Now a household name in personal finance, Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook. The company’s four decades of success — the company reported 2022 annual revenue of $12.7 billion and a portfolio of valued products including TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, Mint, and Mailchimp — has been possible in part by the company’s dedication to innovation. Innovation is necessary for modern businesses to maintain a competitive advantage, meet evolving customer needs, and attract top talent. Prioritizing innovation can also improve the IT-business relationship by positioning the IT organization as a partner that is uniquely suited to evaluate ideas and pursue those most likely to succeed.
Two conversations on Peter High’s Technovation podcast with Intuit’s Chief Information Security and Fraud Prevention Officer, Atticus Tysen, and Chief Data Officer, Ashok Srivastava, show how Intuit has reinvented itself through IT-driven experimentation driven by a desire to solve real business problems and foster a strong IT-business partnership in the process. These interviews show how a formalized test-and-learn process, a set of practices formalizing the steps taken to ideate, conduct pilots, analyze results and scale valuable ideas across an enterprise, can be used to systematically scale innovation and deliver a range of benefits. Among them:
–Change the culture of the IT organization to encourage more frequent ideation and support team members in voicing ideas they might not have previously
–Empower the IT organization with data and agility that allows it to show up as a true business partner
-Increase the influence of the IT organization to build trust and credibility with the business
-Eliminate silos and encourage expansive thinking to ensure the creation of durable, enterprise-grade solutions
Intuit’s innovation journey highlights these improvements in action, as we’ll see below. We will also share Metis Strategy’s 10-step test-and-learn process that you can implement in your own organization.
“At Intuit, experimentation is everyone’s job,” said Brad Smith, Intuit’s former Executive Chairman. Building a culture of experimentation and innovation requires creating a safe space to allow risk-taking and encourage more people to bring ideas to the table. Intuit’s IT organization prides itself on its hypothesis-driven testing culture designed to pursue new ideas with clear business outcomes rather than rely on legacy solutions, bolstering the IT organization’s strategic value.
Solidifying a test-and-learn process positions IT organizations to play a more active role with business teams, understand customer needs, unlock innovation opportunities, and change the culture of IT from reactive order-takers who “just” keep the lights on to partners who help shape the future of the enterprise. At Intuit, the test-and-learn process is guided by the company’s two innovation competencies, Customer Driven Innovation and Design for Delight, which drive all solution development and ensure strategic focus throughout the ideation process. These defined principles, outlined and enforced by the Intuit labs, help narrow down and develop winning ideas by ensuring new solutions unlock value and solve real problems.
IT leaders must be change champions to ensure the successful adoption of a test-and-learn process and the subsequent shift in culture required to improve the IT-business partnership. Broad participation in the test-and-learn process happens when the process is accessible and engagement is encouraged across all roles and tenures.
Intuit’s technology leaders incentivize innovation by giving employees unstructured time for ideation and solutioning, which fosters their participation in the test-and-learn process and refines the company’s ideation muscle outside of day-to-day responsibilities. Other incentives used to ensure test-and-learn participation include the Scott Cook Innovation Awards, which recognize employee innovators; mentorship programs to guide new participants through the test-and-learn process; rotational development programs to upskill employees; and workshops to refine critical thinking skills.
By enabling test-and-learn experimentation, IT leaders can begin to change their organizations’ culture and empower the IT organization to become a true business partner. Intuit notes that the test-and-learn culture has enabled a durable competitive advantage that allows the company to differentiate itself from competitors while focusing on what matters most to its customers.
In a recent survey, 63% of CIOs reported that they struggle to communicate IT’s business value to business partners. Formalizing a test-and-learn process can improve that communication by giving IT leaders the data needed to tell their innovation story and tie new ideas to tangible business outcomes.
Test-and-learn experimentation produces data surrounding the feasibility and value of scaling an idea. Ideas that are ultimately chosen to scale are backed by data on their projected success and business impact. IT organizations can also provide their business counterparts with data on risk mitigation and projected costs based on the initial testing.
Tysen names data as the primary enabler for successful test-and-learn experimentation as it creates opportunities to take calculated risks. Tysen and Srivastava work together to break down data silos and democratize data so teams can more effectively derive and deliver insights.
Pairing test-and-learn with agile delivery methods can promote a culture that rewards failing fast, iterating, and delivering value in the shortest sustainable time. Intuit focuses on lessons learned from experiments rather than if one was a success or a failure.
Intuit’s innovation competency, Design for Delight, further showcases agile ways of working by prioritizing constant customer feedback, quick prototypes, and iterative solutions to ensure initiatives pursue maximum customer value.
Since experimentation often happens on top of day-to-day responsibilities, transparent and realistic expectations must be set to prevent under-delivery or delays and preserve working relationships. Tysen manages business expectations by ensuring that the IT organization outperforms traditional IT metrics as a prerequisite for experimentation. Operational excellence builds trust between IT and business partners and creates space for test-and-learn experimentation that builds that trust further via successful ROI-generating innovation initiatives.
