Get Latest Business News from All Over the World 24/7 throughout the Year: August 2018

CIOs and CEOs of large enterprises are faced with an overwhelming demand to transform their IT enterprise services and with a bewildering, often conflicting landscape of advice. IBM has transformed itself many times since its inception in the late 19th century and is on a continuous journey of innovation and transformation to help clients win in their ever-changing markets. Listen to Angelia Herrin, Editor of Special Projects for HBR, interview IBM’s Max De Ycaza, Director of Technology Innovation & Transformation, about how IBM’s largest business unit, the $40 billion Global Technology Services unit, is helping clients transform their IT enterprise services by leveraging the agile for services operating model.

Download this podcast

Angelia Herrin, host

Welcome to the HBR Quick Take. I’m Angelia Herrin, editor for special projects and research at HBR. Today, CIOs and CEOs of large companies are faced with an overwhelming demand for digital transformation and a bewildering, often conflicting landscape of advice. IBM has transformed itself many times since its inception as a weights and scales company in the late 19th century and most recently embarked on a digital transformation of their own. Today, we’ll talk with IBM’s Max De Ycaza about how IBM’s largest business unit, the $40 billion Global Technology Services unit, is helping clients learn from this journey. Max, thanks for joining us today.

Max De Ycaza, IBM

Happy to be here, Angelia.

Angelia Herrin, host

As you work with clients around the world, you know that digital transformation is on every leader’s mind. But what are the challenges that IT leaders are encountering as they try to keep pace and try to transform process and operations while the business is evolving?

Max De Ycaza, IBM

Let me tell you, our large enterprise clients’ processes are highly dependent upon software. We know that the pace of change around software is lightning-fast. Driving digital transformation really means driving rapid, efficient, and high-ROI responses to those changes. Where our clients struggle and where we see challenges is not in the area of new product development. Standard agile approaches like Scrum and SAFe work pretty well for that. Where we see greater opportunities for improvement is on the less-talked-about but absolutely critical back-office services functions, especially IT operations, infrastructure, and maintenance. It sounds great to simply spin up a new server with a button push on the cloud, but that doesn’t really always provide the security, functionality, or long-term maintenance that most big firms really need. Transformation born in the product world typically hits the wall when it comes to critical productions and infrastructure.

What I witness is that two-speed IT doesn’t work. IT must respond as quickly as the rest of the organization. Why? Because large enterprises’ business operations live in software. Successful digital transformation means being able to change business operations software, commonly called IT services, quickly, reliably, and efficiently. Spinning up an on-demand server in the cloud is not the same as building a security-hardened, permission-enabled asset track server loaded with the client’s applications and data.

Angelia Herrin, host

In the past couple of years, IBM Global Technology Services undertook its own agile transformation. How did you attack this transformation, and how has that impacted the whole organization?

Max De Ycaza, IBM

This was a large, massive-scale transformation with over 110,000 employees globally. IBM GTS does project work too, but most of our work is daily IT services, support, and infrastructure that run the businesses for thousands of the world’s biggest companies. Some of our clients may receive 90,000 support tickets per month. We tried Scrum and SAFe with limited success and even looked outside IBM for best practices. I interviewed the leaders of many fabled Scrum companies, agile certification firms, and some Big 4 consultants, but the advice we got was all product-focused. We created a fit-for-purpose approach that works for both projects and high-volume, high-availability environments.

Angelia Herrin, host

As IBM worked with agile principles internally, you also extended the practice to working with clients. Can you talk a little about the development of agile for services and what that means to customers?

Max De Ycaza, IBM

As we figured this stuff out the hard way, our clients noticed. They had been hitting the same roadblocks with their own agile approaches. They started asking us, “How do you do that? Will you show us how to do it within my own organization and culture?” I have a very small global team of experts, not mid-level consultants. We kept our team very lean but highly expert. When we engage with clients, it’s not a long-term engagement billing by the hour. We involve three flat-fee, fixed-length engagement options that allow our customers to get fast business outcomes and transactions within their own culture and constraints. Then they decide if they have learned enough to continue on their own, or with a bit of additional guidance from us, or with a large-scale rollout.

Angelia Herrin, host

The agile model has been around for a while in software development, and the benefits there are clear. But in working with clients around the world, what are the challenges you see as IT leaders try to adapt this to improving IT operations and services? How should leaders think about working this transformation?

