Any organization looking to deliver quality software rapidly and reliably needs to care about DevOps. Companies that have adopted DevOps principles are disrupting industries, innovating faster and leaving their competitors in the dust. Has your organization embraced DevOps principles?

Business DevOps Savvy

As DevOps tools become more prominent in the IT landscape, it’s important to remember both the business drivers that shaped them and the consistent and repeatable business outcomes they produce. Otherwise, the DevOps message focused on it being a transformation engine risks being wrongfully relegated to the IT process bucket.

What can be misunderstood is DevOps’ pivotal role in dealing with business changes in the wake of digital disruptions. DevOps is about building the organization capability to do just that. It is a compliment to the strategic planning work, providing the approach for digital organizations to hypothesize, validate assumptions and adjust to changing conditions.

Experimenting towards Business Value

According to the World Economic Forum, new digital business models are the principal reason why just over half of the names of companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000. We could argue that the differentiator between the companies that endured vs. those that did not, has as much to do with their balance sheets as it did with their attitude towards experimentation. New entrants could experiment their way to business value whereas the incumbents dared not.

DevOps practices play a key role in enabling experimentation for a digital business. The organizational willingness to experiment and prevailing views of failure warrant a closer look.

Failure is critical to DevOps Culture

Somewhere along the way, under the pretext of risk management, failure was cast out of the club of viable business moments. Factors like organizational structure, processes, and workplace culture reinforced patterns of risk avoidance.

Today however, the pattern of an emerging digital business tolerates the risk of new customer interactions, unexplained online telemetry, usability feedback, unsuccessful builds, failed test cases, and new security vulnerabilities. Each situation not only offers learning moments, it demands them. It could be tempting to avoid the potential of these moments altogether and preserve a low-risk facade. Based on experience, if set-backs and learning are not visible in the initial stages of a project then little of business value or consequence is taking shape yet.

Of course, changing organizational culture is a monumental undertaking. While DevOps won’t change the culture, it can change the habits and practices surrounding failure, which is a big step in the right direction. DevOps assumes that things will fail and makes it safe to do so early in the cycle. Designing for failure and shifting left are DevOps practices that handle failure gracefully. Indeed, learning to fail forward is a key step in beginning to frame mindsets around failure. DevOps reduces operational risk without sacrificing the vital learning opportunities. This commitment to learning is a key enabler to the success of emerging DevOps teams.

Trust in Teams: Remove the silos

DevOps teams include all the necessary roles in the delivery process: from business leaders to process designers, security experts, quality assurance, as well as the developers and operations roles. The ability for DevOps teams to address cross-cutting concerns and deliver from end-to-end is what sets them apart.

The moment organizational leadership realizes the impact of DevOps teams on the current practices is a key inflection point. Will they be made to navigate existing processes or given the latitude to define new methods? For this reason, selecting the right initiative, and the right team, as an initial pilot becomes crucial.

One of the key benefits of introducing DevOps processes and culture is that it removes the communication barriers between teams and the reliance on the availability of an individual person or team for software delivery to progress.

More than a checklist exercise

Teams don’t “do DevOps”, much like they don’t “do Agile”. They adopt an Agile mindset and live DevOps. Organizational commitment to learning is crucial to success. It’s important to remember that:

• A team cannot do this alone – they need a coach.
• This will not be flawless – there will be learning moments.
• Skillsets and responsibilities will change.
• It is not for every product at first – and not intended for maintenance work.
• It is not for everyone -the change can be overwhelming.

If you would like to understand the backdrop of process, technology and automation, culture, measurement, and outcomes then take the DevOps Self-Assessment.

Already in-flight? Ask Microsoft Enterprise Services how Premier Services for Developers (PSfD) can accelerate your DevOps journey to help to drive the digital transformation everyone is talking about, but few are able to execute.

Or perhaps the time has come to reconnect with the developer within? Discover the full potential of DevOps on Azure.

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Optimization of the tools and processes with the objective of having a more capable, effective and productive workforce is key. The more focus on the tools, the more digital our strategy and program will be. Executing these strategies directly impacts the status quo of the organizational culture. In response to stirring the cultural pot, focus on outlining a traditional change management program that includes: communications (sharing the vision and reason for the change), and training (new knowledge and ability aligned with the new tools and processes) to minimize the risk to cultural impact and focus on quickly realizing the productivity benefits.

