation, but I would highlight one of them as the core message, the most significant change of mindset that you need to address, and that is Continuous Reinvention.  The successful 21st Century organisation needs to be thinking differently, and then rethinking continuously to stay ahead of the competition.

Continuous Reinvention – to survive change needs to be a constant.

Can you teach an old dogma new tricks?

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Can you teach an old dogma new tricks?

I was reading Bjoern Negelman’s piece on starting Digital Transformation initiatives in the lead up to the Paris Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and thought I’d add some of our research in advance. One of the things we have been spending quite a bit of time on lately is to think about how to effect change on existing organisations that have not “grown up” with the digitally enabled ways of working that social business tools enable. The issue is this – can these Elephants be taught to dance (and if so, how) or are they so mired in their ways that – to quote Dorothy Parker – “you can’t teach an old dogma new tricks” and the few success stories are complete outliers?

It is no secret that we Elephants have been around awhile, so have seen other “Great Transformations/Process Re-Engineerings/Paradigm Shift ideas come and go. It is therefore quite helpful to look at what past experience has shown about what works, and what doesn’t. To quote Machiavelli:

“Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity!”

And to a large extent, everything that needs be said about the difficulties of change was said by Machiavelli in c 1500:

And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only the lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new. This lukewarm temper arises partly from the fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who will never admit the merit of anything new, until they have seen it proved by the event.

The problem with looking at the past in this space is it is littered with post-event rationalisation and justification, ideological re-interpretation, bad luck events that collapse a good strategy, fortunate events that save a disastrous policy and just pure random events that muddy the waters etc. Nonetheless, this review of experience in Harvard Business Review is a good summary of what has gone before:

Many have come to understand that the key to competitive success is to transform the way they function. They are reducing reliance on managerial authority, formal rules and procedures, and narrow divisions of work. And they are creating teams, sharing information, and delegating responsibility and accountability far down the hierarchy. In effect, companies are moving from the hierarchical and bureaucratic model of organization that has characterized corporations since World War II to … …an organization where what has to be done governs who works with whom and who leads.

Now I’m sure everyone reading this is nodding their heads and thinking this is a pretty good summary for 2015 – but this was written in 1990, a generation ago! Written before the Internet got going, never mind the “2.0” and Social technologies of today. The problems are still very pertinent, so clearly execution is still a problem. While people have understoodthe necessity of change to cope with new competitive realities for some time, understanding what it takes to bring it about is still a huge problem. This HBR case study of 1990 noted two wring assumptions that people still tend to make today:

– that promulgating companywide programs—mission statements, “corporate culture” programs, training courses, quality circles, and new pay-for-performance systems—will transform organizations, and

– that employee behavior is changed by altering a company’s formal structure and systems.

The HBR piece then goes on to summarise what they saw  in a four-year study of organizational change at six large corporations and  found that exactly the opposite is true: the greatest obstacle to revitalization is the idea that it comes about through companywide change programs, particularly when a corporate staff group such as human resources sponsors them. They also found formal organization structure and systems cannot lead a corporate renewal process. They found you had to get a large number of people involved – here is a summary of their view of “What worked”

1. Mobilize commitment to change through joint diagnosis of business problems. As the term task alignment suggests, the starting point of any effective change effort is a clearly defined business problem.

2. Develop a shared vision of how to organize and manage for competitiveness. Once a core group of people is committed to a particular analysis of the problem, the general manager can lead employees toward a task-aligned vision of the organization that defines new roles and responsibilities.

3. Foster consensus for the new vision, competence to enact it, and cohesion to move it along. Simply letting employees help develop a new vision is not enough to overcome resistance to change—or to foster the skills needed to make the new organization work. This is the point that a new core team is formed with new skills imported, and potentially some strong resistors being replaced.

4. Spread revitalization to all departments without pushing it from the top. With the new ad hoc organization for the unit in place, it is time to turn to the functional and staff departments that must interact with it. Members of teams cannot be effective unless the department from which they come is organized and managed in a way that supports their roles as full-fledged participants in team decisions. What this often means is that these departments will have to rethink their roles and authority in the organization.

