Building Intelligence Driven Organization (IDO)

Many studies show that while many organizations across the globe understand the importance of becoming Intelligence-Driven, few are successfully moving beyond the experimentation stage and often fail to operationalize the use of their data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and applications to transform their business. According to a Harvard Business Review Analytics Services survey, 86 percent of CEOs see digital disruption as more of an opportunity than as a threat to their business, but only 47 percent say their organization has developed and communicated a formal business strategy for its digital future.

Following up on my article published on June 24th, 2000 ("Data-Driven Cultural Transformation to Shape New Normal), today, I want to go more in-depth about the concept of Intelligent Driven Organization (IDO). Of course, I'm leveraging Microsoft Consulting Services' collective global experience on Digital Transformation and building IDOs.

What do we mean by IDO? 

We are working with our large enterprise customers in helping them to implement Digital Transformation initiatives that allow them to become Intelligence-Driven, which is leading to real business results. An Intelligence Driven Organization (IDO) leverage data combined with AI surfaced through applications and leveraging agile development to foster growth, innovation, speed to market, and cost-efficiency.

In becoming an IDO, leading companies created the ability to capture digital signals across their business. In other words measure business effectiveness, then connect data and analyze it to create insight. They then use that insight to make decisions and deliver actions that improve future business outcomes. We call this the digital feedback loop, and it is what allows an organization to create deeper relationships with their customers, have more efficient operations, more effective employees and better products and services.

However, organizations have major gaps that prevent the digital feedback look because large portions of the business are not digitized and data is siloed across different parts of the company. A recent Deloitte survey indicates that 63% of executives do not believe their companies are insight-driven because of the lack of infrastructure and teams working in silo.

Here some frequent concerns from our customers at the enterprise:

• Need for strong & consistent enterprise-grade security
• Data ownership & privacy of digital infrastructure
• Manageability and tracking of data sources and devices
• Patching, repairing, updating the digital infrastructure
• Application deployment – building, testing & certification of apps in the digital infrastructure must be seamless

How can we accelerate the benefits of being an IDO?

The Intelligence Driven Organization (IDO) Framework created by Microsoft Consulting Services, encapsulates all our experience and the ingredients required for Digital Transformations on various scales in different industries.

First, we need to understand that every organization is unique and maybe at a different maturity level. To accelerated landing, to start, we recommend to the answers to the following questions: 

• How would that journey look like in my organization?
• Who do we need to get on board? When?
• What are the major steps that will maximize the outcome?
• Are there any quick wins that can help us rally the troops and create critical mass of supporting entities?

At Microsoft, we know that there is no Digital Innovation without a Cultural Transformation and adopting the new systems. For this reason, we usually incorporate our Adoption and Change Management (ACM) team in transformational projects or strategic partnerships to support our customer's cultural changes. Our ACM team and our Digital Advisors are trained and certified in Prosci ADKAR methodology. 

 There is no Digital Innovation without a Cultural Transformation

Digital Transformation related initiatives had the following four phases:

1. Discovery: where we look at business needs analysis, stakeholder and barrier analysis, Technical plans
2. Early Pilots: when small groups build new features with new Teams, in order to unblock technical barriers and generate early wins
3. Launch & Scale: where people start to use the new solutions regularly, barriers to adoption are removed, resistance is managed, communication plans and actions are aligned, sponsors actively support and role-model new ways, and new ideas and feedback are incubated and incorporated
4. Transform: which is when behaviors and mindsets change, culture shift happens. People leverage the full solution, innovation flourishes, people build their digital skills

Getting there...

Based on our most successful engagements partnering with customers globally to assist them becoming Intelligence Driven, we have learned that successful transformation starts with a conversation structured around four interconnected pillars:

• The Executive Strategy (& Culture) that needs to be align with new ecosystem and industry conditions, also needs to be coupled with a culture based on intelligence driven tasks.
• The right Technical Capabilities which are the tools needed to drive strategy execution
• The business scenarios or use cases that will be enabled. The Business Use Cases are the scenarios that will need to be identified and prioritized to implement the strategy and yield the desire functional and business outcomes
• Finally, at the heart, the day to day execution of the digital transformation or operating model. The Operating Model is the execution framework of the organizations people, process and technology and will need to be designed to achieve a significantly higher level of agility, flexibility and scalability.

IDO's Technical Capabilities

Working closely with our global customers and becoming part of their digital transformation, we identified a set of capabilities we realized are critical to a successful change to become an Intelligence Driven Organization. Not all capabilities will be needed or deployed at once – some might already be in place.