While communications and training are key to driving behavioural change, digital transformation journeys relying solely on these are setting themselves to a painfully long path to benefit realization. Organizations cannot transform to digital unless people do. These additional components should be added as part of the change management workstream:

Leadership

In the context of change management, leadership translates into three essential elements:

Executive sponsorship – This is fundamental to drive behavioural change. Executives should be actively involved in the execution of the strategy in an open and transparent way.

Community of Change – Identify people that embrace the change and empower them with the resources to be the promoters of change.

Coaching – Promote a conversational channel by enabling meaningful discussions and open forums, which allows you to listen to what your employees think about the change and tailor your strategy.

Embrace Resistance

Patience is a virtue, but it doesn’t necessarily mean to sit, wait and hope for the best. Where your modern workplace strategy is concerned, it translates into being constantly aware of the impact of the change that your strategy is creating. Adoption measurement and monitoring should become second nature. Find the metrics that can tell your transformation story as it evolves and analyze adoption metrics, defining action plans that will improve your adoption efforts.

Acknowledge and embrace resistance, as it has an inverse correlation with your productivity. Employees will show dissatisfaction and you might experience a tangible customer impact as well. Make sure you can identify, measure and counteract resistance as soon as it occurs. Be patient and let your strategy develop inside the organization. Learn as you go, and course correct as you see fit.

Inclusion

Many transformational strategies are being designed around one persona in mind: Millennials. Focusing on a generalized definition of a generation is a mistake. The basic reality of the millennial generation is that they have been living in a connected and digital world most, if not all, of their lives. Although they could become the most supporting group in the organization around your modern workplace strategy, an effective modern workplace strategy should include all employees in the organization. Target every person regardless of their digital maturity, enabling an inclusive modern workplace strategy.

Consider focusing on the Digitally Connected Employee persona to allow you to design your strategy for every employee. You can design skill development, training and communications suitable for multiple audiences.

Recognition

Identifying, rewarding and recognizing new behaviours is a fundamental adoption accelerator of your modern workplace strategy. Recognition changes are more an art than a science and timing is the most important thing. Consider the following:

* How do you reward new behaviours at the beginning when productivity decreases impacting the status quo?

* When is the right time to switch your metrics and recognition into the new model and dismiss any other old metric?

Like any other transformational endeavour, these success factors can’t be replicated as a recipe for success and immediate results. You will face challenges, resistance and failure. However, for every negative outcome, you are presented with an opportunity to identify, measure and set a new action plan to keep progressing transformation.

The post 4 Tips to Build an Effective Modern Workplace appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Software-driven vehicle transformation

Trying to exponentially transform the way you manage and interact with your vehicles by adding more mechanical gears and cool (but disjointed) gadgets to them is like trying to improve the horse-buggy by adding more horses to pull the buggy.

Instead empower components to integrate, leveraging cloud to enable quick safety decision making, a more productive ride and self-correcting predictive analysis – improving efficiency and reducing costs.

Enter Microsoft’s Connected Vehicle Solution

Digital transformation is reshaping the automotive industry by enabling autonomous driving technologies, advanced driving assistance systems and intelligent infotainment experiences.

These breakthrough technologies are providing automakers and fleet managers with new opportunities to build deeper relationships with customers, streamline their maintenance services, and open new revenue streams.

Take advantage of new opportunities and transform your business

When deciding on the first step, consider adding connectivity. Using real-time vehicle connectivity, automakers and fleet managers can enable remote interactions and use vehicle data to predict service needs, provide consumers personalized offers, and monetize new data streams, positively impacting the bottom line by:

• Increasing vehicle and parts sales. Increase your vehicle’s desirability by enabling customers to remotely interact with their vehicle, track its location, review trip history, and receive push notifications about upcoming service, accidents, and parental controls. Improve parts and accessory sales by providing targeted offers and loyalty programs to drive higher conversion rates of offers, utilization of dealer service departments, and interactions with dealerships.
• Proactively addressing maintenance. Lengthen the life of vehicles and increase customer satisfaction by running remote diagnostics and applying predictive analytics to vehicle data to proactively calculate vehicle service needs based on mileage, driving conditions, and location. Use these predictions to deliver personalized offers to customers and keep fleet assets running at maximum efficiency.
• Enabling new revenue streams. Uncover new business opportunities by monetizing real-time vehicle data for third-party consumption or creating new value-add services for customers. For example, facilitate smart insurance by offering insurance companies preauthorized access to client data to enable pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-drive insurance offerings. Alternatively, deliver new in-app services such as mobile payments to ease transactions for dealer services or add-on roadside assistance services.
• Deploying quickly. Utilizing a compliant cloud architecture, the Vehicle Management solution can be deployed quickly virtually anywhere in the world. Each deployment can be customized to your brand and localized for its market. Built on a continuously evolving platform that includes firmware over-the-air (FOTA) updates, your solution will always have the latest capabilities and security protections.

