To become better dancers, we don’t repeatedly purchase fancier, more ornate outfits, we improve our steps. So why do we persist with the foolishness of endlessly purchasing new technologies without holistically addressing flawed and inconsistent business processes and architectures? Even more disturbingly, why are we surprised when we receive scanty applause for our efforts? Agility is necessary for our organizations to survive, thrive or win in the market place. Those that seek to unlock this agility by purely fixating on technology and tools will fall short. Those that succeed, fully committed to the necessary shifts for agility and optimize both business processes and the technologies that support them.
1) COMBAT UNNECESSARY CUSTOMIZATIONS.
Every differentiated organization is unique. It therefore makes sense that business processes and technologies within these organizations should be appropriately customized to support and enable this uniqueness. However, when we allow customizations to proliferate, unwisely implement them or manage them ineffectively, our organizations pay a steep price. A first step in unlocking agility is working to eliminate unnecessary customizations.
Avoid custom processes and technologies . Does your inquiry collection or store checkout process really need to be that unique? Does the advantage conferred by these customizations really exceed their cost? Leverage out of box capabilities and standardized business processes unless there is a true business need for differentiation.
Avoid customizations within vendor platforms. If customizations are deemed essential, then three actions can limit their negative impact 1) Prefer configurations that are supported by your platforms instead of custom code. 2) Implement custom code outside of vendor platforms. 3)Avoid using vendor-specific programming languages that are not widely supported in the market place. These actions will minimize your switching costs and simplify your movement to newer and better processes and technologies when they inevitably become available.
Actively manage customizations. The need for customizations shifts over time. Business processes that were unique sources of advantage often become commoditized or standard. Similarly technology customizations that were necessary to enable these unique processes may become standard functionality included within existing packaged applications. Product and process owners should vigilantly monitor their domain for opportunities to abandon costly and constraining customizations.
2) SIMPLIFY YOUR FOUNDATION
Business processes are normally stretched or strewn across a complex and expansive landscape of applications: packaged software and custom built, legacy and modern, some internally hosted and others extending beyond organizational boundaries. The count and complexity may vary substantially between organizations but what remains true is that complexity constrains us. To improve agility, we should strive to orchestrate business processes across fewer and more modern applications.
Consolidate applications with overlapping functionality. Often times, applications across the enterprise have a significant level of overlap. Audit your landscape and seize pertinent opportunities for consolidation.
Perform targeted application modernizations. If your organization primarily depends on clunky files processed in nightly batches, you will not wield timely insights. If simple application modifications are slow, onerous and costly, opportunities will by-pass you. Legacy applications that suffer from these limitations (and many others) will severely constrain your agility unless they are replaced or modernized.
Build higher by leveraging cloud infrastructure. Do activities related to managing infrastructure, environments and applications repeatedly create bottlenecks within your projects? If so, then it's possible that cloud infrastructure could accelerate you by: 1) providing an avenue for off loading non-core work to more resilient, performant and efficient platforms & teams. 2) redirecting efforts destined for non-core work towards new business value. For example, instead of managing servers and application environments your team could spend time on new business capabilities.
3) RELENTLESSLY PURSUE AUTOMATION
In our quest for agility, we are endlessly throttled by wasted efforts in the form of repetitive and manual tasks. But we can use well-known lean practices to expose these types of waste and then relentlessly pursue automation of these time wasters. I see opportunities at two levels.
Business process automation. Depending on your skills and resources, you can simply write automation code, leverage robotic process automation tools or other emergent solutions to tackle waste within your teams.
Technology delivery pipeline automation. Technology delivery teams perpetually reside in the critical path for enterprise projects. It therefore stands to reason that automating these teams should improve the overall speed and agility in our organizations. An easy starting point is the application delivery pipeline (how developers build, test and deploy their code).
4) FOSTER MAXIMUM PROCESS REUSE
You cannot move fast if you are continuously re-building yourself from scratch. You must reuse existing assets and capabilities wherever possible. Reuse will accelerate your organization in at least 2 ways: 1) It will ensure the use of proven assets instead of newer, riskier ones that could bring your organization to a grinding halt. 2) It will redirect efforts that would have been wasted on recreating existing assets towards real business value.
Ensure composable business processes - instead of large monolithic processes, prefer smaller composable ones. This will allow for rapid assembly to create new processes and minimize business impact when a change is necessary.
Improve business process orchestration. Businesses function by coordinating many processes. Effectively coordinating existing business processes offers an opportunity for reuse. But when done poorly, it becomes a wasteful bottleneck. Key to our success here will be the quality of our enterprise integration technologies.
Employ design patterns. There are plenty of software design patterns that enable the reuse of technology assets during software development. However, success here demands that we 1) re-assess the schedule-driven myopia that afflicts most projects, 2) properly empower those tasked with safeguarding quality, reuse & standards.
Invest in tools that accelerate discovery. Tools that accelerate discovery of existing technical and business process assets will address at least one of the barriers that prevent enterprise reuse.
5) UNLEASH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-READY BUSINESS PROCESSES.
In the age of AI, organizations seeking differentiated agility must be able to do three things effectively: 1) rapidly collect and transmit relevant data from business processes, 2) harness this data to continuously improve intelligence. 3) rapidly adjust or re-assemble business processes in the face of new intelligence. To take full advantage of the power of AI, it seems clear that our business processes must not only become simpler, smaller and composable, they must also become both data-aware and data-generous.
data-aware processes. Re-design business processes to be able to quickly adjust based on new insights. During design ask the question: "how should this process change in the face of new information"? Then build in the ability to receive insights and adjust accordingly.
data-generous processes. Re-design business processes so that they are able to make meaningful contributions to the desired enterprise insights. During design ask the question: "how will this process and its underlying applications contribute to the desired overall enterprise insights?
Comentarios