“In these times, external advice is often critical and can help create a lot of sustainable value,” says David Glover, a professional director and owner of consultancy Creative Strategies
By Divina Paredes
Often, a small business might have a formal board of directors or an advisory board whose members may or may not be paid for their expertise. The latter is a more informal arrangement where the business owner can access sound advice without giving up any control of the business.
Executives, meanwhile, can apply this approach to their careers, says David Glover, a professional director and owner of consultancy Creative Strategies.
“Creating an advisory board to support you individually is an idea that may be worth exploring,” he explains in the book, Don’t Worry About the Robots: How to survive and thrive in the new world of work, which he co-authored with Dr Jo Cribb.
The advisory board, he states, could be three to four people who meet and talk to you about what you are trying to achieve. The members benefit by getting to network with other interesting people.
He observes a number of small business owners have found this approach very effective. “The best value from a board, either advisory or more formal, is when you get them together and they discuss ideas and offer you guidance for the business,” he states.“Occasionally you may talk to one individual if they have a certain area of expertise, such as financial, and you have a specific question.
“Unlike a formal board, there is no fixed term of appointment and they can meet as regularly as required.”
Glover says during the pandemic, many business owners have found themselves severely challenged and forced to find innovative ways to work with customers and generate revenue. “In these kinds of times, external advice is often critical and can help create a lot of sustainable value.”
He says there are cases, though, where the concept of an advisory board may not be the best approach.
The first would be for a young professional who is tech-savvy and would like to futureproof his or her career. “For young professionals, I would suggest they find a more experienced professional leader who is willing to mentor them on a regular and unpaid basis, help them develop a career plan and pass on their wisdom and experience. Pick someone from a work sector that is related, though not the same.”
The other is for a mid-level manager who is keen to continue training/upskilling in order to remain relevant. “The mid-level manager needs help in putting together a personal learning plan that keeps him or her in touch,” says Glover. “I suggest finding (and paying) a coach with some experience in a relevant vocational education sector who can point him or her in the right direction and hold them accountable to execute the plan.”
Training the mind to be ‘Curious’
An advice in the book that applies across professions and employment levels, is the need to “be curious”.
“If we are to understand the world around us and pick up on the trends that are happening, we need to be constantly curious,” the book stresses. Think of curiosity as “training the mind to be hungry for knowledge”.
It recommends some steps to take:
● Aim to ask five ‘why’ questions a day.
● Sit quietly outside during your lunch or study break and watch a group of people around you. What can you tell about them from what you are observing?
● Pick up a crossword puzzle or download a ‘brain’ app and set yourself goals for completing them.
● Research something you are deeply interested in. Get into the mindset of being an explorer or detective. Keep looking for layers and layers of more information. Reflect on what strategies you used, what worked well and what didn’t work well. Repeat the exercise on a different topic and refine your ability to explore knowledge.
Divina Paredes is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #DigitalWorkplace #Data4Good #Sustainability #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprises
“We need a ‘Challenge Network’…thoughtful critics who point out our blind spots, and help us see what we need to rethink,” says Adam Grant, organisational psychologist and author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
“Listen to ideas that make you think hard, not just the ones that make you feel good, and surround yourself with people who challenge your thought process, not just the ones who agree with your conclusions.”
This call by Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, could just be the anchor for business leaders during these fraught times.
“Most people need a support network, they are our biggest cheerleaders,” says Grant, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “But we also need a ‘Challenge Network’, a group of thoughtful critics who point out our blind spots, and help us see what we need to rethink.”
In his keynote at the SAS Global Forum 2021, Grant points out most people who encounter these “thoughtful critics” dismiss them or drop them from their network. “That closes the door to rethinking and relearning.”
“We could all benefit from thinking a bit more like scientists,” he advises. “Don’t let your ideas become your identity. Value humility over pride, curiosity over conviction and look for reasons where you might be wrong, not just the reasons why you must be right.”
For business leaders, taking on this approach is critical. “I have watched too many companies go under because leaders were good at thinking but bad at rethinking… where leaders fall in love with their visions and strategies and they fail to adapt to it until it is too late,” says Grant, citing the cases of Blackberry, Blockbuster, Kodak, Sears and Toys ‘R’ Us.
How to build your ‘Challenge Network’
Grant says he identifies the most thoughtful critics in his life, and informs them he considers them a founding member of his ‘Challenge Network’.
“Look for someone who understands what you are trying to contribute to the world,” he states. Ask yourself, “do I respect the integrity of somebody’s thought process whether or not I agree with their conclusions?”
“I value the way you push me to think again,” he tells them. “So if you hesitate to give me any feedback because you are worried you may hurt the relationship or my feelings, don’t. The only way you can hurt me is to not tell the truth.”
He looks at the patterns of their criticisms. If four people that he trusts tell him the same thing, that is “quality criticism” and he needs to rethink what he is doing.
He applies a similar strategy in his public talks. At the end of a presentation, for instance, he asks the first few people he sees what he could do better, by ranking his talk from 0 to 10. He will get a range of numbers, but then he also asks, “How can I get to 10? And this, he says, opens the floodgates for the thoughtful criticisms that he finds valuable in helping him get better.
He says in this rapidly changing world, now is the time to ask questions and conduct experiments. “I’d like to see more leaders say, ‘Okay, what are the experiments we should be running around the future of work? Around hybrid and remote work collaboration, four-day workweek, six-hour workday?’”
Asked what big gnarly problem data-driven tech companies can help with, Grant says it is getting people to trust science facts and data in issues such as climate change, and risks and benefits of vaccines. “How can you take all the data that we have in the world and help people believe the science, as opposed to being cynical about it?”
Divina Paredes is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #DigitalWorkplace #Data4Good #Sustainability #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprises
‘In the face of crisis, we have the inherent capacity to innovate’, says Prof Ernesto C Boydon
For the past 35 years, Prof Ernesto C. Boydon has been working concurrently across education and information technology, each sphere complementing the other.
When Boydon (‘Boogie’ to friends and colleagues) turned 60 last May, he retired from teaching to focus on his ICT company.
“This is actually not a total life pivot for me,” explains Boydon, founder and CEO of Cyber Optimus, and an active blogger. “I have always been an entrepreneur and educator at the same time.”
“What’s different now is that I get to engage in a tech business that focuses on something that I love which is teaching and thus, it becomes a continuation of my passion for education even if I have already retired from a regular teaching load.”
In June this year, a month after retiring, his company launched YES! (Ynnov Education Suite), with a city university and a private college among the first users.
Boydon says his more than three decades of teaching helped him create the platform. The pandemic helped him refine it further.
As he points out, COVID-19 brought three Ds to education: disruption, disconnection and discontinuation.
He stresses, however, that there are ways the sector can tackle these challenges.