Learn more about how customers are using Microsoft Connected Vehicles Solutions, and contact me on LinkedIn to find out how we can work together to help transform your connected vehicles operations.

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Canadians have come to expect ‘familiar’ online services from government agencies, providing the same user-experience they get from commercial service offerings. This fundamental shift in the delivery of IT services has forced many government agencies to revisit their approach.

Successfully executing your cloud strategy requires a systematic approach as well as a defined program of change. This systematic approach and program of change is structured around three workstreams: workloads, foundation and operations. 

Consider which workloads to move and why

Addressing the foundational and operational components without having a workload or set of workloads that will exist on the platform is of little value. Identification, prioritization and migration of a workload is essential to the business case for change and ensures the department prioritizes the foundations and operations workstreams.

Address the right foundational components

The greatest degree of commonality across customers is in the foundational components that provide the core services for cloud consumption. The following components are included in this effort and others may be identified: identity, authentication, network, subscriptions and security.

Operational management and support

This workstream often proves to be the most challenging as each customer’s culture and work environment is unique. While Microsoft has numerous proven practices around operations and governance how it is incorporated into the existing customer environment is challenging. This workstream focuses on change management, release management, service management and governance.

Your starting point: Create a Cloud Center of Expertise (CoE)

You may not be intimately knowledgeable in cloud but you possess the desire, drive and entrepreneurial spirit to learn and grow. This multi-disciplinary team will work with cloud project teams and provide:

• Cloud analysis
• Cloud guidance and architecture
• Cloud engagement and reporting

This team will collect winning design patterns and practices to leverage in other cloud projects. Start small and expand into more complex workloads as the organizations maturity in designing and operating cloud solutions (including hybrid) increases. The Cloud CoE will work across all three workstreams (Workload, Foundational, and Operational) to drive consistent & continual delivery, share knowledge with service consumers, enable prioritized cloud deployments, and advance consumption of cloud services.

The Cloud CoE is key to successfully executing your cloud strategy and delivering a systematic approach across all cloud projects that will evolve as your organization matures. Our next blogs will delve deeper into the framework components for this approach which consists of three workstreams: workloads, foundation and operations. 

Find out how Microsoft Digital Advisory Services can get you started on your digital journey by helping you engage your customers, empower your employees, optimize your operations and transform your products.

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Connect products and services

External forces like cyber risk, sustainability and complex regulations force companies to transform how they manufacture products, as well as create unique business models that cater to today’s connected customer.

Businesses previously designed, built, produced and shipped products that customers bought, concluding the cycle. It wasn’t common practice to center the entire manufacturing process around the customer and support an ongoing relationship. Now, organizations are building in continuous feedback loops – sensors in products and customer feedback from various channels. The cloud and big data allow for a greater opportunity to improve customer connections and really differentiate your organization by doing things like listening to customer sentiment, analyzing usage and determining quality.

Digitize your Production

With the convergence of physical and digital, many manufacturing companies are embracing digital transformation. Many manufacturers believe that achieving end-to-end real-time monitoring is key to improving business process, but despite investments made, only 7% of manufacturers have achieved real-time monitoring across the entire manufacturing process. The results for those who have successfully implemented smart, connected factories are extremely powerful with average realized productivity gains of 17-20%.

Digital transformation is about applying technologies to radically change traditional processes, products and services into data-driven, connected solutions that can be monetized through efficiency gains and new business models. This digital-first approach allows acceleration time to market and provides new customer value. Finding an approach that fits your business is critical, as there is no one-size-fits all.

Consider these three foundational guidelines to set your organization on a course that make sense:

• Build a vision for your digital transformation journey
• Develop a holistic and realistic strategy
• Identify a partner with industry experience required to deliver the change you need

Develop a strategy to match your objectives

Three key considerations that are easy to overlook, but important to evaluate include finding the relationship between your strategy and technology, prioritizing agility to contribute to longer-term success and the unique requirements for your industry and vertical.

