Democratize digital in your business

With Fall in the air, I am happy to highlight my new book, a cooperation with Organizational Leadership Professor Zeynep Aksehirli and DATA cofounders Yakov Bart and?Kwong Chan. Break the Wall: Why and How to Democratize Digital in Your Business is available for preorder and answers one of the seven big challenges identified by the American Marketing Association. While organizations have started on the road towards Digital Transformation, many take a very narrow view – examining social media, big data, and the transformation of marketing communications. Instead, the leaders recognize the tidal wave of digital change, with the C-Suite is focused on much larger issues of business model change, the reconfiguration of their value chain, and, in many cases their future competitive advantage.

Inspired by the questions and learnings from these executives, we offer our Nested Adaptive Framework?to work through digital transformation tasks at each level in the organization

While each level changes at different speeds, they all need to coordinate about:

(1)??Initiation of change

(2)??Implementation of change

(3)??Building resilience

(4)??Reconsideration and renewal.

The main point is that the firm is constantly testing and adapting to the future. Drucker would term the challenge as managing “continuity and change” – so, firms can compete in both the present and in the future.

The book’s structure follows the 7 insights distilled from the framework and interviews:

The first insight is eloquently expressed by our interviewed data literacy expert:

In digital transformation the agency is on digital, not on the thing being transformed. But when you integrate something there's two parties. What is the other one in your case? I ?would encourage you to think about that question because you could have a lot of answers that are all valid, but which one you care about most can guide you into a terminology that better reflects your ideas and what's the thing being transformed.

?Second, on explicit and business relevant goals, Jon Hay of the Red Sox told us:

Sometimes, especially in the IT world people get distracted by shiny objects and find that there’s a really interesting challenge that will take a long time, but maybe not be that impactful. I think part of my job as the president in the department is to have those frank?conversations: ‘Here are other things that are coming from people in your department, or adjacent to you. How do we think about what the priority order is? And by the way, how can we maybe align some of these things for more efficiency.’

?Third, analyzing gaps came back in multiple interviews:

?Sometimes people do not know what they should be looking for, they have tons of dashboards shared but don’t know where to start. They are not clear on which dashboard or tool should be used. They've got three BI tools, one of them has 80% of the data, the other one has 15% of that data and the other one has 10% with different overlaps. Data needs to get filtered and sorted to where it is coming from, the trust issues around the data need to be solved.??

Fourth, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Although many leaders seek the benefits of digital transformation, they are not prepared to pay the costs. These costs typically consist of training existing talent and hiring new, specialized talent.

When I'm hiring, I'm filling a very specific need because we want to build out the department. I'm looking for someone that can do a very specific thing very well and that's ?where it starts to get tricky. Our industry doesn't always pay well but had some perks, which have become less valuable with the pandemic. Now you're competing for technical talent that knows what they're worth, and they can go to literally anywhere, regardless of location. It's actually been an effort for us to convince our senior executives – ‘Hey look, if you want these sorts of people, to hire data architects you gotta pay market rate’.

The same goes for training your existing employees, which often excel in know-how on how to prioritize and implement for your organization:

The ideal combination may very well be a team with both new and existing members but even then we should ask: “Have I given the people I already have the opportunity to enact change?”A single workshop attended by individuals from finance, IT, operations and marketing can enhance collaboration and bonding through team projects, shared lexicon and mutual task accomplishment. Such coordinated training doesn’t come cheap but the cost pales in comparison to recruiting a new employee –by today’s knowledge a whopping 80-200% of the annual salary of the position we are hiring for. We may still hire from outside the organization but now our existing employees have the knowledge and confidence to integrate approaches from both new and existing people.

Fifth, aligning different parts of the organization is key, as shown for ethical issues by Cansu Canca, Founder & Director, of the AI Ethics Lab:

?I think now, finally, organizations/companies are realizing that there are ethical issues ???and they have to deal with them, preferably from the beginning. But I can still not say that they are doing it right. I think the good part is that now there’s more awareness. They are putting in place dedicated teams, so that is a big plus. Previously it was only grassroots, and that didn’t go anywhere because the leadership was not interested. Now, there is an interest from the leadership and there’s grassroots interest. And they are trying. I mean, I think both of these aspects, both the leadership and the grassroots are coming together.

Sixth, it is important to implement by democratizing digital tools and manage for expectations:

?I like things where you have a giant screen in the same room where a lot of people are working on the same thing being represented on the screen. So, there’s like a shared ?ownership of what feels like a mirror for us and not a window of somebody looking down at us from outside. That mirror is an example of a version that creates a very different narrative. If we’re seeing all of our work up there, then there’s a sense of shared ownership that could be cultivated. So sometimes there’s like social changes that are very small that work within business language and structure and then having something that talks about that not in a punitive way, but like, oh okay, here’s a trend we’re seeing, help ???me understand this trend. But not here’s a trend we’re seeing you need to work harder on. So much of it is just social.

Finally, it is so much cheaper to learn from others’ experiences (successes and failures) than from your own! We are so grateful to the many executives who gave us permission to share the transcript of their interview in full, illustrating the transparency of today's leaders. I am leaving you with a quote to illustrate why you should democratize digital information in your business:

When I think about power, I think about the ability to authentically engage and change ???the circumstances for oneself or for a community that they’re involved in. That typically for me is trying to democratize rather than centralize power. If we look at most businesses that have succeeded in various forms of what one calls digital adoption or transformation, they often have a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. When you see things like rich media document editing 30 years ago or smartphones, they are two examples that came more from the bottom-up approach where people brought those tools into the workplace and the workplace adapted to support and augment and take partial ownership of those tools to the point where you’ll see mobile tool adoption from the top down and you’ll see it pushed from the bottom up.