Urgent Innovation: Transforming the company dynamics for value creation
It is clear that we are experiencing a new stage, a new economy. Currently, it is not a story of small defeating big; it's about the fast defeating the slow.
Established companies already have a relationship with customers, defined supply chains, understand customer needs, and possess resources and experience. What they need is focus, urgency, and, of course, modern methods to manage the value creation process. So, the question we need to ask is what prevents these companies from creating disruptions for the benefit of their customers, given their decades-long relationship with them.
There is a need to create a dynamic in which building an organization involves urgency, experimentation, and learning as part of everyone's daily work. A dynamic that allows us to break free from functional silos with maximum focus on customers, so that each individual strives for what is best for them, not internal objectives that do not benefit them.
Every day, we need to ask ourselves if our actions truly improve the lives of our customers, create value for them, and if they would pay for it. If the answer is no to any of these questions, we shouldn't be working on it.
When we talk about urgency, we are talking about speed, the time from the initial idea to the offer being in the market. And it matters. It matters because every day gained brings additional income, while being late will almost certainly be a loss of time and money.
It's interesting to note that innovation and learning happen at the extremes. Problems must be solved where experts face them in their daily work. Giving these experts the ability to use modern methods to manage, improve, and create new value creation processes is key to innovation.
When we innovate, we create new offerings that interest customers, take market share from competitors, grow revenues, and in turn, grow profits. This, in itself, enables more and more innovation, making more market bets, accelerating growth, and ensuring the organization's relevance in the future.
However, instead of improving the processes they work with, these experts blindly follow them. This way, the process itself ends up completely trapping them and robbing them of the joy of daily work. Moreover, departments end up acting as silos, so any need requires working with three or four different teams, each with its own priorities and interests. This makes the process slow and complicated: bureaucracy and silos are enemies of innovation.
By giving frontline workers these capabilities, we can start dreaming big: bigger and better things are to come because the entire organization, instead of working bureaucratically, will be customer-focused.
How can companies focus and convey urgency if technology is around them or simply "aligned with it"? Technology must be integrated with the business, be with the people who care the most and are willing to fund it.
The goal is for business areas to solve problems and generate new value for customers autonomously, without creating multiple requests, responding to emails, attending many meetings but by acting quickly and appropriately to their customers' needs. And, of course, trusting them, respecting what they do, and appreciating it.
At the end of the day, the question is how do we empower experts facing problems in their daily work to autonomously resolve these issues without losing control of technology. This loss of control could expose the organization to service outages, security risks, data leaks, regulatory non-compliance, damage to image and reputation, and potential fines or penalties.
In the following article, we will explore how with ServiceNow, we can provide these capabilities to our business areas without sacrificing control.