Max De Ycaza, IBM

I think taxonomy is a problem. The terms digital transformation, agile, and DevOps are highly overloaded. We keep it simple. Let me take digital transformation. It’s mainly about automating manual processes and moving to the web. Let’s take banking, for example. Depositing checks used to require you to physically go to the bank and wait in line for a teller. Now you can snap a picture of the check on your smartphone and deposit it via an app. That’s a digitally transformed process. Then you go to agile transformation, and that’s about changing the way people work to develop and deliver apps like the banking app we just talked about. Then, if you looked at that, you say, “Hey, then what is agile for services?” This is what my team here at IBM does. It’s about changing the way people work to deploy, support, and maintain apps like the banking app we just talked about earlier. Thousands of other mission-critical apps run the business processes in the bank.

Finally, this is the big one, DevOps, which is often used interchangeably with Scrum or agile product development—but those are not the same thing. DevOps means that you have created an end-to-end ecosystem where developers and even maintenance and IT support code changes and deploy autonomously, confidently, and—ideally—instantly with high quality and traceability. I think we’ll all agree that maybe Netflix might be the best example today. It’s really the nirvana state of an agile company, and very few players ever get there. The closer you get, the better off you are. That’s what we help our clients do.

Angelia Herrin, host

Max, thanks so much for talking with us today. If you want to read the white paper by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, The New, Lean, Agile Face of Business, which was sponsored by IBM, you can find it at hbr.org. Thanks for listening to the HBR Quick Take.

To read the Harvard Business Review Analytics Services paper sponsored by IBM, click here.

from HBR.org https://ift.tt/2wqw5YY

The Dangers of Digital Protectionism

4 Strategies for Overcoming Distraction

How to Diversify Your Professional Network

Your Corporate Purpose Will Ring Hollow If the Company’s Actions Don’t Back It Up

3 Ways to Get More Value from Automation - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM PWC’s Strategy&

Automation is helping a handful of companies accomplish what was once thought impossible: boosting financial performance while also aiding fast corporate transformation work. Recently, a financial services organization found $5 million in opportunities to optimize its finance processes. The company found that using robotic process automation alone could free up to 75 full-time equivalent staff. For most companies, however, benefits at this scale are elusive. In their race to become faster and smarter with automation, these organizations do little more than digitally enable the status quo.

There’s still much to learn when it comes to digitizing business processes, and in particular using automation sprints—those smart, fast, and small efforts you use to boost productivity when a change to enterprise architecture isn’t the right step. The first thing you must know is that to use this type of automation in any transformative way, you will need to make some changes. Here are three mindset shifts we have identified to help you see how differently you must work to make this a success.

Shift 1: Automate with a product mindset

For the past five years, companies have been scouring business processes from end to end to identify the best opportunities for digitization and automation. Without a way to break down this task, you’re likely to do one of two things: take on a scope that’s so large it leads to missteps and frustration, or take on a scope that’s not tied to transformation, looking only at rules-based tasks that aren’t linked to strategic aims.

A product mindset helps change this. No longer will all developers be assigned to project work. Instead, some will make the shift to think in products that tackle business goals. These products are typically not for sale, but they do go through a defined development process and provide clear business benefits. Typically they end up as an app or a custom feature in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. And they’re defined by simple names—the invoice processor or the tax validator, for example—making it clear to everyone what they’re for. A core set of very good features hook early adopters, and teams quickly learn what users value.

This mindset gives you several benefits over what you’re likely doing now. Chiefly, it gives technologists accountability to your business teams. For business users to be happy, you have to offer them something better than what they already have. Yet it also gives you an agile way to work: you don’t waste time or dollars when there are no results, and you develop a fast-fail mentality to learn what works and what doesn’t.

The idea is borrowed from the business-to-consumer world, and that’s why it’s easy to embrace. Take the subscriber-first strategy of The New York Times. The media giant has adopted an agile product mindset to engage the customer at critical points—all geared toward turning the reader into a subscriber. It’s working: digital subscribers now comprise more than two-thirds of all NYT subscribers.

Shift 2: Invest for the transitional steps, but sell the grand idea

Today’s automation changes the way IT budgets work too. You may be used to big budgets up front, in the tens of millions of dollars for large IT-led transformation efforts and ROI three years later, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Now, companies invest in ways that support a smaller, more agile approach so they can adjust as they find out what works. Experimentation like this requires a different mindset about funding, and it requires making decisions about budget allocations that give teams the room they need to take products through their natural life cycles. Some products, for example, are created in months and have a short life. When General Electric went from more than 400 ERP systems to 125 in five years, it deployed more than 100 automation bots to fill the gaps among the systems. But the company doesn’t see the bots lasting long. According to a recent PwC webcast, most bots are transitional and will be phased out as ERP systems simplify further.

