Accelerate Digital Transformation by Creating a High-Velocity Culture

My last two columns examined the ever-widening ‘Velocity Gap’ between the typical IT organization’s applications and network teams, and how to close that divide. I had planned to also examine how to then take the next big step: how IT can lead the effort to create a high-velocity culture throughout the entire organization. But I decided to hold off after realizing that is a lot of ground to cover. Defining a high-velocity culture, examining how it will provide you with a competitive advantage over even larger, more established companies, and explaining how to create and nurture it deserves its own time in the spotlight.

MIT (News - Alert) Professor Steven Spear introduced this concept in his 2010 book “The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Experience to Beat the Competition.” Professor Spear states that any organization can create a high-velocity culture. It’s not a matter of having more people, more tools or newer technologies. Rather, the high-velocity organization works constantly to figure out how to do something faster, smarter and less costly. And that provides the IT department with the opportunity to lead the transformation of the entire organization.

Spear establishes six qualities all high-velocity organizations share:

1. Goal-driven: Uses output focused designs, detailed workflows and built-in tests to identify gaps and problems.
2. Establishes clear handoffs: Avoids blame game sessions at all costs.
3. Sets clear KPIs: Transparent measurement against these KPIs is critical.
4. Focuses on continuous improvement: Always working to improve the ability to swarm on problems the moment they occur.
5. Shares knowledge: Inter-departmental sharing is just as important as intra-departmental collaboration. There are no silos.  
6. Encourages independence: Leaders use problem solving skills and the Socratic method to develop independent problem solving so workforces can self-assimilate when problems arise.

Continuously improving network, infrastructure and application performance for all users provides IT organizations with the opportunity to demonstrate how to create and nurture a high-velocity culture enterprise-wide. Aligning more closely with business objectives, and helping create new digital streams of revenue, is critical to strategically impacting the business.

With Spear’s six qualities of a high-velocity organization in mind, here’s an example of how an IT team can lead the application of these principles to a key business application:

1. Goal-driven: Complete an end-to-end performance study of a critical business application.  Map baselines and identify the top two to three constraints. These often are errors, transaction time or capacity constraints.
2. Clear handoffs: Set clear cut responsibilities for all the components that make up the critical business system.  For example, Desktop team owns the OS clients operate on; Network team owns the LAN/WAN fabric connecting clients to the data center; Server teams owns the virtualization, servers and storage the applications ride on; and Application teams own the services that make up the business application.
3. Clear end-to-end KPIs: Each of these departments will establish performance-centric KPIs for their responsible area of the critical business application.  For example, the Network team will monitor overall network response time and loss for all locations, as well as critical application response times by site.  Server teams will monitor for physical server performance, CPU bottlenecks, storage bottlenecks and other capacity KPIs.  Whereas the Application team will monitor business transaction times and error KPIs on the front-end, app-tier and database-tier of the critical business application. An end-to-end performance map will be displayed in the Service Operations Center for the teams to transparently monitor, triage and troubleshoot from.
4. Swarm problems: When problems occur, and they always do, a tiger team of experts will use the KPIs to drive initial triaging – instead of finger pointing.  A small matrixed team of functional experts, instead of phone-bridge with 20-30 people, will swarm the problem using tightly integrated monitoring and troubleshooting resources to rapidly identify the root cause.  Over time adoption of predictive analytics and automated run books will greatly reduce the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).  The clients I work with claim a 5x average MTTR improvement.  The savings add up pretty quickly in a large enterprise where a one-hour application outage can cost up to $1M/hr.
5. Share knowledge: As problems are solved, the lessons learned are captured in your lessons learned database; shared over email lists or social networks; and briefed to peers or industry. The final critical step is standard operating procedures (SOPs) are improved to ensure preventable problems don’t occur again – and knowledge isn’t lost as personnel change.  Repeatable performance and improvement is critical to building organizational velocity.
6. Problem solving: As IT leaders, when problems occur we often know the problem and want to fix it ourselves. However, what we really need is our teams to collaborate and learn to solve problems themselves.  Instead of telling the application engineer the problem is with a Java memory management issue and to restart the JVM, coach them through the troubleshooting process so they personally find the issue and then coach them through options to eliminate the issue from production and then work with development to address it long-term.

This also works well when Network and Application leaders encourage cross-department collaboration on performance improvements.  End-to-end performance improves as key IT constraints are eliminated, and the new relationships streamline future interactions – whether around troubleshooting or improvement projects.

If you would like to learn more, reading Professor Spear’s book is just one option. A number of his presentations are available on the MIT Sloan Executive Education YouTube channel. He often holds up real-world case studies to provide proof of how companies have won sustainable competitive advantages by creating the capacity to improve and innovate faster and more consistently. One of my favorites, “High Velocity Organizations: How the World’s Best Organizations Learn Their Way to Greatness” examines how an auto manufacturer with half the number of workers and factory floor space of its larger competitors was able to double output and still produce higher-quality cars and trucks.