Avoid going it alone

Transformation efforts grounded in industry and vertical expertise are more likely to result in better solutions. The partner you choose should have knowledge of your objectives and scope, a deep understanding of the technology being used as well as strong experience helping others with similar initiatives. They should be able to help you think through the entire digital transformation journey as well as assisting with full execution of that vision.

Find out how Microsoft services can help you drive transformative change while minimizing you risk by reach out to us on our social channels:  Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook 

Learn more: A Strategic Approach to Digital Transformation in Manufacturing Industries

The post Enabling Transformation for the Factory of the Future appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Improving the end user experience with the IT service organization while reducing effort and increasing security is key.  IT is evolving and adapting, becoming more agile to get things done quicker, and working in an environment that empowers and enables users to do more. IT modernization helps your organization deliver the necessary levels of security, functionality and efficiency required to keep employees productive in role – allowing you to deliver better products and services.

Microsoft helps customers transition and manage risk in a smart way by taking advantage of the cloud and modern IT, using tools and capabilities to bring that design point to your existing investments.  As you evolve your Modern IT journey, we recommend focusing on ITSM, DevOps, Win10 and Cybersecurity.

The Modern Service Management Approach

This is geared at making ITSM relevant in a cloud world. Service management experts should be focused on the most important outcomes that evolve customers from legacy traditional IT models to easier, more efficient, cost effective and agile service structures. Modern Apps and cloud services are released to end users and developers in a rapid and agile manner, which requires more facilitation of self-governance and the framework that enables coordination vs enforcement.  Your IT service delivery and support capabilities need to evolve, changing how you govern, operate and support cloud services. Modern ITSM embodies this new strategy, empowering DevOps and end users by allowing free movement in a coordinated, self-governed fashion.

DevOps – Uniting People, Process and Products

DevOps practices are essential to deliver better software faster with less cost. Companies continually strive to maintain a competitive edge and customers expect more frequent deliveries. Re-align your business to digitally transform and enable app innovation. It’s common for IT challenges to arise with extreme pressure on Ops team to configure and provision apps and infrastructure as quickly so that Dev teams can test and release new code. Your company requires a development platform for modern software development teams that includes:

• Any developer, any language, any platform
• Secure yet flexible
• Agile for the Enterprise
• Quality at the Center

Enable Productivity with Windows 10

With the mobile device explosion and harnessing the power of the cloud, Windows 10 is integrated for simplicity and provides intelligent security to defend against advanced threats. Windows 10 enables users to be productive on any device encouraging employees to innovate, create, and ultimately deliver business value. It’s also easy to deploy, manage, always up to date, and harnesses the power of the cloud including proactive insights.

Address the Modern Security Threat

While the attack surface has broadened, attacks have also become more sophisticated and more damaging. Security leaders must balance these challenges with businesses needs to collaborate, innovate, and grow. Embracing an always-on and multifaceted approach to security that protects all endpoints, detects early signs of a breach, and responds before that threat can cause damage is critical.

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What are you doing to ensure you and your team are prepared to handle it?

Transformation is no longer a choice

Companies must commit to adjusting processes, systems and cultures to remain competitive. Uncertainty for many teams can be overwhelming but it’s important not to let it discourage you. Because change drives growth, it’s important to accept it. While many leaders are focused on actively pursuing and implementing new productivity solutions, transformation is most effective when employees are at the forefront of driving innovation.

Regardless of how many years of experience a company has been in business, it’s imperative that its workforce embraces what makes it successful. At Microsoft, this means fostering a culture of diversity, collaboration and agility which helps us live out our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Envisioning, initiating and controlling change creates opportunities and paves the way for organizations to transform and ignite growth. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella refers to the continuous process of renewal in his new book ‘Hit Refresh’, which is something that universally appeals to every organization.

Define ‘Change’ as an Opportunity

Managing your team through transition requires clear focus. Be sure to communicate that change breeds opportunity, and work to unify priorities toward achieving a common goal. Because change usually starts at the individual level first, it’s natural for employees to seek ‘WIIFM’ (What’s in It for Me). Help them find the personal meaning and validate their journey by answering those very important questions.

Show your team that change is good for business because it creates new avenues for advancement and has the potential to further skill development. It can often motivate optimism where innovation is sought, and collaboration of ideas is encouraged. Help your staff become advocates of change by ensuring they feel truly empowered.

Tips to Get Your Team on Board

Effective change isn’t imposed upon your team, it’s cultural. It’s not about what you’re telling them to do, but rather how much you listen to their perspective on how to adapt.

