Saturday, February 9, 2019

Disruption Includes New And Obsolete





Market disruption, and especially the current market disruption, must include two side, the new and the order or obsolete. This is an extremely important concept for the long term success in meeting the change and in my opinion should be viewed as an opportunity to replace legacy inflexible processes and interfaces with a more flexible and robust framework that can support the velocity of the change. The key to success is in reduced reaction time and this means reduced time to sense the change and then reduced time to react and respond to the change. One of the key limiters to the reaction and response to the change is the technology infrastructure and framework of tools and processes supporting the framework. The actions taken to address obsolete functionality and processes will be large factor in the ability of market partners to react and respond to change from within and outside of the organization.




In my experience, every company or organization is enamored with the new and this is especially true in the social commerce marketplace and you see examples over and over again of organizations acquiring new technology in the omni market space to allow them to provide new sales and delivery options. This is all well and good however these organizations also must obsolete and retire services as well. Again, in my experience, there is less of a focus on the obsoleting process than there is on new service development. This weight of the maintenance for support and also more importantly the cost and effort to take into account the obsolete services and technology required for implementation of new capabilities will quickly overwhelm the organization. In the past, an organization could conceivably implement new capabilities and just stop using the legacy capabilities without much of an impact. In this current market environment though the level of change is only increasing and this will require the retirement and removal of obsolete capabilities and services in order to support the velocity of change.




The challenge now for organizations is how to balance, or include, the effort to retire obsolete capabilities while implementing new capabilities. This can be a bit overwhelming at first because the level of effort required to obsolete and retire capabilities is not included in the organization effort plans and schedules, at least initially. These organizations must quickly overcome these issues in order to incorporate the retirement as part of the new capabilities delivery. This can be addressed by updating the capabilities delivery process and procedures to include the questions initially when reviewing the new capability to identify the legacy services and capabilities that should be reviewed for obsolescence. In my opinion this is the best place to evaluate and also enforces the process and procedures in new development.




Traditionally large legacy organizations focused on the new initiatives and this focus tended to leave at least remnant technology and services after the new product delivery. This practice did not impact the organization when change moved at a slower pace. Now with the increased change velocity turning into market disruption, these organizations must focus on the process to obsolete technologies and services because of the impact these unused legacy technologies have on the ability to delivery new change in the manner and speed demanded by the marketplace.

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