6 principles to take you to digital leadership
Tired of lame recommendations from Gartner and other corporate tools? It’s time for something different, something truly and continuously agile. We got a different perspective when we looked closely at my SaaS company, Assembla, and digital leaders like Google and Amazon. Your company deserves a similar level of agility. Principles have the power to drive decisions large and small in the right direction. I worked with Brad Power and Roger Camrass to come up with the principles that will get you to true digital leadership.
We learn nothing by supporting motherhood and apple pie. To be useful, principles should take a position that also has a reasonable opposing position. Our principles for running an agile, results-oriented organization turn out to go against many aspects of conventional wisdom, and most of the IT framework promoted by Gartner.
Data should drive decision making — this conflicts with traditional views that strategy and priorities set by management opinion should drive decisions. Business managers in ‘digital companies’ have more authority due to pervasive data, and can react rapidly based on the real-time analysis of abundant market data
Data should be accessible, not structured — current wisdom suggests that data can be structured into ‘one version of the truth’. In complex, rapidly evolving systems this is no longer possible or necessary. Teams should have access to data in its unstructured and redundant forms, and become more self-managing because they can select the data they need for decision making. This increases access to new data, since it’s available before you put it into “one source of truth”. It also increases the quality and amount of data that is available. New techniques for analytics and machine learning can get meaning out of a mass of raw logged data that would be thrown away in one source of truth.
Projects should be structured into products with clear, real time value metrics and associated product managers. Traditionally projects were managed with stage gates and periodic presentations of business value. Product managers can use real-time metrics to get continuous improvement of business value.
IT teams and components should be re-usable in multiple products — historically such teams reported to one specific product line or program manager so they would receive clear signals about priorities. Digital companies become more adaptable and scalable because every team and capability is available to support new and expanding products
Product managers and technical leads can make ‘build or buy’ decisions to get what they need — this contravenes the traditional way in which IT controls such decisions, because of concerns about support, interoperability, and security). The new approach enables companies to get things done faster, with less work. IT needs to get out of the way, and then catch up.
Emulate the digital leaders rather than struggling enterprises— It’s easier to adopt practices from peers with similar problems, and the consultants (like Gartner) who help them with their struggles. However, this almost guarantees that you will also adopt their obvious limitations. You will get he mediocre performance of your peers, not the superstar performance of Apex digital leaders like Google and Amazon. Give yourself a chance of true success by learning from leaders and winners in the technology business.