The typical IT delivery muscle must be refined, and often rebranded, to position the IT organization as an innovator rather than an expensive bottleneck. Tysen says his organization builds credibility with the rest of the business by leveraging business metrics and KPIs, not just IT metrics, when evaluating ideas generated through the test-and-learn process. Applying business metrics to IT-generated ideas ensures that the IT organization and the business are being held to the same standard and can help ensure fair appraisal and understanding of each initiative’s value.
In a recent survey, fewer than 5% of CIOs reported that they spend time talking about business outcomes or measuring the business outcomes created by the technology they deploy. This is a significant oversight preventing buy-in and limiting the IT-business partnership. Tysen emphasizes the importance of listening to partners to ensure his organization accurately understands their problems so he knows what is needed to create relevant soultions. The consistent use of business metrics across Intuit also ensures the appropriate acknowledgment of IT’s test-and-learn successes.
Test-and-learn experimentation breaks down traditional business silos and seeks to prevent ad-hoc ideation, eliminate repetitive solutioning, and facilitate cross-functional collaboration. It also promotes enterprise thinking, a practice of monitoring cross-functional requirements, scalability considerations, and long-term needs such as reducing future rework and technical debt.
Srivastava notes that Intuit’s process for test-and-learn experimentation relies on conducting deliberate tests that solve specific and identified problems rather than needless, temporary solutions. Test-and-learn experimentation not only brings MVPs to life with speed but also facilitates deliberate and intentional conversations about long-term considerations and dependencies during the product creation process, ensuring that the final product meets as many consumer needs as possible.
When working with clients seeking to streamline and scale innovation, we use a 10-step test-and-learn process to govern the intake of ideas, manage stakeholder expectations, accurately reflect capacity, and capture data to inform a solution’s journey. This process helped a recent client identify and eliminate silos that hindered collaboration while elevating the IT organization to the status of a business partner rather than an order taker.
Implementing a test-and-learn experimentation process enables an organization to narrow an infinite number of ideas and pursue only those that will deliver the most value. The IT organization is uniquely positioned to facilitate this process and help the business identify winning ideas due to its digital testing capabilities and data collection methodologies.
Working closely with business partners can help teams across the organization avoid placing big bets on ideas that may drain their resources without delivering the needed value. Prioritizing resource allocation based on test data and iterating throughout the solution development process creates a virtuous cycle where the business will increase its speed to market for winning ideas while guaranteeing maximum customer satisfaction.
The benefits that come from implementing a test-and-learn process will not be realized overnight. A structured approach to change management and user adoption is needed to ensure an effective transition. It makes sense to start small. With support from internal change champions, consider piloting a beta test-and-learn process, secure quick wins, and use that momentum to facilitate a broader rollout.
Once adopted, an enterprise might face execution hurdles that prevent maximum value realization. For example, a company may not have the discipline needed to define the hypotheses that drive testing, resulting in the creation of tests that do not produce the needed information.
Alternatively, existing data collection and analysis capabilities may not be sufficient to derive conclusive test results. An enterprise may also suffer from “analysis paralysis,” which can create stagnation when a test fails and lacks ownership over revisions. To learn more about avoiding these experimentation pitfalls, see this article that outlines how business experimentation frameworks can help mature a test-and-learn culture across an enterprise.
As we recently passed the two anniversary of the pandemic, necessitating those of us who could work remotely to primarily do so, quite a bit has changed. Some companies have begun to return to office work on a hybrid basis, and roughly three-quarters of companies suggest that the path forward will be hybrid.
Whereas in 2019 and years prior, all work was assumed to primarily take place in an office, now there is optionality. Employees have different visions for what works best for them. Whereas one employee may long for more work in the office, others never wish to step foot in an office again, avoiding commutes and maximizing time with family in the process. These differences of opinion run the risk of creating conflict. To alleviate that possibility, a framework can be helpful. That framework can guide employees to determine together when to work in an office. With that in mind, here are five Cs to determine when work is best done together in an office:
A team may choose to connect when team members from different cities happen to be in the same city. This offers opportunities to bond, to break bread and to share experiences.
Connection may also come in the form of a firm gathering. Especially for firms where most work will be done virtually, outside of the confines of an office, some have elected to have all firm gatherings or department gatherings either in a city where an office hub exists or at a destination, such a Miami during the winter or a hiking destination during the summer. These are opportunities for connection that bond teams together. Colleagues can get to know each other outside of the work setting, and the next gathering may be the light at the end of the tunnel that keeps them looking forward to time with the firm.
Given the emphasis on virtual work over the past two years, there has been much call to evaluate where creative collaboration is best done. Most research suggests that when teams are called upon to create they do so best in person. Though online tools such as Miro and Mural offer worthy alternatives to the traditional white board, brainstorming in the same room together continues to offer greater chances to catch lightning in a bottle and draw out the best ideas for the company. True creation often entails developing something new. This might be a new innovative product, for example. Again, bringing together a cross-functional team in the same room where each can easily hear from each other, note all that is happening, and the like is the fastest path to success.
The office setting is often best suited for collaboration beyond creation, as well. One can think about a linear path in the collaboration process. As a new project or initiative is identified, the kickoff may best done in person. This collaboration can help mete out a plan, determine who will be responsible for what, and what sub-teams might collaborate on which details. There will likely be a period where individuals will have solo work to accomplish before the next collaboration is necessary. Thus, through the life of the initiative, it will be appropriate to work independently for a period and then to collaborate in person together. This can be a force multiplier to productivity, as during periods where independent work is appropriate, one can avoid the commute, perhaps leveraging a bit of the time that would have been spent doing so to drive the independent work to its conclusion.
