Why Self-Organization Demands a New Reality
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
"This all sounds great. But it's just not realistic."
This is what a group of five senior IT executives told me during a workshop I
held not long ago. We were working through an exercise on the organizational
characteristics necessary to successfully execute a digital transformation,
and the group was doing their ‘readout.'
The executives loved everything we discussed and agreed that if such an
environment existed, it would make transformation much easier. They just
didn't believe it was realistic.
Our job as analysts is not only to observe the world as it exists, but also
to paint an aspirational picture of how it might be.
As a result, we spend a lot of time and commit a lot of digital ink to
discussing emerging technologies and approaches, and their potential impact ... (more)
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I was at a conference recently when I saw it. I sighed and shook my head.
A development manager from a large enterprise organization was explaining how
they had created a DevOps maturity model based on CMMI. They went on to
describe their current state of maturity and their plans to get to ‘full
maturity' in the next three years. He continued by explaining how they had
presented this plan to executive management and subsequently received
approval for a new ‘DevOps team.'
Many organizations are now looking to DevOps maturity models to gauge their
DevOps adoption and compare their maturity to their peers. However, as
enterprise organizations rush to adopt DevOps, moving past experimentation to
embrace it at scale, they are in danger of falling into the trap that they
have fallen into time and time again.
Unfortun... (more)
Three Digital Transformation Truths and One Great Myth
By Charles Araujo
It's conference season and, as you might expect, Jason and I have been on the
road covering a bunch of them. It's always great to see what the disruptive
players in the market are doing - and this year did not disappoint. But there
is one thing that repeatedly happens that just gets under my skin:
transformation-washing.
As Jason explained in a Forbes article over a year ago, ‘washing' is when a
vendor (or pundit) applies a buzzword loosely in an overt attempt to attach
themselves to its buzz. And transformation-washing is rampant.
At virtually every event vendors bombarded the attendees with all the reasons
that this tool or that solution was the driving force behind digital
transformation. Unquestionably, many of these tools are innovative and
represent genuine breakthroughs. But no tool, in a... (more)
Time to Pop the Bubble: Intellyx Retrospective and Predictions for 2018
Following a tradition dating back to 2002 at ZapThink and continuing at
Intellyx since 2014, it's time for Intellyx's annual predictions for the
coming year.
If you're a long-time fan, you know we have a twist to the typical annual
prediction post: we actually critique our predictions from the previous year.
To make things even more interesting, Charlie and I switch off, judging the
other's predictions. And now that he's been with Intellyx for more than a
year, this Cortex represents my first opportunity to see if his auguries made
the cut.
Charlie's Predictions for 2017
In last year's retrospective and predictions for the coming year, Charlie
made three predictions: DevOps loses its religion but gets real, AI and
machine learning (ML) become strategic, and the edge comes back into vogue.
I'm pl... (more)
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The rise of the market for No-Code platforms and tools has given rise to a
burgeoning population of ‘citizen developers’ – non-technical business
personnel who can use these platforms to build an increasingly powerful set
of business applications without writing a line of code.
As this market matures, different platforms focus on different challenges. As
a result, a wider range of ‘citizen’ roles also evolve, such as citizen
process creators and citizen data analysts.
High on this list: the new role of citizen integrator.
A citizen integrator is a non-technical business user who uses a No-Code
integration tool to perform either application integration or data
integration tasks – as well as tasks that combine these two integration
modes.
Integration has always been a difficult technical task that has heretofore
r... (more)
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Last week, I published an article for Forbes entitled Customer Success? Pull
The Other Leg. In the article, I bemoan the fact that customer success
initiatives have largely gone off the rails, focusing on reducing customer
churn or selling more to customers, rather than actually focusing on the
success of customers.
I then left readers with a cryptic definition: customer success means
focusing on customer outcomes in terms of your customers’ profitability,
which inevitably depends upon the success of your own customers’ customers.
Astute readers might have noticed the suggestion of an infinite loop in this
definition, a rabbit hole even Alice might not escape: what if your customers
are themselves following this definition of customer success? Then your
customer success depends upon their customer success, which in turn... (more)
The Deconstruction of Digital Transformation
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
The complex idea behind the term digital transformation is that technology
has created a fundamental shift in how organizations operate. The
consumerization of technology - and the customer empowerment it created - has
upended the traditional operating paradigm of organizations moving it away
from a capital and process-centric model to a customer-centric one.
The need to digitally transform your organization is now - or at least should
be - a strategic imperative. The fact, however, that the term digital
transformation is now a bona fide buzzword has obfuscated its importance.
The problem is that we create buzzwords because we need a simple, shorthand
way of communicating what is otherwise a complex idea. In the process,
however, the deeper, underlying complexity of the... (more)
In the 67 years since Alan Turing proposed his Imitation Game - the infamous
‘Turing test' for artificial intelligence (AI) - people have been confused
over the very purpose of AI itself.
At issue: whether the point of AI is to simulate human behavior so seamlessly
that it can fool people into thinking they are actually interacting with a
human being, rather than a piece of software.
Such deception was never the point of Turing's exercise, however. Rather, he
realized that there was no way to define true intelligence, and thus no way
to test for it. So he came up with the game as a substitute - something
people could theoretically test for.
Regardless of Turing's intentions, setting the bar for AI based on its
ability to snooker an audience has become fully ingrained in our culture,
thanks in large part to Hollywood.
The AI We Love - and Love to Hate
Ever since the... (more)
For most of the last decade, there has been a steady drumbeat of predictions
about the demise of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Whether it was the
rise of the cloud, the emergence of the Chief Digital Officer or the promise
of artificial intelligence, there has been a chorus of people claiming that
the CIO role would imminently become antiquated and unnecessary.
As you would expect, there was also a counter-chorus (made up mostly of IT
executives) proclaiming the critical nature of the CIO role and why it was
finally time for them to ascend to the top echelons of enterprise management
and take their proverbial ‘seat at the table.'
And, of course, neither of these eventualities has really happened.
There are unquestionably instances in which each of these predictions has
come true. There are a few organizations that have eliminated the CIO role
and survived to t... (more)
As the adage goes, actions speak louder than words.
This phrase may not ring any truer than when it comes to digital
transformation. Perhaps it's because as an industry we've been talking about
it for a while, but the latest fad seems to be organizations congratulating
themselves for a digital transformation well done.
If you've followed our work here at Intellyx, you'll know that we think that
these proclamations are naive at best - and delusional, at worst. True
digital transformation is a capability organizations must build and sustain,
not a project that they can complete.
Nevertheless, organizations are rushing to the bully pulpit of the industry
press to talk about their successful digital transformation initiatives,
their revitalized technology platforms and the new, avant-garde management
approaches they are implementing.
But look beneath the covers, and you... (more)
Transformation Practice: The Key to Making Change a Core Competency
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
There is a fundamental flaw in how many people think about digital
transformation. First, as we've written about extensively at Intellyx, people
tend to think about it as a finite corporate project, rather than as a
process of continual transformation.
There is a deeper flaw in thinking, however, that leads to this type of
project mentality. Enterprise leaders commonly think of transformation as
something done at a corporate level - something the organization does to
itself.
But that mindset creates a separation between the act of transformation at an
organizational level and the transformation that must occur within each
individual to make organizational transformation a reality.
The truth, however, is that there is no such thing as organization... (more)
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