BUPA’s chief information officer Sami Yalavac has increased staff engagement by 51 per cent and increased its net promoter score – a measurement of employee loyalty – by 50 points during the healthcare giant’s tech transformation.
According to Yalavac, there were 5 key shifts that that allowed this to happen and to implement the 5 shifts below, the way members of the IT group thought about what their roles had to be turned upside down.
Bupa’s tech team had to change focus from just running technology to business engagement, consulting, brokerage and orchestration.
The 5 key shifts (according to BUPA)
Key shift 1: True customer-centricity
IT must think from the experience it is creating for its clients and not just the technology it is implementing. Every person in every role must be focused on how they are contributing to customer outcomes.
We must align the IT organisation’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and key success factors (KSF) with the experiences we are creating for our clients and we must provide visibility to our stakeholders on how we define success. To do this we must realise that our role is part of the business and not to service the business.
Key shift 2: Pro-active business engagement with frontier thinking
We can no longer think of IT as an enabler, technology is now the DOER! It is IT’s job and responsibility to understand the business and customer needs.
Thought leadership is required from IT and we must develop our team’s capabilities to take on this role. IT can no longer just be a messenger and must take on end to end accountability.
In addition, as part of our relationship with the rest of the enterprise, it is IT’s responsibility to constructively challenge any assumptions or suggestions that we see from a different standpoint due to our expertise and insights. We must take the leadership role in developing how IT and the business engage together.
Key shift 3: Be fit for the digital age
To drive our transformation journey, we must invest in our culture and have a strategic approach to developing our people. We must provide the best climate in which our team can work, without it, people either don’t work well or we lose people.
A clear and strategic direction around how technology will enable becoming a digital business is also required. Be careful not to be adding features onto a foundation of technology that is either flawed or outdated.
Architecture must be flexible, adaptable and expandable. We must think of it as a long-term reusable commodity and leverage areas like cloud and integration/APIs to accelerate the transition.
Key shift 4: Right speed delivery
Rather than operating at one speed of delivery, we must be able to adjust and adapt our delivery speeds in an agile way based on the need we are looking to address. The way our IT teams work must shift from being siloed to cross functional teams. Repetitive and highly automated tasks are to automated and we must shift from being project centric to service centric.
Key shift 5: Leverage best of organisation and market
We have rapidly growing demand for our services and limited capacity in terms of time, money and people to serve this demand. The services that are most likely to be differentiating for our customers need to be identified and then there is an opportunity to explore how we best provide our services, including where we need to build capability and/or where we should leverage the market through a clear sourcing strategy and framework. There are times when it is best for us to deliver and times when it is best to use others.
In addition to the above, there are 5 additional changes that are necessary for all of this to work and they are:
1. IT must be part of the leadership team and technology expertise must be viewed as a core ingredient in shaping future direction.
2. IT must lead the technology selection process for the organisation
3. All technology resource selection must be led by IT
4. IT is accountable for technology delivery
5. Match funding to strategic initiatives
Look for a follow up article next month that will expand on these 5 additional items.
Lou Markstrom is the co-author of Unleashing the Power of IT: Bringing People, Business, and Technology Together, published by Wiley as part of its CIO series. Over the past 25 years, he has worked with over 35,000 people to create high performance organisations, teams and individuals.
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