Build for Change: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement through Continuous Digital Innovation

Chapter 4Getting It Done with Customer Processes

Source: © 1963 William O’Brian/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank. Reproduced with permission.

We now have memory (data) together with judgment and desire (intent). Combined, they create wisdom that memory alone cannot provide. But something more is needed. To be responsive, to be able to respond with that wisdom, you need some muscle. Only with muscle can you put memory and intent to work and deliver results.

In the human body, skeletal muscles—also aptly known as “voluntary” muscles—have tendons that anchor them to bone and that are for locomotion. Processes, functioning as muscle, also have an anchor or foundation, found in the remaining three of the “six Ws” discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Data is who. Intent expands the list to include what and why. Like tendons in muscles, working with the brain, processes work with data and intent to complete the list, adding when and where and how. Brains and brawn is better than brains alone.

Every human body depends on muscle. So, too, does your company. Muscle gives you agility, and when combined with brains you are capable of achieving a level of agility that is necessary to withstand the daily business exigencies. Consider “sense” to be data and intent and “respond” to be judgment (or decisions) and processes, and you can see what it takes to be agile and the situations ...