I despise the yearly performance management process.
Once a year, managers and leaders care enough about their employees’ goals
and development plans and must ceremonially record objectives in HR’s
performance management system. At a designated mid-year time, the alerts go
out to managers to complete their midyear review, and sometime toward the
end of the year, they complete a final evaluation.
Around this time of year, one of my bosses used to say to me, “Isaac, read the tea leaves.”
I was a CIO at the time, and he wanted me to review the economic forecasts, company financials, and the other executives’ moods to sense what innovations and investments people would be most receptive to over the next 6-12 months.
If I were doing this analysis today, inflation, recession, and news of layoffs at high-tech companies and large enterprises would dominate my close-range field of view.
But when I look a little past these economic conditions, I also see how improving customer and employee experiences are critically important for the company. We need to grow by retaining customers and adding new ones while energizing employees on a knowledge and tech-enabled future of work.
These conditions suggest that improving AI search experiences should be at the top of my digital transformation priorities. I know AI search experiences are force-multiplying investments because they impact revenue and cost efficiencies when improving customer and employee experiences.
Today, CIOs should prioritize AI search to reduce costs. Recent research published in the report Enterprise Search: The Unsung Hero points to several areas where high-tech and large enterprises can find them. They include
These three points suggest that companies can find cost reductions and efficiencies by revisiting their search experiences. CIOs are likely to find multiple search technologies being used to support search in different business units, customer-facing experiences, and employee workflows. IT and digital transformation leaders can consolidate into a single platform, deploy across multiple business units, and connect experiences from marketing and sales through customer support.
But consolidating to which platform and with what capabilities?
It better be easy to use and deliver speed to value. In the research, only 19% said yes to having the resources and expertise necessary to deliver excellence in enterprise search.
CIOs must also select platforms that help reduce ongoing support costs, and some platforms are just not easy buttons that simplify development, tuning, or maintenance. It’s one reason why many DevOps teams spend too much effort on search experiences and have too few business outcomes to show for it.
So how can CIOs reduce costs and deliver improved experiences? Here are three key ingredients:
Like a good recipe, creating a delightful customer experience requires harmony between a few key ingredients. For search, it’s the intersection of embracing AI capabilities, leveraging low-code development options, empowering customer-driven implementations, and enabling standard best practices. A flexible solution with these ingredients enables stakeholders, product managers, enterprise architects, and DevOps teams to focus on the experience rather than debate implementation details or struggle with ongoing maintenance issues.
The culture shift helps drive consolidation and efficiencies, and CIOs can demonstrate cost savings and how better customer experiences drive growth. A force multiplier!
This post is brought to you by Coveo.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Coveo.
“Some are true collaborative geniuses. These maestros win over stakeholders to buy into visions and customer value propositions without getting sucked into appeasing everyone’s wish lists.”
In Chapter 5 of my book, Digital Trailblazer, I share several of my stories of helping organizations define their agile ways of working. If you’re married to a framework, it’s hard for leaders to develop agile cultures and mindsets. And while empowering self-organizing teams is fundamental to agile, it doesn’t mean that agile leaders shouldn’t establish and adopt self-organizing standards.
New year’s resolutions help you reflect on the past and think about some objectives and changes you want for the upcoming year. I think they are useful tools for self-reflection, even if many of us forget about them once the pressures of the new year take over our days and cloud our longer-term thinking.
This year is a little hard to figure out with the wake of the pandemic
behind us, the threat of a recession looming, and the need to drive
transformative change growing exponentially over time. Just look at
Southwest Airlines’ failure
during the holiday week for an example of an enterprise that didn’t
transform fast enough, and maybe others like
Meta’s overdrive to the metaverse
and arguably risking today’s business. CIOs and CDOs (both chief digital
officers and chief data officers) are facing a challenging year.
It won't be easy to forecast and read the tea leaves this year.
Digital Trailblazers
will need to drive their organizations while also considering how to
recession-proof their digital transformation strategies.
Do you need to author your own resolutions, or can you learn from others? I
believe in the latter, so this year, I reached out to influencers in my
network to share a resolution. You’ll find my resolution at the end.
Also, see my latest post on
enlightening books to read in 2023
and join the
community of Digital Trailblazers.
At the end of every chapter in Digital Trailblazer, find the URL to get access to my community and supplementary content for aspiring transformation leaders.
The Digital Trailblazer Community is free for a limited time, so I hope you’ll read the book and join us!
I know Digital Trailblazers commit to lifelong learning, and recent Pew research shows that 75 percent of adults read books in any format - either print, digital, or both. So, while we all read blogs, watch videos, and listen to podcasts, there's much to learn and an opportunity to relax with a good book.
So, as in past years, I am sharing my top book reads of 2022. There are five I am calling out as must-reads for digital transformation leaders, and others depend on your interests and cover agile, innovation, AI, and the metaverse. I also added one special topic about humanity.
Before I say goodbye to 2022, I want to thank the people and companies that contributed to my successful year.
In 2022, I published over 130 articles, and my top subjects were about data science data governance, dataops (29 posts), digital transformation (25), agile ways of working (19), and DevOps (15). Most of my writing appears on this blog (54 posts), InfoWorld (41), and the rest on eight other websites. The best way to keep up with my writing is by subscribing to my monthly Digital Trailblazer Newsletter.
I also spoke at 60 in-person and virtual events, with the most popular keynote on how Digital Trailblazers are the secret to successful digital transformation. My speaker page has a list of upcoming events. I also published 23 short videos on the Driving Digital Standup.
I want to thank the many people and companies that published, sponsored, and contributed to my work in 2022.
