Innovation Culture – first thoughts (repost)

(originally posted on blogs.sap.com)

If you work in the IT industry, you stumble upon the term innovation A LOT. Everyone wants to be innovative, innovations disrupt markets, innovative companies change our world, innovation is the key lalala…

But like some other hype buzzwords, this term is used so often that it doesn’t always seem to be clear what it means. Still, everyone seems to agree that innovation is an important aspect to be successful in today’s business world.

That’s why I’d like to collect some thoughts about what is Innovation and – you know that’s currently my area of interest – how can we create an innovation culture in companies / organisations / teams?

An attempt to define innovation

“Innovation is pain”

Ok, that’s not really a definition. This quote wants to adress the level of change that needs to happen for a true innovation to arise. Innovation wants to develop a creative solution, create something that didn’t exist before. The only way to get there is to challenge the status quo. If you don’t see the need for improvements or unsolved problems, why create something new? Continue reading “Innovation Culture – first thoughts (repost)” →

Collaboration Culture: What is it and how to create it? (Repost)

(originally posted on blogs.sap.com)

Why is a collaboration culture important and what can be done to „create“ a collaborative mindset in an organization or a team?

The importance of collaboration

Since I am working a lot with the topic of community building lately, it becomes obvious that one aspect of a community is crucial for its success: The community members. If those members are nice to each other, if they have a nice mood in their communication, if the members are polite and respectful, everyone will feel welcome.

But maybe even more fundamental is that the members are willing to contribute to the community. Contribution might be by answering others‘ questions, by sharing own experiences or just liking a blog post to show appreciation: Collaboration has to be high priority of any community.

Continue reading “Collaboration Culture: What is it and how to create it? (Repost)” →

New Work & Fancy Offices

When picking up my girlfriend from the airport before Christmas, I used the waiting time to buy some magazines that are not (directly) related to my job profile – I chose something with a focus for design. In discussions with my girlfriend who is studying architecture, I figured out that design is much more than just making things look good but also to solve problem / offer solutions.
Quite often, the main goal of design is to hide complexity and make products / rooms / buildings look clean / simple / minimalistic. (Same goal as in most of the digitalization projects by the way)

Offices create / free energy!

When diving deeper into the topic, I recognized that a lot of design examples are actually offices. And there is a good reason for that: We spend a huge amount of our life working, most of us in offices, so it seems clear that people have an interest in nice offices where they feel well. (And Well-being for employees is kind of “en vogue” in business)

What also attracts attention is that especially the new cloud-native digital companies seem to shine in building new fancy offices and build references although they at the same time offer most flexibility for people to work remotely. It seems they even need to have more attractive offices so people meet physically and work together more closely.
Plus, they are of course as well in the middle of the “War for Talents” where fancy offices create a great attraction for the Generation Y.

Continue reading “New Work & Fancy Offices” →

Why Change Management?

For being able to talk about Change Management, I need to get some background information… What is Change Management in general, what philosophies are involved here, what aspects can I expect to be covered when someone talks about Change Management?

When first googling the term, I get 1.5 billion results related to the topic and it’s good to see that quite a number of articles is from this year 2018. So it’s true that the topic is currently pretty hot for a lot of people.

One possible definition I found during my research:

Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with the transition or transformation of an organization’s goals, processes or technologies. The purpose of change management is to implement strategies for effecting change, controlling change and helping people to adapt to change.

source: techtarget.com

Continue reading “Why Change Management?” →

outlook: Change Management in Digital times

In my job, I consult several mature companies with historically grown IT organisations.

Of course, they are in the middle of the Digital Transformation hype; when I come in contact with them they already licensed some Cloud-services and now try to get their head around how to implement this new technology in their organisation.

When talking about Digital Transformation, I see two big workstreams coming on the table: Continue reading “outlook: Change Management in Digital times” →

Be original

This week, I had the first week since a long time without business travels. So: time to take a deep breath and think about the world, the good, the bad and to check whether what I am doing is right or not !

I got also a new colleague our team + I am pleased to be the mentor for a student writing his bachelor thesis. I don’t think there is a way to learn more than enabling others. They ask questions you need to answer properly, they raise different points of view than your own.

During all this new aspects, I recognized again that – especially when working in big companies – it is important to be creative in what you do. If you are thinking too often that something could be done better, but it “is as it is”, you should change your way of thinking. That’s the only way how processes / presentations / products / cultural habits can improve.

I might treat this as a reminder for myself 🙂

sliced of citrus lemons — Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

Docker – first container contact

I could use the time “between the years” to educate myself in a topic that I wanted to understand for a longer time: Docker.

Last year, I bought a book about it, so I knew it is something about containers and portable, scalable software development tools, but as long as you haven’t really put your hands on it, you don’t really know what’s going on. Luckily, there is a very good tutorial, directly delivered by docker.com: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/ that I played through in the last days.

Screen Shot 2017-12-28 at 12.44.21.png — if the docker whale is that happy, how can the software be bad???

I would like to share some of my findings here that I experienced throughout the exercise: Continue reading “Docker – first container contact” →

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