SAIIE28 Day 1

The theme of the SAIIE Conference for 2017 is Taking up Stewardship. The below is a summary of the talks that impacted me most, there are many more.

Opening

Prof. David Kruger opened the conference by explaining the reason for this theme, as well as the meaning thereof. Stewardship can be defined as the careful and responsible management of something that is in your care. We live in an environment filled with uncertainty and each of us has to take charge of what is in your care and do what has to be done as well as you can. As individuals we cannot stand on the sideline and wait for someone else to take the lead on finding solutions.

Keynote address

The keynote address by Prof. Lukas Snyman from UNISA focused on models to enhance the skills and technology transfer from South African universities into both the industry and our communities. How do we take our negative environment, which is filled with unemployment, strikes and a lack of entrepreneurship and turn it around? 

A change in our teaching approach is one way of addressing this problem. We have to change the mindset that teaching is only effective when it is contact teaching (the pass rate is still around 35% for some subjects) and move towards online and interactive teaching. We should motivate students to use open resource material, but provide guidance towards the best and most valid sources.

Another solution is getting more students doing projects on a Bachelor's degree level to upskill more people and ultimately enabling the workforce in the industry to solve problems. The highly skilled Master's and Doctorate students are adding value in research, but our country needs some basic skills spread across industries.

Harnessing complexity and navigating uncertainty

This talk by Sonja Blignaut was definitely the highlight of my day. Complexity is all around us - we need to be agile and adapt to the complexity in our ecosystems. We are living in an ever changing world and the pace is just picking up. AI is taking over human functions, especially those that are predictable and often repeated, like accounting. We are in uncharted territory, where there is no pattern to follow, no blueprint, no standard practice and no expert. We have to use our skills to navigate through the uncertainty, be agile and be resilient.

How do we create an environment of innovation? We cannot operate by breaking down complexity into multiply containers, like putting lions in a cage in the zoo. The paradigm of "we need to control" in business is breaking down. Innovation is an emerging property and we need to create an environment where it is safe to fail. Start with where you are and move forward, one step at a time, with a general direction in mind.

To be effective and resilient, you need a certain minimum amount of inefficiency. A high level of efficiency, where a system has been over designed and fully optimised, has a tendency to limit innovation.

We need to think about concepts like VUCA and dynamic equilibrium. Is customer centric design the right approach, or is it a recipe for disaster? Do the measurements and processes in your company contribute to the customer centric values, or are e.g. service agents rated better for shorter call duration, irrespective of the customer outcome? We have to focus on the unintended consequences of the systems and measures we put in place.

To build a self-organising agile team, some guiding principles i.e. enabling constraints are required. There is a strong link to the 3X concept by Kent Beck (Explore, Expand, Extract).

At times of chaos, you have room to innovate. Sometimes, our leadership needs to take a shallow dive into chaos to help them adjust, explore and innovate. You have to disrupt yourself to move ahead and innovate in business.

We need coherence, not alignment. And any strategy should be seen as provisional, like scaffolding that is only used for a limited period of time.

Machine learning for personalised discount vouchers

This talk by C Els discussed a model to use data mining and machine learning  to create personalised discount vouchers for items you need (not want), that are valid for a specific period of time, when customers are susceptible for purchases, based on their transaction history and customer profile. This technique can open up many opportunities to cross sell and up sell products by identifying the correct product to sell at the correct time and place.