A Bridge Too Far

If you haven’t seen the film, it’s a classic and although the film is about a group of soldiers being dropped at a bridge further than they are supposed to, the part I relate most to business these days is the scene when they are asking what is on the other side of that bridge. No one knows, but someone is going to have to go over there. Of course no one wants to, but eventually a brave soul takes the steps to cross the bridge ready to try and blow up the bridge but fully expecting to be shot before they get there so he goes in with guns blazing. You will now be asking what does that have to do with people and technology. Put simply, the way we work can sometimes feel like that bridge too far.

In my own journey, I have worked in sales functions, led products and marketing teams and most recently, headed up operations – all disciplines that have a unique view on the business that they are tasked with supporting. From my time in sales, we focused on ensuring we could get the deal done and ask the products team to figure out how we build a product around it. In a products and marketing capacity, our focus was very much on understanding how we could best define the product and throw it over the wall to operations who will figure out how to build it. And in operations, it is the task of figuring out what has been requested and how this is going to actually work with the systems, tools and people a business currently uses. When an operations team then hands it back to sales – proud that they have been able to deliver the customer requirement with a marvelous “Ta-da it’s ready” to which sales may responds with a “That’s not what we asked for”. This is kind of like playing Chinese Whispers as a kid and giggling at how the message became so fragmented when it reached the start of the circle again. But in business we don’t tend to giggle – well not as much anyway!

For those of you familiar with the film “A bridge too far”, and equally familiar with these functions, you may be thinking a bridge crossing a river doesn’t do these differences justice. I would agree in fact that we sometimes view these as worlds apart instead of merely crossing a river. So let’s extrapolate this analogy. You aren’t merely trying to cross a bridge between functions, but actually we are asking people to don a spacesuit, board a rocket and cross a space bridge not knowing how they will be received on the other side or even if they will understand us. But don’t worry we are armed and dangerous with our own knowledge of how things should work in the business in order for us to do our job, right?

Start-up businesses provide a great learning for established businesses, in start-ups you simply don’t have a choice. You have to cross that bridge or otherwise see your start-up fail. And often in start-ups, it requires people who are working across functions in order to keep the business moving at pace. If the business loses momentum, market confidence can rapidly decline and in turn customers may be lost, resulting in a negative position for the business. Employees of a start-up have no fear because there is simply no time to be fearful or worry about how requirements will be misinterpreted. A start-up ensures these worlds overlap so as decisions are made quickly and together to ensure the business is on board with the outcome we are looking for.

I am sure there will be many of you out there thinking, but a start-up is easier they don’t have the scale we do, they don’t have the complexity of services and systems. Well who put that complexity there, or the systems that you are using? What if we could sit together and redefine what that way of working could look like? Forget who was the person who made the decision or who created the complexity, imagine a world where you could change the business model you work in, below are a few of my suggestions on how you can improve that collaboration.

Stop focusing on the customer and think about the one element you have in common no matter what your function is – the customer. It doesn’t matter if you are the lawyer, IT manager, finance manager, marketing manager or sales manager, this is the one aspect that any function will have in common. I would challenge anyone to identify a function that doesn’t impact a customer directly or indirectly. If you are going to say janitor then my answer is first impressions are everything – what if your customer visited a messy office or overflowing bins? What would that perception mean for your initial conversation?

Take a walk in the other team’s shoes – I will always remember a quote from my coach (you know who you are). In any discussion, no matter how much we disagree there will always be at least 10% truth in what the other person is saying. Pause for a moment and reflect on that concept, what could be that 10% from the other function, once you start there you may quickly find there is more truth or more importantly more alignment between your functions you are merely looking from different lenses toward the customer.

Define what is truly important. I am always amazed at the resolute stand we can make between functions to say we can’t change this or this is a deal breaker, with people left scratching their heads wondering where did that come from? Consider as a cross functional team what are key factors for success as well as failure for any activity undertaken. Agreeing these as a group provides guidance to a business and encourages ideation to be brought into a forum seeking to help realise the benefit vs. attending an episode of Dragons Den (Don’t know what it is … watch some of the video’s gulp!)

These are just a few examples based on my experience and I am sure there are many more suggestions from people out there, but the purpose of these examples is to get you thinking, looking out beyond your realm of influence and seize the opportunity.

