Strategy & Transformation
Flourishing in the modern marketplace relies on an organisation’s ability to make the right choices.
To avoid being left behind in an evolving world it is critical for organisations to jump at opportunities for transformational growth. However, acting without sufficient planning is fraught with risk.
Transformation can only happen when an organisation is aligned on its strategic intent, and IT leaders need the resources to drive great choice-making across their organisation.
From planning to delivery, IBRS can cut through the confusion and guide your organisation all the way through its transformational journey. Our advisors have first-hand experience delivering digital transformation projects and can develop a tailored roadmap to deliver the outcomes you want.
The Latest
2 December 2020: Salesforce introduces Hyperforce. This move is a re-architecture of Salesforce’s design to continually support its global customer base. It has B2B and B2C performance scalability, built-in security, local data storage, and backward compatibility.
Hyperforce allows Salesforce solutions to be run on a hyper scale Cloud service based on the client’s choice. These solutions include:
- Sales Cloud
- Service Cloud
- Community Cloud
- Chatter
- Lightning Platform (including Force.com)
- Site.com, Database.com
- Einstein Analytics (including Einstein Discovery)
- Messaging
- Financial Services Cloud
- Health Cloud, Sustainability Cloud
- Consumer Goods Cloud
- Manufacturing Cloud
- Service Cloud Voice
- Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing
- Customer 360 Audiences
Why it’s Important
Being able to move a SaaS solution to the Cloud based on client's preference, is a radical departure from convention for most major SaaS vendors. It is likely to be followed by other SaaS solution vendors, though Oracle’s close ties with Netsuite and Microsoft Dynamics with Azure, suggest Salesforce’s two main rivals will not be following this strategy any time soon.
This is a long-overdue overhaul for the entire Salesforce architecture as it needs to offer both architectural and commercial elasticity to aid customer’s global digital transformation.
It solves data sovereignty issues and provides all the advantages of using public Cloud resources. It also reduces implementation time despite being an enhanced architecture designed from the ground up to help customers deliver workloads to the public Cloud of choice.
Who’s Impacted
- CIOs
- CTOs
- CRM leaders
- Salesforce developers
What’s Next?
While the Hyperforce announcement is welcoming, there are still loopholes in the horizon. The solution is not available for on-prem implementations of the major Cloud vendors. Meaning, Hyperforce is not a path to an on-prem or hybrid Cloud solution.
For Australian organisations that aim to gain more control over how Salesforce stores information, either for compliance or cost control, to bring it closer to other Cloud services, Hyperforce is worth considering. It offers greater flexibility but also comes with a greater need for managing resources and costs.
Before making any decision on moving to Hyperforce, Salesforce clients should have clear understanding of the following migration aspects:
- Who will do the migration (i.e. the client or Salesforce)?
- Who will deal with the public IaaS provider on a daily basis?
- How will the current service cost be impacted?
- Who will be responsible for the service management of public IaaS including the service desk?
- What are the new risks that should be identified and mitigated?
- Are there any changes to the current backup arrangements?
- Are there any changes to the disaster recovery and business continuity arrangements?
- How will the current change management arrangements change?
- How the exit fees might change?
Related IBRS Advisory
- Salesforce vs Dynamics
- Is SaaS taking more from your company’s wallet? Modern SAM tools can reduce the spend
- CRM modernisation Part 5: Microsoft Dynamics vs Salesforce total cost of service
- IBRSiQ: Can IBRS review our Dynamics365 (D365) licensing calculations?
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
The Latest
2 December 2020: Salesforce Einstein is being extended into the Mulesoft automation and data integration platform. The newly announced Flow Orchestrator enabled non-technical staff to transform complex processes into industry-relevant events. The new AI-assisted MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce will allow an organisation to integrate data from multiple systems, including third-party solutions.
Why it’s Important
AI enables business process automation as a key technology enabler that favours organisations with a Cloud-first architecture. Salesforce will leverage its experience and connections with selling to organisation’s non-IT executives to secure a strong ‘brand leadership’ position in this space.
Who’s Impacted
- CIOs
- CTOs
- CRM Leaders
What’s Next?
