One of the biggest problems with implementing cloud infrastructures into any business – large or small – has nothing to do with technology. This is all about culture, management attitudes and the current place of IT within that business.
They may not be technical but they all can have a significant impact on the way the technology is implemented – or not. Their part in the development and establishment of the processes which underpin the business should never be underestimated by any service provider starting to work with a new potential customer.
This issue was addressed by Derek Miers, Principal BPM Analyst at Forrester Research, at the recent Cordys event, Cordial 2010, in Holland.
“The time taken to get a new or updated process through all the stages from agreement to proceed to having it in production – usually referred to as the Route to Live – is still out at six to nine months, and that is just too long,” he said. “No company will be able to get the better of more agile competitors in the marketplace with that timescale.”
The fundamental issue, as encapsulated by a conference delegate, was that technology, plus culture, equals change – where the culture can be the real inhibitor of making any change at all, or at least slowing the time it takes. That culture shows itself in many ways, often taking the form of a disconnect between different parts of the business. For example, Miers pointed out that on one in five business process management programs report in to IT, according to a recent Forrester survey.
“There is now a need to avoid `the better sameness’ – slight improvements to the same old thing,” he said. “This is despite the fact that it can feel a lot safer than real change. Most important is that it can mean a significant change based on now designing processes from the customer’s perspective.”
One of the key challenges in making change happen and stick is the scaling up of change from pilot level to full project implementation – and then onward growth from there. Miers used the analogy of being in a restaurant with one glass half full, and having to get to the stage where all the glasses in the restaurant are half full at least.
This requires balancing the often conflicting requirements of obtaining some immediate value from any change and getting sustainable value from change over the long haul. As examples, he mentioned the short term value of getting a project in production quickly versus the long term value of getting it in right.
“The start point for any of this is the boardroom. Getting the executive team on board is essential, as this is where most of the problems are,” he said. There is an argument that, with the cloud, this is not always true, in that there is certainly anecdotal evidence that while boardrooms `get’ the idea of the cloud, it is now IT staff that can be the problem. So the bottom line is to identify the cultural problem areas wherever they lie and work to get them on board.
But there is, in his view, often a lack of visible leadership and engagement, especially from senior executives, coupled to a lack of vision. Getting this executive buy-in is important because, as Miers observed, progressing a policy of improvement without a commensurate vision usually leads to a mess.
Another factor here is that senior management often change – sometimes it would appear that such changes happen for change’s sake. So there is often no continuity in senior management and therefore too much emphasis on short term benefits.
His suggestions on how to engage the business include some obvious – but sometimes difficult-to-achieve – tactics, such as the creation of a suitable corporate culture where the need to be customer-facing is at its core. “Frequent travellers can often tell what a hotel room or restaurant will be like from the check-in process. It is all part of the hotel’s culture,” he observed.
So one thing needed here is to put in place processes that empower staff to give customers a better experience of working with the business, which in turn requires having effective operational processes in place so that relevant actions can be identified and acted upon. This will require as many as possible in the business having broad knowledge of the marketplace in which the business operates, and it must ultimately still reflect the strategic planning and management of the business as well as the scope of its services resources.
Most important of all, there is a need to measure the performance of this policy and learn from it, as well as a need to develop a brand-level definition of the customer experience. “Every customer can tell you the link between the EasyJet brand and the customer experience,” he said.
Key to all this, he suggested, will be the use of one of the many different types of modelling techniques now available to help people understand the processes involved. This does mean, however, that staff learn the ability how to break complex processes into their component parts. “For example, the most common problem is that there will be a single instance of a management process that is running many instances of individual units-of-work processes, and people get bogged down trying to model and understand, that combination as a single process,” he said.