“In the face of crisis we have the inherent capacity to innovate, to be creative,” says Boydon. “We can turn around situations, what seems to be a difficulty, to actually become an opportunity.”
Applying this to education, he states: “The role of educators in the new normal is to be effective and efficient curators of knowledge, able to craft a learning plan by clearly defining the learning outcomes, crafting lessons and activities that will optimally result in those desired outcomes, and expertly putting together a variety of learning resources curated from varied sources from all over the internet.”
“When the pandemic started, I saw the difficulty that a lot of schools were facing with the transition to a more technology-based education,” he says. “I started giving a free webinar entitled The Digital Transformation of Education.”
“This is how I got to understand the problems of schools, administrators, and educators more. These insights help me formalise and concretise the design and philosophy that went into creating YES!.”
He says schools had three main pain points – management, digital learning and student engagement. Those three had to be served in a seamlessly integrated platform.
He observes: “Some schools only had a school management system (some call it SIS or Student Information System) while others only had a learning management system or LMS. Or if they had both, it was not integrated so that data had to be entered again into the LMS even if it is already available in the SMS or SIS. And because of the need for synchronous and asynchronous learning sessions for students because of the pandemic, the need for a virtual classroom that is integrated with the LMS also became apparent.”
His team used these insights to create YES! The result, he says, is “a robust, pedagogically sound learning management system for teachers to create their learning plans, define desired outcomes, identify competencies to be achieved, manage grades and rubrics for grading.
“At the same time, they get a social learning platform that looks and feels very much like Facebook and thus create a level of engagement with students – and teachers alike – that is both fun, captivating, and gives an effective and rewarding learning experience.”
“We took that further by expanding our platform to be a comprehensive educational suite that seamlessly integrates our learning management system with a school management system and a virtual classroom.”
The making of a tech entrepreneur
“I was actually already an entrepreneur in 1983 when I first got into teaching,” says Boydon. He taught part-time in computer schools with short-term courses. At the same time, he was building a business, assembling IBM-PC compatible computers and supplying school laboratories with them.
“It was while I was delivering a set of computers for a laboratory at Trinity College of Quezon City that I got invited to teach in the college,” he cites. “The experience reinforced my passion for teaching and I have been a teacher since then until I retired this year. All that time I would still be running a business.”
“At one point I was even joking that the reason I was running a business is so that I can finance my teaching because being a teacher doesn’t really pay well enough to raise a family of four children,” says Boydon, who is national president of the Philippine Society of Information Technology Educators (PSITE) and director for graduate programs in IT Education – Asia Pacific College (APC).
“I have been into e-learning for the longest time,” he adds. “When I first came to learn about the internet in 1994, I was immediately fascinated with it.”
His early experiences online were cumbersome as it was still all text at that time. When he went to Japan for a project in July 1995, he appreciated the power of email to save on communication costs with his wife Queenie.
“But it was still inconvenient because I had to connect to our Ateneo [University] server first using Telnet then go to the email client to write an email. The whole idea of HTML and the browser was already fascinating but it was still crude at the time.”
Boydon was still in Japan when Windows 95 came out. “This was when the full impact of a graphical user interface hit me,” he says. “I related it to the attraction of the website and by 1998 I started experimenting on how I can put my courses online for my students.”
Over the years, he has seen different types of learning management systems and taken note of their strengths and weaknesses.
One open source system that got his attention was Moodle. “Even at that time, it was already quite powerful and attractive to educators wanting to put their courses in an online form.”
When he joined the Asia Pacific College in 2011, he got to learn Moodle more because it was the system they were introduced to. “I was using it for my students but I realised that even if it was something that educators like me loved so much, it was not creating as much engagement in the students. Students found it boring and you had to force them to go to their online subjects,” he recalls.
“By that time, I was also into Joomla, a powerful content management system that I got to learn right from its creation in 2005. It helped me in my business at the time which was website development and hosting.
“An idea came to me of combining Joomla and Moodle and that’s when I discovered that there was such a component that did just that. I could create a more engaging interface for my students using Joomla but I was still creating my subjects and the lessons in Moodle.”
“It proved successful that in 2013, I even won an award for it, the Esther Vibal Award for Education Technology Innovation,” says Boydon. He says the award was the first-ever of its kind given by the Philippine Association for the Advancement of Science (PhilAAS).
He continued experimenting with the system and came up with the idea of putting in a social network interface using another Joomla component called Jomsocial. This created a Facebook-like environment within Joomla.
Taking on the principles of ‘globality learning’
“The philosophy behind the design of our platform is anchored on my definition of what the new learning paradigm looks like. I call it ‘Globality Learning’”, says Boydon.
He says the word ‘globality’ was coined by Daniel Yergin in his 1998 book The Commanding Heights, to describe what was then known as the Information Age or The Age of the Internet.
“The key is to take these globality characteristics and repurpose them for the positive objective of a learning environment,” says Boydon.
Globality learning or learning in our internet age has the following characteristics, he states.
It’s social and interactive where learning happens in social platforms where collaboration, communication, and cooperation abounds.
Learning is delivered in micro and bite-sized portions – small, easy-to-digest nuggets of knowledge and where the understanding and retention is immediately assessed at the point-of-learning.
Learning happens in a continuum. It doesn’t stop and is encountered by the learner in an ubiquitous and pervasive manner.
“As educators, we need not worry where we are going to get the resources to sustain that ubiquitous and pervasive nature of globality learning,” says Boydon.
“The knowledge is already all out there on the internet,” he states. “A lot of the big schools like MIT, Harvard and Stanford have put a lot of their learning resources available for everyone and for free. There are also massive open education resources from various other sources.”
Boydon says the goal is to not just equip schools with the technology to conduct digital learning. “It is about empowering them not just to survive but to thrive by teaching them revolutionary steps to make them the school of choice in the new normal.”
The steps include ensuring schools are agile, adroit and adaptable, he states. “These are three key characteristics necessary for any business to succeed in the digital economy.”
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
James Mansell is part of a small, but growing group of volunteers who are pushing for the responsible use of data to deliver social and economic value. What motivates him to immerse himself in this role?
Data is being hailed as the new oil. Its utilisation can spur the development of startups whose values have ballooned to billions of dollars, or uplift the bottom lines of established corporates even during tough times.
For James Mansell, data represents something else – using it responsibly to deliver both social and economic gains.
“I am a philosopher by training with a full-time job as a data science activist,” says Mansell, smiling.
The latter is an advocacy role Mansell took on, first when he was working in government , and continues as an independent adviser through the consultancy Noos which he had founded.
“I try and focus the government on being evidence-based and outcomes focused and I will talk to anybody who wants to push that agenda along,” he says. “It does not matter whether they are left, right or green.”
