I see lots of great ideas when talking with people on the coffee machine, but we find ourselves most of the time closing these talks with "...yeah, nice dreams". Underlying are a number of factors that prohibits us to change:
- company culture; people are insufficient encouraged to change and contribute. Motivation is something that needs to come from the area around you.
- stop thinking short term processes, think about your company capabilities. Of course you need to support people in their job which is similar to supporting their processes, however, don't design your entire IT landscape to it. Figure out what your company capabilities are and cater for that.
- tools; are you still stuck with those dreadful big fat ERP implementations that require 10 governance bodies to keep it workable for everyone. Suppose that a person from sales has a great idea to get new leads on a way you never thought of. Are you able to get this job done rapidly, even if it is only a temporary activity? "business agility" anyone?
As usual it's a combination of people, processes and tools. I believe that IT departments can play a big role in this game by:
- Improve your ability to integrate. Forget about the big single ERP that does it all. They do, for the current people and current processes. If you want to be agile you need to be able to swiftly get new parts in and out, the only way to do this efficiently is to improve your integration capability.
- Try to get into a continuous business process improvement routine. Don't just improve the tools, but improve the processes, weed out unused elements and plant new seeds.
- Review your operations strategy from closed controlled to open and supportive. If someone comes in with a new device for example that they want to use in the organization they want to be able to use it everywhere to access corporate functionalities. Don't smack them with the "not allowed" hammer, work with them, design for consumerization and encourage their empowerment.