Category Archives: Strategy

Making strategy into reality

The fun of not knowing the answer

Posted on May 22, 2012 by | 2 Comments

The best part of the current startup landscape is that we have no way of knowing what will and won’t work. In fact, the situation is the same for established organizations. Between social, mobile, cloud and an Internet that now reaches billions of people, there is enormous change on the horizon.

We know from recent history that seemingly crazy ideas will break through and what seems like a safe bet will go nowhere. That’s the beauty and terror of the rapid changes we’re seeing.

Given this uncertainly, how does a small startup go from ‘nowhere’ to ‘now here’? (Love Guru reference for non-movie-buffs) How does an established company shift to meet a changing world?

Stay nimble

The first idea can often be just the precursor to the breakthrough. Look no further than Flickr, which set out to create a way to photo share as part of gaming. What they stumbled upon with photo sharing dwarfed the original plan in both creativity and financial value. What matters most about this story is that the founders were willing to see the market for their ‘accidental product’ and change gears and course.

Nimble companies change direction when the cues dictate.

Fail fast, fail cheaply

The ability to get to a great idea can require several attempts at products or services that may not work out. There are countless stories of inventors who found success on their 10,000th attempt, but that’s not the point. Get ideas out quickly and as painlessly as possible so that the good one comes to the surface sooner. The longer an idea takes to develop, the more costly and higher risk it becomes. We cherish the things that have taken our biggest investment, our ‘babies’, which can easily blind us to whether that investment was a good idea or not.

While on the topic…reward those who fail fast and don’t punish willingness to try out an idea. You’d be getting rid of your innovators.

Focus on the important things

What matters most is that the idea has market value and that you have the people to realize the vision. To that end, build a smart, creative team and avoid turnover. The longer you work to solve a problem together, the better you’ll get at it. The team will become experts at moving an idea from inception to market and will get faster and better each time.

Unless you’re one of the few who has unlimited funding (and therefore, time) and a first, perfectly conceived idea, your moves will need to follow these patterns to be successful.

Sure, there’s lots more advice about how to create or change your business. I would argue that this is the core of the problem…this is the hard stuff.

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Posted in Strategy, Featured, Disruption, Disciplines, Startups

A BPM playbook for the Last Mile

Posted on May 22, 2012 by | 12 Comments

Making process ‘stick’ is a real challenge facing process management initiatives. Most BPM professionals try to solve the problem in a similar way…they create the Playbook, the Electronic SOP or the Emergency SOP. Each is a flawed answer to the challenge but could look like progress.

Years ago, before the triumph of  mobile phones, there was the concept in telecommunications of the Last Mile, “the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer.”  The last mile was the challenge that the call seemed “almost there” but was, in fact, missing a particularly  important piece. It was, in fact, missing the single most important piece.

Convergent evolution

BPM has the very same problem nearly everywhere. Enormous resources are invested getting to the point where processes are agreed upon and ready for use by the employees. But how to truly affect the organization and get things done in new and better ways? This is a very real challenge that confronts all organizations at some point in their ‘process lifetimes’.

At a recent APQC conference, I heard organization after organization talk about attempts to take various process initiatives to the masses. Each had eerily similar ways of ‘packaging’ their results for consumption, but each fell short of the Last Mile. Just the fact that each arrived at the need to ‘sell’ a package was a great example of convergent evolution, getting to a similar result despite different starting points.

‘Unsuccess’

Getting to the same place was not validation of their success. In fact, getting to that spot without having the Last Mile figured out is the opposite. What each needed was the delivery mechanism that kept process owned, current and relevant to roles and functions in their organization. Without that, orphaned and stale information was going to be quickly ignored in favor of “the way things have always been done.” While they all seemed on the verge of the big process payoff, each was far from successful at changing the way business was done.

There are no shortcuts for the Last Mile. Organizations need a centralized way to own, store, amend and communicate process. Employees need to have a role-based view of their world that also provides contextual references for getting the job done. They need to trust the system is accurate and intelligent.

What methods or tools are you using to deliver your processes to the last mile?

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Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Process Management, Strategy

Healthcare, your process is your product

Posted on May 20, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Processes are how work gets done. They are a series of activities that convert an input into an output for the customer or next stage of work. Healthcare is fundamentally a service industry with processes as its product. Because efficiency has never mattered in a fee-for-service world, healthcare is overripe with opportunities to innovate.