Mansell is part of a growing volunteer group taking on this advocacy, doing it from the corridors of government, through to not-for-profit organisations, and forums that reach both public agencies and enterprises.
In 2010, Mansell, as director of innovation and strategy at the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), pushed for increased use of shared data as part of the program to reform the welfare system. This included using advanced analytics for segmentation and risk profiling and using real time experiments or campaigns to measure return on investment on government funding for these programs.
Mansell completed an honours degree in philosophy from the Victoria University of Wellington. In 2011, Mansell was awarded the public sector’s Leadership Development Centre fellowship for his work with the MSD. He used this scholarship to complete an adaptive leadership course at Harvard University. He also attended an executive negotiation workshop ‘Bargaining for Advantage’ at The Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania and completed a course on strategy and leadership at the Centre for Creative Leadership in Colorado.
In 2013 he was appointed to the New Zealand Data Futures Forum, an independent think tank commissioned to consider how to build a safe and high trust data sharing ecosystem within New Zealand to drive value for citizens, the economy and improve government services. The forum is chaired by former Treasury Secretary and World Bank executive director John Whitehead.
Through his own consultancy, Noos, Mansell has worked with the likes of the Department of Human Services in Melbourne where he reviewed the agency’s analytics capability, work-shopped options to move towards outcomes focused on child protection.
Leaving a full-time government role has allowed him to work on this goal with more organisations. He works with central government agencies, including the Inland Revenue Department, Ministry of Education, Treasury, MSD and New Zealand Productivity Commission. He is currently on the board of Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) dedicated to the study of how to transform complex data into knowledge.
Mansell traces the root of his data science advocacy to 2004, when he joined the Child, Youth and Family Services (now part of MSD).
He was told to read some cases to familiarise himself with child protection. He ended up reading three cases.
The last case was about a child living in the West Coast who was sexually abused at age two by his stepfather. Child Youth and Family were notified and the abuser was removed. The mother was grateful. But then this young boy was abused again, this time by a cousin. Again, CYF intervened and sent the cousin packing. This happened twice more with different sexual predators.
In social work jargon, this is a severe case of ‘non-protective parenting’, he states. Then the boy himself exhibited harmful sexual behaviour when he started school. The case history stopped about then, at age 12. There were also notes from a social worker who queried on what they could do for this boy without sufficient funding to help the family with care or to rehabilitate this kid.
“I read his case and that was enough,” says Mansell. “It was too traumatising.”
He thought, how the boy had been let down by “a broken system”?
“It is not that the CYF was broken, the whole system is broken,” he states.
“There are really good people on the frontline who are trying to help,” he explains. But the way they were allocating budget, and what they were accountable for were getting in the way.
“The whole system is working against them doing a good job to some extent.”
“It is heartbreaking to see money being wasted, to see things getting in the way of good intentions. At that point, I wanted to help.”
This began a journey to see what could be done, he says. Mansell ultimately ended up advocating the use of shared data and the use of analytics to help the social sector focus on outcomes and in particular, longer-term outcomes.
The case of ‘Marc Smith’
Advocating for increased use of shared data and analytics to drive value is not easy.
“A lot of people try and fail to get it used. It’s a big shift to practice and the operating model for government – not merely tacking on some data science. To drive change I learnt (after four years of failure to make progress) that one thing is try to ‘add heat’ to remove complacency within government and the state sector.”
When Mansell was with the MSD, he spoke at various forums locally and globally, and one of the cases he always brought up was that of Marc Smith.
Marc Smith (not his real name) is an actual person. Joining up the data from services he received from various government agencies reveals a life of physical and emotional trauma: He was found by CYF to have behavioural difficulties at three years of age and by age five was found to have been sexually abused. The cycle of physical and sexual abuse went on, and moved into youth offending and increasingly long periods away from parents in the care of the state. In spite of this, he progressed at school to finish with subjects at NCEA level 2. This is no mean feat given this background, says Mansell.
Marc started receiving the unemployment benefit at age 18.
“You can see the pathway of being abused several times. Of course, he had a bigger chance of offending.”
When he added Corrections data, he found that Smith had started offending as a young adult.
“I use this kind of example to raise challenging questions for the state sector,” says Mansell.
“People in various services like child protection services, Work and Income and Corrections were all accountable for little pieces of the puzzle, but no one was accountable for Marc Smith.”
“Marc is not alone. There are thousands of people in New Zealand who have this kind of profile,” he says.
“The top few thousand New Zealanders with a similar profile to Marc Smith have on average over $300,000 invested and still [result in] very poor social outcomes – long-term unemployment and offending. Most of this investment is late and by that time improving outcomes is very costly and of limited success.”
This was the idea of the MSD CEO, he states.“It is putting a burning bridge in front of ministers and agencies. ‘Hey, look, here are 10,000 people. They cost us $5 billion dollars. They cross all of our agencies. What are we going to do about them because they are going through a pathway like Marc Smith?’”
He asks whether Marc Smith’s life would have turned out differently if only a few thousand dollars was spent earlier when he was aged eight or nine, and not when he was aged 25 and a long-term recidivist offender.
“Do we want to keep paying for prison or spend money early on to have a better outcome?
“But although traditional research promotes early intervention, governments do not do long-term investment very well. Without shared data and the use of analytics to make people accountable and provide the KPIs and tools for longer term pathways, it is hard to focus the social sector systemically on value.
“Why are we not systematically aggregating data to force (and support) the government to see the full picture to make better social investment decisions?”
He says this is not achievable unless the government can track people across services. “We can also use shared data to question which services work.
“Marc Smith is my way of telling the story of those first cases I read – of that 12-year old. But by tracking educational and justice sector outcomes as an adult it also finished the story by tracking the social and fiscal cost of poor early investment.”
He says the current system actually works for some people, but people like Marc Smith can fall into the gaps. It should work for everybody, not just the ‘average’ person.
Mansell cites the Ministry of Social Development as using operational analytics and joined up data to understand who their clients are and how to achieve better outcomes earlier.
“We are starting to make progress,” he states.
Lifeline
“We invested heavily in an integrated client view which is where the data is joined up,” he states. Initial attempts to get funding and formal support through the policy group failed.
“I have consistently found that policy folk are slowest to get it or accept the change because most of them are at risk of being disintermediated by big data.”
Mansell credits MSD CIO David Habershon, manager data warehouse Mike O’Neil and chief data Scientist Kip Marks for taking a punt and helping with the integration of data systems that allowed him to join information from across MSD and across agencies in the social sector.
“They gave me a lifeline,” he states. “We needed to build that stuff to get ready for welfare reform and they pitched in to get it done.
“There was a lot of opposition within MSD because it is such a radically different way to look at your business. They took some risks on behalf of a good idea when they did not have to,” says Mansell. “They got behind me and we had skunk works going on, they built the data and integrated that with the analytics and bought some of the new tools which was what we needed.”
