Designed for Digital by Jeanne W. Ross
Author:Jeanne W. Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: digital transformation; digital business design; digital offerings; enterprise architecture; business agility; digital technologies; culture change
Publisher: The MIT Press
5 Building an Accountability Framework
In the 2012 movie The Avengers, we see individual superheroes strutting their stuff and winning small victories. When it comes to saving the world, however, it becomes necessary for the superheroes to align their individual talents and work as a team to achieve a common goal. To pull this off, they don’t look to a manager to tell each of them what to do. In fact, the film’s World Security Council doesn’t trust the team and wants to send a nuclear bomb to stop the enemy. The superheroes make a different decision—a better decision—and by both exploiting and coordinating their individual talents, they save the world.
As companies populate their digital platforms and configure their digital offerings, they will be deploying their own teams of superheroes. Individually, these superheroes (which may be teams or individuals in the corporate world) can achieve great things like writing a cool app or developing an artificial intelligence algorithm. In other words, each superhero can successfully create components. But to meet big enterprise goals, superheroes must ensure that their individual components combine to deliver truly remarkable digital offerings.
Traditionally, companies have expected managers to know how to achieve business objectives and to instruct others as to what they should do. That approach can generate business efficiencies, especially when addressing well-understood problems. It does not foster innovativeness.
If businesses hope to succeed digitally—if they expect to develop valuable digital offerings at scale—they will need to empower their people to imagine and build great components. Just as important, they will need to align the efforts of those empowered people so those components work effectively together. This goal of empowering people while coordinating their individual efforts is why companies need an accountability framework. Your digital platform is the technology base for digital success. Your accountability framework defines roles and processes for building and using the digital platform.
Creativity, Not Chaos
Established companies designed for efficiency have usually relied heavily on hierarchical structures. They have done so because command and control management approaches have helped companies implement optimized enterprise processes. When reliability and predictability are the most important characteristics of a process, management will want to prescribe how employees should execute that process.
Developing digital offerings (and their underlying components) depends less on standardized processes and more on rapid innovation. Leaders count on people to imagine what’s possible and make it happen. To stimulate creative thinking and exploration, digital leaders are eschewing prescribed, hierarchical processes in favor of empowering people to identify, create, and manage digital offerings. Much like start-ups.
Empowerment pushes decision making to the lowest viable organizational level. Doing so ensures that the people making decisions actually witness the impacts of their decisions. Rather than wait for higher-level analysis, deliberation, and consensus building, decision makers can respond immediately when a change has a deleterious effect on a customer or another employee. These decision makers are also better positioned to think outside the box—to do whatever it takes to solve a problem rather than fall back on normal business rules or processes.
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