We believe that adopting techniques of Digital Transformation and Social Business can drive a step change in creating agile, innovative and high value performance by:
- Improving rate of information flow and knowledge transfer
- Improving speed of response to customers, and to change
- Breaking down silos both internally and externally
- Improving employee engagement and collaboration
- Highlighting potential issues occurring in real time thus reducing errors and poor decision making
- Improving the ability to attract, retain and motivate talent
- Improving the ability to source new ideas/innovations both internally and externally
- Creating a hard to copy barrier to competition as it is a cultural shift, not just technology adoption, and cannot be easily replicated
The McKinsey 7S model is a good way of summarising the holistic, systemic approach we favour. This philosophy forms the basis of the services offered by the Agile Elephant Consultancy.
Our approach to the 7 Systems in detail
EVOLUTION vs REVOLUTION?
We believe the best approach to driving business benefits is to view Digital Transformation as changing the overall business system, rather than deploying individual stand alone tools or methods. We believe it has to build on the existing layers of a customer’s business system, helping evolve it rather than starting completely anew. While it is easier to “build afresh” if one is a start up or spin out (and we can help with that), there are a number of considerations once a company reaches a certain size and age:
- There is usually too much value in existing systems for a radical restructuring, an evolutionary approach is usually better
- Many current digital and social tools are not integrated enough, nor functional enough, to handle a lot of the other areas of business systems. They must be integrated to other business systems to get the full benefit