Leadership and Organizational Intelligence

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Chief Knowledge Officer

Joseph Goedert, Expert says it’s time for Health Care to create ‘Chief Knowledge Officer’ position. Health Data Management, Oct 2011

Chief Learning Officer

CLO Magazine

Josh Bersin, Today’s Chief Learning Officer (November 2010)

“A few years ago I wrote an article about how the CLO is really three people:  A Chief Culture Officer (driving engagement, learning, and collaboration), A Chief Performance Officer (driving employee performance, alignment, and skills);  and a Chief Change Officer
(vigilantly driving change, seeing the future, and helping the CEO and
other leaders transform the workforce as the business and workforce
changes).  Today, more than ever, the CLO must be all three.”

Chief Sensemaking Officer

Peter Flemming Teunissen Sjoelin, Making Sense: One of the Components of Achieving Holistic Management (Jan 2011); Holistic Management in a Context of Enterprise IT Management and Organizational Leadership (May 2011)

Chief Collaboration Officer

Morten T. Hansen, Scott Tapp, Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer? HBR Oct 2010

Lydia Dishman, Why Your Company Needs A Chief Collaboration Officer. Fast Company, May 2012

Is this several different (but overlapping) positions, or several labels for the same position?  I believe these are all aspects of Organizational Intelligence, and call for coordinated leadership. That doesn’t necessarily mean a single position, but certainly not a set of disconnected or rival initiatives.

And who will take such positions? Hansen and Tapp suggest that the responsibilities should be added to one of the existing C-level roles – probably one of the following five.

  • The current CIO. 
  • The current HR head. 
  • The current COO. 
  • The current CFO.
  • The current head of strategy.

I agree that organizational intelligence might reasonably be added to any of these disciplines, but it would undoubtedly represent a radical shift for the traditional disciplines that dominate these functions. Leadership indeed.

A rant against 1:1

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Everey now and again, I get really annoyed with sites that assume you have only one of something. “Please enter your email address” is a common request – except that I have several, and would like to have the opportunity to use any of them as my login …

business-first technology leadership wins

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In 2010, when I wrote the Elemental Links tagline, “Technology Insights for Business Enthusiasts”, some of my trusted associates pushed back, telling me that I need to lead with TECHNOLOGY. But, here’s the thing. In the enterprise, from which I came and continue to serve, a technology-first mindset leads to disdain.

Contrary to the hyperbole of the technology press, analysts, pundits and product marketers, true, enduring, information technology success begins with a business-first mindset, which includes constant context checks.

Now, it would be fair to slap a (micro) pundit label on me, so what follows are snippets from three business-first technology executives, excerpted from this week’s WSJ:

“What directors really value in a CIO is sound strategic thinking and a great ability to execute, says Gambale, a former CIO at Merrill Lynch, Bankers Trust, and Alex Brown, and former partner at Deutsche Bank Capital.”

via Art Langer: Virginia Gambale Says CIOs Should Offer Strategic Advice to Corporate Directors – The CIO Report – WSJ.

“We never start with technologies; we always look at trends in the world that are or may be having an impact on the future of our business. One example is the acceleration of innovation to market. Consumers and users want one-on-one connections to any service or product they interact with, so we have to respond. This is thoroughly changing the way we operate—the always-on, instant nature of interaction today.

We look at those megatrends and forces to see which ones will truly impact our business. Then we go look at what strategies we can devise to take advantage of those trends. The final step is evaluating which technologies can enable those strategies. The value is how we enable this dramatic change through technology.

Every three years or so, we review our strategies. Three years ago we focused on the idea of visualization. We have visualized data across the entire company. Everything we do is visual. This transforms the way the business performs because it creates what I call “information democracy.” There are no more layers. The discussions we are having are much more robust.”

— Filippo Passerini, president of global business services and CIO of Procter & Gamble in WSJ CIO Journal

“We’re truly guided by these big arcs of change [analytics, cloud computing, emerging markets and “smarter planet] that we believe in,” Rometty said. “They lend context and clarity. When you run a big company, context and clarity mean a lot.”

via New IBM CEO Says Will Maintain Longer-Term Strategy

Dangling Conversation

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@markhillary asks “When you follow company Twitter accounts, do you like being able to see who runs the account, like a named person on the profile?”

I think that depends how gullible you are. When I get a letter signed by an Important Person, I gener…

A rant against 1:1

by

Everey now and again, I get really annoyed with sites that assume you have only one of something. “Please enter your email address” is a common request – except that I have several, and would like to have the opportunity to use any of them as my login …

A rant against 1:1

by

Everey now and again, I get really annoyed with sites that assume you have only one of something. “Please enter your email address” is a common request – except that I have several, and would like to have the opportunity to use any of them as my login …

Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Active Information

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This week, I wrote about data fetishes on Active Information. Excerpt:

“On the Big Data front, I’m intrigued by the potential of fast, wide and deep data processing to solve hard problems, learn from outliers and make informed, data-driven decisions.

And, as my clients will attest, I advocate instrumenting everything as a means to discover true customer, business and systems behaviors.

However, I don’t believe that all data has equal value. Nor does all valuable data hold its value over time. Good data programs rely on context and include data weeding.

But, what about the data that should never, ever get in your attention? According to Wharton’s Peter Fader, the least valuable data is the noisiest in the Big Data space: social and mobile.”

Read the post: Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Input Output.
Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Big Data from left field; Big Data Rx
  2. Active Information: Data Scientists, Moneyball, Competitive Analytics & Big Data Definition
  3. Active Information: Reclaim the “I” in CIO, Big Data & Collective Intelligence

EA Heuristic #3: Talk to more blind men to know the elephant

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(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)
Picture of an elephant in a gentleman outfit. Enterprises are like elephants, much bigger than this one, thus a lot harder for any person to get a correct whole picture of.
photo credit: Murilo Morais 
Enterprises are like often like elephants and the enterprises’ employees and stakeholders are like blind men in the classic story; they are each touching a different part of the enterprise and they will each describe the enterprise differently, sometimes in significantly different ways.  As such, though it might seem obvious, it is important to talk to multiple people, and if possible representatives of various stakeholder groups.  Moreover, what EA often reveals is the breakdown in information flow across the enterprise.

In our EA exercise, we got employees of the organization to suggest ideas.  In order to encourage more ideas to be contributed, we make it safe for idea contributors by not tagging names to ideas.  Later, when we evaluated the ideas, we observed that some ideas suggested by one employee was labeled as “we are already doing this” by another employee.  Clearly the initiative in question was seen as an area of improvement in the eyes of the first employee, but seen as completed in the eyes of the second.  This was a good example of different perspectives on the state of the enterprise.