Rethink & Redesign your organization

The pressure to transform is increasing for the majority of companies as the speed of change around us is accelerating. Digital technologies, like Cloud, IoT, Bigdata, Blockchain or Artificial intelligence are all converging and offer tremendous opportunities to create efficiencies, but also to create brand new value.

Industries are getting disrupted in the blink of an eye and incumbents don't even see the competitors, even when they are already knocking at their door. And threats come from everywhere: legacy competitors that move earlier, startups that are more agile, or adjacent industry players that move in laterally.

...But transforming your company is not only about adopting fancy new technologies, it is above all and foremost about making sure you have the best talent and culture. It is about making sure that you create a culture where innovation and entrepreneurship become part of your DNA, where there is no fear of failure and where everybody is hungry to learn and grow both themselves and the company.

But, what does that mean for a company's organization? Do they have to restructure? Add new units, merge others, create a digital business unit? Hire a Head of Digital or a Chief Data officer? How does the organization have to adapt?

The hunt for talent

Transformation is a must, but digital talent is still scarce though. The people you will be looking for are rare, as you will need both new skill sets and new mindsets.

New mindsets

It is no secret anymore that to be competitive companies need to be more agile. This means that they need to work in a more iterative fashion where small experiments are made to validate or challenge current assumptions. And this is something that stretches all the way from the initial conception phase to the scaling and operations of your business.

Leaders, strategists and marketeers need to develop a design thinking mindset to empathize with customers, rediscover customer pain points and needs. Ideas and concept need to be prototyped and validated using lean startup and agile principles. And once products are out there you need to quickly tweak them, rollout updates and upgrades using methodologies like DevOps.

It is important to understand these entrepreneurial and agile mindsets need to be developed throughout the entire organization, and to start you might want to seed talent in each function that needs a boost in agility.

New skills

Businesses are also becoming increasingly dependent on data and software.

We are moving from a hindsight oriented decision making, to organizations that need to take decisions in real-time based on true insights. In the long term we need to set-up our businesses to be able to gather enough data signals to also develop foresight. Data is at the heart of this decision making process and we increasingly need data scientists and data engineers that clean the huge amounts of data a corporate collect and gather insights from emerging patterns.

Similarly we need to make sure all these insights get fed to the right systems for automation. We need to make sure we quickly develop cloud solutions that can test new value propositions.

Data scientists and full stack developers are therefore among the most demand skill sets today according to a joint Cap Gemini and Linkedin Study. But can you find them ? And can you attract them?

Recruit or Train

The key question is then, do you hire or do you source these talents? Or do you train your existing staff? Probably both, and both come with their own challenges.

When trying to source this new talent, the question is really about how to attract and retain them. Most of the people coming with these new mindsets also come in with new expectations on the workplace. Flat organization, ability to continuously develop and learn, purpose of the company, might be as important as salary to attract talent.

And then there is the issue with training. Today when companies trying to define change programs, they try to streamline and approve trainings from a supplier, integrating them in the curriculum required for a job role. That process typically takes ages and you might already have more advanced courses available outside of your learning management system.

In addition most employees find the trainings they are offered by their employer boring and not engaging. This needs to change if you want to have any chance at succeeding making an impact through training.

X-aas (Anything-as-a-service)

Now that we have asserted that you need new mindsets and new skills and have found that it is both difficult to find or train the type of talent we need, are there other options? Can we borrow that talent? Can we hire it for a limited time? Can we use a new business model, challenge and rethink our organizational setup?

I strongly believe that nowadays, not only software but almost everything can be bought as-a-service as long the right business model is applied.

Start by un-bundling your business

Before looking at what to potentially outsource and how we will do that, we need also to think about what parts are really core to our business. For that you can start asking yourself questions that will challenge you current setup. Do you really need these in-house developers? Can we work differently with our marketing agency? Are we spending too much money on bigdata platforms and get not enough value?

Some parts of your organization might actually not be core to your business and with the right business model you could end-up with a much higher performance organization if you structure it differently.

In particular moving away from body shopping and a more results oriented approach will certainly make things easier.

