The Business Analyst as Chief Innovation Officer - SOBARC IIBA Presentation to the BA in IT community

1. The B.A. as Chief
Innovation Officer
Southwestern Business Analysis Regional Conference
May 5, 2017 Doug Ross

2. Objectives of this discussion
.
Define and
Benchmark
Innovation
Establish
Best
Practices for
Advancing
Innovation as
a B.A.
What is innovation?01
Can we measure innovation?02
How does innovation happen?03
The B.A. as lead innovator04
A real-world example05

3. What is Innovation?
Remember
the “Dog
Sack”?

4. What is Innovation?
We all have a
“Pizza Fork” in
the home utensil
drawer, am I
right?

5. What is innovation?
What
genius
invented
Toilet
Golf?

6. What is Innovation?
And who among
us can imagine
living without
“The Wine
Glass Holder
Necklace?

7. What is Innovation?
INVENTION
is not
INNOVATION

8. 01
02
03
04
To turn an invention into an
innovation
FOUR DIALS
If it doesn’t turn a dial, it may be an
invention, not an innovation
TURN A DIAL?
Innovation must have a material impact on the business…

9. Innovation must have a material impact on the business…
If you charted
your idea
against a
standard
framework,
where would it
land?
Revenue Margin Differentiation
BusinessImpact
LowMediumHigh

10. Pop Quiz
1. What are the top three revenue-generating
products at your company?
2. What are the top three cost-drivers?
3. How does your organization differentiate itself?
a) Price – Walmart
b) Customer experience/service – Ritz Carlton
c) Features/Innovation -- Tesla

11. How that we’ve defined it, how does innovation happen?

12. It’s the number of connections…

13. Good ideas…
1. Network: a good idea is not a
single thing, it is a swarm
2. Plastic: the network can
rearrange itself, adapting to
new situations
3. Recognition: opportunity and
willingness to push oneself into
an interconnected state

14. The importance of interconnections
Interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas enter the world
half-baked, more hunch than revelation. Most great ideas lack a key element
that can turn a hunch into something much more powerful.

15. The 10/10 rule…
▪ 1920 – first commercial AM radio
station, KDKA in Pittsburgh
▪ 1950s -- First color broadcast (NBC
Tournament of Roses Parade)
▪ 1969 – Sony creates VCR
It takes a decade to build a new platform and a decade for it to find a new
audience…
▪ Late 1920’s – AM radios in
American homes
▪ 1960’s -- Color broadcasts
become the norm
▪ 1980’s – VCR become staples in
homes
DVD, HDTV, cell phones, personal computers, GPS – all
basically follow the 10/10 rule.

16. Boom!
Within 16 months of the company’s founding, YouTube was streaming
over 30 million videos a day.
Why did it grow so fast?

17. The Adjacent Possible
▪Just at the reach of making a discovery
▪Some bit of information or idea or learning is missing
▪Other pieces were needed to fall into place first

18. Evolution’s path can be explained by “adjacent possible”
▪ Single carbon atom
▪ Compounds
▪ Cells
▪ Tissue
▪ Organisms
▪ Plant/Animal/Mineral
Unhappy about being on the
same slide as a plankton

19. The evolution of good ideas
Good ideas
are not
conjured out
of thin air;
they are built
out of a
collection of
existing
parts…
1. Liquid Network
2. Serendipity
3. Slow hunches
4. Error
5. Noise
6. Exaptations
7. Platforms

20. Liquid networks
▪ Not so rigid that ideas can’t grow
and develop
▪ Not so much space where ideas
can’t reach each other.
▪ Free flow of ideas allows ideas to
connect, grow, reconnect with
others.
▪ Liquid networks complete ideas.

21. Serendipity
▪ “A Happy Accident”
▪ You have to set out in good faith for
elsewhere and lose your bearings
serendipitously
▪ Go for a walk, take a shower, remove
yourself from the problem; relax and get
into an associative state
▪ Research indicates that the web has pushed
our culture toward more serendipitous
encounters

22. Slow hunch
▪ A hunch – a guess about something
based on intuition -- that is developed
over time is more common than a
sudden flash of inspiration
▪ Have to keep the hunch alive
▪ Keep a journal or notebook and
review it occasionally to refresh your
hunch
▪ Sleeping on the problem actually
helps

23. Part of the secret of hunch cultivation
Write everything down.

24. Error
▪ Spark gap telegraph led to the
invention of vacuum tubes,
which in turn led to calculators,
televisions, transistors,
computers, etc.
▪ Fleming discovered penicillin by
bacteria accidentally entering his
lab
▪ A mistake reaching for a resistor
led from an oscillator that
recorded heartbeats to the
pacemaker that regulates them

