In today's enterprise, digital transformation represents organizational change even more so than technology change, as customer preferences and behavior drive end-to-end transformation across lines of business as well as IT. To capitalize on the ubiquitous disruption driving this transformation, companies must be able to innovate at an increasingly rapid pace. Traditional processes for driving innovation -- assuming the company has defined such processes in the first place -- are now woefully inadequate for keeping up with the breadth of disruption and change facing today's increasingly digital enterprise. It's time to rethink our processes for innovation, leveraging the very turbulence that drives the business to change. This session will provide a thought-provoking look at how modern digital practices, including self-organization and continuous delivery models, can provide a template for rethinking how innovation processes can continue to drive strategic value.

1. Innovation Processes in
the Age of Digital
Transformation
Jason Bloomberg
President
jason@intellyx.com
@theebizwizard

2. About Jason Bloomberg
• President of industry analyst firm
Intellyx
• Agile digital transformation thought
leader
• Write for Forbes, several blogs, biweekly
newsletter the Cortex
• Buy my latest book,
The Agile Architecture
Revolution
Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC2

3. Process for Innovation?
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Disrupt Innovate
Innovation is not a typical
business process!

4. The Disruption Spectrum
• Evolutionary innovation
– New and improved!
– Processes reasonably well
understood
– Common
• Disruptive innovation
– New market category!
– Customers didn’t know they
wanted it until they saw it
– Little understanding of the
process
– Rare
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5. Optimization vs.
Innovation
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Innovation
Disrupt status quo
to allow human
creativity to
flourish
Optimization
Establish
feedback loops
that maximize
business
outcome

6. Innovation Requires
Disruption
• External Disruption
– Competitive
pressures/new entrants
– Globalization
– Regulation
• Internal Disruption
– Digital Transformation
efforts
– Innovation initiatives
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7. Disruption Introduces
Risk
• Optimization without
disruption stifles
innovation
• Disruption without
optimization is an
innovation crap shoot
• Optimize what you
can & disrupt what
you must
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Mitigate risk with resilience

8. Resilience
• The ability to respond
quickly and efficiently
to negative change in
the business
environment
– Managing risk
– Bouncing back from
adverse events
– Disaster recovery
• Tactical business driver
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The opposite of brittleness

9. Business Agility
• Responsiveness
– Tactical value
• Resilience
– Risk mitigation
• Innovativeness
– Strategic value
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Ability to respond to change in the
business environment and leverage
change for competitive advantage

10. Innovativeness
• The ability to introduce change into the business
environment in order to achieve a strategic
advantage
– New products or services
– Expand market share
– Enter new markets
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11. What Changes are Necessary
to Drive Innovation?
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12. Today’s Agile Imperative
Organizations
must capitalize
on disruption to
achieve greater
innovativeness
and resilience in
the face of
digital
transformation
priorities
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13. The Core Business Goal
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Agile
Digital
Transformation

14. What is Digital?
Customer preferences & behavior
drive technology choices
Range of technology touchpoints is exploding
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PhotoCredit:RevolWebhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/revolweb/

15. What about
Transformation?
Internal organizational change is necessary
to maintain focus on the customer in today’s
digital world
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PhotoCredit:Pascalhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/pasukaru76/

16. What is Digital
Transformation?
• Customer pressures
driving technological and
organizational change in
companies
• Enterprises rethinking:
– How they serve
customers
– The role IT plays
– How they build & manage
teams
– How they innovate
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17. Digital Transformation
What are you transforming?
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Digital Transformation =
Business Transformation
Customer
Experience
Technology
Internal
Organization
All of the
Above

18. The Key to “Flexible
People”
• How do get teams
to capitalize on
disruption?
• How do you take
creative,
imaginative
individuals and
establish processes
for innovation?
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Self-Organization
PhotoCredit:JulienHarnelshttps://www.flickr.com/photos/julien_harneis/

19. Essential Tool: Self-
Organization
• Traditional hierarchical
organizational models
limit or eliminate self-
organization
• “Skunk works,” startups,
and DevOps organizations
work best when self-
organized
• Should digital efforts be
self-organized?
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20. The Agile Manifesto Leads
the Way?
– Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
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Source:http://www.agilemanifesto.org
“The best architectures,
requirements, and designs
emerge from self-
organizing teams.”

21. Self-Organization in
Practice
• Individuals collaborate on ad hoc basis depending
on business priorities
• Management responsible
for:
– Setting goals
– Providing resources
– Delineating constraints
(e.g. compliance)
– Getting out of the way
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Assigning people or tasks to a team?
It’s not self-organized!
PhotoCredit:RobbertvanderSteeghttps://www.flickr.com/photos/robbie73/

22. Self-Organization Thrives
on Disruption
• DevOps-style self-organization essential
for agile, innovative digital transformation
• Challenge: scale up
self-organization
from small team
level up to
enterprise level
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PhotoCredit:EricaJoyhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/ericajoy/
Innovation hangs in the balance

23. Innovation as Adaptive
Behavior
• Follows principles of
natural selection
• Disruptive
environments drive
adaptive behavior
• The better an
organization adapts to
disruption, the more it
will thrive
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Evolve or die!

24. Organizational
Connectivity & Innovation
• Tightly connected
organizational
networks limit
flexibility
• Loosely connected
organizational
networks facilitate
flexibility
– Reporting structures
– Lines of communication
– Expectations for collaboration
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PhotoCredit:Jamiehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/jbcurio/

25. The Paradox of Self-
Organization
• Managers can’t do it
– Unless they’re on the
team
• Digital strategies at the
executive level are self-
defeating
– Self-organize by not
organizing
– Manage change my not managing
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PhotoCredit:EstebanChinerhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/decadence/
Management Consulting Pitfall

26. A Word to the Managers
• Don’t:
– Assign people to teams
– Assign tasks or projects
to teams
– Determine success
criteria for teams
• Do:
– Provide context for teams (business,
compliance, etc.)
– Ensure that teams have what they need
– Get out of their way
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27. The Continuous Delivery
Mentality
• Self-organized
teams deploy when
ready
• Deployments are
increasingly
granular
• “Fail fast” mentality
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PhotoCredit:DennisHamiltonhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/orcmid/
Resilience becomes part of
the culture

28. The Center of Digital
Enablement
• Team responsible for
end-to-end best
practice across
digital effort
• Where the enterprise
architects fit in
• Essentially becomes
an innovation
competency center
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PhotoCredit:SonnyAbesamishttps://www.flickr.com/photos/enerva/
Let CODE self-organize

29. How to Participate on
Self-Organizing Team
• Know where you
can provide the
most value
• Leverage your
formal and
informal
networks to
recruit the best
people
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PhotoCreditthejbirdhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/jbird/:
Volunteer mindset

30. #1 Requirement:
Empathy
• Focus on the other people on
your team & across your
organization
• Your job is to make them
successful
– And vice-versa
• Thought patterns to avoid:
– Throw it over the wall
– Us vs. them
– Any kind of bigotry
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31. The Bar is Set!
It doesn’t make sense to
hire smart people and
tell them what to do; we
hire smart people so they
can tell us what to do.
– Steve Jobs (allegedly)
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32. Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx
jason@intellyx.com
@theebizwizard
Send email NOW to innovation@intellyx.com
to download this presentation
Thank You!