The ability of organization to rapidly adapt to changes in the society and in the marketplace is a factor that has a major impact on the competitiveness of firms in private sector; and the valuation of public sector services by citizens and businesses.
For this reason, organization have increasingly adopted the concept of ‘agility’ to enhance their way of working in software development in technology divisions for example. In the business lines, agile innovation is also being advocated. Activities are broken down in small pieces, and completed collaboratively in small teams. This approach tends to work well in relatively small projects. However, in large innovation programs with the aim to implement a business transformation initiative that spans more than one year, working with agile small teams at operational level is not sufficient. It may even increase the complexity the risks of fragmented solutions if coordination mechanism and changes in the organization as part of the innovation process are not appropriately dealt with.
Beyond agility
The issue at stake for organizations is to create a working environment that enables meaningful collaboration between people and across organization boundaries in order to fluidly execute cycles of innovations and changes in business operations. During our work with clients, we found that while organizations invest in the development of software tools with the objective to support collaboration, this goal is generally not achieved. As a senior executive explained to us saying: ‘we discuss the importance of collaboration with partners and we invest in tools that do not provide the results we want. We need to first understand what collaboration is all about’.
Digital and mobile
In a time where the ownership of all resources is no longer a competitive force, firms are increasingly focusing on developing an operating model based on using external knowledge and resources to collaboratively manage their businesses. In such a business environment where business leaders are emphasizing value co-creation in an ecosystem in collaboration with partners, organizations should be able to fluidly operate collaboration through their partnership engagements. It is more than just enabling mobile workers with mobile devices and access to the digital workplace any time and any place.
Organization capability
In our work, we combine expertise in the fields of organization design, business model and technology, in addition to industry specific knowledge to help firms to develop fluid organization capability. Such a fluid organization capability enhances the ability to significantly improve collaboration internally between employees but also across organizations in partnership engagements; and to achieve better customer experience two ways interaction.