Author: Phil Le-Brun

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. —Peter Senge       A CIO is hired and charged with “fixing IT.” They launch a major reorganisation based on a desire to be an agile, digital-first, data-enabled, platform-based organisation (thank you, Dilbert). IT-staffed product teams are created, although bereft of the outsourced infrastructure […]

In the previous blog post I explored with Michelle K. Lee some of the societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). In this post I dive into the patterns Michelle has seen organisations implement to take advantage of the promises of ML. ―Phil Some surveys show a gap between an understanding of […]

In my recent blog post I shared a perspective on how to start your exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) and its subset, machine learning (ML), as business tools. I wrote this as a technology practitioner but a student of ML. At the other end of the experience continuum, I have the privilege of working with […]

Tom Godden and Phil Le-Brun In our previous blog post, we discussed why we need to rethink how we outsource in the age of Agile. The problems are clear, but how do we overcome them? In this post, we’ll get into some practical keys to success and obstacles to avoid in order to be successful. […]

Tom Godden and Phil Le-Brun Where does passion and innovation come from in your organization? From the top? From a particular department or individual? From a supplier? We would hazard a guess that it’s probably not the latter—so why do many companies’ investments imply otherwise? We believe there is an opportunity to reassess how outsourcing […]

“We need to be more agile. CIO, make it so.”   This statement might work in Star Trek, but in the real world, it does nothing to create organisational agility and resilience. When talking to C-suite audiences about agility, it’s commonly the chief people officers (CPO) who lean into the discussions. They appreciate agility as […]

“We need to be an AI-enabled company.” Replace the “AI” with any technology from history and this comment becomes a common refrain across businesses lured by the promises of new technology and fuelled by FOMO (a fear of missing out). As enterprise strategists and former CXOs who have lived through many “technology is the solution, […]

In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. —Peter Drucker   Should technology be centralised or decentralised in an organisation? An easy question to ask, and one where leaders can talk themselves into believing there is a simple solution to a normally messy problem. If you accept that organisations are complex […]

Best practices usually aren’t. —Peter Thiel, Entrepreneur   I generally dislike the phrase best practice. It implies that a single truth has been discovered for something which cannot be improved upon. It engenders a complacency that, once the practice is implemented, thinking and innovation can stop. This goes for organisational models too.  Business cases that […]

To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for. —Edwards Deming   We have a problem. Proclamations about the cloud, agility, and digital transformation hide the growing gap between the speed of the outside world and the speed inside organisations. My colleague Gregor Hohpe […]