 Ymlaen o或an, everyone. Can you hear me without a microphone? I think I'll be on rather if I may. Yes, exactly. I'm going low tech. First of all, thank you all for taking the time out of your schedule for coming today. I appreciate it very much. Just to introduce myself for a second, I'm an analyst in Gartner. I focus mainly on strategy issues. How can you make sure IT is delivering to business success, to agency success, to country success? I had the opportunity to participate and present in a two-day CIO academy in Abu Dhabi the last couple of days. I claim to be an expert on strategy, on IT, and on Gartner. I'm an enthusiastic beginner in my knowledge of the Gulf region, I would say. I don't claim to, and I can't answer very deep questions about Qatar or the region, but fortunately, Chan is here for that. But I hope I can present to you some good ideas about what IT strategy is, where it works well, what the differences are between a great, a good and a bad IT strategy. And I'm hoping you'll go away with at least one or two concrete ideas about things that you can do differently in terms of strategy. Great stuff. So, I'd like to make a contention to you, and that contention is if you take 100% of IT organisations in the world, if you take all the IT organisations in the world, the bottom quartile, the weakest performing 25% of IT organisations are distinguished by bad delivery, bad operations, failing to meet budgets, not on time, not in scope, weak customer satisfaction. But the best IT organisations in the world, the top 25%, are not primarily distinguished from the mainstream by great delivery. Great delivery is just a ticket to the game. What they're distinguished by is great strategy, making sure that IT is delivering things together with the rest of the business that generate real value and move things forward. Or, if I can put it differently, there's a fairly colourful expression that the background of this chart refers to. You could summarise most IT organisations by the phrase, great landing, wrong airport. In that IT is often getting more and more polished, better processes, better technology, better relationships with vendors, better asset management, but not necessarily better strategy. So doing things right but not necessarily doing the right things. And we think that if you look at the challenging vision that Chan put up earlier, Knowledge Society 2.0, different forms of collaboration etc, this kind of change as well as global growth, globalisation etc, the need for green, they're all driving the need to focus on strategy. You could say it a very big picture. The last 20 years IT has been about automating the factory of your businesses. The next 20 will be about informating the management of your businesses. So that means great operations is no longer enough. One has to get better at strategy. And as I think we all know in this room, strategy is uncomfortable. Strategy is not just about managing the things you control, it's about engaging and influencing the rest of your business. You can deliver IT systems alone, but I would argue that you cannot reliably deliver business value on your own. Most business intelligence projects that I've ever seen failed, not necessarily technically, but failed to deliver real business value because all the things outside the IT departments control often don't come along in terms of cultural change, training, being clearly focused on business success. So if you like, that's my upfront pitch as to why we believe strategy is really, really important. And for those people who are cynical about IT strategy, I don't think that means strategy is bad, I just think it means there's a lot of bad strategies around. A lot of strategies executed by consultants without real ownership, a lot of strategies which are focused on a list of supply side activities rather than demand side making the business with. So I'm not just here to tell you about problems, I'd like to give you a solution or Gartner's proposed solution to this issue. And I'm just going to take you through a few slides to talk about our IT success kit for CIOs, how to create great strategies. Be very happy to take your questions or challenges during the session or you may want to wait till the end of the session so you see the whole picture. The first thing I'd like to say is a strategy is not the same as a plan. So many organisations, well I guess every IT organisation has some kind of a plan but not every IT organisation has a strategy. A plan is fundamentally a Gant chart, an elaborated Gant chart of who will do what, when, with what results and what cost and what risks. Plans are very fragile, when things change, when oil prices change, when vendor offerings change, plans change, they're internal shocks, external shocks. But strategies, and I'm going to elaborate exactly what a strategy is in the rest of this presentation, in terms of how we will win as a business and how IT will help, what our target architecture is, how we will do financial management, what metrics we'll use. That should be a touchstone at least for the medium term planning period. So the first thing I would suggest is to be successful you need a separate strategy and plan. This is a comment from Tom Halbuty from a North American energy company and he said to me when I interviewed him, when oil prices moved very radically, I needed to scrap the plan, I needed a new plan but I didn't need to change our strategy. And that can be very powerful. I spend a lot of time in Japan and Japanese CIOs tell me also that having a strategy separate from the plan is very powerful for staff motivation to give people direction even while lots of things are changing. If there's only a plan and the plan keeps changing, that can be very destabilising for the culture and very demotivated especially for left brain thinkers. So having a separate strategy and plan is very important and perhaps the