He says the then MSD CEO Brendan Boyle also supported the initiative.
“It got even better because Brendan was a breath of fresh air in MSD and understands this kind of change deeply, so he is a great champion. It’s good to work for a CEO deeply committed to public value and not merely managing risk for ministers.
“This kind of work requires some champions to succeed,” says Mansell.
Mansell says work on the project continues as analytics is continuing to be integrated into the ministry’s operating model.
“We have been building predictive models for 20 years but no one used them until people were building this capability in support of a new kind of business model. That’s really when it gets used.”
The role of technology is to create a smart closed loop learning system, as part of a customer needs and outcomes centred business model, he says.
“That is very different and requires a very different channel strategy, a different kind of funding, and development of data structures.
“Yes, we were trying to build a new way of looking at data, a longitudinal view of data. But it is all about the government being more targeted, a bit more evidence based about where to target investment and accountable for the short and longer term outcomes. It’s about adding value through social spending.
“At the moment what people are accountable for is doing something fast or cheaply, and you are just cost shifting into the future.”
What makes sense for MSD makes sense for the social sector as a whole.
The real value of this approach is in applying it above the servicing level to make better investment decisions across health, justice, education and social development, he says.
This idea came off the back of identifying limitations in investment approach in MSD, he states. “MSD is really only optimising investment across a narrow service offering.
“Many times welfare beneficiaries need better health or education or child protection services, not better CV writing courses. So some of the case management investment in Work and Income should be moved elsewhere – re-invested. This wasn’t a popular view inside Work and Income.”
So, in 2012, he pitched the idea of a Whole of Government Analytics at the centre of government to drive structural shift in the way government investment is managed. This means building accountability and budget allocation around needs and outcomes on the basis of an independent (system level) understanding of pathways across services. This has led to the creation of an advanced analytics function at the centre of government (Treasury).
In addition, significant new funding was also received to expand the role of the ‘Integrated Data Infrastructure’ managed by Statistics New Zealand and enable remote access for a wider range of users. Organisations like Motu now have much better access to integrated case level government data to do research with, he says.
Mansell and New Zealand Data Alliance members work with ministers and Treasury to apply a whole-of-sector view of the social system. This information will be used to shift to population based funding and accountability for outcomes. Elements of these are now being trialled for the 2016 Budget.
“It is about being smarter about where you target,” he says. “Everybody who uses the service gets a better service there is less wastage, everybody wins …except service providers whose services are low value.
“The goal is to make everyone accountable for outcomes so that they start to be innovative about having to solve the problem, and how to avoid bad outcomes.”
Advocacy and risks
What keeps him up at night now are the risks attached to all of these. Along with the big benefits of using shared data to improve outcomes, come big risks. This is deeply personal information and needs to be handled sensitively, he states.
He is working with ministers and senior officials on both sides of the Tasman on how state agencies can safely use data to focus on outcomes and innovation. This, he says, including advocating for the right kind of national data ecosystems, is needed for responsible use of data science and data sharing.
“I shudder to think what the centre of government will do if it has unfettered use of personal citizen data. The government cannot be both gate keeper and user of social sector data. To do so invites a monopoly and so stagnation and I think, a drift to more coercive uses of citizen data.”
Mansell founded the New Zealand Data Alliance, a volunteer group of data scientists providing independent, non-commercial and non-partisan advice to community leaders on the responsible use of data to improve outcomes for New Zealanders. So far their work has included advising senior ministers and not-for-profits.
If GPs, schools and other social sector players can take control of their own data then they will have a powerful platform to challenge the hegemony at the centre of government, he says.
“There is nothing in principle stopping the social sector ‘Uber-ing’ (disintermediating) big government. The result would be a much safer, less fragmented, more innovative and a more powerful provider network.”
He admits being seen as a “lightning rod” when he was advocating all this from inside government.
“I was not popular. I did as much I could do, so I felt it was time to move on.
“The more you get involved in this stuff you start to realise several things. That ‘I don’t necessarily have all the answers’, sometimes you can get too caught up in your own mission and importance,” he states.
“So much of this is about asking the right questions rather than thinking you have the right answers. This is very new and letting go means enabling other people to ask questions and innovate. I think I am learning (slowly!) that you get more back by letting go.”
He says this work is being continued by a lot of people in both government and private sectors. “Most of us have kids and we just want to make New Zealand a better place” he says, on what drives him in the role. “This is one way to do it.”
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
This article is adapted from an interview that was originally published in @cio_nz
The renowned author and researcher on what makes a company ‘great’ and distinguishes it from others
In times of uncertainty, most people are wired to look at what other people are doing, says Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, Good to Great and Great by Choice. “But leaders turn to data and empirical evidence rather than social proof,” says Collins.
“It is important to have good data,” he adds, and to “face the brutal facts”.
“Change begins when you pick up the facts and you confront the brutal facts.
“If you don’t have the mechanism to confront real facts, you won’t be great.”
At the same time, Collins says, one should “never confuse great with big”.
A great company delivers superior performance, and makes a distinctive impact on the world it touches.
If the company disappears, will it leave a hole? “An organisation that does not meet that test is not great,” he says.
It is also about “lasting endurance” that goes beyond a market cycle or a leader. He asks, “does it have superior performance, distinctive impact, ability to continue to deliver superior performance, a proven approach beyond the individual leader?”
Collins says three factors figure in great companies who innovate differently: fanatic discipline, productive paranoia and empirical creativity. “The true productive paranoids are constantly confronting the facts.”
He says analytics plays a great role in innovation. “Do something creative and validate it,” he says. If you are truly disciplined and truly empirical the inevitable happens – “a wonderful blend of creativity and discipline” which he says is a “super rare skill”.
He concludes: “Greatness is a matter of conscious choice and discipline”.
These are from my notes during the keynote presentation of Jim Collins at the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas in 2013. His message about the importance of having good data and to ‘face the brutal facts’ is relevant, more than ever.
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
The technological side of remote work is the least of the problems of today’s business technology leaders, say Gartner analysts Daniel Sanchez Reina and Fabrizio Magnani:
“People’s resilience is at stake, not only because of remote work, but also due to the shock and uncertainty of COVID-19 and economic stress that is shaking the foundations of company cultures.”
In a recent report, they cite the emergence of a group of office workers who feel disconnected from their remote colleagues, and a cohort of remote workers who feel disconnected with the rest of their team too. It’s an issue some New Zealand tech leaders have tackled.
Gartner’s solution: “CIOs must build a culture of resilience.”
To do so, Sanchez Reina and Magnani list four cultural behaviours CIOs can incorporate into their IT organisational culture to achieve this goal.