What I am saying is this is a call for volunteers, volunteers to cross the bridge, unarmed, vulnerable and open to helping the other-side achieve their outcome with the knowledge of not what your world needs but what your world can provide. Take the leap and move to a role where you can challenge yourself to help another function succeed based on your diverse skills. In time, this bridge crossing will be two ways so when you are volunteering you will need to encourage others to follow your example and cross the bridge the other way. This mindset of adding value to encourage collaboration and ultimately drive the outcome the business is looking for namely sustainable growth and serving your customer, all of this resulting in a business realising that no bridge is too far. 

There be gold in them hills!

A new gold mine has been established, okay not a traditional one, but it is yellow at least! “Pokemon Go” has started a global craze similar to what we saw with games like “Angry Birds” and “Candy Crush”. It’s not uncommon to see people randomly walking around the streets or parks with their phones held up looking for monsters! So where is the gold in that you ask? Well how about the 200 million USD of Net Income that Nintendo saw from the game in just the month of July and this was even before the game opened up into some of the biggest gaming markets like China and Korea!

But this blog is not about Nintendo’s success – that is pretty evident. What I am more interested in is the amazing appearance of the ecosystem around “Pokemon Go”, which is very similar to the pop- up towns that appeared at a new gold rush location. The game itself has been running for roughly three months and, in that time, we now have dating applications so as you can hunt monsters with that someone special (seriously!), or get access to maps showing key locations where monsters hang out and even go to online stores where you can buy Pokemon clothing so you stand out when hunting for monsters. I didn’t realise until my kids were running around an airport that apparently Pokemon monsters are trying to now even board planes! 

We have truly moved into a digital era, one where entrepreneurial individuals are ready to respond to the latest craze and set up their own version of a bar, tailor, supply store or even more mature entertainment. Our world has clearly shifted from the physical to the virtual and these pop up ecosystems are testament to that. What is interesting though is that unlike the gold mining towns of old, these digital pop-up ecosystems will disappear faster and leave almost no evidence that they even existed. This is because the technology of our era has caught up with our childlike behaviour when it comes to our digital lives.

I think Bill Connolly said it best with “I want it now, I want it yesterday and stay awake because I will change what I want tomorrow!” We have always wanted immediacy and, as adults, we grow to accept and understand we can’t always have what we want. However, the digital world changed that with information, collaboration, games and shopping. Hence businesses have always been keen on capturing this market, but much like a child, our interests tend to be brief before we will move on with something else (don’t believe me? Well did you know the average use of an application you download is only 4-5 days? – brief indeed).

For businesses to be able to leverage this opportunity they need infrastructure to be available to spin up and spin down. They also need access to high speed connectivity to ensure their temporary services are always accessible and lastly they need to access both of these elements all over the world in order to ensure they benefit from the breadth of interest these opportunities bring albeit briefly.

Fortunately, our word has never been more connected and as such these pop up businesses can thrive profitably for short periods of time and then quickly pull back on the throttle when interest starts to wane. Of course there is no guarantee of success with these pop up businesses, but because of the elastic availability and pay-as-you-use commercial engagements, they can afford to fail and that confidence can help to increase a willingness to experiment with different types of services. Imagine if you tried to do that in a gold rush town – how many unused buildings or wasted supplies thrown out the back of the building as they tried to forget what hadn’t worked!

In today’s day and age it is all about the here and the now, and I believe it will become increasingly common to see businesses where there purpose is to build capability akin to running a short term project. Their success will also be determined by how long they can ride the coat tails of disruptive market developments by being agile and relevant and equally how many of these initiatives they can run in parallel before scale becomes a burden to their agility. The digital boom town has arrived and I am sure it won’t be long before we start seeing a map of the digital gold mines that exist in our newly created digital world to provide budding entrepreneurs with directions on how to find the nearest pop up town and set up their own shop. Ultimately, where there is gold, there is business to be done – albeit in the virtual hills!

Disruption Starts at Home

The word “Disruption” has become a powerful concept of many executives across all industries today as they seek to lead their businesses to growth in what is an increasingly competitive and ever-changing market for us all. However, what is interesting is that for many businesses it tends to be about the outward facing disruption – to disrupt key competitors with innovative services or commercial models, introducing new technologies particularly with a focus on digital.

