Delivering Business Transformation Strategy | Stephen Wise | Integration Professionals

Michael Porter’s books on Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage led me to embrace Project Management. That is, I have frequently said, a company that invests in Project Management is making an investment in their competitive advantage. Less frustration delivering value, less disruption to teams, improved engagement, etc.

Porter’s Five Forces and the SWOT analysis are now inadequate as concrete underpinnings for strategy design. Strategy is still important, but the amount of change driven by disruption, innovation, and transformation means that the interpretation and implementation of Strategy – which occurs during the delivery – requires a high-touch feedback loop.

An increased importance in the strategy delivery does not mean that strategy design is less important – it means that executives must give equal personal priority and attention to designing the right strategy as to delivering.

Here are three key tips for executives to stay engaged in the delivery phase of business transformation strategy. Governance – Decision Making – Planning & Re-planning.

Governance – Build a governance structure that reinforces the accountability and responsibilities for the vision. Ensure the team is adequality resourced in terms of experience and availability. Review and address risks and interdependencies at the beginning and periodically and through the realization of accumulated benefits. Insist on a complete set of regularly reported metrics and milestones.

Decision Making - Move quickly to re-prioritize and remove roadblocks that are uncovered despite a lack of complete information or analysis. Accept changes to time and budget milestones based on new information from the working team.

Planning & Re-planning – The less time you have available – the more important it is to have a robust plan. Don’t forgo detailed planning, but in today’s business environment planning and re-planning must be rapid and agile. Documenting tasks, task owner, and interdependencies are as important as schedule and budget. Issues impeding success should be discussed regularly and recommendations to tweak the plan fed up to the executive team in order to ensure alignment and ongoing support.

Delivering strategy is like going on an expedition through a deep jungle. Every so often you will get to a hilltop and be able to asses how things went so far and what new landscape is coming in to view. An executive that spends time and money crafting the strategy needs to protect her investment by staying available and engaged for those hilltop moments.

Stephen Wise

Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction

Have you had any recent security incidents that you are aware of? | Stephen Wise

According to the 2019 Data Breach Investigation Report, 43% of breaches involved the small and medium business segment. Gone are the days an internet firewall, PC antivirus, and backup is adequate. Agree? Today, in the face of emerging threats, security is complex.

Ransomware and phishing attacks can be let through by even the best anti-virus and anti-spam software. The risk is heightened if users have the same passwords across all accounts – successful attackers can then easy take your money and your files hostage. It is also very common for users to send confidential information unintentionally.

Governments and regulators are hard at work to create policy frameworks to guide business – yet staying up to date and onside with the patchwork of rules has its own challenges. PCI (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronics Documents Act), HIPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) all have some overlapping areas but varying objectives and severity of penalties.

The challenge for CEO/Presidents is that the type of risk and the preventive actions required are rapidly changing. Accountability for a cybersecurity breach sits at the top of the house and so should awareness of the threats and prioritisation of the defences. Here are four topics to be addressed:

1. What defences do we have in place against cyber threats?
2. How is our business data being protected from leaks?
3. Who has access to our information?
4. How are we compliant with the various regulatory frameworks?

If you have trouble answering one of these topics or if you have had an incident in the recent past, please reach out so that I can help point you in the correct direction.

Stephen Wise

Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction

Disruption: Connected Healthcare | Stephen Wise | Integration Professionals

Rapidly converging technology advancements are disrupting all industries. Admittedly, my eyes glaze over from time to time when learning about BlockChain or Cyber-Security. I didn’t need these technologies before – why do I need them now? However, disruptive interventions in Health very real.

When I was in middle school, I had a friend living with Diabetes. This was a smart, careful, and aware kid. He was watchful with his diet and measured his glucose and administered his insulin faithfully. Yet, it was frequent that his blood sugar levels would get out of whack; it was very dangerous life-threatening condition. It has been about 100 years since Banting and Best discovered Insulin at University of Toronto, but we are still living in the dark ages managing the condition.

Consider the future: Aiden is a grade ten student diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes about two years ago. He wears a patch that has a sensor and transmitter that continuously monitors his glucose levels. His phone receives the data, sends immediate alerts when the rate of change exceeds a trigger level, all data is sent to the cloud for storage and analysis. Also, his parents and care-givers have access to the data and alerts.

Aiden is part of a virtual support tele-medicine group. The facilitator is a trained professional and regular video calls on Aiden’s phone include education, coaching, treatment adjustment, and monitoring. The group is designed to help Aiden successfully manage his condition and avoid complications. The facilitator maintains helpful information online so that Aiden can access it in between calls.

As part of the long-term play, Medical researchers collect and combine the data from all Diabetes patients. They use Artificial Intelligence predictions to continually look for opportunities to improve treatment and consequently make unexpected gains helping patients to reduce their symptoms.

Consider a second example. Patients with Atrial Fibrillation wear a device on their chest and go about their daily activities. Leveraging machine leaning and artificial intelligence and huge amounts of data collected from all patients, the system has predictive capabilities and accurately detects the beginning and end of arrhythmias. The benefit is improved clinical data for researchers and doctors to determine an appropriate treatment approach.

High-quality and affordable healthcare has been in crisis for several decades. I believe this is a problem that can be solved over the next twenty years. The two examples above are in the field now. Applying Real-time IoT monitoring and cloud storage, Machine Language, Artificial Intelligence to treatment of Cancer, Mental Health, elderly care will force out inefficiencies in the system driving the overall cost of healthcare to manageable levels.

Stephen Wise

Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction

What value are you creating with your IoT? | Stephen Wise | Integration Professionals

The increasing capability to digitize the physical world presents enormous dollar opportunities. IoT and its technology provides the ability to sense the world or take an action or both. For example, manufacturing applications include operations optimization, predictive maintenance, inventory optimization, and health and safety. McKinsey has suggested that the economic impact of IoT in factories will be valued at 1.2 to 7.7 trillion US dollars in 2025.

Most companies can explore the following over arching models: Transform business process; Enable new business models; or Combine with other advanced technologies like AI and blockchain. Developing a business model to reduce your costs or enhance the customer experience is the first transformation step.

Here are my top 5 tips for developing your IoT business strategy.

1. Ensure the business case has clarity for how the company will capture value from the IoT solution internally or from customers.
2. Executive sponsorship of the IoT portfolio of activities requires business led cross-functional support from all areas of the enterprise; IT enables IoT for the enterprise, not the other way around.
3. Involve manufacturing and the frontline in up-front planning as monetizing IoT benefits depends on business process change and change to customer experience. For example, most implementations will require/suggest for things to be done differently as part of the future state – buy-in from those impacted is critical.
4. Engage partners and internal resources to augment the new skill sets that will be required to maintain and use functionality. Networking and connectivity, Data science, and security will all be learning curves.
5. Manage all your IoT initiatives as a portfolio to initiate/cancel, prioritize, and balance projects according to revenue, cost, resource availability, and risks.

The pervasive embedding of IoT hardware is a given. IoT is reshaping the way enterprises manage processes. Albeit, the usefulness and timing for when it is helpful that your fridge knows it will soon be out of milk is not clear. Nevertheless, the great value to be gleaned in Health, Transportation, Retail, Manufacturing, and so on is logical.
 

Monetizing the power of sensor-enabled data and knowing how to deploy is a disruptive change that should be on everyone’s business radar. 

Stephen Wise

www.IntegrationProfessionals.com

Dramatically Improve Traction