As you can see in the chart below, increasing customer satisfaction is the number one benefit organizations seek from CX management. Organizations understand that just providing a great product or service alone will no longer cut it when it comes to achieving a high level of customer satisfaction. They must offer a superb customer experience as well.

As one business architect of marketing at a telecommunications company told Curt Hall about his firm’s CX goals:

Our vision is to have a system augmented by customer data input versus relying solely on human interactions. This will provide a much more customer-centric view of all our business operations and clarify the role of customer journey management and result in deliberate and measurable improvement in all customer experiences.

If you’d like to participate in the study, you can still respond to the questionnaire. I also encourage you to augment your answers by talking with Curt. He can be reached at chall@cutter.com.

On September 25, he’ll present a webinar, “Unpeeling the Onion: Leveraging Flow to Create and Sustain a High-Performance Operation,” in which he’ll reveal what needs to be “in your center” to ensure your organization is a high-performance operation. Topics he’ll cover include why:

• High performance requires pushing beyond the status quo
• Predictability is an attribute of high performance that goes beyond a good present-state cash flow, and
• The central gears in the machinery of high-performance operations are baseline performance data and performance prediction models.

You can register for this complimentary webinar now, and on September 25 learn how your organization can leverage flow to create and sustain high performance.

Explore the role disruptive technology plays when the innovation process diverges from what companies consider to be good business practices — and from individuals’ comfort zones.  Join Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Katia Passerini on September 18 for her webinar Innovation Models Across Industries: A Linear or Complex Path?

Cutter Fellow Lou Mazzucchelli will lead a Cutter Members-only peer-to-peer discussion on the potential risks posed by machine learning applications. Getting ahead of the issues around ML from the start is easier than dealing with negative consequences after the fact. Join Lou on October 30 for Machine Learning: Are we Teaching the Right Lessons? Registration is limited to ensure a lively discussion, so don’t wait to register!

Most organizations have a strategy. Discover how using business architecture can make yours one of the few to execute upon it. Join Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Brian Cameron on October 15 for a webinar that explores Business Architecture: Strategy Execution’s Secret Weapon.

Enjoy the rest of your summer, and we’ll “see” you soon.

In the on-demand webinar “Architecture for Digital Business,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Mike Rosen explains how taking a business architecture and value delivery–based approach to your digital strategy can help your organization take advantage of the many opportunities that digital transformation provides. He discusses why provisioning your platform based on next-generation application, information, security, and technology is critical to success.

According to Rosen, every organization has essential challenges regarding their platform:

1. Your organization must take the generic digital business platform and architect a specific platform instance to meet your organization’s strategies and goals (business and operating model).
   
   
2. You must transform the marketing perspective of the platform into an architectural and implementation perspective.
   
   
3. Given a specific platform architecture, your organization must incrementally provision the platform over time while simultaneously execute initiatives that deliver on your strategy.

In the “Architecture for Digital Business” on-demand webinar, Rosen discusses the overall architecture needed to create a digital business platform and the new business, information, application, technology, performance, and security architectures that comprise it. (If you’re not a Cutter Consortium member you can watch the webinar on-demand here.) Mike Rosen also delivers a two-day, inhouse training engagement that will help your organization create an architecture for a digital business platform. You can get more information here.

Members of the Cutter Consortium community have benefited since 2005 from Vince’s outside-the-box approach to deploying people and technology in transformative ways through his Cutter Summit keynotes, prolific research ranging from applying big data in higher education to data democratization, from statistical project management to the challenge of leadership and via his advisory role to a variety Cutter members.

Pierre Ouillet, vice chancellor and chief financial officer at UC San Diego said of Kellen, “He is an innovative visionary who brings his deep expertise and organizational acumen to transform UC San Diego and support the success of its academic and research enterprise. His influence has been felt by the entire UC system, including many of our sister campuses, which are partnering with UC San Diego on a number of systems.”

Congratulations, Vince, on this well-deserved recognition! 

Become a Cutter member so you’ll have access to our full team of experts — including hall-of-famer Vince Kellen! Learn more.

