With data flowing openly across most international borders, consumers have become creators, and new innovation, risks and news cascade through the system immune to local politics. For organizations to prevent innovation turning from promise to peril, they need to implement new strategies, management models and processes to facilitate innovation staying within the corporate walls until as a collective group they are ready to share it. Unfortunately, many organizations are relying on outdated IT policies as the governing force.

When new promises are constrained by old policies and practices, the effectiveness of these constraints tend to break down as individuals self-organize into movements in an attempt to circumvent barriers to the progress of ‘new promise’. So what is holding corporates back from harnessing promise and preventing peril?

At the moment, many organizations are in what can only be described as data crisis. For years, data was only seen as a transactional historical record. With the introduction of business intelligence capability, data is now finally being recognised for its strategic and highly competitive value. However, outmoded IT policy constraints restricting access to that data is turning opportunities into points of frustration. In addition, social networks are being viewed as disruptive to corporate productivity, rather than a new pathway to universal interconnectedness at the physical, software, and social level.

Networks are core channels to global change. There existence is beyond the control of individual organizations. As such, organizations must change to support associated technology innovation, such as:

• Device innovations – such as iPhone, ebook readers and netbooks
• Open source and open standards – two growing powers
• Social networking – in all its forms
• Location awareness
• Online video

Each of these elements has the potential to create new kinds of businesses, and business networks must be configured to support these new business models. In my last blog I covered how innovation today is no longer seen in terms of products and innovation, but rather in innovation of business models, business processes and management models.

Underlying each of these innovations is a robust information technology platform that is more than just about standard corporate services such as computing and communications. IT policy-makers and stakeholders need to pay more attention to keeping their policies up to date with the technologies and business models they are designed to support. One way of doing this is through an integrated Change Network. Change networks help to link together all aspects of change within a business – technology, process, people, products & services, markets, policy etc. As a cross organizational collaborative function they serve to signal where policies are acting inappropriately, whilst at the same time serving to protect competitive IP from inappropriate circulation. If a business model releases the points of frustration, users become more open and collaborative, and trust that good ideas will not die due to poor policy. Everyone wins!

Today, 75% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on. This is severely restricting allocation for business building technologies such as business intelligence. However, cloud computing will change that. The strategies and concepts around cloud computing and BI are challenging IT managers to rethink and restructure the role of IT in business. To many, the fear of being made redundant to outsource providers keeps many IT managers awake at night. However, the reality is more that the role of IT will change, rather than reduce. A change that will see IT become more engaged with the business outcomes of IT, rather than the technology itself.

Just as markets have evolved, communication formats have evolved, and IT hardware has evolved – IT infrastructure has evolved in its entirety. Just as the provision of electricity moved from individual generators to centralized mainstream services, so too are IT services.

It will be the role of IT to keep abreast of new technologies and work with the business to understand how this might help the business become more productive and more profitable. Combined, BI and Cloud computing have already bubbled to the surface of the business – from being part of backend, ‘under the covers’ infrastructure to being the center of strategic strength of the business. Those CFO’s and CEO’s who understand this will be the industry leaders of the future.

With the launch by VMWare of its innovative cloud operating system vSphere 4, virtualization has almost been demoted from being the latest word on everyones lips, to being a small part of something much bigger – and something much more exciting.

Cloud networks keep the lights on – and let IT managers sleep at night. Not only are cloud infrastructures intelligent in recognizing that a network is failing to meet a client SLA, they are self healing, adding additional resource or capacity on demand. No IT intervention required. This is exciting news for many businesses who are struggling with their BI programs through underperforming infrastructures, and prior to vSphere the nightmare of ungrading to meet the processing demands on BI.

Rather than being afraid of upcoming technology, IT managers should be rubbing their hands together in delight at the prospect of no longer having to go to the business begging for more budget, just to keep the basics alive.

