FountainBlue's November 2024 Newsletter
FountainBlue’s final Front Line Managers Online program was held on the topic of ‘The Pandemic in Retrospect’. Notes will be included in our December newsletter, but the theme will be around the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly brought on by the pandemic, the aftermath and the implications.
FountainBlue’s final VIP Roundtable was on the topic of ‘hyperautomation use cases’. The full notes are below, but the theme is similar - it’s remarkable what technology leaders and organizations are already doing, and also astounding the amount of work yet to be done, and the challenges and opportunities for getting it done well.
This segues well into this month’s leadership topic - ‘Leaning into an Unpredictable Future’.
Leaning into an Unpredictable Future
Change is inevitable, but how we accept and respond to it reveals not only who we are as individuals and as a society today but also who we will become in the future—a future we have yet to encounter.
The wise amongst us focus only on impacting the things we *can* change while accepting the changes beyond our control.
The tech-philic amongst us wants to use the latest technologies to understand what happened yesterday, oversee our work today, and manage our work in the future.
The efficient and effective managers amongst us want to make a plan, take considered action, and prepare for a future we can’t predict.
Yet it’s not enough to be wise, tech-philic, or efficient. It takes more than the newest technologies and the most experienced managers and leaders to deliver solutions that support the Greater Good. It takes HUMANS who:
Seek what is faithful and wise.
Support what is fair and reasonable.
Empower and support those in need.
Connect and collaborate to achieve our goals.
It takes humans who think through the WHY, the WHAT, and the HOW questions around change.
WHY must we be optimistic and hopeful, despite the overwhelming challenges?
Choosing to be optimistic and hopeful despite the overwhelming uncertainties and challenges is the only way that progress can be made.
Be confident that taking a passionate, optimistic, hopeful, and strategic stand might make incremental progress toward a larger end game. That small step, that ripple of energy in an ocean, may not be enough in itself, but it’s a start and the only way we can collectively shift the narrative and make a difference.
WHAT
What we choose to do is a marriage between what we’re passionate about, what the market needs, and where our skills lie. This sounds simple, but it isn’t.
We don’t dare hope that the three *can* come together.
We don’t reach for the intersection between the three - the passion, the market, the skills.
We don’t create opportunities for the three to flow together.
I challenge you to reflect on how the three shall meet in the middle to benefit yourself and those you touch.
HOW do we plan for upcoming changes?
Be inquisitive and open, yet centered and strategic.
Ask the right questions of the right people and be open to some surprising responses, for it will help plan for changes ahead. But before you ask those questions, be strategic based on the desires of your company, team, product, and what you yourself want, and consider how to achieve those goals.
Be confident and bold yet skeptical and agile.
Boldly and confidently follow through on plans well-made while remaining skeptical that the data content and information will consistently fall in alignment with the plan. Hence, agility around the plan is necessary as the plan gets updated regularly through feedback loops.
Be responsive and reactive, yet strategic and plan-ful.
Address what’s in front of you while keeping a strategic, plan-full eye on the future.
Being inclusive and collaborative, yet independent and connected.
Balance the need to include others, to work with others while remaining independent and centered on strategic overarching goals.
Nobody can predict or plan for the future, but if we all step in and set the bar high for truth and wisdom, for fairness and goodness, perhaps we will see positive incremental progress, no matter how small, with the ripple effect of empowering and enabling those within our sphere of influence.
Notes from last month’s Front Line Managers Online Program
FountainBlue’s October 31, 2024, Front Line Managers Online Program is entitled ‘The Pandemic in Retrospect’ and will feature:
as a Product Leader - Sondra Bollar, Senior Director of Program Management, Oracle Application Labs (OAL), Product and Portfolio Center of Excellence (PPCOE) Oracle
as a Marketing Leader - Louise Lamb, VP, Marketing and Operations, One82 Inc
as a People Leader - Kerry Perryman, Senior HRBP, Samsung Research America
as a Scientific Leader - Leena Priya Makani, Scientist I (Gene Editing), BioMarin Pharmaceuticals
This Front Line Managers Online Program will be the final event in the series. Notes from FountainBlue's October 31 Front Line Managers Online program will be included in next month’s newsletter.
Notes from last month’s When She Speaks Online Program
FountainBlue's October 10 When She Speaks program was on the topic of 'Stay in Front of the Change Curve'. Please join me in thanking our esteemed panelists.
Facilitator Linda Holroyd, CEO, FountainBlue
Panelist Amber Barber, Associate Vice President, Jade Global
Panelist Shari Begun, Vice President, Worldwide IOT Sales, Renesas
Panelist Cynthia Gao, Head of Global HR, ASML
Panelist Diana Pohle, Senior Director, Commercial Analytics & Insights, BioMarin Pharmaceuticals
Our panelists represented a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives but had much in common:
a courageous and open outlook about changes they are facing
a resourceful, can-do attitude focused on delivering value
a resilient and collaborative approach that empowers and engages others around them
a centered North Star perspective that focuses on their values and beliefs along with business and customer value
Our panelists shared that managing the change curve starts with adopting a courageous, data-based, strategic attitude, along with the determination and resiliency to deliver measurable outcomes for customers in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders. Below is a compilation of their best practices on how to stay in front of the change curve:
Be Leaderly.
