Digital is easy; Transformation is hard.

There’s been so much said and written on Digital transformation, and the phrase itself has become commonplace in enterprise vocabularies. The two words have come to be almost inseparable – one practically implying the other. And yet if you break the two apart, the reality is that digital is easy and transformation is hard.

That’s not to say that digital doesn’t have its share of issues to work through. We have seen tremendous amounts of innovation - elastic compute is now available on tap, mature hyper-automation software as a service are digitizing virtually any processes, and composable services are rapidly being assembled into a composite capability to address new business requirements. Data for the first time is a first-class citizen of enterprise architectures and deep learning engines have come to be very inexpensive to train, accelerating productive deployments that deliver real value. The timing couldn’t be better – resilience and response to the pandemic have driven a sharp focus on new capabilities needed in the new normal. And all this innovation in technology is providing the much needed and necessary platform for it to be delivered. Indeed, the pace of change in digital is the slowest it is ever going to be.

But equally all that innovation requires lots of experimentation and curation, thoughtful choices and strategic planning, constantly evolving talent pools, and a never-done execution mindset in technology. Getting all this done, while at once also running the mission critical IT backbone of the business, feels a little like changing the engines while flying the plane – it’s not for the faint at heart.

However, most large enterprise CIOs will easily tell you that the "tech" execution is no longer the long pole in the tent. It’s the business ideation, insights monetization and process innovation that are now the real blocker. Personally, I have spent my entire career in emerging technology – across the startup innovation ecosystem as well as large enterprise architectures – and so I say this with a lot of humility: Put simply, compared to transformation, digital is easier.

I had a great conversation about this with Sigal Zarmi who heads Transformation at Morgan Stanley globally, in addition to being their International CIO. 

What makes transformation harder is that it’s about simultaneously orchestrating change across four different dimensions – technology, data, people, and process across the corporation. That's not only flying the plane and changing engines in mid-flight, it’s also taking off from a moving ship while laying down the runway to land on - all at the same time.

Transformation on the people dimension requires building out new operating models, cross-training and proactively focusing efforts differently on the human-machine continuum, and systematically building in change management and adoption. Transformation requires a reorientation to Experience as the true north for powering and delivering superior value, and consequently, true results.

The second key dimension in Transformation is process design. The opportunity here is in thinking end-to-end, bringing a deep understanding of the industry nuances and best in class process metrics – and reimagining and reengineering the processes - well before automating them. A critical piece is bringing in the right subject matter experts combined with creative and out-of-the-box thinking necessary to reimagine the end-to-end process.

The third key dimension is data. Data is quickly becoming the largest driver of transformational value, so designing for data and analytics-driven business insights is fundamental to success. And yet, data is strewn across multiple entities without a common model around ownership, usage, storage and governance. Additionally, much of enterprise data is dark - i.e. not in structured files - and requires significant engineering and transformation before it can be used. Governance and ethics around use of data are emerging as large company-defining aspects, so they have to be thoughtfully crafted and institutionally deployed. And all of this requires significant orchestration.

In the end, the real test of digital is in the true transformation it drives. And orchestrating technology innovation across data, people, and process together is the key to success there.