As such, many businesses can be left frustrated because in their attempt to disrupt the market they can actually have hit the “destruct button” on themselves. Let me explain why….Disruption just sounds exciting right? Think about your next meeting and starting with, “Okay team, we need to disrupt the market to drive our next phase of growth!” I sincerely doubt there will be one person who will tell you that it sounds like a bad idea. Compare this with the concept of an alternative start to a conversation – “Okay team, we need to run some efficiency programs to cut costs and drive our next phase of growth!” Now if you are managing that team you may have people worried about being the target of that efficiency and, as such, you may end up with only a few murmurs of support.

Being disruptive relies on our employees

So why not turn that disruption initiative to be internally focused to drive employee satisfaction, business efficiency, margin improvements and who knows perhaps even customer growth? We tend to forget sometimes that it is the people of our organizations that actually makes it a business, who determine the culture of the way we work and most importantly, represent the business to our customers. If they cannot be positive about their place of work and products or services they offer, then what chance does your business have in seeing sustainable growth?

We are in an era of rapid innovation, where many aspects of our business can be digital in the way we work whether that is for collaboration, building products or solving customer problems. Many people look at their path to digitisation as simply being the next step of the evolution of their business, build an application, put more documents online, provide collaboration tools to staff and customers. However, these elements are more like the partial ingredients of a cake, and if the ingredients are not complete nor added with the right measures, the resulting changes can actually prove to be of detriment to the business.

A shift in how we operate

The path to digitisation within a business therefore needs to be looked at from a business disruption perspective, what will be the impact on people, processes and existing systems? A disruption in fact is where the digitisation can be the agent of change, but actually represents a fundamental shift in how the business operates. A disruption agenda in the market seeks to drive competitors to figure out how they will adapt to catch up with this change and the same can be said for an internal disruption – however positive it may be. Leaders will need to consider the broader impacts of this change on the way a business operates today and how digitisation will require a change in the way teams work as well.

This is where I believe it will be smaller businesses that will succeed at internal disruption faster as part of their path towards digitisation. The reason being is that smaller businesses can’t afford to customise, request developers to change their software or build something from scratch that fits their needs. Smaller businesses need to leverage available functionality and if that means a change in a process or the way a business operates then so be it. Smaller businesses are like speed boats. They may not have the scale to impact an industry as much as large businesses can, but it is a lot easier to change speed, direction and possibly even the shape of their business.

A large business on the other hand is more like an oil tanker as any decision taken will have an impact on the waters around that vessel and the wake it leaves can result in faraway beaches being impacted by unexpected waves. However the time it takes for decisions to actually have an impact can be a lot longer and therefore much like an oil tanker the route needs to be planned, impacts understood and the action plan to realise that outcome.

Digitisation of a business is no different and like an oil tanker many large businesses will believe they can simply use their weight to push for outcomes they are looking for so that the digital components they select work within their existing business model. This is much like asking a ship engine provider to simply strap the new engine into place where the old one used to be. We already know it wouldn’t work as the new engine will probably have different controls, interfaces, locking mechanisms and so on. Asking an engine provider to change all of these elements to simply fit in with the needs of the ship will most likely result in the engine not delivering the same output as was originally hoped and could actually mean the ship is worse off. You will therefore have simply paid for an expensive piece of hardware with no benefit to the business. Digitisation is very much the same, there are some exciting capabilities out there, but the more a business forces changes of the tools it uses the lesser the benefit that it will bring.

Digital disruption requires organisational change

Digital disruption can be a powerful tool for a business, as long as it is considered simply as that - a tool –  the broader change within the business needs people to engage in changing the processes, ways of working and evolving the culture of an organisation.

If your vision is delivering customer excellence that of course doesn’t change, but your goals as to how that is achieved may need to evolve. There are many partners that a business can work with in driving its own digital disruption, but I would recommend you consider for a moment that the functionality they are developing is based on understanding the needs of many businesses across our increasingly connected world. As such, if there is a feature or functionality that you are looking for that doesn’t exist, consider first if it is the  way you are running your business that needs to change BEFORE trying to customise the software thousands of other companies have been able to work with as is.

Now of course if we follow this journey on its natural course many will say “well, that’s all fine and good Nathan, but actually you have just found another name for business efficiency”. Efficiency which will still result in roles being lost or teams being made redundant. Of course this can always happen, but I believe this can actually be reduced, by digitising the workforce.

