Managing Enabling Technology

This Southbeach model shows an impact analysis for using Technology in business. Reading from bottom left (Technology) to top right (Increasing Profit), we can see a chain of useful and harmful effects as the intended results of automation and combining information in new ways to create new capabilities and business oportunities have their shadow harmful consequences of loss of control, information overload, and increasing cost and complexity resulting in risk of technology outages.

There is a significant management overhead for all enabling technologies. Additional risk management erodes away profits still further, whilst the use of technologies like Business Intelligence to find correlations in market indicators through data mining and provision of multi-level active drill-down reports for management to make sense of the increasing information overload permits evidence based decision making at the highest level in the organisation.

New business opportunities are identified and this often results in yet more technology to overcome the limitations of previous IT systems, and restore control to the business so that opportunities can be properly exploited.

This represents an interlocking of two evolutionary systems in an organisation; the business, and the Information Technology. They enable each other. The boundaries become blurred with time, and the politics of deciding which side of the fence to pitch your tent increase as the cycle of improvement on one side amplifies the other, and technology and business change fall out of sync resulting in solutions that were intended for one purpose being used for another, or investment being targetted at exploitation of existing technology beyond its capacity to support the growth in demand from the business.

Managing enabling technology requires a thorough understanding of both the business and the Technology, and a foot in both camps. In today's world, neither can exist without the other; Building value with business-led inovation requires a supporting culture in the people and a collaboration rooted in relationships built on trust.

Goal Planning

This Southbeach template provides a structure for goal planning. This can be used for setting personal objectives, or planning company strategies.

The focus areas are the objectives themselves. However, these are arrived at by understanding the goal and what it means to have achieved that goal in terms of Key Result Areas. 

Here is an example of a partially filled in template:

Increasing revenue improves profit. Capability, new solution areas and building on success all increase revenue. However, insufficient skills counteracts capability; not knowing where to invest counteracts creation of new solution areas; no case studies makes it difficult to build on success. The root causes of new solution areas, too many options and failure to write up successes are counteracted by the useful enabling actions of recruitment, market research and enabling success.

In general:

Identify the Key Performance Indicators (what you will measure - your measures of success) for each Key Result Area. Set objectives designed to achieve these. Then assess the situation to determine your Critical Success Factors - the things that need to be in place in order for you to succeed at your objectives and achieve your Key Performance Indicators. Some of these CSFs may be missing, so identify the blockers and the root causes of those blockers so that you can create enablers to overcome them and pave the way to achieving your goals.