Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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Much of the approach to business strategy and IT to date has been driven by Finance and Operations' desire for cost savings and efficiencies, from business process optimisation and ERP, to financial consolidation and reporting.

There is growing evidence, however, that there is a shift from cost savings to growth and the customer. And customer obsession is becoming the driving force for business agility. I’ll explain.

Business Strategy Perspective

The traditional Porter 5 Forces model for competitive strategy (competitors, threats from new entrants to the market, threats from substitute products, the bargaining power of buyers and the bargaining power of suppliers) is being questioned in the light of “the social era”, which includes social media, but goes beyond this into general expectations. See for example:

• Recent Harvard Business Review blog post Why Porter's Model No Longer Works
• Forrester webinar Customer Obsession: Imperatives for IT Professionals (subscribed content)

The common theme is that customers will become the focus for strategy – “A customer-obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of and engagement with customers and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.”

Enterprise priorities are shifting (in emphasis rather than completely) from operations to marketing, products and services. But at the same time marketing, products and services are also changing. In marketing for example, the focus is moving from “broadcast marketing” to social marketing and developing deeper relationships with customers.

What is needed to support Customer Obsession?

These priorities mean that customer experience will king - providing a great experience and developing real-time insight will be of prime importance. The new imperatives are to:

• Keep pace with your customers (and if possible to direct them) – be an Apple rather than a Nokia or Motorola
• Design, architect and deliver for engagement with your customers – I’ll say more on this in a later post
• Deliver customer delight – engaging relationship management (personalisation rather than overt marketing), social media/communities where appropriate and engaging content

To give some examples of the different elements of customer delight from our website, our blog posts and insight content (articles, book reviews and videos) give opportunities for providing our website users with engaging content, and features such as our interactive client page, mega drop-down menu in the our services area and book review carousel, add visual interest.

In the next post of this series, I’ll look at the implications of Business Agility for IT Platforms.