5 Tips for Oiling the Wheels of Digital Transformation
Strategy is key, but sometimes it’s the simple and pragmatic actions that grease the wheels of change, especially when it comes to digital transformation.
The term “digital transformation” has now been in our common business parlance for over a decade and has given rise to a whole industry. Yet despite all this collective experience and learning, for many medium to large enterprises digital transformation remains an enigma, delivering results that often surprise, but not always for the right reasons.
Understanding the big picture and having an executable strategy is critical and should never be overlooked, but sometimes it is the simple, pragmatic, and easily implementable actions that can lubricate the wider digital journey.
So, if we acknowledge the above, what are the actions an enterprise can take to grease the pivot to a digital future? As always, the selection of these should be unique to each enterprise, but summarised below are five for thought:
Make Technology Understandable: Cut the jargon, acronyms and buzzwords
This one sits firmly on the shoulders of the technology leaders. We need to make technology understandable for everyone. Examine any enterprise and it is typically comprised of a huge diversity of people with a vast range of experience, backgrounds, talents, and priorities. According to a recent Korn Ferry report, the average age of a US top 1,000 CEO is 59 and 56 across the C-suite.
This means the employee age range can span over five decades, from those at the start of their career to the most senior members of the organisation. Within this range there are the digital natives, immersed in technology from a young age, through to those learning about and embracing digital. The success of a digital journey is underpinned by taking this diverse group on the journey. We can significantly increase the likely success of this journey by creating a common, simple language everyone understands.
An easy win is to cull the technology acronyms, jargon, and buzzwords. Instead, communicate in a common, simple language that focuses upon business outcomes and how to achieve them.
2. Location, Location, Location: Your technologists are part of the business.
No matter where you sit on the remote, flexi or fixed desk spectrum, it is universally accepted that humans are gregarious, social, and communicative creatures. Organisations spend huge sums of money on creating environments that nurture these traits i.e. the modern workplace.
Yet sometimes we miss a trick and still have our teams sit in functional silos, which can perpetuate the barriers between teams. Often the best incubators for change are the informal water cooler chats or the desk flyby. Here ideas are more freely exchanged and iterated, than in formal meetings.
So have your key technologists sit amongst the business teams and watch the digital osmosis at work.
It is recognised, that sometimes this is not always achievable for reasons such as global health crises, leveraging labour arbitrage, budgets, or the geography of existing teams. However, take the time to work out how this gap can be closed. For example, with the proliferation of videoconferencing to the desktop and handset level, make it company policy for all calls to be via videoconferencing or create video wormholes between dispersed teams. These may not be as good as co-locating teams, but they go a long way to closing the gap.
3. Use the digital journey to ask: “How can we improve our processes?”
Most enterprises are built upon processes and it is the ability to successfully and consistently repeat these processes which contribute to the company’s success. Before digitalizing an existing process, ask:
How can we improve this process?
How can we make the outcome or end user experience better?
Often an enterprise will drag and drop the existing process. Unfortunately, once this has been digitalized, the transformation program will typically move on and the opportunity for improvement has passed.
Even if you don’t believe the process or the customer experience can be improved, challenge your process owners to try. Often teams, especially back office, are surprised to find processes no longer align to business needs and at worse are a business inhibitor. And even if it is only a 1% process improvement, the cumulative effect of these can have a tremendously positive impact.
4. Make Technology Accessible
Decades ago, it was the enterprise that lead the use of technology. But since the advent of the Palm Pilot in 1996, the early Blackberry’s in 2002 and then the real acceleration in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone, it has been consumer technology that has been leading the way.
Where consumer technology has eclipsed enterprise technology is in making technology easy to understand, access and use. Today the working population is highly technology literate in their personal life’s, and it is the enterprise who is playing catch up.
Within the enterprise we should make technology accessible, remove the access barriers and let the business play, use, and build with it as they wish.
This doesn’t mean we create a free for all, letting different technologies proliferate uncontrollably and operating costs spiral. Instead we emulate Lego by giving every business unit standardised building blocks of tech. From that they can create as they please.
The technology teams become the owners of the standards and the business becomes the builder, innovators and consumer of technology.
To achieve this requires a significant change in the technology departments including:
Relinquishing control
Organisational realignment into the business
An evolution in thinking
Increasing the technology expertise within the business
Granted, of the five, this may be the most challenging to implement but it has potential to yield the greatest of results by placing technology at the core of the business.
5. It’s a Digital Evolution, not a Digital transformation
Repeatedly we use the word transformation to describe the journey we lead our enterprises on as they adapt to digital and the new business landscape. The challenge with using the word transformation is twofold:
Firstly, the word transformation has an implied end, a final destination, a date at which the project will be closed, and accounts settled. This is rarely the case in a constantly changing business landscape.
Secondly, the term transformation has for many in the enterprise become tarnished with either under delivery, grand promises, or a euphemism for an unwelcome change. This has the immediate effect of disenfranchising the very colleagues and culture you are hoping to lead on the journey.
Instead the digital journey should be viewed, communicated and treated as an evolution in which we are constantly evolving and adapting to the changing landscape.
The fundamentals of business have not changed but digital has changed the fundamentals of how we do business. To succeed in business today we need to embrace digital, leverage it, embed it into our organisational DNA and then accelerate the pace of change. To achieve this requires a great vision, a fantastic strategy, and the right team to lead the digital journey. And maybe, some pragmatic actions along the way. What pragmatic actions will you take?