A shift to digital

A shift to digital doesn’t mean roles simply disappear, it means different types of roles are required, I am sure there will always be some roles that are made redundant, but that isn’t about becoming digital those are more to do with efficiencies within a business that most likely already needed to be changed. We live in a world where we have three unique working generations; those for whom email and mobile was the biggest development of their time, those for whom social media was a significant change and our youngest workforce where the perceived challenges are more about reverse integration into a business that doesn’t seem as technology driven as their personal lives.

Collaborating with different generations

I view these different generations as an exciting time because it will require all three groups to make any digital disruption possible, for the moment one of these groups doesn’t embrace the change then the disruption is doomed to fail. We need to ensure that we have diverse groups helping to define and evolve the digital capabilities of a business so as they are usable by all, for both internal and external customers. We need these groups to aid in the coaching and guiding of others in how to make the change from a user’s perspective and lastly we need to ensure we have the cross-functional engagement that no one is left behind. For this reason I view that more roles will be created and with training and encouragement it becomes more a change of role than an outright “your job has been replaced by a computer!”

Disruption remains an exciting concept and I believe when brought into the business and adopted as part of a change vehicle on the path to digitisation, it can drive significant business value. We tend to associate disruption with something that can have a market impact, which it definitely can, however having a business that can disrupt itself into driving change, that will lead to sustainable growth will ultimately establish a business that is then set to disrupt the market with a business able to support. This will be executed through creating a culture of collaboration, understanding and most importantly employee pride, because an organization that sees the value in the disruption it brings to itself will quickly become your biggest sales and marketing engine when it comes to disrupting beyond your businesses home.

News Flash – Innovation is dead!

This is a theme I have heard a few times in the last few weeks, at a technology forum recently, in a BBC article and on a tech forum. So have we become so comfortable with our technology these days, that we are no longer pushing ourselves to innovate? Have we reached the peak of our technological achievements? Is the supposed tech bubble finally going to burst? Well it sure got me thinking, especially when I have set up this blog to understand the impact of people and technology on each other, I mean if it really is the end of tech I might need to close my blog … (dramatic silence). Shock! Horror!

Seriously though, it did get me thinking about what is driving this growing theme of technology stagnation? In the amazing world we live in, why would people feel we have reached a period of innovation stagnation? I learned from a development coach recently that there is 10% truth in anything someone says (yes you know who you are!) and hence felt that this was a good place to start. We have had some amazing technology developments over the decades; The Mobile Phone, Putting a Probe on Mars, The Internet – and I am sure many more I could mention, but are these really representing the end of our recent technology improvements? I mean if people are saying it, some aspect of it has to be true, because as we have also learned in our increasingly connected world, perception can quickly become reality.

I have seen some amazing developments recently, but it is not so much the developments themselves. Rather, I find something amazing has happened in the realization of these developments; they are no longer referred to as ’technology innovations’ but more simply as ’industry innovations’. The ability for doctors to operate using a virtual operating room, using robotic hands and cameras as if they were really there. Or for Manufacturers to now use 3D printers for manufacturing, or my personal favourite to have driverless cars on our roads – despite some of the recent incidents. Now these are all quite recent innovations – in my view anyway – but there are two things happening in our society that we need to be aware of.

1. Technology has now reached a point where it is infused in every industry, whether traditional or new, to the point that new jobs exist within these industries that are no longer ONLY about the core discipline (whether that be Medicine, Manufacturing or Engineering), but about how technology is being embedded into that industry. I love for example that IT managers in a hospital are not there to make sure the network remains connected, but to ensure the systems directly supporting Health Care services are running at peak performance. Or the Programmer working on self-driving vehicles, who needs to ensure the code used to speak to the ‘road aware devices’ are running properly. I believe this development has moved forward so much that the jobs of the future, for those seeking roles in the technology space, will rapidly evolve into multiple specialisations across industries. For example, you could become a Medical Engineer or a Manufacturing Programmer. I have previously talked about the concept of the changing profiles of roles, but that was merely from within an IT perspective. Where we are headed with cross disciplines - with technology and innovation playing a lead role, is even more exciting!

