Adapting your Cloud Strategy and Design Amidst Geopolitical Changes

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Traditionally, the cloud’s promise has been to go beyond infrastructural and geographical constraints, enabling seamless data storage and processing anywhere in the world to deliver the best experience at an optimal cost to end users. However, as a CxO, whether you are a CEO, CTO, CFO, or CDO, you now may need to revisit your cloud strategy in response to emerging geopolitical demands if your market is global. The “end of globalization” as stated by different analysts following Covid-19 and the resurgence of stronger geopolitical divides is bringing impacts on how global companies may design their information systems.

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7 years of thoughts on Digital Transformation: a retrospective

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Mind thinking light

In my series of articles on “the Digital Shift,” I started in 2016 up to now early 2023, I’ve explored a variety of topics related to the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation. From the importance of having a clear vision and strategy, to development of digital skills and expertise and how to consider technology, I’ve sought to provide insights and practical advice for organizations looking to navigate the rapidly-evolving digital landscape. 7 years after my first article, here’s a personal reflection on whether my thoughts are still the same in light of what I’ve experienced or exchanged with peers so far. Keep reading →

“Digital Transformation”: the ONE thing to focus on?

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“Digital Transformation”: the ONE thing to focus on?
We’ve all been reading articles, analysis, interviews talking about the challenges of Digital Transformation, on the fact that most companies fail in their journey: as a matter of fact, a McKinsey analysis in 2016 pointed that 70% of large scale transformation did not reach their goals (https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-how-of-transformation).
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Digital Shift, episode 4: Management 3.0 (continued), “la fête du slip”?

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Digital Shift, episode 4: Management 3.0 (continued), “la fête du slip”?

In the previous episode, I talked about how Management 3.0 may be a positive approach for management of companies and how to avoid some of the hurdles when making a change towards this kind of management. However, I can easily hear many CxOs and managers, used to working in classic “control & command” organizations, who will raise their voice and say: “yeah, yeah, that’s pretty nice on the paper, but letting people be autonomous and do whatever they want will just be a mess!” Actually, my first answer for them would be “yes, you are completely right!” Keep reading →

Digital Shift & Accelerated Disruption. Episode 3: Management 3.0, a mindset revolution from the C-Suite to every level

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Digital Shift & Accelerated Disruption. Episode 3: Management 3.0, a mindset revolution from the C-Suite to every level
In a previous article about applying a Minimum Viable Product approach from a startup environment to established companies contexts, I opened the subject at the end of the article on the issue of decision-making in established companies and how it could be a challenge to go fast. So let’s talk this time about this issue of decision-making, hence management.
Going digital means a lot of things, from technological to business transformations, impacts on processes, organizations, etc… What is the bottom line for any company which takes the path of digital transformation? It’s to survive by adapting and having the capacity to move as fast as its competitors, especially disruptive newcomers who have the advantage of “no legacy” to slow them down. Speed is key, in an uncertain and complex environment, and this is a whole new challenge for management of large organizations: if your organization scales up to 1000, 10 000 or 100 000 people and has 5, 10, 15 or more levels of management, how can you ensure that decisions taken at the top level management will be taken into account… especially if these decisions may need to change rapidly to cope with accelerated changes on the market? Well, you can not.

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Digital Shift & Accelerated Disruption. Episode 2: Transforming your legacy IT systems from Titanic to speed boats

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Digital Shift & Accelerated Disruption. Episode 2: Transforming your legacy IT systems from Titanic to speed boats
Legacy IT systems often have very poor time to market, it can take many months (or years) before an idea may be effectively implemented and rolled out in production. Legacy systems are often monolithic applications which are costly to be deployed in production, because you need to make exhaustive non regression tests on the whole perimeter to ensure quality, you need to perform lots of manual operations to deploy the application from an environment to the other… In this context, you can not afford to deploy just a small evolution (which you are not sure will not have a side effect somewhere else in the application, hence the full non regression testing) at this cost.
That’s why your best option will be to make big versions with lots of new features to optimize the cost of testing the whole application, the deployment cost, etc… and consequently, this big version will take months before going in production as there will be lots of work to do.

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Digital Shift & Accelerated Disruption. Episode 1: IT outsourcing or in-house development, the battle.

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The big trend in the 1990’s and 2000’s for companies was to outsource their IT, as IT was considered by lots of companies as a cost center. Often, IT teams were thus attached to the Chief Finance Officer as a “support” function for the company. Outsourcing IT meant that companies and C-suite didn’t have to bother any more to manage people and technical issues that sound like coming from Mars to them, they just had to follow the bottom line in the budget. But by adopting this approach, they lost any chance to master their systems and identify how to generate value from their systems instead of just considering them as expenditures. Companies that chose to follow this path clearly missed out the technological revolution and opportunities to create value from the use of technologies itself in the past few years. So companies should take a step back and think about their strategy of outsourcing or developing in-house, not only with a cost approach (which is all the more often incomplete because of hidden associate costs).
OutsourcingOrInHouse

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Digital Shift & Accelerated Disruption. Episode 0: Reborn

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Early 2000’s and the Internet bubble: at that time, promising (or not) startups were creating new services, new offers disconnected from “traditional” companies. On the one hand, “traditional” companies in automotive, energy, transportation, retail, banking… On the other hand, web companies providing free search, free content… Two worlds that seemed rather independent from each other, two economies that seemed to be disconnected from each other. Traditional companies were still dominating the global economy.

About ten years later, the situation started to change dramatically, in every region of the world.

Map of the world with digital
source: http://www.successfulworkplace.org/2012/10/04/digital-disruption-is-coming-to-get-you-brace-yourself/

For the past few years, we’ve witnessed accelerated disruptions in many areas of economy, and big traditional companies have been challenged on their own core business. Digital-born players have taken significant market shares in the traditional industries:

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