I’ve led many successful application development, cloud migration, and
data/analytics programs over the years, and I staffed most of them with a
mix of employees, freelancers, and service providers. Thanks to friends
working at Cognizant, DataMatics, Mobius, Synechron, TCS, Wipro, and others
through my years of leading organizations as a CTO, CIO, and now leading my
company, StarCIO.
The secret of my success has been a co-creation model, part of which I first
wrote about in Chapter 2, Agile Transformational Practices, of my first
book, Driving Digital. “I recommend that either the business analyst or the tech lead come from
your service provider, while the other ideally should be an employee,” is
one of the recommendations I shared on assigning responsibilities on agile
teams.
In that book, I called them “hybrid teams,” but later on, I borrowed
language from one of StarCIO’s clients and started calling it a co-creation
model.
And in Digital Trailblazer, I share, “Several years later, when I become a CIO, my teams and I
pioneer ways to positively partner with our Indian‐based teams. We are no
longer client versus vendor. We are one team, with one mission, sharing
identical KPIs.”
Co-creation requires a shift in mindset, contracting, and operating model.
The transformation is essential for organizations that seek to deliver
ongoing innovations and recognize that it often requires partnering with
freelancers, small contracting firms, and service providers. Sometimes you
require scale, other times expertise, and often need ways to enable
supporting services.
I’ll announce white papers and tools around StarCIO’s co-creation model
through our
Driving Digital Newsletter.
Until then, you can learn more about these models through two recent Driving
Digital Standup videos I recorded around Chapters 6 and 7 of Digital
Trailblazer.
Buried in Bad Data
In this chapter, I tell the stories of partnerships that yielded
customer-facing analytics products and re-engineering many data integration
pipelines.
Transforming Experiences with a Global Perspective
In Chapter 6, I share my partnership stories: With marketing leaders,
service providers, and co-creation teams in the US and India.
