#5 – Ali Davachi – Digital Transformation, acceleration and delivering cost savings innovative business solutions
Ali Davachi (@adavachi) has over 25 years of hands-on experience with all facets of complex technology implementation at scale. This type of frictionless digital transformation and business acceleration is both possible and inevitable when you have the right (business-driven) platform and implementation partner in your corner.
As a serial entrepreneur, he has led and delivered projects in Fortune 500 firms (healthcare, consumer products, financial services, and direct-to-consumer pure plays) with large volume mobile, payment, e-commerce, telecommunications, and customer-facing applications. Working with these businesses, his company has delivered innovative solutions driving millions in savings while allowing these firms to pursue new greenfield opportunities.
Ali has several elegant but straightforward philosophies to help companies. We talk about them on the show in a bit more depth.
The result is that clients retain control of their business, strategy, and customer relationships and data, all while taking advantage of 80-90% lower costs and a 70-90% reduction in time to market.
Show Notes and Highlights from the Episode are below.
Business challenges and the importance of having a good team on your side 02:42
One of the first things new businesses should be doing 08:34
Digital Security and Intrusion Protection 10:22
GDPR Compliance 12:47
Business and Covid-19 15:59
Artificial Intelligence AI 22:09
Better leadership advice 28:26
RAPID Methodology 32:22
Several simple and practical business philosophies 34:55
The importance of having the right teams on your side
“I think you hit the hit it right on the head teams are what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter. Of course, you pick the right technology or any technology you prefer, whatever you’re going to do, but getting the right people to ensure that they’re aligned with you from a cultural perspective aligns with you from a goals perspective.
You being the entrepreneur or strategic leader within the business. And then really communicating clearly what those goals are. So I find that a lot of the disconnect and a lot of the trouble happens when you have a technology team going off on its own and a business unit or a set of business units going off in a direction.
And they’re not communicating with each other.”
AI - Artificial Intelligence
“It’s still not delivering on the promise that many of these companies are pitching, which is that it can figure out features on its own and figure out insights on its own. That’s complete BS. What it does is right now is once you have some ideas about what you’re trying to control for and what you’re trying to look at, you can drive machine learning into those data sets. You can process all that data much quicker than I could write and then point you in the direction you might want to go.
So who’s the most important thing, or what’s the most critical part of a machine learning project. Is it your analysts? It’s whoever’s designing the actual project and the data, selecting the data, cleaning the data, and deciding what features are essential. That’s who decides what, whether you’re going to get value out of machine learning.”
Better Leadership Advice
“Now I’m not going to say out of the blue that they’re wrong. Maybe they feel that’s what they need to do, and they’ve been successfully doing it. So they take that to the next level with the technology, and they create these platforms and these systems that are overburdensome. So they ask that you spend more time filling in things on the platform and not worrying about what you’re going to, what you’re going to be told, then you do getting productive work done. So the answer is yes and no. So if you’re enabling your people to be autonomous and get the stuff done and you’re trusting them, and they can do the work.
Great. If you’re putting more systems after systems, because you want to be hierarchical, top-down, control-oriented. Stop, please stop. Stop. That is not how you manage people, especially in today’s world. Think about your employees; if you’re not doing think about your employee pool.
If you’re in a technology-driven business or a knowledge-driven business, you can hire anybody in the world, and they could be up and running in a day. That’s your competition. Now, your employment competition is not just the guy down the street or the guy in the same city within commuting distance.
Your employees can get online and find someone in Boulder like us who will not annoy the crap out of them wherever they want to do.
So that’s, I think that’s the key. That’s a key differentiator in today’s world because you have to respect the people you’re hiring. Want to do the right thing.
You can’t be the opposite anymore, right.
You can’t be distrustful of the folks you’re hiring. If you are, you need to either go work for someone or stop hiring those. So say the people you’re hiring or let someone else do the hiring because you’re no good at it.”
RAPID Methodology
“So rapid, which stands for research, analyze, plan, implement and decide. So those are the five phases of the rapid process we’ll do: a rapid assessment, which will include the first two steps. And then, we’ll provide a project plan based on the rapid assessment results. These results will consist of a bunch of gap analysis around human capital product sets, usage, general gap analysis within the organization’s customer values, and we’ll put together a “Hey, here’s where you are.”
Here’s where you need to be. Here are some projects we think you need to execute to get to where you need to be. And then we have this flywheel between plan implement and decide, which is at every milestone or every element within the implementation. We’re forcing decisions. You can’t move forward without deciding because we want to have a decision-oriented culture.
We don’t want a fear-based culture.”
This episode is brought to you by SURFNET CORPORATION.
This episode is brought to you by SurfNet Corporation. SurfNet Corp. has been servicing the IT needs of many businesses since 1996. SurfNet is a full-service provider offering IT consulting services including but not limited to internet strategy, development, custom programming, security, cloud computing, and much more.
They also provide web hosting at one of their global data centers and merchant processing to take credit cards for your business and online application. Furthermore, they specialize in taking a project that your business may need, from just an idea that you’d like to implement to a completed project that can help your business grow. You know, I talk to business owners all the time that say, “Rick, I want to do x y or z for my business, but I don’t have the in-house staffing to get it done or…..I don’t know whom I can trust to complete the task and get it done. Fear no more. SurfNet can help and has been for decades. Visit them at www.surfnetcorp.com for more information – Clear Vision, Clear Future, Clear choice! Contact them today!
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Connect with Ali Davachi
- Recommended Books
- Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds
- Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
- AI and Machine Learning for Coders: A Programmer’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence
- I Love It Here: How Great Leaders Create Organizations Their People Never Want to Leave
- People Mentioned
- Elon Musk
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