How to manage VUCA with VUCA
2018 is coming to an end, and with it also comes the time for 2019 IT predictions. You probably don’t need to read them all to know that AI, Blockchain, IoT, Cloud amongst others will be the usual suspects for IT and Digital Transformation trends.
In this article I will try to approach the challenges that every organization is for sure going to face in 2019, no matter what technology we are talking about, and the four areas in which I think we should be focusing in order to be successful, from an strategic perspective. Probably you have heard about VUCA by now. Although the acronym is not new (actually it was coined in 1987), the exponential pace in which change is happening at all levels (e.g. business models, technology) makes this strategic leadership concept more relevant than ever.
So, how do executive leaders manage VUCA? The simple answer is also with VUCA. But a different type of VUCA. I came across this interesting blog article by KAI Partners, in which they propose to “fight” VUCA with VUCA:
- Volatility vs. Versatility
- Uncertainty vs. Understanding
- Complexity vs. Building Connections
- Ambiguity vs. Agility
Let’s try to break down how we can work on each one of this VUCA solutions (Versatility, Understanding, Connections, Agility) one at a time:
Versatility
It is now more important than ever to realize that the only good strategy is the one that has a good execution. And in current markets, the only good execution is the one that prepares us for change. Change in its broadest sense, allowing us to:
- Scale when our business strategy proves to be spot on.
- Turn the rudder quickly when we are wrong, minimizing costs.
In order to be able to build a versatility strategy, and from an IT perspective, companies should focus on:
- Building strong architecture foundations that prepare us to change. At the end of 2017, I wrote an article with my wishes around AI for 2018, in which I stated: “Technological architectures are designed to integrate and scale an AI that will continue to evolve a lot in the coming years until there are market or de facto standards.”. This quote applies to a lot of exponential technologies that are being adopted by companies as part of their transformation journey.
- Building true Hybrid Cloud foundations. With Cloud Computing offerings around exponential technologies being launched at a growing pace, companies are building business solutions using SaaS technologies. While this definitely helps in terms of agility, remember that we should be prepared to scale and change our strategy with the same level of agility. While most companies use Cloud Computing for successful PoCs, few of them rely on Cloud Computing for core processes, and at scale. Here is where Hybrid Cloud should help in defining architectures that help us to seamlessly integrate core systems with innovation systems, or even moving them from Cloud to on premises and viceversa.
Understanding
While we live in a time in which data generates uncertainty, lots of companies are still making decisions without actually looking at data, or at least, at relevant data.
In order to be able to build an understanding strategy, and from an IT perspective, companies should focus on:
- Realizing that software applications and architecture should maximize the use and availability of data to make decisions easier (or even automating decisions). While some companies still differentiate between having a software architecture and a data architecture, we cannot compete without combining both of them as a strong foundation for our IT systems.
- Integrating and scaling Analytics and Artificial Intelligence as part of our IT landscape. Business processes should be able to adapt/ optimize themselves based on data, and at the same time useful information should be presented in a comprehensive way to customers or business users to achieve Human Augmented Intelligence.
Connections and Agility
Connecting (integrating) every technology in our landscape can be challenging. While we covered the need for strong architecture foundations regarding “Versatility”, it is also true that Integration Architectures will play a fundamental role to achieve all of the four challenges we are facing. They should allow us to:
- Be Versatile, by creating new products and services by exposing our assets to third parties, and at the same time by consuming third party data or services (as we mentioned for SaaS).
- Improve our understanding by connecting and sharing our data.
- Be Agile, offering different ways to easily integrate heterogeneous technologies using standard integration patterns.
Nevertheless, as complex as system integrations might be, the most difficult part to succeed on our transformation journey will be connecting people, and engaging them towards our strategic goals.
In order to be able to build an agile connection strategy, companies should focus on:
- Establishing and sharing clear business and digital challenges, analyzing the digital talent map of the organization and clearly defining a digital strategy for people (including a clear transformation map for them, that sets clear goals and manages their expectations).
- Building a digital culture, defining the employee experience, identifying talent and new management methods, training, ecosystems as well as incorporating digital solutions to the workplace.
While I am sure 2019 will see lots of interesting movement around specific technologies like AI or Blockchain, I think that the concepts we have covered in this article will be of great help for companies no matter what technology they are implementing. In fact, this should help organizations to decide on which technologies to focus based on their business goals.
