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Organizational Velocity

The speed at which your organization can change and adapt to change.

Like the Doppler effect where sound waves are compressed to create higher and higher pitches, today's market forces are compressing business cycles demanding more for less. Organizations need to increase their velocity to meet today’s challenges. Competing objectives often make the path forward a difficult decision. Regardless of the current needs, a focus on the future cannot be overlooked. Here’s a framework for transformation:

  1. STRATEGY AND INNOVATION - Focus on future value and drive innovation fueled by planned experimentation.
  2. CUSTOMER DECISION JOURNEY - Deep analysis and ethnographic research to understand how and why customers make decisions.
  3. PROCESS AUTOMATION - Reinvented processes and customer journeys through automation and agile processes.
  4. ORGANIZATION - Agile, flexible and collaborative processes, and capabilities (human capital) that follow strategy.
  5. TECHNOLOGY | DIGITAL - 2-speed IT to support core functions and rapid development.
  6. DATA, ANALYTICS AND ACTIONABLE PREDICTIVE INTELLIGENCE - Usable and relevant customer and business descriptive, predictive, discovery, and prescriptive analytics tied to goals and strategies.

Business & Digital Transformation

Successful business and digital transformations are focused on organizational capabilities and their impact to the company. The strength of digital technologies — social, mobile, analytics and cloud — doesn’t lie in the technologies individually. Instead, it stems from how companies integrate them to transform their businesses and how they work.

Some organizations achieve such exceptional levels of performance—time to market, innovation, growth, efficiencies, reliability, dependability, and adaptability—that it puts their rivals to shame.  The select few are capable of generating and sustaining such high-velocity, broad-based, relentless improvement and innovation, that they achieve unparalleled levels of excellence. Learn what drives the success of these companies.

Business and digital innovation is reshaping industries by disrupting existing business and operating models. But it is also having a profound impact on society, presenting a series of opportunities and challenges for businesses and policy-makers.

Transformation at scale can take several years.  Establishing the right approach and implementation path is critical.  

4As & Company will help ensure the success of your transformation by modeling the changes and exposing the gaps.  Below are models that should be considered in your transformation strategy.

Transformational Modeling

Clearly understand your "as is" and "to be" states with these modeling methods

  • Services Model - Review and rationalization of the collection of products and services an organization offers to meet the needs of its customers with clarity.
  • Capabilities Model - A model of the capabilities that an organization offers or requires, representing what the business does (or needs to do) in order to fulfill its objectives, responsibilities, or strategy execution.
  • Customer Experience Model - Mapping of the complete customer experience from beginning to end identifying both internal and external influences on the CX.
  • Value Chain/ Processes Model - A model identifying specific activities that enable the organization to create value and competitive advantage.
  • Organizational Model - Model that defines an organization's lines of authority, communications, duties and resource allocations determining the number of employees needed and their required skill sets for a given strategic objective.
  • Role Clarity Model - Model demonstrating a solid understanding of employee's role, what the organization's expectations are for them, and the behaviors that lead to success for a given strategic objective.
  • IT Systems Model - Model of the IT infrastructure, capacity, security, and architecture required to meet a strategic objective.
  • Applications Model - Model describing the application software needed to support the business functions encompassing enterprise architecture, infrastructure, security, and data dependencies.  
  • Data Model - Model of the data elements, data pipeline flow and timing required to determine progress toward attainment of a strategic business objective. Digital advantages are made by adopting a "data first" mindset when contemplating new business functionality.
  • Business Metrics Model - Model of key success metrics that provide actionable insight at all levels of the organization. 

Digital Transformation by Industry

Businesses are fighting to keep up with the ever-changing trends in technology. A flawless and smooth digital experience is the demand of consumers from every product vendor, business, and brand with which they interact. Companies that achieve this can benefit from brand loyalty and rapid growth.  The rate of adoption however, varies by industry.

Public Sector

Pharma & Medical Technology

Telecom

Retail

Travel & Hospitality

Financial Services

Strategy

Strategy and Goals are not the same thing.

One of the outcomes of developing a viable strategy is defining goals. Without having clearly defined goals and carefully chosen tactics that support those goals, you obviously won’t be able to gauge your progress and make adjustments to your strategic plan. That being said, too often people confuse strategy with goal setting. They are not the same and it is critical to understand the difference between the two.

Strategy is an exercise in problem solving. While the problem may be as varied as the development of your platform, the launching of your book, the way you will gain market share, or the way you will differentiate yourself and your content in the market place, these are all problems that a well thought out strategy is focused on solving.

Goals that support the strategy are critical, but goals do not solve problems. Goals are a measure of progress. Goals support the strategy.

When a potential client tells us what their current strategy is, we often hear a list of activities, a description of various tactics, and a summary of how they are progressing toward their goals. Our response is typically something along the lines of, “What problems in the marketplace are you and your work uniquely qualified to solve and why do you believe that to be so?” If the strategy cannot be articulated clearly and concisely, it quickly becomes obvious that there probably isn’t one in place. Activity is merely activity – not a strategy.

For example, if the problem is getting the body of work out to a broader audience, several strategies can be designed depending on the unique strengths of the thought leader and his or her organization. They may choose to license their content to others, to build a training company, a consulting firm or a tools-based company, or they may choose to partner with other authors or organizations.