When budgeting, each transitional step is tied to a grand idea, a bigger story about where your efforts are going. In a pricing scenario, for example, your case for investment may first count FTE hours saved by moving away from manual calculations, but the bigger goal is showing how you’re improving prediction accuracy and ultimately how this work is improving margins, share of wallet, or other growth metrics. Communicating the ambition from the start helps build the case for investment over time.

Shift 3: See people as multipliers of value

It may feel counterintuitive, but a human-centric approach helps you focus on where humans and machines can achieve greater outcomes together. When you focus on the roles people will play and augment human labor with digital labor, you multiply your results.

One airline paired its automation efforts with its customer service training so that agents could spend more time looking fliers in the eye and talking to them, and less time staring at a screen and typing. Productivity edged up, to be sure, but the real impact was in customer satisfaction.

Inside the digital factory, human operators must now take on high value-added supervision and control tasks, while the machines operate independently. Humans make decisions and override machines when needed. When companies think people first and orchestrate the human skills necessary for new ways of working, it not only drives results in shorter time frames, but also empowers people to continuously drive new improvements.

We know some companies hope to wait on the benefits of automation until their next big systems upgrade. We think that’s a mistake. At best, that puts your capabilities a year or more behind others’. At worst, you’ve misjudged how valuable it is to move ahead with small automation sprints at a time when competitors are doing the same. Now’s the time to put these three mindset shifts in place with a clear strategy and plan.

To learn more click here.

from HBR.org https://ift.tt/2POVKCE

Can You Afford to Change Your Career?

Why We Procrastinate When We Have Long Deadlines

Why Adding More Products Isn’t Always the Best Way to Grow

Are You Sacrificing for Your Work, or Just Suffering for It?

Understanding Digital Strategy

Sunil Gupta, a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that many companies are still doing digital strategy wrong. Their leaders think of “going digital” as either a way to cut costs or to attract customers with a flashy new app. Gupta says successful digital strategy is more complicated than that. He recommends emulating the multi-faceted strategies of leading digital companies. Gupta’s the author of Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business.

Download this podcast

from HBR.org https://ift.tt/2MXv7N3

Why Women Stay Out of the Spotlight at Work

Assessment: How Productive Are You?

How to Get Your Side Hustle Off the Ground

Introducing Season Two

Listen and subscribe to our podcast via Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | RSS

Download this podcast

Women at Work is back Sept. 17 with stories, conversations, and practical advice about women and work. Expect to hear from us every Monday for the next couple of months.

Email us here: womenatwork@hbr.org

Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

from HBR.org https://ift.tt/2P8xZ7m

Why We Shouldn’t Worry About the Declining Number of Public Companies

You Know You Need More Sleep. Here’s How to Get It.

NASA Asteroid Mission: 16 Psyche

Source: NASA via Space Source: Daily Mail See Also: NASA

The post NASA Asteroid Mission: 16 Psyche appeared first on The Big Picture.

from The Big Picture https://ift.tt/2BXXnep

Congrats! You Bought A House

The 10 year anniversary of the financial crisis is here next month — the remembrances will be coming fats and furiously. This graphic was part of a longer piece on housing in Curbed, which I mentioned in this mornings reads. It is worth looking at as a standalone reminder of the the great housing collapse.…

The post Congrats! You Bought A House appeared first on The Big Picture.

from The Big Picture https://ift.tt/2wxqlvz

10 Thursday AM Reads

My morning train chill reads: • Money Managers Aren’t Dead (Bloomberg Businessweek) • The rise of giant consumer startups that said no to investor money (Recode) • Money Really Does Lead to a More Satisfying Life (New York Times) • 10 years after the financial crisis, is the housing market still at risk? (Curbed) • Why Trump’s Approval Numbers Won’t Budge (American Conservative) What…

The post 10 Thursday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

from The Big Picture https://ift.tt/2NyjXvB

1937 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B

This is David Sydorick’s 1937 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B (bodywork by Touring). It won Best of Show trophy at the 68th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance: Its a spectacular looker, with fantastic proportions and lines. 8C means 8 cylinders, and early in Alfa’s history it was a straight 8-cylinder engine. The 8C 2900 was designed as a…

The post 1937 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B appeared first on The Big Picture.

from The Big Picture https://ift.tt/2wqq9zd