SS - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 18
Or take the real-world service providers who held a perspective of:
‘... highly efficient back-office operations’ during the emergence of serviceoutsourcing
‘... low cost service provider’ during the emergence of off-shore skilled labour
‘... technology-specific expertise’ with the emergence of open systems and software.
Perspective is attained with the help of clarifying questions asked within the context of the service provider’s stakeholders, which includes primarily its owners, its customers, and its employees. Conversely, well-defined perspective serves as a reference for subsequent positions, plans, or patterns of action the service provider may adopt and enact. Public assertions made by a service provider are usually based on strategy as a perspective and reflected in its value proposition to customers. The value proposition may be implicit in the customers it serves, the services it offers, and the particular perspective of service quality it adopts. A clear perspective helps make this value proposition explicit. This strategy is defined at the highest level of abstraction and maintains the organization’s farthest planning horizon. It drives other control views of strategy (the other ‘Ps’) and is modified based on feedback from those views.
Once a perspective has been attained, here is a test:
Does it capture what you intend to do for only the next three to five years, or does it capture a more timeless essence of your organization’s distinctiveness?
Is it clear and memorable?
Does it have the ability to promote and guide action?
Does it set boundaries within which people are free to experiment?
The distillation of an organization’s strategy into a memorable and prescriptive phrase is important. A sound strategy is of little use unless people understand it well enough to apply it during unforeseen or ambiguous opportunities.
3.5.4 Strategy as a position
Strategy as a position is expressed as distinctiveness in the minds of customers. This often means competing in the same space as others but with a differentiated value proposition that is attractive to the customer. Whether it is about offering a wide range of services to a particular type of customer, or being the lowest-cost option, it is a strategic position. Three broad types of positions are variety-based positions, needs-based positions, and access-based positions.
3.5.4.1 Variety-based positioning
Variety-based positioning focuses on a particular variety of customers’ needs and aims to meet them in distinctive fashion. It requires a relatively narrow catalogue of services but with depth in terms of service levels, options, and packages. Service assets are highly specialized to deliver this narrow catalogue. Service providers try to meet all the needs of any given customer segment. Success is in terms of performing exceptionally well in meeting a sub-set of needs (Figure 3.27). Capabilities are strong on leveraging economies of scale, managing similar demand from different customers, and fulfilling it with a small and stable catalogue of services. Growth is based predominantly on new opportunities for the same catalogue of services. For example, a service provider may specialize in payroll services for several groups within a business unit, several business units within an enterprise, or several enterprises within a region.
Figure 3.27 Variety-based (left) and needs-based (right) positioning
3.5.4.2 Needs-based positioning
In needs-based positioning, service providers choose to provide most or all of the needs of a particular type of customer (Figure 3.27). It requires a relatively wide catalogue of services covering various aspects of the customer’s business. This is closer to the traditional approach of grouping customers in segments and then aiming to best serve the needs of one or more targeted segments. Service providers do not worry about meeting the needs of every type of customer. They distinguish themselves by performing exceptionally well in meeting most of the needs of a particular customer or segment. Capabilities are strong on leveraging economies of scope, managing different demands from the same customers, and fulfilling them with a flexible catalogue of services. Growth is based predominantly on new services in the catalogue from the same source of demand.
For example, a service provider may specialize in supporting most or all of the business needs of a group of hospitals. It may offer a catalogue of services that covers infrastructure services, application maintenance, information security, document management and disaster recovery services specialized for the healthcare industry. It maintains expertise on electronic medical records, privacy issues, medical equipment, and claims processing. Similarly, a provider focusing on the financial services industry has deep insight into the peculiar challenges and opportunities faced by investment banks, insurers, and brokerage firms.
Type I and Type II providers are often positioned to serve a customer segment of one. They have only one customer at the enterprise level even if there are several at the business unit level. Many internal IT organizations are expected to meet all the IT needs of the business that own them. They do not worry about meeting the needs of other enterprises and can therefore organize their service assets to best serve one enterprise customer.
3.5.4.3 Access-based positioning
In access-based positioning, service providers distinguish themselves through their ability to serve customers with particular needs with respect to location, scale, or structures (Figure 3.28). Customers vary in size, location, and structure. They deploy business assets in a manner that best serves their own business models and strategies. Some operate networks of retail branches, stores, trading desks, or point-of-sale terminals that serve as access points for users of their own services. Others have business assets concentrated at a few large-scale facilities such as factories, warehouses, distribution centres, and call centres. The employees of some customers are highly mobile with extensive travel and intensive communications needs. Others may have staff mostly in offices and laboratories.
Figure 3.28 Positioning based on location, scale or structure
Positioning of any type requires service assets to be specialized and deployed in patterns that best satisfy the patterns of demand generated by business activities, cycles, and events of the target market spaces. This is mostly an opportunity to consolidate, stabilize, learn, and grow into a high-performing service provider with focus. Specialization of service assets allows service providers to deliver greater levels of utility to targeted segments. It also means risks from the high level of asset specificity when there are sudden or drastic changes in the market space from which some providers never recover.
Asset specificity
The more specialized an asset gets, the lower its usefulness for other purposes. A point-of-sale terminal has higher asset-specificity than a PC workstation or storage device that can be re-purposed. Asset specificity applies to organization and people assets as well. Type I providers who have never served more than one customer find it hard to adjust to corporate mergers and acquisitions.
