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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

“Digital” has replaced “Cloud” as the hot synonym for “Everything.”

No matter what a company plans to do and how it plans to do it, it’s now officially Digital.

Not that I’m a Digital skeptic. I’d just like, when we talk about “Digital,” to be confident we’re talking about the same thing.

Google a bit and you’ll find quite a few different accounts of why Digital is so important, along with several definitions, some of which, reprehensibly, make it a noun.

My favorite: Digital enables new business models. Examples include Uber, AirBNB, and Zipcar, all of whose “new” business models amount to being brokers — companies that bring buyers and sellers together in exchange for a cut of the action.

It’s a very new business model, certainly no older than the Phoenicians.

For whatever it’s worth (probably what you pay to receive KJR) here’s my take on why business leaders not only can’t ignore matters Digital, but have to embrace the subject. Truly Digital companies:

  • Observe: Constantly scan the technology landscape for the new and interesting.
  • Orient: Spend serious time and energy, at the executive level supported by staff analysis and modeling, investigating whether and how each new technology might turn into an opportunity if their company gets there first, or might turn into a threat if a competitor gets there first.
  • Decide: Far too many business executives and managers, and therefore whole businesses run away from the decisions that matter most as if they were rabid weasels (the decisions, that is, not the executives, managers and businesses). Digital businesses have to become adept at making fast, well-informed decisions.

And remember, it isn’t a decision unless it commits or denies the time, staff and budget needed to effectively …

  • Act: It isn’t enough to make the right decision and then either flail away at it or not actually do anything to make it real. Successful Digital businesses must execute their decisions, and with high levels of competence.

It’s OODA again. Digital businesses are built on OODA loops focused on the potential impact of new technologies. Not static list of specific technologies. New and interesting technologies as they arise and mature.

For Digital businesses the Orient stage has outsized significance, because many of us humans have a strong tendency to reject the new as either wrong or no different from the same old same old.

Digital businesses can no more afford to fall into that trap than the opposite extreme — dying from the shiny ball syndrome of chasing the next huge thing before giving the current huge thing a chance to succeed.

So Digital business have to establish methods, and not just methods but a supporting enterprise-wide culture, that let them go beyond the lip service of “that’s what we’ve been doing all along” to accurately recognize what really are familiar old concepts hiding behind shiny new buzz-phrases and what are truly new and important possibilities.

And none of this will matter if the company’s IT organization hasn’t figured out just how different the Digital world is from the standard collection of “best practices” followed by old-school industrial-age IT.

Recent history — how IT responded to two past transformational technologies, the personal computer, and the world wide web — illustrates the challenge. In both cases, IT ignored them completely until long after they’d become entrenched elsewhere in the business.

Why was that? Boil everything down and it came to this: When they first appeared, and for several years afterward, neither the PC nor the world wide web fit what IT did. They were out-of-scope, and outside IT’s current areas of expertise. CIOs didn’t know what to do with or about them, so it was safer and easier to declare them Someone Else’s Problem.

In the Digital era this attitude just won’t cut it because new technologies that can have an impact on your business are emerging faster than ever. Digital businesses need IT that provides technology leadership to the business, at all levels of the business, and at all levels of IT.

Technology leadership means more than just (for example) the CIO explaining to the other members of the executive suite how the Internet of Things represents a threat to the company’s current product line.

It means the IT organization knows how to recognize, research, pilot, and incubate new technologies. And, for those that succeed, how to integrate them into both the company’s technical architecture and IT’s organizational architecture.

All levels of the business and IT means the conversations between a help desk analyst and a workgroup manager about collaboration technologies are just as Digital as the CIO’s executive-suite conversations about the Internet of Things.

And are just as important.

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|In: App Dev Methodologies|Last Updated:

News flash: business is speeding up.

Okay, maybe it isn’t news. But if it isn’t, why are so many businesses slowing down?

No, it isn’t your imagination. Read “The Hard Evidence: Business is Slowing Down,” Tom Monahan, Fortune, 1/28/2016). Among Monahan’s findings, using 2010 as a baseline:

  • IT project delivery has slowed, from 8.5 months to 10 months.
  • Open positions take longer to fill, from 42 days to 63 days.
  • Purchase decisions are taking 22% longer.

Like all statistics, these are open to alternative interpretations. IT Projects might, for example, have become bigger and more complex over the five years covered by the study.

Or maybe it’s due to Agile: Emptying a dynamically managed backlog might take more time than finishing waterfall projects that exercise tight scope management. Completion is one thing. Agile’s shorter time to first value is something else.

For hiring, with 2015’s lower unemployment rate, open positions might have become harder to fill. For purchasing … I’m sure we can come up with something if we put our minds to it.

Or not. Monahan’s data match my experience — the average business errs on the side of caution, never mind the impact on velocity and agility.

What if Amazon made decisions this way? Google?

A better question: What will you do if Amazon or Google decides to invade your markets?

This sort of invasion isn’t always apparent, either. For example, do you think the folks at Dex realized Google Maps was an invasion when it first appeared?

Truth in advertising: Neither did I, until I realized that’s where I was looking for nearby sellers of what I wanted to buy, leaving the Yellow Pages on my kitchen bookshelf.

But then, nobody was paying me to realize it, so I don’t feel all that bad about missing it.

Here’s a guarantee: If your business sells physical products, it’s at risk of invasion from competing products with embedded intelligence and connection to the Internet of Things. If you sell some form of services … see Google Maps, above.

Justifying delay until flank attacks appear by claiming a “fast follower” strategy is a losing proposition. Among the reasons: fast followers are rarely the companies that know how to be fast.

How does a business become fast? Getting rid of everything that makes it slow is a good place to begin. Start with decisions. These are things politically-driven business managers avoid like rabid weasels, by the way, so a business speed-up artist is operating in a target-rich environment.

And there’s no richer set of targets than the variety of governance and steering committees that pervade most enterprises.

Maybe you’ve avoided this infestation. But probably not. The bigger the decision, the more likely it will be governed by a committee, specifically to give decision-makers political cover should something go wrong.

Here are five straightforward steps for scaling back committee decision sclerosis:

  • Size: Committees generally make decisions by consensus. The difficulty of reaching consensus grows polynomially with the number of committee members: In round numbers a committee of ten takes three times as long to reach consensus as a committee of five.
  • Composition: Most committees are composed of representatives from different business constituencies. They’re included to protect their areas’ interests. Committees designed like this aren’t just a consequence of siloization — they’re an endorsement of it.

Populate your committees based on expertise instead.

  • Cadence: Most committees, most of the time, gravitate to a monthly meeting schedule. This make the month the standard unit of time for decision-making. Worse, it builds wait-for-the-next-meeting into the management culture.

Do something radical: Insist that all committees meet weekly instead. Don’t worry about this congesting the company. The effect can be the exact opposite: Committees that meet four times as often ought to have meetings that only last a quarter as long.

  • Culture: Make culture your new governance. Build the right decision habits into it, and culture can be your decision-making “lane markers.” Reserve formal governance committees for use as its guard rails.

Unless, that is, your company makes a habit of hiring and retaining employees and managers it can’t trust to make good decisions. If that’s the case, fix your staffing practices.

Then make culture your new governance.

  • Disband: Do you really need a committee to make this decision? Rely on individual stewards instead, requiring them to make decisions consultatively rather than by consensus or, at the other extreme, solely through their personal judgment and expertise.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Sure, most members of most committees will run away screaming in terror.

But that’s a small price to pay.

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