Could Agile Organizational Design Lead to Digital Commerce Advantage?
According to Gartner's 2016-2017 CMO Spend Survey, B2B marketers spend slightly more of the marketing expense budget on digital commerce than their B2C counterparts, but those companies that sell to both B2B and B2C actually spend the most. Why? Likely because they're maintaining separate work streams, roles and responsibilities and platforms to support each line of business.
Obviously, scalable and sustainable business growth depends on the ability to find and capitalize on synergies across business units. Digital commerce leaders should look for common commerce platforms and related technologies that can meet most of the needs of each business, then invest in lightweight point solutions and software applications to fill in crucial gaps and meet key business needs.
But what about people and processes? How can digital commerce leaders--all business leaders--structure their organization and operations to support digital commerce growth and advancement?
Could agile be the answer?
Consider four fundamentals of digital commerce at their most basic levels:
- Data
- Content
- Delivery
- Experience
This may sound overly simplistic. But, if you apply the principals of agile design and think of each of these fundamental as a platform on which to build, you can see a digital commerce business taking shape. More importantly, you can envision scalable teams, repeatable processes and reusable technologies, thereby reducing redundancies and improving integration and collaboration.
Data, for example, supports targeting and segmentation, modeling and forecasting, testing and optimization, measurement and reporting across functions, from marketing to supply chain. Instead of building function-specific teams to manage and analyze that data in silos and using disparate systems, build a data platform, based on a master data management system of records that feeds ancillary systems. House data and analytics experts in a team that works together to solve big, interdisciplinary problems and can be deployed to apply those methods to smaller projects.
The key to making this work is to avoid creating massive, slow moving teams or growing dependent on cumbersome technologies or rigid, bureaucratic processes. Adopt technology platforms that also employ agile or lean development processes to improve implementation, ease integration and encourage rapid innovation. Routinely rotate team members among different problems and projects to maintain their agility and support cross-training, perhaps implementing a "gig economy" approach to project staffing.
Test this agile approach to organizational design and operational planning within a small or mid-sized business first, like digital commerce. If it's successful at improving speed of execution and knowledge and insight sharing, consider rolling it out to other businesses.
Fractional CMO & Consulting - Marketing, Advertising, Creative Operations, eCom, Thought Leadership, Innovation and Process Improvement, Analytics, Social Media, Studio Management
7 年This would seem obvious, though even as people in large organizations would agree with you, collectively many companies seem unable to take the advise. The idea sounds great when discussed by individuals and even when suggested by teams and project groups "to avoid creating massive, slow moving teams or growing dependent on cumbersome technologies or rigid, bureaucratic processes. Adopt technology platforms that also employ agile or lean development processes to improve implementation, ease integration and encourage rapid innovation". Everyone would agree its the right thing to do, then promptly ignore it. In practice institutionalized red tape gets in the way of habits, power, protectionism, and group think which are often at play in large companies. Its so much easier to say, "look we have a policy that dictates to us", "we must create wasteful slow processes because of our over indexed interpretation of SOX", or "we are governed by some policy we wrote years ago, we must adhere to the written policy" . Why don't people realize its ok to update policies, they are merely documentation for how to do things not the law, not the world of God, not the Bible.