In mid-2019, IBRS noted a significant upswing in interest in Mulesoft and integration technologies more broadly from the non-ICT board-level executives. In particular, COOs and CFOs expressed strong interest in, and awareness of, process automation through APIs.
Digging deeper, IBRS finds that Salesforce account teams, who are well-known for bypassing the CIO and targeting senior executive stakeholders, are also bringing Mulesoft into the business conversation. Also, Microsoft is expected to double-down on AI-enabled business process automation with the PowerPlatform.
As a result, the addition of Salesforce Einstein AI into the discussion of automation and integration is expected to land very well with COOs and CFOs.
CIOs need to be ready to have sophisticated discussions with these two roles regarding the potential for AI in process automation. Expectations will be high. Understanding the possible challenges of implementing such a system takes careful consideration. CIOs should be ready to build a business case for AI-enabled business process automation.
Related IBRS Advisory
- CIOs seek ready-made over DIY AI solutions
- Responding to budget cuts by increasing efficiency: First Steps
- Artificial intelligence Part 3: Preparing IT organisations for artificial intelligence deployment
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
The Latest
2 December 2020: DXC Technology is partnering with Microsoft to create modern workplace experience. This effort is aimed at addressing the demand by enterprises to improve workplace agility, which has come into sharp relief during the pandemic.
Why it’s Important
This announcement clearly shows Microsoft’s strategy for securing not just segments of the enterprise architecture of the future but the lion’s share.
Enterprise companies are driving the business transformation to enhance collaboration, increase mobility, and improve customer engagements. This announcement comes as competition such as Salesforce heats up through several acquisitions, and Microsoft’s long-time rival, Oracle, makes inroads into new models of SaaS.
Who’s Impacted
- CIO / CTO
- Enterprise software architecture team
What’s Next?
Microsoft, like all vendors, has a strategy to extract ever more revenue from its clients. However, Microsoft's unique position in the market gives it huge power. Understanding how Microsoft will evolve its services and licensing models is essential for keeping budgets in control.
As explored in this week’s Salesforce Slack announcement, IBRS sees that one option for the future digital workplace architecture is based on five platforms.
- A platform consisting of central systems of record (e.g., CRM, ERP, etc.) in the Cloud or Cloud-like environments
- An integration platform that surrounds the mentioned platforms
- A one (or likely two) low-code platform(s)
- A platform that provides the needed collaboration tools
- A federated information management platform.
Indeed, Salesforce is buying the platforms it needs and integrating them then, leveraging its strength in selling it to both technical and non-technical executives. On the other hand, Microsoft is starting from a position of technical strength and deep connection with the systems integrators.
This is evident with the DXC agreement, which is a classic strategy. Leveraging larger SIs as a strategy to deliver a future digital workplace architecture, with Microsoft 365 and Teams (collaboration), Dynamics 365 (core systems), Power Platform (low code and automation), and Power BI (business intelligence).
Related IBRS Advisory
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
The Latest
2 Dec 2020: Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack. The forthcoming merger of Salesforce and Slack provides an avenue for a new operating system of how e-commerce organisations and companies grow and succeed in the digital space. The merger is anticipated to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022.
Why it’s Important
Salesforce has struggled to shore up offerings in the collaborative side of the business, which will evolve to be an important part of modern CRMs and ERPs, along with low code dev and integration for process automation and business intelligence tools for analytics. The planning acquisition of Slack rounds out Salesforce’s ‘magic four’ components of a modern digital workplace.
The Slack acquisition aims at heading off increasingly strong competition from Microsoft’s Dynamics, the Power Platform, PowerBI, and Teams.
Who’s Impacted
- CIOs
- CFOs
- COOs
What’s Next?
Consider your future digital workplace architecture based on these five high-level platforms:
- A platform consisting of central systems of record (e.g., CRM, ERP, etc.) in the Cloud or Cloud-like environments
- An integration platform that surrounds the mentioned platforms
- A one (or likely two) low-code platform(s)
- A platform that provides the needed collaboration tools
- A federated information management platform
Though these five platforms need not all come from the same vendor, nor even be made up of a single vendor’s solutions, Microsoft, Salesforce, and little-known Zoho are all vying for the entire set. The competition for the overall ‘Enterprise Digital DNA’ will heat up significantly through to 2025.
