At The Edge of The Enterprise and the New Lean

One of the Truisms for anyone practising IT Strategy and Architecture, is that All the Competitive Opportunities Arise at the Edge of the Enterprise. Everything else is about making business more fit to exploit them through improving the agility, effectiveness, efficiency and protection of  business capabilities.

This is why Digital has been so important. Digital blurs the edge of the enterprise so that a business may operate globally to reach more customers or provide a more comprehensive service to existing customers. Digital also make it easier to partner with other organisation to deliver new products and services or a better sales and delivery experience. 

Digital also makes it easier to reach out and find out what is going on in the market place and find out what is going on and to affect delivery of service in customers homes, premises and assets through combinations of IoT and Big Data.

However, as companies all adopt digital models and Digital becomes the new normal other things are starting to happen. Customer expectations have risen and improving the "Customer Journey" or the life cycle of customer experience has now become essential. This is now encouraging greater examination of internal processes and capabilities.

Whereas before, internal capabilities were improved for scalability, predictability and efficiency. Now, internal capability has to be optimised to address everything that is essential for delivering service to customers. Digital has become part of the New Lean Organisation. Not only does this change the nature of investment, it requires continuous discipline, development of Enterprise Architecture capability, partnering with Product Managers (especially in Marketing) and investment in flexible productivity technologies such as BPM and Machine Learning to reduce lead times for customer fulfilment, improve consistency and enable employees to spend their time doing meaningful work (as opposed to the drudgery of many repetitive clerical tasks).

This will not only make employees more productive, but it should enable organisations to deliver a wider range of products and services, tailored more specifically to individual customer needs and with enhanced economies. For some people this means more fulfilling jobs. For others this represents a threat to low skill jobs. The biggest challenge now is going to be the (re)training of low skill employees.