Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In this on-demand webinar, Senior Consultant Whynde Kuehn explores an enterprise perspective on the strategy execution life cycle and the critical role business architecture plays throughout the life cycle. She also discusses some practical steps you can take to optimize the strategy execution life cycle and begin to integrate business architecture into it over time.

This is the third Advisor in our series on combating the scourge of administrative evil. The first in this series examined three governmental IT systems — one each from the US states of Michigan, Washington, and Rhode Island — each experiencing operational failures that caused needless harm to their respective state’s citizens. In the second Advisor, we explored the idea of how poorly managed and executed government IT systems that inflict such needless harm on their citizens can rise to the level of being administratively evil. In this final installment, we discuss ways to mitigate administrative evil.

With the introduction of robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation (CA) tools, potential adopters of these new types of service automation tools remain skeptical about the claims surrounding their promised business value. Potential adopters want to know why organizations are adopting service auto­mation, what outcomes they are achieving, and what are the practices that lead to achieving multiple business benefits. To answer these questions, we conducted two surveys of 143 outsourcing professionals along with interviews of 48 people, including service automation adopters, providers, and advisors. From the inter­views, we identified 20 adoption journeys. This Executive Report documents the RPA “triple win” — for shareholders, customers, and employees — emerging from the successful organizations we researched. We also detail eight RPA and CA adoption cases to show how automation was carried out, and the multiple emerging benefits. Finally, we outline 20 action principles, which other organizations can enact, to deliver such outcomes.

There has been a big escalation in the media profile of service automation over the last three years. With the introduction of robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation (CA) tools, potential adopters of these new types of service automation tools remain skeptical about the claims surrounding their promised business value. Potential adopters want to know why organizations are adopting service automation, what outcomes they are achieving, and what are the practices that lead to achieving multiple business benefits.

To answer these questions, we conducted two surveys of 143 outsourcing professionals along with interviews of 48 people, including service automation adopters, providers, and advisors. From the interviews, we identified 20 adoption journeys. The benefits include doing more work with fewer humans, improving service quality, executing services quicker, reducing service costs, extending service coverage to 24 hours without shiftwork, increasing work team flexibility, increasing compliance, and, most surprisingly, increased employee job satisfaction. 

Today’s organizations are constantly growing and reshaping as they implement new strategies and business model changes to react to the external world and internal pressures. While the ability to translate business direction into action is critical for any organization’s survival, most need to recognize there are significant opportunities for improvement. This Executive Update will cast a new vision upon strategy execution, an organizational capability that not only helps to ensure survival but can also be a source of competitive advantage.

If you start changing an organization toward an Agile mindset, there’s no real end. Agile is about creating an organization of continuous learning and the transformation is done when there is nothing new to learn, which will probably be never. This puts an enormous challenge on middle management.

In the first Advisor in this series, we examined three governmental IT systems from the US states of Michigan, Washington, and Rhode Island. Each experienced operational failures that caused needless harm to their respective state’s citizens. In this Advisor, we argue that a strong case can be made that these failures can rise to a level of administrative evil.

A corporation has various business goals, many of which involve profit expectations and ROI. Lapses in the development of a corporate architecture and security risks to data storage and processing can stifle business profit goals. Although there are a few industry and government regulations intended to strengthen a corporation’s information security posture, no regulation should be considered a one-size-fits-all solution.