IBRS expects Salesforce and possibly Microsoft to make new investments in information management platforms from 2021 to 2022. There will be rapid expansion, followed by feverish consolidation of the low code platform market.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Salesforce vs Dynamics
- Can IBRS review our Dynamics365 (D365) licensing calculations?
- CRM modernisation Part 5: Microsoft Dynamics vs Salesforce total cost of service
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
The Latest
5 December 2020: Australian education solution vendor Tribal, has upgraded its digital learning design chatbot. The move is illustrative of how chatbots can be leveraged to aid complex tasks - in this case, learning content, delivery, and leaner coaching.
Why it’s Important
Chatbots are not unique to Tribal. However, Tribal is demonstrating how such agents can deliver new capabilities into the LMS market, which can be glacial in the adoption of innovation. The Tribal chatbot is aimed at improving knowledge transfer inside an organisation. It assists domain experts to build learning content and share knowledge by recommending approaches to online training.
Who’s Impacted
- CIO / CTO
- Service delivery teams
What’s Next?
Like most forms of AI, chatbots will make their way into organisations through their addition to existing software solutions, either via paid upgrades or as part of the ongoing improvements of SaaS solutions. Chatbots will increasingly act in an advisory manner or as a guide for complex processes inherent in the vendors’ solutions.
As a result of this trend, staff will be presented with a growing number of chatbots embedded in different vendor’s solutions, each serving a specific purpose. This itself will present a new challenge for digital maturity and staff satisfaction.
Related IBRS Advisory
- CIOs seek ready-made over DIY AI solutions
- Modern CRM Part 4: Specifications and requirements template
- Contact centre trends update in 2019/2020
- Chatbots Part 1: Start creating capabilities with a super-low-cost experiment
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
Conclusion: Organisations wishing to re-engineer their old legacy systems to modernise their environments, leverage the power and cost-effectiveness of Cloud and prepare themselves for the future should explore the new SaaS offerings when developing their service go-to-market strategies and tenders.
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- Wissam Raffoul
Conclusion: The true benefit of digital strategies is in the thinking, reviewing, assessing and critical evaluation of where the current state is and where the target needs to be. Organisations that have commenced digital transformation have recognised that capability development and ownership of the strategy can make or break success. It is critical to be brutally honest about capability and skills to get to the target.
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- Sue Johnston
Conclusion: Machine learning operations (MLOps) adapts principles, practices and measures from developer operations (DevOps), but significantly transforms some aspects to address the different skill sets and quality control challenges and deployment nuances of machine learning (ML) and data engineering.
Implementing MLOps has several benefits, from easing collaboration among project team members to reducing bias in the resulting artificial intelligence (AI) models.
- Details
- Joseph Sweeney
The Latest
Woolworths has selected Dell Technologies Cloud to support its private Cloud infrastructure over two data centres. The Dell offering provides Woolworths with a consistent, managed operating environment across public and private Clouds.
Why it’s Important
The future of enterprise computing will be hybrid Cloud because hyperscale Cloud services are not the most cost effective environment for every application or use case. However, the benefits of Cloud can be brought into on-premises data centres through adoption of new architectures, including new management services, containers and virtualisation, hyperconverged systems and software-defined infrastructure. Dell’s approach wraps these technologies into a commercial model that mimics hyperscale Cloud vendors: consumption-based and elastic. It is a model worth watching.
Who’s Impacted
- Enterprise architects
- Cloud migration leads
- Data centre managers
What’s Next?
Dell Technologies Cloud is as much a contractual innovation as it is a set of technologies. Like Oracle Cloud, it evolves traditional ICT operational models to embrace aspects of hyperscale Cloud, while recognising the necessity of on-premises infrastructure. This is one approach that may, if appropriately provisioned and supported locally, see strong growth among larger enterprises and those needing to maintain their own data centres, while still taking advantage of the benefits of Cloud computing.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 49: The case for hybrid Cloud migration
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 50: Hybrid Cloud migration – Where is the money saving?