In their Executive Update “Ambidextrous Organizations: How to Embrace Disruption and Create Organizational Advantage,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Wilhelm Lerner and Marten Zieris introduce the Ambidextrous Organization Development Canvas—a model that drills down from 6 design dimensions into 72 specific business capabilities to help organizations develop a common language and make decisions on organization transformation priorities.

To move toward ambidexterity, organizations use the concept of capability building blocks to determine their desired individual organizational equilibrium. This approach is based on three steps:

1. Conduct an organizational assessment. Assess your organization against a set of capability building blocks, giving the business a unifying language to express the current state of the organization. Knowing where you are now creates the foundations for an organizational transformation roadmap.
   
   
2. Build an organizational target picture based on your strategic ambition. Determine the right target model to support the strategic cornerstones defined by top management. This provides a compass for the organizational development journey. The primary focus should be on how you change steering/transformation dimensions, as this is the essential layer that will make the whole new organization work, combining multiple systems in one organization.
   
   
3. Derive the necessary measures to build up the capabilities. The result of the third step is a transformation roadmap that should speak to your organization and its needs. This must address people’s mindsets, revamp organizational practices and routines, provide the necessary tools and methods for transformation, and, above all, outline and promote new leadership behaviors. If it does not, it is doomed to fail fast.

In “Ambidextrous Organizations: How to Embrace Disruption and Create Organizational Advantage”, Lerner and Zieris demonstrate how applying the Ambidextrous Organization Development Canvas will help you increase the resilience of your organization by complementing your existing skill set with speed/creativity capabilities, enabling you to respond adequately to external disruptions. (If you’re not a Cutter Consortium member you can download a copy of the article here.) Wilhelm Lerner will also be delivering a webinar on the topic next week (March 27, 12PM EDT). You can get more information and register here.

For more on the Ambidextrous Organization

Cutter Consortium Research: Cutter Consortium Members can read Ambidextrous Organizations: How to Embrace Disruption and Create Organizational Advantage, by Wilhelm Lerner and Marten Zieris.

Register to attend the webinar, Ambidextrous: The New Organization Archetype and learn how to master the balance between the opposing imperatives of speed/creativity and scale/productivity systems.

In the Cutter Consortium Executive Update “Twice the Product in Half the Time,” the pair explores why it takes so long (years, even decades!) to get a new product out of the manufacturing plant. Then they explain how an organization can apply Agile principles to physical product delivery to cut that time to delivery significantly.

According to Smits and Borsella, when you apply the Industrial Agile Framework, you can change directions while working on product development without having to go back to square one. And, as with Agile for software, inspecting early and makes it possible to find and fix problems before they become excessively costly.

In “Twice the Product in Half the Time,” Smits and Borsella point out the myths surrounding Agile product development, the commonly perceived causes of lost productivity and the common responses, which are often flawed to demystify the myths surrounding agile product development. The myths, and the Industrial Agile response to them are:

Myth 1: Maximizing People Utilization Gives the Most and Cheapest Output

• Perceived Cause: Our “resources” — people — are underutilized

• Flawed Response: A “full resource utilization” approach

• Industrial Agile Framework Response: Don’t focus on resource utilization; focus on availability. Each person should work on a single product delivery and be completely focused and available up to the delivery.

Myth 2: Large Batches Are Optimal

• Perceived Cause: We need to understand all the details before we can build anything
• Flawed Response: Create a phased delivery plan with large batches of work and long stretches of time
• Industrial Agile Framework Response: Deliver products in small steps, not as large projects. Accomplish as much in each small batch as the focused group of people (described in Myth 1) can deliver in two weeks.

Myth 3: Iterating Physical Product Delivery Is Not Possible

• Perceived Cause: Departments are not optimized for rapid delivery
• Flawed Response: Local optimization (not seeing “the whole”)
• Industrial Agile Framework Response: Don’t do local optimization by department; instead optimize the product delivery. Make sure all the people relevant for delivering the product into the hands of
  the customer are always engaged and are only focused on the delivery

Myth 4: Only the Most Complete Feature Set Will Do

• Perceived Cause: It is too expensive to build product versions
• Flawed Response: Every possible product feature will be implemented before the first launch
• Industrial Agile Framework Response: Again, don’t do local or
  step optimization, but instead deliver the small batch from each iteration ready for manufacturing. The outcome of each two-week iteration includes design, testing, materials, manufacturing steps, service manuals, and so on.

