Developing Data Strategy

The concepts of net-centricity, information superiority and power to the edge emerged out of the US defence community about twenty years ago, thanks to some thought leadership from the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP). One of the routes of these ideas into the civilian world was through a company called Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2005 along with its founder, Ray Ozzie. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) provided another route. And from the mid 2000s onwards, a few people were researching and writing on edge strategies, including Philip Boxer, John Hagel and myself.

Information superiority is based on the idea that the ability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information will give you operational and strategic advantage. The advantage comes not only from the quantity and quality of information at your disposal, but also from processing this information faster than your competitors and/or fast enough for your customers. TIBCO used to call this the Two-Second Advantage.

And by processing, I'm not just talking about moving terabytes around or running up large bills from your cloud provider. I'm talking about enterprise-wide human-in-the-loop organizational intelligence: sense-making (situation awareness, model-building), decision-making (evidence-based policy), rapid feedback (adaptive response and anticipation), organizational learning (knowledge and culture). For example, the OODA loop. That's my vision of a truly data-driven organization.

There are four dimensions of information superiority which need to be addressed in a data strategy: reach, richness, agility and assurance. I have discussed each of these dimensions in a separate post:

• Data Strategy - Reach
• Data Strategy - Richness
• Data Strategy - Agility
• Data Strategy - Assurance

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Philip Boxer, Asymmetric Leadership: Power to the Edge

Leandro DalleMule and Thomas H. Davenport, What’s Your Data Strategy? (HBR, May–June 2017) 

John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, The Agile Dance of Architectures – Reframing IT Enabled Business Opportunities (Working Paper 2003)

Vivek Ranadivé and Kevin Maney, The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future--Just Enough (Crown Books 2011). Ranadivé was the founder and former CEO of TIBCO.

Richard Veryard, Building Organizational Intelligence (LeanPub 2012)

Richard Veryard, Information Superiority and Customer Centricity (Cutter Business Technology Journal, 9 March 2017) (registration required)

Wikipedia: CCRP, OODA Loop, Power to the Edge

Related posts: Microsoft and Groove (March 2005), Power to the Edge (December 2005), Two-Second Advantage (May 2010), Enterprise OODA (April 2012), Reach Richness Agility and Assurance (August 2017)

Enterprise OODA

In response to @Griff0Jones, I promised to beef up the coverage of OODA in my book on Organizational Intelligence (draft now available via LeanPub). I should welcome any comments and suggestions on the following, as well as pointers to any practical examples.

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The choices we make at the personal level are influenced by our experiences and our environment. We are not always fully aware of these influences, and may need someone else to point them out to us. The same is true of the strategic and operational choices made by organizations.

In a rapidly changing environment, we need a feedback loop that continuously aligns our behaviour to these changes. This is an important aspect of agility. And in a competitive situation, competitive success depends on our being more agile than our competitors - in other words, having a faster and more accurate loop.

A good model for this is the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop created by John Boyd. Some people confuse this with the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) loop popularized by Shewhart and Deming. However, the key difference between PDCA and OODA is the explicit inclusion of sense-making, which Boyd calls Orientation. Boyd himself produced a second model, IOHAI, which is largely an expansion on the sense-making area.



In order for the OODA loop to produce real agility, there needs to be agility in each of its parts.

Agile Observation. One criticism that has been levelled at the OODA loop (for example Benson and Rotkoff) is the tendency for what you observe to be narrowed to just those things that seem to help with decision making. (David Murphy describes this tendency as inevitable.)

Simon Thornington raises a related issue in a comment to David Murphy's blog. So much of what is observed is via instrumentation (or alternatively the output of models). Without the observer having prior knowledge of the construction and assumptions of the models, he or she cannot orient effectively based on the observations. Simon suggests that this was a factor in the recent Airbus crash, various space program mishaps and throughout finance.


Agile Orientation. David Murphy points out that really big risks are often not acted upon because we are oriented so that we cannot decide, and reminds us what happened to those people who tried to act against the firm’s orientation at MF Global, or Enron or HBOS.

Discussing strategic planning through the OODA lens, Henrik Mårtensson points out the importance of orientation. If we only know one strategic paradigm, and choose a strategic method from within the range of options provided by the paradigm, we loose (sic) the ability to improve beyond what the paradigm allows. ... Boyd believed it is absolutely necessary to be able to switch paradigms at will.