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
The Latest
CommsChoice Group has announced expanded Centre functionality for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing. The new service allows companies to implement a call centre natively within the Teams environment, leveraging Direct Routing.
Why it’s Important
Many Australian organisations - in particular public sector and local government - are in the process of re-architecting customer engagement from traditional ‘centralised call centre’ models to multichannel and then to omnichannel. The introduction of collaborative telephony solutions with rich API support, such as Teams, brings the possibilities of accelerating the move to true omnichannel services. Direct Routing allows contact centre agents to make and receive calls within Microsoft Teams, while also engaging in mixed mode communications, such as chat (potentially assisted by chat bots) and video meetings.
Who’s Impacted
- Call centre managers and architects
- Sales managers
- Telephony teams
- Office365 teams
What’s Next?
While CommsChoice is not the only vendor offering call centre integration with Teams, its announcement shows the likely future of calls centre architecture: a blend of collaborative tools and telephony, linked to internal and external-facing service channels. However, IBRS cautions organisations against rushing to adopt omnichannel call centre architectures. We have noted that the most successful organisations take a measured, phased approach, moving first to a multichannel operating model and only then to omnichannel. Many organisations have departmental processes that struggle to support true omnichannel. Staging through a multichannel model first allows organisations to identify and address the internal departmental silos before making the biggest step to omnichannel.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Omnichannel Customer Service must be more than Multichannel done properly
- Improve the customer experience within a digitally transformed world
- Modern telephony: Considerations
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
The Latest
19 Nov 2020: During its annual summit, Snowflake announces a series of new capabilities: a development environment called Snowpark, support for unstructured media, row-level security for improved data governance and a data market.
Why it’s Important
Of Snowflake’s recent announcements, Snowpark clearly reveals the vendor’s strategy to leverage its Cloud analytics platform to enable the development of data-intensive applications. Snowpark allows developers to write applications in their preferred languages to access information in the Snowflake data platform.
This represents an inversion of how business intelligence / analytics teams have traditionally viewed the role of a data warehouse. The rise of data warehouses was driven by limitations in computing performance: heavy analytical workloads were shifted to a dedicated platform so that application performance would not be impacted by limits of database, storage and compute power. With Cloud-native data platform architectures that remove these limitations, it is now possible to leverage the data warehouse (or at least, the analogue of what the data warehouse has become) to service applications.
Who’s Impacted
Development teams
Business intelligence / analytics architects
What’s Next?
Snowflake's strategy is evidence of a seismic shift in data analytics architecture. Along with Domo, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and other Cloud-based data platforms that take advantage of highly scalable, federated architectures, Snowflake is empowering a flip in how data can be leveraged. To take advantage of this flip, organisations should rethink the structure and roles within BI / analytics teams. IBRS has noted that many organisations continue to invest heavily in building their BI / analytics architecture with individual best-of-breed solutions (storage, databases, warehouse, analytics tools, etc), while placing less focus on the data scientists and business domain experts. With access to elastic Cloud platforms, organisations can reverse this focus - putting the business specialists and data scientists in the lead.
Related IBRS Advisory
Workforce transformation: The four operating models of business intelligence
Key lessons from the executive roundtable on data, analytics and business value
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
Conclusion: Despite decades of investment in new technologies and the promise of 'digital transformation', workforce productivity has languished. The problem is that technological change does not equate to process nor practice change. Put simply, doing the same things with new tools will not deliver new outcomes.
The mass move to working from home has forced a wave of change to practices: people are finally shifting from a sequential approach to work to a genuinely collaborative approach. And this work approach will remain even as staff return to the office.
The emerging wave through 2020 and beyond is process change: continual and iterative digitisation of process. Practice and process changes will be two positive legacies of the pandemic.
- Details
- Joseph Sweeney
The Latest
13 Nov 2020: Google Cloud announced preview availability of a serverless Database Migration Service (DMS), which enables clients to migrate MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases to Cloud SQL from on-premises environments or other clouds.
