Silos aren’t golden
Lowering corporate risk through infrastructural renewal

Over the past decade, businesses and public sector organisations have invested heavily in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the belief that they were arming themselves with the resources to enable them to gather and manage information better, and make their operations run more efficiently.

This has been, at least partially, in response to a rapidly changing economic and organisational environment.  PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 9th annual global CEO survey published in 2006, highlighted this issue when it found that over three quarters of almost 1500 CEOs questioned believed their businesses – and the business climate in general – had become more complex than they were three years ago. 

But the reality is that the piecemeal introduction of new ICT technology, has often not made their businesses simpler to manage, nor more effective and responsive. All too often, organisations suffer from being held back by their systems rather than being truly enabled by them - increasing rather than decreasing corporate risk.

In particular, organisations typically now find themselves so hidebound by system complexity that they are unable to change themselves to fully exploit the dynamics of their markets or even to conform to new compliance requirements. And this means they are unable to manage a major component of their risk profile – their ability to compete effectively, or meet service level commitments.

PwC says
So how can an organisation tell if it is making any positive progress in tackling complexity? In attempting to throw light on how improvements could be made, the PwC survey highlighted the existence of 'Highly Capable People' and 'Effective Communications' ranking numbers one and two, as key complexity improvement indicators.

To develop these criteria, points directly at the need to move to a collaborative business model, where organisations can begin to harness the people, intellectual property and communications, in order to anticipate and respond to continually changing internal and external conditions. 

However, by investing heavily in communications, computing, and data storage systems over recent years, organisations have unintentionally created chinese walls of silo-based information, isolating people, stifling creativity, building complexity, increasing cost and multiplying risk.

To get true value out of ICT, what organisations must do is replicate the 'coffee machine' effect in their business infrastructure. They must foster instinctive communications and environments that allow and encourage the exchange of ideas, and enable people to interact and work together productively.

Five steps
To assist organisations in making this a reality and lowering their risk profile, Logicalis has defined the five key phases of the move to managing business complexity, unlocking business agility and lowering risk: Connect; Converge; Mobilise; Collaborate; and, finally, Working as One.

This is not a 'rip and replace' approach.  The goal of the process is to make sure businesses realise the greatest return on investment from existing computing and communications systems, but have a clear understanding of where further investments will lead them.
 
Whatever its size, the process does not call for wholesale change within an organisation. Clearly, such an approach would introduce a large component of risk on its own.  Rather, it sets out key stages that an organisation can work through, at a pace of change that meets its needs.

The good news
The good news is that many mid- to large-sized organisations are already beginning to exercise strategies that have the potential to manage complexity and make themselves more agile.  They have invested heavily in the first two stages of the process - Connect and Converge. This foundation will provide the basis for improvement, but the full potential of the investment will only be realised if organisations complete the process.

The second piece of good news is that the capital cost of technologies that deliver mobilisation and collaboration are proportionally lower than the Connect and Converge phases. So, to go the extra mile requires a comparatively small investment, and promises continuous, cumulative improvement and an increasingly lower risk profile.

Attitude, behaviour and usability
But technology alone can’t achieve the organisational goals we seek. To help us understand more about the risk inherent in driving change, our work with Professor Dale Littler - a leading academic in the field of business strategy at Manchester Business School - has revealed that 'Attitude', 'Behaviour' and 'Usability' are critical factors to achieving higher agility and lower risk.  Unless these are properly addressed, transformation programmes will fall short of expectations.

Logicalis and Littler have looked at the 'soft' questions that are so often paid little attention. How do people’s attitudes to technology and change affect business transformation programmes? How do you get people to adapt their behaviour to accept and harness new technologies? How can businesses make sure that new technology is usable by, and useful to, the people on whom business agility ultimately depends? And, crucially, how do you overcome someone’s need to own information?

Change without frontiers
The answers to these questions go to the very heart of the challenge of managing change and lowering risk successfully. Whatever the technological basis of an approach that truly lowers risk, we have to make collaboration a positive personal journey.  In that way people are able to experience the value in exchanging and building on ideas and thoughts.

There are recent lessons to be learned. Voicemail is a proven personal productivity tool enabling people to carry on working without missing important calls. But it can get in the way of a team of people who are working to a common aim – because it isn’t interactive. Instant email communications devices like the Blackberry allow continuous contact through the most common form of business communications, but inject a sense of urgency into a conversation that demands a response, and frustrates the sender if one is not received, introducing negativity into the relationship.

Feel your presence
One fact is clear; to get more out of systems and people alike, we need to stop bombarding them with information, to a point where they become less efficient and productive. Intelligent presence management is one technology that enables people to choose the best way to get to the people and information they need, to get the job done.

So, if you would rather be contacted by Instant Messenger than by phone, the system will make this clear to everyone who needs to reach you. Presence and preference solutions hand power back to the users, making many of the above questions a lot easier to answer.

Marshal and maximise
After all, managing organisational change, hand in hand with managing risk, is not about accurately predicting the future.  It’s about enabling the ability to cope successfully with, or capitalise on unexpected and inevitable events or trends.  And to do so you need to be able to marshal and maximise your resources quickly and effectively.

The path to Working as One does not deliver a silver bullet, but we hope that it changes the mindset of how computing, communications and users could work in the future; and how businesses can set in motion, a process that enables them to cope with complexity, change, and the ever present need to minimise corporate risk through the effective use of ICT.

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