Working in a digital context, part 1

- Welcome to "ITProTV". I'm your host, Don-- (voices overlapping) - [Announcer] You're watching "ITProTV". - Hello, everyone! Welcome back to another exciting edition of "ITProTV". I'm your host, Vonne Smith, and this is our various and professional series. And in this episode, we're going to be working in a digital context. And here to help put everything into context is Miss Jo Peacock. How are you? - Absolutely great. Thank you, Vonne. How are you? - I'm lovely. - Oh, oh, that's lovely. - Yeah, that's (laughs) - That sounds so contrived. (laughs) - It sounded as though you were actually trying to mimic my accent there for a second. - Actually, it kind of was then I'm like, oh wait, no, I wasn't supposed to do that. I'm sorry. I'm not trying. - I think you can't do that unless you got a cup of tea in your hand. - I know. (laughs) Oh. So onto the show. - Yeah. - We're talking about working in digital context. We're in the next subset of the main topic, like the main domain. - Yeah I mean, I can bring that up if you want. - Yeah, just to kind of get a context as to where we are, if we're looking at-- - Where were we? - The test material. - Let me just take a look at my slides for a second. So, we're talking about that. So, we working in digital context. So, we've taken a look at the concepts in the digital world and now we are onto the next one. So, we're still in that section of a digital world. Yes, you're right. So, we are there and now we've got to go and find my slides again. (laughs) - Yeah, I totally threw a curve ball at you there. - Yeah. You did. - It's like, where are we? - I know. I know. But yes, that's exactly where we are. So, we're still only 5% into the course at the moment. So, 5% into the materials. Don't forget though, that when we take a look at the VeriSM at the management mesh, and when we start taking a look at applying VeriSM itself, then we've got a lot of work for you to do. So, whilst that will take up 40% of the content, it's still a lot of work for you to do because you've got to go away and you've got to build up a management mesh. And you've actually got to undertake some assignments and you have got to look at the case study. So, there's a lot of work for you to do coming up, which is actually quite nice for me because it means, well it's nice for you as well. It means you get less time listening to me and more time actually working this out for yourself and putting it into context yourself. But right now what we're looking at is we're actually sort of working in that digital context. And then we've looked at the digital world and we've looked at VUCA. Remember v-- Oh. - Volatility. - I see now I'm putting her on the spot. - Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. - Yay! That's right. Yeah. So we've looked at that. The simple fact that we really don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. That's what it all boils down to. And that's why I use that picture of the volcano, because we don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. We never know what the next big thing is going to be on the internet. I mean, I remember... Do you remember Google Glass? - Yes. There was a big fanfare about it. - Right. I mean, I absolutely loved the idea of it. I thought, now this is going to be absolutely fantastic. And then what happened? It kind of just fizzled out. - Yeah, I don't really hear much of it nowadays. - Yeah. And at the time of going to recording, yesterday, there was a press release or something in the news yesterday about Amazon and Amazon's Alexa. And apparently that, and I could see Amazon Alexa now falling into, I wouldn't say a huge amount of trouble, but I could see usage of Alexa going down a little bit at the moment as well. Because there was something about Alexa listens in to all of your household conversations. - Oh, like every other device we have? - Right. Yeah. I mean, just like Siri does it. - Little pessimist over here. - And it's funny that in one of our last episodes, we talked about the internet of things and we talked about listening in and Siri listening in and Amazon listening in. And now here we go. It's actually in the news now that yeah, Amazon have been listening in to our Alexa conversations. So, we don't know what's going to happen next. We really, really don't. And that means that we've got to be prepared for the unknown. - And maybe you can learn from that if people value privacy. Kind of going back to like, what is the value? What is my value of this particular product? And maybe that's a lesson to learn. Hmm. Maybe we shouldn't have the speaker on all the, or the microphone all the time. - Remember in one of the previous slides we looked at where I actually said, you do what the customer wants, but nothing more. Yeah. What does the customer actually want? And don't give them anything else because giving them something else, it's not necessarily going to be value add. In fact it's probably not going to be value add. It's going to be something that's actually going to irritate them. So, it's great having a voice command where you can press a button and then you can speak into something and give it a voice command. But then if you've got something that's listening all the time, is that actually what the customer values? Is that what the customer wants? Give them what they want. Now I know there's going to be some of you out there that are going to say, "Well actually yes, "that's exactly what I value. It's exactly what I want." And that's fine. But when you are in an organization where you are producing a kind of one size fits all piece of technology, then you have to go with what the majority wants. Because it's the majority that are going to bring in the profits for you. It's not the minority. - You're on the other side. You're on the other