For each of these strategies a set of specific goals can and should be created to measure the progress and make the necessary tweaks, but the strategy of partnering or licensing is a way to solve the problem of getting the work out to a broader audience. The goal of researching a list of potential partners is just one of many tasks that need to be accomplished to support the strategy.

So, what’s the point you may ask? Fair question. The point is to have a strategy that has the best chance of solving your specific problem, have goals that are aligned to it, and not confuse the two as they serve very different purposes.

Five Forces Analysis

4As & Company

The Five Forces Analysis  provides a framework for industry analysis and business strategy development formed by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School in 1979. 
Porter's five forces include - three forces from 'horizontal' competition: the threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products, and the threat of established rivals; and two forces from 'vertical' competition: the bargaining power of customers, and the bargaining power of suppliers.

Horizontal Competition:
The threat of the entry of new competitors
Profitable markets that yield high returns will attract new firms. As more entrants emerge, the profitability will decrease for all firms unless the entry of new firms can be blocked by incumbents. 
The threat of substitute products or services
The existence of alternative products increases the propensity of customers to switch to the alternatives. 
The intensity of competitive rivalry
For most industries, the intensity of competitive rivalry is the major determinant of the competitiveness of the industry.

Vertical Competition:
The bargaining power of customers (buyers)
The bargaining power of customers refers to the ability of customers to put the firm under pressure, which also affects the customer's sensitivity to price changes.
The bargaining power of suppliers
The bargaining power of suppliers refers to the power that suppliers may exert over the firm when there are few substitutes.
 
Download Five Force Analysis mindmap here.

Innovation

An Innovation framework and discipline increases success by over 36%

Digital transformation and corporate innovation are two of the biggest trends in business modernization today.  Innovation, beyond traditional R&D, is in fact, becoming a corporate mandate within advanced organizations. At the same time, research shows that corporate innovation is nascent and can provide an opportunity for organizations to explore new opportunities internally and externally. For example, we learned that only 46% of businesses are investing in innovation strategies to uncover new growth opportunities. Furthermore, just 36.9% are investing in innovation initiatives as a proactive measure to adapt to disruption. Companies must be bolder and more innovative in these disruptive times.  We can help you implement a comprehensive innovation framework that can benefit you in executing your growth or efficiency strategies.

Innovation... a Framework is Key 

Mobirise

Is it a strategic objective to enable and foster innovation in your company?
-  Innovation is essential, more than ever before
At the same time, companies struggle to establish formalized innovation practices and processes within their organizations.
-  A holistic innovation framework called Innovation Management Framework can help organizations to innovate better.

What is Innovation Management Framework (IMF)?
-  IMF articulates innovation management as a structured, comprehensive and consistent set of concepts.
-  IMF is a broadly applicable foundational knowledge base for innovation management and collaborative innovation. 

Technology

4As & Company can help solve your  technology challenges

  • CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE- there are a number of advantages and challenges with adopting cloud infrastructures. While providing scalability and cost advantages, challenges around performance optimization, bandwidth cost, interoperability, vendor lock-in, governance, increased complexity and security can cause projects to stumble. We can help address these challenges.
  • DEVOPS- Is more about team interaction and less about tools. The concept of continuous integration / continuous deployment is to remove the barriers that exist between developers, IT operations, and security staff. DevOps is a highly developed process accompanied by the automated workflow that enables it. Implementing DevOps means always questioning the way you develop, test, deploy, and operate applications. The process, technology, and tools need to change, and organizations should gather metrics to determine if the changes made actually increase productivity. Do not set it and forget it; DevOps needs to change and evolve to keep up with emerging ideas and technology. Always design your DevOps process with change in mind.
  • DATAOPS- is a set of practices and tools used by Big Data teams to increase velocity, reliability, and quality of data analytics. It emphasizes communication, collaboration, integration, automation, measurement, and cooperation between data scientists, analysts, data/ETL (extract, transform, load) engineers, information technology (IT), and quality assurance/governance. It aims to help organizations rapidly produce insight, turn that insight into operational tools, and continuously improve analytic operations and performance.  We can help with developing and managing the datapipeline for your dataops.
  • ANALYTICS AND ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE - getting to the right data to make meaningful, actionable decisions is often a challenge.  To understand the decision impact, you need to represent the data in a format that is visual and readily understandable to the audience. Handling unstructured data and representing it in a visually attractive manner can be challenging. Additionally, today's decisions need the support of descriptive, predictive, discovery, and prescriptive analytics which require the development of good/dependable analytic models. We can help with data pipeline, business analytics and model development. 
  • GOVERNANCE - With the speed of continuous integration / continuous deployment, IT governance needs a framework and methodologies that can keep up with the development requirements and maintain sound principles.
  • CYBERSECURITY- is always a balancing act - protect the business, but don't get in the way of the business. Threats are external and internal, from infrastructure, cloud, applications, users, hackers, and IoT devices. We can review or help mitigate cybersecurity risk.
  • RPA - or Robotic Process Automation and Cognitive Automation is the "last mile" in many digital transformations that may offer the highest payback by automating processes and collecting data across legacy systems which are critical to business success. It is important to understand the maturity model for implementing automation as you roll out and scale.

4As & Company is an assemblage of Senior Business Leaders with an average of 20+ years of experience in management and technology consulting. The group has served in senior management capacities at start-ups as well as Fortune 500 companies, benefitting organizations by increasing their organizational velocity in critical transformational activities.

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