Elaboration of Measurement Methodologies
The measures discussed in the article can be summarized into three main categories:
1. Operational Excellence
Operationally excellent organizations mainly concentrate on quality, programmer productivity, and costs minimization. They think that those are the keys in order to achieve their market objectives. These organizations have their own strategies for their services/products. They offer limited menu of choices, but the products/services are delivered excellently and at a competitive price.
2. Customer Intimacy
Customer intimacy is the latest term in trying to create tighter relationships with customers. The term, developed up by marketing gurus, is aimed at creating a detailed understanding of the customer to the point of understanding buying habits and behavior in order to provide better products and services.
Customer-intimate organizations adopt a different market approach. Whatever the customer wants, they will add it to the menu. The menu is custom-made for each engagement. Customer intimacy sometimes is well known as a way of getting greater share of the customer’s wallet. There are few spending alternatives outside of the services offered: bank and savings accounts, certificates of deposit, credit and debit cards, brokerage services, frequent flyer mileage incentives, travel arrangements, etc.
This kind of organizations emphasizes flexibility since they have to constantly add features to the base product. Accordingly, any processes that increase generality and the ability to add features quickly would be valued. So, processes such a product line architecture and application generators would be candidates for immediate adoption.
3. Product Innovativeness
Product-innovative organizations prioritize on maximizing the number of turns they get in the market. They introduce many new products, selling innovations and features. The number of new product introductions, patents, or Nobel prizes would be the measures for success.
Such organizations emphasize features, so improvement must be framed in that context. Features, not quality or cost, are the deliverable. Accordingly, any processes that increase the number of features will be valued. Processes that emphasize competitive position, places in the product space where opportunity is the greatest, would be valued. So Quality Function Deployment would have high probability of being adopted into practice, for example.
It is also noted that customer-intimate and product-innovative firms are organized differently than those with operational-excellence strategies. They have high differentiation (meaning many experts) and high integration (getting disparate, possibly competing experts to serve in the interests of a common, corporate goal).