Keeping pace with digital strategy

Modern Architecture - How do organizations keep pace with digital strategy when new customer journeys require speed, agility and cost effective ways of providing innovative new solutions to their customers.

A colleague recently asked me the following question, Why does the (deliberate) strategic’ approach to technology adoption often prove to be much more costly, timely and complicated and what would need to happen for incremental customer journeys/ and new adoption markets to become cheaper/quicker/faster than (emergent) point solutions?

This question intrigued me and forced me to think on how to address the problem being communicated. It also summed up my observations, not only in recent customer centric technology conversations, but from observations over the last few years where many organizations set out on a path for providing technology solutions in the core but often find the time, agility required and cost barriers to provide solutions to emerging markets or new identified customer journeys force those markets or journeys to source their own solutions, even though sometimes they end up being in direct conflict with the strategic direction being set. So how do we as an industry address this and do similar organizations face similar challenges? (My observations and based on my experience they do and are). Business is all too familiar with Strategy v Tactical solutions and often we need both, one that is intentional in its direction setting and one that is emergent to address fluctuations that are influenced by considerations such as PESTLE, (Political, Environmental, Social, Technological, Legal and Economic). So with this in mind I set off to investigate the how do we ensure the strategy being set as deliberate is stronger and adoptive in the long term versus the point solutions that often creep into the tactical mix due to the barriers highlighted earlier, thus helping us to answer the question, how do we ensure incremental adoption of the strategic technology direction, create the required value, (faster solution adoption, more managed innovation, reduction in maintenance cost, reduced technical debt etc.) than tactical isolated point solutions. My findings to date consist of the following elements and have helped me to formulate the questions that need to be asked to provide clarity in answering the question.

1.   Strategic Buy-In - How aware is the broader business on the strategy and do the required stakeholders have the required level of desire to follow the emergent strategy?

2.   Quantitative v Qualitative (Do point solutions?) that have not had the rigor and level of considerations that most strategic technology platforms have, provide the speed and more importantly the safety requirements that ultimately will ensure adoption metrics are enduring. Fast and low cost is beneficial, but not if the risk (safety) and Architectural ability to endure is diminished.

3.   Political - Are there barriers to adopt strategic solutions?  Skills? Knowledge, Vendor preference? Etc. Understanding these in the areas where new customer journeys are needed, or new markets that are considering adoption of the core platforms, help to ensure decision making is much more effective.

4.   Environmental - Are there legal/regulatory challenges that require a point solution? What are the environmental challenges that drive teams and emerging markets to abandon strategic initiatives in favor of point solutions?

5.   Social - What social aspects have been considered? Technology choice can often be based on a social bias that is influenced by skill, capability, geography Etc. An example is adoption of cloud. in some geographies cloud first as a principle, is still way down on their list of priorities due to some social concern on less than modern considerations for its adoption. (I could list a hundred more here).

6.   Legal - Speaks for itself, we might think this is a rare consideration, but it is more common than we might think. Consider a solution that a legal agreement was reached for say hosting and then it fails due to performance reasons and you want to move it to a strategic platform, legal constraints can often delay or make the transient move negligible from a business benefit perspective.

7.   Economic - Points solutions might be seem cheaper but at what risk? Time to Value might be increased, but at what cost, security? reliability? scalability, replaceability, you can see where I'm going here........

In summary, there are several considerations and factors that need to be considered to answer the question, each one important in its understanding, I have used PESTLE as an example to provide method to asking the right questions to the problem, there are others, not a single one that is right or will give 100% accuracy. My belief is both emergent (strategic) direction is needed as well as providing the framework for dealing with tactical (emergent) point solutions and finding the balance that ensures the right outcome for the business that addresses the question - What needs to happen for incremental customer journeys/ and new adoption markets to become cheaper/quicker/faster than (emergent) tactical point solutions?

Comments always appreciated, what are you seeing? What tactics have you employed to address these concerns? In the new world where we encourage agility, flexibility and replaceability how should we manage and control all that shapes our deliberate business outcomes needed and balance the tradeoffs between strategy and tactical Solutions that can often cause so much conflict and confusion?