The Mutable Business – Expert Opinion

Fail often and fail fast is often taken as the agile war cry, but often people haven’t thought very deeply about what it actually means.

If COVID is over, should we return to the old ways? A mutable company could manage this – but perhaps the new flexible working practices are more productive in some cases.

For years – decades, actually – it’s been easy to find data and opinion about the failure rate of transformation programmes.

The implication of an Institute of Internal Auditors poll is that hybrid working, including home-working, is more risky, or brings in unaddressed risks.

Managed service offices validate the addressing of employee welfare issues that the employer is responsible for.

Computer games have a pivotal role to play in changing the way we work – bringing remote working to a whole new audience.

David Norfolk sets the scene for a series of articles in which we will be considering the widening impact on organisations of the growing focus on ethics.

The 'fourth industrial revolution' may be tech-driven, but touches many areas of our lives. Defining and developing digital skills needs to reflect this.

What would you have expected to hear people talk about most at the CDO Exchange Europe? Data? Technology? Governance?

Individuals, employers and societies all have to play their part in ensuring good quality career planning and talent development are available to all.

This year the BCS SM-ITAM Conference is virtual – over three days, plus a keynote from Claire Agutter, one of the 50 most influential women in tech.

Covid has bought changes to working patterns, and new opportunities, which reinforce one another and come together in greater empowerment.

Bloor Research chairman Brian Jones chaired the CDO Exchange this week, and offers his thoughts and findings from the two-day event.

As organisations adopt new business models and the shape of the workforce changes, approaches to talent attraction and retention need to adapt accordingly.

The Future of Work is more likely to involve an equal partnership between employer and employee, than the “boss and minion” relationship.

If your trust culture is strong, you’re in a great position to exploit the opportunities offered by changing ways of working.

Organisational change will create greater autonomy and democratization – but the fundamentals of great leadership don’t change.

As Covid-19 accelerates the pace of change, flatter, cell-structured organisation structures will soon have their day.

Future of Work is the “gig economy” - temporary positions with workers hired short-term. This is very “Mutable Business” but can bring worker insecurity.

The migration to a human/machine hybrid business model is well under way. The pace and nature of the change is accelerating all the time.

Managing the response to a persistent enterprise threat like the Coronavirus requires a commitment to the principles and practice of Business Resilience.

A cautionary tale about the importance of testing against user expectations, from Bloor analyst David Norfolk.

With the Covid-19 outbreak causing more home working it is pertinent to consider its impact, both in the long term and the short term.

BMC still seems to be in the process of re-inventing itself and its new acquisition of Compuware brings major new Mainframe capabilities.

These days, you should think of the mainframe as a very performant, flexible server with good parallel processing and virtualisation capabilities.

Paul Bevan hopes we are becoming a little more realistic about the claims that Cloud computing will automatically save money.

Is this a technology you should care about and include in your plans? Here are the five things you need to know to answer that question.

We live in exponential times, what Darwin didn’t say, disruption, reinvention and why we talk Mutable Business not digital transformation.

Talking to Curtis Preston about Druva’s data-management-as-a-service and its support for AWS Snowball Edge, speeding-up and de-risking cloud transitions.

NextStep 2018 was OutSystems’ conference promoting its capabilities in processing Large Application Portfolios and its affection for BizDevOps.

Automation of software service delivery links your tools with software APIs – giving you a “software-defined infrastructure” and the Morpheus platform is a good basis for this.

Choosing KPIs is important, they can be financial or non-financial, or composite KPIs that you can’t measure directly may be better indicators than simple KPIs.

IBM have the skills, knowledge & experience to help CIOs re-architect their IT to achieve mutability. The M in IBM remains a critical element in their offer to their customers.

The recent TSB migration debacle was more than an Ops project and had Dev, testing and customer impacts. In these days of Ops/Dev collaboration, should it have been run as a DevOps-style process – or was it run “DevOps in name only”?

Interesting short article on visualising your assets based on architectural-style viewpoints: Better Configuration Management CMDB Data Visualization for Free.

While you are all (I hope) thinking about GDPR, just a brief heads-up on another EU initiative that will also still be important post-Brexit. The NIS Directive is the first piece of EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity. It provides legal measures…

As companies like TSB are currently finding out, “rip and replace” modernisation of high-capacity business-critical systems is high risk.

GDPR is very emphatically about managing privacy with the interests of the data subjects at heart. It is not about encouraging lazy people to sign away their rights.

The bottom line, I think, is that (regardless of GDPR and its jurisdiction) a mutable company can’t afford to have a breakdown of trust with its customers and other stakeholders – as Facebook is discovering. GDPR may simply be a catalyst for bringing data-related trust issues to the surface.

David Norfolk comments on an interesting article, for emerging Mutable Businesses, from McKinsey.

Blockchain governance will be key to its success in its role as a distributed ledger technology for mutable businesses.

The data centre market shouldn’t be complacent about the development and growth of The Open Compute Project (OCP).

Analytics maturity a route to achieving an effective data culture.

Developing data culture to get the most out of analytics.

Robotic Process Automation may be the practical face of business process automation today, but it is not exactly new.

Each winter you get the reviews of the market by all of the big US-based analyst houses, which is of interest because so many technologies start off in the US and take quite some time to get to EMEA. Over…

Configuration management would seem ideally placed to take advantage of a secure distributed ledger, using Blockchain.

Users of developerWorks Recipes can tap into IBM's platform-as-a-service, Bluemix, to share IoT knowledge.

A forum report.

Addition of user experience feedback to the developer experience.

Report from IBM's Developer Connect 2014 conference in London.

What you see of is not necessarily what you need

Boldon James and its Allianz story

A survey raises some thoughts.

Actionable insight and trust working together, give organisations the freedom to "innovate@speed".

A BMC quiz identifies areas of friction between IT and business users