Aug 17, 2015 By Salesforce

The 4 Core Principles of "The Simple Enterprise" for Productivity (by Deloitte)

in Leadership, HR

The Core Principles of "The Simple Enterprise" for Productivity

The last 15 years have seen a fierce escalation in complexity for the modern enterprise workforce. It began at the turn of the century - amid Surbanes-Oxley - with the fashion for using to technology to impose seemingly endless regulatory compliance and governance, meaning workers were forever filling in online forms and convoluted workflow.

Then the continuing sophistication of the internet has meant information overload is a psychological, not just a commercial, reality. Finally, the new Mobile phenomenon means there’s almost nowhere in the planet where you can’t be bothered by your employer. Work has become 24/7. Burnout is a dangerous occupational hazard for most of us.

It is no wonder then that 35 percent of workers report that they feel their productivity is being hindered₁ - not helped - by legacy IT systems.

Yet for all this technology, we can’t get done what we need to; only what we’d rather not bother with. For instance, 70 percent of workers say they don’t have access to the data and analytics they need to make better decisions.₂

Complexity in the Enterprise has reached pandemic, crippling proportions. Success in the future lies in creating structures and working environments that workers can thrive in, and not become buried in endless process and value-less information.

Here at Deloitte we call this “The Simple Enterprise”. Put simply, so to speak, this is a modern work environment that enables employees to work in a way that suits them rather than enslave them in a cumbersome and rigid structure that only serves to frustrate and limit them.

The model consists of the following core principles:

Breaking down silos: making it easy to use technology to collaborate right across the enterprise peer-to-peer without hierarchies and departmental fiefdoms getting in the way. This enables centres of excellence and knowledge to be unlocked easily to make customer discovery far easier and access to expertise far faster.
Early Technology Adoption: making it easier for workers to adopt and leverage new and disruptive technologies and integrate them into their workflow in a way that turbo-charges innovation at the same time as retaining talent.
Process Rationalisation: by controlling the way management and department admins add new processes and forms, you can rationalise and simplify the degree of compliance and governance your organisation creates and standardise the day-to-day admin for workers, meaning they can focus on value creation instead.
Expediting the strategy-to-execution cycle: too often workers are in a perpetual planning cycle, never getting to the execution. By the time plans are agreed, market conditions have made them obsolete and you must return to the whiteboard! By better communicating the enterprise strategy and mission, you enable employees to execute on that in a way that is lean and dynamic.

As the competition for new talent grows in pace, much of the focus has been on the user experience. That lens is about what modern cloud and mobile technology can do to improve the user experience for the modern worker. This is a reaction to perceptions of what the Millennial generation will - or rather will not - tolerate. However, little attention has been devoted to the overall work experience that belies that. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or intuitive the interface is, if work is still too hard to get done, the best talent will go where it is easier to perform and achieve. While complexity has always been thought of as demonstrating value, increasingly we will see that it is simplification that wins the day!

To hear more on this change model, why not tune into our recent Webinar on the Future of Work.