Innovation through rigor

Most people think of innovation in terms of products:  Apple, Google, etc. We always hear about those game changing product launches that corner a market. While there are still plenty of innovations to be had for new treatment modalities and groundbreaking therapies, healthcare organizations are primed and ready to see major shifts in organizational performance by innovating their processes. What we, at APQC, refer to as innovation through rigor.

Some of the best representations of these principles come from the Toyota Production Systems (TPS), or the Toyota Way. The basic principles of TPS go to the core of what healthcare has purported for years and drive straight to the center of why many healthcare organization were created in the first place. The principles of TPS are:

  • Continuous improvement
  • Respect for people
  • A long-term philosophy
  • Belief the right process will produce the right result
  • Developing your people and your partners adds value to the organization
  • Continuously solving root problems drives organizational learning

When I read through this list, I am amazed at the parallels I see to the mission and purpose of the healthcare organizations I’ve been a part of over the last 20 years. Why, then, is there a disconnect between most healthcare organizations and the concepts of continuous process improvement.

Binary focus

It comes down to a singular, binary focus of many organizations. Healthcare organizations tend to focus all their energy serving the patient. Now, before you lambast me, let me explain.

I’m NOT promoting that the patient shouldn’t be a key focus of any healthcare organization…far from it. It should be the central focus; it is why you the organization was created. I’ve found that some healthcare organizations (and many non-healthcare organizations) take on a hero’s mentality to serve the patient at all costs, which ultimately leads to very convoluted and at times unsuccessful approaches to serving patients. The exact opposite of what they have intended.

Instead of thinking about how to treat THIS patient the right way, the organizations innovating through process are figuring out how the treat ALL patients the right way. Thus creating an organization innovating patient care through the way they work with patients, not just the technology, treatment, or modalities they apply to a single patient.

Falling short

When I look at the principles of process innovation noted above, I think healthcare respects people, does focus on long-term solutions, and focuses on developing people. I think they tend to fall short on their continuous improvement focus, focusing on how they work vs. who they work on, and stepping back to understand and solving their root process problems.

We’re already seeing examples of the use of continuous process improvement and process innovation within healthcare at organizations like Virginia Mason, ThedaCare, and others. They are able to apply these process innovation principles to impact the real outcome for all patients, showing us all that it isn’t an either/or problem. Stronger, more innovative processes will result in better patient outcomes, better financials, better HCAHPS scores, or whatever process outcome you choose to measure. The key is taking a more holistic, process approach vs. a binary vies creating tradeoffs between the care of patients and other outcomes such as financials or patient satisfaction. That is not a place any organization wants to find itself.

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Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Healthcare, Markets, Process Management, Strategy

Moving at the speed of software

Posted on May 13, 2012 by | 1 Comment

The following was first published on Call IT Anything.

Your company, regardless of industry, is now controlled by software.

People are still the underlying foundation of any company, but the best people can be no better than the software they use to perform their jobs.  You can only move and adapt as fast as your software can move and adapt.

Likewise, if you are building bricks and mortar facilities, they too must be adaptable to the changes in business models that are being driven by the Speed of Software.  In other words, heavy investments in bricks and mortar can inhibit the ability of a company or industry from leveraging the benefits of delivering their products and services through rapidly adaptable software.

Building barriers?

I was touring a healthcare organization recently that is building a beautiful new “Cardiology Services Tower” in anticipation of the aging baby boomers and their needs.  The thought that kept running through my mind as I reviewed the plans:  You are building an enormously expensive structure here that will last at least 40-years, but is based upon the old way delivering healthcare, including the relatively new and already outdated notion that a hospital should be a 5-star resort.

Agility

The future of all industries is defined by software, not bricks and mortar.  Don’t buy software that can’t adapt, and don’t build buildings that paint you into a corner and that can’t leverage the Speed of Software.

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Posted in Disciplines, Healthcare, IT Strategy, Markets, Strategy

Stop budgeting, start improving

Posted on April 21, 2012 by | 1 Comment

The following was first published on the Harvard Business Review.

In a recent post, I argued that companies can’t keep their costs in line by attacking them directly. The typical approaches of budget cuts and layoffs usually don’t result in sustained changes to their cost structure — the costs creep back. Instead, companies must make fundamental changes to the way they work — how they market and sell, handle orders, bill for those orders, manufacture and distribute their goods, and serve customers after the sale. If they remove waste, errors, and time from these processes, they will get cost efficiency as a byproduct.

Cost rolls up

This isn’t the way many organizations try to contain costs. The mistake they make is to keep a tight grip on budgets to try to achieve their cost targets. They’re driven by the spreadsheet view of the organization — a hierarchy of cost numbers that roll up from work groups to departments to the top of the organization. It’s a world view common in the C-suite and the business schools that prepared them.

