Using standardization as a strategic tool to create focus and drive innovation

businesskeys™ helps business leaders, industry associations and governments set standards and build infrastructure which create a more certain and sustainable future. We unlock business value, empowering organisations to deliver to their full potential.

Business performance is impacted by the way in which capabilities and resources are used to obtain desired results. Our programmes in the areas of leadership, business management systems and technology management address the twin problems of being overwhelmed by complexity and the uncertain future faced by business. On the one hand a business needs to be responsive to risks and achieve profitable compliance; on the other it needs a platform for growth and innovation.

We provide the tools to enable business leaders to balance standardization and innovation:

• standardization - SURVIVAL - manage volume growth, maximise efficiencies in repetitive operational tasks, comply with demands of regulators and customers

• innovation - GROWTH - explore new opportunities, develop new technologies, challenge industry rules, while pushing for access, acceptance and adoption of your products and services

We deliver increased revenue and productivity through renewed focus and a results-driven value delivery system.

What makes businesskeys™ unique?

Using a new standards-based approach we deliver a clear strategic direction and a simple framework for doing consistent and sustainable business with the following benefits.

• demonstrable/ recognised by others - provide trust & assurance needed to win business or satisfy the regulator (recognised as 'state-of-the-art' in law)
• agreed way to do something - ensures cooperation, co-ordination, collaboration
• assured, compatible processes and products - meet accepted standards, compatible with others, interoperable
• not based on management fads, or consultant's proprietary methods - wider acceptance, more confidence, more sales
• creates a focus on specific regulatory, market and customer needs and business objectives - drive behaviour and performance
• basis for quality and innovation

businesskeys™ has unique insight, recognised authority and proven and unique tools and methods

What are business keys?

The vital components for business success.

Underpinning every business is a network of standards deployed to:

• connect the business to its customers
• co-ordinate, control and ensure consistency in business activities (value delivery)
• simplify processes to improve productivity and reduce costs
• shape the future of technologies, products and services

All successful, sustainable organisations are underpinned by a matrix of standards and business systems that coordinate its activities and connect it to its market and customers.

Businesses are complex open systems - you cannot understand them completely but you can manage them by managing their 'business keys' - the critical nodes in the system - like the vital organs in the body; the lungs, heart, liver, etc.

In a business value chain they are the points that determine commercial leverage. And the great thing is that standardization allows you to affect the way systems perform and thus the results they achieve.

Standards are the keys to integration of systems/ components from others, including customers - and a way for you to integrate your product into their lives.

The keys that create change and unlock business value are standards.

What is standardization?

Standardization (redefined) - a dynamic process for getting more people to value what you offer

Our new definition of standards and standardization allows us to utilise the existing institutions and bureaucracies set up to develop standards but also to achieve so much more by expanding the way we think of standards - not merely as technical tools but to create a framework by which an individual company or industry can develop technology and do business in any market in the world.

Using standards in this way provides a coherent method to control the complexity of technologies and markets by controlling the small set of simple rules that underlies the complexity - the standards which define the architecture.

To be a leader requires the systematic and strategic use of standardization.

• strategy - establish focus - create a roadmap to the future
• systems - identify opportunities - manage your business blueprint
• standards - implement:
  • compliance - getting done what must be done
  • cost reduction - at a profitable level
  • growth - access to new markets/ opportunities
  • innovation - agility and flexibility with lower risks and faster market adoption