At a time when so many people are leaving jobs as part of the so-called great resignation, it is all the more important to invest in one’s people. Better coaching, counseling, and career planning are key investments to make. An in person meeting is often best to read reactions to guidance provided, praise given, and constructive criticism proffered. These are conversations where trust can be won or lost, and it is best to be in person for more of them, if possible. Ironically, it is often the youngest members of our teams who appreciate the importance of in person career planning least but benefit the most from such guidance. It must be proven to them that these conversations are worth their while with the results that they might garner from more explicit planning sessions.
Last among these factors is the need to celebrate together. During the period of virtual work primarily, where meetings tended to stick to agendas that fit in 30 or 60 minute windows and then each team member spread like seeds to the next series of meetings with other people, many took for granted the need to celebrate all that we accomplish along the way. When a project concludes, when promotions are announced, when quarterly earnings are made public, among many reasons to possibly celebrate, taking the opportunity to do so forges bonds, while also making explicit the accomplishments of the team.
None of this is to say that these five activities can only happen in offices. None should wait for everyone to be in the same place at the same time to happen, of course, but in the balance, these are activities that are best done in the office. The framework is clarifying. It articulates a means of cutting through conflicting opinions of whether to meet in person or not. One can imagine colleagues debating whether an activity should be done virtually or if it rises to the level to warrant a trip into the office. One could determine if the activity aligns with the categories given, and if so, make the call to do so. Hybrid work is tricky as we have the unleveling of the playing field in earnest, but by setting up some simple ground rules together with sound explanations of why the path has been chosen will ensure that you are building trust across the team for the long term.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
The fifth and final Metis Strategy Digital Symposium of 2021 is in the books. Thank you to the global CIOs, CEOs, and entrepreneurs who joined the conversation.
Looking to 2022, technology leaders said developing and maintaining strong cultures, motivating teams, and providing continuous learning and development opportunities are among their continued priorities. Also on the CIO agenda: maintaining agility and momentum following a period of significant digital acceleration. Additional highlights from the event are below. Check out our YouTube channel and the Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of individual panel discussions.
New ways of working enable agility and speed to market. CIOs noted that a continued shift to product-based operating models, paired with advanced applications of data and analytics, has led to greater enterprise agility. More nimble technology architectures also support more nimble operations.
Increased customer adoption of digital channels during the pandemic accelerated the shift to new team structures, roles and responsibilities and reinforced the need to deliver products and services to customers faster and with less friction. Michael Ruttledge, CIO at Citizens Financial, noted a 30% increase in the use of digital channels. Over the past year, his team has introduced more than 900 features in its mobile app. Citizens has leveraged advanced technology in those efforts, Ruttledge said, “but at the same time we’ve had to get that to market very quickly, and we’ve done that by changing our agile culture.”
Pairing new ways of working with agile, scalable technology architectures has helped the IT organization at Target move faster and deliver more value across the organization, CIO Mike McNamara said. Today, Target has hundreds of products across the business that can release updates daily or weekly. “The rate limiter is how quickly our business and our guests can absorb change rather than how quickly we can produce it,” McNamara said. “That speed and agility has just been a phenomenal benefit to the business.”
Fostering a strong culture is more critical than ever. As the war for talent intensifies and organizations embrace more flexible working arrangements, technology leaders are thinking about how best to foster a sense of connectivity and maintain innovative cultures as teams collaborate in new ways, both in the office and remotely.
Asurion CIO Casey Santos noted that her team is telling the company’s story in a more personal way, emphasizing the strength of their culture and technology, becoming more flexible, and relying on less formal recruiting techniques. Santos’ team is also training leaders at the company to be better coaches and sponsors so that they can help employees through their journey at the company. Asurion is also bulking up its internship, internal mobility, and rotational programs.
Underpinning many of those actions is a push to create learning and development opportunities for talent across the organization. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, “lifelong learning isn’t optional anymore,” said Sri Donthi, Chief Technology Officer at Advance Auto Parts. He shared the guiding principles he has followed while developing an engineering culture: creating a comfortable environment for employees to challenge themselves and excel; starting with the customer in mind while looking at the big picture; and keeping innovation top of mind. Donthi emphasized the need to lead with empathy and care, and encouraged fellow leaders to develop skills including crisis leadership, virtual leadership, and inspirational leadership.
Companies double down on upskilling and talent initiatives. Creating learning and development opportunities remains top of mind for CIOs in the year ahead, with 35% of participants noting reskilling or upskilling as their talent development priority in 2022, followed by enhancing employee experience.
Toptal Co-Founder and CEO Taso Du Val predicts that there will be a plethora of online courses that will allow employees to earn certifications. More meaningful content and a better user experience, among other factors, will make these programs more impactful than traditional education programs, he said.
