Overview: Digital Transformation

"My advice: Jump headfirst into AI with everything you’ve got."

Is your organization more like a jellyfish or a flatworm?The author's "Jellyfish and Flatworm story has been remarkably effective at helping ... [executives] visualize the impact of AI on their customers, their products, and their employees... this story is about why Knowledge Representation (KR) must be the core of any cost-effective lo…

many teams ... have become obsessed with ... being agile ... But agile is not a strategy — it is a capability... cannot permanently affect ... competitive position unless there’s a strategy behind it... constant cycles of optimization... offers little more than diminishing returns... not considering the opportunity costs ... A good idea is not the…

managers often confuse a strategy’s design with its execution. Recognizing the difference between these two will have a major and positive impact... Strategy design involves detailing positions to take on ... strategic factors... decision criteria used by key stakeholders... the position that, for instance, Ford or Toyota as a company takes to woo…

A brief summary of my experience in building company structures and supporting processes, role definitions, etc.

embracing and sharing the power of communication strategy much more broadly to help drive results and performance... supporting practitioners and clients to rediscover communication strategy as a source of real advantage.... the opportunities available to use targeted, intelligent approaches to getting the right people talking with the right info…

New tools are needed to help organizations leverage on the power of ecosystems and enable participation of external entities in the business process. That’s what the Platform Design Toolkit is for: design systems that create much more value than they capture and motivate everybody to join.

META Ventures provides venture capital fund management, entrepreneurial training and innovation consultancy to cities, regions and national governments in several countries, as well as EU Institutions.

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

The framework probably needs some explanation, and I intend to both refine and provide more detailed explanations of the framework in the near future. In the meantime, here is our Beta v1 of The Future of Work framework. - Launching new framework: The Future of Work - Trends in the Living NetworksTrends in the Living Networks

"When starting a new [internal] communication project, asking the right questions of your customer sounds like a no-brainer. But are your questions right? ... Richard shares his method of developing the right questions to deliver the best results –  to start your IC projects right." - The power of critical thinking: How asking the right questio…

The 2015 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte identifies strategy, not technology, as the key driver of success in the digital arena. Conservative companies that avoid risk-taking are unlikely to thrive - and they'll also lose talent ... The ability to digitally reimagine the b…

"By evaluating 18 practices related to digital strategy, capabilities, and culture, we have developed a single, simple metric for the digital maturity of a company... its Digital Quotient. This survey reveals a wide range of digital performance in today’s big corporations... a strong and adaptive culture can help make up for a lack of technica…

Distributed intelligence means you need to find a social process, not a data-driven solution... You cannot outsource leadership to your analytics group. - Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

"the whole point of digital transformation is realizing that technology fundamentally changes how you do business in just about every way. It therefore poses very difficult questions to business and technology leaders: Who best should do our work today? Where does the value come from? What do these new ways of working actually look like? How c…

"While traditional strategy calls for rigorous analysis and critical thinking, design thinking espouses ‘thinking by doing’. The key is to find the sweet spot between the two approaches." Nice exploration of overthinking vs. underthinking: "... overthinking — aka ‘death by analysis’. An obsession with minimizing risk leads to the inability to ma…

"most digital transformation deployments fall into the 'deploy and pray' category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. ... paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

Some useful ideas for what we call the 'Project Briefing' stage, which may be the first part, or indeed the entirety, of a project's Inception phase: "... we often discussed visual or technical issues without a clear understanding of the business goals... we immediately jumped to design suggestions that were based on personal opinion, assumption …

"research into network science has begun to shed light on how synchronization happens and how we can make our enterprises function more effectively.... Great overview. Of particular interest to I-Labs: - "research helps explain why it is so hard for enterprises to adapt to new challenges... leaders need to treat new initiatives not as mere organi…

"... is to foster alignment and enthusiasm toward the right goal. I’m thinking of official leaders (and myself) when writing the above, but there are official and unofficial leaders in every organization. " Very short post, very worth reading. Sometimes the simplest insights are the most powerful. - The Job of Leadership — Inside Medium — Medium

"movements... seem to self-organize and spread virally, as if they were LOLCats or some other digital meme. So why can’t we get our organizations to act the same way? You would think that with command and incentive structures in place, it would be easier for leaders to set a direction and get things moving, but anyone who’s run an enterprise kno…

"Traditional intranets required someone at the helm with a broad perspective and variety of skills. Newer social intranets, with their greater ability to influence company culture and productivity, have only added to the pile of needed skills. In this article we explain what the core skills are for successful intranet managers, common gaps in exp…

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

If you're involved in developing strategy, you need to read 'Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy'. Personally I recognise a lot of this, including in myself, although I don't consider myself particularly smart. The key recommendation? "strategy should not be a monoculture ... of high-IQ analytical wizards. Great strategy is aided by diver…

5 brief points on how leaders can get everyone thinking strategically, and not just reacting. I personally like point 4: "4. Create a philosophy. ... communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in orde…

The ever-excellent For Immediate Release (episode 638) put me onto 10 things you still need to know about social media / social business, by Olivier Blanchard (aka the Brand Builder), which sounds like every other post you've ever hear of. But it's worth a read...