Not Your Typical IT Partner
We believe that many businesses struggle with digital transformation and re-platforming because their efforts are not integrated. In most of these initiatives we see a well-intentioned attempt to understand the customer and their needs and then we see a somewhat disconnected effort to overhaul current systems.
While most of us understand that the synchronization of technology and customer needs is critical, it isn't easy to pull off.
We provide the entire Playbook to our customers. It is based on decades of observations made in business transformation and technology re-platforming projects. Below is a summary that gives a sense of the scope of what we have learned.
Keep in mind that these plays can be adopted individually and incrementally.
Creating Customer Value is at the Center
Korio is not your typical IT Partner. While most integrators and technology consultants focus strictly on the platform, we know that this is not the path to success. Winning in digital channels often requires a comprehensive "re-think" of many aspects of the business.
We start by bringing the larger team back to first principles. We ask the team to describe the elements of value delivered to the customer. We ask them to gather this information directly from customers, and to use their voice as it is captured. Value creation for the customer ought to be at the center of every business and, for this reason, it is at the center of Korio's Business Architecture model.
The secondary elements - the things that ensure value is delivered - are brought to life by a series of "plays" or tactics that we group under 4 distinct disciplines:
- Customer-In Planning
- Metrics Definition & Measurement
- Modular Platform Development
- Team Structure & Roles
We recommend that each of these disciplines have an assigned executive sponsor, but that they not be tied to specific functions. We believe strongly that the teams that are ultimately organized to drive a transformation be small, but cross-functional.
Plan From the Customer, Inwards
We usually think about our overall business in terms of an organization chart, a mision, a vision and a set of strategies. At Korio we believe that there is an important and actionable "overlay" that is typically missing. We call this the Business Architecture.
A Business Architecture is critical because it demands that we think about our business as a collection of "value-creating" flows. This, in turn, forces us to understand how our business creates value that delights customers, causes them to transact with us - and stay with us. We do this through the two main stages of building a Business Architecture: Value Mapping and Customer Journey Mapping.
Think about your business and platform through the lense of customer journeys, valued outcomes and metrics. See your business as a flow of value-creating activity. We call this your Business Architecture. Here are some sample Business Architecture-related Plays from the Korio Playbook:
We consider this approach a better way to describe an effective business than just using, for example, an organization chart. Organization charts typically confirm that our business is most likely designed around traditional functions - which is fine - but it doesn't help us understand, evaluate and perfect how our teams come together to deliver value. We believe that a Business Architecture fills this gap and causes us to think differently about our business.
Korio believes that defining these flows through Value Maps and Customer Journey Maps can also become the basis for our technology architecture - from the back end of our systems all the way up to our customer-facing digital experiences. In fact, we believe that there is no better way to think about our overall platform.
Korio offers a platform that is built on this powerful idea that our business and its technology can and should be built around value-creating flows and the journeys that we believe our customers want and deserve. We also offer tools through our Journey Mapper that help our clients define and continuously optimize their Business Architecture. Journey Mapper is used to generate most of the software code required to bring a differentiating digital platform to market.
Metrics Drives Design & Analytics Drives Optimization
Usually we struggle to measure what matters. If we can get the data, it usually comes too late and at a significant cost. This is a fixable problem.
Rich, real-time metrics are critical to velocity and keeping transformation costs in check. Release features early and often and lean on your data to optimize them. Reduce your dependence on opinion and group-think and commit to facts and data. Here are some sample Data-related Plays from the Korio Playbook:
If you follow the discipline of starting with a high level definition of how your business creates value and then re-think your business from the voice of the customer, inwards, then defining the right metrics becomes straightforward. Next, if you follow the discipline of building your platform in smaller modules - each designed around a value-creating flow - then these metrics will be integral to good design. Finally, when you adopt the data pipeline and analytics technologies that we recommend, you end up with a platform - and a business - that is easy to measure and that gives critical metrics the right level of visibility. With high visibility data, delivered in real-time, continuous optimization gets much easier and becomes ingrained in the way you work and, as importantly, it becomes embedded in the culture of the business.
While the plays we recommend can be adopted incrementally, we think that metrics definition needs to happen early. Utlimately, this leads to a realization that current systems and the business processes that they support are very difficult to measure. While taking what we call "point measures" can be easy, measuring an end-to-end flow can seem impossible. To overcome siloed measurement, we strongly recommend that one of the first technologies to deploy be a data pipeline.
A data pipeline is critically important to effective measurement and advanced analytics. It is also a key enabler of modular re-platforming.
Incrementally Re-Platform with a Modular Approach
It is our observation that that most modern platforms have evolved to become unmanageable or, at best, very hard to optimize. We attribute this to a number of factors, but most notably to a disconnect between IT and "the business" and to lax enforcement of architectural best-practices. As it turns our, the most resilient technologies - and the ones that stay fit-for-purpose the longest - are the ones that adhere to system design principles that are not new.
