A non-trivial amount of the work we do in Digital Strategy at the moment is focused on the design of digital operating models. I don’t particularly like the name, but the sentiment is about designing a business fit for the New Machine Age. As I’ve mentioned before, this philosophically means that it ultimately needs to become outcome- rather than process-centric. Making that happen means applying some new organisational and operational concepts to the business, one of which is an idea we’re beginning to talk about a lot: cadence. Cadence basically means the rate at which you do things. Businesses always have them. They’re part of the culture. In a PLC, they are quarterly to match the reporting cycle. In the public sector they’re often annual. In digital startups they could be as fast as weekly, to correspond with the tempo of an agile delivery ethos. Usually though a business has a natural speed and struggles to operate outside of it. The public sector struggles to act outside of
Thoughts on strategy in a Digital Economy