To be sure, organizations need financial targets, and when they are under severe pressure, slashing “overhead” is far faster and easier. But the tight-fisted approach winds up being wasteful, and there is a better way.

7,000 lines of data

Consider ThedaCare, a healthcare system in Wisconsin, which eliminated its budgeting process in 2010. According to ThedaCare’s chief financial officer, Tim Olson, top management viewed it as a significant waste of time. With four hospitals, 22 physician locations, and over 5,000 employees, ThedaCare managers spent 10,000 hours a year to build their budget, and another 10,000 hours to explain, manage, and argue about it.

The organization replaced the budget with a quarterly forecasting and planning process. Managers no longer have to collect 7,000 lines of budget data. The new plan includes a rolling look back at the last eight quarters and a look forward at the next six. Managers look at numbers at a higher level than before. For example, they’re monitoring cost per unit of service (not just cost by department) to be sure that they offset cost increases (e.g., due to inflation, salary increases) to maintain margin in an environment of downward pressure on prices. When managers see problems ahead, they launch a process improvement initiative — not budget cuts — to close the gaps. ThedaCare also introduced a daily financial management tool for department managers. Some 200 department managers now have a standard dashboard. Since about half their cost is people, the dashboards largely help them monitor labor costs.

Group Health Cooperative, a nonprofit health care system in Seattle with 10,000 employees, has also thrown out its budgeting process. In 2009 the organization moved to a run-rate methodology, which monitors spending quarter-over-quarter. That reduced the administrative burden of budgeting, and freed up managers to improve processes. Now they focus on what they must do differently to get a different outcome. CFO Ric Magnuson says that the change has forced managers to develop a much better understanding of the work in their departments, particularly which activities truly matter. There have been challenges. Some people like doing budgets, working with numbers and keeping score, rather than rolling up their sleeves to help streamline work.
What’s going on here?

Lean Accounting

A company’s leaders need to be accountable for financial results. But as Orry Fiume, one of the founders of “Lean Accounting,” told me, they shouldn’t run their business day-to-day by the numbers. (Lean Accounting redesigns a company’s performance measurement system so that it encourages continuous improvement.) A performance management system needs to include both financial and process improvement targets. The financial targets are far easier to set but also far less useful as a tool to help managers achieve them. The process performance improvement part is critical to changing the work activities that lead to the results. Determining what operational changes to make is difficult and often accomplished through trial and error.

ThedaCare and Group Health still have an annual planning cycle where they set targets and identify gaps in revenue, profit, and other metrics, and they monitor their performance quarterly. But instead of driving the high level targets down into detailed departmental targets and budgets and monitoring those detailed budgets, they take the high level gaps and charter multidisciplinary process improvement teams and projects to close the gaps. They then monitor those projects and their impact on process and financial performance quarterly, paying most of their attention to process measures. The role of leaders day-to-day is to check progress on these improvement activities. It isn’t to sit in their offices reviewing budgets. (For more discussion on eliminating budgets and transforming performance management, see the Beyond Budgeting Round Table.)

Organizations today must focus their leaders on improving service, cost, and quality, not on budgets and expenses. This shift will require personal transformations for most C-level executives, especially the chief financial officer. That will be the subject of my next post.

Question: Have you seen organizations whose top management shifted their attention from the budgeting process to setting and monitoring continual improvements in time, cost, quality and other operational indicators?

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Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Finance, Healthcare, Markets, Strategy

Get your team to work across organizational boundaries

Posted on April 18, 2012 by | Leave a comment

The following was first published on Harvard Business Review.

Competition today punishes companies that make episodic improvements in key processes. Continually improving performance is what matters, and that can only happen with teamwork across functional and company boundaries. A company must get its sales, marketing, research and development, operations, and even customers and suppliers to work together.

Yet teamwork across organizational boundaries is unnatural. The natural tendency of organizations is to optimize locally — within a business unit or department, rather than optimizing for the global customer experience or the enterprise. Too often, the sum of the parts doesn’t make for a high-performing whole. Getting people to improve processes across boundaries typically requires a crisis or constant pushing from a senior leader.

Suppose you’re the chief medical officer of a physicians’ clinic and you want to improve the experience of patients with hip or knee replacements while reducing the cost of their procedures. Who do you need to involve in improving the process? The doctor and nurses at the hospital will do the surgery. The physical therapists and rehabilitation nurses will prepare the patient before the surgery and help with therapy after the surgery. And the insurance company will pay for the procedure. In the typical U.S. healthcare scenario, each player is a separate business with its own objectives, business practices, culture, and information systems.

