I’ve just come from a great coffee with a long term client of ours and she said something very interesting… “OK, so what’s next?”
Jan wasn’t talking about what’s next on the agenda, nor about what the next project was. We had just finished ironing out daily issues with her current technology and she was looking forward to how tech could drive her organization’s effectiveness.
”Jan I’d like to change your thinking around IT’s place. IT can drive value at three ascending levels, the first two are often about effectiveness. The top tier is about value creation”. Jan had heard this all before but was patient enough to hear me out: “Jan, I see it like this:”
- Tier 1 Automation: Where we look for efficiency, usually within functions
- Tier 2 Enablement: Where IT helps us do things across functions and between organisations
- Tier 3 Transformation: Where IT changes our business model
To date Jan’s strategic planning had taken the perspective of how IT would support the strategy, not how it could be one of the fundamental determinants of her strategy.
I suggested we look at each level in order and reserve a whole further session just for the Transformation conversation. In Jan’s case we agreed to sit down with her strategic plan and use a great little tool called the Business Model Canvas to not only map out her business model, but we used it to systematically look at how technology could be used to Automate or Enable each part of her business model. (Click here for a great little video on how to use the canvass).
During the session we walked through four key questions that required Jan’s knowledge of her organization and my knowledge of IT to nut out:
- Which tasks or activities could be automated, sped up or simplified using out of the box tech (Jan doesn’t have the budget to build custom software)
- Where are the greatest disconnects between parts of her organization?
- What links to external partners take up lots of time or resources?
- What changes and new products/services are coming down the IT pipeline that could help Jan?
What emerged was a rethink of IT’s role in how Jan’s business model functions today and how it could make things ‘better’. Ideas for how IT might actually Transform her organization naturally flowed from our conversation about automation and enablement. We parked them for now and derived a list of 15 areas where we could deploy IT, much of it already in place.
As for the Transformational bit, that’s the subject of an upcoming piece.