side of the fence, but you have to think like a consumer. But, you are the one as the provider. So, it's sometimes like, I don't want to say a double edged sword. It's hard, sometimes to differentiate between. - Well, and it's about building up that relationship. And I've just brought up this adaptive service model actually while we're talking about this. It's that first blue box right at the very top there where you can see it's got the relationship between the provider and the consumer. It's really, really important that you understand who your consumer is. Something that I do want to mention actually while we're still talking about this slide is, that you as a service provider will have a different perspective than you as a consumer. And it is really difficult once you are a service provider in that particular space, it's really difficult to then put yourself in the shoes of an impartial customer, an impartial consumer, because you've lost your impartiality. Let's say for instance, and we'll carry on with the Amazon example. Let's say for instance that you and I were both working for Amazon. You and I were both working on the Alexa project as it were. How easy is it for us then to detach ourselves from our work and say, oh, what would a consumer want? It's not that easy because we think our product's absolutely fantastic. We think it's great. So, we would utilize tools and techniques such as focus groups, et cetera, to tell us exactly what our consumers want, tell us what our customers want. And that would help us to build up that relationship. 'Cause if we are providing something that the customers don't see as valuable, then unfortunately that relationship is breaking down. It's clearly not working. - Yeah. I mean it happens in everywhere, in life. Where somebody points out, "Well I thought of it this way." You're like, I never even, that never even occurred to me. That wasn't even an inkling in my brain because I was looking at it just in this one way. And I didn't even think of that way. That's good feedback or like that's something that it's kind of hard to take the blinders off sometimes. - Yes. It is. And focus groups will help us with that. We need to have somebody impartial that's going to help with that relationship. Now, in certain service management frameworks, we'd call that a relationship manager or a business relationship manager. Somebody who kind of bridges the two entities, and tries to see things from the other's perspective. The consumer is never going to see something from the service provider's perspective and nor should they. But, the provider should try and see things from the consumer's perspective. And there's the difference. Remember what we said in the previous episode is the responsibility is always on the person that's doing the communicating. The responsibility is always on that service provider to understand the consumer. It's not the consumer's responsibility to try and figure out what it is the service provider is trying to provide. If I've got to figure out what it is you are trying to sell me, then trust me, I don't want it. It really is quite simple, as simple as that. So, let's start by looking at the context then of working in a digital world. And we're going to start off by looking at digital transformation. And digital transformation refers to all the changes associated with applying digital technologies across all areas. There's going to be a little bit of what we call organizational change management that's brought into this as well. I mentioned this in a previous episode. We started talking about how some people are comfortable with change and some people aren't so comfortable with change. The simple fact is that technology is, part of absolutely everything that we do. We've talked about this. So when it says that it's no longer provided by IT teams, well it's not. It's not. If I wanted to go and get a new cell phone. Oh no, I'm going to ask you the question actually. If you wanted to go and get a new cell phone, where would you go? - To, well. (laughs) I normally just go online and buy it straight from Apple. (Vonne and Jo laughing) - I'm going to first go to Apple. Yeah, right. - I'm sorry I am, I will say I'm a true Apple fan girl. - No, I know. It's okay cuz we're one in the same. But if we wanted to buy a new cell phone, we wouldn't want to go to our IT team and say, "Oh look we want to buy a new cell phone." - No. Or I would go to the actual store either the Apple store or AT&T, that's just the provider here in this particular area. And I would go there and they would hook it all up and put the cards in or what have you and, poof there you go. - If I wanted to buy one of these... This is, oh there we go. You can see your screen there now. That's an iPad. If I wanted to buy one of these, then where would I go? I probably wouldn't go to IT. You see in this day and age of that BYOX, that bring your own device, quite often we don't go to IT when we want something. We'll go out and buy it and we just expect it to work in our environment. Now, imagine if we have got absolutely everybody in an organization who's going off and buying all of their own devices and just expecting them to work with whatever software that we have, that's chaos. Then you might have some that don't even want to change. In fact, I've worked with one organization where we've got exactly that situation. Where you've got a lot of people that want to be technically aware and that actually want to be cutting edge. And then you've got a lot of people that don't want things to change at all. And they've still got servers lying around from 10 years ago that they don't want to disconnect from the network, despite the fact that nothing actually works. So, organizations or service providers now have got a real challenge on their hands because they have got to