What is Business Agility?

• Business is “the activity of making, buying, or selling goods or providing services in exchange for…”
  • Corporations –> Money
  • Non-profits –> Social Causes
  • Education –> Knowledge
  • Government –> Citizen Services
  • Military –> National Defense

• Agility is the “ability to move quickly and easily.”
• Business Agility is the ability to move quickly and easily to:
  • Make products and services
  • Buy products and services
  • Sell products and services
  • Provide products and services

to employees and customers along with the ability to effectively and efficiently collaborate with partners and vendors.

What is Digital Transformation?

• Digital is “electronic and especially computerized technology.”
• Transformation is “an act, process, or instance of transforming or being transformed.”
• Digital Transformation is the process of transforming:
  • How things are made
  • How things are bought
  • How things are sold
  • How products and services are provided
• through electronic and especially computerized technology.

What are the Relationships between Business Agility and Digital Transformation?

• All organizations are digital in one way or another. Some are more digital and some are less but fundamentally they utilize a mix of the following to achieve their desired outcomes and capabilities:
  • People who use technologies
  • Processes enabled by technologies
  • Technologies to capture and synthesize data
• In order for your organization to survive and thrive in today’s hyper-competitive business environments, your organization should have:
  • People who can quickly make decisions on how products and services are created, bought, sold and provided
  • Processes that reduce the time between data capture to informed decision-making
  • Technologies that capture, manage and disseminate data quickly to decision-makers

Note that without Digital Transformation, achieving Business Agility is a hallucination!

Understand your Today to Create your Tomorrow

• Do an honest and comprehensive analysis of how business is done currently
• Holistically understand how current people, processes, technologies, products and services (business and technical) are affected by Strategies, Politics, Innovation, Culture and Execution (SPICE) factors
• Determine if current capture of KPIs, SLAs and other metrics (e.g., employee incentives) are just for collection or are these measurements truly bringing change within the organization

While it is great to imagine and document your future, but any shortcuts you take in the assessing your present will come back to haunt you in the future!

Analysis

Today (Where you are)

• Create a list of roles and responsibilities for everyone in your organization, partners, and vendors
• Map hybrid business processes that show people-technology interactions
• Determine what data is being captured, managed and disseminated during people-technology interactions
• Determine the relevancy of the data for informed decision-making
• Assign a cost to each business process
• Assess how quickly and easily your organization can respond to employee and customer needs
• Determine the various obstacles that result in poor execution of strategy
• Understand organizational and individual biases

Tomorrow (Where you want to be)

• Eliminate overlapping and redundant roles and responsibilities that don’t provide value to your organization
• Create governance, functions, teams and business processes that optimize the use of data across people and technologies
• Create metrics that result in effective decision-making and lessons learned to improve those metrics
• Communicate effectively to eliminate any preconceived notions of your transformation journeys
• Create test labs for all employees to test business models, enhance current capabilities and new capabilities
• Create a new culture through norms, standards, communications, and incentives and know that not everyone is motivated by the same things
• Continuously self-evaluate your maturity level and make use of lessons learned

Asking Questions

• Strategy
  • Who is affected by transformation?
  • What siloed/outdated/imaginary/undocumented processes are affecting strategic execution?
  • What technology and non-technology tools are used to make a strategic decision?
• Politics
  • Who is distorting transformation communications?
  • What processes and data are leading to transformation easily being vetoed?
  • What technologies’ decisions are empowering transformation?
• Innovation
  • Who is assessing frontline employees, external customers, similar industries and different industries to bring innovation to the organization?
  • What processes are in place to raise people’s ability to contribute?
  • Are there technologies to test out new capabilities and business models?
• Culture
  • Who is motivated to participate in transformation journeys?
  • What kind of processes are in place to encourage culture change?
  • What kinds of technologies are used to assess culture and changes?
• Execution
  • Who is setting the expectation at all levels for the transformation journeys?
  • What processes are in place that obstructs strategic execution?
  • What technologies are in place that obstructs strategic execution?

Transitions

• Organizational Structures
  • Optimize organizational structures based on a mix of functions, products, services, and geography
  • Create formal and informal strategic linking through processes and coordination
• Governance and Processes
  • Create governance structures and processes to evaluate how data can be captured, managed, modeled, assembled and deployed
• People
  • Find people from top, middle, and frontlines to champion transformation journeys
  • Show how transformation actually makes people’s lives easier
• Program Mission
  • Views transformation journeys as an investment portfolio of multiple projects and operations
  • Connects business and technical operations to business capabilities and outcomes
  • Measures relevant metrics and abandon irrelevant metrics that cannot be connected to business value
  • Creates alignment of IT with non-IT functions (e.g., Accounting, Administration, Business Development, Customer Service, Finance, HR, Management, Manufacturing, Operations, Productions, R&D, Sales, etc.)
  • Creates effective feedback loops across the organization

Author: Khan

Speaker | Advisor | Blogger View all posts by Khan