5. Institutionalize revitalization through formal policies, systems, and structures. There comes a point where general managers have to consider how to institutionalize change so that the process continues even after they’ve moved on to other responsibilities. Step five is the time: the new approach has become entrenched, the right people are in place, and the team organization is up and running. Enacting changes in structures and systems any earlier tends to backfire.

6. Monitor and adjust strategies in response to problems in the revitalization process. The purpose of change is to create an asset that did not exist before—a learning organization capable of adapting to a changing competitive environment. The organization has to know how to continually monitor its behavior—in effect, to learn how to learn. Some might say that this is the general manager’s responsibility. But monitoring the change process needs to be shared, just as analyzing the organization’s key business problem does.

Fast forward to 2011, and this summary from the Wharton Review shows not much has changed in what seems to work, and what seems to go wrong. The structure is different, the issues largely the same:

1. Structure and Process. Large retail stores….might ask corporate and regional managers to …leave [individual] stores alone and allow store managers to do their own thing. Interference with the stores, it is hoped, will decrease if managers are asked to butt out and let local decisions and actions prevail. But what happens when the next major problem arises? Corporate or regional managers swoop down on the stores, bringing centralized solutions. As an alternative, they could change structure instead. Increasing the span of control for corporate or regional managers, for example, would militate against involvement in the stores. Large spans foster decentralization and autonomy at lower levels by making it more difficult to actively meddle in a larger number of stores’ strategy and operations. Behavioral change of top managers can foster behavioral and culture change in the stores.

2. People. Bring in fresh blood and thinking. Rotate managers with different views of competitive conditions or operations. Supply different, needed skills or capabilities from the outside. New people, ideas, and strategies can lead to behavioral and performance changes that, in turn, can affect new ways of thinking and culture change.

3. Incentives. Randy Tobias once remarked that the culture of the old AT&T rewarded “getting older.” The culture, over time, became stifling and bureaucratic. Appeals to managers to change and team-building exercises didn’t work. But CEO Tobias and others after him changed incentives to reward performance, not getting older. New people were attracted by the new incentives and the opportunities presented (see previous point) and the culture began to change. The same emphasis on incentives can be seen over the years at J&J, GE, and other companies. Incentives affect behavior and performance and attract new resources and capabilities, which can lead to culture change.

4. Changing and Enforcing Controls. It’s important for companies to increase feedback, evaluate performance, and take remedial action. Emphasis should be on tweaking strategy implementation activities to achieve desired results. It’s vital to learn from performance, including mistakes, and use the lessons learned to change incentives, resources, people, methods and processes, and other factors to foster strategic and operating goals. It’s also necessary to hold managers accountable for performance results, a formal mantra of Robert Wood Johnson, Jack Welch, and many others. These actions or emphases will help to shape new behaviors, task interactions, and ways of thinking that will create or define a culture of learning and achievement.

So the issue remains – these observations are a generation apart, and to all intents and purposes not a lot changed and we are not a lot farther in knowing what to do to drive change in 2015. Clearly it is very difficult, as Machiavelli warned us.

Part 2 (to follow) will look at lessons from non-business areas for insights

Perspectives on Enterprise 2.0 Summit London 2014

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Perspectives on Enterprise 2.0 Summit London 2014

This is the first of a sequence of posts capturing some of the spirit, discussions, book suggestions, references and ideas that came out of the first incarnation of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit London (3 day event) on digital transformation, social collaboration and the future of work. The British Academy as a venue lived up to our expectations, and everybody seemed to love it as much as we do…. and so we have already booked for next year on October 21st & 22nd 2015!

Here are a few tweet impressions (messages and more to follow later) of the main conference day November 26:

#e20s conference day workshop
(one of the three afternoon workshop streams)

More on #e20s London to follow. If you’ve got posts, photos, or feedback about the conference, please contact us.

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Agile Elephant is a new kind of consultancy designed to help companies embrace the new digital culture of social collaboration, sharing and openness that is changing business models and the world of work.

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