Myth 5: Detailed Management Is Needed to Guarantee Early
Delivery

• Perceived Cause: Lack of process and management will result in chaos
• Flawed Response: More process, more reports, and more
  checklists
• Industrial Agile Framework Response: Don’t use prescribed processes; use a light framework and the team the freedom to fill it in with the best practices. The delivery team can then decide what activities are necessary to deliver each small batch.

Myth 6: Agile Product Delivery Doesn’t Scale

• Perceived Cause: Only small teams can work in an iterative way
• Flawed Response: Doing more of the same process
• Industrial Agile Framework Response: Only add people to teams when inspections show the need to add a person.

In their piece, Smits and Borsella offer examples of companies that applied the framework to product development; they describe how the actions these organizations took saved rework and time; and they weave a running example — a new design for a high end, carbon fiber bike — into their piece, illustrating the principles of their framework.

The duo is presenting an webinar on Industrial Agile next week (Feb 6, 12pm EST). You can get more details and register here.

For more on Industrial Agile

Cutter Consortium Research: Cutter Consortium Members can read
Twice the Product in Half the Time and The Industrial Agile Framework: Scrum Is the Heart of a Future Lean-Agile Industrial Environment, both by Hubert Smits and Peter Borsella.

Register to attend the webinar, Industrial Agile: Accelerating Physical Product Delivery to learn more about the Industrial Agile Framework and ask Hubert Smits and Peter Borsella your questions.

A new wave of smart automation and autonomous systems has emerged with the ability to make and execute decisions with little human intervention. The movement is primarily driven by advances in areas such as AI/machine learning, robotics, drones, blockchain, 3D printing and wearables. It’s also propelled by the desire by business and industry to better exploit the full potential of these technologies for improving decision-making, productivity, reliability, customer service and user interaction, and for reducing cost and errors. It extends beyond an enterprise to its suppliers, customers, and others in its supply chain enriching their integration and collaboration. It is also driven by desire to deploy new novel applications. While the ongoing smart automation efforts are both promising and encouraging, it also raises a few technical, social and ethical issues and challenges which need to be satisfactorily addressed.

An upcoming issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, Guest Edited by San Murugesan, aims to examine the next frontier in automation and the challenges they present. It’ll also examine the disruptions it might cause and their impact on businesses, the job landscape, and society. Furthermore, it will discuss how the IT industry and IT professionals can get ready to embrace the new frontiers in automation.

For this issue, we’re seeking insights and perspectives from practitioners, academics, consultants, visionaries and industry experts that address one or more of the following questions:

• What are the promise and potential of the next frontiers in automation?
• How are smart automation, autonomous systems and robo advisors being used in domains such as business, finance, industry, smart factory, healthcare, education, etc.? How will automation shape these domains in the future? What new applications and innovations might emerge?
• How will automation embrace AI, ML, IoT, and cloud and be innovatively employed in smart city applications, robotics, home appliances, and personal gadgets?
• How might smart automation improve cybersecurity and effectively manage cyber threats, including obscure, new and unknown (future) threats?
• What should encompass an enterprise automation strategy, and how should it be implemented? What are some examples?
• What are the limitations and challenges posed by autonomous systems and how may they be addressed?
• What are the major concerns, fears and threats of emerging higher levels of automation with no or minimal human intervention? Are they overhyped or real?
• How might the new levels of automation impact the jobs landscape, IT and otherwise?
• What new opportunities will arise now, and in the near future, for the IT industry and technology professionals?
• Who are the major players in the automation and autonomous system landscape (technology, applications, services and tools), and what are their offerings?
• How can these systems and humans work together collaboratively?
• What are moral and ethical obligations and responsibilities of application developers and those who embrace them?
• How can we test and evaluate these systems and establish their trust-worthiness?
• Do automation technologies and applications need be regulated, and if so by whom?

