The Best Hybrid Work Models Deliver with Results-Oriented Communications

 The hybrid work model is now ubiquitous and has significant momentum. It is a model that blends new work styles that enables employees to work from different locations dynamically: home, office, or on the go. It encourages autonomy and flexibility but keeping it on track puts a significant burden on effective and results-oriented communications. Hybrid models also leverage many traditional and new communication channels. Linking these channels and all their communications is challenging and necessary to deliver the demanded higher performance with great flexibility. Hybrid work models and results-oriented communications go hand in hand. Still, few organizations have a handle on linking results to communications that are the lifeblood of the hybrid work model. Click here for more on results-oriented communications.

Benefits of the Hybrid Work Model:

The benefits of the hybrid work model for the COVID era were plentiful because safety was the number one issue for all involved. Analyzing the benefits now we are down the road a bit yields a clear picture. There are reduced overhead costs exemplified by lowered rent, utilities, office supplies, and such. There is often boosted productivity as office chit-chat is diminished and people are no longer interrupted in a face-to-face fashion. There is also a great reduction in micro-management, which is the bane of real productivity. The commuting is often significantly reduced, and employee well-being is increased because they control their work schedule. Team building occurs quite naturally enabled by better collaboration tools. The benefits are substantial for both the organization and employees; however, it is not all hearts and flowers. Some challenges start to emerge.

Challenges of the Hybrid Work Model:

Both the organization and the employees must up their planning game. Meeting types have to be matched with the kind of supports that is needed. Each participant will have to be considered for remote vs. live. Better resource scheduling by skill type will have to be considered. The level of dress and formality will need to be considered as well. After the meetings, the archiving of issues and solutions linked to actions will need to be recorded and shared will also need a plan. Rethinking the workplace is also necessary. What kind of work can be done remotely, and what should be done in the office is an issue that third-party office spaces can temper?  Management visibility becomes a balancing act. It would be easy to error in the direction of invasive surveillance, so watching deliverables is a better practice. On the other hand, remote workers can easily fall into the trap of thinking they are second-class workers, and fair pay emerges as some locations require more pay than cheaper locations.

Net; Net:

Hybrid Work Models need speedy and innovative solutions that drive organizations towards results-oriented communication infrastructures and tools. Deliverables become the focus of optimizing hybrid work results. These deliverables need to be tied to stakeholder outcomes, requiring technologies that can archive team results and link them to desired outcomes in a shared way. There will be a targeted application of new kinds of collaboration tools that don't just support low-level random communications but link everything to results and outcomes. Hybrid models are here to stay even if COVID dissipates, and we no longer have to deal with threatening scenarios. Hybrid models also optimize on opportunities while linking strategy to operations as they both evolve and optimize.

 

 

Results-Oriented Communications Are Now Emerging

 It is becoming painfully evident that traditional communication channels are just not making the grade in these days of group innovation and fast-moving change. Organizations are dealing with communication challenges that are accelerating in today's demanding world. If you have ever had to manage, influence, guide, or participate in or with groups of various people inside or outside your organization, you know how severe communication issues can be. These issues can only be solved by communications focused on results while all participating can be moving towards results in synchronization. The shift from messages only to include pertinent data tracked to results is the best way to find the straightest line to desired outcomes.

The Need for Outside-In Perspectives

Today customer, partner, community, employee’s needs are becoming more prominent in the most successful organizations. The outside-in approach introduces new sources of communications that will be necessary for organizational progress and success. However, it adds more complexity to an already overtaxed and unfocused set of communication channels, methods, tools, and techniques. 

The Need for Laser Focus

The world will not wait for organizations to untangle their communications messes that are growing in complexity by adding more communications on older point-to-point capabilities like email, messaging, voice, project management, and broadcasting tools. Unfortunately, none of these channels is guided by a common set of expected results or goals, leading to a lack of momentum and focus. Often the results are surprise deliverables that the sponsors did not desire or expect. All of this because of weak and unfocused communications and lack of consistent visibility.

 The Need for Broad Skillsets

The overwhelming need for better customer, employee, and partner journeys with shared goals, policies, and guardrails drive more multi-disciplinary teams that break down organizational, skill, and digital domain silos. Of course, specialized skills and training will still be needed, but lateral thinking and rich sets of compound skills assisted by digital bots or knowledge agents will be the norm.