Create an environment of ‘open vulnerability’. This means staff bring their problems and fears out in the open, providing leaders the chance to tackle them.
Identify ‘impact orientation’. The key is to identify what meaningful work is for each team member.
Provide ‘intrinsic rewarding’. “Feed each employee’s main basic recognition need by identifying which of the three basic motivational needs of human beings prevail in them,” advise Sanchez Reina and Magnani. They note that people are governed by three major types of needs: achievement (sense of accomplishment), status (prestige and influence) and affiliation (friendly relationships).
Foster an environment where a ‘sense of tribe’ goes beyond the IT organisation, by establishing permanent links with other parts of the company.
NZ CIO turned CEO helped teams manage anxiety at work and home
These insights resonate with Alin Ungureanu, a former healthcare CIO and now CEO of financial software provider Chelmer.
Over the past few months, as the pandemic crisis unfolded, Ungureanu says they held regular meetings —one on one, with the team, or the whole company. “The company meetings were focussed on updating everyone on our stability to give everyone certainty and remove personal and family anxiety,” he says. In these meetings, 15 to 20 per cent was focussed on business, and the rest discussed the concerns of staff and their personal accomplishments during the week.
“We involved in our session not just our employees but our strategic partners as well,” he says. “We recognise that we are in this together and we play our part by maintaining the high performance to support our clients’ businesses and employees.” He adds, “We had a common purpose, to continue to do the best for our clients and this provided stability and certainty for our company and our staff and family.”
During these times too, they learned to “accept less than best and less than perfect but not compromise company values, company culture and personal values,” Ungureanu says. “Emergency situations should be used as a motivator not as an excuse. The events brought us more together.”
NZ business coach explains how to achieve ‘open vulnerability’
Gartner analysts Sanchez Reina and Magnani advise leaders to “keep [their] senses wide open to identify concerns—personal or professional—that the team may not be sharing” with them.
He relates that during Operation Southern Watch in the Gulf, he worked with a young corporal who was normally very vocal.
“As the operation progressed, I noticed that he was becoming increasingly withdrawn and sullen,” says Griffin. “I took him to one side on more than one occasion and asked if he was okay. He also replied that he was ‘fine’ and nothing was wrong. I had more than 200 people under my command and a very stressful job, so I must confess that I accepted the obviously cursory answer.
“However, there are times when intuition or a ’sixth sense’ kicks in. I just felt that there was something deeply troubling this young man. The next time we spoke, I didn’t accept the ‘I’m fine’ response. I explained to him that nobody was fine, we had put ourselves in danger, many people were frightened. We had been separated from loved ones for over four months now and it was okay to be not okay.”
The young corporal broke down and cried, says Griffin. The corporal told him about his concerns about family. His brother had committed suicide only weeks before and his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. “He was beside himself with worry, unexpressed grief and the ‘shame’ of not being able to cope,” says Griffin. “I arranged for him to fly home on compassionate grounds and made sure that he had support at the other end.”
He believes this experience provides lessons for organisations working through the current crisis. “We are currently living through a pandemic, the future is uncertain both financially and personally,” says Griffin. “We may have loved ones overseas, elderly relatives or other at-risk family members. We are being asked to change the way we live and the way we work. Many of us are not ‘okay’. As leaders, we need to recognise this and be willing to act.”
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
Why Dr Ayesha Khanna is advocating for, while keeping a watchful eye on artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies
When Dr Ayesha Khanna talks about artificial intelligence, she does not start with technology.
“That’s the wrong way to start,” says Khanna, co-founder and CEO of ADDO AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) solutions firm and incubator.
“I start with impact.”
For her, one way to do this is to imagine Barack Obama as a law student.
According to her, if Obama were to enter law school today, he would most likely be studying the AI platform.
In fact, she says a professor at Yale Law School told her one of the most popular courses for their students is around robots and AI.
She cites a possible scenario wherein a new lawyer is asked to research a case, to find similar cases and any precedents. This “grunt work” is not exciting for this lawyer.
Meanwhile, software from Ravel Law can go through all of the related cases that happened in the United States, find interesting correlations, such as who constituted the jury, the arguments, and decisions.
“This is now the kind of automation that we are seeing across all fields,” states Khanna.
She cites another case, the creation of ‘Ross’, which was touted as the first AI lawyer.
“Everybody was worried Ross would replace lawyers,” she says.
Ross can mine huge amounts of data and give insights to support humans, she explains. “It is important to note that human input is still part of the equation.”
“Yes, we need lawyers, but not need them trained the way they were or work the way they were. We want them to focus on what they went to law school, to think,” adds Khanna. “And we need them to understand how to work with machines.”
She stresses that law schools are also not behind the AI trend.
Harvard Law School, for instance, has started the CaseLaw Access Project (CAP).
This is a compilation of all precedential cases – covering 40,000 volumes of case law comprising some 40 million pages of text of cases from 1658 to present.
The law school has posted 360 years of US case law free and available on the internet for students in partnership with Ravel.
“This is an essential tool for lawyers in the future,” she declares.
For Khanna, these examples of how AI has changed a traditional industry like law present critical lessons for today’s business leaders on how they should view this set of technologies.
She adds that, “Innovation today is driven and made possible by many of these technologies.”
“If you don’t move fast, someone unexpected will come after your business with the power of data and AI,” warns Khanna.
“I spend a lot of time educating senior executives and encouraging them and for their middle management to train the business users on the basics of AI.”
She tells them: “If you don’t have an AI-first approach, you are going to be disrupted by a competitor.”
“First of all, it is important to have someone technically savvy on your Board,” she advises.
“You need to have diversity on the Board. As more and more products are powered by AI, make sure they are not biased in any way.”
Diversity in the team is also important. “If you have women, minorities of all ages [in your team], they will notice this [bias] before the product hits the market.”
“You have to train your people around governance,” she states. “Looking out for bias is an ongoing, constant process.”
Khanna points out, too, that “Data you put in is important, oversight is important. Inspect your algorithm to make sure it is not biased.”
She has a similar message for those in charge of regulatory systems.
Regulatory panels should not just be composed of lawyers and politicians, but also technology experts and philosophers, she says.
“Get the experts at the table so they can truly inform what is happening right now because change is happening so fast.”
It takes a community
Khanna is emphatic about the need to upskill and empower everyone to use AI.
“No job now does not have or will not have someone related to AI and data as part of a team.”
She says it is likewise important to ensure programmes will nurture the talent to succeed in the AI-driven world.
“Every single thing my children do will be impacted by AI,” she states and notes that, “To have sustainable and equitable growth in an AI-powered economy, we need to guide and empower our nation’s talent.”
“You need to upskill and empower everyone. Your domain expertise and knowledge will be your advantage.”
At the same time, an AI engineer cannot go to any business or company and try to change it with the use of AI without understanding the domain.