How can you organize this team to optimize the patient’s experience, rather than optimizing each party’s objectives, and reduce overall costs? And how do you do this when changes to the process may create winners and losers?

The only way to sustain improvement in a cross-organizational process is for workers in the process to see it from end to end. Only by understanding the entire flow and logic can they uncover huge opportunities for improvement. And only by collaborating with other process workers can they implement the changes.

Over the last 20 years, I have found the best way to do this is to assemble the key stakeholders of a process in a multi-day workshop. The participants begin by mapping the process as it actually operates (not how it is supposed to operate) — quantifying process performance value from the standpoint of the customer (external or internal), as well as waste in steps or between steps. Physically walking through the process steps — following the route of a patient, for example — can be illuminating. Comparing the amount of time in which work is performed (the “work time”) with the end-to-end cycle time (the “elapsed time”) should be a focal point of the team’s discussions. I have seen findings like 10 minutes of actual work required to complete a process that takes place over 20 days.

The team’s next task is to identify problems with the process. Subsequently, the group envisions how to change the process to improve the customer experience, reduce time and cost, and improve quality. This new design usually has fewer steps in the process. The team eliminates wasted time, allowing workers to complete the same 10 minutes of work in 10 hours instead of 20 days.

The maps of the current and future process, opportunities, and implementation plan are useful artifacts of the workshop. However, the more important outcome is actually development of the team itself. Whether in sports or business, a team is a group of people with a shared goal. After the workshop, everyone who works in the process has a common vision of what they are trying to jointly achieve, how the various work steps affect the process or behavior of others across departments, customers, suppliers, or other stakeholders, and how they can jointly improve the process for the customer.

The immediate challenge the team will face is getting the participants back at their home organizations to buy into the redesigned process. In the hip or knee replacement process example, the representatives from the hospital will explain to their colleagues how the new process will not only make the patient experience better, but will also lead to more business being referred to them by the primary care physicians due to their closer working relationship.

The bigger challenge, however, is not to just implement the changes that have been identified. More important, it is to maintain the team’s effort to continually improve the process and not accept slippage. This can be particularly difficult because the team’s tendency is to want to rest after a big push, go back to the comfort zone of work with their home team, and focus on meeting their local performance targets. Instead, the process team needs to go back into the ring to improve the process again and again. Constancy of purpose matters more than one workshop’s flash of brilliance.

So how can you get this process team to sustain operational gains and continue to attack the next set of process problems? You need a way to maintain the extended team identity.

As I described in a previous post, social networking technologies offer new ways to support teams, especially process teams that cut across organizational boundaries. Consider MITRE, which manages five research and development centers for the U.S. government (DoD, FAA, IRS, Homeland Security, and Federal Judiciary). The company has conducted pioneering work with new social media to build teamwork between its 7,600 employees and an external network of academics, former employees, vendors, industry, sponsors and front-line beneficiaries of its research (such as IRS workers, soldiers, and health care professionals). In 2009 the company deployed a social networking prototype it calls “Handshake,” which looks like Facebook, with photos of members and profiles, file sharing, blogs, and discussion groups. Handshake members discuss concerns, offer comments, and trade ideas across dozens of topics. Some are high-level discussions about technology trends, while others deal with problems that benefit from online brainstorming sessions.

Over the last two years, MITRE has seen steady growth in Handshake membership to about 5,000 MITRE employees, 2,000 external participants and 850 groups. According to interviews and a survey MITRE conducted with members of Handshake groups, the system has enhanced cross-organizational participation and strengthened business relationships. Donna Cuomo, chief information architect in MITRE’s Center for Information and Technology, says that “Handshake enables collaboration among a network of professional and technical colleagues, so we don’t just make MITRE-only decisions anymore. We’re leveraging our connections and contacts to bring the best thinking to bear for our customers’ problems.” For example, Cuomo described a new mobile application MITRE developed that was distributed to front-line soldiers, who then gave rapid feedback on the product through Handshake.

Back to the hip and knee replacement example, the chief medical officer of the physician practice should establish a social networking platform like Handshake for the extended team members. That would let them jointly monitor progress on their improvement initiatives, continue to identify new opportunities, and maintain and enhance social ties.