The Need for Innovative Dynamic Experimentation

A world driven by "do it, try it and fix it" is putting additional pressure on the communications infrastructures that exist in organizations today. With iterative methods being all the rage and new digital technologies that deliver incremental results during development, communications take on new importance for keeping all the team members on point. Change is only accelerating and continues to compound communication issues.

The Need for More Collaboration

All of the above puts tremendous momentum in and around collaboration. It is why point-to-point collaboration tools have taken off, and group video tools are all the rage. Unfortunately, not all the team members can be available to keep themselves in the loop, and they will have to scramble to stay pertinent and on point. Imagine a result-oriented approach that prioritizes the critical content and messages under one roof.

Net; Net:

The need for speedy and innovative solutions is driving organizations towards results-oriented communication infrastructures that share meta-data, data, and traditional messaging methods. We are moving away from unguided point-to-point communications that create tangles and confusion to result-oriented communications that share messages, content, and data under a unified infrastructure—all of this synchronized communication leads to a shared pathway to results. The days of "willy-nilly" communications are numbered. Watch this space for more on results-oriented communications, especially in this hybrid work environment ushered in by COVID.

 

 

 

What Have People Read in the First Half of 2021

 Thanks to all who have read my posts and especially for the feedback. As momentum swings up in this shift from the lockdown mentality to near full speed, the topics are shifting ever so slightly. There is still a big emphasis on hybrid work and results-driven collaboration, but the demand for top talent is forcing a shift in management attitude as I tried to capture in corporate culture and leadership style posts. The top topics in the last year are Customer Experience/Journeys, Management Improvement, Trends in Digitial, Digital Business Platforms (DBP), Better Ongoing Data Management/Data Mesh, and Real-Time Business Response. See Figure 1 for the last 12 months running. 

The first half of 2021 has all of the trending topics included, but a couple of new topics have popped up. Most organizations want to be more aware, so the interest in Management Cockpits and Real-Time Fast Boards is increasing. Also, organizations are concerned about the direction and progress towards digital transformation. In other words, "Is my digital progress on point?" "Are Management Disciplines Keeping Up with Better Learning?" See Figure 3 for the first half of 2021. Figure 2 identifies the most active countries for the first half of 2021 outside of the US which dominates the number of hits to date (not shown).  Let me know of any topics you would like me to address and I will try unless they are way out of bounds for me. 

                                Figure 1 Top Hits for the Last 12 months 

                                Figure 2 Non-US Hits 

                                Figure 3 Top Hits for the First Half 2021 

Art for the 2nd Quarter 2021

 It's always fun publishing creative works for me. COVID has been a boon for us creatives because we have all kinds of time to create. Besides the half dozen new songs that are in progress with my teammates, managed a couple of commissioned paintings and several new fractals. I hope you find some of these as eye candy for you. I even got to do a corporate logo :)

If you want to see my whole collection of art, please click here

If you want to hear my completed songs, please click here 

                                                   Moon Struck Owl 

                                                  Corporate Logo #1

                                             Rainbow Stallion

                                                      Crispy Layers

                                                     Fire n Ice

The Need for Real-Time Fast Boards

 

It is becoming painfully apparent that traditional dashboards are too slow and static to compete in our changing world. While COVID-19 has driven the point home, there are more changes to come that will be demanding faster and more innovative solutions for competitive decisions. Traditional dashboards fail to deliver on the data-driven culture as data speeds up and sits in the cloud for new AI and advanced analytic assisted decisioning. According to the Harvard Business Review in 2020, 84% of frontline workers report a poor experience with today's analytical solutions, and 67% of executives are not comfortable using data from their existing data resources. It implies that the problem with decisioning is that there is more than keeping up with known or emergent KPIs.

The Need for Speed

Traditional dashboards do not deliver modern world speed because they are fragile and use old data. Most decision-makers are dealing with data that is 4-5 business days old at best. If a decision-maker wants a new insight or tries another decision-making approach, it takes too long to change the existing dashboard. The data is slow; the dashboard changes are time-consuming and expensive. It is no wonder only a small group of executives believe their existing analytic solutions are mature enough to keep up with the organization. Faster decision data in the cloud is one step in the right direction.

