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

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Poor IT systems can be a serious impediment to business agility. I've seen many companies hamstrung by IT systems that don't interface to other systems and are difficult to enhance with new features.

So, what should you look for in your IT Platforms to enable business agility?

The starting point is to have flexible IT platforms that:

• Can be easily configured and extended
• Have strong APIs (interfaces) - organisations such as The Guardian are leading the way here with APIs to re-use their content
• Strong roadmaps including emerging standards (such as social, mobile, HTML5)
• Allow rapid deployment, with options to deploy in the cloud for example
• That have a good selection of supporting companies that provide expert implementation services

Two other factors are needed to support the "customer obsession" discussed in my last post:

• IT systems that support engagement
• Systems that build customer knowledge

IT Systems that Support Engagement

Software needs to be thought of not as code, but as creating experiences and delivering engagement.

There is a move from "systems of record" such as databases to "systems of engagement" - systems that include the context of an on-going communications relationship. These systems of engagement give users value and are focused on the individual.

Another way of expressing this is that we are moving from the age of information to the age of the customer (as described in a book I'm reading at the moment - CRM at the Speed of Light, Fourth Edition: Social CRM 2.0 Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers and also a recent Forrester webinar). This movement puts the power in the hands of the customer and the challenge to companies is to react to this fundamental shift in the market.

Customer engagement is across multiple touch points, including the web, email, social and direct service. IT needs to provide an architecture for providing a consistent message to these touch points.

An example of this shift in the market to flexible platforms from the NFP sector is that many oganisations are moving from membership administration database systems to CRMs such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce and from bespoke content systems to market leading CMS platforms such as Drupal and Sitecore. These systems provide all the capabilities mentioned above and there is a large pool of companies that provide implementation and consulting services.

Building Customer Knowledge

The underlying need for building customer knowledge is to provide the data needed to:

• drive innovation for new products and services
• improve existing services
• support rapid decision making (making the decisions needed for business agility)

Whether this is labelled "big data" or the more traditional business analytics, the key business requirements are for systems (data warehouses) and data analysts to get information and insight out of data.