Understand the benefits of modular systems all the way down to the parts of the digital experience that we don't need our developers re-coding every time we need to add a feature.:
Modularity is one of those principles. Software that is broken up into small modules that are, each, designed to do one thing well is a characteristic of all great platforms. First, small, well-designed modules are easy to integrate - and easy to improve or remove and replace. Platforms built from modular components tend to have many moving parts, but the parts interface with each other in a simple and well-governed fashion. In the plaforms we build components integrate through "messages" flowing through the data pipeline or through direct API calls.
One attribute of a modular approach is what we call the "loose coupling" of the modules. Loose coupling, done properly, ensures we avoid that inevitable mess that we end up with when we hard-wire all of our components together. Systems that are built as one large monolith - where the components are tightly-coupled, start out seeming much simpler than a modular system, but these platforms almost always evolve to where the complexity becomes overwhelming and optimization becomes impossible.
For businesses that can't afford the disruption or cost of shifting to a new, modular platform all at once, the news is good: modular platforms can be built incrementally and existing legacy platforms can be extended or replaced incrementally. Typically, when you work with consultants to help you re-platform, they will usually bring you down the path of building a monolith. For most consultants, their business model simply doesn't align with modularity and an incremental journey to transformation.
This mis-alignment between consultants and a business needing to re-platform incrementally is also evident in the way consultants tend to work: they usually struggle to truly apply Agile principles. We believe that modular platforms, delivered incrementally are critical to business success and work best under an Agile or modified Agile approach. Even without external consultants causing Agile dysfunction, most businesses struggle to do Agile well. We believe that this is attributable, in large part, to systems that are not modular and that are, therefore, harder to build or optimize in reasonably predictable increments.
Adapt Team Structures & Roles
While we acknowledge that organization charts and functional groupings are important to the enterprise, in our experience, they are not nearly sufficient to support customer-in design, modular replatforming or data-driven optimization.
In our experience, the most impactful and sustainable organizational driver of success is what we call the Small Autonomous Team (SAT). A SAT is a cross-funcitional group of 3 to 7 individuals who are given clear ownership of a segment of the value stream which, in most cases, is a segment of the high level customer journey.
We see dysfunctional team sizes and team roles in most businesses we go into help. Studies tell us that teams of over 6 or 7 see their effectiveness drop exponentially for every added member. We see a tendancy to default to larger teams to broaden the basis for consensus building and to ensure communication happens. In our view, rich data and effective measurement fills this gap far more effectively. We believe that a strong committment to data and measurement allows smaller teams to move with greater focus, agility and speed.
Large committees and teams usually spell disaster when it comes to digital. Invest in real-time data and small, empowered teams to unlock velocity and agility:
At Korio we also see a deep and troubling divide between the business and IT. In effect, this creates an unnecessary distance between the technology we build and the customers that it serves - including the end-customer. To remove this gap and eliminate the divide, we always introduce Small Autonomous Teams with cross-functional members that include an embedded contributor from IT. Modular, low-code platforms dramatically reduce system complexity and the boundaries of each module are easily owned, in their entirety, by a SAT. This allows us to confidently assign a different type of IT professional to the SAT. We call this role the Business Solutions Developer. These generalists have business analyst skills and coding skills that are deep enough to build, test, deploy and optimize modular solutions on a low code platform.
Compare embedded IT with the typical approach to pooling developer teams in IT. Pooling might have made sense when a transformation or re-platforming is framed as a project. In traditional projects,pooled resources were assigned to one project in one part of the business and then, when that project is complete, they were shifted to the next project - in a whole new part of the business. This dated approach prohibits IT from ever gaining a meaningful understanding of the business and the customer problems the business is designed to solve. In the new model, "projects" should be rare and are not a fixture in any substantial way. In the new model, getting good at digital is a way of being. It never ends and it certainly isn't time-bound like a traditional project. In this context SATs and their embedded IT members are a powerful forever proposition.
Final Thoughts: Be Incremental & Modular
The Korio Playbook has emerged from our collective experience across a number of challenging transformation initiatives. It has been designed to be modular so it can support incremental adoption. Being incremental and modular is a core principle for us at Korio. We know that our clients have a business to run and they can't simply stop everything to "transform" ... or, at least, they should be able to work at their own pace.
Being incremental and modular also shows early evidence that their emerging Business Architecture will be embraced by the end customer and will postively impact the bottom line. "Big bang" transformations carry significant, unnecessary risk. Not only that, to stakeholders and partners, the pace seems unacceptably slow resulting in a loss of momentum and excitement around the initiative.
While we encourage clients to adopt all of the plays, each of the plays in our playbook can be executed independently. Each play is designed to result in a measurable and visible positive impact for the business. Visible outcomes, produced incrementally, mean a steady stream of results that can be celebrated along the way.