"What's next" for integration competency centers? - Part 3
Next in the next-generation strategy kit is: “High degree of collaboration of the ICC across stakeholders that allows more transparency in the engagement and leads to co-creation of methods of delivery/operation of ICC with stakeholders”.
Basic premise for this view-point is the evolution of the working model for ICC. A typical model for shared services has ‘close door’ system or ‘black box’ system. It means that for rest of the organization, this shared services engagement is only for the delivery of service outcomes. For rest, ICC manages internally. It worked fine during early phase of the evolution of this system since it brought relief to other dependent parties from headache of managing variety of matters; now they could just focus on the outcomes from this shared service. But today, this black box is limiting the overall capability of the organization to innovate and improve
With advent of modern social networking and collaboration practices (like wiki, blogs etc.), possibilities of innovation has gone multi-fold. How to leverage the talent, ideas and learning across the organization in integrated manner, that’s the focus of this point.
As I see, going forward, ICC as system need to bring in closer involvement of other systems (read business units/groups) for co-creation of value. Co-creation of value is the key here. It means that a measurable value goals will drive the ICC in terms of its core focus and ICC will develop ways to deliver these value in collaboration with other stakeholders. Co-creation implies that ICC will closely involve other stakeholder in critical aspects like methodologies, engagement model changes, cross-leveraging of best-practices (across portfolios of domains and technologies) etc. Now stakeholder are not just the actors in the ICC engagement usecases, but they become co-owner of the practices, models, processes and various other operating frameworks being used by ICC. So first of all, why do I think it will work? Okay, here are key reasons for that:
- In this kind of operating model, objectives are co-owned and aligned. Otherwise, typically ICCs run with their agenda that may or may not align to objectives of the business units.
- In this model, ICC has greater spectrum of ideas and view-points, directly coming from its service consumers. That has greater chances of success than ICC hypothesizing the solution and methods in silo.
- Solutions and methods derived by this model will have naturally greater acceptance from the stakeholders engaging with ICC. That makes life in ICC easy and issues can be now discussed/managed with transparency.
Co-creation as a strategy is gaining wider acceptance with big businesses and as I see, it will fuel up the innovation if done rightly. It also supports the focus of continuous improvement where majority of input from entities being engaged is being turned into an improvement and taken back to them again as a change for better.
