Digital Decoupling

I. VERY BUSY CATAPILLERS

An organization cannot move as one. Resembling a caterpillar, it experiences a lag from front to back in communication, readiness, delivery and collections. They operate at different speeds, under different rules, and on different scales. For example, placing orders, supporting one stakeholder, closing a reporting period, filing with regulatory agencies. All functions ideally flow productively in optimal sequential order.

When environmental conditions signal changes, externally facing teams tend to feel it first.

Baselines are disrupted, constrained by the growing misalignment between narrative (for which the organization is built) and data (which is under no obligation to conform to any narrative). The ability of the organization to interpret and respond appropriately will likely happen quickest here than at any other stage of the challenge.

External facing systems (sales, support, procurement) tend to be more adaptable as their teams must be more immediately responsive to their respective stakeholders. They tend to support more agile teams and have a culture of adaptability to shifting conditions.

By contrast, operational systems (HR, finance) tend to stabilize over time as the functional teams they support tacitly or formally adopt standards and controls. They establish stable platform on which the organization can predictably grow its business. operational teams are less suited to adaptation, based on cultural foundations older than any business operating today. For them, change is neither natural nor easy.

III. AGILE ORGANIZATION 'PUT'

They must all serve each other to reduce operational drag allowing growth to flourish. The best way, in terms of path of least resistance and highest propensity for success, to set a self-sustaining cycle in motion is to harness the natural tendencies of organizations. Allow stakeholders to follow their own respective self-interests. And to make sure the clear rules of engagement and fields of fire are established, communicated, and enforced transparently, lest anyone's sense of stake be perceived to have been compromised.

III. KEEP THEM SEPARATED

Rather than saddle mature systems with the disruptions of changing expectations, separate legacy and mission critical systems from product development and business analytics. Insulate back-end operations from the churns of change while unleashing the externally facing functions that be design respond quickly to new challenges. Allow these complimentary domains to negotiate their own optimization based on their own criteria and timeframes as a strategy for coordinated asynchronous growth.

Start fresh when exploring new idea with relevant data samples and fresh bespoke environments, isolated from core ones. Negotiate refreshes on data to feed discovery and modelling and automate them to restore the time back to the functional teams providing the data.

IV. The "SO WHAT?"

Organizations need not compromise their customer-facing, strategic and supporting operations while innovating. Free all teams from unnecessary drag on each other's resources through smart and minimalist integration at the data layers to feed secondary users of functional data. Keeping them separated is the more tactical and change-proof approach to balancing business as usual with innovation, by not extending existing core teams and systems to also support what are likely to be by definition, many expensive experiments.