Digital Transformation Journeys - Lessons Learnt

In the past 5-10 years, a lot of companies have quickened their pace for the digital transformation of their business. When company leaders are delegated the job to drive digital transformation, it is key to first understand what this big word means. As a consultant, often I ask the question "WHY" to ensure alignment with the business drive and value proposition. I am sadly often faced with answers such as "It's the latest buzz" or "We need to automate to be faster". One of the myths to be busted is that Digital transformation is not just about being digital. It's a entire holistic journey of business evolution accelerated by ubiquitous and hyperconnected technologies amongst others.

Here's a very holistic definition of Digital transformation coined by Altimeter:

Digital transformation is the evolving pursuit of innovative and agile business and operational models — fueled by evolving technologies, processes, analytics, and talent capabilities — to create new value and experiences for customers, employees, and stakeholders.

An interesting survey from the State of Digital Transformation 2018-2019 report showcased three key information that I took away as valuable lessons:

The last graph showcases a reality on challenges that many people working in the Digital Transformation space would have experienced. In my personal capacity, I experienced two different scenarios:

1. In the first scenario, the client was busy changing its customer platform, infrastructure, implementing agile/devops all at the same time. It was very disruptive to drive productivity due to high levels of instability in the work environment at a people, process and technology level. Trying to do everything at the same time in a big bang approach was costly as a lot of rework effort was required and the quality of what was delivered was poor. One of the lessons learnt for me was that one has to curb the amount of change to sizeable and logical chunks that is easier to accept and adapt.
2. In the second scenario, the client decided to drive their IT operational efficiency and introduced a suite of tools to automate deployment, releases, testing amongst others. They chose to opt out of other activities that they assumed would be simple to drive, such as change management. The challenge here is that the client did not have the right driver to push the transformation journey and the tools were being retrofitted in a "Business As Usual" world that wasn't prepared to evolve. Lots of effort was required to introduce a change management group with a better representation of different key players and multiple sessions were held to influence the true value proposition of efficiency. For instance, what type of ROI does agility and flexibility of new infrastructure will bring to the business to get the right buy-in from business? What is the value to customers?

In closing, digital transformation is here to stay in this era and one needs to truly make an effort to adapt to the changing market. One of the key element that will allow the community to flourish is to collaborate and adopt a learning attitude. And if you are a late driver of digital transformation in your business, keep in mind Big Data and AI as part of your new digital makeup for creating new customer experiences.

References:

1. https://www.cio.com/article/3211428/what-is-digital-transformation-a-necessary-disruption.html, Written by Clint Boulton, May 2019
2. https://www.cio.com/article/3235958/secrets-for-getting-digital-transformation-right.html
3. The State of Digital Transformation, 2018-2019 Edition, Altimeter