final thing I'd like to say on this is typically strategies and plans have different cycles, time cycles in the business. Most businesses fundamentally have four time cycles which you can see on the left here. A very short term which might be a quarter, a short term period where everything is fully planned in terms of costs, resources, projects and programmes. That might be a year, might be 18 months. A medium term which is your sort of detailed strategy horizon typically two years, three years, maybe five years, maybe ten years. And then the very long term which I think Andrew may have, a chance I may have described as falling off the cliff, just where we don't really know what we have some directional ideas. And our proposal is you have to aim for these kind of refresh rates. There'll be a very fast refresh of your plan as things change differently, you know things cost more, things cost less, people leave, people join. But you should look to review your plan roughly every short term planning cycle typically every year, whereas you should look to completely renew your strategy only every medium term planning horizon, two, three, five years, whatever that is, with only a light touch refresh every year. And that combination makes for a really powerful, directed, but still agile business. If the strategy changes every quarter, every month, you haven't really got a strategy, you're in a knee joke mode. But at the same time, if the plan doesn't change for two, three or five years, the plan is probably out of touch with reality. I spoke recently with the CIO of the Swedish Railway, and Swedish regulations require that they provide plans for their IT spend and their infrastructure for 25 years, which is basically impossible, tremendously difficult. I think one has to manage these things so that you have some powerful directional touchstones, but you also have a real roadmap that is agile and in touch. So that's really our first message separating the strategy and the plan. Second message is what should be in your IT strategy. I'm going to propose a model to you. There's a lot of detail behind it, but just for the purpose of this session, I'd like to put in front of you a very concrete picture of what should be in your IT strategy. And there's three parts. The first part we call the demand side of IT strategy. How will our business win, or how will our government agency succeed, and how will IT help? I'll go into this in a little more detail, but fundamentally it has a business context section, which is what services do we provide, or where do we play as a company, not as IT. How will we win? Will we win because we're low cost? Will we win because we understand our customers and stakeholders better? Will we win because we have innovative products and services? Third, what business capabilities do we need? Do we need a highly innovative product lifecycle? Do we need very high availability and visibility of our supply chain? What are the business capabilities we need? And finally, how will IT contribute to that picture? So that's the demand side. I'll just lay out for you the other two parts of IT strategy. The control side. For those of you like me who are ex-computer programmers, I think of the demand side of IT strategy as design time strategy. The control side is runtime IT strategy. How will we make sure day to day the decisions, the behaviors, the activities that we do are consistent with our business strategy? So control side IT strategy contains four things. A set of principles, a set of very high level principles that can be used to guide our actions, our governance, our decisions. And I'll give you a couple of examples in a moment. IT governance. For each type of decision we make, who will be involved? How will the decision be made? What tools will they use? What value measures will they use? And how will it be enforced? How will it be communicated? And how will exceptions be handled? IT financial management. How will IT be funded? Will it be funded from a central IT pot? Will some be central? Some be project funds from business units? Will we charge back? Will we fully charge back? Will we partially charge back? Will we overly charge back? And then what metrics will we use to measure the success of IT's contribution? And how do those map to business success metrics? And then just to complete the picture, the supply side of IT strategy, which is what is much more familiar territory for most IT strategies. IT services. What is our service catalogue now? What does it need to be? IT architecture for infrastructure, applications, information, business process. What is it now? What does it need to be? People side. Organisation chart and skills inventory. What have we got now? What do we need to transition to? The as is and the to be. And similarly our approach to sourcing. What do we outsource? How do we outsource it? Do we mix in source outsource? Do we have long term relationships with partners or short term transactional ones? Our approach to sourcing. So, that is the complete picture. I'll go into a little more detail, but I just wanted to present to you the complete picture of our CIO success kit. Our argument is that is what an IT strategy should look like. Everything in there is necessary and there is nothing that you need that is not in there. That's our picture of what is in an IT strategy. The other thing which some people find challenging is we believe the IT strategy as a document should be at most 15 pages with about a page for each of these. If I can contrast that, I review about 80 companies IT strategies per year, public and private sector globally. I review about 80 IT strategies per year. The majority of them are about 70, 80, maybe 100 pages. They're much more focused on the supply side. Within the supply side they're very focused on architecture and within architecture they're very focused on the infrastructure and applications