BICG 2024 – 1999 Looking back

This vision was summarised as follows:

– Information and communication technologies (the internet, mobile technologies, miniaturisation, etc.) were set to drive and spur a change in the way we work unlike anything we had ever seen before.
– And this was going to cause the way we work, illustrated by the cube shown below, to ‘shift’ three-dimensionally in terms of time, structure and place. Those three vectors were fairly static in 1997: people normally worked in one place, at a specific time and within a fixed structure. But even then we believed that this scenario would gradually become more flexible, eventually leading to a (perhaps utopian) reality in which we would work whenever, however and wherever we wanted.

Now, 27 years on from the launch of Office21 and 25 years on from the founding of BICG, we remain caught up in the same paradigm: technologies (now driven by artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, etc.) will continue to transform the way we work at a pace we have never seen before, and our three key areas are also becoming increasingly flexible (the pandemic has undoubtedly helped to accelerate this process across the vast majority of society).

However, looking back, what I believe has truly set us apart at BICG over these 25 years is not merely having been part of that vision of the future to guide our clients, but, far more importantly, how we strive to make it a reality in our projects.
How do we make the ‘journey’ a reality for each of our clients?
I would say there are fundamentally three aspects that set us apart:

One. Our origins and guiding principle, thanks to our collaboration over these 25 years with the Fraunhofer IAO Institute, have enabled us to continue acquiring knowledge and remain at the forefront of innovation in this context of such rapid change and evolution.

Two, the integration of disciplines. The ability to bring together disciplines that might appear disconnected but which, in our view, have always been strands that needed to converge into a common strategy:

– The first is cultural transformation and change management; if change is driven by people, we must start by changing the people so that they can undertake it.
– Next came architecture, the design of our working environments. We soon realised that this was a very powerful vehicle for conveying what we want to be as a company and making it visible and tangible.
– And we continued to move forward, incorporating disciplines into our approach. The third was processes, which played a key role in the adoption of changes in working methods and in the quantifiable success of transformations. This is how working methods such as Lean, Lean-Sigma and Agile emerged.
– Next came the professionalisation of communication, both internal and external, with the creation of a small internal communications agency where we integrated the support we provide to our clients during transformation processes by creating communication materials and campaigns. These not only have an impact within organisations but have also proven to be a valuable tool both for attracting new talent and for demonstrating the consistency of the messages organisations convey internally and externally. We have been calling this ‘Company Experience’ for over a decade now (Company Experience = Employee Experience + Customer Experience)
– And finally, in 2017, we realised the enormous amount of data being generated within organisations regarding all aspects of working practices. That was when we created Digital Solutions: a team dedicated to capturing, understanding and visualising all the information generated by this data, and proposing solutions and applications to help simplify decision-making in this entire field, creating a sort of digital twin of our way of working.

And three. The passion our teams put into every project. Because, although our work is based on a robust, proven and scientifically validated methodology, every day we have to seek new paths to achieve greater success, understanding that our work is always for, by and with people… and we all know that no two organisations are the same, just as no two people are the same.

So, with these tools in our toolkit, we accompany our clients on their transformation journeys, challenging them daily and constantly encouraging them to go further, or as we often say: to dare to throw the stone as far as possible. And the fact remains that none of our hundreds of clients has ever told me at the end of a project that they had to back down, that they had gone too far with innovation… and yet, more than one has told me that if they could go back to the start, they would dare to do even more.

Let’s not forget that in this ever-changing world: today’s most innovative way of working will be yesterday’s news by tomorrow!