Accept change as a given and manage and lead in order to stay in front of the change curve.
Leverage your intuition, tempered with data, to strategically and planfully address the changes to come.
Communicate clearly and transparently WHY change is needed, WHAT the change will be, WHEN the change will happen, HOW the change will be implemented, WHO will be impacted, etc.,
Adopt a Strategic and Open Mindset.
Understand how the macro and micro trends are/will be directly or indirectly affecting your industry, organization, and team.
Strategically plan in detail, but be willing to be agile and shift into other strategies based on feedback, market changes, customer requests, etc.,
Leverage scenario planning to help plan agile responses for the external changes that impact yourself, your team, and your company.
Plan for both the long-term and short-term needs of the company.
Be a continuous learner and grow a learning culture.
Integrate past learnings into current and future strategies.
Proactively Manage a Change.
Manage the roadblocks around change implementation.
Clearly define success metrics and report regularly on the progress.
Integrate the technologies and tools so that your team and organization benefit, but don't delegate the growth of the company and the management of the tools to the technologies themselves!
Prioritize and deprioritize objectives based on the needs of the company.
Together We're Better.
Motivate, empower, and enable your team so that they can fully participate in change initiatives.
Include a diverse, neurodivergent team to help with change management and implementation.
Create a culture that welcomes everyone to lean into change and support each other through change.
None of us can visualize and plan for the future, but our panelists have inspired us to believe that we too can be resilient, positive, powerful, and even successful if we face changing one challenge at a time, leaning into our skills, our connections, our resources, our capabilities.
Notes from last month’s VIP Roundtable Online Program
FountainBlue's October 11 VIP roundtable was our final program in the series and was on the topic of 'Hyperautomation Enterprise Use Cases'’.
Gartner defined hyperautomation as a 'business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.'
We gathered executives with experience in technologies ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to event-driven software architecture and robotic process automation (RPA).
They also have some direct or indirect experience with business process management (BPM) and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), as well as integration platform as a service (iPaaS), low-code/no-code tools, packaged software, and other types of decision, process, and task automation tools, whether it's custom-designed and developed in-house or an adopted implementation.
Below is a summary of thoughts on hyperautomation enterprise use cases:
The integration of AI and Machine Learning allows for:
More intelligent and adaptive automation processes
Enhanced decision-making through AI-powered data analysis
Automation of more complex tasks and workflows
Leveraging Industry-Specific Applications also makes sense:
Manufacturing: Enhancing production efficiency and enabling smart factories
Healthcare: Automating sensitive data processing and improving patient care insights
Financial services: Improving compliance processes and customer service
The shift toward Cloud-Based Solutions hyperautomation platforms can lead to:
Greater scalability and flexibility
Easier integration with other cloud services
Reduced infrastructure costs
Improved deployment and scalability.
Process Mining and Analytics can allow enterprises to:
Identify optimal processes for automation
Gain deeper insights into business operations
Continuously optimize automated workflows
Integrating Low-Code/No-Code Platforms can lead to:
Faster development and deployment of automated processes
Empowerment of business users to create automations
Reduced reliance on specialized technical skills
It's early days for enterprise hyperautomation use cases, but also exciting times.
A prerequisite for mass adoption and integration is to truly manage and integrate the volumes of data, focusing on the most relevant data and creating dashboards with actionable insights in real time.
The risk is too high to fully automate solutions, especially for regulation-intensive industries like healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.
Keeping humans in the loop is necessary to help oversee hyperautomation integrations so they are compliant, secure, safe, and aligned to corporate and customer expectations and goals.
Individual technologies are progressing quickly, but integrations BETWEEN fast-evolving solutions will be more complicated and will take more time.
Most enterprises can't afford large investments in hyper-automation solutions unless they focus on delivering short-term value as well as exceptional value for the long term.
Our executives consistently remarked on both the progress to date as well as the work yet to be done. The challenge *and* the opportunity lies in the ability to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver high-value, high-quality solutions at scale.
How can we address the rising need for 'low-volume, high-mix' solutions when it's resource-intensive to do so?
How can we optimize complex integrations of a wide range of technologies?
How can we leverage hyperautomation tools, processes, and technologies to solve specific customer problems?
How can we leverage hyperautomation to facilitate innovation?
Our executives agreed that hyperautomation enterprise use cases will continue to evolve, so below are some suggested thoughts for adopting and integrating these solutions for enterprises:
Adopt hyper-automation solutions that will do the necessary dirty, dull, or dangerous work necessary for your enterprise.
Leverage hyper-automation solutions to keep your technologies, operations, systems, and processes secure and compliant.
Provide tools, systems, and processes that provide dashboards of actionable insights to help oversee complex operations.
Create hyperautomation tools and technologies which support the adopted quality and operational standards adopted by your team and organization.
Consider the role of humans closely in overseeing the company's adopted hyper-automation solutions.
Design hyper-automation solutions that would help quickly identify problems and/or make data-based decisions so that the enterprise is safer and more efficient.
The bottom line is that hyperautomation use cases for enterprises must consistently provide value and create impact while remaining secure and compliant.