25. Noise
Albert Einstein is
considered the patron saint
of useful messiness; he
once stated “If a cluttered
desk is a sign of a cluttered
mind, of what, then, is an
empty desk a sign?”
Ideas flourish in an
environment where they
can collide into one
another

26. Exaptation
Example: In Indonesia, Timothy
Prestero redesigned neonatal
incubators out of automobile parts
because the locals had access to and
knowledge of automobile engines; they
were inexpensive and easy to maintain
compared to conventional incubators
Defined: “Using a feature or structure for something other than its
original intended purpose”

27. Platforms
Tim Berners-Lee had a global,
TCP/IP-based network at his
disposal.
He invented the HTTP protocol
and kickstarted the world-wide
web.
The Internet platform he used
was an outgrowth of a military
network funded by DARPA to
survive a nuclear attack.

28. Putting it all together…
An idea does not pass
from a single neuron to
another single neuron in
the brain. Instead it is
jumps across the liquid
network and connects
and reconnects with
multiple neurons.

29. The B.A. as the Network Connector
B.A.
Product
Owner
2
Other
B.A.s
3
Devs
4
Testers
5
Writers
6
IT Mgmt
7
Biz
Mgmt
8
End
Users
1
The audience for the solution
The visionary
Engineering
Peers
QA automation and testing
Documentation specialists
IT Management Team
Managers in the business line

30. The B.A. as idea connector: a possible process flow
Working with an end user,
B.A. discovers an unmet
need and records it
B.A. records one or more
hunches, nurtures and refines
them over time
Working with a product
owner, the B.A. uncovers an
RMD opportunity and records
it
Reading an article, the B.A.
recognizes a useful pattern
for his or her project and
records it.
01
03
0204
The
B.A.’s
Idea List

31. A methodical approach to the B.A.’s liquid network
Great
Ideas
Methodical
Sharing and
Collaboration
External
Network
General
Learnings
OTJ
Learnings
Functional
Network
Customer
Network
Team
Network
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
Are you sharing?
What are your fellow team
members thinking?
What are your
customers thinking?
What are your fellow
BA’s working on?
Can you shadow or review
business processes?
What news/research
items are relevant?
What’s Happening
Outside?

32. Contact center example in epics and stories
As a rep, I can only search
for consumers on account
number or social. I would
like to search by name, ZIP
code, etc.
As a rep, I have to keep five
different applications open
in order to answer most
consumer questions… and
each one operates
differently!
As a rep, it can take 3 to 5
minutes to enter
consumer information
into each application to
look them up…
As an IT manager, we
don’t have the funds to
perform a major
overhaul of our contact
center apps…
As a rep, payment info is
on a separate screen
from the product order
detail. I would like the
last payment info to be
visible on the order
detail screen.
As a call center manager,
I need to reduce handle
time from 6 minutes to 4
or 5…

33. Potential contact center innovation?
The adjacent possible:
▪ Software robotics (RPA)
Attributes:
▪ Light IT touch
▪ No changes required on legacy
systems
▪ Wraps a new user interface over
existing apps
▪ Employs robotic automation to
bring together the data needed to
dramatically reduce handle time

34. How the B.A.’s liquid network facilitated this…
Great
Ideas
Methodical
Sharing and
Collaboration
External
Network
General
Learnings
OTJ
Learnings
Functional
Network
Customer
Network
Team
Network
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
Are you sharing?
What are your fellow team
members thinking?
What are your
customers thinking?
What are your fellow
BA’s working on?
Can you shadow or review
business processes?
What news/research
items are relevant?
What’s Happening
Outside?

35. Tool: a simple way to gauge ideas
Investment: Low Medium High
LowMediumHigh
Business
Value:
Investment (i.e.,
time-to-market,
FTE hours, cost,
risk, etc.
vs.
Business Value

36. Tool: a simple way to gauge ideas
Investment: Low Medium High
LowMediumHigh
Business
Value:
Investment (i.e.,
time-to-market,
FTE hours, cost,
risk, etc.
vs.
Business Value

37. Moving ideas through the process
Record and nurture ideas;
measure their value.
For vetted ideas, a CBA and
a rough timeline
Capture Proposal

38. Critical success factors
030201 04
RMDNetworkIdeasResearch
Are you keeping
apprised of
external factors?
Are you keeping a
record of your
ideas?
Are you
leveraging your
liquid network?
Are you assessing
business case or
CBA?

39. Ladies and gentlemen, start your innovation engines!
Doug Ross
VP, Cloud and Software Development
Sogeti USA, a Capgemini Group Company
doug.ross@us.sogeti.com