Next up was Scott Klososky on Do You Have Velocity Leadership? Scott talks to organizations about how technology impacts different businesses and has a book coming out soon (though I could not find a link for it). He uses a quote to show his attitude to technology:
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single person contemplates it, bearing within them the image of a cathedral
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
In other words everyone has access to the technology, some people can see how it can be used but most cannot see what can be done. Steve tries to bridge using his experience both as a geek and as a CEO. He recently wrote a book on Harnessing Velocity.
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Learn to better predict the future
He was focused on executive prediction but of course this is also true transaction by transaction, hence the focus on embedding predictive analytics in EDM -
Build sophisticated digital plumbing
EDM is, of course, about adding smarts to digital plumbing. -
Evolve the organizational culture
The current range of technology attitudes varies widely between generations.
Scott talks about “a high beam” theory – because things are speeding up, then you need to have better headlights! Scott had some interesting points to make about the power of virtual worlds to provide different kinds of feedback and experience such as using visual information about an audience to help a speaker tell what they think. Scott finds a large gap between the C suite, mostly older folks who grew up without technology and don’t feel it, and IT departments. This is not going to go away any time soon so it must be managed and this gap must be closed. Scott’s experience doing this involves a lot of education about technology to the C suite using “layman’s terms”. He talks about a communication layer, with a hardware layer, database layer, application layer and business intelligence at the top. He uses BI the way I would – not the technology labeled as BI but true business intelligence. He feels that SOA, virtualization, standards like XBRL and more make digital plumbing more useful. For instance, XBRL would support automated auditing.
Scott had a nice little stack – DIKW – Data to Information to Knowledge to Wisdom – that seemed like a nice match for the kind of thing we are talking about. BI is focused on information where EDM and rules are focused on the later stages. He used a number of the kinds of stories I use – banks with overlapping forms and no customer picture, doctors who use paper forms and no automated diagnosis etc. He made the point that being paperless is just the beginning – must be able to act on it automatically. He wrapped up with a nice comparison of technology attitudes between older executives and new, younger workers.
He had a set of final recommendations from his book:
- Round organization charts with CEO in the middle and customer focused people on the outside
- Ranks-off meetings for things like product and strategy meetings
- Geek seeding to get younger, geeky people into different parts of the organization not just concentrated in one area
Don’t forget you can find more posts through the DIABLOG.
