Everybody wants to “fix” the status quo. No brainer? Heard a million times?
What happens next? The “we are fixing” status becomes a life time mantra with only incremental progress and there are simply too many distractions to enable a true Sea change or a paradigm shift in how companies operate.
We all want to do this, don’t we? No matter how large or small an organization is, no matter what Industry, the mantra always is “fix this” and “that’s broken”. Leaders engage consulting firms, create TASK groups, halt initiatives and dig into historical data to solve this but the reality continues to be that most organizations due to one reason or another are unable to invest the time to truly map out the big picture. It would be absolutely naïve of anyone to think this can be achieved overnight or there is one answer. This is part of the reason companies go into a whirlwind of symptom fixing and never quite get to the holy grail. Again, very simple to comprehend but it is amazing how often this is missed. The bottom line is, we are missing a baseline – a foundation – a definition of what our business has transformed to in the age digital communities. i.e. Understanding your Customer Centric Architecture of today and how it has transformed your business as you knew it.
Most Business/ Tech Leaders have heard this, recognized it but don’t know where to start. How to get answers to; what are we in the business of today? Where do we meet our consumers today? Where are they going? Not what capabilities you want (that’s the fundamental mistake businesses make with a starting point), not what frills you want but “Who are you today and who do you want to be?. Let me elaborate on that a little bit. Several companies may have started out as manufacturing, finance, retail organizations 10s of years ago but the reality of many of these companies is that they have undergone transformations to where they cease to be and flow like they used to owing to several factors but primarily to digital innovation and the changing landscape of consumer definition. For example most financial organizations have now become automation and data driven companies that think less like insurance companies or hedge funds and more like statistical and decision engines that are influenced by everything from changing definition of customer, CRM, meteorological data to terrorism alerts. Retail organizations have transformed from pure selling organizations to customer behavior analytics engines where everything starts from and ends with the customer including what they want, where they want it and how to provide it as well as what to measure towards their next purchase. Most companies conduct studies and assessments and jump to BPM or technical architecture based on their assumptions of reality. No wonder there still remains a huge gap between business expectations and technical delivery. IT and business are no longer siloes; they have to and should operate as one entity to deliver one result.
What is key therefore is to define who the company is and lay a framework or an architectural vision for how the company should truly strategize and operate in this digital renaissance – a rebirth that will keep changing based on massive shifts and innovations in the world – like the next internet or social media. A baseline understanding also keeps at bay distractions and fads owing to the awareness of Who are we? Where are we headed?
It sounds fairly simple right? Bring in resources/ consultants, create a big picture, layout a roadmap. Albeit this approach gets you a bunch of excels and PowerPoints but what are they worth? How relevant are they?