The Rise of the Chief Simplification Officer

Why simplification should be at the heart of every organisation’s strategy

Discover why the call for a Chief Simplification Officer (CSO) is a game-changer for organisations, according to HotTopics contributing editor Rich Corbridge.

Gartner suggests that in order for simplification to become a high-priority goal, organisations need to create yet another new role—that of the Chief Simplification Officer (CSO).

This new role, the so-called CSO (editor’s note: not to be confused with security-focused CSOs or CISOs), will have three henchmen to help with the greatest task that any large legacy organisation has: the Application Undertaker, the Value Interrogator and the Project Assassin. 

I love this idea. At last, the process of simplification sees leaders going basketball-inspired ‘full-court press’ to find a resolution for this perennial and impactful issue.

As we seek every way possible to land a transformed way of delivering for citizens or customers a set of accurate, efficient, human-centred and future-focused services, the art of simplification has to be at the centre of what we do next. 

One outcome of allowing all the flowers to bloom as an innovation strategy is that organisations land themselves with a level of complexity that needs to then be resolved. The business case for simplification is that it becomes the ‘only’ way to grow and scale with any kind of speed. 

The role of the Chief Simplification Officer

The issue to guard against though is episodic simplification, where a business case is created to go after the transformation or modernisation focused on certain areas that once done are then left alone. What we need to go after is the holistic, and continuous, change cycle of simplification, setting this as the new normal is key to truly becoming a digital-first organisation. 

Let us have a look at how we could define those ‘henchmen’ of the CSO to really build our ways of working for a future state: 

The application undertaker

This role is multifaceted. Not only does it do what it says on the tin, the retiring of old applications, it also has a focus to find the application being made for new things and where they are not simple by design, repeatable, reusable and composable then it ‘retires’ the application for this new thing and works with our business to refine the ask to be based in simplicity. 

The value interrogator

Responsible for truly getting under the hood of what is the point of delivering this role allows simplification to be so closely linked to value that they become the same thing. Once that is achieved it won’t be digital and transformation championing the art of simplification it will be every part of our business. 

The project assassin 

Ninja-ready, able to dive into any programme board and push the boundaries so hard that we at last really do start to create a process to stop some things. Big (and old) organisations really struggle to stop things, sometimes for good reason but ‘sunk cost’ or time elapsed is not a good reason. The Project Assassin way of thinking will allow us, maybe even force us, to stop things that are not grounded in simplicity. 

What if we created a culture-hacking moment? At the end of every meeting, we often ask, ‘can we do this in a more simple way?’ – and sadly, of course, we can. How can we win as a business, and how does this thing we just agreed help us to do that – whether it’s the new cornerstone for an operating model or even a new business strategy. 

How did Richer Sounds enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most sales per square metre? By offering the most simple solution to every problem. They focused on four things: customers, products, processes and assets. Once they had this obsession ingrained into their teams, they were able to create a way that every colleague insisted on a ratio of inputs to outcomes that forced simplification to sit at the centre of everything they considered. 

The five levers

Simplification has to help us get to a place where we can alter the pace of delivery relating to the four ‘Vs’ of data. 

Remember those, when they were everywhere: volume, velocity, veracity and variety. At the heart of simplification is—how do we give our colleagues who are supporting customers everyday the data they need at the right time, in the right place with the right volume and accuracy so that they can be the absolute best they want to be with every person they are supporting? That’s why Richer Sounds was able to offer the most simple solutions – they focused on what the colleague needed, what the colleague knew and made that the beating heart of simplicity itself. 

For us to land simplification, we need to build understanding and belief through five levers. We need to understand how to pull them and what the implications are when they are pulled: 

Enterprise-wide clarity 

This is hard for larger organisation. How do they try to make sure teams of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people have the clarity of what they’re doing? 

How do they enshrine the principles of simplicity into every outcome they are going after? If they pull this lever, there is no going back – once the whole organisation gets a feel for this it will not want to revert back to the old ways of considering change. 

Strategy directed

‘Strategy directed’ means handing over control, being obsessed with collaboration and not the human nature of ownership for comfort. 

Enterprise simplicity requires collective ownership; it does not allow for us to seed ownership to a subsection of the department, or for us to seize the strategy delivery as our own (and only our own).  

Future focused

This one gets a lot of debate, to some degree because agreeing when the future is has become harder over the last 18 months. 

We know that we do not know what the future holds – and therefore adopting a simplification mindset into the future feels like the right way to set ourselves up to be truly ready for perpetual change. 

Being able to take an ‘atlas’ view of the future, and therefore know where we are going and what all of the maps to get there look like, will be intrinsic to our success and will facilitate a long-term simple view of our north star. 

Encapsulated by metrics

Measuring the creation of simplicity is hard. We can use cold hard tech-debt remediation plans and count percentages but that, I think, is what is preventing the business case for simplicity being passed. 

We need a width of metrics that allow us to measure both the remediation of debt, the removal of risk and the improved perception of our colleagues using our systems. It is hard but this multifaceted view is necessary to allow focus. 

Underpinned by data

Without the data to create the metrics this ship is sailing nowhere. The data needed for the metrics proposed needs to be data that is collected already, new data collection created to measure the implementation of simplicity defeats the object. We need to see ourselves a job of finding proxies within the data we have for the metrics we need to collect. 

If we pull all five of these levers in the right way then we facilitate our large and currently complex operations teams in changing how they are known, they can move from a cost-to-do operation to a place where value is created; the value zone of what we do. Once there they are able to release four forms of value, new efficiencies, increased effectiveness, increases in business integrity and a new agility that allows us to be cheaper and faster to adopt change. At this point that enterprise strategy becomes ‘easy’ to implement and faster to results. 

AI and simplification

That business strategy sets a new theme as we see the ubiquitous mentioning of AI land in the simplification agenda. All new technology from now needs to do two things from the dawn of AI—it must simplify what we have and it must be additive to global GDP. That last one may feel odd but it perhaps is the best way of measuring simplicity in many ways and gives the measure a global stage of importance. 

AI-driven capability needs to differentiate us, but the definition of differentiation has changed. It is now about the promotion of our responsibility to citizens and customers, it has to be about removing friction, it has to be about scaling the simplification of the current state to make us better for the future. 

Simplifying often ‘brittle’ processes is hard and yet is entirely necessary. This is the only way to get to full capacity of what we have now, and the use of the newest tools being given to organisations like ours now opens a door to do this in human-centred and focused ways that make it so exciting to see into our simple future. 

The customer experience is the most important receiver of the benefits of complexity removal, Leaning into the removal of complexity requires a methodical activity, an activity that we make a conscious decision to go after and one that will see us set up for any and all futures.

With thanks to Dave Aron from Gartner for the inspirational conversation that got me thinking in this direction and to Owen Pengelly for the introduction. And to Arvind Krishna IBM leader for additional ‘moments’ during his THINK keynote in Boston in May 2024. With a special thanks to Adam Gale at the KLAS global conference too who also pushed the simplify, simplify, simplify message in June 2024.

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HotTopics contributing editor Rich Corbridge is the CDIO and Director General for Digital at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), where he is responsible for technology and data.

Corbridge has spent over 25 years in senior digital and IT positions in public and private sector, having previously been the Director of Innovation and CIO at Boots UK, CDIO at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Chief Information Officer for the Health Service Executive in Ireland. Corbridge has been ranked within HotTopics Global CIO 100, and is listed as one of the UK’s 50 most influential technology leaders by ComputerWeekly.