Leadership
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4 Storytelling Secrets to Make Your IT Strategy Unforgettable
Traditional approaches to communicating the IT strategy are failing you. 4 Storytelling Secrets to Make Your IT Strategy Unforgettable. As technology leaders, we focus too much on whether the business case is solid, the architecture is sound, and slides are packed with data to prove it. Yet, when you are done presenting your IT strategy,… Continue reading
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Business capabilities: A misunderstood and underrated tool for your IT strategy
Too often, we have seen discussions on business capabilities being limited within Enterprise Architecture teams. These hardly reach CIOs and business strategists to really make an impact. In fact, business capabilities, when used correctly, are foundational to any business and IT strategy. CIOs and IT leaders who don’t use them in their strategy creation are… Continue reading
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Architecture is a meaningful discussion
Sometimes architecture is simply a discussion, a dialogue, not necessarily a diagram or architectural artefact. It’s not only about just transformation or change initiatives. You may achieve more by cancelling a change initiative through meaningful discussion – walking through the current landscape, the technical debt it might bring and the size of investment vs ROI.… Continue reading
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Gooch’s Paradox
Gooch’s Paradox: “Things not only have to be seen to be believed, but also have to be believed to be seen.” I consider that the latter part of the paradox is what causes organisations to get stuck because their leaders often literally cannot “see” certain risks or opportunities until their mental model changes. Continue reading
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Ivory tower assumptions
An interesting story from the mid-90s, when US carmakers wanted to enter the Indian market. However, the prices of their cars were high for the Indian market. So, they asked the car designers which features from the car could be eliminated to make it affordable. Designers made an assumption by looking at US customers and… Continue reading
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Innovation without ecosystem is merely an invention
Thomas Edison wasn’t technically the inventor of a light bulb. Decades before him, inventors such as Ebenezer Kinnersley (1761) and Humphry Davy (early 1800s) did a great amount of work to create incandescent lamps. However, Edison turned the electric lightbulb into a practical product and wrapped an entire ecosystem around it. Edison understood that the… Continue reading
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How Newton’s First Law Explains Organisations’ Innovation Struggles?
Newton’s first law of motion is also called the law of inertia. Organisations looking to innovate get trapped with this inertia. Organisational inertia keeps them with the status quo. When trying to break the status quo, you hear those famous words: “This is how things are done here!” You can’t just start innovating the organisation… Continue reading
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Innovation energy
Every organization has a vast amount of innovation energy, but most of them waste their innovation energy by either not harnessing it properly and keeping it locked, or showing off with one-off innovation efforts that go nowhere. Many think that they have done a great deal by asking their employees about innovative ideas, but never… Continue reading
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Which CTO personas have you seen in your business?
CTO’s role vary in scope depending on the industry and organization size. In a typical Gartner personification, we see the CTO’s role in primary industry businesses in four personas: · Digital Business Leader — Accountable for the digital business technology strategy and building and architecting the required digital platforms. · … Continue reading
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What you see is all there is or shall I say what you show is all there is?
Let me start with a beautiful scenario from Innovator’s Dilemma (slightly adapted version)In the same week, two respected employees, one from marketing, the other from engineering, run two very different ideas for new products past their common manager two levels above them in the organization. The marketer comes first, with an idea for a higher-capacity,… Continue reading
Thinking Space 