1. Innovation Processes in
the Age of Digital
Transformation
Jason Bloomberg
President
jason@intellyx.com
@theebizwizard

2. About Jason Bloomberg
• President of industry analyst firm
Intellyx
• Agile digital transformation thought
leader
• Write for Forbes, several blogs, biweekly
newsletter the Cortex
• Buy my latest book,
The Agile Architecture
Revolution
Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC2

3. Process for Innovation?
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Disrupt Innovate
Innovation is not a typical
business process!

4. The Disruption Spectrum
• Evolutionary innovation
– New and improved!
– Processes reasonably well
understood
– Common
• Disruptive innovation
– New market category!
– Customers didn’t know they
wanted it until they saw it
– Little understanding of the
process
– Rare
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5. Optimization vs.
Innovation
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Innovation
Disrupt status quo
to allow human
creativity to
flourish
Optimization
Establish
feedback loops
that maximize
business
outcome

6. Innovation Requires
Disruption
• External Disruption
– Competitive
pressures/new entrants
– Globalization
– Regulation
• Internal Disruption
– Digital Transformation
efforts
– Innovation initiatives
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7. Disruption Introduces
Risk
• Optimization without
disruption stifles
innovation
• Disruption without
optimization is an
innovation crap shoot
• Optimize what you
can & disrupt what
you must
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Mitigate risk with resilience

8. Resilience
• The ability to respond
quickly and efficiently
to negative change in
the business
environment
– Managing risk
– Bouncing back from
adverse events
– Disaster recovery
• Tactical business driver
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The opposite of brittleness

9. Business Agility
• Responsiveness
– Tactical value
• Resilience
– Risk mitigation
• Innovativeness
– Strategic value
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Ability to respond to change in the
business environment and leverage
change for competitive advantage

10. Innovativeness
• The ability to introduce change into the business
environment in order to achieve a strategic
advantage
– New products or services
– Expand market share
– Enter new markets
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11. What Changes are Necessary
to Drive Innovation?
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12. Today’s Agile Imperative
Organizations
must capitalize
on disruption to
achieve greater
innovativeness
and resilience in
the face of
digital
transformation
priorities
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13. The Core Business Goal
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Agile
Digital
Transformation

14. What is Digital?
Customer preferences & behavior
drive technology choices
Range of technology touchpoints is exploding
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15. What about
Transformation?
Internal organizational change is necessary
to maintain focus on the customer in today’s
digital world
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16. What is Digital
Transformation?
• Customer pressures
driving technological and
organizational change in
companies
• Enterprises rethinking:
– How they serve
customers
– The role IT plays
– How they build & manage
teams
– How they innovate
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17. Digital Transformation
What are you transforming?
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Digital Transformation =
Business Transformation
Customer
Experience
Technology
Internal
Organization
All of the
Above

18. The Key to “Flexible
People”
• How do get teams
to capitalize on
disruption?
• How do you take
creative,
imaginative
individuals and
establish processes
for innovation?
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Self-Organization
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19. Essential Tool: Self-
Organization
• Traditional hierarchical
organizational models
limit or eliminate self-
organization
• “Skunk works,” startups,
and DevOps organizations
work best when self-
organized
• Should digital efforts be
self-organized?
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20. The Agile Manifesto Leads
the Way?
– Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
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Source:http://www.agilemanifesto.org
“The best architectures,
requirements, and designs
emerge from self-
organizing teams.”

21. Self-Organization in
Practice
• Individuals collaborate on ad hoc basis depending
on business priorities
• Management responsible
for:
– Setting goals
– Providing resources
– Delineating constraints
(e.g. compliance)
– Getting out of the way
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Assigning people or tasks to a team?
It’s not self-organized!
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22. Self-Organization Thrives
on Disruption
• DevOps-style self-organization essential
for agile, innovative digital transformation
• Challenge: scale up
self-organization
from small team
level up to
enterprise level
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Innovation hangs in the balance

23. Innovation as Adaptive
Behavior
• Follows principles of
natural selection
• Disruptive
environments drive
adaptive behavior
• The better an
organization adapts to
disruption, the more it
will thrive
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Evolve or die!

24. Organizational
Connectivity & Innovation
• Tightly connected
organizational
networks limit
flexibility
• Loosely connected
organizational
networks facilitate
flexibility
– Reporting structures
– Lines of communication
– Expectations for collaboration
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PhotoCredit:Jamiehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/jbcurio/

25. The Paradox of Self-
Organization
• Managers can’t do it
– Unless they’re on the
team
• Digital strategies at the
executive level are self-
defeating
– Self-organize by not
organizing
– Manage change my not managing
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Management Consulting Pitfall

26. A Word to the Managers
• Don’t:
– Assign people to teams
– Assign tasks or projects
to teams
– Determine success
criteria for teams
• Do:
– Provide context for teams (business,
compliance, etc.)
– Ensure that teams have what they need
– Get out of their way
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27. The Continuous Delivery
Mentality
• Self-organized
teams deploy when
ready
• Deployments are
increasingly
granular
• “Fail fast” mentality
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Resilience becomes part of
the culture

28. The Center of Digital
Enablement
• Team responsible for
end-to-end best
practice across
digital effort
• Where the enterprise
architects fit in
• Essentially becomes
an innovation
competency center
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Let CODE self-organize

29. How to Participate on
Self-Organizing Team
• Know where you
can provide the
most value
• Leverage your
formal and
informal
networks to
recruit the best
people
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PhotoCreditthejbirdhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/jbird/:
Volunteer mindset

30. #1 Requirement:
Empathy
• Focus on the other people on
your team & across your
organization
• Your job is to make them
successful
– And vice-versa
• Thought patterns to avoid:
– Throw it over the wall
– Us vs. them
– Any kind of bigotry
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31. The Bar is Set!
It doesn’t make sense to
hire smart people and
tell them what to do; we
hire smart people so they
can tell us what to do.
– Steve Jobs (allegedly)
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32. Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx
jason@intellyx.com
@theebizwizard
Send email NOW to innovation@intellyx.com
to download this presentation
Thank You!