The notion of Shadow IT as an expression of the mismatch between supply and demand of remains fascinating to me as it pits the abundance of what’s possible with technology against the scarcity of making it available, with a backdrop of people picking up IT by its scrappy bootstraps . I’ve written before about Lisa-in-accounting’s Access databases and Jason’s customer data...
One of the privileges of consulting is breadth. Especially as strategists, you tend to not go deep in one organization, you go wide across many. David Epstein wrote about this in Range: generalists who draw from diverse experiences often see patterns that specialists miss. I am far from the smartest person in any room I walk into and I am grateful for the vantage point. Right now, the pattern is...
Remember those miracles from the spring? The ones where teams stood up digital channels in days, migrated to remote work overnight, and duct-taped together solutions that kept the business running? Turns out that those miracles come with invoices. And they’re arriving now. I’m not talking about cloud bills, although those are eye-popping too. I’m talking about the accumulated...
In February, a client shared their three-year digital strategy. It was well crafted with a phased approach, careful governance and had executive alignment. By April, only three months later, they had implemented the most tansformative elements. Not because the strategy was brilliant. Because a pandemic made it non-optional. Necessity Beats Strategy We’ve spent years trying to convince...
In a meeting last month, a senior executive mentioned without a hint of irony: “We need to transform our transformation.” The room didn’t flinch. That’s how far gone we are. It’s been roughly a decade since “digital transformation” entered the corporate lexicon, and the phrase has been stretched to mean everything and nothing. It’s on every strategy...
It’s not uncommon to manage hundreds of APIs in a drive towards increasing interoperability. Surprisingly, it’s also not uncommon to see organizations track them by spreadsheet, In one case, I reviewed a client’s API strategy that was encapsulated in two tabs: Published and Other. That was it. That was the strategy. Organizations have embraced the idea that APIs are important…...
There’s a moment in every cloud strategy workshop where someone says it. You can feel it coming… the CIO leans back, crosses their arms, and declares: “We’re going multi-cloud.” The room nods. It sounds smart. It sounds strategic. It sounds like the kind of thing you’d read in an analyst report. And that’s the problem. Hedging Your Bets Fallacy I recently...
Kids with a parent who works as a consultant grow up with strange perspectives. Monopoly games come with Net Present Value analysis on potential hotel acquisitions; science fair projects with kick-ass hypotheses and massive amounts of data to back them up. But also, mom or dad consultant is away a lot, visiting faraway clients, missing key moments. Too many conversations by phone or video call...
Prototyping is the transition from talking about it, to doing just enough of it to see where it takes our ideas. Not until we build a semblance of our solution can we test to see if our ideas stick. Prototyping drives the feedback loop and becomes the launch point for ideas we want to invest in. Where does prototyping fit? In Design Thinking, we progress through: Empathy to understand our users...
The old school project/program/portfolio management office (PMO) is a relic from the command-and-control models of the past. It worked well for managing predictable solutions. But it’s where agility and innovation dies. Bring on the revolution. Recognize This? When I see old school PMOs (and these are more common than you think), I see: A drive for compliance with processes and standards...