“AI is your responsibility, your opportunity and your problem,” she points out, in a message addressed to leaders in government and the private sector.
“You need an interdisciplinary team,” she says.
She adds that the ability to collaborate is an important skill. “A lot of innovation will be led by people in partnership with the business.”
Khanna further says, “You will need to work with deep technology experts on AI, robotics and virtual reality. You need to think for your company, your customers and what matters to them.You need the basic skills to connect the dots, look at a problem and the solution. The glue between them is technology.”
“AI is inevitable,” she says. “You will run into the need for AI and data.
“You must be open to ideas and be able to work with people like AI engineers, and are empowered and confident to question their bias.”
She also says, “You are able to probe and make sure they reflect the values of your company.”
Khanna, thus, encourages everyone – no matter what age, gender or background – to learn a bit about AI.
“At the very least,” she says, “you can sign up for newsletters that will keep you in the loop of interesting things that are happening in emerging technologies.”
This way, “you can recognise it and feel empowered to be part of the AI-powered economy.”
Khanna, who has an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University and a doctorate in information systems and innovation from the London School of Economics, is personally involved in this advocacy.
She is the founder and chairperson of 21C GIRLS, a not-for-profit that provides free coding, artificial intelligence, and robotics classes to girls in Singapore.
She says the not-for-profit has taught over 5000 students in schools and community centres and is supported by a range of organisations like Google, VISA, Goldman Sachs, and PayPal.
She is also founder of Empower: AI for Singapore, a national movement to teach all youth in the country the basics of artificial intelligence.
Khanna, however, lists a range of issues that need to be considered as organisations move into the AI world.
She points out AI is not infallible.
“It is important for us to look at the benefits, but also think about the risks,” she says, citing “the importance of regulation, safety nets, and the human input on making final decisions.”
She notes that 5G is coming, connecting over a billion sensors around the world with IoT.
“But if everything is connected, you think of cybersecurity, and you think of data protection, as well. You should have the right to your information, and it should be easy for you to understand how the company is using your information.”
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
Three years ago, beverage company Frucor Suntory began a journey to start digitising its business and move away from analogue methods of communicating with its customers by fax and telephone.
Frucor Suntory’s sales reps across Australia and New Zealand lacked the tools they needed to provide the best service to customers such as dairies, petrol stations and supermarkets.
To modernise its business-to-business sales process, the organisation used a raft of technology platforms from an ERP system at the back end to an online store front under its ‘digital for growth’ programme.
“We had fantastic people going out there and selling every day, but we were not supporting them with great tools. They were doing it on their own,” says Fernando Battaglia, value manager, customer and consumer at Frucor Suntory. “We want them to be able to transact with our customers using the new system, and direct them to our existing ERP so they can get delivery that they would normally get, as if they ordered from a sales rep.”
The digital for growth team includes people with experience in agile practice and business analysis especially in customer experience. Battaglia joined Frucor Suntory as part of that team, initially as digital solutions manager. “The team had to work fast. If we took too long to get these in people’s hands, the enthusiasm, the desire to get there, was going to go away very quickly.”
In the first three months, they gathered information on all of the mechanisms, learned more about the platforms, and focused on some very specific use cases.
The online store was the MVP (minimum viable product) under the new programme. Before this, Frucor Suntory had never sold online directly to a customer. The company launched the online store with 10 pilot customers who could place orders, and receive deliveries without the need for a sales rep.
“We started at the end of 2016 with pilot customers and beginning of this year, we are at 3000 customers in New Zealand and Australia,” says Battaglia. “We are one company across two countries, so when we delivered the online store, we delivered the capability for both countries.”
Digital transformation and business continuity at Frucor Suntory
he platform allows sales reps to quickly respond to customer queries. It provides instant reports on breakdowns and other issues on their connected devices, like the chillers provided to customers.
Analytics capabilities are available in one dashboard, which means sales reps have the needed information at their fingertips, doing away with manual reports. Reps can instantly upload and analyse shelf-space photos to show how products are displayed in-store. The marketing team also has access to more customer data, and these are used for more targeted and personalised campaigns.
The digital tools they set up have been important in ensuring business continuity when New Zealand moved to alert level 4 due to the pandemic.
“Obviously, certain stores and businesses have been closed due to the COVID-19 situation,” says Battaglia. “But the ones that are open continue to order through the online store, or through the sales reps.”
The reps get up to date information on the business which means that they have an “effective visit” – through a phone call or another digital channel – without being physically present.
He says even before the national lockdown, both the customers and staff found that online ordering was beneficial. Social distancing was implemented in alert level 2. “Systems like the online store certainly helped.”
Battaglia stresses that the sales representatives chose the customers for the pilot programme. “We brought the sales reps in from the beginning. We had our sales director in the project, we had people nominated within the business who worked with us to establish the right sales process. They also advised the additional developments needed for these customers to order online.”
“This was a very important element,” he states. “We have never tried and will never try to replace the people that go out there and sell the products. They are the heartbeat of our company.”
He says the online store is to be complementary to the sales representatives, who fundamentally manage the relationship with the customers. He notes that when a sales representative walks into the store, taking an order is just one of the many tasks they have to do. They need to make sure, among others, that they are executing on Frucor Suntory’s contractual requirements, talk about promotions and see if products are in the right place.
Digital brings critical customer insights to Frucor Suntory
Before the launch of the online store, Battaglia says people were absolutely certain customers will not place orders in the middle of the night or on a weekend.
“Since then, we have taken orders from the online store every single hour, every single day, on Sunday morning, and lunchtime at any day, which is the busiest time for a lot of our customers,” he says.
The impact on the sales representatives was two-fold. Before, when the customer ran out of products, the only option they had was to call the sales rep or the contact centre, which was only available during business hours.
“The biggest concern for us was no disruption,” he says. “If we capture the orders here and let the reps do other activities, that was a win.”
“The other thing is we incentivise our reps,” says Battaglia. “They get credit for all the orders within their region that go through the online store. If we hadn’t done that, every time we take an order online, we would have taken money out of the pocket of our sales reps and that is something we will not do.”
He says they are seeing some interesting insights from the two years of the online store.
“The traditional thought is whatever you do online has to be quick and efficient,” he said. Today, they found every single visit by a customer to the online store was about the same length of the visits of the sales representatives to their premises.
“From our point of view, the customers are getting twice as much time looking at our products and interacting with us. It doesn’t mean they are taking a long time to order, not at all. It means they are being exposed to more information on our products. Those are things we did not understand until we actually saw people going there,” he said.
Insight is not just data sitting there, says Battaglia. “You start to learn about your customers, but it is still up to you to ask the right questions. What is the information and behaviour of our customers telling us, and how do we use that to better customise our experience and to better focus our sales force to react to that?”