Some best practices to get your team on board include:

• Be transparent – Share what you know and be honest about what still needs to be defined
• State the questions – Define the questions and provide the data needed to answer them well
• Get their input – Involve staff and allow them to take ownership of issues and problems
• Be in-tune – Listen to their feedback and take their concerns seriously
• Inspire change– Integrate yourself in a team of peers working towards a common goal vs instructing change

Achieve More Together

Because change is constant, organizations need to drive change through people rather than driving people through change. Break from the traditional leader-follower mindset by empowering your employees. Test drive some of the tips shared to find out how you and your staff can cohesively work to embrace change and drive impactful results.

The post Change equals opportunity: How to get your Employees on Board appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

However, specific implementations still require a healthy degree of research and experimentation to drive-out the full value of blockchain. In this respect, Microsoft is in a unique position to help customers move past conceptual understanding and learn through ideation and experimentation.

With this in mind, the following post will begin by exploring the degree of fit between the key characteristics of a blockchain, and aspects of the Public Sector mission. The post will then explore candidate Public Sector scenarios with a more detailed foray into the use of blockchain for real property management.

Blockchain and Public Service.

Let’s start with why before moving to the how. Blockchain is a building block, or tool, that tackles a specific design challenge: how can a common set of information be shared across many organizations, without any single party being the central authority, while ensuring the changing data set remains trusted? The blockchain proposed to solve this challenged using a distributed ledger:  a distributed database with a trust harness.

In this light, the blockchain can be described as a tool to enable distributed digital trust. It is therefore not surprising that the blockchain has shown the most potential in circumstances where there is an opportunity to share data across multiple parties without having established trust between each party a priori. This is how trust in payments using the bitcoin digital currency based on a blockchain is established.

Another differentiating feature of a blockchain is that it does not rely on any single intermediary. In fact, no single party is trusted absolutely; their actions are scrutinized equally through cryptography.  As a result, the blockchain is also tool that enables disintermediation, or circumventing middlemen, to lower the cost of operations or transactions.

A final aspect of the blockchain to consider: it is important that we are exploring a blockchain and not the blockchain, a mythical solution to transformation everything. Several blockchains will be established for specific purposes or industries, and to address both public and private scenarios.

Using our definition of blockchain as a backdrop we can now explore the data stewardship role played by Public Service.

Public Service: A Trusted Steward

At the heart of the Public Sector’s purpose is maintain the trust of its citizens and constituents. From this imperative of public trust stems the need to demonstrate accountability through transparency.  Furthermore, the Public Sector operates at the interaction of many stakeholders: constituents, citizens, NGOs, private enterprise, and other jurisdictions. We can see here the applicability of the blockchain distributed trust model discussed earlier.

Public sector also must uphold its responsibilities in terms of the efficient management of public funds by minimizing intermediaries. This is of particular interest given its role as the steward of the public wallet. Again, he finds here an alignment with the transactional efficiency of a blockchain.

This high-level overview of how the design characteristics of blockchain presents the to some information stewardship challenges faced by Public Services.

Public Sector Blockchain Scenarios

The Public Service federal, provincial, and municipal level acts as a trusted intermediary and steward of public record in a wide range of areas including registries, permits, claims adjudication, voting, copyright, and trade.

Public service is also a trusted steward of confidential records in the areas of identity management, health, education, and electoral processes. These scenarios share certain aspects their public record relatives which also shape the service to citizen. However, these scenarios also consider confidentiality to be of paramount importance.

Another area that warrants exploration is the question of Public Sector procurement, and supply chain management. Much like its private sector counterparts the public sector much also manage the complexities of increasing elaborate supply chains.

In each of these scenarios a blockchain embeds core capabilities in the area of audit. Indeed, digital records increase the ability to detect fraudulent operations early, preventing unwanted consequences, and reducing the effort or implementing corrective measures downstream.

Detailed Scenario: Real Property Management 

Governments manage among the most diverse real estate portfolios. A blockchain scenario of real property management would include the following elements:

• Devices can track the state of safety of buildings and their maintenance in your organization.
• From bridges to elevators blockchain can provide for a tamper-free ledger of operational data and the resulting maintenance.
• Third-party repair partners can monitor the blockchain for preventive maintenance and record their work back on the blockchain.
• Operational records can also be shared with government entities to verify compliance.

