Culture Shows Up Again as the Thing Driving Agility

Forbes Insights and the Scrum Alliance have got together to publish a recent report on Organisational Agility, drawn from interviews with over 1,000 C-suite executives from around the globe.

A key theme which runs through the whole report is how important Culture is to Organisational Agility. (Something which I emphasised in "The Way of DAU"). Additionally, there are some compelling findings about the benefits of organisational agility. Over 50% of respondents identified benefits in the areas of:

• Time to Market
• Speed of Innovation
• Employee Morale
• Ability to Attract Talent
• Competitiveness
• Financial Results
• Ability to Manage Across Geographies

To re-inforce these findings, the report focuses on the performance of leading Agile Organisations and Laggard Organisations. Whilst they represent similar proportions of the overall survey population (16% and 19% respectively), twice as many Leader Organisations enjoy annual growth of over 20% as Laggards do.

In all probability, the CxO community that the authors consulted, probably included a pool of organisation most interested in Agility, as an earlier report by McKinsey suggested that only 4% of organisations have completed an organisation wide Agile transformation.

The report looked at a number of things, including whether organisational agility was End-to-End or siloed in functions. Based on the opinions of the respondents, it appears that Operations and Technical Functions tend to be the most Agile (79% and 75% respectively), followed by the usual suspects in Sales and Marketing. Interestingly enough, Finance achieved a credible 64% vote of confidence, but HR was amongst the laggards with only 56% of respondents considering it an agile function. Considering that HR is often thought of as the "Guardian of Culture" this is a worrying gulf and should be a wake up call to HR to re-vitalise its mission.

One area that I would have liked more analysis on, was whether Leading Agile organisations already had positive innovative and collaborative cultures before they embraced Agile or had to focus on it as part of Agile Adoption.

Anyway, the take away is that all CxOs, irrespective of function, need to work on fostering the right culture.

Aligning Digital Exploitation with Operational Capability

All Enterprises Are Not the Same

One of the tenets of Digital As Usual (DAU) is that most businesses are not pure play digital organisations. In almost all cases there are operations and activities which are essential to either fulfilling service or delivering a product which need to be managed as well. The Digital Adoption Framework assumes an Industry Categorisation Model as illustrated below.

The Industry Categorisation Model identifies 5 Categories along a continuum of Industry Product Nature. At one end of the continuum are “pure play” digital organisations, whose products are Information and Content based. These consist of Market Platforms like eBay and Compare the Markets.com who provide a platform, through which other organisations and people sell their goods and services, as well as Publishers and Providers of Content who provide videos, e-books, podcasts, news, music etc. At the other end are Extractor and Grower type businesses, such as coal mines and cocoa growers who provide natural unprocessed products. Off course not all businesses fall neatly into just one category. A major energy company such as Shell or Exon may straddle several categories along an Upstream (exploration, drilling and extraction) to Downstream (transport, refining and distribution) activities.

So why is this important when thinking about digital businesses? Well each different type of business operates in different ways, has a different level of dependency on capital assets and has different opportunities for exploiting digital technology to augment its business model. Additionally, the whole concept of Lean Delivery via Design Thinking, Agile Delivery and DevOps may have different opportunities and constraints as well as nature of delivery in each category.

Some Examples of Exploitation

The diagram below looks at the potential for exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies according to Industry Category.

The “X”s in the table represent significant opportunity for exploitation against a generic type of Use Case. So for example AI technologies (machine learning, visual recognition, natural language etc.) can be used to provide insight and learning in every type of organisation, but there is very little opportunity for them to add to “customer experience” in say mining or farming. Again there is huge potential to build AI capabilities into consumer products, e.g. Alexa in Amazon’s Echo, but there is little opportunity to enhance a product such as iron ore or tree trunks produced from a Natural Product Extractor or a Grower. 

Alternatively for IoT, see diagram below, the opportunities are pretty limited for an Information publisher, but there are many areas where a farmer could use it to track livestock and monitor soil conditions and crop conditions, as well as control assets such as vehicles and trailer equipment.

This moves us onto exploiting iterative approaches within an organisation. The other night I was talking to someone from a major pharmaceutical company. Drugs take years of research to identify promising candidates for a problem and to test for efficacy and safety, as well as meet regulatory demands. There is little opportunity to exploit Iteration in this type of product development. But for the company overall, there are opportunities around internal processes and with Agile Marketing.

Agile Marketing is a growing area of adoption within industry and works well for consumer driven businesses. At its core is the use of small integrated product teams which focus on market research, product promotion, delivery of marketing and promotional materials, advertising and the information analysis systems used to support marketing data analysis. These teams tend to work in multiple sprints testing out marketing promotion hypotheses and rapidly identifying which approaches produce optimal results, to improve overall revenues. 

