Your Data and AI strategy:
Where to innovate, reinvent, cannibalise, or retain?
When starting a new role there is the inherent benefit of a ‘fresh-eyes’ perspective on what is working and the areas to improve in realising and accelerating the business value of Data and Analytics AI.
Yet when embedded in day-to-day delivery mode, its hard to make a detached independent assessment as to the right opportunities to progress or the fundamental challenges to resolve.
A rigorous review of what to ‘Innovate, Reinvent, Cannabilise, and Retain can help ensure that the direction, balance of priorities and resulting business aligned roadmap meets current needs and accelerates future value delivery.
Using an understanding of business priorities and the art of the possible, along with experience of what works, what is the right priority and balance of activity across:
-
Innovate: Where has the data and AI innovation been conscious, focused and structured in what to solve for and how? What is the right balance between learning from innovation with activity where the impact and feasibility are more certain? Is the innovation ‘shiny new’ technology/ solution led or grounded in business problems to solve? Does the approach ‘forward-solve’ the post-pilot barriers to implementation?
-
Reinvent: Where or how does the business perception, team focus, or approach need to step-change to deliver strategic impact? The stretching of business opportunities and adoption best practices should be a given, yet what are the more fundamental opportunities/ challenges that need to be solved for? What is actually preventing the business become data driven and how are these being addressed in the roadmap?
-
Cannibalise: Seeking opportunities to automate or productionise is critical to freeing up team members to work on higher value outcomes and enable talent development. Remaining in the comfort zone needs to be challenged – if the team doesn’t consider how to cannibalise itself then an externally imposed review might do it instead.
-
Retain: There should not be improvement for improvements sake. There is finite resource/ capability bandwidth and change fatigue is real. Therefore, its critical to make conscious decisions and agree with stakeholders on what to leave for now (but not forget!) due to prioritisation or marginal benefit/ cost.
Forming a detached view of where and how to Innovate/ Reinvent/ Cannibalise/ Remain ‘as is’ can be uncomfortable and also challenging when in a heads-down mode of team management and delivery. There is no shortage of opinions on what to do, but which are based on learned- experience, expertise and appropriate to the scale and dynamics of the business.
Unless there is conscious reflection and rigorous assessment – the business aspiration, value and team development risks being akin to a rudderless boat tossed and blown by the wind.