Citizens Financial introduced academy programs that allow engineers to spend 10 days learning skills such as React, Java, Python, or learning APIs, CIO Michael Ruttledge said. The company also developed 38 different badging and certification programs across a range of technologies. At Discover Financial, the Discover Technology Academy runs a series of courses while also serving as a hub for multidisciplinary teams to share their knowledge and experience with others, encouraging collaboration and allowing innovation to scale more effectively.
Target CIO Mike McNamara said engineers at the company are expected to spend 20% of their time on learning and development, part of the framework Target has built to recruit, develop, and provide continued learning experiences for teams. He’s also proud that many leaders who have worked under his leadership have taken on CIO or senior executive roles at large companies around the world.
Common platforms enable data-driven customer experience at scale. Heading into 2022, leaders across industries continue to develop and refine platforms that allow their organizations to leverage analytics and AI across a broader range of products and services, deliver sufficient governance, and scale new solutions quickly.
At Experian, EVP & Global Head of Analytics and AI Shri Santhanam is leveraging a technical and commercial platform, along with the company’s vast troves of data, to develop more products powered by AI and machine learning. Common platforms allow Experian to bring in new data sets more easily and create more sophisticated models that give individuals, particularly those whose experiences may not have been reflected in traditional models, access to credit.
Anjana Harve, Global Chief Information Officer at Fresenius Medical Care, has focused on developing a platform that helps patients manage their care effectively and provides continuous insights throughout the user journey from early care to dialysis treatment. Through connected platforms, Fresenius can drive standardization, bring innovation and speed to end users, and guide workflows while providing the most relevant and personalized information for patients and clinicians.
Leaders continue to unlock new capabilities with data and analytics. Nearly 40% of attendees noted that they expect to see the most technology investment in data and analytics in the year ahead, and 71% noted that advanced AI is the emerging technology that holds the most promise for their organizations in 2022.
Discover Financial CIO Amir Arooni emphasized the importance of advanced AI in giving customers “actionable data that empowers them.” Applications of AI at Discover include real-time fraud detection and analyzing past spending data to advise customers on what to purchase and when, providing guidance on how to save more money and earn rewards.
Advanced analytics techniques are also making strides in the construction industry, which has begun to embrace technology as more digital tools, accessible via the cloud, went mobile. Turner Construction CIO Warren Kudman said the industry is “waking up to the value of data” and has used digital tools to visualize and manipulate environments virtually, reducing the likelihood of costly mistakes. Turner is also using data and ML to track and assess safety conditions at job sites, proactively identify interventions, conduct remote inspections, and track materials as they arrive on job sites.
Dean Del Vecchio, CIO and Chief of Operations at Guardian Life, discussed how the company is using data and AI to develop insurance products faster, easier, and with less friction for customers. Thanks to new tools and new ways of working, some processes that used to take 45 days have been cut to 30 seconds, he said.
Like so many companies over the past year and half, Ralph Lauren has had its resilience tested as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had to shut down stores and offices, and had to advance efforts to better interact with customers and associates alike, safely.
Fortunately for the company, Janet Sherlock, who has been the chief information officer of Ralph Lauren for the past four years, initiated a number of initiatives that gave the company a leg up. Her purview is such that she has unusual influence for a CIO. She runs strategy and overall management of all of the technology including design conceptualization through to the point when products are distributed to either wholesale partners, the company’s stores, or directly to the company’s consumers. Her team is also responsible for store technology and the full ecosystem of in-product management and user experience. Additionally, Sherlock oversees all global digital platforms, marketing technology, data analytics, and data science. All of this is on top of global infrastructure, cybersecurity, IT risk, compliance, and privacy.
Among the fortuitous programs that were in place prior to the pandemic that aided the company’s transition during the pandemic was a hybrid flexible work arrangement called Flex Place. Upon this foundation, Sherlock’s team rapidly rolled out virtual appointment booking. Her team had already made significant progress on curbside pickup for customers. Completing its rollout ensured that the company could still do business through stores even if customers were unable or less willing to go in them.
“I think our biggest shift left efforts was probably in virtual stores,” said Sherlock. “We had been considering our approach to virtual stores before Covid hit but that was something that we pulled forward very quickly and aggressively. Our stores were such masterpieces, and the experience is so unique, we felt it was important to offer the world of Ralph Lauren to our customers, even if they couldn’t physically visit our stores.” Her team rolled out a rich virtual store experience and quickly integrated it with the company’s e-commerce platform so that customers could purchase certain products via hotspots directly from their virtual experience. “At this point, we have seven different virtual store experiences, and are continuing to build on the capabilities that we have in our virtual store environment,” noted Sherlock.
One of the thornier issues that Sherlock and team had to grapple with how to assist Ralph Lauren’s design and merchandising teams, each of whom relied and thrived on in-person collaboration. Sherlock’s team set up a design collaboration platform for them to use, and it proved to be a silver lining of the pandemic inasmuch as the teams developed new ways to work and collaborate. Now the design and merchandising teams anticipate an ability to continue to work both in person and virtually, adding flexibility to their work routines.
Another process that the company took for granted had to be done in person was the product approval process, which traditionally relied on in-person meetings to discuss milestones related to lines, styles, and fit approvals. It was long assumed that those involved had to be able to physically see and touch the material in order to make decisions. “We were able to leverage our 3D product development for the approval process, which also had the side benefit of streamlining the process,” said Sherlock. “We [also] had to create online experiences to replicate and replace our showroom visits, and support different virtual ordering processes for our wholesale partners.”
