Guide to enterprise change management software

Why digital businesses need to reinvent their enterprise software platform.

Growth is not an option

At any point in the life of an enterprise, leaders face three options: to sell, to stop... or to grow.

Any organization that isn’t growing is basically dying a slow painful death. Because competitors won’t be standing still.

The three steps of strategy execution

Every enterprise follows three stages of strategy execution:

To grow, and businesses need inspirational leaders with a purpose and vision who set the direction. But to do that well, they’ll need data. Examples might include an analysis of the buying audience, the size of market opportunity, the state of competition, the average profitability on a typical deal etc.

The second task will be to map out the business model, i.e. What customer value does the enterprise create, and how does it turn this into shareholder outcomes?

The third task is to equip the enterprise to discharge the business model in the most effective way; to maximize the profitability returned from delivering the business model. Discussions will move on to resourcing matters such as People, Process, Technology and Data.

... And if businesses really want to thrive and survive in the digital age they will need to repeat this process at least once a year.

Enterprise IT is singularly ineffective at coping with growth, and change

The enterprise IT architectures that exist today in any business over 10 years old were modeled on design ideals forged in the 1980's. Then, the priority was to process business critical data through robust and repeatable processes that could scale. This meant that businesses could scale operations to harvest a growing global market for goods and services. At the time, the idea of online trade was in its infancy, most data was entered by employees, and was processed and held inside the enterprise firewall only to be used by office workers in the office.

Any requirements for applications demanded by departments, teams or individuals to improve the organizations ability to discharge its customer value and maximize profits were met by encouraging used if desktop tools like Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access, and latterly Share Point. Adopting this strategy enabled It to cope with demands for technology. In recent years, the need to process data and solve problems at department level have been met by a blend of Saas applications and software robots.

The primary consequence of this strategy is a loss of effective data driven decision making. A paucity of enterprise technology (Saas sprawl) that has segregated data into hundreds of silos making it almost impossible to lever value from data to make effective business decisions. So it is that in most companies today, the tail wags the dog: the mass of data processed by operational applications is lost to leaders charged with making the most important decisions.

A second impact of this legacy has been the resulting fragility and brittleness of IT systems.

LEADERS will complain of the lack of progress in technology evolution (frequently criticizing IT as the 'Business Prevention Department' ), the lack of insights to answer strategic questions;
Department leaders will complain they can't get their hands on useful insights they need to perform their roles; that they spend much of their time as surrogate IT workers propping up spreadsheet apps, on how poor their work applications are compared to the 'free ones' they use at home, that they are short-handed because the majority of their process are either manual or partially automated;
In truth, no corporate role has come out of this pre-millennium Enterprise IT hangover unscathed. The IT leaders, the architects of this mess, have met their own fate. They now face a vast legacy burden resulting from complex or broken data models, too many apps to mention, together with ever increasing pressures to respond faster to change and embrace new technology innovations.

Remodelling enterprise IT for the digital age

To keep enterprise technology in line with ever changing business needs, change management teams need to command all forms of resources including IT. That means overcoming the biggest logjam in application development, that of coding and scripting. Use of manual coding of applications creates a burden of testing and tuning. It also demands expert skills in short supply.

But there are other inhibitors to enterprise applications evolution to aid growth and manage change....

Satisfying enterprise performance and security parameters
Any application created for use by an enterprise

Leveraging data from systems of record
Systems of record - like enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and human resources information systems - hold business critical information that will need to be reused by other enterprise applications. Any applications platform, to be useful, must integrate with these existing systems without creating performance issues.

Use of too many tools in the development stack
To produce an application can demand a blend of UX design, database management, Web and content management, business logic and algorithms, artificial intelligence and report visualisation etc. that are traditionally fulfilled by different skills and tools. The inevitable consequence is a large project team and high costs., even when the cost of integration is ignored.

Accessibility to bleeding edge technologies
Business leadership teams know that advanced applications technologies like artificial-intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality and big data create new ways to bring customer value. They want access to these technologies and expect future applications to incorporate them.

Digitizing organizational anatomical DNA
Knowing the interdependencies between people, systems, processes, data, suppliers, and risks is mission critical to any business. Without this understanding, how can organisations hope to grow, or manage data privacy risk?

Overcoming IT procurement habits
Enterprise IT leaders are strongly influenced by Gartner and other analyst firms that specialize in supplying insights on new business technology market innovations. Their analysis limits its scope to already mature technology firms turning over a considerable amount of revenue. It is in Gartners interests to have lots of technology classes in order to sell more of its reports to more vendors. Therefore any major step change innovation that redefines the structure of a market, first has to prove itself 'in the trenches' before progressing as a recognised enterprise IT solution. This invariably creates a barrier to step change innovation that hits hardest in corporate procurements led by individuals who benefit from not taking risks.

Overcoming IT behavioral norms
Another inhibitor to change lies in the tech stack logic adopted by IT teams and their investment into coding. Most people in IT have a coding background. They naturally prefer solutions that raise the bar on the importance of their skill. Codeless sof

Designing high quality applications
It isn't good enough for applications to work but be difficult to use. Neither is it good enough for data processing functions to meet business needs but not that of Users and Customers. Modern enterprise applications must compare favorably to consumer applications.

Ecosystem focused
Businesses today aspire to have enterprise

What do we mean as change ready software
Enterprise software needs to be designed for iteration and adaptation over time. The biggest inhibitor to this is cost. The tools and methods used today require large project teams to fulfil applications development tasks. Change ready software makes it economic to repeatedly build and deploy apps to tune enterprise applications as needs change. In order to fulfil this ambition, any solution must by necessity be codeless.