Episode 3: Improvement requires fear, or, digital transformation by crisis and fear

July 6th, 2020 · 38 mins 38 secs

About this Episode

    <p>People in large organizations avoid improving for improving&#39;s sake. They&#39;re very rarely proactive in transforming. Instead, it seems that management in most large organizations only act, and change, when they fear competition and failure. &quot;Everyone&quot; knows this is a bad strategy, and yet &quot;everyone&quot; does it. Perhaps we should embrace that behavior, or at least be empathetic, and figure out how to work with it.</p>

We discuss this problem and things to do in this episode.

Also, we find out why Coté always has bad breath.

Mood board:

  • (6:30) - The daily, normal fears are going to drive what a business does more than large, one-off crises.
  • If your inventory is on an AS/400, then you're in trouble.
  • A chaos monkey for business, or, training for the unexpected.
  • "When there's not a crisis, every penny is squeezed out of technology."
  • Outsourcing, but the harmful type.
  • Hold your customers close, know your evolving storefront.
  • Now, software is the primary storefront.
  • To improve, you must have an enemy.
  • (20:51) "If you're trying to modernize, do this 'digital transformation,' it has to come from a place of an existential problem."
  • (21:26) To prepare for a major disruption, you have to prepare for a bunch of minor, incremental disruptions. You have to sell [the return] on paying for change.
  • (25:51) If you want to justify paying for continuous delivery, you have to find a problem to solve.
  • (27:41) They're bean counters, so just count the beans for them - just give them some beans and they're happy.
  • (28:58) As technologist, our views on revenue are not considered important or valid.
  • (29:21) Fear and loss are often easier to quantify, e.g., "if the database goes down, the business halts, and we loose millions a minute." Growth potential is harder to quantify and pitch, so we often ask for money based on fear and loss.
  • (29:36) "Even though I think about revenue streams, I've never been taken as seriously when I talk about them, as when I talk about fear."
  • Finding people outside of IT that care about software, like, in "the business."
  • (32:55) The only reason for technical agility, is business agility.
  • (33:44) If you do live through a crisis, try to internalize your failure to prepare so you only learn once from crisis, not again and again.
  • (35:33) The Business needs the fear, and then needs to ask IT to help with some optimistic technology action...cause no one's gonna believe IT.

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