0:01 Hugh Dillon: If you take exactly what the business team says they want, you won't build a high quality modern product. And in reality, modernization is about upgrading your organization's capability to change and change quickly.
0:18 Jennifer Poma: Let's start with the big picture, why is modernization such a critical challenge for organizations today?
0:24 Hugh Dillon: Yeah, so it's actually one goal disguised as another. When you hear about modernization, you hear a lot about getting to modern technology or upgrading a system. And in reality, modernization is about upgrading your organization's capability to change and change quickly, much more than it's about a modern technology.
And so it's just really important for organizations right now to get your framing right on how you think about modernizing your systems and moving into the future. And so you've heard it probably in the past framed as transformation, which makes it sound like a one-time thing. But these days, in reality, it's more of an evolution, meaning you're always having to work on changing.
If you're sitting still, you're falling behind. And so really building your organization's capability to change is the key thing for organizations to focus on in the second half of this decade.
1:22 Jennifer Poma: Your blog introduces the concept of a service blueprint strategy as a way to approach modernization. Can you break that down for us? What makes it different from other strategies?
1:33 Hugh Dillon: Yeah, so service blueprinting is not a new thing. It's been around for a while, service design as a branch of design. And the value of it really comes up when you reframe modernization from a we need modern technology problem into a we need to communicate well and we need to figure out how to change both as a business and technology organization quickly.
And so what we found from talking to our clients is that they weren't able to change quickly for two big reasons. The first one was the technology teams were just building exactly what the partners in the business asked for and not necessarily what they wanted. And so there's a communication breakdown of if you take exactly what the business team says they want, you won't build a high quality modern product.
The second thing is the technology and the business teams would get together and drive compromise initially around, hey, let's get to 80-20. Let's get the process aligned to what this out-of-the-box tool does. And then we'll just do a little customization towards the end of the project to be able to address any missing functions.
And what they kept realizing was that the last 20% ends up being 80% of the work. And so we like service blueprinting just because it's a way to show everyone on the same page how the technology systems that you have in your ecosystem are integrating into the overall process and also be able to trade off, hey, if we make a change in this part of the process, it's going to affect these other pieces. Are you sure you want to do that? So you kind of solve both problems at once.
3:21 Jennifer Poma: Can you share an example where this approach helped a company modernize effectively?
3:25 Hugh Dillon: We had a client who was looking to navigate kind of the start of this process. And that's really where the service blueprint, among three or four other methods, is actually really helpful. Because you're able to navigate the initial, how much should we change at once?
And have we thought through all the downstream effects of what this change means? And should this live in a big platform? Should we integrate each individual tool, or should we authorize to a single one?
All of these questions that kind of overwhelm you just by the amount of open space and ambiguity you have when you start thinking about making something new. And so the big takeaway there was that when we used the service blueprint, we got very visible alignment within three-ish weeks to be able to say, this is what we think we need to move towards, and this is what will change a little bit at a time. And that just kind of illustrated for that client that modernization in 2025 is really about evolution more than it is about transformation, because it's an ongoing thing.
And so they were able to see where they're going to change small bits and pieces one at a time and bring it back into the big picture. And we had Figma prototypes and architecture designs built on top of a process that everyone felt aligned to within six weeks. So evolution these days means moving much faster than a, let's do a big transformation effort. Let's make this a large future state effort.
5:03 Jennifer Poma: Many organizations hesitate to modernize because it feels like a big effort. How does a service blueprint help break it down?
5:11 Hugh Dillon: Yeah, so the first thing it does is just shorten the learning curve. So you need to focus on learning communication patterns and methods to communicate well and improve that capability before worrying about what the changes might mean for your business process or your daily work or any of the other things that come downstream of agreeing to this change. And that lines up with what we're hearing from clients as what we're really after is the ability to change and adapt.
And so learning to communicate and getting good as an organization about communicating is really the first step in that.And the service blueprint forms an approachable way to have a structure to your communication. The second thing it does is get away from the we've tried that mentality.
A lot of companies have attempted a modernization, attempted a big effort and not have the success that they had in mind. And so it's a smaller time commitment and a smaller chunk to see what could change easily. And then larger efforts can be commissioned around the smaller successes and you start to build that momentum from those initial chunks.
6:29 Jennifer Poma: This has been great. Before we wrap up, what would you say to technology leaders thinking about their next modernization?
6:35 Hugh Dillon: Yeah, two things. The first one is the saying "design your communication or your communication will design you." And that is ultimately just a mantra that helps you frame the modernization correctly.
If you look at it as looking for the latest tech, that tech is going to change faster than you can implement it. But the ability of your organization to change and adapt over time is an evergreen pursuit. So it's easy to kind of shy away from those communication problems and kind of focus on what you're building.
But it's worth it to go ahead and build the capability for your org to communicate changes, to adapt quickly and align quickly. But you don't have to go without methods to do that. And so service blueprint is one of about four to five core methods you can use to align your team and learn and build that capability to change quickly.
Because 2025 and beyond is going to require that your organizations change faster. So if you'd like to talk about that, we'd love to talk about it. But thanks again. This has been great.
