Consider this scenario: One day you wake up and think: “I want to be healthy!”
Not all? The problem with “being healthy” is that it is not something you can buy. You cannot buy health with your credit card. Instead, what you really want is to be a healthy person. This simple phrase change makes you completely rethink what you want.
It changes your mind to understand that to achieve the goal you want, you must become a person who will reach that goal step by step. A healthy person would probably take daily steps like exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet, and understanding their weight. These disciplines, practiced daily, will make you healthy. The methodology, however, can be applied to much more than just your health.
open lsd He has been very fortunate to work in many companies in South Africa, from FSIs to telcos to retailers, which provides a lot of insight into understanding the goals and challenges these organizations face. Although all of these organizations are very different, they are all on the same path as all of us. This path, of course, is the path of modernization.
I want to modernize! Not all? As organizations go down this path, you can again see that the question was asked the wrong way. Instead, companies should say, “We want to be a modern organization,” which automatically returns the question, “What would a modern organization look like and what would it do?”
A modern organization:
- Create a vision and strategy;
- Build a culture of skill and flexibility;
- It establishes a solid talent management framework to create the necessary skills for this world;
- It has a user-centric approach to its products;
- You design it for scalability and future-proofing;
- Makes sure decisions are based on data; and
- Has a strong change management approach to communicate the benefits and rationalization for modernization effectively.
These are just some of the starting points you will need on your trip. Looking at these requirements, it is clear that you cannot do this on your own. In my own experiences seeing our customers, and taking part in panels and roundtables from the US to Europe to South Africa, I realized a common theme: partners are becoming key to modernization success. .
This may not be news to most people, but finding a partner to help you on this journey is incredibly important. However, organizations may still be making a mistake if they try to select one or two partners to do everything they need for this modernization journey.
In Jim Collins book Good to excellent, talks about the Hedgehog concept, one of the concepts being: “Determine what you can be better at in the world and what you can’t be better at in the world.” I think this is what organizations should be thinking about when choosing partners for the modernization journey, that is, the partner that is the best in the world at that specific step of the journey.
hundreds of steps
And there are hundreds of steps, from DevOps to microservices, serverless, development, databases, caching layers, infrastructure as code, building agile teams, changing culture, and creating strategic presentations and roadmaps.
The realization that this modernization task is immense is also being experienced by vendors and major cloud providers. They are creating more and more partner ecosystems and creating more and more incentives for partners to work together because they also understand that no single partner can be the best in all aspects of their technology.
The challenge for organizations that want to modernize is not only selecting the best partner but also managing it. A modern organization needs to become like the conductor of an orchestra: once you have the best musicians (the best partners) playing all your instruments (being the best in the world at what they do), they will need to provide clear and concise instructions on how to play and how to play together
I believe that this will allow an organization to accelerate its journey and that this is the discipline in which organizations need to become true experts. If you can carry out experiences with your partners in true harmony, you can really modernize your organization.
To bring all this together, an organization that wants to be modern needs to have the discipline to embrace the plethora of partners, assign them the appropriate step in their modernization journey, manage them, and make them work together.
If all of this sounds too difficult, remember that no one ever said that becoming a modern organization was easy. Just like trying to be healthy, the benefits of being disciplined only pay off much later.
- The author, Neil White, is CEO of open lsd
- Read more LSD articles on TechCentral
- This promoted content was paid for by the interested party
