Building in organisational adaptability

The way in which most businesses organise for value has a fundamental 20th century mass production design flaw. It constrains them from reaching both the capacity and capability to respond to the market at the speed our digital world demands.

It is specialisation.

Specialisation made a great deal of sense in a mass production world - enshrined in Adam Smith's pin factory, through Henry Ford's Model T and beyond.
But it presents a problem of friction for the modern, responsive organisation.

For example - if you have wonderful developers in one silo, and wonderful business leaders in another, you introduce a brake on responsiveness.
While you may have optimised your tech teams to develop, and your business teams to come up with ideas to value, in order to accelerate the generation of value these 'roles' should be more closely connected (as we see in Agile, Design Thinking, Lean Start-up, Holocracy and combinations thereof).
Specialisation made sense when neither party could easily access the skills of the other.

That has changed. Technology now enables business ideation. Technologies that enable one-to-one marketing, for example, can inspire businesses to ideate on the new models this supports. But the friction comes when tech delivery capacity and capability remain a bottleneck.

Those choke-points all too often force businesses back to 'as usual' when striving for new.
What is required is a way of giving business people technology skills and technology people business skills. In this way the organisation becomes more responsive to upturns and dips in  the requirement for both. It becomes built to adapt.

Pipe dream? Hardly - there are already many no-to-low code platforms and technologies which enable pretty much anyone with a laptop to develop their own applications and business process automation with nothing more than the lightest layer of additional coding*.
Business folk can be technology folk, too. At low cost. Minimum Viable Products can be crafted by the people with the vision and the insight - closing the strategy gap through direct and hands-on involvement.

And this cuts both ways. By applying managed innovation as a way of working (Agile, Design Thinking et al) Technology folk can become as enabled to access insight, set vision
and focus on value as their business colleagues.

Bringing both no-to-low code platforms and insight-led, human-centred managed innovation into your org, is a huge leap toward becoming a truly responsive organisation.

*I do not dismiss the importance of technologists. Even the best of these platforms 1. Had to be coded in the first place 2. Create their biggest bang for buck when some customisation is applied.

Digital is not a destination

I see a lot of talk about the journey to digital transformation as if its some kind of destination.
Becoming digital is not the end point. In many ways it's a launch pad to becoming a business prepared to engage in an increasingly digitized world.
There are some basic essentials with anything digital - understanding the technology requirements, the role of the data ( where you are going to get it from, store it, what it's going to inform, how you are going to draw insights from it) - the architectures required to bring business, hardware and software together, the layers of integration demanded; The people and the processes; the skills and the new ways of working, etc
But all you will achieve is the same but faster and cheaper (ideally) if becoming digital is your end game.
Becoming a different kind of business is where you should be headed; one which places customers in a different role; and one in which the business itself sees itself playing a different role. Setting this new goal, this new destination, is your first essential step. The roadmap comes second.
Digital is the way we connect ourselves; it reveals to us a connectedness which requires us to open and think differently about our role in the world. Does our presence in the life of customers offer us unique opportunities to understand behaviour; does that understanding reveal new business opportunities - does it reveal new benefits for society?
Uber is valued so high because it set out to value data first. It figured that by being a peer-supplied taxi service it would get lots of data about moving people and things. It is this data which they see as their long term business - delivering what ever you need where-ever you need it when-ever you need it.
That *may* reduce the carbon footprint of vehicle deliveries in the long run. It *may* reduce your costs or benefit your convenience. Soon they are going to have to be explicit about this every time your data is shared with them.
Be sure that businesses must  begin to think holistically about this - about having the best interests of their customers at heart and being able to demonstrate this. Without this they will not be allowed to take advantage of the new bounties data is offering.
Digital Transformation has always been a journey, not an end in itself. The end remains becoming an Open Business.