employ some form of organizational change management in order to ensure that technology remains current. And I'm just talking about remaining current. I'm not actually talking about, disruption. I'm not talking about getting out there and doing something different. I'm just talking about your organization remaining up to date. Cuz technology changes so quickly that, just to remain current, it involves a lot of change. It involves organizational change management. If we want to become digital disruptors, if we want to do something completely different, and we really want to disrupt the marketplace, then not only do we need to remain current, we need to go one step further because we actually want to do something that's innovative, do something that's different and we want to disrupt. We want to, as it says there, enter new markets and deliver products faster and increase our profitability. And that's not optimization. Optimization is getting better at what we do, becoming more efficient, becoming more effective. Whereas disruption is doing something different. It's being innovative, it's getting out there and disrupting the marketplace. And of course there's a higher risk with that as well. But that means we have to bring in organizational change management. Now I've mentioned OCM, I've mentioned organizational change management a couple of times now in the past few minutes. What do I mean by organizational change management? It is a subject that we've covered in a couple of our other series. We've covered one with PMI and we've also covered it within ITL when we looked at the ITL 2011 practitioner, then we've actually covered organizational change management. And really it is the people side of change. The fact that people go through what we call an emotional cycle of change. Whenever there is anything different, the first reaction from anybody is to run away. "I don't want this, I don't like it. "I don't know what you are doing to me. "I absolutely hate it. "Please don't do this to me." And then we go through a cycle of change and that cycle goes through the complete, "I just want to avoid it. "I'm going to pretend it's not happening." Right the way through to, "It's all your fault. "You're doing this to me." And then, "It's all my fault. "What have I done to actually deserve this?" Right the way through to the, "Okay, I can see this. "It's not too bad." And then we get into the point where we can then start to become more productive. Only after we get to that point. So, what do we have to do then in order to minimize that, "Oh, what have you done this to me for? "Why is this all my fault?" Well, we introduced something called, we want to implement something called organizational change management. Now, Kotter, John Kotter did something absolutely fantastic a few years ago in that he analyzed this. He analyzed the emotional cycle of change and he said, "What can we do to minimize that initial disruption?" And he implemented something called Kotter's eight steps. And it's well documented, it's been revised since he actually came up with the first idea. And Kotter's eight steps start with a very simple premise. And that very simple premise is creating a sense of urgency. In other words, you have to create a need. Now, you mentioned Apple. Apple do this absolutely fantastically. Apple have a huge press release. And in that press release they tell you all about absolutely everything that this new product is going to do. They tell you all the positive side of it. And what they're doing is they're creating a sense of urgency, they're creating a need. I always remember, and I always tell stories of when Apple first announced this thing here. When they first announced this, they did this huge big press release and this wonderful piece of wearable technology. I had never even conceived of this idea before. But then all of a sudden after five minutes of watching this particular press release, I had this watch-shaped hole in my life that could only be filled by this particular device. Absolutely fantastic. I was one of those people first in line, I was going to get that piece of technology. And I did. Absolutely amazing. Put it on my wrist and then realized that I can't see a thing. So, this piece of technology that was actually going to change the world, it was going to do everything for me. It was going to make tea for me, it was going to send my emails, it was going to give me directions, it was going to open my front door for me. It was going to do everything. And then I realized that yeah, it does, it reads out my text for me, but I can't read them, unless I've got my glasses on. It'll tell me what emails I've got, but the font's so small I can't read them. So yeah, it's a fantastic idea. But what do I use it for? I use it to tell the time. I use it and it does tell me when I've got a text or when I've got a piece of mail coming in. But, what we went through is something that actually Vonnie was talking about just before we started this particular episode, that Vonnie talked about an inflated peak of expectation. And what Apple did there is that they created a sense of urgency. They created that need and that then got over the emotional cycle of change because I had a desire for that particular piece of equipment. However, what they also created in doing that was an inflated peak of expectation. In other words, I expected more from the device than I actually got. So then, I had that sense of urgency, I had the need, but then when I actually got that piece of technology, it didn't work the way it should. So, I then sunk down into what they call the trough of disillusionment and I just sunk down into, oh, this is never going to work, before I then climbed back up again into maximum productivity, which was going to be my plateau, my maximum productivity. I've quoted a lot of