2. The lifecycle of innovation is actually now moving so fast that we are no longer seeing the leaps that we have in the past, in fact in many areas the life cycle of innovation is now occurring in months and no longer years, which could have led to the perception that innovation has simply stagnated. Technologists now have access to platforms and tools which help to rapidly reduce the cycle of innovation from the drawings on the back of a beer coaster, to a working model - whether software or even these days hardware. Many innovations failed to see the light of day, because our ability to promote those innovations was limited to what we can see - and the era of social media means that our world has never been smaller. What I mean by that is Innovations are no longer successful based merely on who has physical visibility of them in the real world, but now they are successful based on who can view them in our digital world. Platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo are creating the funding enablers for people, anywhere in the world, who share a common interest or a belief, to connect. Kickstarter alone has supported over 100,000 creative projects raising over two billion US dollars to date a figure which I am sure would have some VC's envious! This to me, raises the view that innovation is being realised faster, broader and with a greater chance of success, because these crowdfunding platforms are not only bringing in funding, but also evidence that there is interest in that creative idea, whether it be technology based or Fashion or even food! I share this with you as I believe this growing crowdsourcing trend is accelerating our innovation journey - and businesses are starting to catch on that crowdsourcing is not only a great source of ideas, but when an idea is supported it can immediately translate into customer demand, as Lays found out when developing a new chip (Hmm Cheesy Garlic Bread)!

These two factors of technology now being embedded in everything we do, along with the speed with which new ideas can be realised are in my view, key drivers for this perception of innovation stagnation. In fact I think it is the speed with which we now see innovation occur, that gives us this perception that it has become stagnant, much like looking at a wheel that is spinning so quickly that it appears to be standing still., Technology innovation is occurring so often that we are now forced to filter out what is relevant to us. I spent an evening looking through some forums and came across some exciting products such as Evadrop, Seatylock and Phree (I should note these are ones I picked out at random, but there are many more). These are exciting innovations, which on the surface can seem small and without the impact that the arrival of the mobile phone did, however if these innovations realise their ambitions, they could change the world we live in and hopefully encourage others to open their minds to the possible.

So to answer the question ‘is Innovation dead’, well in my view… no, but I can understand why people would see that it is. The era of huge technology leaps has past and the era of constant innovation has arrived - an era where technology is embedded in every industry and where the speed with which concepts and ideas can be realised, is faster than ever. So fast in fact, that it can seem we are viewing simple development steps. Yet it is the development platforms now available, that are creating the opportunity for innovations to be developed quickly and either realise their potential or fail fast and avoid the risks of high cost failure.

Ultimately we have entered an age where we are embracing a greater appetite for risk - in trying out new ways of working or other concepts, knowing that if it doesn’t work the first time we can try, try and try again, as we continue to refine our innovations in an iterative process across days or weeks instead of years. I look forward to the next era where innovation merely becomes a class you take in school and where you learn to create new concepts and new ideas with the platforms that start-ups and other businesses are using today, so that Innovation doesn’t die, far from it, it simply becomes a way of life.

Who's watching now?

With recent news topics covering the “standoff” between the FBI’s ask for access to `the San Bernadino Killers’ phone and Apple seeking to stand up and protect the privacy of its customers with concerns this could quickly become a default ask for all devices, ironically, I am getting a sense of déjà vu from almost 15 years ago when operators were facing the same debate.

15 years ago, governments and their security agencies were asking telecom operators to share their voice and data information for people deemed a security risk or to investigate a person’s activities prior to an event that happened - criminal or otherwise. At that point, the world was up in arms as to what this would mean for personal security or for that matter privacy as  governments were able to track what people were doing and where they were going.

However, over the years this has become a norm and, although not always accepted, a balance has been established where the operators report to the public on how many times they are asked to share information by the relevant government agency. What is interesting here is that this data is quickly becoming irrelevant as we move to digital and start to reduce our use of mobile platforms like traditional voice and SMS. With these traditional platforms, operators have had visibility of the activities of individual’s voice and messaging communications, whilst in our digital world all communications are increasingly moving to IP or Internet based services. This makes it incredibly difficult for operators to keep track, if they can keep track of the information at all.

I recognize that it is not only telecom operators being asked for end user information, but also the over-the- top players like Google, Apple and Facebook among others, and that they report on these regularly to the public. However, we need to recognize that there is increasingly ony one common source when it comes to telecom services, over-the-top services and other applications and that is simply our mobile phone. A little like our wallets used to be with our ID, credit card information, loyalty cards, receipts etc, with all of this now digital it is the mobile phone, which will increasingly become the centre of security discussions.

It is therefore not surprising that in recent surveys when people are asked what they would be most worried to lose the “mobile phone” is becoming increasingly prevalent[1], versus a decade ago when it was their wallet. The simple reason for this being we store more of our lives in our phones and online that anywhere else these days. Government agencies can approach credit card companies or operators and even online providers to ask for data about an individual, but the one area they are still trying to gain access to remains the phone. The documents, photos, message exchanges all have a common source instead of trying to debate access rights with all of the individual platforms.