For many organizations, this will be an iterative multi-year journey to reach their north start or vision. The North Start is an articulation of the relevance of the organization in the future, and articulates why it has purpose and why their customers need and want their offerings.

At Microsoft Consulting Services, we believe every capability should be at the minimum the topic of a conversation on the path to becoming Intelligence-Driven. Think of it as a checklist or map to help navigate the sometimes-elusive scope of digital transformation.

Let’s drill down and quickly go over the different items of our IDO Key Capabilities list.

• Intelligent Applications represent how we can infuse applications with data and AI so they can adapt to the user context, so they can better understand the user intent in order to anticipate and predict and learn new ways to enable the organization business processes. As an example, with Virtual Agents (*), employees and customers can now access the information and capabilities that they need using natural language. Same goes for Collaboration tools…though there is deeper reason that speaks to the importance of collaboration "Understanding data requires collaboration". Data engineers, data scientists and business analysts sometimes live in different worlds; it is only when they start to collaborate that the full business value of information can come to life. You can learn more by reading the article "Digital Transformation with Intelligent Apps".
• Intelligence Services allow stakeholders to access vital information through pre-made reports (BI-as-a-Service) or through the ability to access data that has been curated and is ready for consumption so users can build their reports (Data-as-a-Service). Both models working together provide a pivotal path to adoption, so users have a standard and governed way to access information. We also could start by looking at Predictive Analytics, a natural extension of Business Intelligence (BI), and for many organizations, the first step into AI. One of the foundation capabilities of AI is Machine Learning (ML), as it allows identification of patterns in data and the creation of reusable models to automate business logic. Using Azure AI, we can create custom models or leverage one of our many pre-trained models that are part of our Cognitive Services family. More information about AI and ML here.
• App Development Services are about building new user centric Line of Business (LoB) applications to drive business innovation. They ideally leverage Cloud for speed, agility and scalability as well as integrate the available AI services, running on any device, anyplace, anywhere.
• At the heart of the intelligence driven organization the Data Platform, it is in many ways the most obvious capability that needs to be developed. It starts with the ability to connect to internal and external data sources including open datasets and store it so it may be correlated, organized and accessed.
• The Internet of Things (IoT) is an enabling technology for businesses to evolve their operations, products and how they interact with customers. By connecting devices and collecting data, it becomes possible analyze that information to create new insights. With IoT solutions, everyday things that can be IoT-enabled, such as an office building, washing machines, elevators or vending machines. Allowing organizations to make improvements to their business - from increasing operational efficiency to delivering better customer experiences and new revenue streams. In the article "IoT Adoption in Digital Transformation Journeys" you can find the recommended 12 milestones to success with IoT.
• Cloud computing is the digital computing platform that enables agility, speed, scalability of our data, and applications to create the value our organization needs today while controlling infrastructure costs. At Microsoft, we also insist on the importance of making the Cloud a secure and trusted environment for our customer's business.
• Intelligent Edge is where all types of devices are created as ubiquitous computing that acts as an extension of our own IT infrastructure. We will need to manage this often-vast computing environment to protect our information and data assets while making sure the logic that we run on the “Edge platform” is deployed and maintained to meet the expectation of users. Our Edge related technology can run on diverse smart objects such as smartphones, IoT-enabled devices, or field observation, or inspection devices (i.e., Drones).
• Operationalizing an IDO is about leveraging the best practices to put an agile and continuous process that efficiently build and improve their data and applications. The operations should support the development of applications, the creation of machine learning models, and the management of our data. DevOps, MLOps, DataOPS are here to signal the need to move operations from one-shot management of projects to managing the lifecycle of everything.
• Many of those principles will apply to Governance as well: The idea that we will leverage best practices to be agile and continuously implement the life cycle of our effort around security, identity, compliance, and even adoption and change management. We want to set up those processes for the entire organization and not for each capability independently.

We can't forget that an Integrated Security Strategy should be a foundational pillar supporting the mentioned capabilities, especially when planning and executing our operations and governance. 

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[September 1st, 2020] If you speak Spanish, I want to invite you to watch the following interview to Millan Sanchez (Senior Solution Architect for Latin America)

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(*) Virtual Agents are critical to the digital transformation strategy as they provide a simple way to surface complex data and processes in the user context.

(**) The North Start is an articulation of the relevance of the organization in the future, and articulates why it has purpose and why their customers need and want their offerings.