I recently read an interview with Ranjay Gulati published in the Harvard Business School “Working Knowledge” newsletter (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6201.html) based on the reference given by Dick Lee in his blog here. As Dick rightly says it is an interview which will change the perspective that many of us see customer-centricity.
Based on Ranjay’s research into the outside-in mindset covering companies over the last decade, he indentifies the process changes as a journey. In a lot of cases, companies in various stages of the journey believe they have reached complete customer centricity when the are able to understand the customer. However, as Ranjay rightly mentions, just knowing the customer is not enough.
Having said this, I start thinking what happens to companies which become complacent after they implement outside-in processes for their products. As companies grow and become more “attached” to their product offering, they start moving down the road towards the inside-out mindset. There have been many start-ups which have made it big with their new product offering, which fit into exactly what the customer needed. They listened to the customer and came up with a solution to the problems that the customers had. However, really only a handful have been able to sustain the perspective to come up with new innovative products.
So in my view, the journey to the outside-in paradigm is a two way street. At one end you have the inside-out (product centric) mindset and the other end you have the outside-in (customer centric) mindset. Where you are in this journey depends on your innovation and creativeness to find solutions to the customers’ problems. However, staying there requires “continuous” innovation and change. As wise men have rightly said, “Change is the only Constant”.
It is questionable whether enterprises can actually maintain a focused strategy long enough to align their core business processes with information technology. Organisations across the globe have adopted the SOA(Service Oriented Architectures) to meet the rising demands of Customers. What I feel is a "H" point ie a 3 way road 1) product Centric 2) Customer Centric and 3) information Centric. The information centric approach supports business processes by defining activities with pre and post conditions.Each activity in a business process is represented by pre and post condition for the implementation so the journey from Product Centric to Customer Centric is bridged by Information centric processes.There should always be a way to move from "Inside Out" to "Oustide In" which we may call the third route.
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