Digital Transformation - Lessons Learned

After being a part of several Digital Transformation initiatives with several organizations, here are my lessons learned for successful implementation and very poorly executed initiatives.

Here's a snippet of my take

Change management and process optimization adoption: leading successful transformation is all about engaging both business and the technology teams. Therefore, leadership is key to be successful. Too many times the infighting and politics between business functional leaders and IT leaders on who is leading the initiatives supersedes the strategic goals and value of why the organization is undertaking the change.

    Be Pragmatic: Success is contingent on removing the assumptions and barriers to change. The notion that things must work exactly for business as the use to or that IT is in charge of all decisions because it is a technology project MUST be addressed via roles and responsibilities not just for the tactical teams but for the leadership teams too.

    Technical integration MUST be a part of the initial assessment. Last minute showstoppers are an indication of poor assessments in the beginning of the project.

    Data migration must not be a last-minute exercise – for large organizations with varied data points, a data governance team MUST be established from the beginning of the project.

    The right skill for the right job – It is a MUST to assess your team’s capability to deliver

Leadership as a joint venture: Alignment between the Business team to define and own the business process flows needing new technical innovation or transformation own by IT must be at the forefront of the implementation. The leaders of both must make this clear to their teams.

Collaboration: Establish a Steering Committee for each major initiative with the right decision makers (a meeting setup with leaders from business, IT and vendor (if any)) to help establish a collective vision, provide support, model expectations, ensure accountability and regularly reflect transparent communication and messaging.

    External vendor implementation must align with internal IT approach prior to signing the contract (again common vision). If Business unit engages with an external vendor, IT must vet the language of the contract for compliance with internal IT practices. Business must not manage technical vendors.

    Relationships are the clue that holds the change process together to create that innovative transformation

    IT teams must showcase a nimble and stable infrastructure and platforms to support intelligent process automation to gain trust from business and limit business need to go rogue with external vendors or shadow IT teams.

Most implementations are hampered by poor leadership and their unique teams pick up the infighting leading to silo’ed and ineffective execution practices.

Technical implementation: Large organizations are mimicking the software delivery methodologies of startups or smaller software organizations with more digital-focus methodologies without the same success rate.

 The key for large organization should a sharp focus on agility for the entire enterprise - Enterprise Agility. Adopt a strategic funding model for initiatives that does not follow the ‘Big Bang’ delivery approach (a.k.a Waterfall approach). So, most organization need to rethink their funding model to align with the technical implementation approach (Agile, DevOps, SAFE etc.).

Lastly, a focus on lean governance and continuous integration building quality around the product and value to be delivered must be driven by an integrated-focused strategy.

So much more to go into ...…Product Model, Business Relationship Management, IT Service Management and more in this new age of digital transformation delivery.