Technical debt - a luxury you cannot afford for long

 

Are you caught up in the luxury trap?

Most of you will recognize the television concept of "Lyxfällan", "the luxury trap" or "Luksusfaelden" - a hit tv show where participants get help with getting out of debt, reorganizing their economy and take steps towards better financial habits. It's somewhat educational, but mostly a reality tv style flash impression of other people’s lives, intended to shock and awe for maximum viewership and ad revenue.

 

 "How can people just ignore invoice reminders and letters from collection agencies?" (you might think, whilst watching the show).

A valid question but in fact most of us are a little blind to different kinds of debt building up over time. For some it's financial, for some it may be lack of sleep or exercise and for many organizations and businesses - it's technical debt.

Technical debt reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. 

The trap we get caught up in is a classic ”boil the frog” or ”death by a thousand cuts” situation – it’s not any one individual decision or mistake that take us all the way to ruin. It’s the gradual deterioration of interdependent components that in the end cause breakdown or perhaps even worse, misinformation.

Like any building or larger asset, maintenance and recurring investment into the IT infrastructure and applications supporting your information flows is required to keep it working as intended over time. If neglected, technical debt builds up and will eventually cause serious disruption to your business - hopefully not to the degree where collectors come for your assets though. Every business needs to be able to trust their data, able to get reliable answers to reports and queries designed to support the decision-making process. 

You can compare it to being able to start a car and drive off but when you discover that the brakes don’t work – you face a number of ’challenges’. If your reporting doesn’t work at all, you know you have a problem – but a report with healthy figures that misrepresent reality, that could be a real showstopper problem later down the line.
 

Luckily, there are ways out of the deepest trench and similar to the many reasons you may find yourself there - one is through continuous improvement: 

• Continuous review from an enterprise architecture perspective helps in identifying potential risks or investment areas in time. 
• Even mainframe and legacy infrastructure can be modernized through application refactoring, migration or encapsulation using e.g. data virtualization or RPA to make it operationally efficient despite outdated technology.
• A step-by-step approach can be taken to reinvent and migrate your integration environment from an onsite colossus to a nimble, agile and cloud-based platform which supports and empowers your business & application teams rather than stifles innovation.

Don't get caught in the technological luxury trap - make sure your core information assets are in order!

 Are you looking for ways to leverage technology to benefit your business and outsmart the competition?  Get in touch - every step forward starts with a constructive and thorough discussion! 

 

Digital business Automation – the Swiss army knife of information management

 

 

The One Tool - how can a new tool improve on the too many tools problem?  

In the early days of my career, I had the pleasure and privilege to work at an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software company.  Back then, with some consolidation going on in the ERP market, it was easy to imagine a not-too-distant world where all conceivable business transactions would be handled within an end-to-end monolithic ERP platform (think SAP).

20 years on, the market and reality went in the completely opposite direction. We now have a plethora of systems and information sources which contribute to the overall IT landscape and working tools that we use on a daily basis. Each and every one of them are considered more or less necessary. We're stuck in a trap where even modern integration strategies and platforms come up short when it comes to reducing the number of systems required to support the business operations.

We’ve got external information sources, reference systems, real-time data streams, data lakes, data warehouses, systems of record (with our common set of databases), systems of interaction (desktop applications, web frontends, mobile apps) and everything in between. We’re trying to make up for fast-paced requirement changes in the customer base, pressures to improve quality, margin and efficiencies internally. As well as to expand and enable new capabilities, often with maintained or diminishing manpower resources and the result is too often a bolt-on, a quick-fix, something that fits into a short-term budget or time window.
 

Narrowing down the problem definition

The source of the problem is three-fold:

• We cannot fully out-think the direction towards future customers. Instead, market- and business requirements will drive technological solutions. Reality will always move faster than our ability to fully design and implement support for the functionality “needed” to stay agile, competitive and customer focused with adequate profitability. This is usually expressed in the now classic conundrum of “two-speed IT”, “bimodal IT” or “shadow IT spending”.
• Our IT landscapes and system investments are typically too shallow, focusing on functionality and short-term gains, diminishing or even removing the focus on underlying Master Data Model and process coherence across macro processes and geographies, despite such factors being crucial for long-term IT spend ROI.
• Systems and software applications are developed on a spectrum from fully bespoke and tailor-made (expensive to build, expensive to maintain) to off the shelf industry standard applications (made for minimum effort support and maintenance, “easy” upgrades). Priced accordingly, too, and we tend to prioritize price over functionality and capabilities, in the sourcing selection process.

So we always have to play “catch up”, improving on the toolset, system map, expanded and new applications. We have to make up non-standard ways to use applications as the delta between standard workflows and each way of working in individual organizations differ slightly, and we have to compensate for maintenance and security shortcomings in application uses introduced from the business side rather than the IT side of the organization.

The practical result is a patchwork of applications, slightly disconnected and slightly the wrong fit, to be supporting the business in an efficient and conclusive fashion. We put ourselves, our time, attention spans, energy and bandwidths into the gaps between applications, compensating for shortcomings in the functionality and adjust our workflows and processes accordingly.

This takes us to the starting point of the argument for this post: How can a new tool improve on the too many tools problem? Well, if you start by looking at the existing IT landscape in detail, you’ll see that most applications are made up of components, usually cross process in some areas.  At some point, e.g. the OrderWarehousingInvoicing solution got connected to the CRM suite to facilitate transfer of records and improving on the related workflows. Automation and interconnectivity happened – within the application, and bit by bit we’ve adopted a system of systems rather than a set of standalone applications.
 