Why it's Important
Refactoring applications to take advantage of Cloud-native databases is one of the fastest cost-optimisation opportunities for organisations migrating to Cloud services. Cloud-native databases offer cost-efficiencies in both technical terms (e.g. storage costs) and operational savings (e.g. auto-tuning and scaling). However, the cost of migrating can be a sticking point in the development of business cases, especially where specialised outside help is required.
Google DMS addresses the above by simplifying and reducing the cost of database migration. It eliminates the need to provision migration-specific compute resources.
Azure and AWS have their own database migration approaches, and even though Google’s solution is in its infancy, it has a solid road map.
Who’s Impacted
Organisations with Adobe Marketing Cloud and related investments, and Workfront customers.
- Enterprise Architects
- Cloud Migration / Strategic leads
What’s Next
Organisations with Cloud migration strategies should be comparing how to not only optimise the cost of running Cloud databases, but also the cost and agility of migration. This consideration should not rest upon one use case, but assume that an increasing number of databases will be migrated over time, both from on-premise and from other Cloud providers.
Close ‘like-for-like’ calculations suggest that Google’s MySQL database services are lower than that of both Azure and AWS, though direction comparisons are difficult given the number of possible configurations. Therefore, while Google is not a major Cloud player in the ANZ region (compared to AWS and Azure) it can be considered as an option for cost-optimisation in a multi-Cloud setting.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 50: Hybrid Cloud migration – Where is the money saving?
- Running IT-as-a-Service Part 33: How to transition to hybrid Cloud
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
The Latest
9 Nov 2020: Adobe announced a commitment to purchase Workfront for USD1.5b. The deal will bring Workfront’s marketing workflow and collaboration solutions into Adobe’s portfolio of ecommerce, content creation and delivery solutions.
Why it's Important
Adobe is the leader in the marketing technology landscape, with a wide portfolio of solutions for content creation and delivery. In the last three years, Adobe has aggressively pursued design and ecommerce automation through AI and related technologies. The addition of Workfront to its portfolio brings collaboration and workflow into the mix. The likely result being AI powered decision-making into marketing workflows.
Who’s Impacted
Organisations with Adobe Marketing Cloud and related investments, and Workfront customers.
- eCommerce / marketing technology leads
What’s Next
Workfront and Adobe have a history of collaboration and there are cultural synergies that will likely make the merger relatively seamless from a customer perspective. In the near term (2-3 years), Workfront clients will not see a significant shift in product direction nor licensing. However, as Adobe leverages its AI capabilities into Workfront, expect to see new capabilities that benefit Adobe Marketing Cloud, Experience Manager and other products in the Adobe suite. Longer term, Workforce clients (many of whom are already Adobe clients) should prepare for the more assertive licensing audit activities for which Adobe is known.
Related IBRS Advisory
- Acquisitions Part 2: Predicting the outcomes
- Acquisitions Part 3: The role of corporate cultures
- The Future of Work (Adobe Think Tank Video)
- Software licensing tactics: Delay, delay, pay, pay
- Can IBRS provide an analysis on whether to deploy Bronto for marketing automation - or something else?
- Details
- IBRS Advisor Team
Conclusion: Organisations using Microsoft Server licences should consider leveraging the full potential of recent developments in the AWS licence suite. For more than a decade, AWS Cloud services have provided different organisations reliable data servicing and fewer downtime hours. AWS suggests that it offers clients more instances and twice the performance rate on SQL servers compared to other Cloud providers. Clients will need to have a performance rating in mind to validate these services for their own use.
Over the past decade, AWS has sought to innovate its processes and features following customer feedback. For example, the AWS License Manager was developed after customer feedback as a one-stop solution that manages usage limits and enables IT licensing optimisation across a variety of software vendors and across hybrid environments. It is important for customers to compare this licence management solution with other Cloud providers to validate the additional benefits.
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- Mark Unwin
Conclusion: SAP ECC on-premise versions required ownership of ERP infrastructure and multi-year licensing. The business cases for such investments considered ERP systems essential to remain competitive in IT service industries, logistics and resource-intensive sectors.
