In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Ken Fulmer, Chief Technology Officer at Information Workplace Solutions, Inc., a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Emerging Trends in Technology and Critical Skills.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: It is always about getting better business outcomes.  As a management consultant, we spend our time trying to bring strategic focus to a problem, understand the issues and objectives, and then target a set of action steps that will get to a better business outcome, often with the use of technology.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities for your organization?

A: The aspects of capabilities entail the right blend of People, Process, Technology and Data.  It starts with People and the right culture, the right change processes, the right talent and skills, and the right attitude to get things done.  The extent of the robustness of capabilities varies with each business engagement, where a whole new business model may demand transformational change, or in many cases, it is about continuous improvement and the capabilities evolve consistent with the rate of change required.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: Agile is certainly becoming a significant impact in most situations.  Many project efforts are most effectively solved using agile based approach.  Many other projects though blend agile and traditional approaches, especially those intensively using cloud based, SaaS based or Commercial Off the Shelf Packages (COTS).  The hybrid approach is by far the most common and projects that true agile are common but not the most common yet.  Even more critical, is using agile at the enterprise level to plan work and develop a more intensely agile approach to solving the portfolio and program level objectives.  These enterprise agile approaches are very new and growing and show great promise, but are still emerging in the marketplace.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: The most important learning for me has been the concepts surrounding Design Thinking.  The book by Tim Brown, titled “Change by Design” and the impacts that follow based on the Stanford Design School have had a major impact on me personally.  The paradigm of how to really come up with innovative ideas, how to solve problems by challenging the very premises presented and creating new ways to approach requirements, and solutions design are really important.  They impact all areas of focus for attendees at BBC for sure.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: The key to me is about the continuous and rapid rate of change in our world.  Technology change, market change, and the pace of all this change is so different.  To remain relevant in the face of this requires a commitment to life learning.  It also means that the skills we need are quickly changing, and our core skills remain, but our edge skills are evolving.  We need to know more depth about a lot more things, as the roles of pure specialists are being supplanted by mixed skills.  Agile shows this to be true, where roles are changing and agile teams involve participants doing more that are not defined totally within traditional role definitions.  Hybrid roles are now the most common and this means more flexibility in skills and tasks.  It means learning what is necessary to get the tasks done.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: For me MS SharePoint is the tool that just keeps on giving.  Establishing knowledge sharing environments seems to have no end of usefulness and extends to every area of the business.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Always focus on the customer first was true five years ago, and remains true today.  It is however easy to loose site of this and to focus on more internal processes, and get lost in internal organizational politics.  If we make the customer first and drive all our business processes, data flows and systems, optimize around the customer perspective and then we will be most successful.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: How do you find your passion and sustain that passion for a lifetime?  I do not yet know the answer to that question in total, but it is about a life well balanced, and about feeling like faith, family, country, and community are severed.  That we can understand our talents and use them most effectively.  The passion part comes from an inner drive to enjoy what we do, and to never be fully content, and to get and give inspiration freely.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: My talk is largely about the skills necessary to be successful in a world of rapidly changing technology.  It starts by examining the new technology initiatives that will be most impactful or most disruptive to our current business models, and then looks at how many new skills will emerge as high demand ones.  Clearly old skills still remain in place but new ones will drive the highest demand.

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Don’t miss Ken’s presentation, Emerging Trends in Technology and Critical Skills, at Building Business Capability on Friday, November 4, 2016 from 10:10 to 11:10 am. Click here to register for attendance.