2023 - Welcome to the revolution!
This blog begins the theme for a series of articles with the goal of bringing awareness to the importance of Data strategy, Agile mindset and Business Intelligence in this phase of our Industrial (or information) revolution.
Over the next 12 months I hope to talk to industry experts, find and connect existing research, hypothesise, experiement and prototype some of the techniques and advice I find along the way and ask the question;
With the the technology and methodology available to us... where are we headed and what can we achieve?
Lets start from the beginning.Sure?
Lean
During the industrial revolution of the early 1900's we accelerated our production skills that enabled us to evolve from industry 2.0. The acceleration was due to Ford and Toyota who perfected the art of production value through whats now known today as "Lean thinking". Some suggest LEAN later became part of the blueprint for Agile. Most industries today use either LEAN or AGILE in manufacturing or development to maximise output and value.
Data
Todays equivalent of Ford and Toyota are Big Tech in; Google, Amazon, Microsoft and their leaders have something in common with Henry Ford and Kiichiro Toyoda. To develop global organisations they recognised that harnessing data was essential. All 3 have developed data centralisation strategys with Google Cloud, AWS and Microsft Azure and a way to analyse through Business Intelligence products - Tableau, Quicksight and PowerBI .All big tech were early adopters of agile (lean evolved) to create a continuous learning framework.
Agile
All 3 big tech recognised that value is driven by data. In 2001 the agile manifesto was created by a handful of bright software engineers. 6 years later Google were adopting agile closely followed by Microsoft a year later. The first impact may of been with Amazon who first started with Agile in 1999 and switched to a "customer obsessed mindset".
Agile is a methodology that helps deal with increasing complexity and the pace of change in a volatile market place. In this moment of the industrial revolution, companies adopting agile often stand out from the crowd in their industry with superior products, services and culture , examples are NASA, NETFLIX; SPOTIFY, SPACEX, more locally VISMA, DnB, Sparebank, Salesforce and many more.
In this moment of the industrial revolution, companies adopting agile often stand out from the crowd in their industry with superior products, services and culture
A mature agile organisation will understand how to apply the knowledge gained from its data into continuous improvement of the organisation. Some ways to describe how an agile organisation works are ;
- Open collaboration – both within the product/ project team and with stakeholders
- Rapid iteration to deliver small incremental usable items of value
- Continuous inspection and improvement to improve the team’s performance
- Empowering indivuals to create self-managed teams
- Flexibility to adjust plans and turn direction of projects, products or even the organisation, as needed.
Digital Transformation
For the last decade emphasis has been for business to digitise procedures and move data into cloud systems. Companies like zappier and automate offer 1000s of automated pipelines to save time and money and improve data accuracy.
But zapping data around is only the beginning of our transformation, this is known as digitisation. Forward thinking authomation suppliers will provide a more holistic a approach to digitisation and recommend strategies for data centralisation to learn from the data as it moves. In our industries we sit on large amounts of data and just like big tech we need to learn from that data to improve and grow - after all thats our data, we own it and we can learn from it.
Business Intelligence
Back in the 90s i remember frantically working on systems to extract data from large inhouse servers to highly paid consultants to spin up the data in OLAP cubes, drill down , group and present to business leaders. Business Intelligence, was as important then as it is now but only available to the big spenders.
Business Intelligennce, over the last 20 years had its own mini evolution, dealing with data from in-house on premise systems being thrown into the cloud. This effected the momentum of BI.... With data moving into the cloud how would technology provide us methods to access and report on data now distributed through many clouds?
Today there are mutlipe strategies for accessing cloud data thats more accessible and easier to use than ever before. However, traditional BI approaches often don’t meet the realities of the fast-paced and ever-changing needs of today’s world. Waterfall BI is a one time event of delivering a report, we need something more adaptive, more agile.
Agile Business Intelligence
Agile Business Intelligence (ABI) refers to using agile software development methods for BI projects to reduce time-to-value. Agile BI enables the BI team and client to make better business decisions through a managed framework. Agile, used with a skilled coach can bring together all elements that may effect and drive value and help shape the organisation to maximise its ability now, and, in a sustainable, scaleable future.