The next stage of the SAP journey recognises that Cloud infrastructure associated with S/4HANA can remove the large capital investment and reduce operating costs. Even with this infrastructure saving, the data migration risk remained with CIOs looking to identify a reliable data migration method. Any data migration considered to be high risk should be avoided in the current environment. Many are unfamiliar with the best method to migrate from on-premise SAP solutions to SAP S/4HANA in the Cloud.
SAP and its partners are now making this data migration journey not only more transparent but achievable in a timeframe that is measured in months not years. This is being achieved through Cloud platforms that can interrogate and integrate legacy data, then present migration paths in real time whilst retaining the data integrity before, during and after the migration.
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- Mark Unwin
Conclusion: ‘Voice of the customer’ (VoC) programs often involve the collection and analysis of data through feedback, research and analytics. This can provide an organisation with a strong view of customer desires, pain points, improvement opportunities and new product opportunities. However, this approach does not provide insight into whether these desires, pain points and ideas are shared by your employees. It also does not tell you whether these ideas are easy to implement or if they are achievable. In part, these are the reasons why only 24 % of large firms think they are good at making changes to the business based on insights captured through their VoC programs1.
Many organisations invest in employee engagement programs and initiatives, without realising the full benefit (i. e. action) of this investment2. This paper explores how, by capturing the voice of your staff as a component of your VoC program, organisations can increase the practical value of insights collected, expedite the road to implementation and focus on targeted, achievable action.
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- David Beal
Conclusion: Growing use of SaaS-based, low-code application development platforms will accelerate digital process innovation. However, embracing citizen developers (non-IT people who create simple but significant forms-based applications and workflows) creates issues around governance: including security, process standardisation, data quality, financial controls, integration and potentially single points of failure. There is also a need for new app integrations and service features for its stakeholders that need to be addressed before the potential for citizen developers can be fully realised.
If governed properly, low-code platforms and citizen developers can accelerate digital transformation (or at least, digitisation of processes) and in turn alleviate the load on traditional in-house development teams.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in prolonged lockdowns and quarantines, limiting economic activity and resulting in closure of businesses and many people losing their jobs. Various institutions around the world are unanimous in predicting that a recession is on its way, if not already here. Unless a vaccine is developed in the immediate future, the uncertainty will continue to rise in the days and months to come. However, businesses can turn this situation into an opportunity to examine their current operations.
A review of the events of the recent global recession – the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 – reveals that six recession-seeded trends, when acted upon promptly, provided business advantage. Although the trends for the anticipated COVID-19-led recession are still to be established, CIOs can benefit from re-examining the lessons of the past recessions and exploring a recession’s potential to deliver organisational efficiencies and savings. The outcome may be selective adoption of technology or deferral of projects, but the potency of these trends cannot be ignored.
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- Sue Johnston
Conclusion: The need to see value from an enterprise architecture (EA) framework is essential, if for no other reason than to justify the cost. However, the business benefit of EA is not just the cost. It will also provide reduced risk and improved agility for the business in its use of ICT.
Many organisations struggle with how success or failure of EA should be measured. This paper provides the reader with guidance and advice on what to measure EA against and how that measurement could be presented as a key performance indicator (KPI).
In establishing KPIs for the EA framework your organisation has adopted, both business and ICT will jointly have a better understanding of the value EA brings to the enterprise, and be able to provide governance on the continuous improvement of your EA framework to achieve even better value.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion: The Digital Ready Workforce Maturity Model serves as a tool to help organisations measure the digital readiness of their workforce. It provides the baseline for organisations. This insight then informs strategic planning, policies and capability development priorities for organisations to guide and subsequently monitor maturity and capability.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: IBRS has identified five areas of governance overlooked in the rush to deploy Teams. Organisations now need to ‘back-fill’ these areas to ensure the organisation meets its compliance obligations and reaps the full benefits of the digital collaboration environment.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: Many organisations have implemented collaboration and in particular video-conferencing facilities to support critical business operations in response to managing the COVID-19 pandemic. While remote workers have embraced these platforms with enthusiasm, organisations have had little opportunity to govern the use of these platforms due to the need to roll them out quickly. As end-users push forward with sharing confidential data and video across many teams, issues of data access rights, data confidentiality and employee confusion will emerge. Unless organisations put in place appropriate governance on their collaboration platform, the full benefits of the platform will not be realised.