More about VMWare vSphere 4

Top 8 Sleep-Killers

The top eight issues keeping business leaders awake at night include:

1. “the constant pressure to meet and beat my quarterly targets” – since the outputs are very data driven, make more use of data to drive the inputs to meet these targets.
2. “how to balance my work pressures with the needs of my family and my health?” – reduce the time spent managing and performing repetitive tasks that can be taken over by intelligence driven processes
   “how can I recruit smarter, more productive people?” – even as a strong supporter of BI software I was unaware of how effective BI was in the area of recruitment until I spent some time investigating this further for my book. Even understanding how BI will transform businesses and how important change is as an everyday part of work recruiters can evaluate candidates for their willingness to collaborate, share ideas and let go of old concepts and assumptions and adopt more modern methods of logic driven decision making. As we go through this period of transition between Socratic right/wrong mentality to one of fluid thinking and multiple options of exploration, we find that not all people are willing or have personalities that are comfortable with releasing old styles of thinking, decision making and management and not adaptable to constant change.
3. “I’m losing good people. How can I keep them from leaving?” – The power of BSC type strategic methodologies and personal productivity dashboards cannot be underestimated in the value of helping each individual understand the value they contribute to the overall organizational goals and in self managing their performance and decisions on a day to day basis.
4. “I need to develop a lot more leaders in our enterprise” – Leaders today need to be more coaches than managers, but the overwhelming amount of information needed to complete every task prevents many from implementing productivity and development programs. By releasing much of this load to BI tools and combining insight driven decision making into more innovative channels, teams feel more empowered and naturally more motivated.
5. “to better manage a much more competitive culture” – it is predicted that the capability of artificial intelligence will surpass that of human intelligence within the next 20 to 30 years. Those companies which do not start the transition to leverage this capability through the adopting of BI tools will not only struggle to keep pace with competitors who do, but fail to deliver insightful products and services to retain their existing customers.
6. “we need to find a more effective communications strategy” – communication is wasted if it does not effectively transfer valuable information. The degree to which the information is valuable is determined by its relevance, accuracy and timeliness. BI tools are effective in all these three domains and the collaboration tools inherent in BI solutions ensure that information is not silo’ed or hoarded.
7. “our metrics are not up to scratch. How to better analyse sales and KPIs” – strategy is too often poorly implemented and/or devolved throughout the organization. By integrating Balanced Scorecard and BI KPI’s are easier to detect and more appropriate to measuring the businesses performance in reaching its goals. I often find that businesses have implemented sound KPI measuring mechanisms but they are either measuring the wrong things or too many things. BSC + BI help businesses avoid both of these mistakes
   “I worry about whether our security is OK” – most large corporates have sound security policies. For those small businesses, the benefits of SaaS BI, CRM and other business software ensures that data is more secure than most previously experienced.
8. “how to ensure the survival and succession of my business” – when we look back at why only 18 of the Fortune 500 companies in 1974 still survive today, the underlying reason has been failure to change the way the business operates to keep up with changes in the business and consumer environments. The lack of flexibility through rigid ego-driven hierarchies, lack of information and poor collaboration has been the demise of many previous great companies. When BI is fully integrated into the operating environment, the infrastructure almost self evolves as new data-driven insight highlights new opportunities – new decisions to be made – new processes to implement and new relationships to form.

1. Single Event – It starts with a single event,
2. Isolated Events – It then appears on the horizon as a series of seemingly unrelated events
3. Connected Events – It then becomes a trend, with more ‘isolated’ events starting to form connections located in remote regions
4. Local Market Force – It appears in your market – and boom, suddenly with the speed of Web 2.0 it becomes a recognisable market force
5. Mass Market – It reaches mass market – where it has not only the inertia to continue under its own energy, but also leaves behind a latent footprint impacting other market factors
6. Shadow Force – It becomes a shadow – it has moved from a driving market force into a market that lingers to the sidelines of a new change

If you are not watching over the horizon, and monitoring any new forces that transform from being isolated events into trends, then yes, the change will appear to happen rapidly. What has changed more than the so called ‘speed of change’ is the complexity of change. In many cases, it is the complexity that allows change to be hidden in plain sight.