“We start with an ‘ideation space’ in the cloud that gets all of the participants’ minds going a few weeks before the actual event — if you wanted to re-invent this part of your business, what would you do and why? So everyone comes to the meeting with ideas to talk about. In innovation, I think, fortune favours the prepared mind. It’s not inspiration.
“Neither is this exercise about ‘choosing’ technology. It is focussed entirely on the business aim or challenge or need and understanding that. The specific technology solution will follow in due course down the line — although we do have our Blue Mix application development and usually industry experts on hand. With one client recently we had a simple trial app functional within about 15 minutes.”
The point, Evans emphasises, is that something usable and appropriate can be chosen and designed and implemented speedily. The technology to do that may be complex, but the core challenge is the best fit for the business need or issue.
Gar MacCríosta is an IT architect and fellow of the Irish Computer Society who has firm views on the ways in which we have traditionally built applications and systems. “For the past two decades or more we have built things having very predictable views about what the future would hold. Bluntly, large ERP projects and most of the platforms and most other ICT are all built on very obvious solutions with tight constraints and observance of Best Practices. We’ve built an industry on that approach, it’s how people are educated and trained. Our world view is that we have the ability to predict what will happen.
“Yet the facts are that our project success rate has been appalling. The real chance of IT major project success is down around three in ten, with a modest rise to 50% in some better managed cases. They also go on forever — I was once brought in half way through what turned out to be a seven year government project. I think when there is a high degree of uncertainty our brains kind of freeze, they don’t like it, so they naturally go for predictability and the past justifies everything. All project management is based on predictive models and identifying the 700 steps that will get us to our objective.”
MacCríosta references the work of Dave Snowden, an authority on the evolution of complex systems of all kinds. “He uses a quadrant that divides problem domains into Obvious, Complicated, Complex and Chaos and I think that applies to ICT systems, people systems, value networks, industries and in fact wherever we need to probe for answers — or just initial clues — as to where you want to go and why.
“We’ve talked about ‘alignment’ for years. But if the business does not actually know where it’s going, the ICT has to align with an ever-shifting target. So one and perhaps the only approach is to look at goals and learnings rather than the potentially spurious things like objectives, which are always based on that assumption of predictability.”
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