The post Is Blockchain a Technology for the Public Sector appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Successful businesses have one thing in common – they began as great ideas. Some were so simple making people wonder why they hadn’t thought of it themselves and others so profound leaving people in awe of how the idea was conceived.

Fabulous ideas don’t always come easy. In fact, many people wonder how the inspiration is conceived, and better yet how to replicate that inspiration of innovation. What’s the secret? The next big idea is out there … so how do you spot it?

Solve problems

Ideas often stem from a problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes it’s one of your own problems, and other times it’s someone else’s. Look around and identify issues or inefficiencies that are visible. Think about how they would work in an ‘ideal world’ and what you would need to do to make that happen. Brainstorm and jot down all these ideas.

Look for trouble. What is irritating and annoying to people is potentially a goldmine idea that you want to explore. When you realize that frustrations are ideas in the making, you spark your creative side and allow for the fun to begin: innovation! Questioning everything you do will help you to recognize where improvements can be made.

Listen first, stop talking

Learn to listen. Listening to understand, not just waiting for your turn in the conversation, is crucial. This is your opportunity to learn and grow. Find out what people want and need, and most importantly find out why. If you’re not listening and understanding why, chances are you’re never going to come up with a solution to their problems. It’s important to listen to:

• Your customers – they’ll tell you what you need to improve and what you need to innovate
• Your employees – they’ll give you feedback related to improvements to your business processes
• Your competitors – what they’re doing/saying can form future strategic decisions on innovation

Collaborate to innovate

Tap into the ideas and expertise of all your coworkers. Your company has countless combinations of thinking and behaviour as well as other traditional elements of diversity such as age, gender and experience.  Collaborating to create better ideas allows you to use these differences to learn and grow from one another.

Staying competitive in today’s fast-paced world means that organizations must foster a culture of innovation from within.

Breathe life into your idea

When you have a great idea on your hands you can feel it. It keeps you up at night and gets you out of bed in the morning. But without proper execution, your idea has zero value. Learn more about the real value of innovation and find out how Microsoft Services can help you innovate.

Listen here to learn more on how ideas play an important role in every innovation program.

The post The Aha Moment: Find Your Next Great Idea appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Technological advancements in artificial intelligence and cloud computing are fundamentally changing business models and industries. These changes are taking place at unprecedented speed. While managing programmatic change or optimization can be challenging enough, leading innovation and disruptive change on a regular basis is especially difficult.

Effective Leaders Embrace Disruption

In a world of emerging technologies, emerging markets and customer demands, innovation is imperative to keep your company relevant. Powerful leaders are not distracted nor fazed by disruption and they can measure their success and progress in the context of continual change.  For savvy leaders, the digital age – despite its challenges – has brought with it a revolutionary opportunity.

The best leaders welcome and encourage new ideas and models of doing business as well as innovative solutions to the toughest problems. It takes courage to leap into the unknown and encourage your employees to do the same.

Driven by Purpose

An EY-sponsored Harvard Business Review study found that organizations with a clear purpose drive innovation. Leaders that demonstrate that purpose through sound decisions and actions on a consistent basis are most effective in driving innovation. If they can connect innovation to the purpose of their organization, they show authenticity to stakeholders and are likely to have better performance and reputation.

Microsoft’s purpose and vision is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This is possible only by continuous innovation. Great leaders who can sustain innovation recruit employees who are passionate about the purpose and empower them to drive it forward.

Encourage Intrapreneurship

One thing remains true for all organizations – the future is uncertain. Business models can be displaced by a new app, platform and technology. Leaders should look to disrupt their organizations by fostering an  innovation-culture, allowing employees to act like entrepreneurs within a large organization.

One way to support new ideas is by providing an environment that supports fast prototyping. At Microsoft, we run global Hack-a-thons that foster innovation at all levels of the organization, across roles and regions.

Welcome Diversity and Lead Inclusively

Leaders can’t generate new ideas and perspectives or leading-edge approaches without a diverse workforce. There should be a good mix of attributes on all teams: gender, background and qualifications. Diversity is good for business.

Achieving diversity through focused recruitment approaches is only half the battle. Leaders should lead inclusively to harness diversity for innovation and competitiveness.

Successfully Execute your Innovative Ideas

Great ideas are only as good as their potential to be successfully executed. Find out more about how you can pave the path to successful innovation within your organization by realizing Execution as the real value of innovation and disruption.

Listen here on how to measure the success of your innovation programs.

Reach out to us on our social channels to continue the conversation: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

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