I would have loved to have seen the presentation that’s been given some positive press here.  Westpac are putting some meat around their transformation agenda after having learnt from the experiences of other banks.

Many of these large scale transformation programs (think ERPs, CRMs, core systems replacements, etc) have a tendency to teach the organisation about a product.  The whole organisation will learn how to implement that product – they’ll learn it’s strengths and weaknesses, and the right and wrong ways to successfully exploit them. Those in the organisation who aren’t part of the solution will at least learn that they have an opinion about these things.

Now, the actual benefits of these programs aside, this is a strange way to for your organisation to spend a few years.  These programs become a distraction that take up executive, management, and operational attention.  But what if you changed the conversations so that rather than learning about a product, you completed the same program but what you where really doing was learning about your customers and how to better orientate your organisation towards their needs?

I think the approach Dave Curran has managed to convey (again, based on the reporting – I wasn’t there) starts to do that.  This approach means that effort is first and foremost about the customer. Now I’m the first to say it’s not that simple.  There is still a lot of work to make that vision operational. But it completely changes what the organisation will primarily be learning during program.

The key lessons now will be about customers – what Westpac knows about them, what they don’t, what decisions they are making every day, and how that might be understood by Westpac staff when making their decisions.  The other lesson they will be learning is how technologies they already have, combined with technologies available in the market, can be used together to support various customer scenarios.  Not trying to find “the best” solution without any context, but trying to design solutions across a well informed view of what is important to customers.

I think too that if this is done right, the discussions won’t be broad sweeping generalisations. They won’t be “is this one monolithic system really customer focused?”  Likewise, there shouldn’t be that tendency to continuously revert to “yeah, but what is a customer?”  That conversation seems out-of-the-box but is typically only asked because the people in the room have never met a customer (!) so they revert to broad open questions rather than use their experience.

Done right, this approach will draw out rich, informed conversations that admit that we have to bring components together to support specific customer scenarios.  It will draw out conversation about what we don’t (!) and ensure we find out.  Done right, this approach keeps up the sustained momentum these programs need to do the hard work that will truly transform the organisation.  

I have a few grounding concepts that I think are relevant here.  They are quite simple in their nature but powerful as the basis for governing change.  I’d suggest these should be established for the program.

The Customer Advocacy Office

We talk about the importance of customers all the time but often the question we don’t ask is “what is the business unit in our organisation that advocates for our customers?”  I don’t mean lets give somebody the responsibility for customer and then split the role into “Contact Centre” and “Web site”.  I mean real, serious thinking about customers.  Being able to understand and back up with facts.  Being able to offer targeted operational changes – backed by evidence – that will improve the experience of customers.  

Customer Experience Campaigns 

Your organisation is probably comfortable with marketing campaigns.    But what if the concept of a campaign was expended to include any situation where your customer had a defining positive or negative experience with your brand?  Customer Experience Campaigns apply the basic concepts that are used to manage a marketing campaigns to all of the individual experiences of your customers.  This is actually really difficult, and really important.  And it’s what we mean when we say we want to be customer focused – but do we actually do it?

Customer Information Management

There is a lot of work required to get a single view of a customer.  There is even more work required to repurpose that view so that it highlights the information required for different groups to make decisions (i.e. single core data, multiple views).  But that’s still not “customer information” – that’s just consolidating and presenting data effectively.  A true responsibly for customer information management means knowing what you don’t know about your customers, and understanding the value of finding out.  It also means understanding how modern technology allows us to understand and predict the complex decisions that our customers are making by using big, social, cheap, integrated data to act as a proxy for intimacy when you can’t always get inside your customer’s heads.

Customer Return on Operations

Things like Net Promotor Score (NPS) are great but they are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using customer-driven metrics to improve your organisation.  These “voice of the customer” metrics are great but they are “lag” indicators until you do the correlation required to make them “lead” indicators.  Measuring you customer return on operations combines how your customers think you perform with how you think you perform.  It’s hard, it takes a prolonged effort, but who could argue that it’s not important? 

Competency Centre -based Business Transformation 

Many transformation programs are top-down.  This means they are limited to the types of transformation that you can achieve top-down.  The Westpac approach will required a middle-out approach.  There are many functions within the organisation that will need to be transformed to execute on the vision.  Thankfully, competency-centre based business transformation is an excellent alternative to top-down transformation – if your transformation team “gets it”.  

This approach also includes the question of which type of “core” you want your organisation to have (accounting, versus product customisation, versus customer hub). When you’ve done the right homework, you can then make clear and informed decisions on whether something is differentiating or not differentiating. This decision drives standardisation but it is so mixed up in a tight bundle or current power struggles it needs an informed third party to arbitrate. 

I’m not saying just talk about the concepts above in the executive management team. I’m saying that in addition to the other governance required for this sort of program there are executive roles for each of the above areas.  There are charters and terms of reference for each of the above areas.  Each of these areas should be managed as a business capability where the executive in charge is responsible for working across functions so that the people, process, information, and technology all work together to support the capability.

By the way, I’m not sure I get the title “Dancing About Architecture” that the article  I link to above uses.  I’m assuming it’s a reference to the “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” quote that I, like everybody else, mis-attributed to Elvis Costello until I just looked it up.  It’s a nice image – the idea that you might use something other than architecture (such as your customers) to guide the direction of your architecture.  You dance around (or “about”) your architecture so it knows where to look.  Though by alluding to the music quote the author seems critical of the approach.   Anyway – looking forward to part 2…