"There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer." -Peter Drucker
Most organizations are
organized in silos. How would you ensure that all structures, processes, and
strategies align around an excellent customer experience to result in a
profitable and evolving business? How would you model different value
propositions to different customer segments yet developing and offering the
product and services using the same or similar business capabilities? What
approach do you take to architect a customer-centric organization? What
architecture artifacts and building blocks do you create to support such
business transformation? Are there any EA frameworks and tools available to
architect customer-centric enterprise? What’re the perspectives for shaping an
outside-in, customer-centric business?
- "Client Intimacy" (customer centric) is a combined cultural, business, and technology issue. All three aspects need to be addressed in order to achieve "client intimacy". To be truly customer-centric, organizations need to re-focus their thinking, culture, behavior, processes, and systems. Companies that have a definition of customer experience and decisions could use this definition in everyday decision making. However, organizations need to determine the optimal balance point between adding value to customers and adding value to the company.
- Customer-focused enterprise vision, strategy and governance model should enforce the alignment of the various silos towards customer-centric products and delivery mechanisms. This also provides the potential for enterprise effectiveness and efficiency.
- Engaging customers directly and on an ongoing basis to see how their goals are changing might be a good way to predict future behavior. There is also lots of potentials for customers to influence designs directly. Approaches to building business intelligence on customers tend to look at the past behavior of individuals to try to determine the segments that they belong to and forecast future behavior (building intelligence on tastes and wants).
- Customer experience depends very much on employee’s behavior and knowledge/skills they possess. Companies should develop a training program to equip their employees to deliver the customer experience so that they could offer support and advice to their customers with the right information at the right time. Moreover, companies should develop a partnership program between various organization units (marketing, HR, IT and Operations) to define and deliver the customer experience. Every department must have an individual or a stakeholder/group with a customer role.
- Customer Satisfaction measure is dependent upon various factors and other measures. Organization should also architect Measures and dependency of measures on other measures like lead time, sales volume, product price, customer promise indicator, etc. Increase in product price may lean to decrease in customer satisfaction. This means architecting all touchpoint of customers to offer a total experience.
- A "customer-centric architecture" should be:
- Business requirements centric;
- Simplification around silos: People over time have created complexity by dividing functions and now need to get them back within the whole.
- Ensure the "traceability" of the transformation of these business requirements to make them handled by the proper organization (of processes) and its related information systems;
- Guarantee the proper INTEGRATION of the result of the transformation in the existing EA
- Guarantee
the full CONSISTENCY of both the organization and its information system
with the requirements and (by transitivity), the full consistency of the
organization with the information system, such as it is actually
implemented.
- Different EA Models & Measures:
1) Value Reference Models: Understand the customer's value perspectives
because the value is so situational and contextual. You can also develop value
reference model from an organizational perspective, such as the tools and methods
used to define the value chain that supports the customer experience. Or it’s
about an "outside-in" perspective that describes the customer's
interactions with the business.
2) Business Capability Model is so important to create the WHOLE
architecture of the enterprise. Capability Modeling offers a normalized view of
business functions too. But then the capability model is not the end, it has to be
realized through the resources that are working together to perform an activity
or function to add value to the customer.
3) Performance Reference Models are 'how are we doing measured against
something or other' models. They are something that is done as a means of
measuring performance of operating models. Or you can create a Measures Reference Model to align the
business strategy with the architecture road map. Measures work like glue in
connecting strategy (Goals/Objectives) to the capabilities being developed in a
given time frame. Metrics are time-bound as well. Use metrics to assess
capability maturity. It is the measures (value) reference model that ties
multiple goals/objectives and strategic evolution with the capabilities needed
to move to the future state.
There’re still many challenges facing EA and business today in driving transformation: How to transform from an inside-out operation driven to the outside-in customer-centric organization, how to transform an IT-centric EA to the customer and business-centric EA? How would you manage the business
transformation; what tools and artifacts (road-mapping etc) would you create to
ensure that business is evolving towards the customer-centric vision? How would
you build the EA models differently to architect a customer-centric
organization? Or do you need to have a completely new approach and thinking for
architecting a customer-centric organization.
1 comments:
Great blog... I found valuable information about customer-centric operations. Thanks for sharing valuable information in very nice way.
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