I raise this because at some point the “national security” card will get played by government agencies and businesses could end up being forced to comply, similarly with what telecom operators have been through already. I would like to suggest to these handset manufacturers and over-the-top providers to start collaborating together about how they can protect the majority and isolate any handset access to be limited to individual cases. Perhaps there is a unique code that is created based on mutual compliance between the vendor and a government agency for an individual handset, that is to say avoiding sharing access to all phones through a generic override code or similar, which governments could then gain access to whenever they should so choose. In combination with this, then provide visibility to the public as to how many devices the government agency requested access to and how many devices they were given access to. Now this is just a suggestion and the important point here is for the digital community to think through a proactive approach of how they want to engage government agencies rather than being forced to comply with some all-encompassing banner of national security.

Our world continues to change and we need to remember that our lives, which were once paper-based, followed by analog and mobile, are now quite simply digital. Combine this with many governments that continue to fear what they don’t understand, the result is raising concerns on information that they believe exists, but are unable to see or control. In a digital world, where the data we create and store is growing exponentially every day, of course it is impossible to track absolutely everything. However, perception can quickly become reality, as governments and their associated agencies will continue to want to gain further visibility of our digital lives. So, we either act proactively and educate through defining an engagement model which protects the majority of people and addresses data sharing when only absolutely critical for the protection of society, or digital businesses will rapidly become the victims after a few cases under the banner of “National Security” become common place.

I appreciate this is a fine balance and many people will be unhappy with the idea of giving up privacy of our personal items, some will say this must be defended at all costs, but there are precedents already and I fear simply defending will result in a outcome none of us are happy with. I for one would rather know there is an understanding between digital providers and governments as to how this will be managed in the future before it becomes a case of turning on my phone or tablet and asking myself the question “Who’s watching me now?”

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[1] http://blog.zixcorp.com/2014/09/survey-says-individuals-would-rather-lose-wallet-than-mobile-device/

Ctrl-Alt-Del

We all know what happens when we press ’Ctrl-Alt-Del’ on our keyboards – well, at least I hope you do, otherwise you may find this article rather uninteresting (now, I know a few of you just checked by doing it, so welcome back to the story). When we perform this ‘three button miracle’, we get to see the task manager, i.e all of the active applications we see on our laptop. Imagine for a moment, that you have closed all of those active applications and you are left with a desktop with no activity. Would you continue your work by simply reopening what you closed, or would you think about how you would do things differently?

In today’s “digital world”, we are increasingly comfortable to evolve our collaboration choices, social media, applications for our phone (yes, both for fun and the more serious activities). This is often because there is a better tool for us to use, or the tools we have aren’t working in the right way, or we simply want a change. Interestingly though, most of us don’t do this in our business environments. Think for a minute and ask yourselves, “Why do we do the ‘Ctrl-Alt’Del’ magic combination”? Perhaps our application isn’t working, or our PC or tablet is running slow? Are we worried that our device is stuck within a loop and can’t move forward from? Now, consider the business environments we work in. These reasons can seem very similar, yet our response tends to be a shrug of the shoulders and we continue to push through.

As you read this, consider for a moment that you could ‘Ctrl-Alt Del’ your business. Take a moment to pause and reflect on what is working, and think about whether your processes, systems and tools are doing what you need them to do? Which ones are consuming too much time or resource? As you reflect, you may also sense a glimmer of hope – that idea that pops into your head of the “What if?.

However. then the reality of how complicated or hard it can be leaps to the front again and the hope is gone. I encourage you to force that “What if” concept back to the front just for a moment – let it breathe and consider a minor application or toolset in your business that could be changed with minimal effort and would help your business start to realise the impact a pause and change could have on your organisation.

Of course, many of you will say, “But Nathan, we are already doing this we, are going through significant change as the market evolves”, or “We have tried it before and ended up in the same place”. I tip my hat to those who have not only achieved a rethink, but equally to those who are continuing to try. Without this commitment to change, then businesses will continue to plod through using what they have.

In essence, businesses can’t simply pause and then create a change. It needs to be embraced by the leaders of organisations. Congratulating one another for doing something new, without understanding how to create the right environment for it to be continually successful will simply doom it to failure. One such example was for a start-up business unit which was a business’s efforts to pause and use a fresh approach to change direction for an area of their business where they were being challenged by competitors.

