Have you ever been involved in a “brute force” cost cutting exercise? Ever felt helpless as valuable programs were eliminated or gutted and skilled talent walked out the door? If so, you are not alone. You were likely involved in a corporate expense slashing exercise or what many call “corporate downsizing”. These efforts have historically been orchestrated by C-suite executives coupled with management consultants, with little or no input from rank-and-file employees. Unfortunately, the C-suite and their advisors often lack the in-depth knowledge and appreciation for what is involved in the co ..read more

Enterprise design is the collaborative practice of designing and creating better enterprises. Enterprise design envisions perspectives on how an organization can and should evolve, addressing relevant aspects of user, customer, product, and organizational design elements. The discipline incorporates design thinking from an enterprise perspective; but where do strategy execution and design intersect? Fundamentally, strategy execution seeks to deliver on a business vision, goals, and objectives, which ideally are influenced by design thinking and practices. Even more critical, however, is the ab ..read more

Historically, strategy execution has been a linear process, where one group sets strategy and another group implements it. In practice, implementation teams often hold different views of what should be done from the strategy setting team. A second challenge is that strategy is often cast in stone, remaining fixed in place for extended periods. Strategy stagnation is typically based on the errant assumption that markets, customers, and competitors are standing still until the next strategy refresh; a far cry from reality. It is no small wonder that strategy execution failure rates remain stubbo ..read more

More and more organizations are seeking to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. AI is promoted as being able to transform every aspect of how organizations function, yet this vision is far from reality. As episode guest Seth Earley said in his recent book, The AI-Powered Enterprise, in spite of multiple generations of investments and billions of dollars of digital transformations, organizations are still struggling with information overload, which undercuts efforts to excel at customer service, reduce costs, and maximize efficiency. The foundation of ensuring that an organization can ..read more

Organizations around the globe rely on manual work, spreadsheets, and similar desktop tools to perform both mundane and sophisticated tasks. In some cases, desktop solutions take on appropriate tasks, like crunching data, but in other cases spreadsheets have taken a dominant role in keeping organizations running. In the latter case, spreadsheets serve as a vital link for transforming and porting data between systems, managing operational business data, running assembly lines, automating financial work, and automating other capabilities. These “shadow systems” represent significant risks to org ..read more

This episode of The North Star will highlight best practices for end-to-end strategy execution based on insights collected from the more than 2 dozen industry experts interviewed over the past 6 months. These interviews, which covered topics as wide ranging as innovation, organizational design, strategy formulation, artificial intelligence, program execution, work management, data management, software design and development, and systems modernization, highlighted the challenges organizations face leveraging these disciplines in an integrated context. Today, most organizations either ignore man ..read more

Long ago, U.S. states set their own standards for railroads, meaning tracks did not align as trains traveled cross country, creating more than an inconvenience. The technology industry also requires standards, which underpin a wide swath of technical and analytical work at organizations. Standards dictate how data is exchanged, business processes are structured, software is designed, mobile phones work and governments stave off cyberattacks. Is your manufacturing, financial services, insurance, transportation or telecommunications company engaged in standards work? As a rule, the answer would ..read more

Prior episodes of The North Star identified business architecture as a positive factor in successful strategy execution. It should come as little surprise then that, as business architecture has gained traction, the demand for skilled practitioners has grown. One association’s career center that specializes in job opportunities for business architects has scores of job openings. In addition to the fact that there is an actual shortage of skilled practitioners, the lack of well-formed job descriptions makes it difficult to attract talent. Many open requisitions expect every business architect t ..read more

This encore of Episode 1 of the North Star establishes the show's purpose, basic themes and range of topics to be covered. Host William Ulrich will discuss the suboptimal strategy execution track record that organizations share across the private and public sector, consider the root causes of these execution performance issues and lay the groundwork for optimizing strategy execution. He will share his experiences and lessons learned over the course of his 40-plus year career that has shifted his thinking from a technology-first to a business-first and customer-first perspective. William will a ..read more

On this episode of The North Star, we will explore the root causes of underperforming software teams. William Ulrich will welcome this episode’s guest Darius Blasband, CEO and founder of Raincode, a Brussels-based compiler technology company and author of ‘The Rise and Fall of Software Recipes’. Darius will offer his controversial opinions on topics such as Agile and software team composition. His opinions are not just controversial, but they are human, coming from years of personal field experience. So, are you concerned that your large-scale software development investments are not returning ..read more