The Need for Complete Context

It is so easy to focus on fragments of a decision and sub-optimize. Often getting data about critical neighboring contexts and downstream impacts of decisions are overlooked, or the time-pressure causes this step to be skipped. Often siloed analysis contributes to a fragmented insight situation. It can be caused by organizational boundaries, various tools, and incomplete data sources. Therefore organizations are moving from a patchwork of disconnected dashboards to management cockpits.

The Need for Collaboration

A wise decision-maker will often check with other fine minds and experience bases to attain decision excellence. Collaboration alone can help knock down some of the organizational walls and resist a significant decision, and take appropriate actions with speed. It is beneficial in verifying the data and the potential downstream outcomes of a decision and the resulting actions/impacts. Often the collaboration tools are devoid of decision contexts and are a separate disconnected toolset.

The Need for More Smarts

Even these fast boards need assistance with detecting necessary signals, events, and patterns. It is mainly an issue for emergent situations where the signals, tolerances, and patterns were not anticipated. Since there is no way for the human eye to catch these speedy emergent patterns, there is a crying need for AI and Analytics with insights to detect these patterns in real-time minimally and predict the emergent trends ideally.  These same smarts will help us personalize the analytic outcomes and new fast bords that play in a management cockpit.

The Need for Dynamic Experimentation

Once detected, the decision-maker can orient his/her options with the help of collaborators. Some of these collaborators should be AI and advanced analytical models that can project the impact of a decision and resulting changes. The ability to experiment with a range of analytics producing various outcomes is a must in a world of increasing speed. It may imply re-using models and analytics that have proven helpful in the past. All of these contribute to an immediate use-case development environment.  In today’s market only a few players seem to understand what decision-makers want including SAS, Tibco, ThoughtSpot, and Wizly

Net; Net:

The tension between dynamic data and static siloed dashboards has to be resolved in a world of change. We are no longer in a steady-state, and I expect more issues to respond to with fast boards applied most intelligently. If we can’t do that, we will never scratch the surface of all the big and complicated data we are capturing today and storing for tomorrow. It’s time to modernize decision-making to help optimize operational outcomes while sharpening organizational tactics within emerging opportunities and threats that may deliver new strategies.

 

 

What’s Driving Data-Intensive Applications?

Today and in the foreseeable future, huge waves of data-intensive applications are breaking over us, with more waves to come.

It’s not just the data volume, often referred to as "Big Data" or "Monster Data," which pushes opportunities in the direction of organizations. It’s also the demand-pull of applications, processes, and journeys growing in importance for organizations to compete. These data sources are often measured in terabytes or petabytes, but “being large” is just the obvious, in-your-face description of what comprises a data-intensive application. In these apps, the data is commonly persisted in several formats and distributed in many locations and must be cared for in various ways for organizations to flourish. Coping mechanisms will be described in future posts, but this post identifies the drivers of data-intensive applications.

The Demand-Pull Drivers are Data Hungry

Because of the pressures on organizations to expand their views on the scope and impact of applications, there is a considerable demand for more data as focused and simplistic applications transition to intelligent large-span applications. In addition, the speed to detect emergent signals, events, and patterns is ever-increasing, putting pressure on follow-up decisions and appropriate actions. It’s much like a fighter plane that has to make decisions and take steps in seconds; however, management is used to working in days, weeks, or months.

Moving from Dashboards to Fast Boards

Today's organizations need to anticipate critical patterns to intercept opportunities and threats at more incredible speeds to make decisions and take appropriate actions. Some organizations are crafting technical sentinels that sit on the edge to sense and sometimes respond if given the freedom to do so.

Excellence with Management Cockpits

The idea of people watching many individual dashboards/fast boards and integrating their contexts with speed is somewhat an unrealistic expectation. Minimally, these need to be brought together into a management cockpit to grok the intersections of the visible measures. These measures range from KPIs to out-of-tolerance situations. Eventually, the management cockpit would be assisted by bots/agents to notify management of threats and opportunities. Ideally, these management cockpits could help in a "fly-by-wire" fashion within practiced business scenarios. 

Decision Management and Assistance

Besides the speed to sense, decide and respond, data has to be available to venture into new contexts to aid the decision-making process and play out the ramifications of any action about to be taken. Operational adjustments may require simple tuning or kick-off other individual efforts. Tactical moves require new versions of rules and critical adjustments of guardrails and constraints resulting from decisions. Strategic moves require some forms of advanced analytics and potentially gaming alternatives through a management cockpit. 

