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Aerospace organizations are pushing new boundaries every day. Their products, research, and technologies are changing the way the world works. We see it every day in the way humanity relies on communication, global positioning, and special analytics to enable smart cities, smart cars, and smart factories. It is their ability to systematically innovate, push boundaries, and challenge norms that propels Aerospace every day — it is what excites growing countries and high-value entrepreneurs to invest.

The impact of space technology, on other industries, is wide and vast, and the innovation ripple of research has spurred many high-profile products, including Teflon and CAT scans, as well as many more developments from NASA.

According to Verified Market Research, the Global Satellite Communication Market size was valued at USD 65.68 Billion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 131.68 Billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 9.10% from 2021 to 2028. Its impact on the global economy spans many industries, especially Pharmaceuticals, Beauty and Care products, Semi-Conductors, and Food and Nutrients. Companies are working with aerospace technologies to accelerate innovation and provide new differentiation.

What of the Aerospace companies themselves? How are they researching, developing, managing design, planning, producing, and managing their logistics and operations? They, too, are adopting new digital thread technologies, commercializing data more than ever before. They are focused on cybersecurity and sustainability and delivering on the design cycle faster than ever.

It seems natural that Aerospace companies will be planning a large role in the 2023 Innovation awards. Innovations span industries and the innovation awards are celebrated across the globe.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane to celebrate the innovation leadership of aerospace from around the globe. Then, I will share information about the 2023 SAP Innovation Award program and how companies can get involved.

Aerospace and Defense 2020 SAP Innovation Awards

We celebrated a record number of submissions for the 2020 SAP Innovation Award program. Among them were Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd, which developed a “Smart-K” Digital Innovation of KAIZEN for aerospace manufacturing.

Manufacturing of aerospace and defense systems can be a labor-intensive industry. It is crucial to link engineering, which must maintain tight control of configuration and change, to the shop floor, which requires continuous improvement on a daily basis.

Using SAP S4/HANA Manufacturing for production engineering and operation to establish a consistent digital link between production engineering and production execution ensures both frequent changes and change management control. The accumulated data will also help streamline business processes and improve productivity.

KHI created a new vertically integrated digital platform for production engineering and manufacturing, making it easy to balance strict change management with frequent improvements (i.e. KAIZEN). This competitive advantage collects digital data, reduces flow time, and leads to a more data-driven business.

“The competitive advantage of our production process is that it’s sustainable KAIZEN. We are confident that our ‘Smart-K’ digital innovation of KAIZEN, which includes configuration and change management that are crucial in aircraft manufacturing, will be more strictly controlled and will allow KHI to advance and sustain KAIZEN more effectively,” said Hiroyoshi Shimokawa, Managing Executive Officer President Aerospace Systems Company.

The innovation resulted in over 1 billion manual activities of 4,000 workers being integrated by digitization. There was a 20% increase in productivity for change management by the vertically integrated platform. There was also a 15% reduction in flow time by utilizing actual data and insights from workers.

Covid impacts have created change

As COVID-19 hit, leading manufacturers pivoted to transform their business models, address supply chain disruptions, and manage workforce constraints.

Operations have shifted to focus on business continuity, cybersecurity, and enabling a workforce with digital tools so that they can continue to produce, deliver, and service.

The geographic dependency, regulatory restrictions, and supplier slowdowns forced A&D companies to quickly monitor and respond to sourcing risks while balancing a shift in the demand pattern, these new digitally enabled skills will continue to provide resilience in the future.

A&D companies continue to address new challenges in new ways, there is no better time to share their innovation story with the world.

Share Your Innovation Story

This year’s SAP Innovation Awards aims to honor and celebrate the achievements of forward-thinking companies that have harnessed the power of SAP technology to become an intelligent enterprise; thrive in new business realities; and create positive economic, environmental, and social impact to help the world run better.

SAP is thrilled to showcase these inspirational customer and partner stories that use SAP solutions to differentiate themselves, achieve tremendous results, and adapt to dynamic customer needs.

More information on the award timeline and list of prizes is available here. For details on the judging criteria and category definitions, visit the SAP Innovation Awards website. The submission period is now open, and all entries are due by February 1, 2023. Get started today and join the conversation online using the hashtag #SAPInnovation.

For more innovation stories, follow @SAPIndustries on Twitter and join us on LinkedIn.

Digital Transformation

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When you think about people entangled in organizational politics, terms that come to mind include manipulation, self-serving, turf battles, power plays, and hidden agendas. Not terribly uplifting. But Neal Sample, former CIO of Northwestern Mutual, sees it a different way. “I think of a different set of words like influence, diplomacy and collaboration,” he says. “In reality, politics aren’t good or bad. It’s just how things get done in organizations.”

So how should we be more cognizant about office politics versus organizational politics now that the pandemic has shifted the former to the latter? Managers approach it in different ways but for tech leaders, it can be particularly challenging, something Sample calls the physics of IT.