As Sherlock contemplated the future, she noted three strategic priorities: experiences, data, and automation. The overarching benefit of these foci should be greater nimbleness for the company. The experiences center around creating a variety of customer journeys and allowing customers to engage in the ways that best suit them rather than dictating how they shop and purchase products from Ralph Lauren. “Everything is interoperable between our online, our [marketing technology] and our in-store capabilities are blended together so we can create seamless experiences and we have some really cool ones planned for the future,” noted Sherlock.
Next, she believes data strategy will be a critical area of focus. “We’re being very deliberate about the overall data strategy for the core elements of data, things like our product data, our digital assets, our customer data, thinking strategically about where they’re stored, how they’re accessed and leveraged, how they’re maintained,” said Sherlock. “[This will impact not only] data analytics, but [it will allow Ralph Lauren] to serve up on a real-time basis things like personalization, real-time actions, real-time decision-making…Then, of course, it leads to our capabilities in advanced analytics and data science, which for us is a major area of emphasis and focus.” She refers to IT as the “connective tissue” of the enterprise relative to data, and that this is a discipline that will lead to better collaboration across the traditional silos of the company.
Sherlock believes that greater degrees of automation will improve the efficiency of all that IT delivers while further modernizing the practices of the company to better compete in the digital age. Sherlock and her team have implemented a variety of changes that have overturned decades of inherited wisdom about how business can be done, providing new benefits along the way. Necessity is the mother of invention, it is said, and many inventions have been created due to the necessities that the pandemic has driven.
It may seem strange to think of a technology or digital leader being responsible for aligning strategy across the enterprise. Since the inception of the CIO role, strategies were often created and then brought to them. They were not engaged in the strategic planning processes of the rest of the organization. Instead, they had to bring to life the outcomes of those strategies.
If you think about it, though, aside from the chief executive officer, only the chief financial officer and chief human resources officer has the breadth of purview comparable to a CIO or chief digital officer, and the technology and digital executives are increasingly involved in customer-facing activities in a way that the CFO and CHRO roles have not historically been.
Technology and digital leaders must recognize that they engage with the rest of the enterprise and the company’s customers, and that is rare if not unique. As such, they must leverage this advantage to a greater extent in fostering strategic alignment.
Strategic alignment means ensuring there is alignment from enterprise strategy to divisional, business unit, or functional strategy. This alignment is often misunderstood or lacking in companies, and that disconnect means wasted effort and money for the enterprise.
Further, a lack of well-articulated plans at the divisional level means the path to bringing those plans to life will be murky at best. For reasons of self-preservation and value-creation, technology and digital leaders must push for better.
Translating IT strategy from the enterprise level to the divisional level is important because it is at the divisional level where the work is done. Enterprise strategy typically calls out objectives related to revenue growth, cost efficiency, customer satisfaction, geographic expansion, product innovation and the like. It is the divisions of the company that determine how each of those will happen.
Let’s take revenue growth as an example. Growing revenue is vital to the health of a company, but each function — from sales and marketing to specific product or service areas — contributes in different yet important ways. The specifics of what each function will do needs to be formulated clearly to have teams go and find the new revenue through the various mechanisms available across the company.
Engage teams to conduct an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). Such analyses are typically simple, easy to understand, and ensure that leaders can gather information quickly, easily and at the right level of granularity:
As you gather feedback from these SWOTs, it is important to categorize the feedback into topics like people, processes, product, brand, geography or market, finance, customers, organization or culture, competition, technology, vendors or partners, and the like. These form the vestigial versions of objectives for the enterprise or division.
Optimally, you should gather that feedback into a common framework of objectives, goals, tactics and measures.
Each objective should have a goal associated with it. This is a success metric that helps chart the path to success.
Using the same rather generic enterprise strategies, the goals might be defined as revenue growth (grow revenue by 15% in the next year), cost efficiency (grow costs at a rate 5% under revenue growth in the next year), customer satisfaction (improve customer satisfaction with our products from 70% satisfied to 80% satisfied in two years), geographic expansion (open 10 new offices in the coming year) or product innovation (introduce two, $50 million revenue products in the next year).
Try to limit the number of goals to two, as if you go for more than that, the strategy is less of a filter and is permeable to too many ideas.
Next, the digital and technology leader can brainstorm tactics with members of the enterprise or divisional team who are experts in the area noted by a given objective. As noted above, these are the various actions available to the company (or division) that help it reach the goal(s) articulated.
It is important to note that tactics should never include the name of a particular solution. The extent to which a project name or a vendor product is noted in a strategic plan renders it more important than it is. The action is one thing; the means of delivering the action are another.
You may believe that Salesforce is the solution you wish to use for customer relationship management, but better to articulate the need for CRM than to note the solution. The solution should be debated.
The tactics can be more plentiful, and during the brainstorming phase, definitely err on the side of more rather than fewer tactics. After the list is finalized, the tactics should be prioritized. The prioritization should be undertaken based on the perception of which ones are being pursued today, which ones are likely to be pursued in the near term, which will be undertaken in the medium term, which will be undertaken later, and which ones may or may not be undertaken.