Value Chain & Supply Chain Extensions

Today, an awakening occurs that requires knocking down organizational/skill walls to eliminate silo thinking and actions. There is a race to kill silos in value-chain and supply-chain situations encouraged by businesses partnering to produce products or services. There is a premium on innovative collaboration that crosses all kinds of boundaries to create overarching goals and results while satisfying individual organization units at the same time. The goals, rules, policies, and constraints need to be tweaked simultaneously during operations in the middle of changing conditions. 

Supporting  Journeys

There is a considerable push to define constituent journeys, especially customer journeys, that are often integrated with employee/support journeys. Journeys require an outside-in perspective requiring more data to represent specific goals of the personas and individuals interacting with an organization. The customer experience is tracked, measured, and recorded with sentiment data, often represented by voice interactions when live via a representative or chatbots. The data around loyalty and satisfaction proliferate with an outside-in journey perspective.

 

The Data Push Drivers Overflow

Data offers opportunities in its new forms, amounts, locations, and captured contexts. Until now, the "Big Data'' headline has been driven mostly by the volume story. That is about to change with the new data types and formats that are entering the organization. In addition, there is a new generation of the distributed types and a movement that says that views can be constructed no matter where the data resides at the moment. While location complicates data quality and compatibility issues, there are alternative ways to cope with new tolerances for perfection depending on the usage described in the demand-pull section above.

 

Voice Data

Voice is a key new tributary to tap for organizations, thus tempting leverage for competitive advantage, particularly in servicing processes/applications. Voice can be leveraged to see how often competitors are mentioned in calls. Voice can also be analyzed for emotional reactions in the context of the servicing experience. It is often helpful in unscripted situations, which often occur with service representatives who are skill specialized. Now it’s not just NPS scores that count for customer satisfaction measurements.

Image Data

Images can be helpful when brought up in context. Not only can physical plant layouts and machinery be checked for safety purposes through image analysis, but broken machinery can also be detected before a significant or cascading problem occurs. Not only can out-of-bounds situations be seen, but optimal real-time planning can be enhanced by image detection. Real-time image help is a must for some jobs.

Video Data

Videos can be leveraged for better productivity, such as optimizing worker movement for better quality and faster processing. Video can be used to identify resources in action, such as people and machinery, for various kinds of operational optimization and training opportunities. Imagine showing an inexperienced worker a video on how to service a particular component such as a pump after taking a video of it in operation provides self-paced, on-demand training - without asking experienced workers for help.

Edge Computing Data

Data can be detected at the edge before it hits mainstream processes/applications. An unexpected event can trigger the notification of an emergent set of conditions or patterns for real-time decisions or actions in most cases. With the proper freedom levels, goals, and guardrails, this reporting creates a bevy of data for each node at the edge, whether a sentinel or an actor.

Distributed Meta-data

The data about the data is often called meta-data. With the sophistication of data storage and state combinations, meta-data is important to properly manage the distributed data sources. In addition to the physical state of data, such as its location (on-premise or cloud storage), its state of meaning, transformation, source, and context can be managed with meta-data.

Net; Net:

There are so many trends contributing to data-intensive applications that there will likely be another new one later today. New ways to manage traditional and new coping mechanisms will emerge over the next few years. I'm betting that both the demand-pull and the data push drivers will only accelerate. We are in the middle of a massive revolution for managing data differently. Be aware and get ready - data-intensive applications are coming for your organization.

What is a Digital Transformation?

I've recently been asked to describe and define transformation so that organizations, end-users, and vendors can claim transformation. According to the multiple definitions I found on the web, "A transformation is an extreme, radical change" So what do we deem extreme and radical? I would say that while pursuing a digital program, an organization discovers a new or dramatically extends a business model. An example would be an insurance company that became so great at insurance claims that it started a subsidiary to manage other organizations' claims. Another would be if an organization had a significant change in its competencies and skills that it looked and behaved radically different. However, there are incremental ways of sneaking up in these sweeping changes and transformations. So it might take a while to claim a true digital transformation.

While I don’t think that transformation ends, there are points in the transformation process to declare an organization transformed. To that end, I tried to develop a way to measure if the transformation effort is significant. Besides the softer sides of organizations like culture, organization, competencies, and skills that are harder to measure, there are five dimensions of change that I was able to noodle out to describe here. I'm sure this will morph over time, but this is my first stake in the ground, and I'll go from here. See Figure 1 for a spider diagram (aka Kiviat diagram) of the dimensions of transformation where I showed a typical traditional process or application measured on the diagram. The idea is to move the measurements to the edge as depicted by the red arrows. The five dimensions are described below. While the shape will vary by organization, a transformation would occur with an average of a "4" for each measure.