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- Dr. Philip Nesci
Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic has taken the whole world by storm, shutting down establishments and pushing businesses and public sector agencies towards high levels of uncertainty. It seems it will be a while before this storm lets up.
Regardless of how bleak the effects of the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns are to the economy and the business sector, it can be a platform where leaders and innovators come forth.
Most companies are struggling to determine the next steps and are barely surviving through their business continuity plans. This paper aims to help you pivot towards a different perspective.
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- Sue Johnston
Conclusion: A simple Google search can provide access to thousands of change management frameworks, methodologies and theories. Many relate specifically to digital transformation; however, methods such as the Knoster model cover organisational change more broadly across culture, vision, resources and action planning.
The frequency of unsuccessful organisational change or transformation is on the rise1. While there are many organisational change theories, this paper demonstrates the connection between a particular theoretical framework (Knoster model) and how an organisation can translate these theories into successful organisational activities and practice.
This advisory paper will step through the six dimensions of change within the Knoster model for managing complex change and how you can use this to easily investigate and diagnose the overall health of your organisation’s change or transformation agenda, and to identify practical steps to stay on track.
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- David Beal
Conclusion: When it comes to embracing collaboration, organisations should recognise that it is difficult to manage diverse personalities, perceptions and beliefs. In addition, every individual is going to have their preference on what makes a ‘good collaboration system’.
As a result, it is vital that project leads carefully consider the role staff play in a successful Microsoft Teams deployment and prepare staff for the changes ahead.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: Many organisations have now contained the COVID-19 crisis and stabilised their operations. The focus is now rapidly shifting towards the recovery phase. While the full implications of the 'new normal' are yet to be fully understood, it clear that industry sectors will be impacted very differently. What are the three mega trends emerging in the post COVID-19 world.
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- Dr. Philip Nesci
Conclusion: Microsoft Teams is a collaborative hub for teamwork with links to a wide range of information sources and communication capabilities. While a latecomer to the collaboration software solution market, Teams benefits from being included in Microsoft’s 365 platform, which means many organisations have ready access to collaboration capabilities without the licensing costs of dedicated third-party solutions.
Teams is a relatively new and rapidly evolving solution; therefore, deployment challenges are present. Organisations must prioritise a structured approach to planning, governance development and security. Planning is important to empower users so that the organisation can break down information and communication silos. The sooner the organisation prepares concrete plans, the smoother the transition will be. This paper outlines better practices for such planning.
Organisations that rushed the deployment of Teams to support working from home as part of the pandemic response should revisit their Teams deployments against the better practices discussed in this advisory paper, and ‘back-fill’ any missing activities to ensure that Teams maintains long-term benefits for the organisation.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: For many years, shadow IT or business-managed computing has flown under management’s radar screen with mixed results. For some organisations it has been a panacea as it has helped them automate business processes quickly and gain valuable business insights from accessing complex data structures.
In some organisations, business managers resort to developing a shadow IT solution because skilled IT resources are not available due to budget constraints. When this occurs, business or engineering professionals (also known as digital natives) are then reassigned to provide a stop-gap solution, which is often uncontrolled. For these managers, shadow IT is an irritant as it diverts them and their direct reports from their everyday tasks.
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- Alan Hansell
Conclusion: With working from home mandated for a large portion of Australian workers as part of the national pandemic response, ICT groups are tasked with rapidly scaling up existing remote working programs and implementing entirely new ways of working for staff.
On the 16th April 2020, IBRS moderated a virtual roundtable where senior ICT executives discussed their organisation's experience in rapidly migrating to working from home and explored the lessons they had learned along the way. This paper details the insights gained and makes recommendations.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: More than one-third of businesses globally claim to have an omnichannel strategy, which is often predicated on the use of digital channels and platforms1. However, in this quest to leverage digital channels, many organisations are rushing to create omni-enablement plans that look good on paper, but in fact, fail in practice.
This paper covers the three measures that organisations can take to successfully evolve their multichannel foundational investment (walking) for sustainable future omnichannel enablement (running).
