Competing at Cloud Speed

Innovation Excellence.com 29 Sept 14 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

Change is Accelerating. We live in an era of constant, accelerating change, and the only organizations that are equipped to keep pace are those that are capable of competing at Cloud Speed. Does trading out packaged Software installed on your own servers for the Cloud-based versions offered by your vendor accelerate your organization to cloud speed? I’m afraid not. So what the heck is cloud speed anyways?

Competing at Cloud Speed is a goal that every organization should have, and it requires learning fast not failing fast, it involves creating the flexibility to adapt to trends that spread globally faster than ever before, to respond to competition from unexpected sources, and provides a potential antidote to preventing decreasing product & organization life-spans.

Accelerating to Cloud Speed requires your organization to operate under a series of principles that make it both FAST & agile; Going FAST (the Right Way) In the experience of Gordon Tredgold, creator of the FAST Approach to Leadership, we usually end up doing either the wrong job or a poor job in an organization because of a lack of focus or accountability, as a result of work has that’s been made overly complex, or because transparency doesn’t exist across the organization.

The FAST Approach to Leadership attempts to address these concerns by answering the What, Who, How & How Far questions related to the task, service or project that is to be delivered (or goal to be achieved). The following four areas make up the letters of the FAST Approach to Leadership and its FAST acronym:

F = Focus, and is about the “what”. What we’re doing, what is our objective, and what does success look like?
A = Account-ability, is about the “who”, who is going to do the work, who will be accountable & how will we hold them accountable.
S = Simplicity, and is about the “how”, what is the solution, how are we planning to deliver success. Is our solution simple or have we over complicated it.
T = Transparency, is about How Far. How Far we have come and How Far we have to go in order to be successful to reach our goals & Vision. It’s also about our honesty about our progress and capability. Focus & Accountability help to ensure that we are getting the “right” job done, increasing our effectiveness. Simplicity & Transparency help to ensure that we do a good job. The objective of FAST Leadership is to ensure that we do the “right” job, well, each & every time.

[ Becoming Agile, Market Dimensions, Infra-Structure Elasticity, Improving the Velocity of Cloud Speed in Premium Content ]