bicg 2024 -1999 Looking Backwards

In 1997, a few years before founding bicg in 1999, I was working at the German Fraunhofer IAO institute in Stuttgart when, collaborating in the launch of the Office21 research project, we presented our vision of what we believed would happen in the coming decades in the world of work, which was summarised as follows:

  • Information and communication technologies (internet, mobile technologies, miniaturisation etc.) were going to lead and stimulate a change in the way we work like we had never seen before.
  • And this would cause our way of working, illustrated by the cube I show below, to “move” three-dimensionally in time, structure and place. Those 3 vectors were quite static in 1997: one normally worked in a place, a certain time and in a fixed structure. But back then we already thought that this scenario would gradually become more flexible until we reached a (perhaps utopian) reality in which we could work when, how and where we wanted.

Now, 27 years since the launch of Office21 and 25 years since the creation of bicg, we are still immersed in the same paradigm: technologies (now driven by artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, etc.) will continue to transform the way we work at a speed we have never seen before and our three vectors also continue to flex relentlessly (no doubt the Pandemic has helped accelerate this process in the vast majority of society).

However, looking back, what I think has really distinguished us at bicg over the past 25 years is not just having been part of that vision for the future to guide our clients but, more importantly, how we try to make it into reality in our projects.

How do we make the "journey" real for each of our clients?

I would say that there are fundamentally three aspects that differentiate us:

One. Our origin and common thread, thanks to our collaboration over the last 25 years with the Fraunhofer Institute IAO, has allowed us to continue acquiring knowledge and to remain at the forefront of innovation in this context of such accelerated changes and evolutions.

Two, the integration of disciplines. The ability to bring together disciplines that seemingly might appear disconnected but which in our eyes have always been lines that should converge in a common strategy:

  • The first is cultural transformation and change management, if changes are made by people, we have to start by changing people so that they can undertake them.
  • Then came the architecture, the design of our working environments. We soon realised that it was a very powerful vehicle to transmit what we wanted to be as a company and to make it visible and palpable.
  • And we kept moving forward and including disciplines within our approach. The third was processes, which had a differential value in the adoption of changes in the way of working and in the quantifiable success of the transformations. This gave rise to the Lean, Lean-Sigma, Agile, etc. ways of working.
  • – Then came the professionalisation of communication, both internal and external, creating a small internal communication agency in which we integrated the support we provide to our clients during the transformation processes by creating communication pieces and campaigns, which not only have an internal impact on the organisations, but have proven to be a valuable tool both for attracting new talent and for showing the coherence of the messages given by the organisations internally and externally. We have been calling this Company Experience (Company Experience = Employee Experience + Customer Experience) for more than a decade now.
  • And finally in 2017 we realised the enormous amount of data that was being generated in organisations in everything related to ways of working. That’s 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 that help us simplify decision-making in this whole area, creating a kind of digital twin to the way we work.

And three. The passion that our teams put into each project. Because, although our work is based on a robust, contrasted and scientifically proven methodology, every day we have to look for new ways 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 briefcase, we accompany our clients on their paths of transformation, challenging them on a daily basis and constantly encouraging them to go further, or as we say: to dare to throw the stone as far as possible. And it is still true that none of our hundreds of clients have ever told me at the end of the project that they had to back out, that they were too innovative… and on the other hand, more than one has told me that if I went back to the beginning, they would dare to go further.

Let’s not forget that in this fast-moving world: today’s most innovative way of working will be yesterday’s tomorrow!

I am very grateful for these fast-paced 25 years:

  • Thank you to our customers, who have trusted and allowed themselves to be challenged, to be challenged and have often chosen the difficult way out of their comfort zone.
  • Most especially, I would like to thank the incredible team that is and has been part of bicg, who not only do methodologically rigorous and precise work, but also adapt very creatively to every challenge they encounter… and all the while putting a sustained and admirable passion into everything they do.

Thanks again… this is just the beginning!

Iñaki Lozano Ehlers

CEO bicg.

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