One of the hardest issues for traditional organisations to address is the move from legacy technology to business agility. SAFe agile framework (a system for organising and delivering agile for enterprise) defines business agility as, ‘the ability to compete and thrive in business through the use of digital technology’. As a definition this is useful, but it isn’t much more helpful to business leaders than that.
Where the rubber hits the road leaders must still define their vision and objectives in a way that management hierarchies can do something tangible with. Just saying we need to be more agile and its your job to figure out how and report back creates a disconnect or divide which is not leadership. However, setting out a vision along the lines of ‘we have an opportunity to adopt tools and techniques to empower teams to self organise and make data and analysis more available across our organisation. Let’s set a target of reducing waste/overhead in this area by x and increasing profits and customers by y amount here over this timeframe’. The vision is for people and the objectives are the foundation of strategy. If leaders engage with their organisation and show up this can be the starting post with a solid chance of achieving the momentum and change necessary.
It’s not just about vision though. Finance is a major area of obstacles for enterprise teams. When it comes to embedded systems. there are a number of issues to address:
How do we know the current system isn’t fit for purpose any longer?
What is the cost of maintaining this system and the lost opportunity cost we are holding on to by not upgrading?
What is the cost of modernisation of this system?
How do we do that and how uncomfortable is it going to be?
Very often the answers to this question, as a first response, ring the death knoll for a change project because the cost of modernisation and the disruption it causes is enormous and immediately strengthens the argument to maintain the status quo. So what should we do?
The answer lies in the cross section between people, systems and technology.
Any successful technology transformation at its centre must materially improve the employee and/or customer experience. Whether that is an efficiency gain, receiving more value from the interaction or whatever it is, technology is fundamentally about supporting the people in the system to drive gains for the business. In essence you are trying to create win-wins. If the people gain and adopt/use the feature more, then (supposing that costs and supply make sense) the business gains (profit, customers etc). This is the most important of the three.
