Cloudified Scaled Agile [March 2022]

Innovation Ecosystems and Business Composability in a Post-Pandemic, War-Hit Decade

Just as we thought the inflationary recovery of a post-pandemic world is going to be the headline for the rest of this decade, a war imposed on Europe pushed the rising commodity – and consumer prices – into a newly accelerated growth, and put the global energy market into a costly and long crisis.

High market volatility always raises enterprises’ attention to the importance of improving their processes, further reducing their wasteful activities and to seek innovative ideas for leaner yet more impactful products and services.

The Covid19 pandemic had already created its volatility and through that had accelerated the digital transformation of enterprises – or kick started that - in many sectors, leading to further global integration of digital ecosystems and supply chains.

The assumed slow down of the pandemic, and governments’ attempts at removing the enforced restrictions and assisting businesses to recover from the prolonged loss of business, have led to a rise on demand for goods and service in all strategic supply chains, raising the prices on everything, especially on fuels.

Having a new war breaking out is a very impactful disruptor to the global economic recovery, especially when one side is a major exporter of oil and gas and key commodities and is now going to face a phased and growing enforced embargo in their ability to sell to the market.

If enterprises already had the appetite and justification to mobilize their resources in search of more efficient and cost optimized innovation, they are now virtually famished and many face an existential “do or die” scenario where they need to find a way to survive the turbulence of high commodity prices and low consumer spending in the fear of an extended crisis period.

In my article published in the March 2022 issue of the PM Magazine, I take a closer look at the importance of Innovation Ecosystems in alignment and collaboration with the Business Composability of an organization as two key survival factors during this decade.

The Digital Decision Making Process for Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is a fundamental change in the form of products and services that an organization provides and the way they are going to be advertised, positioned, provisioned and services. Such significant change needs a well planned and well communicated?and well managed phased transformation plan which will impact all main decision points in the organization.

It is estimated that worldwide investments in Digital Transformation will exceed $6 trillion by 2023, while more than half of global GDP will be digital be end of 2022. Forbes also believes that over 90% of enterprises have already started working on a Digital Transformation at some level.

This is while about 70% of digital-savvy enterprises (e.g., telecom and media) and 93% in traditional sectors (e.g., oil and gas, construction), have failed to complete their transformation and / or receive the benefits of digital transformation.

Inefficiencies in the organizational decision making structure have been blamed for over 60% of these failures.

Decisions made today are more complex and executives are asked to explain or justify their decisions more than pre-pandemic scales. Decisions are now expected to be the outcome of a symbiotic connection between humans and machine learning algorithms.

Before the Digital Transformation shook down and rebuilt the way executive decision were made, they used to follow an overlapping top-down model with a bottom-up validation mechanism.

The organizational strategic portfolio would guide the siloes about their share in the big picture and how their tactical work would help the enterprise aggregate the expected outcome. Tactical decisions in turn would be the source of Operational decisions which would run the business interaction with the market and the feedback that was collected would be funneled up and aggregated towards the Strategic decisions as a verification structure.

The centralized structure of this model always ran a high risk of creating bottle necks and queues in the form of Decision Backlogs owns by senior management and executives who were defined and designated as the sole authority to make the needed decisions, and most would be overwhelmed with the volume of the decisions they need to make and cause major delays to vital business changes and market targeting attempts.

The accuracy, relevancy and effectiveness of this approach has always been a hit-and-miss for most enterprises. Lack of transparency, slowness of decisions flow, misalignments, and bottlenecks in the siloes would cause a lot of business losses for the organizations.

In my article published in the March 2022 of the PM Magazine, I explain how the evolution of the decision making process can drive Digital Transformation success for the organizations that are open to adopting new ways of leadership and value delivery.

How to be a better Digital Transformation Leader?

The overwhelmingly digitally disrupted market landscape, that has accelerated its changing pattern during the pandemic-hit era and now is in the recovery and rebuilding of the economy, has left very little options for survival of non-digital native businesses, but to go though their own DX journey in all their relevant areas of functionality.

These days, if you are a CXO or rank among the Executive Team, you already are a?Digital Transformation Leader, as your most time-sensitive, business-critical mandate that is hopefully completed or well underway. The future of your organization is literally in your collective hands, and you cannot afford letting it slip!

I have been a transformation advisor, writer, public speaker and coach in both?Enterprise Scaled Agile?and?Digital Transformation, working with several private (Fortune 500) organization and the public sector, and I would like to share with you some of the best features of top DX leaders that I have observed, and worked with over the past 11 years!

Metaverse

[Harvard Business Review] The Meaning of Life in the Metaverse.

We could soon be living more of our lives in immersive virtual worlds, but what will that look like and how will it affect us? New York University professor of philosophy and neural science David Chalmers joins Azeem Azhar to discuss what the metaverse might offer us, the moral quandaries it could pose, and what our rights there might look like.

[CNET] Shopping in the Metaverse Could Be More Fun Than You Think.

