Author: Phil Le-Brun

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 […]

“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” —Brian Herbert, Author It’s easy to think of life as linear stages. Where did you go to school? What do you do for a living? What are your retirement plans? These stages are interspersed […]

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams I have been privileged to meet executives from every sector, many with the newer title of “CDO.” The “D” usually stands for Digital or Data. Here’s my observation from seeing great CDOs in […]

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. —Peter Senge       A CIO is hired and charged with “fixing IT.” They launch a major reorganisation based on a desire to be an agile, digital-first, data-enabled, platform-based organisation (thank you, Dilbert). IT-staffed product teams are created, although bereft of the outsourced infrastructure […]

In the previous blog post I explored with Michelle K. Lee some of the societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). In this post I dive into the patterns Michelle has seen organisations implement to take advantage of the promises of ML. ―Phil Some surveys show a gap between an understanding of […]

In my recent blog post I shared a perspective on how to start your exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) and its subset, machine learning (ML), as business tools. I wrote this as a technology practitioner but a student of ML. At the other end of the experience continuum, I have the privilege of working with […]