I was fortunate enough to have a discussion with the start-up business unit, working under a large parent company the other day (no, not mine!), where they were being given conflicting direction – “Go forth and conquer this market as a disruptive player!”. Sounds great, right? However, this was followed by the second part of the conversation – “You must of course remain within the architecture and capabilities of the parent business so as we maximise our assets”. Now, after being ready to jump for joy, I was left staring into my coffee cup hoping that my disappointment for their predicament didn’t show. Unfortunately, this is very common for many incumbent businesses seeking to jump on the start-up bandwagon, without truly understanding the changes they need to make in their own thinking when considering what they set out to achieve.

In the case of this business unit start-up, that change from the parent company needs to be in giving them the opportunity to be disruptive or accepting that the goal in establishing the business unit is to disrupt the broader organisation. The latter would require some serious commitment, and a jump off a sizable cliff given the risks it may be perceived to have within the business, particularly as in many large established businesses, the employees are the culture, and they represent the way of working – hence changing this overnight can be challenging.

In this case, providing that new business unit the flexibility to define its market approach, its IT architecture and ultimately its culture will help to define its success. Of course, we can say “But what if it fails?” At least, if it stays within the way of working of the parent company then the assets and people can be reintegrated into the business”. If this is your thinking, then I’m afraid you will never know what success could look like. We don’t see business start-ups wondering about how they might mitigate failure, but how can then create the best chance for success.

“Hackathons” are a great example of how businesses can create the best chance for success, and to date have always been synonymous with technology led businesses, and in particular start-up environments. The idea of throwing a problem into a room with some really bright people to design and develop with a new widget or code to address a bug in a platform is increasingly common. I would however propose that hackathons become the tool of choice for our ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’ moment.

Once we pause our business, what are we going to do? How do we ensure we don’t go back to our old ways of working? How do ensure our staff embrace this change with us? In any organisation, there are lots of bright people in their field who are keen to get more involved and with the right tools, they can have  a phenomenal impact on helping to improve the way a business achieves its objectives. The people that make up an organisation want their business to be successful; it’s what makes it a great place to work, so leveraging their commitment and channeling that willingness to succeed through these types of tools can create a great environment for change.

This for me is why leaders really need to ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’ their businesses and have a serious think about the way they are running their organisations. Can it be done differently? Yes, I hear some of you saying –  it is simply impossible to change your business given how long you have been working in that way, but I say give your teams a chance to embrace change, a change made of their own interest, engagement and outcome. It might start small – from how a team collaborates, or how you engage with your customers, but ultimately if it gets the business thinking about the “possible”, then that can only be a good thing … right?

We built a house!

Ok, so it’s not a physical house but we have built a new business in Indonesia. I can tell you, having previously seen my first home being built, it feels very much the same.  In any construction there are a number of key factors to consider; managing the timelines for the project, ensuring contractors don’t blow out the budget (this is a biggie), adapting to the required changes as we learn what works best and above all ensuring the customer is happy with the outcome. In the case of my first home, my customer was my wife, and in the case of building this business, our customer was the Indonesian market.

When building this business or “digital house” as I call it, we learned there are a lot of great technologies in existence that can be leveraged to build a business’ operations and business systems. And for anyone that knows me, exploring these new technologies was like placing a kid in a candy store and giving them some money to fill a basket – don’t worry I was well behaved, for the most part.

Ironically though, I don’t believe it is the strength of our technology that will drive the right outcome for our digital house, but more so the less predictable elements that will define the successful build of our house - quirky people! Whilst quirky people are not necessarily sought to build a physical house  –in the event the bathroom may end up in the kitchen and a shower in the study – we were fortunate to have some amazing people on this project. It wasn’t just their knowledge that assisted us, but their ability to think outside of the box, and consider the unusual and unconventional ways to approach the deliverables for this unique program. Simply put, they needed to be quirky!

There were a lot of unknowns in the building of this house –  from how we could integrate into the local operator’s business and operating systems and avoiding significant upfront investment to ensuring we were compliant to local market regulatory policies. Importantly we also needed to ensure that whatever we built would support the business’ key goal in serving our customers in a new and differentiated way.