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- David Beal
Conclusion: One of the misconceptions in business intelligence (BI) is that the goal is to capture and report upon all available data. This misses an essential business maxim: data is only useful when it is applied deliberately and with a clear goal in mind.
Too often, an organisation’s focus on BI quickly moves from aspirational principles of ‘being a data-driven business’ to discussions of technology architecture and data governance. However, it is dangerous to focus on simply hoarding data in the hope it will be useful in the future. What extracts value from data are steps taken after collection. And to define those steps, an organisation must first define the purpose to which the data will be applied.
IBRS has identified four increasingly sophisticated business models for how data can be applied: business reporting, data visualisation, key performance dashboard and predictive decision support.
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- Joseph Sweeney
IBRS was asked to present on the AI market for 2018 - 2019. This advisory presents an AI market overview for this time with an outlook towards 2025. How has your organisation's AI journey progressed?
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: The phrase ‘People, Process and Technology’ describes the three key elements of a successful business. Business is the why, People the who, Process the what, and Technology the how. No single element of the trilogy can be seen as more important than the others. However, in the post-COVID-19 world, successful businesses will see that the focus of People has changed – they no longer go to work, work goes to them.
In technology terms, this effectively means that everyone is now the core of the system; the old concept of a core that is controlled from a central hub is now questionable. Post-COVID-19 technology design must allow for each worker to be able to work from any location, able to access information, services and data when necessary, and for each location to have surge capability.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
IBRS analyst Dr. Joseph Sweeney provides best practice-advice on working from home in the current pandemic situation. Dr. Joseph Sweeney discusses current working from home policies which are mandated due to public health reasons, and explains how he has helped many organisations to adopt proper work-from-home practices.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Conclusion: The recent use of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions has demonstrated the value of this type of technology to consumers and organisations. It resulted in the recent discovery of new antibiotics, the emergence of self-services (e. g. virtual agents) and the ability to analyse unstructured data to create business value. However, releasing AI solutions without integrating them into the current IT production environment, the corporate network and Cloud will limit the value realisation of artificial intelligence deployments.
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- Wissam Raffoul
Conclusion: Organisations that are nearing the end of life for their current voice platforms or have a compelling event to hinge the replacement of their voice service, need to review their use of voice before replacing the technology. IBRS recommends organisations look to leverage voice as an application to operationalise the processes within the organisation, and improve customer satisfaction.
Today the newer technology offerings allow your organisation to get a better return from voice. However, the use of these new technologies will impact business processes and offer greater innovation for your customer interaction. It will not be a simple replacement of boxes.
The key is understanding the power of voice. It is now an application driven by smart software. Businesses need to assess their use of voice to determine the cost benefit of the changes in the technology stack now on offer.
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- Mike Mitchelmore
Conclusion: A common pitfall experienced by service-orientated organisations is the disconnect between its digital efforts and its marketing program. In good practice, marketing efforts should underpin your digital strategy. This can be achieved by unifying marketing’s focus on customer and staff engagement, communications and promotion with the leveraging of digital channels to conduct these activities.
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- David Beal
Conclusion: Being Cloud-based, Microsoft’s Office 365 includes features that would traditionally be considered backup. According to the Microsoft Office Trust Center, Microsoft establishes itself as a data processor with a primary focus on data privacy and management. It is not responsible for compliance or backup, but reliability and availability. As a result, Microsoft may not be able to provide security and protection to data in a way that meets an organisation’s compliance requirements.
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- Joseph Sweeney
Is your Working From Home Policy causing you grief?
Most organisations’ Working From Home policies are created under the assumption that people would be seeking permission to remote work. As a result, they focus on things that are simply not applicable to, or even blockers for, mandated working from home and self-isolation.
Worse, many policies have clauses that are impossible to enforce during this pandemic, go against government recommendations and potentially open the organisation up for workplace challenges. At the very least, older WHF policies can confuse and worry staff.
To help, IBRS has created a template for a simple, practical WHF policy, written in staff-friendly language. You can quickly customise and download this policy template as a Microsoft Word file.
Click here to create your Working From Home Policy template
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- Joseph Sweeney