- In the world of work, we've been fixated on our silos.
Why else would I have just covered front and back office
in a way to describe areas within an organization
where automation could play a role?
We design in silos, we hire in silos,
we invest in enterprise technology in silos.
Furthermore, we also serve our customers in silos.
But recently, some people have started to foresee
of a future where, by using platforms
and automation technologies,
we can create better access to organizational data
and in so doing, we can break down those silos
within the organization.
So picture this, in the future, after a customer speaks
with a front office customer care agent,
that interaction and the insight generated
would be shared with for instance,
a supply chain professional trying to ship the good
to the person that the agent just spoke to
and also with the finance and accounting department
that collects the money for the shipment.
You see, silos no more
because silos throttle data creation, stifle insight,
and just generally create a bad experience for everyone.
You feel this every time you try to book that holiday
we mentioned or interact with your bank
or try to navigate the health care industry.
Having to fill in numerous identical forms
or tell that next agent,
I've already given you this information.
It's just not acceptable anymore.
The new generation of digital native customers
will leave you faster than you can say,
the computers are being slow today.
And with increasingly digital levels
of operation infrastructure,
the hope is we can move from the feeling of many offices
to a reality in which there is effectively just one,
one office, one integrated enterprise connected by data,
underpinned by intelligence,
designed with the science of service
to be absolutely focused on the end result.
One such framework that highlights this concept
is actually called one office
and was developed by HFS Research.
In their model,
there are five fundamentals of the digital one office.
First, that it fosters genuine digital customer, partner,
and employee engagement.
Second, that enterprises leverage design thinking techniques
to achieve continuous digital outcomes.
Third, enterprises create a digital operations foundation
able to automate, digitize, virtualize, and secure.
Fourth, that enterprises establish
an intelligent, digital, support function
free from the silos we mentioned
and the hierarchies that often accompany them.
And finally, fifth,
all business processes should be intelligent,
designed as such to create the data
that will promote predictive decision making.
And the end result should be,
no matter what sort of customer you are,
be it a customer of your company's HR department
or an account holder at a bank or a patient in a hospital,
the integrated organization of the future should be able
to help that customer one caring interaction at a time.
But I'd chance a guess that organizations like yours
are far from this integrated, one office reality.
To get there, you'll need technology, design thinking,
capable change management and a strong mandate for change.
Let's move on now
and talk about putting together that mandate.