Finally, a measure or measures should be defined for each tactic. For the same reason noted for the goals, try to limit them to two. For the goals and measures, remember the acronym SMART.
Our current moment has provided an opportunity for CIOs and other technology leaders to be the catalyst for their firms’ strategic evolution. These executives should take advantage of driving digital change. Otherwise, they risk digital driving them.
Peter A. High is the author of GETTING TO NIMBLE: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader and President of Metis Strategy, a management and strategy consulting firm focused on the intersection of business and technology.
With all the ways digital innovation has enabled companies to remain productive during the pandemic, one of the most positive outcomes is improved collaboration across traditional business silos. In my new book, Getting to Nimble: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader, I discuss how enterprises have made these silos more permeable, creating greater partnerships along the way.
Consider the following five examples and how they could apply to your digital transformation efforts.
Talented technologists are in high demand at most organizations, tasked with helping teams in other divisions figure out the digital implications of their ideas and strategize accordingly. In many cases, these ideas come from the technologists themselves. Companies that provide such “T-shaped” career paths offer an enormous advantage, developing leaders with great breadth and depth of experience. When they ascend to “chief” roles, they do so with a much clearer understanding about how value is created within the enterprise.
Agile methodology has been a boon for collaboration across the enterprise.
The traditional “waterfall” method of development involves someone from the business side (outside of IT) placing an order with the IT department. The IT team then develops this order, with little input from the business side until the project is completed months later.
In contrast, agile development includes the intended audience or user of the project in development from ideation through completion. With each iteration, the user validates value, and features are amplified or turned off accordingly. In some cases, the entire project may even be scrapped as a result of what the team learns.
DevOps blends two traditionally siloed parts of the technology and digital domain: development and operations. In a traditional project development model, developers take a project from ideation through completion, and the operations team then moves it forward. There is often a moment in the lifecycle when the project is “thrown over the wall” from development to operations (even this phrase highlights the distance and disconnects between the activities of the two groups).
DevOps instead makes delivery teams responsible for production issues and fixes, whether legacy or new, drawing them into the lifecycle earlier. Greater levels of involvement and accountability make for better work products.
The migration from a project to a product orientation is another area that benefits from greater collaboration. Internal “products” are also good examples of this – think order-to-cash, onboarding new hires, or creating a mobile customer experience.
These products potentially involve great value, and the product teams are typically cross-divisional or cross-discipline: They might include tech and digital, marketing, sales, operations, and any other division to which the product is relevant. A product leader should lead the cross-functional team, and that team should be prepared to remain intact for a longer period of time than the typical project.
An early example of this type of project orientation comes from Atticus Tysen, Chief Information and Security Officer at Intuit. When Tysen became CIO, he brought with him a product orientation, defining products for IT to drive. By developing in long-term teams, each team member was able to develop a higher level of expertise in the product area than they would have in a more traditional project structure.
Data strategy has also driven more cross-functional thinking. Done well, all strategy should invite greater collaboration across traditional silos since value is truly driven at the intersection of the disciplines. Data strategy should apply everywhere data is gathered, secured, synthesized, and analyzed – across the entire company.
Many companies have found it useful to have a leader who drives data strategy on the company’s behalf. To do this effectively, that leader (whether the CIO, the chief data officer, or another IT role) should engage leaders in other parts of the company to ensure that the data strategy is as comprehensive and useful as possible.
These are just a few areas where stronger collaboration is happening across industries and geographies. Companies that fail to take advantage of these trends risk falling behind more nimble players in their industry.
Peter A. High is the author of GETTING TO NIMBLE: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader (Kogan Page, Spring 2021) and President of Metis Strategy, a management and strategy consulting firm focused on the intersection of business and technology. He has advised and interviewed many of the world’s top CIOs and leaders at multi-billion-dollar corporations like Gap, Bank of America, Adobe, Time Warner Inc., Intuit, and more.
Technology executives continue to tackle urgent tasks related to the COVID-19 pandemic, from supporting a surge of remote workers to keeping critical business systems running. But as remote work becomes the new normal (at least for the next few weeks), many CIOs are also grappling with larger cultural questions, primarily how to keep teams engaged and productive while working from home.
Below are a few practices leaders can take to maintain a culture of engagement and prepare their teams to emerge empowered on the other side of this crisis.
This is a time of immense uncertainty for both companies and individuals. Personal and professional routines have changed overnight as people make the shift to working remotely. Regardless of job title, everyone on your team is making an adjustment. One of the easiest ways to help create stability is to acknowledge that adjustment and do what’s possible to help the transition go smoothly.
A small but concrete way to do this is to provide training sessions on how to use various collaboration tools. While an IT team may be proficient in making calls on Zoom or communicating with Slack, others may using the technology for the first time. (One technology executive I spoke with recently said a training session for Zoom drew more than 5,000 sign ups.) Developing these opportunities is a simple way help your teams navigate the change and get to work faster.
