At the end of 2009, the Operations Council conducted an agenda poll, asking hundreds of Operations executives what their top strategic priorities would be for the coming year. One survey finding that jumped out immediately was the low percentage of executives who saw improving agility as a top priority (just 8% of the sample—the only category that generated less interest was “Other”).
This statistic surprised and confused us, especially when taken in the context of two other data points: one, that nearly 90% of executives across industries cite agility as a key competitive differentiator for 2010; and two, that 38% of Operations executives think they are performing below target on their agility goals (a higher percentage of below-target performers than any other category). Putting the pieces together, the message we saw was this: Operations executives know agility is important, but for some reason they are failing to address it, and as a result, institutions’ performance in this area suffers.
As we spoke to our members about the topic of agility, we started to understand why many financial services Operations functions were leaving the issue unaddressed. A few consistent misconceptions came up in our conversations—urban myths, if you will, about operational agility. One of the biggest myths is the belief that there is a tradeoff between agility and that most sacred of Operations’ goals: cost efficiency. In the face of such a tradeoff, a majority of Operations executives, not surprisingly, chose efficiency.
I can tell you the agility-cost efficiency tradeoff is a myth because the Council has collected the data to prove it. As a part of our agility research initiative, we conducted a member survey, asking Operations executives to rate their effectiveness in several dimensions of operational agility, defining “agility” as “the ability to meet changing customer and business needs more quickly than one’s competitors”.
The survey data has enabled us to dispel a number of myths held by many Operations executives in the industry. Learn more about the myths we have refuted around operational agility—and see how becoming agile is probably a lot easier than you think—by reading The Truth About Operational Agility: Six Myths About Operations Role in Developing an Agile Organization.
Over the December holidays, I was visiting family in India, and despite everything you read about rapid economic development and the expanding middle class, the poverty so many people experience there is still striking. However, the poverty I saw this time looked very different than what I’ve seen in previous trips. People still live in flimsy shacks, but now they have televisions in those shacks. In the big cities, mobile phones are everywhere. In the past, large populations of the “unbankable” seemed completely out of the reach of traditionally structured financial institutions. These days, in countries like India, large bands of the population can be served through channels that were never an option before, like the mobile phone. 