layer. So, really our message is a 70 to 80 IT strategy here paying lip service to the rest of this stuff is not useful. We have an acronym. I don't know if any of you have heard of it. W-O-R-N. Does anyone know this acronym? It stands for Right Once Read Never. And frankly most IT strategies are like that. Even more so if they're developed by consultants without much internal involvement. They become shelfware. They may be very beautiful, have lots of great ideas, but they're never read, never used. And in fact I would argue that liquidity of strategy, strategy flowing around the organisation with everyone understanding it, is even more important than accuracy of strategy. So changing the discipline of strategy to create very short documents that are not boring even to board members and senior management. I hope you'd agree if you can create a compelling version of this demand side, which will be about four or five pages, that should be very exciting for everyone in the business. And they can drill down into more detail if they want to on the demand control and supply side. So that's, I'm going to talk in a little bit more detail, but that's really the key message I wanted to leave you with, that this is what a great IT strategy should look like. So let's drill down. I would say the most unfamiliar part is typically the demand side, or the demand side is to have lip service paid to it. So if I can, I'll drill down a little bit into that. We think this is a very good way of looking at the demand side, getting very clear on how your business will win, or how your public sector agency will satisfy its stakeholders. In the private sector, why will your customers buy from you? And to be clear, this is an input to IT. This is business strategy, but it's essential for designing your IT strategy. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this model. It's not a Gartner model. It's from two guys outside Gartner called Tracy and Weirzema called the value disciplines. They analysed which businesses are very successful over time, and they came to a very clear conclusion. What they said was, every business that's successful over time chooses one thing to be world class at, and they identified three. Either customer intimacy, having a deeper relationship with your customers or in public sector, your stakeholders, understanding them better, giving them a better overall experience. Product leadership, continuously developing exciting new products and services that satisfy your customers, your stakeholders better. Or operational excellence, higher quality, lower cost, shorter cycle times, lower inventory levels, etc. I've talked to some CIOs about this and they go, oh great, we have all of those in our mission statement. But in fact, the message is the exact opposite of that. The message is this little blue box here. You do just enough in all of the areas, but you choose one to try and be world class at. Nobody can be world class at everything forever. Nobody can be superior to everything forever. So the question is, which one of those is your business, your agency, your enterprises value discipline? That's the starting point of IT strategy. Maybe I can just lay a couple of real examples on here. HSBC Bank, large global bank, very complicated business. They have consumer banking, they have wholesale banking, they have investment banking, they have some other services. They are very clear how they win is through customer intimacy. If you speak to Ken Harvey, who was the CIO and is now the COO of HSBC, what he'll say to you, rightly or wrongly, is that HSBC's opinion is money is money. Product leadership is not the way to go in their banking sector. Operational excellence is just a ticket to the game. But the way they win as a business is by having deeper and richer customer interactions, customer touch than anyone else. That allows them to do some very interesting things like they filter their innovation, their R&D. They only do innovation on things about customer touch. For example, they were the first bank in the UK to have mobile phone top-ups for prepaid mobile phones at the cash machine at the ATM. And the reason they did that wasn't primarily financial, the reason they did that was to increase customer touch, customer intimacy. Walmart, the American supermarket chain or American headquartered supermarket chain, would it be clear to you which is their value discipline? Operational excellence, it's not that interesting that it's operational excellence, but it's interesting that you guys immediately know that, and everyone in Walmart knows that. So when they're making decisions, for example, they can choose to under-invest in CRM, but very aggressively invest in their supply chain in radio frequency ID. Not because RFID is a cool technology, or at least it was a few years ago, because it directly drives how they'll win as a business. Now, I would argue these kind of discussions are very hard to have with your business. Typically, the head of marketing thinks it's about this or this. The head of finance, chief financial officer might think it's more about this. But it's very powerful if you can move towards not only clear business context in your IT strategy, but clear view of business success, because then you can start to do trade-offs. And I would argue that true strategy is about trade-offs. A strategy that says, you know, we will delight our customer or we will be high quality and low cost is meaningless and useless because it doesn't allow you to make trade-offs. But a strategy that says, you know, we'll try and be as good as the rest at operational excellence, but how we'll really win is through customer intimacy. That's powerful because you can make trade-offs in IT and other areas. So that's the next thing I wanted to introduce to you. This idea of a differentiated focus. And actually, I didn't ask Chamberlain, I was interested what that