Author: Phil Le-Brun

One year ago we published our first research report on the role of Chief Data Officers (CDOs). The renowned Tom Davenport, in partnership with MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium (CDOIQ), was commissioned to conduct a global study of CDOs across industries, tenures, and stages of the data journey. At the time I […]

Never waste your time; it is too precious. There are never any guarantees we will have tomorrow. —Catherine Pulsifer, Author “I don’t have enough (fill in the blank)” is a common refrain in the face of new demands. It’s normally followed by that much-loved phrase “We need to prioritise.” I’ve observed that the challenge is […]

 “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist & philosopher   Thinking is hard; energy intensive even. Perhaps that’s the reason we obsess about food. One estimate indicates we make over 200 food-related decisions a day. Another popular internet statistic boldly states that the average human […]

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. —Roy Amara, Amara’s law I’m fascinated by the technological tipping points in history that have ignited the public’s imagination—the first TV broadcast, manned space flight, or video conference. Each of these events made a […]

“Stop trying to make everyone happy. You’re not chocolate” – Anon As a distant observer of the art of being a DJ, I believe I can make their jobs easier. My cunning plan is to replace all those complex sliders on their mixing decks with binary switches. Volume: yes or no? Bass: on or off? […]

With data at the centre of every application, process, and business decision, nearly every organisation I talk to describes a quest to become more data-driven to discover and act on insights rapidly. They know there is gold to be found within the troves of their data, but—frustratingly—it usually doesn’t materialise in a timely way for […]

In my customer conversations, Supply Chain Management (SCM) has become almost as constant a theme as people and agility. The last two years of pandemic and other disruptive events, along with the necessity to achieve sustainability objectives, have shocked companies into realising that they don’t necessarily know as much about their supply chains as they […]

In the first blog post, René Schneider and Andrea Sturm described the why and how of DB Systel’s transformation journey. Here they dive into how their organisation is now structured and some of the steps taken to achieve this state. It’s not a pattern that can be cut-and-pasted, but I find inspiration and insights in […]

Pick an organisation to transform into a modern, agile, and self-organised equivalent. Would you pick one of the biggest transportation companies in the world which happens to be a German state-owned, 150-year-old railway organisation with Works Councils? Probably not, and yet DB Systel, part of Deutsche Bahn, shows us that any organisation given the right […]

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” — From the Agile Manifesto Since my blog post on the Chief People Officer (CPO) and CIO partnership, a new urgency has emerged—popularly named the “great resignation”—triggered by a demand for skills, a search […]