The Culture Supporting Digital Transformation

When you hear the words digital transformation, can you tell me what comes in your mind? I'll give you 15 seconds to quickly write down the words that pop up in your head on to a piece of paper. Once you're done, come back and read the remainder of this article.

I'm going to guess that the words you wrote down would look something very similar to the word cloud from Forrester.

Contrast the above and what you may have written with the below.

Did any of the words you write look anything like word cloud above? I'm going to say no. The above is a word cloud generated after  my team conducted user research (design thinking) with nearly 50 correspondents in my IT organization, during Q1 2017. We basically asked the question "What is Digital Transformation? What does it mean for you?"

And you know what the interesting was? For my organization, the biggest challenge about embracing digital transformation was not the technology or creating new business models. Our challenge was something a lot more fundamental.

It was about getting management support to give people the time to experiment and play around with digital technologies to try to address business challenges.

In the interviews, I learned that my colleagues do know about the latest going-on in the technology space. They know about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cryptocurrency. They know our business users were also facing challenges trying to maintain a profitable business. 

The basic design challenge I had to answer, as the one driving the digital transformation, was: 

How might we create an environment that encourages our employees to collaborate and innovate together, like startups, while at the same time addressing some of our real challenges as an IT organization?

You may be asking yourself, "Why is Fariz arguing that digital transformation is a work culture problem?" Well, the below Mckinsey blog post mentions a bit about culture as one of the biggest challenges for large corporations when trying to transform. Based on my experience, I agree. Working culture and mindset are the core drivers of driving digital transformation success.

How can I say that working culture and mindset are core drivers of digital transformation? Fast forward to present day, compared to some of the other business units, our IT organization is more advanced in terms of the cultural aspects. Our people now see problems as design challenge opportunities and look to organize groups to tackle it head on as a corporate startup. Our language has transformed into something more akin to an innovative design firm (like IDEO) or startups: 

• "Have we interviewed and observed enough extreme users? What are their jobs to be done, pains, and gains?"
• "Why do we things that way? Let's get wild and create out there ideas inspired by some of the latest digital technologies and movies." 
• "What do we need to launch the 1st experiment in two weeks time? At what level of fidelity does it need to be? What learnings are we trying to capture?"

To get that use of language, you really need to spend your energy on ensuring the new work culture takes hold. You keep talking about culture. Just what exactly is that culture based on?

The cultural pillars of digital transformation would be:

• Design Thinking inspired by IDEO
• The (Lean) Startup Way inspired Eric Ries
• Agile

There's this picture form Gartner for you that is based on other works combine into one pretty nice picture. Note: Just because you know about the methods does not mean you will be successful with digital transformation. Methods does not equal culture. 

Why do you call them cultural pillars? It's simple. Digital Transformation forces you to change and innovate. Those three pillars, when combined, allows creates a working environment focused on always innovating and ready to change.

Hold on a minute. But my company is also very innovative. Most large corporations may tell you they have an innovation culture but what they really have is a culture of continuous improvement.

Innovation and continuous improvement are two different things.

Let me give you a simple example. The iPod with iTunes was not a continuous improvement over the CD Walkman and CD stores. The iPod with iTunes was a truly disruptive innovation driven by customer centric approach.

Wait, but what about your initial problem on getting time? Well, let me get to that. So, in Q1, my focus was to actually embed the cultural pillars of digital transformation in the organization, find and support 1-2 corporate startups, and get one senior management as a venture capital champion.

When the startups presented to our management team, they were surprised at how quickly the team got tangible results, learnings, and developed skills to utilize the newest digital technology (chatbots, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition). More importantly, we were more customer centric and delivered value to customers in 1-2 months instead of a year or more. 

When our senior management saw the impact of this innovative culture, everyone was given the objective to take part in these innovation initiatives. 

That's it for now. Please comment and I'd like to get your feedback on what you'd like to read in my next post about actually doing digital transformation. I'll share what I know.