might be for Qatar's vision. But the differentiated focus. I didn't want to put you on the spot, but maybe if you have a view on that at the end, I'd be very interested. The one challenge is to say we're a customer intimate company or we're an operational excellence company is still a little bit too high level to say, OK, do we buy this ERP system or that? Do we build in-house or do we outsource, et cetera? So what's useful as a layer, and I think this has been an advance in my view in the last five years, a layer between very high level business strategy and IT is a clear view of capabilities, business capabilities. You know, if we're truly going to be the most customer intimate bank in the Gulf region or we're truly going to be the lowest cost retail chain in Asia Pacific, what capabilities do we need? And just for example, HSBC, they believe they need very strong innovation, but only focused on customer. Walmart believes they need a very high level of transparency in their supply chain to support their strategic posture. So, again, if you can start to build this kind of picture, how we'll win and what capabilities we need, you can really in a meaningful way tie IT to the rest of the business strategy. And if I can just throw in an example from the public sector, I apologise it's from the UK again where I'm from, but in the UK I work with the Department for International Development, who is responsible for UK's government's contribution to solving world poverty. DFID works in 95 countries, or it did until recently work in 95 countries around the world, engaged with embassies, non-government organisations, charities, et cetera. They have a very thin presence in a very large number of countries. They have to do all of the value disciplines, but when you talk to Simon Jones, who's the CIO, what he'll tell you is how they really win is through stakeholder intimacy, their version of customer intimacy, having very good strong relationships with all the charities, all the embassies, all the NGOs around the world. That's really what makes them win. They have to be just good enough at the rest. How does that translate? For example, they have an IT principle that says we will never do anything unless it can be accessed over a high-latency satellite link because of some of the countries they operate in. Previous organisations like this haven't followed that. They've created very great IT services that can be only accessed at the centre. I'm mindful of Chan's comment about the core versus the centre and the changing balance. DFID, a public sector agency, says yes, we can be clear about this, we will be focused on stakeholder intimacy and that drives the rest of our IT strategy. I'm suspecting, I don't know, this might be a little bit unfamiliar territory for you guys, but I think it's really important to be as rigorous on the demand side of IT strategy as you are on the control and supply sides. To make a point, you won't find this stuff in ITL or COVID or Prince II or most of the IT standards. This is the art of IT leadership. As they say in America, this is why they pay you the big bucks. If I can give you one final concrete example, I'm not sure if 7-11 is present in Qatar, is it? No. Are you guys familiar with it? It's a convenience store chain, selling bread, eggs, milk, rice, the daily needs. It started off in America, but it's now headquartered in Japan. 7-11 Japan did so well, it bought the parent company. It's the eighth largest retailer in the world by volume, has 35,000 stores around the world, 12,000 in Japan. As far as I know from my personal experience, it's the most strategic IT user in the world. They say they will win through customer intimacy. The logical conclusion I would think if you're thinking about a convenience store chain is operational excellence. You're not looking for a branded milk experience or a branded bread experience. You'd think it's an operational excellence play. Suzuki-san, who is the CEO of 7-11, says, no, actually, we're about solving our customers' daily needs. We're a customer intimate organisation. How can they do that? Well, they have 35 million transactions per day in their stores. They really know what everyone buys and everyone wants. They can actualise that and turn that into a really customer intimate service. They're one of the only organisations in the world in retail to change what is on their shelves multiple times per day. Some of their metropolitan stores in Japan, for example, will change what's on the shelf five or six times per day. The experience being when you walk into the store at lunchtime, your bento box is on the shelf next to you. When you walk in during a festival, the rice you need is next to you. Very powerful. What business capabilities do they need? They need information and tools for store managers making decisions. They need an agile supply chain so that when store managers make decisions, they can meet them in an economically viable way. And they need leadership and communication so everyone in the business understands how they will win. Amazingly, I went to see them recently, they have nearly 2,000 field sales and district managers who come to head office every week. They have 2,000 people all over Japan, which is a very large extended country, who come every week to talk not only about operational issues but strategy and innovation. So, what's IT's contribution? I think it's fairly obvious. Great, great business intelligence, real-time operational business intelligence. Tools for store managers to tune, to accept or reject the system's recommendations for stock etc. A supply chain solution architected for rapid response. And also, their innovation focused on customer information capture, as well as now understanding what consumers buy. They're also interested in what consumers browse. And all of this is actually leading to a different strategy for them. They also have a banking