“I think politics is really about getting a positive outcome when there is scarcity,” he says. “That’s what you’re trying to work for. That clinical definition has the idea of advancing one of your ideas, which I think is okay, as long as it lines up with a positive outcome whether it’s for shareholders, customers, clients or patients. Not every idea can’t be implemented, and that’s when politics comes into play. You have different groups with different ideas of what positive outcomes look like, and then it’s navigating those potentially choppy waters especially as an IT professional.”

Sample, whose career also includes roles at Express Groups, American Express, eBay, and Yahoo!, knows that ethically building critical mass of support for an idea you believe in is a textbook description of those who are politically savvy. But equal empathy for dissenting positions goes a long way to achieve beneficial outcomes.

Tech Whisperers podcast’s Dan Roberts recently spoke with Sample about the evolving nuances of organizational politics. Here are some edited excerpts of that conversation. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On leading equity: I think a lot of the old definitions of politics had to do with the physical space in the office, with relationships, tenure and a notion of favoritism: who had been around before, who had achieved before, who seemed to be in favor versus out of favor. And a lot of that goes away with online equity. But a virtual environment is complex for gathering a diversity of ideas. For example, we remember the first time we saw ourselves in little boxes outside the office in the early editions of Zoom, and there was a certain level of equity associated with it. We all had the same size real estate. On the other hand, people noticed an asymmetry in airtime. Unless you were very intentional about pulling people into a conversation, there was a chance that people who were otherwise shy or part of a marginalized group would be even more shy or more marginalized. It was actually easier to get lost in the conversation. People didn’t talk over each other or sidebar in a way that might have happened in a face-to-face meeting.

On the physics of IT: IT is a unique element of a business. In the notion of resource scarcity, we might want to get something done but then halfway through the year, even with an annual plan, a new idea comes up, or some M&A or a competitive threat emerges and we decide we need to change something. Inside of information technology, sometimes there are these tradeoffs—the physics of IT. You have one particular team that knows a system. They’ve been working on Problem A, and now they’re going to work on Problem B. Or you have a certain amount of capacity and throughput that’s sitting in a data center or in a legacy installation, and you can’t magically grow that by a factor of 10 because of your historical application services. In any way, IT has this notion of physics. There is a limit that happens sometimes with subject matter experts or resources. Other areas don’t have that conundrum. Sometimes you can solve the problem with money, but there are other elements of the workplace that aren’t constrained by the same set of resources, the same physics problems that IT have. Because of that intrinsic scarcity, IT is where the conflict often shows up.

On negotiation: As an IT professional, I’ve spent time learning from the world of business about how to be a good negotiator. One thing that was new to me years ago was the notion of a BATNA—your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If you find yourself in negotiation, the first thing you have to figure out is what the best alternative is, which tells you what it’s like if you lose. It also tells you what your leverage is with a vendor, let’s say. You have to think about your pricing negotiation. Having that in mind, starting with seeing what it looks like to lose this negotiation, or not end up with the price you want, is incredibly powerful because then instead of talking about it like it’s an all or nothing, it’s really the difference between 100 and 80, but 80 at a lower price. You figure those things out. That is really powerful. What’s also interesting are contracts between IQ and EQ. I think folks used to be happy to be IQ-oriented professionals in technology. And a lot of time, we were thought of as sort of back-office cost control. But that switched to the notion that technology is the product or the experience, or powers the supply chain, is true just about everywhere now. The big difference, from a negotiating perspective, is because of the physics of IT and that tradeoffs happen in technology a lot, you have to be good with your EQ. Not even just dealing with a single partner but somebody who wants something from you. Sometimes, the battleground is two different business divisions or maybe two functions that both want something and suddenly, your job is to now be Switzerland.

On the good fight: We should all be fighting to win for the company, enterprise, organization. But politics is when we have different ideas, when there is scarcity and we can’t do everything. There has to be a tradeoff. If you fight to win, you’re going to set yourself up as an adversary. There’ll be an outcome that’s positive and negative—the classic win-lose. But if you fight to lose, the first thing you do is adopt the opposition idea, philosophy, product or approach—whatever you feel is competing with your proposal or idea. So then you adopt it as your own and spend time figuring out why the other side is right instead of doing research to back up your own position. For example, if you think going to Agile from Waterfall is the right thing to do, spend time trying to figure out why Agile doesn’t work. Then I guarantee two things will happen. You’ll either become more effective and persuasive with your own argumentation because you better understand the alternatives, or you might find yourself changing your mind. And from an office politics perspective, this is one of the best things that can happen for a long-term relationship, coming to a partner with humility. You demonstrate you have empathy and are a good partner because you are willing to compromise.

CIO, IT Leadership, IT Management, IT Strategy, Remote Work

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

John Hill, chief digital information officer for MSC Industrial Supply, received his Doctor of Business Administration degree in May. His dissertation research examined the question: After years of investment in project management, change management, and more recently, agile principles, why do most companies still have a stunningly high failure rate for digital initiatives? 