things at you just in this past few minutes. I've quoted to you the emotional cycle of change. I've quoted at you Kotter's eight steps and we've looked at the inflated peak of expectations and that trough of disillusionment. But nevertheless, it all boils down to organizational change management and understanding how people's minds work. And this is exactly what we need to do in order to affect digital transformation. Digital transformation cannot be achieved by just simply giving a piece of equipment to somebody and expecting them to work with it. We have to understand first of all how people work before we can understand how they work with technology. So, digital transformation has to be driven both internally as well as externally. If we don't understand our organization and how they're going to react to something new to us being a disruptor, then we're certainly not going to understand how our customer is going to work with that. So, this is something that Apple have to do first and foremost is ensure that everyone in Apple is just as excited for that new device as Vonne and I are for that new device when it comes out. And that means that we have to have transformation within all considered in our organizational strategy. So, we have to consider how we're going to manage that organizational change management in our processes, in our go-to-market strategy, in our culture, and in all of our principles and all of our networks. How are we going to manage people? How are we going to drive that sense of urgency and how are we going to create that need? And I feel like I've preached for a long time and Vonne hasn't said a word. - I'm just over here thinking I'm hanging out on Jo's therapy couch. You talking about the emotional cycle of change and I'm like, oh yeah, I know that one. (laughs) So, I'm just over here thinking about, mhmm, yeah, you're right and just translating into my life choices and things. But how it all does, the whole psyche of your customer. Like, we tie-- It kind of sounds like all touchy feely and like, oh, you know, we're going through these emotional changes, but it's so true. We all do that. So, that's all, that's why I'm just kind of just taking all in. - Well the fact of the matter is, if we don't understand how people are going to take change, then change is not going to be successful. Because change, whether it's bringing in new technology or any type of change to be honest, is going to be dependent on the people. Remember I said in a few episodes previous, that the tools will only do what you tell them to do. So, a tool can't manage change. We've got to manage change. And we have got to realize that even though we are in IT, we're still people and we still have to manage that people side of things. It's not just about the technology. It would be fantastic if it was just about the technology. Wouldn't it? - Yeah, I mean I think somebody just recently told me, "Feelings are real." - Right. - We respond on our feelings a lot of time. So, you do need to take that in consideration, especially with change and bring in that digital part of it or just how we live now. It's really that. - Right? So change is, it's important to acknowledge that change is going to affect people, it's not just about bringing in the new technology. You've got to convince people that using that new technology or following that new process or this new strategy, that go-to-market strategies, it says up there, but that new strategy is actually real. - Yeah. And it goes back to something my dad always says, "Presentation is everything." Of how you actually present it, is going to change. Like the Apple speech or not speech but the watch, like how you're presenting this to them is going to make a huge difference as to whether they're going to adhere or they're going to retract. - Yeah. Yeah. It will, it will. And it goes back to communication and about having that common language again and making sure that you're communicating in the right language, that you understand what's important to people, that you're communicating what's important to them. You're creating that sense of urgency. - Yeah. I'm just in another one of your series and I'm over here going, oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like ping, ping, ping light bulbs, connections, dots. I'm just like, I see how the world works. (laughs) - Well, what I want you to do right now is I want you to go away and then see how the world works. 'Cause I can hear-- I've actually been listening to Vonne typing and I know that she's been googling this. So, this is what I want you to do now. This is your challenge for in between this episode and our next episode. Your little homework is, I want you to go away and I want you to research Kotter's eight steps for transformational change. I want you to research the emotional cycle of change. Just go and take a look at that. And I also want you to take a look at that inflated peak of expectation as well, and take a look at that particular cycle too. And when we come back, we're going to carry on, we're going to talk about the effective digital transformation on our products and services. But for now, I want you to go away and I want you to research those three things. I want you to look at the emotional cycle of change, Kotter's eight steps for transformational change. And also look at that inflated peak of expectation as well. - All right. Well you have been tuned into another one of Jo's therapy sessions. Thank you so much for watching and thank you Jo, for providing me all of this insight. - I feel like I should get you a couch. - I need a fainting couch for sure. (laughs) Well, thank you guys. We're going to go ahead and sign off for "ITProTV". I've been your host Vonne Smith. - And I'm Jo Peacock. - We'll see you soon. 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