“If you are a customer, who has never purchased this product but you browsed it online, we can see that and provide information to the rep,” he says. “We are learning more every day. We have only scratched the surface, to be honest.”
Lessons learned from Frucor Suntory’s digital transformation
Battaglia says an important lesson from the success of the online channel was a holistic approach to any digital initiative.
“You need to look at the whole business,” he points out. “If you bring a platform or a system, ask, how does that exist in your whole ecosystem? There are a lot of companies that are trying new things. It might work for a few months until you decide you now want to start reporting on that activity, to link the data they have. That is when everything falls over. So we considered that from the beginning.”
He explains one of their options for the online store was to continue to build on existing tools that they developed in-house. The other option was to go with SAP as the technology provider was already in its core ERP system. They opted for the latter.
“If we are going to do anything quickly it has to plug into SAP which is our business record. You’re never truly going to know ahead of time what is going to work and not work for your customers,” he states. “You have got to get out there and try it, and see what comes back.”
For Frucor Suntory, this was getting the answer to a critical question businesses ask in the age of the customer: “How do we increase touch points with customers without having to double the size of our workforce? Digital, that is how.”
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
Just over two-and-a half years ago, Opher Yom-Tov became chief design officer at ANZ Banking Group, the first bank in the world to create this role.
His remit? To apply human-centred design (HCD) to solve tough problems and build compelling experiences for customers and staff.
“A bank, like any other company, whether they sell shoes or computers, at the end of the day, they have customers,” he tells CIO New Zealand. “ANZ is no different from any company or organisation that provides a product or service.
“The better we can design things that our customers actually want and need, the more successful we will be and the happier they will be,” explains Yom-Tov, who has worked in some global major brands including Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer, P&G, NASA and Intel.
Based on these experiences, he shares the opportunities and challenges for organisations adopting human-centred design.
He stresses the importance of involving staff from across divisions to work with design teams in order to maximise benefits from applying human-centred design in various areas of the organisation.
Defining human-centred design
“Human-centred design is a way of solving problems,” he says at a recent Trans-Tasman Business Circle forum in Auckland.
“It is an iterative approach to solve the right problems in the right way, starting with people.”
“The first line, iterative, suggests we are not going to get things right the first time,” notes Yom-Tov. “The focus of human-centric design is making sure you are solving the right problem. There are multiple ways of solving the problem, in which case we have to experiment. And finally, if you don’t understand what people want, it will all be for nought.”
Does your organisation understand that design is more than ‘lipstick’?
He tailors the definition for an internal banking audience.
For the head of risk, human-centred design (HCD) is “a risk management methodology that enables us to visualise and validate our future plans before we invest.
“For leaders, HCD is an approach to collaborating that inspires our people to do their life’s best work and bring their whole selves to work.”
According to Yom-Tov, embedding design in the organisation is the big challenge.
“I work incredibly hard at ANZ and outside to help reframe what we mean by design.”
The challenge includes defining ‘design’ in the context of HCD.
“People often gravitate to aesthetics or visual design when they hear the term,” he says.
“While visual design is incredibly important and if done well is unbelievably powerful, the term extends to other areas such as interactions and services.”
Design, for instance, could encompass an airplane flight, which he describes as “an incredible choreography of things to get together before you get a simple experience.”
Another domain of design that is so removed from visual design is around systems and “wicked problems” such as climate change.
“There is no single organisation, no single individual that can tackle that issue alone,” he says. “It will need a collaboration of networks of cooperation among organisations and individuals.”
Human centred-design: A team sport
Human centred-design borrows from different disciplines, such as anthropology and psychology, to understand how people feel and what is most important to them, says Yom-Tov. “It is a team sport.”
“It is a way of working together to actually combine different disciplines to all solve the problem, to all go out and spend time understanding, developing ideas and bringing their ideas to solve the problem.”
In the context of an organisation like ANZ, he says there are three areas to consider in building this cross-functional team – desirability, viability and feasibility.
“If you think at a very high level, if you want to solve any problem, you need to consider the desirability of the solution,” he states. “Will the people want it? You need members who understand people, like anthropologists, marketers or front-line staff.
“You need to worry about the feasibility,” he says. “Can you deliver it? Is it legal? You need people from technology and risk and legal and process and security.”
On viability, he states, “will you actually make money? Does it support your organisational objectives? You need people from finance who understand the business model.”
The paths to foster human-centred design
Yom-Tov likens the bank’s ‘design journey’ to climbing four mountain peaks, with a key question for each destination.
First is the mountain of change. He asks, “Where are you on your design change journey?”
He says there is a place called the “oasis of awesome” where an organisation can read customers’ minds, staff are incredibly loyal, products are best in class, and ideas come from anywhere inside and outside the organisation. It is where “you make lots of little bets that have massive payoffs.
“It is quite easy to recognise organisations that are already at the oasis of awesomeness,” he says, “but it takes a journey to get there.”
The second peak is the mountain of sponsorship. “Do you have someone in the organisation who is an active visible and fearless sponsor of design to make sure you have enough air cover protection? Where does your design sponsor sit in the hierarchy?”
At ANZ, the design sponsor is Maile Carnegie, group executive, digital and Australia transformation.
“She had her own journey in design,” Yom-Tov says of Carnegie, who has worked at Google and also spent 20 years at Proctor and Gamble in roles including managing director Australia and New Zealand, general manager for Asia strategy, marketing and design roles based in Singapore.
“She shone the spotlight on design as a strategic tool and ensured we have focus and support in the organisation.”
The third peak is the mountain of understanding. He asks, “Does your organisation understand that design is more than ‘lipstick’?
“Where does the appreciation of design live in an organisation? Is your organisation still thinking of design as purely visual or does it truly understand how to capitalise the power of design and apply it to systemic strategic problems to solve?”
At ANZ, for instance, the executive team had suggested applying human centred design to their annual budget cycle.
The bank assembled a cross-functional team, with members coming from finance, product, technology, and design, to discuss the budget cycle spreadsheet and calendar of events.
“We spoke to 150 participants and we learned everything about personal and organisational motivations in order to understand what is required for an effective collaboration,” shares Yom-Tov. “This is leadership applying design to solve a problem that on the face of it does not seem to be a design problem.”
The fourth peak, he says, is “the most challenging of all”, the mountain of design mastery.
He says the bank is competing with a lot of organisations in attracting and growing world-class designers. The bank took time to understand the most valuable skills designers need and distilled these to 25 shared and specialised skills.
They then had the 160 designers map their levels of mastery for every single skill. “It is an eye opener to see the depth of skills that are actually required to be a good designer to solve problems.
“We are trying to create great masterpieces,” he says. “Our masterpieces should be problems we solve for customers, the products that they are enthusiastic to buy.”