Agile Decision, Agile Action. Henrik argues that operating with a crippled OODA loop and a strategic model that separates strategy and action may not kill you, but the faster the environment changes, the more hampered your organization will be by its own strategic model. Henrik recommends William Dettmer's Strategic Navigation, which in his opinion combines the principles of Maneuver Warfare with the analysis and planning tools of The Logical Thinking Process. The result is fast high quality strategic planning, and seamless integration between planning and execution.

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Sources and further reading

Kevin Benson and Steven Rotoff, Goodbye OODA Loop (Armed Forces Journal, October 2011)

Blogs by Henrik Mårtensson, David Murphy, Chet Richards, and Spartan Cops.

Intelligence Failure at Kodak

@mkplantes sees the demise of Kodak as an intelligence failure.

Put yourself in their Kodak leaders’ chairs for a moment and consider the four expectations of a leadership team and, more importantly, consider the speed with which they had to work though all of the expectations:

• Sense what’s going on around you? (“Digital is coming!”)
• Make sense of what you see, hear, and feel (“Film is dying, but we can’t kill it now. It’s too important!”)
• Decide on a course of action (“OMG! Nothing is as big as film is now. Let’s think about this and be careful.”)
• Act on your decisions (“Well, this is a big ship! Hard to change course overnight!”)

Kay Plantes, A sad “Kodak moment” business model failure WTN News 7 October 2011

This is effectively an OODA loop. Dr Plantes identifies a number of possible errors in this loop.

1. Incorrect estimate of the pace of change. "Successful companies often underestimate the speed of industry evolution."

2. Incorrect understanding of the value proposition from the customers' perspective. "People don’t buy film, they use film to capture the pictures they want."

3. Incorrect optimization of the basis of competition - commodity wars.

If it was a strategic error for Kodak to get caught up in a dogfight with Fuji, we should also ask how Fuji is faring? Has Fuji committed the same errors as Kodak, and is it suffering the same fate? Meanwhile, Stuart Henshall compares Kodak with HP: two inventive companies, who "failed time and time again to find a more agile footing". (HP - What's Your strategy? August 2011).

Dr Plantes complains that Kodak was focused on the product rather than the value received by its customers - in other words, a platform strategy. But Kodak has been trying to shift its business model from product to a service-oriented platform for at least five years. In November 2006, an article in BusinessWeek described this transformation, and outlined some of the big challenges then facing Kodak (Mistakes made on the road to innovation, BusinessWeek November 2006). In February 2007, Clayton Christensen and Scott D. Anthony saw the Kodak strategy as an ambitious attempt to implement Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation (Will Kodak's New Strategy Work? Forbes February 2007).


Antonio Perez (who spent much of his career at HP) has been the CEO throughout this period, and has watched the Kodak share price drop from around $25 to less than $1. We may infer that Kodak has failed to overcome the challenges identified by BusinessWeek and Christensen. But why?


What's missing from Dr Plantes' analysis is an appreciation of how these four steps operated as an effective OODA loop, with feedback and learning, rather than merely repetition. In a detailed analysis of Kodak strategy, George Mendes concludes

Kodak is an example of repeat strategic failure – it was unable to grasp the future of digital quickly enough, and even when it did so, it was implemented too slowly under a continuous change strategy and ultimately it did not fit coherently as a core competency.

George Mendes, What went wrong at Eastman Kodak (pdf), TheStrategyTank

There is a great deal on the Internet about Kodak's social media strategy - but it seems to be largely about Kodak marketing communications. Journalist Courtney Boyd Myers (@CBM) invites us to Meet the brilliant and beautiful woman behind Kodak’s social media strategy (September 2011). The woman in question is extremely photogenic and obviously good at self-promotion, but there is nothing strategic in the article. The big strategic error here is to regard social media and content management as a marketing issue, separate from the business model itself. This seems to suggest a lack of joined-up thinking - and ultimately a failure of organizational intelligence.


In 2007, Jacob McNulty thought that that instilling the elements of a learning organization would have strongly contributed to a different story for Kodak’s recent years.

A learning organization is one that learns from its mistakes and successes, spots trends in the market and acts on them by being nimble enough to do so.  A culture of learning rewards knowledge sharing which reduces the chances that you’ll be blindsided by something like digital in 2007. Kodak could have presented themselves as a picture company many years ago - whether those pictures are on film or in a file it shouldn’t matter.  Part of making that transition would require a company that is ready to learn and develop.

Jacob McNulty, Not a Kodak Moment (2007)

Other sources claim that Kodak is a learning organization. In which case, why has it failed to learn the things that matter?

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