A social media platform like Handshake or a three-day process workshop are just tools to help build and maintain teams that work across organizational boundaries. These tools need to be complemented by new behaviors of the CEO and C-Suite, shared objectives and measures, and agovernance structure and management processes to implement changes together and monitor and celebrate progress. These institutional changes are huge. Yet, as shown in the MITRE and patient journey examples, the best way to compete is to get everyone working together across boundaries to solve customer problems.

Question: What experience have you had in building teamwork across organizational boundaries?

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Posted in Strategy, Workplace reality

What’s the big deal with Big Data?

Posted on April 15, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Big Data is the technology focus of the year, and Hadoop is the software that is gathering all the attention of investors and startups. How much is hype and how much is ‘wave of the future’? There is always some amount of hype around new ideas, but I’ll argue Big Data has its value based in diversity.

Diversity of locations

Those who argue that Big Data is just hype (and there are a few) ignore the argument that there is a new diversity of data that has never existed before. The diversity comes from the combination of internal and external (and cloud), mobile, plus the explosion of personal data from social networks. 800M people have put their preferences and relationships on Facebook, but there are many, many other places where data is now available that was never reachable before.

Diversity of users

Big Data has benefited large organizations that could afford hardware and quantitative analysts for many years, but has been out of the reach of small to medium companies. The low cost of storage and open source software has made this technology available to a broad spectrum of companies. It will only get cheaper, meaning the adoption will increase.

Diversity of data sources

The proliferation of web-enabled devices means that satellite, RFID, machine-generated and many other sources of data are in the mix along with consumer information. This data, taken at the right volume and velocity, demonstrates patterns that are useful for predicting opportunities and problems in supply chains, contagious diseases, drug therapies, and a host of other meaningful ways. It opens the door to ideas and solutions that weren’t imaginable a short time ago.

Data traction

Big Data without context or purpose isn’t all that useful, and that’s where process management comes in. In Clay Richardson’s words, Big Data needs Big Process. In his post, Big Data Ain’t Worth Diddly Without Big Process, he argues that ‘Big Process’ is a move from silo’d approaches to BPM and process improvement to more holistic approaches that have a chance to effect business transformation.

Companies have long brought together subject matter experts and mapped how things should be done, but we’ve never really been disciplined about applying the wealth of available data in a systematic way that can revolutionize business. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and Big Data is all about having the right, timely information to measure meaningful things and affect change.

That means process becomes less about rigid flows and more about an organization being able to use data in specific ways to improve product development, strengthen marketing and sales, and create better customer service. Big Data used well drives organizational change, and that change needs to be wisely managed as an agile process infrastructure.

The companies that don’t put their ear to the tracks by managing Big Data are the ones most likely to be disrupted. And there is lots of disruption ahead.

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Posted in Data Analytics, Disciplines, Featured, IT Strategy, Strategy

What are you waiting for?

Posted on April 13, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Inefficient processes can make or break your organization’s ability to succeed. Each year organizations dish out hundreds, even millions of dollars leveraging the wrong resources to try and improve ineffective business processes.

According to Forrester Research, many organizations who have achieved significant success have shifted their BPM priorities from reducing costs to improving the customer experience and increasing value innovation. These companies see a tremendous return on investment in the form of increased competitiveness, customer growth, accelerated time to market and improved operating model flexibility.

My Thoughts…

I have heard many thought leaders talk about the importance of the ‘customer experience’ – it is nice to see that Forrester has uncovered companies that are focusing on improving their customer experience.

A good example would be Amazon. I have learned that they have access to most things that I might want to purchase. It is easy to find the items, read reviews and do a single click to purchase. And if that is not enough, for a small annual fee I get free 2 day shipping. They make it so easy for me to do business with them that I seldom look elsewhere.

I have read that they have installed BPM software. From my experience, it seems they are doing it right.

If your company hasn’t considered improving their business processes, what’s holding you up? I’m sure you know that the status quo is costing your company real money.

What are you waiting for?

Your Thoughts…

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Posted in Retail, Strategy

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Look to IT for Process Innovation?

Posted on March 29, 2012 by | 8 Comments

The following was first posted on Harvard Business Review:

Suppose you’re a senior executive at a large financial services company such as Nationwide Insurance or ING. Would you look to your information technology organization for ways to improve customer service? Would you ask IT to come up with ideas for new financial products and services, or new ways to deliver them?

Probably not. While you realize that all your products and processes depend on information systems (which is why the industry spends far more on IT than any other), you associate the IT function with the drudgery of maintaining the firm’s ancient systems. You think your IT organization is overwhelmed just keeping all the old systems running.