When asked about the future of design in organisations, Yom-Tov says he wants design to “become invisible…that it just becomes the norm.”
When a new CEO comes in to restructure an organisation, “I’d love for them to get to the point where a design function is just a given,” like HR, finance, technology, and marketing.
Show me the ROI from human-centred design
Forrester analysts Ryan Hart and Benjamin Brown note that design thinking can be applied to virtually any internal or customer-facing initiative.
For organisations that apply design thinking, the potential benefits are massive and wide ranging – higher labour savings, risk reduction, greater customer satisfaction, and increased revenue are just among these.
In fact, they estimate design thinking can deliver a return on investment of 85 per cent or greater.
Customer experience professionals can use design thinking to inexpensively assess the potential of different project directions, help teams identify opportunities, brainstorm ideas, and test proposed hypotheses.
“By saving money instead of spending it on dead-end projects, companies can divert investments toward more promising efforts, including opportunities discovered during the design thinking process.”
On the organisational side, when adopted at scale, design thinking can have a profound impact on the way teams work.
“Design thinking teaches employees to first and foremost empathise with customers and colleagues alike to put them on a path to innovation through experimentation,” they note.
The Forrester analysts advise organisations to calculate the ROI of their design thinking initiatives as part of a broader, more persuasive business case to support and scale a human-centric way of working.
“Ultimately, the end goal should not be a ‘scaled design thinking practice’ but happy, loyal, and profitable customers and employees.”
Design thinking for government agencies
Government agencies across the globe, meanwhile, are also looking at human-centred design to build better services.
Gartner forecasts that by 2023, 60 per cent of government agencies will have human-centred design techniques integrated into their digital service design process.
“Gartner considers human centred-design and its associated techniques as essential capabilities for all government IT areas, because they will be a mainstay of future citizen service design as the line between digital and physical continues to blur,” says Dean Lacheca, research director at Gartner.
He says government CIOs and their leadership teams need more than just a passing understanding of HCD to find the opportunities and the impacts of adopting this approach.
From a technology perspective, HCD is encapsulated as an ISO standard1 and has formed part of improving the user experience of hardware for many years, Lacheca writes in a recent report.
He notes human and social services organisations have been using HCD outside of technology for some time.
Employment and job agency departments are using human-centred design techniques to explore how digital technologies and platforms can be used to reimagine how the job ecosystem operates. Income and company tax agencies use HCD to reimagine the way government services are delivered.
“An outside-in perspective on how people engage with these processes has allowed some government organisations to transform the citizen experience to be almost frictionless,” says Lacheca.
“HCD is all about delivering better outcomes for the users of government services. Direct citizen research, user segmentation and analytics are vital inputs into the process, but they take time,” he adds.
“Government CIOs must work with business leaders to ensure that the adoption of human-centred design is supported by an effective, agile, and iterative approach to delivery.”
Human-centred design is not just for corporations
“Having strong disciplines around human-centred design really pays for itself when you are in fast-changing ambiguous environments,” says Liz Maguire, director of Five Points Digital consultancy.
Maguire has used HCD extensively over the years to support new digital developments.
“Design thinking helps us put things in perspective,” says Maguire, who was most recently head of digital and transformation at ANZ Bank in New Zealand. “Human-centred design helps organisations better understand the actual customer needs that they are trying to address and shows them whether the proposed solution really does address that need,” she says.
“It also helps ensure that any biases or assumptions you are carrying into the project don’t negatively impact the end result by making sure you are designing your digital tool with the customer in mind.”
Maguire says she has seen lots of examples where feedback from HCD goes against the “conventional wisdom” of the people building the change.
“I think that discipline in listening to and actioning what customers tell you is something that ensures you’re building digital solutions that customers will use.”
“You don’t need to be a big organisation to use HCD, it’s very easy to get going,” she points out. “You also don’t need to limit your HCD work to technology change, it’s just as useful for other strategic change across your organisation.”
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
My sister, Dulce Paredes-Tadena, a food scientist in New York, met Donna Sturgess in a conference and told me she would be a good person to interview. I spoke to Donna in 2011, but her message – of doing something unfamiliar, even unplugging from our usual technology tools, to get a fresh eye perspective about work and life – resonates more than ever.
Today’s executives are busier than ever, but business strategist Donna Sturgess says a day off from the office for an “immersion” will refresh their view of the organisation, and generate new ideas for innovation.
The key is to go to a place or do an activity they are “very unfamiliar with”, says Sturgess, president of Buyology and former global head of innovation for GlaxoSmithKline. “Go out together as a team and watch people,” says Sturgess. And it does not have to cost a lot of money.
“Somewhere in New Zealand there is an annual fair, a festival or event. You can take them out for the day.
“Because it is a physical as well as a mental experience, you stimulate productive thinking,” says Sturgess, who espouses the concept in her book Eyeballs Out.
You are not going to find new ideas on your computer or your spreadsheet or your meetings. You really have to step away and step out of your context to discover something new.
She says technology companies do these immersion experiences. “It stimulates a different kind of conversation in terms of what is meaningful to people.”
“In this busy life, we are bombarded by email, meetings and all these things we think we have to do,” she says.
But these activities will not generate fresh ideas. “You are not going to find them on your computer or your spreadsheet or your meetings. You really have to step away and step out of your context to discover something new.”
The team can be composed of executives and staff across business units. In an immersion, they do not have to be good at the activity. This, she says, “levels the playing field” for all team members.
Sturgess, who has no military background, cites her experience while visiting an aircraft carrier. “I couldn’t get over how many thoughts I had about my own business by being on that carrier,” she says. “You take on the mind of a beginner and what happens in that instance is that your brain actually slows down and absorbs information differently.”
Like an epiphany? “Sort of like that,” she says, with a laugh. “It is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. You have a bunch of different pieces and I have to figure out where this fits.
“It is going to open your eyes up to the business,” she says. “I tell people don’t do this so linearly. If you work in the food business, going on an immersion tour in a restaurant is not going to teach you anything.”
She says a company that is doing work on green technology, for instance, can visit an organic farm, and ‘dimensionalise’ what they mean when they say they are making their product green.
Similarly, an immersion in the winery will be for a business “that might be involved in fabric or clothing or things where you have a more sensory experience, how does wine do that?”
A caveat: If you do organise that big day out, it is best to leave your “technology tools” behind. Otherwise, says Sturgess, “You have not stepped into a new world. You are still back in the office.”
People are calling you, or you are playing with your smartphone, she says.
“The ‘partial attention world’ is not getting you anything on a day-to-day basis. If you go on an immersion and give it your partial attention, you should just stay home.”
About the author: Divina Paredes is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
Based on these experiences, he shares the opportunities and challenges for organisations adopting human-centred design.
Divina Paredes Insights 