Decentralization:

Unless there’s a compelling market-oriented reason for a decision to be made at the top, it’s delegated to the lowest level where the best information resides.

Marketing Mechanisms:

The market is the most efficient process for allocating resources. Therefore, central planning and powerful budget offices are shunned in favor of market like processes that are scarce resources flow to individuals or departments, based on profitability or risk.

Ownership:

Because entrepreneurial behavior is desirable, make people at all levels feel the consequences of their decisions.

Minimal Organization:

Corporate activities are limited to those few things the company does better than any outside source.

The obstacle to customer service was an organizational model replete with overlapping functional roles and overly independent geographic responsibilities. To sort this out, the company needed software to manage customer relations, software to configure the right product-pricing mix, and analytical software to manage financial performance.

The missing element was a clarification of the following decisions:

Who should deal with customers, and when?

Who should be involved in what decisions, and how?

How are priorities to be assigned?

Who gets what information when, and what is the proper use of that information (was it evaluative, analytical, or informative)?

Involving IT people early on and directly in the information gathering and analysis used to answer such questions, and also to assign decision rights, led these people to naturally redesign the planned software and make it more useful and used.

Senior execs don’t pay enough attention to IT early in the change process.

Here are the general examples:

When IT is aligned with company wide needs early in a transformation, the need for rework is minimized, and the cost and risk of schedule delays are lowered.

The process of consciously examining decision rights helps answer two basic questions about IT systems: Who will we them? And more important, why will they want to use them?

By clarifying decision rights, roles, and information requirements, need to have vs. nice to have IT capabilities become Distinguishable, producing minimal requirements and making the scope of the project more manageable.

The process clarifies which problems are rooted in IT systems, and which are in the organizational model. It separates our organizational problems that IT can’t solve but for which it’s often blamed. This point was of particular significance at company XYZ.