Change is hard for people.  It challenges their preference for certainty and they feel a loss of control.  This is clearly evident in any enterprise undergoing transformation.  

Fear of change is not felt evenly within the organization.  Executives are usually advocates for change.  They know the enterprise has to adapt to a changing world and new challengers.  Something  is going  to  have to change.

The line worker has a different view.  Although there is the fear of their job going away, the job itself is still based on tasks.  Just tell me what to do and I'll do  it.  The way  they  do  their  work may  change, but  the  nature of the job  is the same.

The group most challenged by change is the "hard middle".  These employees value their ability to manage people  to get the  work done.  They value  their expertise and deep business knowledge.  They  look at change as challenging those core  values.  Continual engagement does  not always  result in their  buy-in.  The key to  transformation is empowering the hard middle.  By giving the hard middle capabilities to monitor and manage work, the hard middle can be converted from the organization's transformation's greatest road block to its greatest advocates.  The result  is to give them ways to use  their expertise to contribute  more  value.  The results will be clear and visible.  The hard middle has to become the change agents for the  new operating  model.

One major challenge in transformation is aligning with Enterprise goals.  

One  technique to handle this is through the  establishment of fusion teams.  "Fusion teams are multidisciplinary groups that blend technology, analytics, and domain expertise to accelerate the delivery of digital products and services." Fusion teams are not new.  They have been around at least 25 years.  Fusion teams can be very  successful, but their long term success depends on aligning their solutions into a repeatable operating model  and  architecture.

This is  where the  Center of  Excellence (COE)/Communities  of Practice (COP) model excels.  Fusion teams facilitate coming to a solution.  The ultimate  goal isn't to  solve a problem, but to set  up a framework to repeatedly  solve problems.  This is where the COE comes in.  They  are experts at products/technolgies.  Their objective is to establish patterns of integration, usage,s and innovation.  In the  Right  Strategy, the COE is often in the shared service products (In the EA Diagram - Integrated  Services, BI Services, Integrated Application Services, and BPM Automation Services).  The  COE are experts on leveraging the technology and exposing capabilities.  The serve the  standardization function in the Investigate - Standardize -Optimize pillar.  Their  goal is to  make  the  new capability repeatable, supportable, and consumable.  

The Communities  of Practice are  the  business (including IT) consumers of the  capabilities developed.  This is  the  optimization step.  Building easy to use  patterns  of consumption that  result in faster delivery and consistent  performance.  The  COPs are empowered.  As long as  they follow the  COE patterns, delivery is streamlined.  The COPs expose expertise from across the Enterprise.  

The use of Fusion Teams/COE/COP establish a new, dynamic integration of technology  to  support the  business.  It creates an Digital Factory where all Enterprise assets (technology, business knowledge, etc,) can be aligned for success.

Empowerment is the key to unleashing  the power of the organization.  An industry pattern for many years  has  been configuration.  With established patterns, the entire customization of a solution  can be  done through  configuration.  An example is an eCommerce product.  These products are developed to allow the business to configure it as they need.  They can simply add/modify  products, bundle products, do customer outreach and  experience, etc.  These are out  of the box because  all commerce sites  essentially do the same thing.  When you have a pattern to support, after  it  is standardized, it  can be optimized to support configuration.

The Right Strategy is the more common pattern.   It is all about  consumption  of technology. It  is the underlying  truth of technology  that mirrors  differential calculus.  It is the single point of change, where technology is used.  Technology is only  of value when used.  It can only be used either  by  a person,  a technological agent (AI bots, IoT), or a process.  The first two  are handled by a tool. The best example is BABE.  It allowed the business to create tools to solve problems.  They  configured  the  tools, tied them to work lists, and established success criteria all through configuration and without IT involvement.  

Configuration changes  the  SDLC.  There  is a  new  entry  ramp to production.  The  business can move and test  their  changes independently, and once they  meet the gates established, can promote to production.  Governance is  integrated  into the  SDLC. 

When the partners are not internal to the organization, optimized integration patterns are critical. At its technical core is something like IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), but its consumption model may be closer to BAaaS (Business Assets as a Service).  BAaaS is the optimization of IPaaS (standardization).

There is a future where all consumers are partners.  It is an expansion of the  Hackathon model, where consumers (individuals, AI agents) can safely, securely leverage many different enterprises' capabilities into unique tools.  The basis for this is  within an optimized IPaaS, the security model was based on consumer owned credentials (like ATLaaS).  The tool instantiation has unique content in the  consumer.  

Democratization is another expansion on the SDLC.  The acquisition policy enforces the governance around the capability.  It may include approvals, testing, service levels, costs, etc.

The consumer becomes the focus of all consumption.  All required capabilities come to them, rather than them having  to endlessly search for them.  In this world, the  best, most consumable capabilities win.  Advantage can be taken or lost in real time.  No enterprise can ignore the opportunity.

