All organisations have a strategy, some more formally than others, some more detailed than others. The common point is that it is difficult to get agreement on the vision behind the strategy. I suggest a magic triangle of business success which is based on reading long term trends in the way of doing business. These trends are here stated generically and need to be fine-tuned and double-checked for your specific business.
I also recommend to share your business vision largely throughout your organisation. Together with clear strategic objectives, a roadmap and a well-balanced organisation, good understanding of the vision increases compliance to it, motivation and enables successful empowerment. You can apply the stated success triangle on the team of receptionists in your office building, to a customer service department or to a large international corporation.
Customer-Centric Organisation: Taylorism allowed us to identify specialist tasks and opened the way to automation, efficiency and better intrinsic quality. We specialised to the level that identifying and explaining a production cycle of neither what product or service has become a real challenge. Definitely, the objectives of Taylorism are actual. At the same time, we have to rethink quality and value-creation of customer contact and put customer perception back in the middle of our attention. Customers are expecting instant results, right-fit to their specific needs. Ambitious isn’t it? Yes, this requires speed and adaptability, preferably founded on a product portfolio. For most organisations, a fundamental rethinking of their business architecture and consequently their functions, processes, authority distribution, information system and support organisation.
Effective Digitisation: our society and business practices are getting over the hype of going digital because it is fancy. Customers are expecting real added value from digital tools. This is evidently linked to sub-visions: high availability and effectiveness.
Digital tools should first of all work fine. High availability IT has just become a standard to which a lot of internal IT departments cannot compete. To achieve it, service delivery architecture should be coherent instead of scattered, most probably cloud-based, very strict management rules should be applied and user-centric support will really make a difference.
Digital tools should be effective. Digital tools need to be coherent and complete and thus support one-stop-shopping. Digital tools also need purpose, they need to provide value added! The customer or the agent needs to be convinced that doing something creates value. Notably for regulatory requirements: instead of focusing on the constraints of MIFID, you could imagine the wonderful amount of ‘farming’ information you collect. This is BI in practice. Just an example, keep on being creative.
Operational Excellence and Conformity: having excellent governance is a key success factor in a steadily changing and digital environment. Organisations which have effective control over operations’ conformity and performance, have few issues with adapting and being creative in crisis situations. Operational excellence is based on factual knowledge of operations and a constant quest for improvement, driven by the principles of lean management (eliminate waste) and six sigma (data management, business intelligence).
This triangle is interrelated: customer centric organisation is based on business intelligence (data insight) which is the basis for digitisation. Digitisation is the condition for collecting voluminous and reliable data about customer behaviour in which your customer centric organisation shall be based.
I consider this triangle a sound basis for defining a viable and credible vision on your specific business. The challenge remains to detach from your daily business to develop the challenging ideas. I highly recommend workshopping facilitated by external professionals.
I suggest applying this vision to your business, whatever the level you are on. I would be glad to hear your feedback.
Marnik Demets