Iterative development also its quite different for delivering an oil tanker or a film, to the development used to support a consumer service. In the case of the former, iterative design, development and continuous testing techniques are used to deliver a single integrated complex product over a period spanning many months if not years. In the latter they are used not just to deliver the product, but to continuously keep it fresh, up to date and moving ahead of competition that is playing catch up.

So it's important not to adopt a one sized fits all approach, but to really get down to what can work for your organisation. This is part of what I talk about in my book.

Digital Era Customer Contact and Experience

In the 1980s, The theory of Customer Care was propogated widely at the same time that call centres started to evolve into contact centres. The subtle difference between a call centre and a contact centre being that a contact centre is supposed to deal with customers through all media of communication: letters, telephone calls, and direct contact in person if somone knocked on your door. With the '90s, email was added and then websites and latterly mobile apps have started to grow traction.

In parallel with this we have seen all sorts of mechanised and automated technologies arrise to help improve productivity and efficiency. IVR or Interactive Voice Response (which really is not that interactive), Power diallers to fuel direct telemarketing campaigns, backed up with scripting to ensure consistency of message were also introduced followed by features such as distributd call centres, off shoring, workflow based load balancing etc.

The touble with all these approaches has often been that they focus on work load balancing, limited levels of scalability and cost efficiency rather than personal experience. Offshoring also intorduced problems with culture and language, as well as greater possibilities of fraud and exposure of customer data to theft and exploitation, as "solid legal contracts" have proven to be paper tigers in protecting confidentiality. In fact in some countries, such as Singapore, which have reutations for innovation and fast moving companies, customer experience is terrible.

This just does not cut it in the modern digital age, when customer experience and reputation will make or break a company. We now have people pondering the future of the contact center and whether there will be any people in them to take calls with the advent of AI and chatbots as well as the use of IoT to collect customer behaviour information and change the model by which companies interact with customers.

The real issue is that many of these advances can be uselfull exploited in situations which suit "self serve" activities such as "how can I fix my thermostat or change my account settings". They don't particularly work well when there has been a service failure or a billing mix up. Assumptions that Generation Next Letter in the Alphabet will always want to contact you via a certain technical chanel are also wrong. Peoples contact method decisions are often affected by context. If they are not allowed to use mobiles at work for instance, or they are in an airport and have lost their mobile phone or iPad and urgently need help with a travel problem, then other contact options are needed.

The new technologies offer opportunities, but greater effort needs to be put into creatively exploiting them and designing a great customer experience. So it is interesting to see that a company like Creston is establsihing a global network of Customer Experience Centres to show exactly what it can do for people. It will also be interesting to see how Creston exploits this interaction chanel to improve its customer offerings as well.

Digital Experience (DX) And the Re-invention of Marketing

The Post War World of the '50s and '60s saw a massive explosion in marketing as companies tried to force feed Baby Boomers mass produced electro mechanical goods, encased in plastic. They did this by trying to create desire and brainwash people into needing their brands. This was the last hurrah for the Henry ford approach, "they can have any colour they like, so long as it is black" and the Taylorist School of management which focused on productivity and costs, whilst paying lip service to quality.

It took the massive economic melt down of the late seventies and early eighties for the Quality led management, pioneered largely by Japanese companies to gain acceptance in Europe and America, which at the same time was accompanied by the angst of Punk, as Generation X turned on mass consumerism and the break down of "A Job for Life". Customer Care, based on the concept of listening to and delighting customers, came to the forefront. New technologies like CADCAM and philosophies like Flexible Manufacturing made it possible to design, prototype and evolve products to meet customer needs and gradually Design Thinking came into being.

At the same time, the '80s saw the birth of the PC and take up of lower cost client server technology, which usurped proprietary mainframes whilst Rapid Application Development (the forerunner to Agile) sparked the first steps to evolving the Digital Ecosystem that we see today. This has pushed marketing evolution to the extent that the modern marketing function is digitally obsessed with Customer Behaviour Data, Customer Experience and Agile Marketing. So much so, that most digital conversations inevitable involve talking about Customer Experience and the Customer Journey.

So it was great to see Nimbus Ninety publish "The CX Manifesto" which sets out over 30 recommendations under the 5 headings of Personalisation, Experimentation, Trust, Data and Loyalty in its latest  quarterly publication of the Chief Disruptor magazine. This is well worth a read as it has been compiled by practitioners from London's vibrant digital scene over the first 6 months of 2018 and is based on sound experience.