Overcome speechlessness with use cases

To overcome the dilemma that IT service providers and potential business managers cannot communicate for their mutual benefit, use cases can be used as common ground.

IDC provides just that with their DX use cases database. They not only list these cases but provide detailed goals and objectives, match them to the appropriate technologies and outline possible benefits.

The improved variant of a use case is a Case study with real applications and results. They are just so hard to find. And the key reason behind this is, that hardly any customer has appropriate controlling and reporting to deliver the nitty-gritty facts everybody would be so keen to see.

But make no mistake, use cases are just an alternative to start from scratch. It all starts with a culture of change that most large organizations lack and therefore prevent their employees from rethinking a business issue.

But as top management keeps repeating the buzzwords transformation, innovation, agile, and recently sustainability, we can expect more and more empowerment in the specialist departments.

To encourage your staff to come up with new ideas you can provide them with workshops that are just so generic as the use cases. It won't do the trick, but it might be a necessary and useful start.

Combine it with support programs like a suggestion system and things might start to develop. It might be the first step for your organization to develop or improve products and services that keep you relevant in the marketplace.

The next steps are starting an initiative, allocating resources, finding partners, co-create prototypes, failing, restarting, overcoming objections when implementing, readjusting expectations several times, succed.

As this is uncharted territory for most organizations a driving force is needed to align stakeholders and facilitate a process that ultimately leads to a cultural shift.