Democratization can be achieved by  expanding building on the  enterprise's empowerment initiatives.

Empowerment, and the ever expanding leveraging of assets, changes the way IT gets discussed.  It changes from discussing very big problems (replacing large systems, engaging  new  technology) to the instance of usage.  

Could you perform brain surgery  if  you  had  the right  tool?  Every question  becomes  "what is the right  tool  for that and how do we acquire and incorporate those capabilities"? The only technical assets  that  make an organization unique  are their information, rules, and processes.  

The Right Strategy is a new way of thinking of IT.  The focus is on usable tools in a business context.  Technology, data and other capabilities support the tool in meeting its objectives.  It is therefore the antithesis of how systems have historically been built.  

You see this every day.  Every time you signon to a system, you are entering another silo.  If you think of it as a physical silo, it may be even easier to understand.  For a single instance of work, you start by doing something in Building A (after having passed security).  The next step in the process requires to do something in Building B.  You walk over there and pass security (signon to another system).  You keep walking through building after building trying to get something done.  It gets worse if you only go to a building occasionally.  You may forget what you need to get into the building (like your user id or password), or you might forget how to get to where you  want to go.  

After doing this a while and with continual use, you may actually get another building to trust you based on your primary building's credential (federation).  

The Right Strategy is a sharing paradigm.   The work we need to do in the other buildings are not only brought to us, but in a context that the outcome mandates.  

If creating buildings is not the right metaphor, then what is?  Virtual buildings?  No, It is more like building  a cruise ship.  A ship that can navigate the new digital age.  Something that is in motion and can take the business to where it needs to go.  This metaphor helps to define a new optimized division of work in the IT delivery model.

Along those lines it is better to think of the stakeholders in the digital world as we think of the relationship between parties in the cruise boat industry.  There is the ship building company who is responsible for building the features and functions of the boat (this is the IT shop), there are their suppliers who offer the components of the boat for the suppliers (IT vendors), there is the crew who steers and operates the boat (the business) and there are the passengers/clients (customers).  

In the new metaphor, the vendors are the suppliers.  They offer capabilities.  They may do this either in product sets (collection of capabilities) or as individual capabilities.  These are the building blocks for IT.  Traditional IT vendors offered products that were bundled with constraints. These constraints were to make the product more  functional.  Each product had a user interface to make it easier to use.  Security was built into each product.  The vendor kept adding to the product so that  customers didn't have to purchase or integrate with other products.  Products became silos.  Training was required for every product.  Not just for functionality, but for specialized navigation and administration.  If vendors had made assumptions (or dependencies)  of how their products would be integrated by an enterprise, they immediately limited their audience.  Vendors didn’t intentionally build in these lock-ins.  It was a by-product.  The more a customer took advantage of these “bundled features” the harder it was to get out of the product.  

Today products are moving to an API (capability) based offerings.  Vendor products still have specific administrative UIs, but these UIs consume functionality through  APIs which allow for other consumption models.  Security is still bundled in a lock-in fashion.  Building Right  Strategy tools breaks down this last silo, by leveraging capabilities based on consumption not platform.  

IT becomes the shipbuilders.  They take certain capabilities and prepare and package them for the business to use.  They create combined components (power and steerage) that the business is then empowered to use to accomplish their goals (expanded BusOps) and steer the ship.  The business defines the capabilities and even some of their usages.  It is the ship builders’ job to make them available and easy to use. 

The crew is the business. The crew accepts the ship builder as the primary deliverer of features. There may be other direct supplier relationships (SaaS solutions, in the ship building metaphor something like branding or Wifi).  However, someone is still responsible for integrating these into achieving outcomes.   The goal of the ship builder is to empower the crew to successfully use the ship to meet business goals.  Navigating is the best example.  Once delivered to business, why would the ship builder be involved (unless there are issues)?  However, it does bring up a potential conflict.  Who is responsible for running the engine room?  Is it the business?   Is it IT?  Or is it a combination like on a ship?  Many of the functions in the engine room are handled by the engine crew?  However deep maintenance or issues would require support from the ship builder and/or supplier.  The digital age is evolution, and some of these responsibilities change with maturity.

The passengers are the business customers.  It is often best to offer many services to the customer and let them pick their experiences.  This is self-service in IT.  

By preparing to sail, we change the basic IT and business dynamic.  IT empowers the business with ways of being successful without vendors or IT trying to tell them how.  The division of work empowers stakeholders to deliver on their core values. In this mode, all stakeholders are consumers of technology.  More importantly, if tool configuration can be optimized, then all stakeholders can be a deliverer of business success.  That is the goal. 

The Right Strategy is building something different.  It therefore needs new techniques and guidelines to assist in delivering the Right Strategy.  Next we will discuss some of the enabling techniques that facilitate Right Strategy decision making.