DO IT ONCE.

There is no company on the planet that does not face major competition ultimately resulting in a need for transformation. It happened to GE in the 80s, IBM in the 90s and now Cisco in this decade along with many others in the industry and every segment of manufacturing over the past 100 years. There is nothing that will stop company transformation for the next century given the nature of business and competition is and has been changing for decades and will continue to do so.

Most companies take a leap of faith and believe technology transformation is the only solution, while others believe transformation is like a marathon and may take 10 years to execute. These strategies all have been proven wrong because strategy without proper execution is like a hallucination. It happened with Western Union in the 50s and 60s, they did not transform for 2-3 decades and their business shrank until they realized how much and how soon they need to execute transformation.

In addition, board members highly request CEOs to transform so they can compete very effectively with competitors. We have seen new CEOs in Yahoo and HP which are by far the best of the breed in understanding how businesses work and have the depth and breadth to be able to transform their companies to success with right people, strategy and flawless execution.

I have developed some basic models that any entity, including the U.S. government, can implement true transformation and become one of the most dominant companies on the face of the planet. It basically does not start with technology. We had built many processes due to the legacy infrastructure of the U.S. and U.S. based companies, which I view as analog, and we are force fitting a digital technology on top of an analog process. It just does not work.

The best and most effective way, without spending billions or hundreds of millions in transformation, is to start with process structure and then determine what technology best fits into digital process. In addition, any transformation, right or wrong, requires the right people with the right training at the right job and their passion and motivation to make it happen. Without cultural transformation along with this process, companies waste their valuable cash and end up replacing CIOs, CTOs or even CEOs. I am a strong believer that these transformations can be very successful in the 21 century and below is a model that has been applied which massive success in transforming many fortune 50 companies in the U.S., but can also be applied to any company anywhere on the planet.

It is a model I call Concept of One, which is the first step in major transformation of any company. In my later blogs, I will talk about the next 2 major steps needed to complete and make this the most successful transformation in history. As Jack Welch of GE and Lou Gerstner of IBM accomplished massive transformations in the last few decades, I am a strong believer that every company can transform themselves within just 3-5 years, not 10-20 years, with leadership like that of Jack and Lou driving the changes. We have a very strong bench in leadership roles in U.S. based companies who can make this happen for entire companies, investors, shareholders and customers.

The Concept of One is a powerful tool for reducing costs and creating efficiency by consolidating multiple organizations, networks, systems, platforms and processes into one. With the Concept of One, you do it once, do it right, and use it everywhere.

The basic principle of the Concept of One is that we will leverage our scale to perform a given function in a centralized manner – either from the point of view of platforms, systems or processes. With the Concept of One, we will not have multiple organizations, platforms or systems performing the same function. Instead, there will be clear accountability and responsibility for performing any and all functions.

Most processes are based on concept of many, and often these processes are engineered as a series of independent sub-processes, rather than one end-to-end process, e.g., in a service provider world, one could easily find a series of provisioning processes for Frame services, another for ATM, another for circuit switching and yet another for IP, etc.; and more complexity arises when each process is often supported by a host of dedicated and duplicate OSSs; and to make this more inefficient, each process is executed by a different group of people.

Concept of One combines these legacy networks into one converged IP network, combines end-to-end processes into one, eliminates some, and uses one end-to-end process and one set of OSSs and one group of people to execute on the customer orders.

Concept of One is an enabler for business transformation to drive cost down, shorten cycle time and to improve the customer experience.

In order to achieve the principle of the Concept of One, we need to be aligned on a common vision and plan of record to support that specific business need. This business need can vary from a frame relay switch upgrade to an OS consolidation to the Voice Breakthrough initiative. Without a common vision, underpinned by an agreed upon architecture, the team will fail in its objective.

Describing the Concept of One in terms of consolidation to common platforms and systems is a fairly well understood concept – but with obvious difficulty in implementation. The benefits of these types of consolidations include not only lower cost through efficiencies, but also fewer database integrity issues, less fall out, more flow through and thus, achievement of faster time to market for our customers.

The meeting of our objective will rarely depend on one organization and function for its achievement. Much of our work requires cross-organizational teams – most frequently requiring Architecture, the Service Realization organization, Subject Matter Expert and frequently, Research. Each organization provides critical skills and functions to the support of the initiative or goal. All are needed – and all must be active participants in the work of the team.

Participation on a team does not mean a “free-for-all” in responsibility. The architecture team should not be doing research; nor should service realization team be doing systems development. Each function or organization must have clear accountability under the total umbrella of the overall project. Any given work function should be performed in one and only organization to avoid duplication.

This does not mean that only one solution or architecture should be evaluated or pursued in the formative stages. We need innovation as well as critical and objective differences of views until the architecture and solution are adopted. Competition in the earliest stages is healthy to ensure we have thoroughly and carefully analyzed alternatives. Once selected, we need to unify beyond the single architecture and solution to win in the market place.

With the business imperative to be cost-competitive, we cannot afford to have multiple processes, platforms and systems with their own unique requirements and resource needs. Our future success depends upon eliminating duplication and redundancy by consolidating and creating common processes, platforms and systems supported by accountable teams.

The essence of the Concept of One is that you do it once, do it right and use it everywhere.

Dr. Eslambolchi