As someone who writes about innovation and is a Twitter friend of mine, Jose Baldaia is one who understand the importance of not only encouraging innovation in companies, but also engaging others in the innovation. Jose recently wrote a post about this topic, What we need is the ability to simplify the complex and do it at scale.
As usual, I agree with his premise. This is a very interesting conversation and I think one that many innovative organizations are having right now. My interest in this topic relates not to products but to services, as that's what my company, Improvizations, does. We sell implementation and upgrade services to companies that use Kronos software. We work very hard to simplify and streamline our customers world. However my thoughts would apply to any services company. We all need to package our services in components that are easily understandable to the customer. We must conceptually model our ideas around what a customer needs and wants to be able to offer and to communicate our 'product'.
Jose goes on to say,
"Things are composed of parts or units, more or less simple and therefore the more units we combine to form what we perceive as a thing in the world (a product, process, system, service, etc.), the more complex it seems."
This makes me think of our internal systems. We are currently in the process of completely overhauling the tool set we use to support our Delivery process. There have been discussions about hundreds of different, sometimes conflicting, requirements. This is as one often finds in a Kronos implementation where we are discovering their true needs. Early in the process Cindy requested one of the requirement considerations to be that one software handle 80% of the requirements to 'keep it simple' for the Talent. This seems to fit Jose's theory, however we have to evaluate how many 'units' are going into that one software suite too, and how well they combine the result into a single product. Either way can be more complex!
So do we need to follow that same advice? Of course we do. Simplicity in either the individual units or in the 'package/product' that our Talent (and Customers) use is just as relative as the service products we offer. So as we progress down our chosen path we will be treating ourselves just like we treat our Customers. Looking to Wow!
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