How the Next Generation Enterprise is Different
From Process Optimization to Process Innovation, On Demand (part 6 of 10)
Traditional firms design and optimize efficient business processes and create information technology applications to support these -- often implementing "best practices." The upshot, often after 9-figure, multi-year IT implementations, is that you can be as good as your competition.
Today's market leaders (big and small) view themselves as a dynamic business platform and excel at inventing new processes instead of perfecting them. They are great at listening to their market and quickly bringing new ideas to it. They accept that some ideas may fail, but they detect and rapidly invest in the winners.
Most organizations also seek to optimize core internal processes. However, as the corporation becomes open and networked and the axis of collaboration shifts to external parties, firms will need to build integrated external processes. This requires an IT capability attuned to the needs and expectations of users outside corporate boundaries; not just employees, but employees of business partners, customers and other participants in your business web. This means an "outside-in" perspective for the design of processes and roles.
Most processes are also hard-wired and difficult to change as they are codified in software. But today's business environment demands agility and business processes need to change. Companies must respond "on demand" to constantly changing conditions.
An nGen must have a business architecture with components that are modular, interconnectable, and easily reconfigured -- just like the technologies it employs. There is a clear distinction between what persists over time and what flexes. This architecture enables the enterprise to change the mix of its portfolio of activities to focus more on innovation, value creation, and changing customer needs.
An nGen executes process networks instead of rigid business processes. It enjoys a culture of experimentation and is willing to fail quickly at certain endeavors in order to ferret out successful, innovative new solutions.
In nGens, work happens on demand. If the business architecture is the map, then each process and capability is designed to work with the others. Standardized interfaces and shared components enable a new level of agility. Processes are designed for flexibility more than repeatability, designed to gather and deploy resources as needed.
For example, innovation processes will need to be fundamentally reconfigured if businesses are to seize the Prosumer opportunity. Just as you can twist and scramble a Rubik's Cube, prosumers will reconfigure products for their own ends. Static, immovable, non-editable items will be anathema, ripe for the dustbins of 20th century history.
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