Powering Digital Transformations with a Single View of Customer & “Lights Out" Business Models

The Problem

 Digital Transformations cannot be delivered by applying traditional business models, processes and approaches. Today's organizations are human centric. They have deeply ingrained traditional thinking, organizing their activities and structuring their processes around people, departments and organizational charts rather than their customers, capabilities and information assets. They are command and control hierarchies where much effort is wasted on internal politics, the manipulation and control of information triumph and the advancement of individuals.

"Technology transformations" focus on the internal administrative needs of employees rather than directly addressing needs of the customer by powering their journey automatically using the information assets the business holds. Much effort is wasted, and considerable costs incurred, through the continual generation, duplication and regurgitation of out of date, inaccurate or misleading information, continually reported and centralized to executive and board. Directors "direct" and executives "manage" through broken governance structures and ineffective compliance frameworks while the organization continues to navigate towards its own oblivion, blissfully ignorant of that fact.

The Future

"Turn your organization into a machine and let your customers drive it" 

Digital native, or digitally transformed businesses are organized around their customers and the information assets they acquire to serve them with. A Single View of Customer combined with the holistic and systematic management of the information assets used to power the customers journey is the foundation for future organizations.

The customer is placed at the center of the organization and all of its decision making. Organizations of the future strive to create "lights out" business models and processes, where everything is automated, with learning and decision making driven by artificial intelligence tools and software. Human centric and internally controlled processes are eliminated. Traditional centralized control and governance functions are extinguished.

In the information centric organizations of the future, all decisions, customer interventions and learnings must be driven, powered or augmented by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The primary focus of the organization becomes the creation and maintenance of it's of the “lights out” business machine - the collection of hardware and software tools that the organization builds arounds its core information assets and then gives to its customer to drive. The customer is at the center of and controls their business processes. Three fundamental themes must be applied:

•  Self service
• Mass customization
• Customer driven choice

In the organizations of the future three types of roles are required - those who build and maintain the machine, those on the frontline who service the customer directly and a small core who oversee the organization and its processes, providing governance, strategy and direction. All organizations of the future must be technology centric and information driven, as the skills and execution capability required to create and sustain the machine fundamental to the survival of the organization itself. Lights out organizations have the potential for transformative cost reductions and infinite scale. They can disrupt any traditional market and business model - Think Amazon (the most valuable company in the world) if you are skeptical on this point.

Right Now

We are seeing a formidable coalescence and acceleration of transformative technologies that, while interesting in their own right, collectively combine to deliver the platforms and tools required to make lights out, AI powered businesses a realizable reality. In no particular order, we have in recent years seen huge advancements in:

• Cloud
• AI & machine learning
• Internet of things
• Mobile computing
• Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies

Combined with continued incremental advances in:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Collaboration software
• Databases
• General SaaS offerings
• DevOps tools & processes

To be used separately or integrated together. The tools to build the future exist, even if the vision, skills and execution approaches do not.

Get Started 

Start with a fundamental assessment of your technology people and processes:

• Do you have the vision and skills to drive the future of the organization or are you struggling with obsolete systems and crushing technical debt of underinvestment in the past?
• Do you have a single customer view?
• Do you understand the customer journey and their interactions with your organization?
• Can you track activities, correspondence and documentation across all processes and engagement channels? 
• What about information assets - are they understood, secured and leveraged?

With the answers to those questions you can start to create a plan - building an executable technology roadmap to eliminate technical debt while acquiring the necessary skills, systems and processes that can lead you into the future, sprint by sprint - one milestone at a time.