Enterprise hits and misses - U.S. digital governance flails, enterprise tribes rise
- Summary:
- In this edition: Learning from U.S. digital governance knee scrapes, cloud financials and crying babies, plus the rise of enterprise tribes. Whiffs include Facebook failing at "Free" and Basic." And: your David Bowie video tribute.
diginomica hit: Digital lessons the hard way - U.S. government edition by Derek and Stuart
quotage: "The comparison between what the US is saying and the actions of the UK a few years ago are striking. All the same problems and it seems very similar responses. And that’s not a bad thing, the UK saved millions and millions of pounds by doing exactly this – consolidating contracts and acting as one buyer." - Derek
myPOV: It's always a treat when Stuart and Derek switch gears from keeping the UK government honest to putting U.S. digital governance to the test. Derek gets it going with US Government wants to simplify how it buys software – but bigger challenges lie ahead…. Stuart weighs in with Cloud learnings from the Department of Defense’s shortcomings.
As the U.S. federal government embarks plans to simplify - there's that word again - and consolidate its software procurement, Derek gives a cautious endorsement. But also a warning from UK lessons learned: short-term savings are tempting, but long-term problems need a deeper reckoning. Issuing the dreaded "lipstick on a pig" caution, Derek says:
What the US needs to be thinking about is what comes next? Are they going to attempt the platform route too? Is this just about savings or are they willing to make investments too? What are they doing to do about government systems at a state level? What are they going to do about skills?
Meantime, Stuart looks at hard lessons on public sector cloud computing adoption via the US Department of Defense’s (DoD), which has been criticized for lack of metrics. Not a happy thing when you're trying to prove that the cloud-centric Joint Information Environment is delivering ROI. Stuart extolls the DoD to take the criticism to heart and get this right - or lose digital momentum.
diginomica four: my top four stories on diginomica this week- Crying baby syndrome crimps shift to cloud financials -What do ERP financials systems have to do with crying babies? Den sees a parallel where you might not. Getting a baby to stop crying is more about getting everyone back to sleep than world-changing innovation - most of the time anyhow. Den parsed a recent London conversation with Workday's Mark Nittler. At the heart of this: what does digital data mean for finance? That's what Den/Mark wrestled with, resulting in the keeper line: "aggregation is the enemy of understanding."
- Convergence, collaboration, context: 3 C’s of frictionless - Phil's been on a roll with enterprisey think pieces lately, building on his frictionless enterprise theme. This time, we've got the three C's, coming soon to a coffee mug near you. Context may be the underrated part, or as Phil puts it: "Because connected digital technologies deliver this pervasive context, it shortcuts many of the laborious processes that used to slow down the traditional enterprise." But: digital context often means new data sources, which implies "data infrastructure investment." Phil never said frictionless was easy or cheap. It's just better than the alternative - getting your tail kicked by nimble competitors. Or: a bad service outage for starters (HSBC online banking outage shows its lack of cloud smarts).
- Is HR ready for neuroscience? - In The brains behind HR, Janine looks at the how neuroscience's move from the lab to the workplace could change HR (hopefully for the better!) The idea? Try to reduce the 70 percent failure rate of change management projects with neuroscience. Yeah, neuroscience is a solution du jour, but Janine sees potential, Example: find ways to deal with the "threat response" to feedback during performance management reviews. It's early days, but uprooting manager bias and stale leadership models intrigues.
Jon's grab bag - Den riffed on my prior piece in Specialist, generalist or polymath? We don't see eye to eye on this - though we do agree on the pursuit on mastery - but it's a skills debate worth having. Kurt Marko makes his diginomica debut in CES Market update: Still searching for the Next Big Thing, as he looks for the credible trends with the CES tech show absurdity looming in Vegas.
If you're looking for a cathartic Monday rant (or two), get some vintage Stuart Lauchlan spleen-venting in BBC cites digital as the Perfect Curve towards dumb logo redesign. (p.s. "Digital folly" and "knee-jerk redesign" - ouch!). Derek punctures a few more digital hype balloons in My car buying experience in the UK has been a digital disaster, Our beleaguered scribe hadn't bought a car in six years and thought "digital" would make the whole buying experience so much better. Insurance marketplace idiocies and exorbitant London parking fines do not a good digital experience make!