solution now, Seven Bank in Japan, and they potentially could be the face of the Japanese consumer. So, everything that Japanese consumers want to do, they can do through 7-11. They're actually, you know, the consumer hiding as a retail chain. So, it's a very interesting strategic play from a business sense, they're truly differentiated, but also from an IT sense. And I'll just put up to finish. This is the revenue chart for 7-11 over the last 34 years, and the profit chart looks similar. It's truly a great example, and an inspirational example, clear business strategy, clear IT strategy. So, I know, I think a lot of people when they look at this, they say, yeah, yeah, but we're in a complex business. We have multiple business units, and it's strategies not clear etc. I recognise that it's a lot easier for me to put up a PowerPoint slide than for you guys to run a business. But I would say, this is an aspirational target, and it's nothing to do with the sort of stuff one normally thinks about in IT. It's nothing to do with data centre virtualisation, nothing to do with processes etc. All those things come in, but the point is, where do they focus? And I would just suggest, if you find this interesting, you maybe go away and do this exercise with your IT teams, with your business leaders. How do we win as a business? If it's a public sector agency, maybe how do we succeed in the eyes of our stakeholders? What business capabilities do we need, and how will IT contribute? I'd suggest you take that away. I'm sure that slide doesn't look like rocket science, but it can have some very powerful results and generate some very powerful discussions, especially if you're rigorous on the top box, especially if you don't allow a very simple generic answer to the top box. So that was a picture of the demand side of IT strategy. I've spent more time on that because I think it's less familiar to most people and more interesting. I'd just like to finish by talking a little bit about the control and supply sides of IT strategy. How you make good decisions and how you express in your strategy your as is and to be states. So let's start with the control side and principles. I'm not sure how that sounds to you. I think to some people IT principles or principles or values can generate a lot of cynicism. It can sound like something that's printed on a card that you use as a coffee mat and never really look at doesn't really connect to your day to day reality. But our belief is you can create IT principles that really change the way people behave. Most people don't read documents most of the time, but if you've got a short set of principles that you can use as a touchstone in governance meetings, in helping your team work through decisions and thinking about things, it can start to get very powerful. And specifically, if you can create principles, a short set of 8-10 IT principles that satisfy three criteria, that connected to how your business wins, they're specific to your enterprise. They're not, as Americans would say, motherhood and apple party. They're specific to your enterprise and they're detailed enough that they will really change things day to day. If you can create a set of 8-10 principles that satisfy those three criteria, our evidence is they make a real difference. And if I can, I'll just share a couple with you. Sam Pension, a Danish pensions company, they face a lot of regulatory change and they've had a lot of trouble keeping up with regulatory change. They created a set of 13 principles around how can we be agile in the face of regulatory change. One of their principles is on the right here. We must be able to disengage from any vendor or partner within two to three years. So any relationship we have with a vendor or partner, we must be able to disengage in two to three years. Now for us, that's not right for everyone, but they've decided it's right for them. And it satisfies our three criteria. It's connected to how they'll win as a business, regulatory agility. It's specific to them. It's not something that every organisation would agree with. And it's detailed enough it will really change behaviours and decisions. So it's a very powerful principle. Maybe if I can just pick one more. The DFID one I mentioned, need to support extremely remote sites for stakeholder intimacy. Their principle, all systems to be used overseas must be delivered in a way that they can be accessed over a high latency satellite link. Now we have much more detail about this, examples of which areas you would create principles in. But again, I wanted to introduce to you this concept of powerful IT principles. And in my six years working at Gartner, I would say this is the area I've seen the most impact. Some organisations find demand side strategy a bit hard to get their heads around. But if you can create a set of IT principles that really mean something, I have seen them actually make a difference in value delivery. The second area is governance. And I'll just mention this. I think the word governance is like the word strategy in that nobody is quite sure what it means and it means different things to different people. But what we're meaning here by governance is how do you make your decisions? How do decisions related to IT get made? Not just regulatory decisions, all decisions. And for the purpose of this presentation, I'd like to give you one simple message. If your governance is anarchic, it's not defined, it's based on who has the most powerful voice, that's very dangerous. But equally, if you just have one governance mechanism for everything, one IT steering committee or one CIO IT leadership team, that is also dangerous. Our research suggests, together with MIT, suggests you have to design governance for each type of decision. I've put eight up here. Strategy, investment prioritisation, architecture risk, benefits realisation, infrastructure etc. That may be the set