                                       Figure 1 Transformational Dimensions

Innovation: You can find many business leaders and business GURUs saying that innovation is the new area for competitive differentiation. I find this hard to argue with as many new digital technologies are emerging as business climates are changing and new/non-traditional competitors are entering many industries. So organizations that can match the many moving parts of customer need with the emergent set of digital technologies at the right time will be pretty innovative. Like it or not, change is accelerating, and how organizations deal with it will make the difference in the survive, thrive, and capitalize continuum. If you are reacting to table-stakes change, you might survive. If you are collaborating or ideating on better solutions, you can go beyond survival. If you are "built for change" and practice agile approaches, you are more likely to thrive. If you practice "Out of the Box thinking and implement it before others, you are likely to capitalize. Pushing this dimension to the edge requires a stomach for risk. Take the risk to become innovative.

Personalization: Today, if you know your customer and have much of the data accessible in one spot or as few as many, you have a good chance for survival. However, this is the minimum. You need to know more about your customer, which notably includes their overall goals and the goals of each interaction with your organization. Organizational goals will often be at odds with customer goals, so striking a balance between your organization's goals and your customers' goals will be essential. This goal confusion is where digital assistance and real-time analytics can help sharpen focus on what the customer really wants. Listening to the customer sentiment emerging in their voice and moving images can tell you a lot at the moment or over time. Customers do not just want standard transactions aimed at organizational outcomes; they want better practices aimed at their whole journey. This process includes transactions outside of your organization's scope at times. This process applies to employees, partners, and vendors as well. Pushing this dimension to the edge will imply more short-term costs, but the outcomes will be more profitable overall in terms of satisfaction and loyalty. Invest in your constituents.

Scope of Impact: Often, short-term costs and timing can be wrung out of departmental processes and workflows to the delight of the accountants and the department heads. However, cross-organizational methods that consider the goals conflicts between organizational units have proven to deliver more benefits over the long haul. The short-term benefits for any department may not be optimized, but the overall outcome will be better for all. Savvy organizations will look at their internal processes and consider comprehensive strategies that include external organizations. Some organizations have outsourced tasks and functions to make them cheaper at the cost of the end-to-end process. When something goes wrong in this case, the "finger-pointing starts."  More progressive organizations will look at complete value chains, entire supply chains, along customer/employee journeys. Pushing this dimension to the edge takes longer and costs more, but the overall solutions are better. Journeys constitute an important principle included in Industry 4.0 that pushes this dimension to the edge. Break down the walls inside or outside your organization.

Automation: Hyper-automation is a popular term today that combines the automation benefits of many digital tech streams. There are many benefits in this particular dimension that have driven BPM, RPA, and Mining. While this is a good direction, this automation needs to become intelligent and learn to become better over time. The collaboration of man and machine starts to emerge to augment the humans involved in the processes. These and future automation will be free to sense, decide, and act independently as they learn over time. However, automation will need to be driven by goals and guided by constraint guard rails. As more business conditions, events and patterns become emergent and changing; this dimension will travel to the edge over time. Free your automation to seek goals and be guided by constraints.

Secure Digital Tech: Digital technology will need to emerge and mature. Organization's experiences with each technology stack, such as iBPMS, RPA, Machine Learning, Mining, Data Mesh, Hybrid Cloud, Deep Learning, Distributed Database, Chatbots, Knowledge-bots and Bots/Agents on the Edge will play an essential role in the future. These unique digital technologies have started to converge in profitable pairings and end up Digital Business and Technology Platforms that work well together. Over time they will become competent and help organizations self-adapt. Combine digital technologies into platforms for better leverage.

Net; Net:

There are no universally accepted transformation definitions that guide organizations today. This writing is my attempt to start one, and I hope it evolves. You will see me use the above dimensions to rate example implementations to show if a transformation is impactful enough to be declared a transformation. Until then, each vendor will claim transformation victory, and organizations will make changes incrementally. Remember that closer to the edge means real transformation. Also, remember to give your organization credit for softer progress implied by skill-building that leads to competencies.