Empowering Ideas Together - The Mantra for the Enterprises
Power is the ability to change. When ideas are empowered, organizations succeed and grow. This is the only blueprint for success in a future characterized by increasing globalization and hence increasing complexity. Survival and success in such a dynamic world depends solely on continuous learning and innovation.
Modern businesses are not designed for continuous Innovation. How does one inculcate continuous innovation in large organizations? It is time to really understand and leverage each and every human mind that works in and with our organization – minds of our employees, our customers, our suppliers, our complementary partners and even our competitors. We should engage with the minds so that ideas thrive as long as we can make them live. We believe that ideas die first, and then, of course the enterprises. Empowering ideas should be our mantra and our life long quest.
Future Proofing the GDEs
Our research and experiments indicates that GDEs, fundamentally, need to focus on four key areas. These need to be explored with a focused approach to adapt, adopt and thrive in the complex milieu of the globalizing world. For these areas, Hexaware Innovation Labs is building multiple frameworks to be used, adapted and built further. These four areas are
1. Customer Value Framework - Are you the customer of your products/services?
Most of us believe that we know what value we are delivering, yet it is difficult to come out with a single crisp definition. Also, we normally do not question “what is customer value?” Every body talks about it, in the belief that it is so very well known at the fundamental level that it is implicit in our work.
All said and done, the provider is not the customer. It is of utmost importance, while evaluating value, to understand and empathize with your customer. Also, there will always be a tradeoff between total benefit versus total cost that customer will keep on evaluating. The smart salesman sells enough benefits, at highest cost and creates an impression that the benefits perceived by the customer are the best that cost incurred can buy. It is interesting that the salesman may not keep the relationship going if the value remains at the perception level only. This calls for an end-to end customer value model which runs, adapts and gets refined as we get deeper into the customer relationship. We have an interesting perspective on this model as shown in figure 1.
We propose two key dimensions of any customer-supplier scenario. The First dimension is how much the customer knows what they need. Many times we have observed customer needs are hidden and typically not articulated. The Second dimension is how much the supplier knows what the customer needs. These two dimensions create 4 clear quadrants – Known-Known (the first box is the deterministic world) the focus is on delivery efficiency. In the second box, known-unknown, the supplier has to discover what clients need – it has to follow the path of customer intimacy. The unknown-known, the third box, the supplier has to let customer learn through a process of what we call orchestrated customer learning. It is really the fourth box, where maximum synergy and value can be co-created – where no player knows the needs – in this scenario we propose Value-Net deep dive as a model for creating value. |
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2. Knowledge/Information Worker Productivity
Productivity, as the ratio of output and input, is the metric of efficiency that we have inherited from the industrial age. This metric in the new world of predominantly knowledge/information work is failing miserably. Let us consider an example of software development activity. What is really the output of software development activity? Is it the amount of software (i.e., size) as reflected in Lines of Code or the functionality delivered? Secondly, does this output need to be measured only in terms of size or the quality of output should also be included The software is developed through the intellectual effort of people (software developers) and also the time that they take to develop the software. Since studies have shown that number of software developers and time are not replaceable with each other in a linear manner, it makes sense to incorporate both as the input. The established, standard metric that is used – a legacy of industrial era production based metrics – Kilo Lines of Code per Person Week (KLOC/PW) doesn’t really reflect the true nature of software productivity.
In the age of wiki’s, blogs, un-conferences and open environments, how do we understand what is work and how do we really measure it? Is there really a need to have a metric at all? These are some of the questions we have been researching. It is imperative that GDE’s understand the value of the knowledge work and come out with some sort of assessment of how to value it, especially in the knowledge age as people have said.
3. Decision Engineering
Decision engineering is an emerging discipline for developing tools and techniques for informed operational and business decision making within the industry by collating and exploiting distributed organizational knowledge. It is imperative that an enterprise-wide decision engineering framework should incorporate tools and techniques for all the stages to be mixed and matched by actors in specific scenarios as the case may be. Just to give a view of the extent of the work involved in designing such a framework - the number of techniques for forecasting alone are listed below - Systematic Expert Judgment/ Decision Matrix/ Analytic Hierarchy Process/ Bayesian Inference/ Cross-Impact Analysis/ Early warning Indicators/ Extrapolation with Moving Averages/ Trend Analysis/ Time Series Analysis/ Spectral Analysis/Combined Trend and Time Series Analysis /Trend Impact Analysis. It is important to be able to use various such techniques in the specific business scenarios. Furthermore, decisions need to be engineered at various levels - e.g.
- Strategic/Policy
- Evaluating Options/Alternatives
- Evaluating Factors affecting a particular decision
- Evaluating ROI/ Cost Benefit Analysis
- Evaluating Uncertainty
- Market Analysis/ Technology Forecasting
- Operational
- Process Evaluation
- Process Optimization
- Performance Evaluation
- Evaluation of Quality Attributes – Reliability/Availability/ Survivability
- Project/Program Execution
- Technology Evaluation
- Choosing a Product
- Benchmarking products
- Evaluating Architectures
It is evident that no single approach, tool or technique will work in an enterprise. Definitely frameworks need to be evolved to help GDE’s make robust decisions in the constrained time lines.
4. Innovation Crafting Framework
Innovation can not be left to happen on its own. GDEs need to make it happen. It is about shifting from what is currently working and look at what is needed and what should be the need of the customers as well. We have experimented with many techniques of idea generation and taking them to fructification. The framework called Innovation Crafting framework helps teams, groups, companies in new product development, process improvement, organizational change initiatives, strategy creating and aligning with vision, strategy deployment and variety of scenarios that come up as situations to be explored for implementing change. The framework defines specific phases of the Innovation process and aids the process through established techniques and methods that have given robust results. TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem solving), Design Structure Matrix (DSM) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) are three main techniques that we introduce in the framework. These are besides regular brainstorming methods. |
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Conclusion
In the increasing globalizing complexity, continuous innovation is the only savior. The methods, metrics, structures of the old millennium are failing in the open world of globalizing work. The new methods, models, metrics and structures are needed to make the Globally Distributed Enterprises (GDE) successful. We have proposed four key frameworks - Customer Value, Knowledge/Information Worker Productivity, Decision Engineering and Innovation Crafting. We believe these are the frameworks for deployment in the GDEs to ensure robustness in future - really future proofing the enterprises by making them Innovative. In the world of exploding global complexity, Innovative Enterprises are the only option
