From podcast host Chris Surdak

"In our Next Generation Operating Model research a key finding was that changes to organizational structure typically have little positive impact on organizational performance, and more often than not they have a negative impact. This notion flies in the face of decades of management theory, and initially rubbed my colleague, Lem Lasher the wrong way. Join this conversation between Lem and myself as we find the common ground in our perspectives that organizational structure can actually be extremely important to generating operational results, but it is only a small piece of the entire puzzle."

Many organizations are struggling to become data-driven. But do they understand why? Many are investing heavily in analytics and automation, but are they achieving transformation? If you have not changed your operating model, and how you define value for your customers, have you really transformed? Join this discussion between Chris Surdak, and Albert Marinez, Chief Analytics Officer of Intermountain Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare systems in the United States, as they review the importance of adopting a transformational operating model in achieving actual transformation.

When embracing digital transformation, getting the fundamentals right is, well, fundamental. Yes, you need to deploy cloud effectively. You need to incorporate automation appropriately. You need to roll out a blockchain in a meaningful and effective way. But while this is necessary, it is not sufficient. You need to then follow through with embracing real change, achieving entirely new outcomes and engaging customers in entirely new ways. According to Philippe Mazas, CIO of Mundipharma, this is “playing in the final third of the pitch,” a reference to major league football. Getting the fundamentals right is not enough; it’s just the starting point for ultimate success. Join this podcast as Philippe and Chris dissect this notion, and how it impacts an organization’s ability to succeed with transformation.

In this episode, Chris Surdak and Jim Petrassi (CTO, Health Care Service Corporation) discuss org structure layer cakes, disruptive metrics and the value of radical transparency in achieving ops-model effectiveness. Jim also shares with us his organization's lessons learned in rethinking their operating model in a post-pandemic world.

Chris and Jim also cover:

How do you transform your organization's results from delivering in months to delivering in weeks or even days?

How do you use radical transparency to drive significant organizational change, in the fact of resistance to risk-taking?

How does being less risk-averse lead to reduced risk in your operations?

How does accepting less-than-perfect delivery lead to better customer results and fundamentally happier customers?

Over the second half of 2020, LEF set out to understand how organizations were revisiting their operating models in the wake of COVID-19. We undertook this research on Next Generation Operating Models (NGOMs) with the goal of contributing something new to this domain.

To mark the release of this new report, lead author Chris Surdak has been talking to a number of senior leaders and in this episode is joined by Diane Schwarz, CIO of Johnson Controls.

Chris and Diane discuss operating models, organizational resilience, the importance of setting and keeping goals, and the nonsense that is the "Center of Excellence."

The food ecosystem is critical to the UK's operation, and it is becoming more complex under the impacts of sustainability and the adoption of digital and food technologies. For example, how would you deal with the arrival of the biggest platform businesses as food distributors?

Julie Pierce is Director of Openness, Data and Digital at the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and has worked with Lucy Hart of Foundry4 to identify ways for the regulator to work with many different digital native food businesses.

In this podcast, we cover:

- What are platforms, and what is the current situation with digital native Food Business operators (FBOs) in the food ecosystem

- The challenges and opportunities digitisation of FBOs creates for the FSA

- The types of responses and tools being considered

- How might we reimagine the operating model of our Food Regulatory system?

The FSA is pioneering the regulation of hybrid physical/digital businesses in the food sector. Our podcast highlights new and occasionally counterintuitive insights into what creates a win-win for regulator and business.

Kicking off our series of podcasts on Platforms and Ecosystems Bill Murray speaks with Simone Cicero, Managing partner of Boundaryless and creator of the Platform Design Toolkit.

Bill has followed Simone for the best part of a decade and he's that rare thing – a thought leader that builds practical capability to change in many organizations and people.

In this episode, Bill and Simone discuss the main trends carrying over to the other side of this Covid shock in 'the marketplace age and Network Organizations' rise made up of entrepreneurial units. They also cover the biggest challenges faced by traditional companies in becoming more entrepreneurial.

Simone gives his views on what will happen beyond 2021; the trends that we must consider when designing firms and organizing a society in an age of platforms and ecosystems.

Crucially, they discuss 'The unbundling of the firm', how it is happening, and the challenges to the traditional organization in unbundling and re-bundling propositions.

For Simone's latest Whitepaper – 'New Foundations of Platform Ecosystem Thinking' https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/new-foundations-of-platforms-ecosystems-thinking/

Simone Cicero is the Platform Design Toolkit creator and an independent designer and a facilitator, speaker, and entrepreneur focusing on open business models. Former Chairman of the Open Hardware Summit, and program fellow of OuiShare Fest conference. Thanks to The Platform Design Toolkit's work, he has contributed to launching a new design domain and has empowered hundreds of thousands of practitioners worldwide. Simone has worked with all organizations – from Fortune 500 to the United Nations, from social enterprises to start-ups – on platform and ecosystem design.

Ollie Buckley is Executive Director of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI), an independent UK advisory body launched in 2018 to advise on the governance of AI and data-driven technologies. Immediately prior to this, Ollie led the Digital Charter team in the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), where he was responsible for policy development on the societal impacts of the internet and new technology. Ollie has over 10 years’ experience shaping the UK government’s digital agenda in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, Government Digital Service and DCMS. Before that, he was a strategy consultant working with a variety of private and public sector clients around the world.