When a tax collection agency decides to accept electronic filing of tax returns and electronic funds transfer (EFT), there is a significant change in its patterns of business activity. Consequently, some service providers, including the agency’s own internal units, have better access-based strategies than others to serve the agency. An insurance company offers to initiate the claims process at the site of an accident. It does so by dispatching claims handling staff to the accident site with all the resources necessary for the claims process. This strategy not only provides distinctive value to its policyholders but also speeds processes and reduces administrative costs from lengthy cases. It puts an office-based clerical job out on the front-line in vehicles specially equipped with the necessary business applications. The insurance company itself adopts an access-based strategy to distinguish itself from competing insurers.
Other service providers in turn may compete to win the business of this progressive insurer by offering mobile workplace services that automate and integrate the claims processing vehicles with back-office systems. Service providers with knowledge and experience in mobile systems and applications, similar to those used by emergency medical services, would have a distinctive advantage.
Service providers may adopt one or more of these generic types of positioning (Figure 3.29). There are no universal rules for these positioning strategies, simply plans and patterns that work, or definitions to comply with. Concrete plans are required, however, to maintain strategic positions from which the mission and objectives are achieved. A sound position guides the organization in what to do and, just as important, in what not to do.
Figure 3.29 Combining variety-based, needs-based and access-based positioning
Once a position has been attained, here is a test:
Does it guide the organization in making decisions between competing resource and capability investments?
Does it help managers test the appropriateness of a particular course of action?
Does it set clear boundaries within which staff should and should not operate?
Does it allow freedom to experiment within these constraints?
3.5.5 Strategy as a plan
Strategy as a plan is a course of action from one point to another within a competitive scenario. Often referred to as an intended strategy, it is the deliberate course of action charting a path towards strategic objectives. The planning horizons are typically long term but lengths may vary across organizations, industries and strategic context. Again, plans are the direct means of achieving goals and objectives. They commonly focus on financial budgets, portfolio of services, new service development, investments in service assets, and improvement plans (Figure 3.30).
Each plan focuses on achieving well-defined outcomes or conditions in a particular context. The key inputs to a plan are frequently derived from the results of the strategicassessment, and are framed by the strategic position and perspective.
Figure 3.30 Operational plans and patterns are driven by strategic positioning
Plans are linked by the need to achieve certain strategic objectives. For example, building infrastructure capacity, consolidating staff at key locations, licensing a new set of software applications, and complying with an industry standard may all be parts of the same strategic plan to reach a distinctive position.
Service management can be viewed as a coordinated set of plans with which service providers plan and execute their service strategies. The difference between success and failure in strategic leadership and direction is largely dependent on how well this coordinated set is put together, put to work, and controlled in execution. Two service providers with equal sets of resources may achieve different degrees of success simply because of their strategic plans.
3.5.6 Strategy as a pattern
Strategy as a pattern is an organization’s fundamental way of doing things. They are the basis of what are called emergent strategies, distinctive patterns in action reinforced over time by repeated success. For example, rather than pursuing a plan to cut service costs through service sourcing, the provider makes sourcing decisions one at a time – testing the validity of the idea. First it may source telecommunication services, then application hosting, then security services, and so on, until a strategic pattern has emerged.
The patterns are embedded in a service provider’s way of doing business. Management systems, organization, policies, processes, schedules, and budgets are all discernible patterns of action that are documented and controlled. They are the consequence of perspectives, positions, and plans directed by senior leadership in service of a particular customer or market space. Others exist in the form of tacit knowledge carried by those who carry them out. They may be neither documented nor discernible because they are unexpected outcomes realized in pursuit of certain goals or objectives. Nevertheless, they deliver value to customers so managers must capture and codify them into the organization’s documented practices.
Consistent and controllable patterns are part of the service provider’s distinctive capabilities. These patterns are valuable because they emerge inside the organization as a direct consequence of actions taken by managers and their teams. Therefore they are likely to be a signature of the organization and a source of competitive advantage. While industry practices and standards are available to all, signature processes can truly distinguish the value provided by a service provider.22 Best practices are patterns in action for superior outcomes over the normal expected performance using prevalent practice in comparable circumstances. Organizations can set their own improvement threshold for designating a pattern as a best practice. Other criteria may include elements of innovation, efficiency gains, external recognition, and the transferability of the related knowledge.
Patterns are useful in identifying areas of opportunity. Useful patterns in performance can be codified into practice and made available as reusable assets to other parts of the organization. When patterns in action become systems and processes, they are placed under Configuration Management so they may be stabilized, standardized, and improved. They are the past guidance from which to reaffirm or correct the current strategy. As business cycles continue, new patterns in action may emerge and provide feedback.
When managers put in renewal or improvement activities, they advance their organization to an advanced level of maturity. Strategy as patterns in action can therefore be a very powerful perspective of strategy because it engages all levels of management and rests on systematic learning. Service management can be viewed as an adaptive network of patterns through which strategicobjectives are realized. Some patterns in action are shown in Table 3.1.
Example patterns of action
Description
How-to patterns
Set the operating style of the organization. The framing of how activities are performed, for example:
R&D staff must rotate through operations