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

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Products and services have the potential to transform customers, to change their behaviour. Henry Ford changed his customers into drivers, IKEA has changed their customers into assemblers of furniture and Ryan Air has created passengers willing to take their own sandwiches.

These are some of the examples from a recent Harvard Business Review webinar How IT Creates Customer Value featuring Michael Schrage.

The webinar makes the point that although we can often focus on technology or business changes such as Ford's production lines, Amazon's online store and Apple's iPad and iPhone, the real key is how these companies have changed their customers. The central message of the webinar is that companies need to focus on how they can change their customers' behaviour and how the company can benefit from this.

Michael Schrage makes the point that IT innovations, such as social media and the cloud, enable transformations in customer behaviour (as long as the customers buy into what is being sold). The business has to decide how to best harvest these potential changes in customer behaviour.

Our membership organisation clients provide excellent examples of this - they are changing their membership customers from members of a club, to active participants in their profession's community. The organisations change from being club gatekeepers to community facilitators.

Looking even closer to home, at IndigoBlue we apply Agile techniques to transform the way that organisations run their business change programmes - changing the way team members behave in delivering change.