Gucci, Dyson and other big brands are experimenting with immersive virtual experiences.?"The concept of a virtual store that's just a replica of a real-world store is not terribly exciting because there's no need to be bound by four walls or a specific location in the digital world," said Sky Canaves, a senior analyst at Insider Intelligence. Shopping, she said, could be "far more dispersed" and "experiential" in the metaverse. Gucci, Nike, Vans and Ralph Lauren have already created their own Roblox experiences, some charging to buy digital clothing and accessories. Roblox users pay for digital goods with a virtual currency called Robux that they can purchase with dollars or earn by developing games for the platform.?

[Fierce Electronics] Nvidia extends Omniverse to cloud, continues to expand metaverse-enabling platform.

Nvidia is expanding its Omniverse universe with cloud-based access to the metaverse creation platform and a new computing system to power the most complex industrial digital twins enabled by the platform, along with other Omniverse-related announcements the company made at its GTC Spring event this week.

Digital Transformation

[Harvard Business Review] Overcoming the C-Suite’s Distrust of AI.

Data-based decisions by AI are almost always based on probabilities (probabilistic versus deterministic). Because of this, there is always a degree of uncertainty when AI delivers a decision. There has to be an associated degree of confidence or scoring on the reliability of the results. It is for this reason most systems cannot, will not, and should not be automated. Humans need to be in the decision loop for the near future.

[Fierce Electronics] Airborne drones to deliver medical supplies to Kiev, Kharkiv as war rages.

As war deepens in Ukraine, rescue drones will be used to air deliver medical supplies and equipment to provide humanitarian aid inside cities under attack from Russia through the services of Revived Soldiers Ukraine, a nonprofit dedicated to helping injured soldiers and civilians.

Teams and Business Agility?

[Harvard Business Review] Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety.

During the last 20 years, the agile movement has gained astonishing momentum, even outside of software development. There’s agile HR, agile project management, agile customer service, agile sales, agile operations, agile C-suite, and so on. But approximately half of organizations that undertake agile transformations fail in their attempts. If your team has yet to reap the rewards of agile, you need to understand what’s preventing you from delivering the fast, frictionless, scalable solutions you envisioned. After evaluating several agile teams and conducting a series of interviews with leading agile experts, the author believes the primary factor is disregard for the first value of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Here are five practical ways to increase psychological safety to foster a collaborative, successful agile team.

[Harvard Business Review] How to Motivate Your Team When People Keep Quitting.

When teammates leave, it can have a ripple effect. How can you help mitigate further attrition and keep everyone motivated and engaged when someone else quits? The authors offer six strategies: 1) Create certainty for your team wherever you can 2)?Solicit feedback to assess individual and collective capacity. 3) Enable autonomy. 4) Give your team permission to push back. 5) Shield your team. 6) Create connection.

[Gartner] Lessons from the Big Quit.

Nearly one-third of employees plan to look for a new job within the year, and 26% have already made phone calls or sent out their resumes to prospective employers.Employees are departing for a variety of reasons: to sit on the sidelines of the labor market, to earn more money elsewhere or to switch fields altogether. With an increasingly competitive landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees, executive leaders must find solutions to grow and keep operating.

Cyber Security

[Harvard Business Review] The Cyber Insurance Market Needs More Money.

As cyber risk is growing, the cyber insurance market has stalled. Insurers are taking bigger losses, seeing tighter margins, and relying more heavily on reinsurance to cover their own risk. The result is that companies are getting less protection for more money. Insurance linked securities (ILS) could help give insurers the breathing room they need to keep growing — and meet customers’ growing needs — by helping insurers hedge against rare, catastrophic events.

[MIT Sloan] How to build a culture of cybersecurity.

Technology and training are not enough to safeguard companies against today’s litany of cybersecurity attacks. Here’s how to infuse safe behavior into corporate culture. Investment in cybersecurity technologies and training and awareness programs has soared the last few years as the threat landscape grows. Yet those efforts don’t go far enough in fully mitigating cybersecurity risks, according to Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, or CAMS.?This is because the weak link is typically people and behavior — a problem that is only resolved through a combination of technology investment and culture change.

Cloudification and 5G

[Fierce Wireless] AT&T touts international roaming for 5G.

Travel is ramping up both domestically and internationally, so AT&T decided now is the time to announce 5G roaming in more than 35 international destinations for select 5G devices. Wireless carriers traditionally bring in revenues through international roaming, but when Covid-19 struck, that meant a lot of people who normally traveled for business or pleasure were no longer ratcheting up roaming charges. According to AT&T, its International Day Pass encourages customers to use their phone like they do at home; the pass provides high-speed data, talk and text in more than 210 destinations for $10/day.

[Fierce Wireless] New Broadband Forum specs allow ISPs to begin tapping 5G capabilities.

The Broadband Forum wrapped Phase II of its wireless-wireline convergence (WWC) effort, unveiling new specifications which will allow legacy residential wireline gateways to take advantage of certain 5G capabilities. Its latest work builds on Phase I specifications completed in 2020 and includes two key updates: multi-access support for 5G residential gateways (5G-RGs) and multi-session enablement for fixed network residential gateways (FN-RGs). Multi-session support for FN-RGs is another big change. While this capability has been supported in the WWC specifications from day one for next-generation 5G-RGs, FN-RGs were previously limited to a single session.?

Please keep following my posts on?LinkedIn?for daily updates. Reach out to me for any questions!

Cheers

Arman Kamran