Leapfrogging in IT - step by step

Modern automation, using technologies like BPM or RPA, allow for an abstraction layer across and between applications rather than within , creating completely bespoke workflows which fit your organization and business model like a tailored suit, whilst leveraging the power of standard off the shelf applications. Depending on the information flow requirement or workflow properties, several of the labor intensive and repetitive tasks can be captured in process maps and logical conditions, that direct the workflow automation to free up time and resources from associated tasks.

Thus, limitations within applications or data sources, can be leapfrogged with “yet another tool”, allowing us to match our business requirements with a better functional fit, raising efficiencies and quality, and to build a system of systems which as a biproduct also allows us to focus on problem solving and creative tasks rather than rote repetition.

One tool to rule them all, one tool to find them, one tool to bring
them all, and in a well -planned system architecture bind them

So to speak. And you don’t have to wager your eternal soul to reap the benefits, in this case.

The bonus element of this technology and tooling, is that you don’t have to go all-in, aim for a monolithic big bang investment. It can be implemented on an activity by activity process by process basis.  And with the time and resourcing gained with each step, the available resources to improve further through intelligent information grows.

This is the last of a four-part blog post series about intelligent automation, using technology in a smart way to get the most out of the time, energy and overall investment each organization is faced with to improve Customer offering, quality and overall market competitiveness.

Are you looking for ways to leverage technology to benefit your business and outsmart the competition?  Get in touch - every step forward starts with a constructive and thorough discussion!

Automation - the hidden potential

 

 

Leveraging the power of automation

The power of automation - it certainly has a ring to it, right? If you've already read the preceding blog posts in this series, you know that we've covered various aspects of implementing automation; inherent distrust of new technology and the not-invented-here (NIH) challenge, finding the right mix between improving workflow and introducing yet another tool & technological platform, and avoiding the most common pitfalls when it comes to moving from labor-intensive to automated workflows.

These are crucial steps towards leveraging the power of automation, and with successful outcomes it can be a game-changer for your business, your colleagues, and your customers.

In a way, the title of this post could’ve been “Leveraging the power of technology”, since the application of technology in most cases aims to provide some kind of automation of a task which we either do not want, or cannot afford, to execute manually. We could call it “creating capabilities” and “eliminating inefficiencies”.

Classic LEAN methods prescribe the elimination of waste identified with the mnemonic TIM WOODS – Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overprocessing, Overproduction, Defects, Skills

A brief explanation of each, highlights quite clearly what areas we can address with technology and automation as low hanging fruit -

• Transportation - Moving items or information
• Inventory - Items or information that the customer has not received
• Motion - Excessive movement within workspace
• Waiting - Waiting for information or items to arrive
• Overprocessing - Doing more work than necessary
• Overproduction - Doing work before it is needed
• Defects - Mistakes and errors that need to be reworked
• Skills - Not using the skillset available
   

Eliminating inefficiencies

Through e.g. integration, BPM or RPA as technologies, we can make sure that the right information reaches the right recipient in time – always – and the move, the transportation, is automated.  No more trudging through an export from SAP to filter, sort, copy and paste the information into another system to generate a report or presentation material.

This also includes a variety of operations on the information set, which may today be carried out manually – the exclusion or addition of an area code prefix in contact information, the sum total of a sales report, the concatenation of street name and post code in the address field etc. just to highlight a few generic examples. It gets done automatically, every time, and without any errors, mistakes, defects.

The win, the measurable impact in each task, activity and process – is that lead times are shortened or even eliminated (moving or waiting for information), actual work required is minimized (more work than necessary), the automated parts of the process are quality assured and secure (errors than need to be reworked), and the actual work required shifts focus from rote repetition to creative innovation and value-adding problem solving, making sure that the full skillset available in your colleagues comes to use (using the skillset available). Keep in mind that efficient automation also includes the factor of eliminating overprocessing (not doing more work than required) even if that work is automated in itself. Almost needless to say, customers – internal as well as external – will receive service with a completely new level of availability, transparency and response time which in comparison to the previous situation, will be game-changing.
 

Creating capabilities

Having seen what technology can do to our existing ways of working – what does it mean for the overall business, and the way we approach and communicate with our customer?

Looking at industry trends in practically every field over the past 20 years, it is clear that a vital part of our customer expectations, regardless if it is in relation to a product or a service, online or offline – is digital - the information dimension is critical. If I need a product, I want to be able to order it online, I want to be able to follow the delivery information from dispatch to delivery, I want information about the product properties to be available online and I want to be able to interact with other consumers who use that product to maximize my benefit and use from it. This is completely regardless if the product is IoT enabled and connected to a centralized service – and by then we’re entering into a whole new dimension of associated services, metrics, customer consumption and behavioral information etc. which can completely transform a business from reactive and competition driven to proactive and customer centric.

These are the kinds of capabilities that only are available through leveraging technology and automation – there just isn’t a way of achieving those types of information transfer and transparency, without efficient automation. Judging by the direction that the market and consumer behavior has taken – in short, you could say that there is no other way to stay competitive, relevant and valuable to a fast-paced information driven consumer base. You might think that this is strictly specific to the B2C market, but if so - take another look – B2B is even more data driven, from supply chain to aftermarket, the information flow is becoming the backbone of market leaders in every industry – and we’re taking our behaviors and expectations as consumers or professionals in both directions. Intuitive seamless access to information, private and professional – is standard, and a capability you cannot operate without.

This is the third of a four-part blog post series about intelligent automation, using technology in a smart way to get the most out of the time, energy and overall investment each organization is faced with to improve Customer offering, quality and overall market competitiveness.

Are you looking for ways to leverage technology to benefit your business and outsmart the competition?  Get in touch - every step forward starts with a constructive and thorough discussion!