In our earlier blog we outlined how organisations must take a strategy first approach to AI adoption.
However, too often strategy is seen as a document to be delivered and read by senior leadership rather than a way of thinking and guardrails to inform decision making.
One of the key questions I ask teams when working with organisations is ‘how does your work contribute to realising your strategy?’ Too often individuals and teams don’t know, and a vague answer of work being either tactical or strategic, meaning short or long term is given.
In the rapidly changing world of AI it’s imperative that your AI strategy is able to translate directly into execution.
A strategy first approach means that all work that happens within an organisation is strategic, meaning it contributes to strategic goals, whether small incremental improvements or longer term initiatives.
This blog is going to talk about some specific ways of enabling that, with recognition that AI driven innovation means thinking differently about how organisations must organise themselves to execute against strategic goals.
Taking an outcome-based approach here, our priority is to ensure AI initiatives are aligned with business goals. We need to create a strong thread from the organisation's strategic objectives through to every feature being delivered to production.
This ensures we’re executing to deliver value from AI, while incorporating the unique risks and challenges of AI and innovation. It also ensures we’re reducing waste (in terms of time and resources) to execute on AI projects, compounding our return on investment.
The risks of AI-led innovation are different. Organisations often lack effective approaches to manage them, so translating their AI strategy into execution using a current paradigm is ineffective. We see this in several ways:
We want to propose a fourth way, an approach to execute against their AI strategy that:
It’s important to remember your operating model is downstream of strategy. There is not a one size fits all model, and it should be right for how you want to execute on your strategy. Orient your operating model based on outcomes, so you’re creating opportunities for discovery not solutions. This establishes a backlog of opportunities, instead of targeting AI at low level, tactical problems, thereby limiting its potential.
To avoid siloed AI, and thereby limited value and opportunity, create multi disciplinary teams at every level, charged with continuous discovery for the opportunities AI can be targeted at. This means a multi disciplinary group who own the strategy, and perform high level opportunity discovery, down to detailed problem and solution discovery by teams tasked with executing on an individual initiative.
The real value in AI is building capabilities, not simply pointing the technology at particular problems. Delivering early value is important for buy-in from stakeholders, but maintaining a long-term vision is paramount. To do this, develop a north star objectives framework, detailing your vision, and use this to guide what you’re prioritising.
Finally, there is a tendency to think that an approach tailored to innovation and uncertainty is how the whole organisation should transform, in reality you need different models with different horizons and different skills. A Three Horizons model with teams who focus on pioneering AI, establishing production AI services and maintaining them for the long term is a pragmatic approach that incorporates the different skills and mindsets required at each stage.
Taking your venture into AI beyond strategy and into execution allows you to break the paralysis. Instead of wondering ‘what do we do about AI?’, you can start to think ‘how do we innovate and add value but take into consideration our unique risks?’.
Beyond the step change, the potential value to be derived is enormous. Consider the objectives as laid out in your north star framework - these can now be executed against. This ensures your AI initiatives ladder up to the strategic goals of the business. This approach allows you to rapidly innovate, but within the guardrails of what’s going to create long-term value for the organisation.
There are four key things you should do to lay the foundations for executing in the right way:
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