One of the key challenges with developing appropriate governance mechanisms for data-driven technologies is the sheer ubiquity of how these technologies permeate every aspect of our lives & work. Multi-stakeholder approaches have been used in the past to develop governance approaches for tricky ethical issues, but often these examples are limited in the scope of their application. Ollie used the example of how governance for the application of stem cells in fertility research in the UK was developed through a dialogue between the scientific community, faith groups, medical practitioners, patients, and others. While the scale of that challenge was large, developing governance for data-driven technologies is more akin to developing the overall governance for all of medicine, not just one small piece. The scope of the challenge is vast and the appropriate governance mechanisms will necessarily take time to evolve.

As prior guests on the podcast have noted, governance happens at many levels: at the data model, organization, and at the regulatory level, to name a few examples. Ollie views the role of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation as a sort of ladder between the layers: seeking out the places where governance already exists and providing the essential links that allow all the elements of governance to come together in one robust system so that everyone from a CEO to a technologist to a citizen-consumer knows what the expectations are and how to ensure they are met. Two examples of how the CDEI is developing these essential links are its AI Barometer analysing the risks & opportunities for data-driven technologies across five sectors, and a recent report proposing a new framework for trustworthy data sharing across public-sector services.

Ollie ended on an optimistic note: those of us who are steeped in the challenges of digital ethics may be deluged by the many negative stories we see on a daily basis, or even by the fragmented nature of so many seemingly disparate frameworks and models for regulating the space. The problems can seem too vast to contemplate. But one positive takeaway is that public discourse on the subject is maturing. The importance of developing robust digital ethics mechanism is becoming a more recognized aspect of our day-to-day lives, and the digitization of formerly analogue systems and processes affords us another opportunity to recognize the bias inherent in these systems. It’s only by recognizing the challenges we face with societal fairness that we can start to redress those, and automation gives us an opportunity to put right some harms that have already been in existence for a long time. Creating a better future is something we can all look forward to.

On this episode, I’m joined by Mark Hughes, DXC’s senior vice president of Offerings and Strategic Partners. Mark is responsible for DXC’s technology strategy by driving innovation in DXC’s core offerings. Before stepping into this role, Mark led DXC's security organization and offerings and he previously served as BT’s Chief Executive of Security. Mark is a Royal Military Academy graduate and British Army veteran and he serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Board.

Mark’s extensive experience with the development of cybersecurity and privacy moving from concepts to recognized business functions gives him a window into the possible future for digital ethics. Mark described several phases of cybersecurity coalescing to be what it is today, from industry recognition of the risks to aligning on a systemic multi-stakeholder approach, to the development of governance frameworks both within industry and from external regulatory bodies, to identifying specific roles that are now responsible for ensuring adherence to those regulatory frameworks.

But building an effective approach to cybersecurity (and by extension digital ethics) isn’t just about developing the right formal processes, it’s also about building the right culture of expectations so that doing ethics is simply part of the everyday practice of developing new products & services. It’s important to have formal checks in place, but a lot can be managed by simply making ethical considerations a regular part of the development cycle. One area that Mark often sees being missed is developing an approach to rapidly respond when things do go wrong, as they inevitably will no matter how carefully considerations are made leading up to that point. Without minimizing the importance of the avoidance of harm, often the thing that really differentiates successful approaches from unsuccessful ones is the ability to respond quickly & effectively to a problem once it’s been identified.

Mark finished with the idea that it’s more important to get started with a simple process than to try and perfect everything before proceeding. In software development we’re all familiar with the idea of patching to respond to threats that have been identified since these systems are far too complex to identify every potential issue from the start; we also need to develop an approach to digital ethics that keeps potential risks & benefits in constant review with processes to respond to emergent harms.

For this episode, I’m joined by Katie Shay, the head of Business & Human Rights at Cisco. Katie compared the growing strategic focus on human rights in business operations to the prior development of Privacy Engineering as a discipline: she believes the trajectory from being an important but loosely organized set of principles to a recognized business function is beginning to coalesce. We’re starting to see a move towards a recognizable discipline of Human Rights Engineering. We can observe this broader trend not only through Katie’s direct work at Cisco but also examples of companies like Salesforce taking a proactive stance by creating an Ethical & Humane Use of Technology Office, as well as firms long beleaguered by criticisms of their human rights records like Facebook and Twitter hiring human rights directors to critically examine their impact.

Katie pointed to two essential frameworks as fundamental background reading for anyone looking to build human rights operational governance processes: the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Katie focused on several principles for developing an effective human rights governance process: understanding bias, creating a diverse team and noting where there are gaps in order to figure out how to bring those perspectives to the table, interdisciplinarity in approaching an issue, and strong cross-functional relationships. By using these principles, Katie finds that a human rights-based approach not only provides an effective framework for risk mitigation but also by its very nature gives more insightful outcomes to enhancing all kinds of business decisions.

As with so many of our guests, Katie focused not only on the risk mitigation aspects of ethics but also the opportunity for identifying market gaps and driving strategic success: she spoke about one initiative in Cisco’s internal incubator where a technology team came to Katie’s team for human rights guidance. The Business & Human Rights Team were not only to find examples of risk areas and talk the incubator team through some strategies for mitigating those risks, but they were also able to identify several new ways the technology could be used for enhancing human rights, thus adding to the incubator team’s business case for taking this novel project from an experiment to a technology worth backing in production. While the technology was still too early-stage to discuss in detail, the approach of using human rights to guide better business outcomes should be an inspiration to any team seeking to accelerate their decision-making capabilities.