“Every CIO knows change is not just about technology, it’s about people, process and technology,” Citrix CIO Meerah Rajavel wrote in a recent blog post. The company’s IT team worked closely with HR to craft the company’s work-from-home policy and develop a list of resources. “We decided to lean in and take a walk in the user’s shoes and collect feedback along every step of their journey that could be used to deliver a superior experience that would enable them to perform at their best.”
When visiting corporate innovation labs in recent years, it has been increasingly common to see a company’s leadership principles hanging poster-size on walls throughout the building, a not-so-subtle reminder of the firm’s cultural tenets. With the switch to remote work, it is now more incumbent upon executives to ensure those principles remain top of mind. Consider posting your team’s strategic priorities in prominent places across virtual channels and reference them when communicating with team members. Doing so can serve as a reminder that just because employees are no longer in the office, the company is still guided by the same vision.
While CIOs should continue to share frequent business updates with their teams, they can also magnify key wins and lessons learned. When working together in an office, it can be easier to see and celebrate victories, or to notice when something doesn’t work as it should. Without a shared physical space, CIOs can help develop cohesion by broadcasting the stories of teams solving challenging problems or otherwise rising to the occasion during the crisis.
Regardless of the message you are communicating, be clear and tailor it to the platform you are using. A request delivered “face to face” via video conference may come across differently than a terse message on Slack. Also, while it may sound dated, don’t be afraid to use the phone. While there is a plethora of communication tools at our fingertips, sometimes an old fashioned phone call can help you deliver a message most efficiently.
It is easy to think about remote work as an isolated activity, but it’s worth considering how it can help create new connections. As Adam Ely, deputy chief information security officer at Walmart, said in a recent LinkedIn post: “I spoke to one company that said this drove (security teams) to have better relationships with people in business lines they didn’t know.” Those teams now have a better understanding of their colleagues’ business processes and plan to work more closely with peers across the business. It is a potential silver lining for IT, where strong relationships with business partners are increasingly critical to growth.
The surge in virtual communication tools can help foster these connections. Virtual coffee chats, lunch breaks and happy hours have sprouted up both inside and outside the office as people look for new opportunities to connect. At health technology firm Cerner Corp., which has 27,000 employees working from home, teams are using collaboration tools in new ways, such as creating specific channels for discussing health-related topics, sharing work-from-home tips or sharing photos of their home offices.
While many companies are still in crisis response mode, it is increasingly important for CIOs to think about how their teams can emerge from the crisis in a position of strength. This presents an opportunity to bring a variety of voices into the conversation, working with colleagues across the organization to research the technologies and trends that are likely to rise in importance over the coming months. Even if your organization is unable to invest in those technologies today, exploring business cases now can prepare you to move quickly when the time is and give people a role in shaping the organization’s future.
As the shift toward remote work continues, leaders will be tasked with creating an inclusive work culture that also encourages productivity and innovation. Prioritizing health and safety, equipping employees with the right tools and fostering new forms of collaboration can go a long way toward making it happen.
Asia Miles was established as a loyalty program under Cathay Pacific 20 years ago. Though it is still owned by Cathay, Asia Miles now partners with a great number of airlines as well as through an ecosystem of partners to add value to frequent travelers with different ideas of what a great loyalty program should yield.
Michael Yung is the Head of Digital Product and Technology at Asia Miles, and over the past five years, he has helped grow the company, and to help it continue its evolution to become a digital leader in the loyalty space. He explains the evolution of the company from largely a call center-based business to one that services customers across a wide array of digital formats. He describes the different types of customers Asia Miles serves. Yung also talks about the diverse team he has built. Lastly, he details his team’s creative use of blockchain for marketing campaigns using smart contracts. I caught up with Yung recently at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, and covered all of these topics and more.
(To read future interviews like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Please provide a brief overview of Asia Miles’ business.
Michael Yung: Asia Miles is the loyalty rewards program of the Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific Airways. Similar to any loyalty rewards program, our members can earn miles by flying, traveling, shopping, dining, or even by having a mortgage with our banking partners.Our members can redeem points for many rewards such as hotel stays or laptops. We set up our program in 1999, so we are celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. Over the 20 years, we have accumulated over 11 million members, we have about 700 partners around the world to serve those members, and we are the leading loyalty program in Asia.
6/11/18 By Peter High, Published on Forbes
Mickey Boodaei has been a leading entrepreneur in the security space for years. He co-founded Imperva, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011, and he co-founded Trusteer, which was sold to IBM for $1 billion in 2013. Soon after the latter acquisition, he founded Transmit Security.
Interestingly, Boodaei did so without seeking venture capital. He indicated that by putting his own money (and that of co-founder Rakesh Loonkar) into the start-up, it felt more like when he founded his first firms, but in this case, there was no one else to answer to.
Transmit Security provides, “a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects,” as Boodaei explains. He also notes that “security and customer experience are the two most important goals of any organization today. We bundle these together and address them as a single challenge.” In this interview, he explains his personal journey as a CEO, the importance of a strong co-founder, and his opinions on the evolving threat landscape.
Peter High: You are the Chief Executive Officer of Transmit Security. Can you provide an overview of the company?
Mickey Boodaei: We founded [the company] four and a half years ago with the goal of building a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects. These include projects such as authentication, authorization, fraud prevention, account opening, among others. Our R&D Center is in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the rest of our technical teams are physically close to our customers in the US and Europe.
