Delivering the Benefits of Technology
Outhentics can help senior leaders as they face the challenge of leading and delivering significant technological change within their organisations. Whether it is seeking to align technology implementations and benefits realisation with organisational strategy and priorities, providing individual coaching and support in the face of organisational or individual technology challenges we understand the pressures on senior managers and can provide support, coaching and through our associates more detailed implementation support. Our approach builds on the research into leadership development needs commissioned by Mark Outhwaite when he was at the NHS Modernisation Agency.
Key themes driving our approach
Complex change interwoven with the use of new technology requires leadership that has the capacity, capability and thus the confidence to redefine the vision of how their organisation relates to customers or patients and then has the staying power to see through the process to successful delivery. Experience in the NHS and evidence from industry demonstrates that this is a journey that may take several years before it begins to deliver the scale of benefit that is possible – and thus requires a similar long term commitment to support and development of those providing the leadership.
US research (E. Brynjolfsson, - Centre for Continuity Science MIT) into what drives performance improvement in a technologically rich change environment has identified seven key attributes of a ‘digital organisation’
- Move from analogue to real-time digital business processes
- Distribute decision-rights (delegation)
- Foster open information flow and access
- Link incentives to performance
- Maintain and communicate goals
- Hire the best people
- Continually invest in human capital
The evidence suggest that without addressing these seven complementary components, investment in IT delivers few if any benefits and indeed may actually adversely effect the performance of the organisation. It is a truism but no less valid - successful organisations are more likely to have successful IT implementations and benefits delivery. The corollary might well be (especially in public service organisations) that unless an organisation has successfully addressed and embedded the fundamentals of systematic performance improvement that IT implementations are likely to be very high risk and deliver limited value. The seeds of recent high profile IT failures in the public sector have been in the failure to fundamentally review, rethink and streamline the underlying highly complex business processes prior to implementation rather than in the failure of implementation.
When investment in IT is combined with investment in the components of the ‘Digital Organisation’ performance improvement can be significant. Investment in IT as a substitute for getting to grips with fundamental organisation performance and underlying complex processes is asking for trouble. Computerising a 34 page benefits form may be a triumph - how much better if the form had been reduced to two pages first of all?
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