Agile BI enables better business decisions, faster
Agile BI is a continual process or service and not a one time implementation. Managers and leaders need accurate and quick information about the company and business intelligence provides the data they need and promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, in a time-boxed iterative approach.
Margherita Bruni in her article 5 Steps To Agile BI outlines the five elements that promote an Agile BI enterprise environment.
- Agile Development Methodology – “need for an agile, iterative process that speeds the time to market of BI requests by shortening development cycles”.
- Agile Project Management Methodology – continuous planning and execution. Planning is done at the beginning of each cycle, rather than one time at the beginning of the project as in traditional projects. In Agile project, scope can be changed any time during the development phase.
- Agile Infrastructure – the system should have virtualization and horizontal scaling capability. This gives flexibility to easily modify the infrastructure and could also maintain near-real-time BI more easily than the standard Extract, transform, load (ETL) model
- Cloud & Agile BI – Many organizations are implementing cloud technology now as it is the cheaper alternative to store and transfer data. Companies who are in their initial stages of implementing Agile BI should consider the Cloud technology as cloud services can now support BI and ETL software to be provisioned in the cloud.
- IT And Agile BI
Agility is driven by the need to serve end users. It’s about always being relevant and responsive. To achieve maximum effectiveness, IT must interact with the business it serves and also connect with the business problems. A BI team with high turnover from project to project will find it much harder to leverage lessons learned. Finally, beware red tape, which is usually imposed by ingrained processes and project management offices. Business and IT executive sponsors must commit fully to agile development. Only then can the need for speed be reflected in the BI infrastructure
Instead of traditional business intelligence project management approaches, organizations could use an Agile Business Intelligence approach. When using an agile approach, rather than planning everything upfront and then delivering the whole system at the end, Agile BI looks to deliver multiple small increments that progress towards change, improvement & growth.
Agile Transformation
When we turn Business Intelligence inwards we gain insights and awareness on our business areas that need improvement. In an agile transformation we take a step further to consider human, cultural and ethical values and how they contribute to the organisation goal. Making use of Agile BI on top of ERP and industry data, advisors will sit with a wealth of data that will empower change.
During an agile transformation an organisation hierarchy maybe optimised and new structures promoted to empower individuals and self organised teams. Frerik Laloux author of "A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness" explains there have been at least five distinct organizational paradigms in human history born through an evolutionary process that started 100,000 years ago and adds that a new form of organisation is emerging into public view and suggested there is a natural next step coming in our evolution - a new transformed organisation that is more like a living organism, that is self managed with wholeness and evolutionary purpose.
Using tools like an agile maturity assesments with Lalouxs organisation model can help you pinpoint how mature your organisation looks and may bring some awareness to where you might want to go.
Where does this lead to?
We are at an accelerated curve of our evolutionary path, enabled through transformational tech :Data services, Business Intelligence and Agile awareness. Workflows and processes of Agile Business Intelligence are evolving and producing new discovery, faster.
Technology is evolving, AI is here and will impact how we read and analyse business metrics in vast volumes.
As these key ingredients are gathering momentum and are intregrated into our organisations a new shift in consciousness will start to happen.
Laloux asks if the current organizational struggles could be a sign that civilization is outgrowing the current model and getting ready for the next and if that shift of conciousness could help us invent a radically more soulful and purposeful way to run and return value into our organisations and communitys.
The Industrial Revolution has been criticised for leading to ecological and habitat destruction and is inherently unsustainable leading to eventual collapse of society, mass hunger, starvation, and resource scarcity.
As we enter 2023 with our planning tools and proftability projections, lets also look for awareness, wholeness and purpose because with the tools we have available to us, we can start to achieve great things in our industries.
Welcome to the revolution!
Credits:
Frederic Laloux - Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014)
Margherita Bruni - https://dsimg.ubm-us.net/envelope/277542/495883/5-steps-to-agile-bi_8524665.pdf
Nick Hotz - Data Driven Scrum : https://www.datascience-pm.com/data-driven-scrum/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_collapse
Andreas Holmer - https://medium.com/workmatters/1-2-3-ideas-on-teal-organizations-self-management-wholeness-purpose-97014a63bd07
About the author :
Andy Smith is a product manager and agile coach at Syndeo