Vision and approach to organizing systems and processes to manage strategic outlook and achieve business goals.
Overview
Companies that do well typically focus on one of three Value Disciplines Models as described by Treacy and Wiersema – operational excellence, customer intimacy, or product leadership. They provide differentiated customer value by focusing strategically on one of these disciplines while achieving industry-standard performance in the other two disciplines. This is mainly due to a strong alignment between their strategy and operating model, including their organizational structure, systems, and processes, that best support the selected value discipline.
Operational excellence refers to delivering customer value at optimum cost, quality, and convenience. Organizations pursuing operational excellence achieve it by optimizing their systems and processes for efficient customer value delivery.
Customer intimacy emphasizes customer experience and provides tailored offerings to meet unique demands. Companies achieve this by combining a deep understanding of their customers with organizational systems and processes that can quickly respond to changing customer needs.
Finally, product leadership companies differentiate themselves through innovation and new solutions. Such a strategy requires their business systems and organization to be designed for discovering new ideas and agility for delivering them faster.
The Business Technology Strategy is an organization's approach to aligning its systems and processes to support its business goals. It provides a sustainable competitive advantage through innovation and organizational agility.
The organization's business strategy is defined within the competitive environment in which it operates. Further, the strategy is supported by its resources and capabilities to achieve those goals. Organizations often cannot control the external environment and its impact on shifting their strategy to adjust to the changing competitive landscape. Hence, organizations rely heavily on aligning their organizational capabilities to achieve their strategic goals.
Easy access to technology and capital has further fueled the competition in the recent past. With more accessible resources, companies that can optimize their capabilities to better support customer needs will improve their chances of success.
More companies are now using Enterprise Automation to keep up with such advancements to differentiate through products, services, user experience, and costs.
GEARS framework includes three specific Business and Technology Strategy models for enterprise automation that supports separate value disciplines for aligning an organization's operating model with its business strategy. Each model allows organizations to focus on improving practices critical to achieving their business goals.
The business technology strategy for creating an automation-first mindset requires three key elements:
- Setting a business vision
- Adopting a suitable organizational design
- Utilizing accessible technology platforms that support rapid changes
Successful implementation of business strategy requires everyone within an organization to have a shared understanding of a company's practices to achieve its goals and objectives. It requires setting a vision for enterprise automation as transformational, not just as an operational productivity-enhancing or task-elimination exercise.
An essential element for a sustainable transformation is to disrupt the existing operational processes. A new operating model also motivates employees to follow a set path to achieve a well-defined vision. This approach ensures employees have a reason and the desire to change, gradually creating an automation-first culture.
Organizational capabilities also include systems and processes that ensure everyone can get the information they need when they need it, which contributes to achieving the business objectives more effectively.
Typically, organizations need to share information about their strategy to allow every individual to understand their role in achieving the overall business goal. However, people within an organization already share information across groups in a manner that helps them carry out their tasks. Often, such information-sharing may not follow a defined structure for sharing information through a hierarchy.
Acknowledging this social nature of the organization and facilitating such communication for better decision making by structuring an organization that promotes a culture of cross-team collaboration through its systems and processes can result in better information sharing. This approach to creating effective information processing through organizational design further motivates team members by ensuring alignment between their work and contribution to its strategic goals.
Your Business Technology Strategy should be designed to facilitate your business strategy and organizational design alignment. It should further guide a selection of proper automation technology platforms to sustain this alignment.
GEARS Assets