Hill’s conclusion was that companies need to do a better job with organizational digital agility (ODA), which is a business’s ability to create digital capabilities quickly and efficiently.

“My hypothesis was that in many companies, there are organizational behaviors that impede project and change management practices,” says Hill. “You cannot deliver anything with terrible project and change management, but excellence in those areas alone is not sufficient for developing digital capabilities.”

What is organizational digital agility?

ODA, says Hill, is made up of three components: slack, alignment, and speed.  

ODA defines “slack” as resources that you can move from one project to another without losing any value. “When you have everyone fully engaged in an operations project, but you have to pull them off that project for something more urgent, you pose risk to the first initiative,” Hill says.

With slack, CIOs do not allocate all their resources to operational issues. They allocate some to innovation, education, or continuous improvement, which they can pause to move those resources to something more urgent. “The key to slack is that moving resources off of innovation to a high-priority project poses little operational risk,” says Hill. “Those resources can then return to the innovation activity without losing productivity.”

The second component of ODA is alignment. Hill points out in his research that most companies have a governance process through which executives align on the top list of projects for the year. But if you ask the management team which project is No. 5, 6, or 7, they will likely not know. “When conflict of resources occurs among those top projects, no one knows how to resolve it, because the prioritization is not granular enough,” Hill says. “Without clear alignment, you lose efficiency when those resources move from project to project. You increase the likelihood that the squeaky wheel gets the resources.”

The last component of ODA is speed, which is becoming critically important at a time when the rate of technology change in the market is so high. 

For his research, Hill conducted a study of 132 CIOs from companies ranging from $300 million to over $10 billion in annual revenues, and he was able to demonstrate a correlation between a firm’s ODA and its creation of digital capabilities. His research further demonstrated the connection between a firm’s digital capabilities and its ability to compete in the marketplace. “The impact of ODA is pretty stunning,” he says.

Advice for CIOs looking to improve ODA

For slack, Hill suggests setting aside sprints for innovation, education, and reducing technical debt. “This way, if you need those resources to fight a fire, you are not posing a risk to the organization,” he says.

For alignment, Hill has three recommendations:

List more than just your top priorities, and be sure to create an ordinal ranking. At MSC, the executive team has taken that first step.Develop processes to understand the true capacity in the organization. Hill likes the enterprise Kanban board, so you “see who is available and who is tapped out,” he says.Create end-to-end teams and reduce the number of resources that move from project to project. “Call them squads or product teams or scrums, but you want all the resources necessary to build a new digital capability on one team,” says Hill. “An end-to-end team could be made up of business analysts, BI analysts, data engineers, developers, and QA, with a few traveling shared resources.”

Hill acknowledges that speed is the trickiest component of ODA because it can be very difficult to find the root cause of why you are not moving faster. Here, Hill suggests shifting your emphasis from old-school steering committees to a product management model and the “end-to-end teams” concept.

“At the heart of improving speed is empowering the product owners to make decisions about the backlog and execute,” he says. “Having to wait for steering committee meetings can really slow things down.”

To increase speed at MSC, Hill is working on the concept of portfolio allocation. With an ordinal ranking of investment priorities, he aims to allocate spend to the product owners in each business unit or functional area. Those product owners then prioritize that spend within their product team. “The teams are closest to understanding what new capabilities are needed in each platform,” says Hill. “They don’t need to slow down the work by asking for direction.”

How ODA impacts the CIO role

During his first five months at MSC, which distributes metalworking and other industrial products, Hill has been reducing the time it takes to review team activity. “When I spend time with the team, I just want to know about any blockers, issues, and risks and how they are being delt with,” he says. “The team should not spend time building project status presentations. I want them to be fast and use Jira, not PowerPoint. Our meetings should last 15 minutes.”

Finally, Hill suggests acknowledging that ODA does not come from changing a few processes. It is an entirely new way of working for the IT team.

“IT leaders are used to functionally and operationally managing the people that work for them,” Hill says. “Now, the person taking a squad leadership role must work across the entire organization to bring together business analysists, data scientists, developers, and operations people to ensure we are not duplicating work. At the same time, some associates who functionally report to them may be taking work instruction from another squad leader. Changing the behaviors of IT leaders is a big challenge.”

But an even greater challenge than changing behaviors in IT is getting executives to embrace the prioritization process. “When C-level executives try to squeeze in a new priority, rather than recognizing that other work needs to stop, they usually compress everything else. When you have too much work in progress, you reduce efficiency,” he says.

To Hill, ODA is a perfect example of how the CIO role is evolving away from technology expert and toward an orchestrator role. “CIOs are not the people who need to be technology experts” says Hill. “Today’s CIOs are the designers of organizations who can keep 25 balls in the air at the same time, and know how all those balls fit into the digital vision years from now.”

Change Management