The ultimate goal of simplification is to make the company more innovative, intelligent, for engaging employees, satisfying customers and leading to long term prosperity.
Over-complexity in a business may be hiding simple and innovative ways to achieve premium outcomes because people involved just usually get the time to step back from the complexity and hence, they continue to follow the old routine to do their work. The goal of simplification or optimization is to eliminate unnecessary complications, lower cost, fine-tune processes or structures, and leverage trade-offs to improve organizational efficiency, flexibility, dexterity, and agility.
Cost optimizer: Cost is part of business management, it can be categorized into operational cost, financials, people cost, vendor cost, , license cost, procurement cost. etc. The company has limited budget and resources, the challenge for management is to have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. The cost breakdown provides insight into where the most budget is being spent, which in turn identifies opportunities for bottom line improvements.
At some point in the enterprise evolution, business effectiveness and efficiency are correlated specifically when the organization reaches its capacity. Cost optimization is a structural approach and never enough effort to improve effectiveness and efficiency, and fine-tune business capacity. It’s important to leverage the latest technologies or tools to continue trimming costs, weeding out redundancy, retooling business processes or operations, reduce the total cost of ownership, and ultimately improve bottom-line organizational efficiency and increase organizational capacity.
Organizational structure tuner: To adapt to faster changes and enable information flow frictionlessly, organizational silos need to be broken down; the overly restrictive business hierarchy should be fine-tuned by leveraging the latest technology and collaboration tools to harness cross-functional communication and collaboration. The organizational design shifts from inside-out process-driven to outside-in people-centric. The organizational structure needs to be solid enough to give some sort of forms for enhancing accountability, and open enough to its environment and allow the movement of information, ideas and people smoothly. Organization structure and its impact could play either positive or negative impact on business culture and effectiveness. Thus, you have to make sure that the organizational design is not only in alignment with the organizational "culture," but also helps to cultivate the culture you desire to build in the company.
Digital organizations are ever-evolving, empower their employees to discover their talent and build professional skills; engage customers, partners in continuous conversations and encourages great autonomy. The challenge will continue to be: 'How to achieve a balance between virtual worlds and the human connection, creativity and process, management and governance? Technically, organizational design must be adaptable, take advantage of the digital technology platforms & tools, to break down functional silos, improve people engagement and productivity. A hybrid nature of organization well mixes the virtual social platform with the physical functional structure, so the official structure and unofficial structure co-exist antagonistically or harmoniously, to strike the delicate balance between solid and flow, foster cross-functional communication, collaboration, and accountability.
Complexity simplifier: Complexity is part of business reality nowadays, that comes in due to vey characteristics such as, less structure, rules and regulations, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, interconnectivity, lack of linearity and increased flux, etc, working and impacting together. Considering there is no universally agreed definition of complexity, in the corporate scope, the complexity can be good or bad for businesses depending on your strategy and capability. There are varieties of complexities such as hierarchical complexity, environmental complexity, information complexity, collaboration complexity, design complexity, governance complexity, etc. Complexity is that critical mass point of optimization such as it is an integral stage of business improvement and maturity cycle.
So simplifying complexity is always a consistent effort to improve business effectiveness and efficiency. Simplicity is the design of looking for what is common for clarity and maximum reuse. Simplicity is the building blocks in optimizing corporate design and management discipline. The business leaders and professionals should ask insightful questions to help them figure out the causes behind complexity and clarify how to simplify it in the right way. For instance: What are desired complexity, what are unwanted complications? Is business management increasing in hierarchical complexity because they need to coordinate they want to enforce status-quo? How do you know you have the minimum required complexity, as to support flexibility without increasing support costs? Simplifying the complicated thing is an optimal and smart choice, organizations have to sharpen the skills for managing complexity by following the “Simplicity Principles” to push the boundaries for improving business quality, effectiveness, and maturity.
Simplification or optimization is not a one time initiative, but a continuous effort of management to improve process agility, resource integration, cost-efficiency, structural flexibility, and organizational agility. The ultimate goal of simplification is to make the company more innovative, intelligent, for engaging employees, satisfying customers and leading to long term prosperity.
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