How to "design" a transformation, or create an adaptive organization.
Audience: enterprise architect
Today, every organization is undergoing a transformation, digital or conceptual. Or it no longer exists. :) Transformation and digitization are such fundamentally overused words, such buzzwords that their full meaning is no longer perceived. Transformation is a bit like a incantation. The key question is how to increase the probability of its successful implementation. How to prevent unwanted impacts or even total failure. What to do so that the transformation does not become just a disruption.
Agility as a would-be miracle solution
Agility is a principle that is the new reality of large corporations. Thanks to digitization, classical hierarchical management was unsustainable. Agility is an organizational principle, it is the setting of structure, partly reset of processes and culture. But even agility itself is not omnipotent. Not to mention the ability of organizations to realize this cultural rebirth. The broader concept of adaptability - the ability of an organization to respond quickly to change is a broader and yet more precise direction.
Speed of innovation / road-to-market
Fast ability to change, introduce news and innovations, fast response. Extremely important. Agility helps a lot because it speeds up processes. It enables the existence of "independent" teams that are able to develop a completely different dynamic than the standard in the hierarchical structure of approval and reporting. However, more innovation and new products need more control over implementation. There is a need to describe the scenarios and choose the most effective one. To have the greatest possible certainty of impacts. The implementation system speeds up the overall preparation and implementation process. It leads to a reduction in the number of iterations and thus to a much greater ability to act in the short and long term.
Transformation, strategy and its execution / Change by Design
Most transformations fail. The reason is far from the absence of strategy, will, determination and aspiration. The reason is purely managed execution.
It is an extremely demanding process that is difficult to guarantee. What can be done is to reduce the risk of the whole operation. The first step, therefore, is to have a tool that is able to make a data description of the execution. Translate it from strategy into scenarios for structure, processes, technologies, products, individual initiatives. This will make it possible to describe the impacts of the scenarios and thus optimize the resulting scenario. Data speeds up and simplifies decision making. It will enable communication and connection of teams.
It is impossible not to return to the analogy of standard architecture. No one even makes a minor renovation of a building without an architectural plan that clearly describes where the electrical wiring is drawn. We need an architectural plan. We need a team that understands him in some form. And we all need to agree that it is the basis for a successful reconstruction.
Adaptive enterprise
At first glance, agility and a holistic perspective seem to be in opposition. The opposite is true. The more agility, the more holistic a view is needed. These approaches are complementary and together bring the ability of the organization to adapt. Both approaches have the same goal.
It is an organization's ability to act thanks to a greater interconnection of structure, processes, strategy and technology into a more functional unit, which is not paralyzed by excessive rules, hierarchies and restrictions. It is true that agility primarily seeks a network of high-performance, relatively independent teams, almost mini-businesses, that allow for flexibility.
But this certainly does not mean the absence of a need for a holistic view. And the absence of management ambition from the point of view of the whole. A holistic view does not mean a priori rigidity. Although it is true that traditional tools, procedures and work with data often lead to this. However, smart data integration outputs that maintain a holistic view, but in dynamic live quality, can be as flexible as agile teams.
On the contrary, they will be significantly strengthened if they have relevant data that will support their data supported initiative and that will provide a greater degree of control. The risk that a business takes has its limits.
It is difficult to find the right partner in an organization to discuss the benefits of linking agility and holistic architecture. However, the pressure of business reality is so great and the agile transformation has progressed to such an extent that the situation is gradually improving.
Value-driven strategy and business development
Strategy remains something of a royal discipline. The value focus of the strategy and transformation adds a dimension to the whole effort, which is the pursuit of a better world. Execution in this sense will always be the seemingly simpler part. Even if we take a partial approach to this perspective, it is important to realize that strategy creation is also a "design" process that requires data. Which requires a smart, dynamic and live description of the organization. Otherwise, it builds on highly professional but assumptions. In addition, the data-based strategy naturally leads from the very beginning to an accurate description of the execution and evaluation of individual milestones and their optimization.