Enterprise Execution Capability: Its Role, Accountability, and Importance

Who takes accountability for it? Where is corporate memory kept, and who decides on the quality of execution capability? These are critical questions that directly impact the functioning of an organisation. One might also ask: what is at stake if this capability is weak? What will be impaired? Is it important to maintain a certain level of quality? Should it be made explicit, or can it exist implicitly, almost coincidentally?  For instance, no one questions the need for a finance function in an enterprise—its existence and importance are explicit. However, when it comes to execution capability, the same level of essential need is often lacking. It seems as if enterprises aspire to this capability, but it remains elusive and implicit.

Where does an enterprise’s capability to execute reside? Who is responsible Enterprise Execution Capability: Its Role, Accountability, and Importance.

The Hidden Power of Execution Capability.

Execution capability is a leading force in an organisation, responsible for creating its commercial reality.

Yet, the intelligence behind execution often stays implicit, unrecognised, and largely neglected. Its weaknesses manifest in perceived symptoms such as poor communication, reliance on email and spread sheet processes, misaligned teams, misaligned systems, scattered information, low-quality data, negative customer feedback, long lead times, supplier or customer disputes, equipment and stock losses, audit findings, cash flow constraints, slow responses to market changes, etc. Ironically, those voicing these concerns are often the least aware of the root causes. The typical organisational response is to spend more, bringing in third parties or making new procurements—solutions that rarely deliver sustainable results and often serve as temporary fixes at best.

A More Appropriate Approach: Making Execution Capability Explicit A more effective and sustainable approach is to embed execution capability explicit; organisations need to create the capacity and knowledge base that ensures execution intelligence is owned and carried by an identified team/function, resourced with appropriate professionals to carry execution across the company. This will permeate every team and process, becoming less independent of any single incumbent or their know-how. Custodians of execution intelligence must cohere to live and breathe enterprise execution. They are the essential ownership that should ingrained execution capability into all teams as a paramount nature of the enterprise.  The execution intelligence team will preferably be backed-up by independent external support to strengthen continuous longevity and should never become a casualty of compromise on organisation vitality. 

“In the exponentially more complex context of a business, an “information universe” describes this complexity. It equips decision-makers with contextualized information to derive the necessary intelligence for their decisions. The input for preparing this universe is the management objective at hand, leading to a robust description for consistently predictable outcomes.” – Hendrik Oppermann, Business Architect