for you or it may be slightly different. But our research shows governance has to be designed by type of decision. We call it decision domain. That's what makes a difference. And it has to be designed thoughtfully to align with business success. If your business is in a phase that you want to encourage 10,000 flowers to bloom around the world, autonomous growth, you don't want very draconian centralised governance. You have to align your decision making by type of business goal. So I'll leave you with that thought. Again, obviously we have a lot of materials, a lot of tools and templates. But that's our basic message. You have to design governance thoughtfully and you have to design it by type of decision. If I may, I'll just flip very quickly to the supply side of strategy. I won't spend long here because I actually think most people are pretty rich in the supply side of strategy. You know, your architecture, your services, your sourcing, your people. All I wanted to say is this strategy, as I mentioned at the beginning, is not the plan. So this isn't about a very detailed plan or a shopping list of things you want to buy or a laundry list of projects. Simply, where are we now and where do we need to be? This is an example from the Irish government, Department for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries. Their message is this is where we are now on the people side of strategy. The yellow represents consultants, the green represents employees in different areas. And this is where we need to be. They've got problems with intellectual property leakage. They've got problems with not being able to get skilled staff on time, et cetera, et cetera. They've got a lot of talent issues. So this is a great example of a succinct people strategy, conveys a very clear message. And frankly, it's about the level of detail that you could get a senior executive interested in, in our opinion. So just on the supply side, on this supply side, our messages keep it very simple, very straight. There'll be loads of documents underneath this in terms of what you do, but you need a high level picture here. If I could finish, it's fine having a great IT strategy, but how do you get your IT team engaged in it? How do you get your IT team to care about it to optimise on the right variable? How do you get your IT team not thinking about technical elegance or their particular role, but business success? I'll tell you something I worked on with an oil and gas CIO in Europe that was quite powerful, very simple. But he introduced something called strategy moments. At the start of every meeting with his IT team, whatever it was about, he would start with two questions. How do we succeed as a business and how will IT help? It sounds very simplistic, but over time it changed the nature of the meetings. The first couple of meetings, nobody felt comfortable answering the question, so the behaviour he did was very interesting. He disbanded the meeting and sent everyone back to their desks. But after a while, people started taking this seriously, thinking about this, and it set a fantastic tone so that people weren't getting lost in the weeds of their projects, of their challenges, of their conversation. So I would suggest something like strategy moments as one of your talent management tools for getting everyone thinking in terms of the big picture. Obviously there's many other tools, job rotations, brown bag lunches, mentoring, reverse mentoring. But I think this is a very powerful, very simple technique for getting everyone to think about the big picture. And finally, how do you get everyone in the business aware of IT strategy? How do you get everyone thinking about how IT will help the business win? If I can, I'd like to tell a very short story. This is from Whitbread, a company that owns mainly hotel chains and restaurant chains. The CIO there, Ben Wishart, was very passionate about IT being able to transform their business, but he felt that the board were not really engaged on it. He created what he felt were very good IT strategies, he presented them, but people were more interested in IT costs and not very interested in IT's transformative potential. So he did something amazing. Over a weekend he wrote down a story, he wrote a story about how the IT strategy, the different phases of IT strategy, would feel and how they would change the lives of customers, of employees and of other stakeholders. After that weekend he paid an advertising agency £15,000 and in one month they turned his story into an animated cartoon. And this is a large footsie company, this is not a start-up, it is a large very conventional company. He turned his IT strategy into a cartoon. He presented that at their autumn planning meeting. Where everyone else was presenting white papers, former white papers. And to cut a long story short, it completely transformed how they use IT in their company. How they use IT in the company now, they have online check-in for their hotels, so busy people don't have to wait in the reception area. They have revenue and yield management that they've copied from the airline industry, which has added a few points of profit. They have all sorts of exciting new IT capabilities. But the trigger wasn't a 2,000 page detailed project plan, it was a cartoon. And certainly Gartner's advice is not that everyone should use cartoons to communicate. Our advice is you should invest in communication much more, human communication, not TCPIP. Human communication throughout the strategy process, making artefacts that really mean something to your stakeholders, that go the extra mile to talk about how it will change what they care about, whether that's money or productivity or comfort, whatever it is. Going that extra mile and thinking of communication as a big part of the strategy process, as opposed to the icing on the cake, is the other best practice I wanted to leave you with.