Leveraging Technology to Help Create a Frictionless Business
Not terribly long ago consumer technology caused many of us to scratch our heads in disbelief and utter several creative expletives. The days of cassette tapes, Windows ME and horrible printers are now (mostly) behind us on the consumer side of technology, we can buy random brand cheap electronics with the expectation that most of the time things will just work. This is not the case in the enterprise IT market. Yet.
Its really important to have a good perspective on where the enterprise IT space is in terms of its development and maturity. It is still a nascent area. Many businesses didnt really start making heavy use of IT systems until the 90’s and 00’s, and many still struggle to tie IT to the business it supports. From that perspective consumer technology had a long head start.
In the past decade we have seen a rapid rise and maturation of processes (Agile, SAFe, DevOps) and core technologies (AWS, Linux) that have set the stage for the enterprise space to finally start catching up with the consumer space and present internal business units with a frictionless experience. Why is that important ? Why is that important ? Because it allows your business to operate at immense speed, and at lower costs.
Consider how difficult it was just 10 years ago to start a technology business or project — you had to buy equipment, license software, hire a wizard etc. It was not uncommon for this to take weeks or even months. Now you can go to any number of Software as a Service vendors or Cloud providers and have an online business or project operational in a day or less. A solid example is your marketing team deploying a product mini-site on Squarespace vs undertaking that endeavor 8–10 years ago. It is now higher quality, faster and lower cost than ever before.
At the more extreme end of the spectrum is startups who have designed their business around these modern concepts and tools and can for example avoid a vehicle recall by a software update sent over the air. This same paradigm is now available to enterprise IT teams but the skills, corporate policies and hierarchy have not quite caught up.
While the implementation of a website may be trivial, in many businesses the process of approving and funding that website is not.
I talk to customers and peers across the industry quite frequently about these hurdles. Its getting better every day, and will eventually cease to be a bottleneck (For you, or for your competition). As HBR recently pointed out -Once businesses become more efficient at allowing IT to operate at consumer speeds we will see a massive gain in economic efficiency.
The roadblocks that slow down rapid experimentation and deployment of new technologies are often rooted in risk avoidance techniques that are essential to large and long term material investments (eg real estate and people) but do not (and should not) apply in the same manner to technology investments (eg deploying a VM on AWS). This must change.
Since the foundational technologies and related processes have improved, and the business side of things is starting to catch up it’s not difficult to imagine a time in the near future where enterprise IT (including application development and other technology groups) is a frictionless business function. Gone will be the days of endless meetings and procurement nightmares.
Under this scenario the adoption and usage of technology (eg a product marketing website) in a business becomes similar to that of consumer technology, and could be leveraged to gain real business efficiency. Something that has been talked about for decades, but has often gone unrecognized in the average business because of poorly designed software/systems, poor organizational alignment, inherited business dependencies and lack of skills.
The real challenge in the face of the economic slowdown is for businesses and government agencies to to take advantage of this massive shift. Based on my experience and seeing first hand what my peers in the industry are doing I’m advising any executive who asks to develop a mid-term strategy focused on this concept. Address the skills and organizational gaps by building the right team and optimize your business strategy to better leverage technology. Focus on creating a frictionless relationship between business and technology and the end customer your business sells to (be it B2B or B2C).
Start with reviews in the following key areas, and restructure the business to effectively prepare itself to benefit from the shift taking place in enterprise technology. A word of caution — if you dont adapt, your competitors (internal or external) will. Although this is a very large undertaking it is essential for most businesses to effectively compete in 2016 and beyond.
Organizational Structure
Don’t review just the org chart, but also your hiring process, technology decision tree and overall responsibility matrix of both the technology teams and the business units. This will help to identify key people, organizational weaknesses and bottlenecks/inefficiencies.
One common misstep that occurs here is the emphasizing of accountability, but not its counterpart authority. It is entirely too easy to drift into inefficiency by micromanaging and armchair quarterbacking because authority has not been delegated the right people. Accordingly a key thought in structuring the organization for long term success is ‘making ownership of decisions easy’. Look for the people who are most impacted by a process or decision and ask yourself if you can empower them to effectively own it.
Ensuring that decision making responsibility and authority reside at the lowest level in the organization (that can make an informed decision) will help your organization gain immense speed and drive employee engagement, just make sure to support and coach those individuals in their decisions, especially through early missteps. This becomes a much easier proposition to take on if you also look to maximize your top talent by placing them in corresponding decision making roles.
Technology Adoption Processes
The key question to ask here is — How long does it take to get a new technology implemented in your organization/business unit ? There is no concrete correct answer, but moving forward the time frame should be hours or days, not weeks or months. This is especially true if you are in a market that is being saturated by competitors or revolutionized by startups.
There are of course caveats. Replacing your entire on-site storage infrastructure will take longer than deploying a new product launch site onto OpenShift, but the overall goal here should be to remove obstacles and create a frictionless process that works to protect the business while allowing the teams and people doing the work to move fast.
One example of how this could align would be giving line-of-business managers some level of authority over technology acquisition, so their group (eg marketing) can move at a pace appropriate to their needs and adopt the tools they need/want (again, make ownership easy). The risk here is little to no standardization across business units, but that isnt always a bad thing, you just have to balance it with a process that provides a minimal amount of validation — It usually makes sense to adhere to a security policy for example, or use the same enterprise storage vendor, but maybe marketing should be able to use Wordpress on OpenShift instead of Squarespace. Make sure you factor this into the Organizational Structure as a whole so that things are consistent.
Employee Enablement & Engagement
As the linked Forbes article above points out, talent is your number 1 priority. Most studies and reports on employee efficiency in the modern workplace focus on engagement, which is often tightly coupled with recognition. As a leader it is critical that no matter what organizational structure you choose that people are recognized based on their effort and their success.
Another key ingredient in driving engagement in the modern workforce is openness / transparency. Any decision making process (not just the outcome) that impacts employees on a day to day basis should be subject to their (constructive) criticism, and with more people able to review those processes the people who self select / choose to get involved become more engaged. Rather than having involvement dictated by firm policy, it becomes a bit more of an open forum as described in the open organization.
“The currency of leadership is truth and transparency.” — Howard Schultz
Plenty of other ideas exist on this front. Everything from having employee’s work at a charity for a day or allowing them to have free time (Google’s infamous 20% rule) works to varying degrees. I can attest firsthand that having a peer-to-peer recognition system that people enjoy using is very effective.
Customer Experience
This is a challenging area for most leaders, especially those in a business which focuses on B2B sales rather than the end consumer. Evaluate what your customer sees in terms of engagement with your brand and business, and understand how you can leverage a more dynamic and technically savvy business to improve on those perceptions and remove friction from the process.
A broad review driven by probing questions will often reveal a lack of self awareness in the broader organization with regards to the customer experience and the role individuals play in it.
In the B2B world for example — does your sales and order process involve humans ? Should it ? What is the lead time to fulfill an order ? How seamless is the customer engagement if there is an issue during or post sale ?
A shining example of how to build a customer-centric company in the consumer space comes from Zappos. The examples often cited are also ones that can help drive employee engagement along with enhancing the customer experience.
Many of the most valuable businesses in the world have a frictionless customer experience. Look at everything from Amazon and the myriad of ways you can buy (mobile app, dash, buttons, echo, website, subscriptions) to Tesla’s lack of dealers. Reducing the time spent and number of ‘choke points’ / bottlenecks a customer has to endure to do business with you is the holy grail of frictionless customer experience.