Please send your article ideas to San Murugesan and Christine Generali and include an extended abstract and a short article outline showing major discussion points. In your proposal, highlight key contributions of the article that are of value to the readers and include a brief biography of each author.  Accepted articles will be due January 21, 2019.

The goal was to create an environment in the company conducive to innovation and research. Creative ideas likely to result in a business win or revenue-generating opportunities were given the necessary hearing and then funding by the “idea board,” which comprised important company stakeholders. The idea generators, called “intrapreneurs,” owned the project and received a percentage of the revenue generated by the project upon realization. This resulted in enhancing the ­feel­ing of ownership, accountability, responsibility, and involvement of the people who participated in such projects.

Intrapreneurship acted as a sounding board for employees, who generated ideas that became real differentiators for the company. The company saw an increase in curiosity to think out of the box, to be aware of what is happening in the world today, and of how to apply certain concepts for the benefit of the company.”

Bhandarkar and Rao sum it up:

In today’s digitalized world, the only thing any company can predict with 100% certainty is that change is imminent. When leaders gain employee trust and enhance engagement with intra­preneurship and similar initiatives, employees become more favorable to change, and even come to expect change rather than seeing it as a surprise or, more often, a shock. Slowly, this thought process becomes the norm and is internalized into the genetics of the organization.

For More Insight on a Human-Centric Approach to Change and Transformation

Cutter Consortium Research: Cutter Consortium Members can read additional case studies in Transforming Change into Trust in the Digital Era, and can also read the 4-part series Putting the Human in Digital Transformation by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Greg Smith and his colleagues to learn tips on how to  truly engage your people by understanding their behaviors and, consequently, ensure that they undergo successful digital change.

Watch The Great Enablers of Genuine Digital Transformation, an on-demand video in which Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Greg Smith discusses 6 key enablers to deliver positive change, and how these enablers can be unified into a powerful toolkit to facilitate successful transformation.

Cutter Consortium Workshop: Equip your leaders with the insight, perspective, and tools to help users deal with the human risks of digital transformation. Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Sheila Cox’s workshop, Navigating Business Transformation Change, will teach your team how to ready the people who will be emotionally impacted by a digital transformation and catch the resistance to such an initiative early in the process.

So, what is hybrid? Implicit in the notion, explains Prasad, is plurality — there is more than one thing in play. These things, while independent, must somehow tie together with a similar purpose. Otherwise, they’d just be distinct yet complementary components.

A hybrid cloud — a public and private cloud duo — combines two different implementations of a similar capability. Writes Prasad in a recent Business & Enterprise Architecture Advisor:

[Public and private clouds] “have similarities in that they both bring similar abilities to abstract away physical infrastructure and operational concerns, while being different in the variety of services, internal integration, and control that can be exercised by the enterprises that choose one or the other. Or, both. That last part — almost an aside — is particularly important.”

Bringing the two similar, yet different, cloud architectures together creates something new. Describes Prasad,

There is an emergence that occurs: a ‘platform’ comes into view that enables the individual parts to be considered as a unified whole and acted upon as one thing rather than two. In our hybrid cloud example, it may be desirable, for instance, to be able to deploy applications across the emerging cloud platform; some parts of the application cast in one mold, while other elements embrace the yang to the former’s yin — all while allowing the application to remain whole in conception to the human eye, though, in reality, distributed.”

Hybrid is not new. Throughout your organization you’ll likely find the entrenched old and the emerging new sitting side by side. A hybrid architecture makes it possible to introduce elements of the future while respecting investments of the past.

For More Insight on Cloud Computing

Cutter Consortium Research:  Cutter clients can read Balaji Prasad’s full Advisor “A “Hybrid” is an Architecture Skybridge.

In IoT and Interoperability in the Cloud: Practical, Challenging Scenarios, you’ll discover the  challenges that arise in real-life scenarios due to lack of interoperability and some practical standards in the IoT and cloud space.

Cutter Consortium Consulting: Discover justwhat cloud computing capacity you actually need, and where and how to procureit to get the most value from your cloud investment with Cutter Consortium’s Strategic Cloud Procurement Assessment.