by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
As detailed in the course so far the overarching requirement for any organisation is to have a strategy. I realise most companies have a business strategy, but this is a “future state” document. It is a fundamental as “if you were going to start the company again, where you you start from?”
Often it is seen that a company may not be able to do this themselves or it works better if they get third party help. This should be done for a number of reasons:-
- The flee in the jar syndrome – If you put a flee in a jar and put a cover on it, the flee will jump to the cover and will get so used to the cover being there, that removing the cover the flee will not jump out. It is conditioned. In many cases you will hear the words “we have always done it like that”
- Turkeys wont vote for Christmas – In many situations within a company where there are “empires” or internal situations where it is in the employees interest to keep things the way they are. Classic in companies is legacy IT, 80% of the costs and people are spent on maintaining the current IT estate. There is no motivation for them to want to vote for more agile systems, such as cloud.
- Business Silos – In many organisations, companies work in silos, often in a situation where there is little co-operation, in fact to the point where they “throw stones at each other over email”.
By bringing in an outside third party they are able to brining knowledge of other companies and industries and challenge “flee in the jar” thinking. They are also able to discuss without legacy systems or (solutionising) getting in the way, for example providing the latest benchmarks as well as asking some of the “big hairy” questions. Finally, they are able to work far more quickly across line of business (XLoB) enabling discussions and decisions to be made faster.
So what is “future state”?
An organisation needs to bring it’s brightest people from all (or as many) departments as they can to a “future state” workshop. It as this event that the company will brainstorm the answer to the question above. If we started this again, what would we do?
I would expect this to be socialised around the company and then a board decision made.
Outcomes could be new working models (for example, through customer journey mapping) or innovation panels. At Adobe, they closed the innovation team and made everybody an innovator, giving everybody an innovator pack https://kickbox.adobe.com/
I’ve also seen a new company being created and it maybe that the legacy company is expected to wilt or they just cut one across.
Or people can go down the route of the traditional change management program. The mistake and the reason for failures mentioned before is that is is often treated as a way of striping out cost rather than a new way of doing things. This is why it is critical that board understand why this is a business imperative and not just a way that IT people can get shiny new objects or a cost cutting exercise.
For example, in my business we are seeing incremental sales growth of 20 – 30% by using technologies such as social media. There is gold at the end of the rainbow and a lot of it!
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