Den rounds it out with a couple of keepers on media turmoil. GQ ramps the adblock war in a clear demonstration of defeat sets up a badass think piece disguised as a rant, Friday Roast: the death of the web is the Evil Empire’s big lie. We get the web we deserve. Den would have us do something about it before we find ourselves walled in by algorithmic social mediocrity. Long live the hyperlink baby!
Best of the rest
No special kudos this week, but a fistful of honorable mentions. It's early 2016, still time to make the cut - start blogging people!- Open source, with a commercial distribution twist - One reason open source had made big inroads are the commercially-distributed versions that come with useful bells and whistles such as SLAs. Meaning: someone to call and yell at in the middle of the night. In Enterprises and Open Source: The Important Role of Commercial Distributions, Mark Copeland explains why open source has surged and the corporate advantages of a commercial distribution.
- Building an enterprise tribe, Mark Finnern style - The former SAP Chief Community Evangelist (aka SAP Mentor Herder) opens the kimono on the secrets of building a passionate/effectiveness enterprise tribe (10 (was 7) Criteria to Add the Right Mix of People Into Your Enterprise Tribe [E-Tribe]. Criticism is the hard part - you have to empower the tribe to criticize the powers-that-be, and not just via backchannel. But that's a point Finnern and I may take up on a future interview.
- Why The Blockchain, Not Bitcoin, Is What's Fascinating Builders - Readers liked this read/write piece on the industry application of the "blockchain," aka distributed ledger. Use cases span music (artists getting paid based on network verification of copyright), tracking digital art with attribution, addressing land title fraud, financial services legitimacy via "open ledgers," and yes, the buying/selling of marijuana aka the "pot chain."
Honorable mention II
General Motors pledges $500 million to Lyft for driverless taxi research - detail on one of the biggest enterprisey stories of the week.
Scaling Email: The Heart Of Cross-Channel Digital Marketing - a review of email marketing products as they move upstream and contend with the so-called "marketing cloud."
The Skeptic Test – A Key Step to Messaging Improvement - a message to enterprise vendors: "Superlatives don’t work anymore. Unless they are accompanied by validation. " Put your messaging through the "skeptic test," - your prospects already do.
News Analysis: In Search Of Growth Amidst Digital Disruption - video and (a bit) of commentary on the problematic macro-economics of 2016 and what they mean for enterprise.
Revisiting The New Polymath - returning to a book that matters - returning to a book that matters, and impacts the corporate innovation AND individual skills combinations.
Henley Business School’s free Digital Leadership course - this weekly course starts in February and may be worth a look.
Whiffs
Don't watch if you're a Vikings fan (sorry Jarret!), but this compilation of Viking fan reactions to the 27 yard field goal whiff is misery therapy (I like the top one of the uberfan dismantling his living room). While we're on sports, this compilation of ESPN product hucksters is embarrassing (ESPNers Can't Help Tweeting Out Deceptive Ads). Not because they have sponsors, but because they do it so shamelessly (and, due to lack of disclosure, so unethically). It's akin to shaking someone's hand, only to realize they are copping a feel with the other... Hey ESPN - I hear there is a sale on self-respect at Home Depot this week.
Meanwhile, Facebook got some flack on Buzzfeed for its soullless newsfeed magazine-from-hell resdesign (not yet official). But a bigger whiff is brewing with Facebook's tone deaf rollout of its Facebook Free Basics program. On the surface, Free Basics would seem like a no-brainer: bringing mobile Internet to developing countries.
Leave it to Facebook to drop a monopolistic turd in their Internet punch bowl by pretending that net neutrality rules are a hipster obsession, as opposed to an ideal that their own constituents actually care about. They managed to get Free Basics temporarily banned in India by assuming that gratitude over access trumps probing questions. Facebook could have anticipated this by providing users access to competing services (Twitter, Google, etc). I guess they prefer to slog through a unnecessary, reputation-damaging mess.
Officially off-topic
It's an all-Bowie off-topic this week, starting with a classic live rendition of "Life on Mars" in 1983:
Then we've got "Heroes," live from his final full concert in 2004:
David Bowie made damn fine use of his time on this extraordinary - and sometimes gut-carving - piece of rock. Back when magic was hard to come by, Bowie's music reached into my life and said, "live!" Ground control...
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, Loser and winner - Loser and Winner © ispstock - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: SAP, Workday and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.