Where compliance dictates specific procedures, technology can support ‘release valves’ to allow in-flight approvals for variance and change
In today’s increasingly dynamic business environment, organizations must continuously adapt to survive. Ironically, change management has become a major bottleneck. Inefficient offline reviews are disconnected from daily operations and unresponsive to evolving requirements. Organizations’ need a practical mechanism for managing controlled variance and change in-flight to break the logjam.
It’s important to note upfront that technology does not make a company agile. Enterprise Agility is the measure of an organization’s overall responsiveness to its environment.
Many factors temper Enterprise Agility, including: business size; resources; industry regulations; etc. Change impacts people and their daily operations and the relative adoption of change is a function of an organization’s culture. However, technology can impede or facilitate enterprise agility
From a systems perspective, Enterprise Agility is about mitigating structural impediments to variance and change
The problem with this approach is that approved change is delivered long after the request, if at all, resulting in lost initiative and lost business value – this is the paradox of the Red Queen, “…it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place
Ironically, change management programs have become the chokepoint for Enterprise Agility, an inefficient rate-limiter.
While controls are important, gratuitous controls stifle problem solving and innovation. Tremendous value can be released by simply empowering people with greater discretion to meet business objectives
Where compliance dictates specific procedures, technology can support ‘release valves’ to allow in-flight approvals for variance and change so neither time nor value is lost, and accountability is preserved.
Global competition is driving a new customer-centric era. Organizations must find ways to efficiently satisfy individual requirements…This represents a phase change from the age of standardization to the age of specialization.
Rather than focusing on standard procedures, people need the authority to flexibly meet corporate objectives. People need to be able to respond to the environment, to adjust plans to keep goals in sight.
The scale of unleveraged human capital reveals a tremendous opportunity to tap the enterprise cognitive surplus…After all, businesses are socio-technical systems. Technology may connect, automate, and report, but people are the agents of change. The Network is the People!
The standardization of business processes removed human discretion, problem solving, and innovation…Processes need to become 2-way conversations.
Enterprise Social Collaboration is not about liberation, it’s about optimizing work…It’s about giving people joint-custody of their activities so they can co-author processes on-the-fly, using authorized discretion to best meet business goals in a transparent and auditable fashion.
Lean Integration is about matching system resources to business needs…just the right information, at the right time, to the right people
In combination the two provide for an integrated feedback loop…where the system both responds in context and enables process participants, based on authority, to ‘negotiate’ system requirements for their circumstances.
COMMENT
IT should be used to automate repetitive tasks in order to free up employees to get on with more important challenges. The past 10 years organisations have to rely on technology to solve the problems, when in fact problem solving is a natural human instinct
- Gary Woodfine
