“You watch the game, you don’t see Busquets. You watch Busquets, you see the whole game,” said Vicente del Bosque when describing his Spanish team midfielder.
Ok, if you’re not a football fan then bear with me on this, as I decided to combine two of my favourite things in this post.
The concept I want you to take away is there are many similarities in how successful modern football coaches set their teams up to play, and how the FICO Platform provides businesses with the enterprise-wide ability to be successful.
Most of the best teams use some form of a pivot in their midfield. In rough terms, the pivot has the task of being the link between defence and midfield, breaking up the play and protecting the final third of the field. On top of that, they also have responsibility when the team is transitioning to attack. Usually, they will be the ones that distribute the ball and orchestrate the play.
So, the pivot provides the team in possession a high degree of control and agility to move forward. It pins the opposition back, allowing the team to stretch play and create and probe for gaps and opportunities to exploit with smart decision making.
The pivot is the backbone of the team, an enabler who provides the flexibility to change shape quickly, solve complex analytical problems instantly, to read the game and find the best course of action. Essentially, they are the brain that allows the components of the team to come together and flourish.
Having the ability to pivot is fundamental to success in business too. It needs a platform to use as a base and that platform is the foundation for being able to flex the approach and quickly adapt to evolving needs. Being able to operate cohesively and break down the siloes (such as organisational, data, lines of business) and to have clear lines of sight right across the breadth of the enterprise allows us to implement the most precise customer decisions that unlock business value.
So, in our world of consumer interactions and automating decisions across the customer lifecycle, a world that has shifted away from an orderly and linear customer journey, a world of disruptive competitors, we need a foundation from which to understand our customers from an event-driven and profile-driven perspective. We need to join the dots as to how the game is evolving around us and have the ability to think several steps ahead. We need to act as the midfield pivot, to implement a platform that enables us to move away from point solutions operating in isolation of one another.
It’s no good if the defenders operate in isolation from the midfield and the midfield does their thing whilst leaving the forward line marooned. The whole flow of the team becomes disjointed and won’t perform to the best of its ability. That’s where our CTOs, our transformation leads, our enterprise architects should have the over-arching vision that knits the individual business areas together into one team that work with one another using a common set of tools and innovates together for the benefit of the collective.
You might not always ‘see’ the platform, but it is there, just like Busquets, dictating the game and helping organisations to accelerate digital transformation programs and operationalize AI at scale.
Learn more:
Business Transformation Through Digital Decisioning Platforms
Webinar: Forrester - Why Everyone Needs a Digital Decisioning Platform
Analyst Report: The Forrester Wave: Digital Decisioning Platforms Q4 2020
