Transformation by globally scaling local customer journey successes

Going Hybrid with Deepak Subbarao: The 10's

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Seth Adler
Seth Adler
04/22/2019

Going Hybrid with Deepak Subbarao: The 10's

In the 2010s, enterprise truly realized the need for a dynamic approach to business. It was a combination of the emergence of the process of thinking, the force of mobile and the explosion of data. It led to the consideration that maybe there's a case for a hybrid approach, for having a very close set of common strategies, a set of common covenants, and a common set of transformation initiatives.

Going hybrid

Last decade we did get introductions to the frameworks of design thinking and customer journey. The concept of customer journey, of course, has been around for some time– but we really started to leverage and build transformations around these customer journeys.

We started to ask, how can we think end to end– and began to grapple with what that meant in terms of set up and our own operating models. That led to the challenge of making sense of having a global centralized approach, which ultimately led to the case for a hybrid approach.

Intelligent automation disruption

It's very interesting how not only the methodology, but the business structure and enterprise getting disrupted that has all led up to this almost perfect moment in time to adapt and adopt these intelligent automation technologies for the enterprise. Little of the applied form of internet technologies or automation available along with their subsets will be applicable at the local level. Our local team levels are not necessarily pushing down and finding every solution across every organization– but rather they are saying what would make sense for a particular region, customer, or organization, and then rolling out that set of automation technologies.

Scaling custom customer journey success

Looking into the future, with these past 30 years of business and enterprise in mind, I think the first key lesson is being global. It does not necessarily define the success criteria. When I see that a solution applies to most of our customers, I do not necessarily mean it’s a successful solution that can be rolled out everywhere.

We have learned from our understanding of the customer journey that we have these different types of customers to which we cater. That fact is more important than identifying goal markets. The approach to the solution should be global but at the same time can be localized and adapted to the local needs– that’s the first lesson from our collective recent history.

Value of the data

The second lesson is just the value of the data. We did not realized the true value of data over the past 30 years. When you’re working towards it, when you get into the middle office or the back office– the value of the data is still not being appreciated. Slowly, that's one of the realizations we are having across the organization.

Fail fast, learn quickly, scale up

The approach you take to determines how quickly you scale up. We have agile methodologies, as opposed to waterfall approaches, because we've got this technology that can be implemented quickly and iterated quickly (as opposed to an ERP system). Usually the transformations we did and the ways we scaled the solutions across the organization were pretty slow, very linear, and sequential.

There's a case now today for continuing, clearly scaling, so at least we can fail fast and learn fast. Using these lessons from the past we can apply everything that we know to scale up in a way that makes sense for the enterprise, makes sense based on the technology, and of course make sense for the customer.


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