If one is used to IT serving as a means to simply digitize existing business processes and activities, it can be very difficult to make the jump to awaken the entrepreneurial instinct needed to use technology to fundamentally evolve a business.
It’s all too easy to become stuck in conventional thinking and old habits. We may think we know what we want, but that may not be the same as what we really need. In my experience, we often fall back on what we already know and ask for additional functions and features to improve that realm of the known.
So how can one drive customer-centric innovation, when sometimes we’re our own worst enemies?
I’ve found that the methods and philosophy long used in agile IT development can also be re-purposed to help drive customer-centric innovation. Personally, I’m a big fan of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto, which can also serve to drive the “Digital Jump” that I mentioned in my previous post.
Essentially, an approach where business and IT work hand-in-hand in a supportive and motivating environment, where change is welcome and where the notion of what is great evolves through iteration and constant refactoring.
The ‘secret sauce’ is often about being able to quickly (two weeks at most) and iteratively produce ‘touchable’ prototypes and concepts that help business and IT functions to challenge one another, to stimulate the imagination and to initiate that disruptive discussion where the ‘Digital Jump’ happens.
The two other key success factors, long ago recognized by the agile movement, are:
- To treat innovation delivery as a marathon, not a sprint (the sponsors, the leadership, the business and IT should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely)
- To truly foster a safe environment where the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its own behavior accordingly
So, what happens next? First, one must choose the right delivery approach based on the situation, as mentioned by my colleague, Mick Slattery. The right approach, whether traditional, agile, or a hybrid of the two, should always match the business issue at hand. Mick talks about how the right approach to IT project delivery supports innovation and competitive advantage in the video below.
There comes a time when it’s time to scale-out fast and cost-efficiently, and again, IT delivery methodology can teach us something about how to get this done. Waterfall may not be getting a lot of evangelism nowadays, but once you’ve defined an end-point and you need to go-big, it can be an effective and efficient methodology to industrialize. Now that I think about it, that is equivalent to the approach that Henry Ford took to take his innovation at scale by industrializing the manufacturing process in the assembly line. I guess good ideas never go out of style.