Scaling Agile is not the Path to Business Agility

in #art6 years ago

Act 10. The Digital Marketing, CRM and Experience Platforms.

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ERA

While the future-oriented CIO was busy talking to the agile rebel alliance and rolling out continuous delivery pipelines, his marketing counterpart was emerging fast as a leader in the newly labelled Digital realm.

The enterprise’s marketing executive was also drinking the Kool Aid generated by the exceptional marketing engine of the large product companies. The darlings of the Gartner Quadrants and Forrester Waves announced that we were now in the Age of Customer Experience as the colourful fireworks sparkled in the background of some fancy venue in Las Vegas or better yet, the Sydney Opera House.


We saw the rise of the “plug and play” Digital Marketing, CRM and Experience Platforms.

The enterprise kicked off product-centric digital transformation programmes that promised to deliver unified customer views and digital operating models optimised for reuse, self-service, and standardisation of digital assets. The customer visions were crisp and compelling and the Kotter-style strategy and change frameworks, useful.

The promise of a less fragmented and wasteful technology ecosystem was irresistible to both digital and technology operations teams who had suffered the most as they witness velocity killing both agility and their work-life balance.

Inspired by new acquisitions, agency conglomerates and consulting firms embraced convergent thinking and elevated it. In this new world of unicorns, consultants worked their magic on aligning stakeholders, and Design Thinking and Customer Experience Design professionals led the effort instead of being reduced to delivering Lean product user experiences. They were joined by teams of creatives to help them imagine and reimagine the future.

Unfortunately, all too often, for every type of nail and wall, there was just one hammer. Reinvention was now constrained by the features of a platform; features available to all competitors.

It’s not that these platforms are not useful, they are, particularly as they evolve from opaque monoliths that constrain our ability to adapt and to deliver truly unique experiences, to cloud-based, headless, API-driven, open-source-like ecosystems, designed to deliver network effects. Even the most prominent champions of custom software development have learned, by now, that we shouldn’t build commoditised functionality when you can buy it, rent it, or leverage available open source solutions.

If the goal is digitisation, then this narrow focus on the rollout of the purchased platform may be a step in the right direction, but the focus of this article is not the necessary digitisation of the enterprise, but its sustained agility and growth.



Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://selfscroll.com/scaling-agile-is-not-the-path-to-business-agility/

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