I can appreciate anyone who has worked in a start-up before will be thinking, ”well Nathan, as a start-up that’s pretty straight forward and common”. However, I would ask you to consider that this is a joint venture between two incumbents that were running successful businesses in a prescribed way for a long period of time with clear views on how they felt the business should be established. This isn’t in line with a common start-up model.

The approach we took therefore may have appeared normal for a tech start-up, but for two incumbents it was a leap of faith to change the approach in addressing these challenges, whist driving the outcome that would enable a new business to grow. It wasn’t possible to simply run through a check list – what we needed was people who would adapt to the changing landscape as we learned more about the market and business environment we were operating in, and challenge what was possible (or equally not viable) and what was needed to adapt to the needs of the local operator.

What was imperative in building this digital house was the need to change our way of thinking, focusing on quick outcomes in small steps, empowering our teams and accepting that failure could and would happen.  It is very easy to slip into an approach of “that’s what we have always done” as a reason as to why we shouldn’t try something different, I can’t count the number of people who were happy to tell us “that won’t work”, or “you can’t do it that way”.

This is where we get to the next critical factor - you need people that are committed, and almost stubborn, to ensure that they stay true to the journey that is being defined. You also need an understanding boss who will give you the flexibility to pull this together without losing faith in what we are able to achieve (thanks Boss!). There were times when we would question ourselves – “are we doing the right thing?”, and “should we back off and simply accept that near enough is good enough”. I am glad we didn’t as the outcomes we have started to realise are down to that commitment to the goal.

Equally, the team knew we would not make all the right bets to address both our current and future requirements. As such, we needed to make sure that we had some flexibility moving forward. By taking a cloud platform approach to all the technologies that we introduced offered us the flexibility to evaluate functionality, without feeling we were committed to the tools that we were using in the long term. Yes, there would be a revised integration effort if we changed out an element of our architecture. However, that was better than being stuck with a physical platform for five to seven years that we would have to keep customising to the point that it could no longer be changed out without a complete new build.

 The cloud approach has also meant that our costs for the platforms are directly correlated with the growth of the business. Yes, there is a case of initial capacity, however this is minor compared with the scale we can grow these platforms to as demand increases. Lastly, the hybrid nature of our cloud environment, which extends from Indonesia across international markets, ensures that we can be compliant to evolving regulatory requirements in Indonesia whilst leveraging the benefits of different cloud platforms.

Another key aspect has been the way that we have engaged our suppliers. Every conversation has started with, “how do you interface into other systems?”, “what use cases can you share about that integration”, and “what best practices have driven the development of your systems?” The reasons for these questions were because we knew that to maximise the value of the technology we were using, it was more important to have systems that would naturally talk to each other and had done so before, versus our own team having to build a system to translate between two systems – as if we were trying to help translate between two completely different languages.

To this end, it became clear to us we were building a “digital ecosystem” or a collection of technology partners that would need to interoperate to ensure we could serve our customers in a valued and differentiated way. This ecosystem may evolve over time as we find different technologies that will help us serve more effectively in the future. Fortunately, by remaining true to the approach the team has taken, will help to ensure all new members of the ecosystem understand the requirement for interoperability.

We have now established a Service Provider in Indonesia with no network assets, nor any voice infrastructure. Admittedly, we have had to build a private cloud to meet local market criteria, however the majority of our technology is cloud based. We are developing a culture where the teams succeed or fail together, and where we do fail, we fail fast, dust ourselves off, understand why we fail and then move forward again – but always as one team.

We are also now serving customers and gearing up to expand our portfolio, but the house is clearly built. To that end, in building our digital house; the operating license is our foundation, our walls are the tools, platforms and processes we have created, the roof is the governance we use to always make sure there are no leaks in what we have built, the windows our experience centre to show customers a view of what we can provide, and the interfaces connecting our systems together is the cabling. We can now see where we need to improve the house - where the walls need finishing and where the roof needs to be maintained, but none the less we now have a house!

However, our digital house is still just a shell. It’s the people who work in it that are making the digital house our digital home, and ultimately will be the ones who welcome our customers and partners in as we seek to change the customer experience and serve the Indonesian market with our version of kopi and thee.

This article is dedicated to the Implementation team from the past year that had the patience to work with us, the passion to drive us to complete our goals and never accept near enough as good enough. We recognized that this success will always be bigger than any one person and that we all should reflect on the role we played in realising the building of this house. I would especially like to thank the team for putting up with my crazy ideas, passionate discussions and occasional singing in the corridor!