If this is you, you’re likely missing out on the product and process ingenuity of your IT people. Just consider how Nationwide and ING have tapped the brains of their IT organizations. What they’ve done provides lessons for broader organizational change and adaptation.

How are they doing it? David Bogaerts and Jael Schuyer are process improvement experts (“Lean Master Black Belts” and “Agile coaches”) in the IT and operations group at ING, a leading bank based in the Netherlands. When I asked them about skills their IT organization has brought to process improvement activities, their answer was quick: The IT organization knows how to get people working together as teams.

ING is in the middle of a transition from traditional step-by-step (“waterfall“) software development approaches to using cross-functional teams to make quick, small changes to systems (called “agile scrum” methods). It has worked very effectively at a team level, and they’ve scaled up to 40 “scrum” teams.

When I asked them whether their company as a whole could work this way, they gave an emphatic “yes.” Building on their team successes, they created an “Agility capture team” of senior IT leaders to address larger issues. They have weekly planning meetings and conference calls twice a week to work on internal customer service improvements. While the IT organization is driving this, more importantly they have roped in business unit and functional heads to surface their needs. As a result, process improvement activities have begun rippling out from the IT project team level to the core operations of the business.

I saw this ripple effect at Nationwide Insurance after speaking to Tom Paider and Tim Heller, managers in the firm’s Application Development Center. They told me that entrepreneurial people in IT at this $20 billion financial services provider started using a process improvement (“lean”) development framework and rapid (“agile”) development techniques several years ago to standardize system development approaches. “It enabled us to take teams that were having successes and build on them to scale,” Paider said. “We now have dozens of teams with industry-leading quality and productivity statistics. We are adding 1-2 teams a month to this model.”

Fifty companies have visited Nationwide in the last 12 months to learn how the company has embedded process improvement into the work of the IT function. Building a new mindset of making many smaller changes and learning from each one, instead of getting a detailed specification and delivering it, has been a concerted cultural transformation. This continuous improvement thinking is well known in manufacturing, but few do it well or consistently. At Nationwide, it’s not an elite group’s job to improve work every day — it’s everybody’s job.

I see a big opportunity for senior executives to embrace the process innovation successes that are bubbling up from IT organizations such as those in Nationwide and ING — and then expand on them. Improving the performance of the IT department is hard enough. But by adopting the techniques of process improvement leaders, Nationwide and ING are doing what’s nearly impossible at most large organizations: forming cross-functional teams to quickly design and implement better ways of serving customers and improving enterprise performance.

In the past, IT functions at even the most IT-intensive companies have struggled to get a seat at the business strategy and operational improvement table. However, today IT functions in financial services firms (more than any other sector) are in a leadership role to drive competitive advantage.

Question: Have you seen IT functions that are leading the way in their companies to make cross-functional process innovation happen?

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Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Future of work, IT Strategy, Strategy

Are we living in a post-CIO world?

Posted on March 8, 2012 by | 12 Comments

Watching Apple’s rollout of the ‘new iPad’ and Tim Cook’s talk of the “Post-PC World”, I have to wonder if even more has changed without any bold announcements. Specifically, the dependence of the enterprise on application development/support, business analysis, and many other services of the IT organization. I guess the question is, “Are we living in a Post-CIO World?”

The evidence

Maybe the question is a little broad and you’re skeptical, but consider these points before you walk away:

  • Isn’t the business able to determine many of its own process and data needs instead of relying on teams of coding engineers to build and support custom applications? Didn’t SalesForce prove that?
  • Does a carefully designed UI that takes two years to roll out offer any advantage over an app, thrown together quickly but ready for use in days or weeks?
  • Does a collaborative world of social media end the need for teams of people to maintain the Exchange Server?

Sure, there’s provocation in my questions, but there is a fundamental shift happening that is often called ‘consumerization’ but is something much bigger than consumer products in work environments. It is also much bigger than Apple versus Microsoft.

The shift

We’re seeing the very gradual shift of IT’s role to a data-focused organization and away from applications.

It has become more important to manage web access in many companies than to support email, for decades the cornerstone of communication. Business process is defined and managed by end users before anything can be automated. There’s a quick and dirty way to model almost everything without heavy lifting from technologists.

We’re not in a post-CIO world. We have many reasons to continue to maintain legacy applications, but I would suggest that we’re headed to a new place where IT’s role is far more focused on data architecture and events than applications. This will be a healthy step forward in agility for an enterprise trying to stay ahead of the competition.

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Posted in Data Analytics, Disciplines, IT Strategy, Mobile, Social, Strategy

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