As a company, we focus on large enterprises with millions of end-user customers. Most of our customers to date have been banks, insurance companies, telcos, and retailers. We have two global financial customers with over 20 million users each, and about 20 customers with more than five million users each. Our customers typically use our platform to consolidate and accelerate multiple initiatives in the identity space. For example; multi-factor authentication in biometrics, behavioral analytics, and advanced fraud detection, attributes-based access control, new data protection regulations, using the mobile device as an authenticator for call centers, branch and web, authorization and authentication around open API’s, and more.
High: Yours is an organization that is experiencing extraordinary growth, and you have been able to do so without venture funding. Could you talk about the way in which you have grown, as well as the advantages of having done so without taking on venture funding in your early stages?
Boodaei: Our goal was to build a big company that is focused on what we enjoy doing around cybersecurity, which is working with large enterprises. We wanted absolutely zero external pressure as to the direction of the company or the speed in which we are growing. Therefore, my co-founder Rakesh Loonkar and I decided to invest our own money in the company.
We have been relatively successful in the past, so we could afford the risk of losing many millions if we failed. Today, Transmit is a profitable company, so the investment paid off. Not taking money from venture capitalists is not something everyone can do, so we consider ourselves lucky to be able to fund ourselves. Personally, I find it uncomfortable taking someone else’s money when I can do this with my own.
I also believe that it made us more focused and got us to work harder. If you look at first-time entrepreneurs, they are eager to secure their future. For us, by using a considerable amount of our own fortune, we created a strong motivation for ourselves to succeed that is not dissimilar from first-time entrepreneurs. This is the idea behind the self-funding concept of our company.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
6/4/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
7-Eleven is a big retailer. It operates 65,000 stores in 18 countries, has 55 million customers in stores on a daily basis, and conducts 20 billion transactions annually. Like most retailers, it is in need of transformation. Enter Gurmeet Singh. With a Ph.D. in Engineering from Rice, and stints with leading companies like FedEx, Intuit, and Capital One, Singh joined 7-Eleven in August of 2016 as chief digital officer. He would add the chief information officer title in November of 2017.
Singh joined the company with a mandate from 7-Eleven CEO Joseph DePinto to make the company a digital leader. Singh embarked on a multi-year journey to become a digitally-enabled organization, including a “full stack transformation” approach which encompasses consumer-facing technology, back-end technology, infrastructure, and the organizational stack. He also expanded the company’s loyalty program from its initial focus on beverages to a full-fledged loyalty offering that is available on mobile, web, digital loyalty card, and even through chatbots.
Singh notes that “the closest store to a customer today is in the palm of [his or her] hand,” and he wanted to go beyond pushing customers from mobile into stores, and allowing customers to interact with 7-Eleven on their terms, through the interface of their choice. To foster this, Singh’s team helps the rest of the organization understand the art of the possible through constant experimentation with new technology. He describes his path to innovation in great detail herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Digital and Chief Information Officer of 7-Eleven. Could you describe your role?
Gurmeet Singh: I started at 7-Eleven as the Chief Digital Officer, with my primary responsibility being driving digital transformation. This company founded convenience at a global scale, with 65,000 stores in 18 countries, 55 million customers visiting the stores every day, and 20 billion transactions on an annual basis. You take that, and you overlay the consumer trends and the new technology trends like big data and digital payments, and you have the perfect formula for redefining convenience.
Technology is a key element of a digital transformation and it is also key to becoming a digitally-enabled company. Initially, we started off with what most companies have been doing and what most consulting companies have been citing as a strategic approach, which is building a two-tier architectural model. A two-tier architectural model means you have digital technology capabilities that are being developed at a higher speed, and then decoupled from that, you have your legacy enterprise systems which have longer release cycles at slower speeds. Additionally, enterprise and legacy work was being managed in long cycle processes as projects, not as products.
Old models in any company are always changing, and they should be changing. They are a function of maturity of the company, the need of the hour, and the market factor. As we evaluated the speed of our transformation, we felt that we were not getting to the speed we needed. To get there, we needed what I call a full stack transformation. When I say full stack transformation, I am talking all the way from the consumer-facing technology to back-end technologies, all the way to infrastructure and cloud. It even goes beyond that to encompass the organizational stack.
To bring more efficiency and effectiveness to our decisions, our prioritization, while driving the productization of IT, we decided to combine the CDO role and the CIO role. This allows us to drive vertical product slices while working on horizontal capabilities. If you are doing one after the other, you are taking too much time to get the business transformed. If you do not do a vertical slice, you do not know what customer problem you are trying to solve. Combining the functions gets us there faster. It is harder, but you end up driving more synergies. We drive higher team engagement. You speed up your transformation journey, and you end up creating a stronger pool of talent as one team. What we did was then combine digital and IT, which we call DIGIT, which is very much digital.
High: You are clearly thinking multiple years out. The changes require hard work to be done in the near term to make the organization nimbler for the long term. How difficult was the process of selling this internally? Was it difficult in having your peers among the executive leadership understand the rationale behind all the hard work to be done in the near term for a better outcome for the long term?
