Provocative title right! Well, I’m about to reference Elon Musk, so it might get more provocative! Seriously though, love him or hate him, agree with him or not, I did see an interesting Tweet from Elon Musk recently.
I can’t find the exact Tweet again (I should have saved it!) but he described how most companies focus on adding 20% on top of their business (be it new products, services or ways of working), but few focus on removing the bottom 20%. If it’s old adage that 80% of business value comes from 20% of activities, I wonder why we don’t spend more time ‘trimming the fat’?
This conundrum always comes to light when we look to streamline, integrate and automate our back-office systems.
We’re sold on the dream
There’s never been a better time to optimise your back-office systems. With a whole range of SaaS, low-code, no-code and iPaaS tools, not to mention AI, there’s a whole bunch of value to be realised at a relatively low cost.
But here’s the thing, if you put lipstick on a pig…it’s still a pig (no disrespect to pigs).
What I’m talking about is blindly trying to apply new technology on top of sub-optimal or poorly defined ways of working (aka ‘target operating models’). We too often look to technology in isolation to solve our problems, rather than looking at technology and operations collectively.
In essence, what we do is move the same old problems to new technology and spend money in doing so.
We need to re-imagine our operations considering better technology
I’m not saying we need to throw the operations playbook out of the window. But we should be thinking about how we can trim, simplify and streamline as part of a move to new technology. After all it’s called ‘transformation’ rather than ‘replication’.
As humans we’re naturally fearful of losing things, so it can be difficult to let go of that process that only applies to one customer, who contributes little to the bottom line. But these are the things that we should be thinking about. We should be actively thinking about what we are prepared to lose so we can leverage our strengths – and amplify them by using better technology.
