4. Change is Emergent, Not Planned: but you should plan for emergence.

In the move towards Cloud Communications initial attention will be drawn to total cost differences from On Premises. Cloud costs in relation to storage, hosting of data, etc. will trend towards low very quickly. Value will pool around Application and Service performance. An aspect that receives less attention is the ability to deliver “adaptability”. Sense and Respond adaptability to the changing, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment requires employees and customers to be self-empowered, to be able to “pull on resources’ and to be empowered with the training, knowledge and authority to address the customer problem.

Of course, If all your interactions are totally predictable, programmable and stable then there is little need for this kind of adaptability and the focus could remain in issues such as reliability, security, and efficiency.

Where users, supervisors, managers are all empowered to change or self manage even small elements of “jobs to be done“, things improve little by little every day until suddenly at the end of the year you are significantly** better. Anybody who has spent time trying to make deeply flexible systems understands the challenges this poses with regards delivering flexibility while retaining usability. Flexible systems enable you to develop, implement, and track these many small changes for cause and effect relationships, and to track outcomes. On a higher level we can also see the emergence of surprising “new shapes” and “new relationships” which we would not have thought about testing for. They open up the ground for new service innovations. (In a different, but related enterprise context, Esteban Kolsky makes the case that it is the fundamental flexibility of a platform that is crucial).

We certainly try to develop the relationships with our clients and to provide the tools that help you capture data about your interaction cycles. It is also our experience that there is value to be delivered in bringing our data approach to the analysis of the “customer interaction journey”. It is not only “functional” at the point of interaction, and the micro-contexts around that point, but we also try to see the emergent relationships.

If your wondering what it might take to lead this kind of a change effort and transition is I direct you to this blog post by Graham Hill.

Bottom line – You can’t be emergent without flexible systems and iteration.

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