Flexing to keep-up: drivers, enablers and key success factors

"Empowering your people"

Enabling change is dependent on culture. People make culture.

Shift to business agility is about changing the overall culture. The real change will be in the way actors deal with their role and responsibilities, both from a change and run perspective.

One of the key characteristics is that it requires a far more collaborative approach from business, but at the same time delivers results and value faster.  As such, the organisation inevitably tends to become more collaborative and less hierarchical once the agile methodology is fully implemented.

The method is especially suitable for adapting to changes and rolling out new products in a timely and efficient fashion. This can include finding new ways to reach the organisation’s current and potential customer base, test new strategies or perhaps learn more about the customer preferences.

"Overcoming legacy and anticipate regulations"

There are two main roadblocks in the years ahead: increased regulation and legacy systems.  Firstly, regulations will continue to drive several required system changes and will therefore remain a challenge for banks especially who have not yet implemented these changes, or not very good at anticipating those.

Secondly, large organisations reached a point where the weight of historical decisions in technology became too important for maintaining the usual status quo. The more they wait before investing in simplification, the more expensive and complex it will be to transform.

Legacy systems and batch-based applications do not support the use of available advanced technologies and analytics solutions, which can result in a failure to support the strategic objectives of the business.

This in turn leads to poor analytical practices, ineffective operating models, cumbersome and manual processes.

A key question for banks is therefore how to ensure that the current process and legacy systems are not a hindrance to being relevant for the customer and becoming agile.

If the end goal is a client-centric organisation, one of the obstacles to overcome is legacy systems. One way is to have more coordination between IT and business.

MBx’s approach to tackle legacy challenges

1.      Define which legacy systems need to remain and what adaptations are required

2.      Identify legacy systems which can be migrated and decommissioned

3.      Develop an effective business and IT partnership, changing business needs can be quickly responded to Ever increasing need to have a global and holistic understanding of the enterprise and how best to integrate the IT governance, risk management and compliance strategy

“Embrace innovation as a matter of routine and become a real client-centric organisation”

Once these roadblocks have been surpassed, the next step in moving towards a truly client-centric organisation is to identify and understand the different customers segments. This is as important as reshaping the culture to be innovative and collaborative. (this can surely be actioned in parallel of simplification)

Digital transformation has changed the way of communicating with clients, the channels they use and the products they want to have access to. As such, people will need to:

1.      Listen and engage with customers

2.      Enhance products launches and promotion

3.      Build communities and promote new products

4.      Aggregate and distribute content across the social web

5.      Improve comprehensive digital consumer experience

6.      Integrate e-commerce and customer care platforms

Research through the years has demonstrated that for a customer experience to be considered as excellent (aiming for better than just good), it has to meet client needs, be easy, and be enjoyable. A poor customer experience results from the inability to provide a relevant and seamless journey among customer touchpoints. As a consequence, customer experience (CX) becomes a strong indicator to measure channel integration maturity. Less nimble organisations do not structure and share information across organisation or channels and do not foster a complete customer journey. This means they are not offering a “unique company experience” to clients, there is a lack of Business Intelligence capabilities and inefficient process architecture. They do not have sufficient analytics to understand the customer and streamline operations.

However, by tackling existing roadblocks, increasing the awareness of industry changes and implementing an agile organisation, bank executives can put their firm on the path to a truly client-centric organisation.

This leads us to realising the importance of client strategy as a key enabler towards business agility.

Thoughts?