Software & Design

Design and development is probably the most obvious place to start. Unless you are a software house you should really question whether you need to have any developers in-house. The risks with new developments, finding the right talent, means that you might be better off working with a design studio that has developed software similar to your needs hundreds of times. This is particularly true for companies that decide to develop their own app, but lack experience in UI/UX design and scaling this type of product.

Not only will you lower the risk, you can nowadays also choose between various attractive business models. For startups it is quite common to get development done against equity, but you can also tie your payments to different stages of maturity. Good prototypes can be developed by studios really rapidly and at a fraction of the cost of doing it internally.

Some studios even provide CTO-as-a-Service during this stage, so that you get the full technical part outsourced with controlled quality. Other business model models offer you even to take over the whole team if the wanted success is achieved. This type of build manage transfer model can be quite attractive to reduce your risks while also building up internal capabilities.

Marketing

As social media platforms have become ubiquitous in our digital world, it also means that marketing is not only about the content anymore, it is also about the envelope, the platforms and the metrics. This also means that marketing teams need to look differently than what they did 5 or 10 years ago. They need to have the skills to deliver a true omni-channel experience.

To do that you can not only really on an agency to distribute your content, you need to build-up new capabilities that allow you to interact with a much more complex and interactive eco-system. Besides content producers, you need now also data scientists, and platform specialists to be able to properly orchestrate the execution of your marketing plans. The dialogue with agencies has also to evolve beyond the traditional channel and impressions discussions. You need to actively manage the impact and conversions, and bake that into the business model.

The transformation is such here that you might want to consider sourcing in a CMO. That approach will allow you to build-up capabilities while at the time orchestrating the execution of the current marketing strategy. Hiring a CMO-as-a-Service will give you a multi-faceted digital marketing experience that will make the transformation process much smoother.

In terms of business model you can also rethink how you incentivize that role, as you can tie it to a hybrid business model using both a retainer and results based fee.

Data & Insights

We all know how crucial data is and will be for your business. We also know about the huge amounts of investments companies make into Data lakes and Bigdata IT systems before even having a data strategy. These are huge sunk costs, that often take a very long time to deliver value.

One approach here is to acquire the data you need as a service. Here it is important to understand how much of the data that you are processing to collect insights is actually yours, versus the amount of external data you are consuming. Get Data-as-a-service and on top of that using a Chief-Data-Officer as a service, might allow both to setup your data management capabilities and reduce unnecessary costs.

Innovation

Crowd-sourcing ideas is per se nothing new, but the whole idea of outsourcing innovation is something that is gaining traction. Corporates accelerators is one way you can try out new ideas that have been sourced from startups, and having these programs managed by a 3rd party means that the whole startup scouting is outsourced.

Innovation-as-a-service is something that can be segmented in various stages, where you could secure you whole innovation funnel is managed and where various solutions integrate your business lines or business units as they mature.

The business model here could a be based on seed capital, mentoring, and market access you provide in exchange for equity.

Learning & Development

If find learning and development, which is usually part of HR, completely disconnected from reality. The way training curriculums are designed, the way they are implemented is old fashioned, boring and outdated. Companies need to provide employees a reason strong reason to stay and that is a personal development that goes beyond their current roles and responsibilities.

Move toward experiential learning is one thing, but it is also about opening up your corporate learning to more sources that will provide a much more personalized and contextualized training experience.

Here also I believe that Learning-as-a-Service would serve companies much better. Having an external entity curating the right trainings and measuring engagements would be much more valuable than try to develop everything in house.

Falling corporate walls and re-designing your organization

As companies need to transform and change their company culture, it is essential they also rethink the design of their organization. The organization itself need to become much more fluid, skills and talent will have to be sourced-in and sourced-out much more rapidly.

Corporates falls are slowly falling and survival will depend on a company's ability to create stronger connections with other players in the eco-system that can fill talent and skills gaps.

The Anything-as-a-service approach to develop many key functions of your business will also force your think about your organization in a much more modular fashion, where bricks can be added or removed. Performance contracts between these organizational modules will also allow for more innovate incentive models and business models.

What are your thoughts on this important aspect of digital transformation? Is your company embracing any of these approaches? What other functions would you use as a service?

Finally if you would like to hear more, or invite to present this topic for your management or employees just drop me a message at [email protected]