Firms struggling to embrace digital transformation - Is the complexity justified?!

Firms are loaded with piles of debt they have managed to accumulate in various forms (structural, financial, technical, systemic, personnel, etc) over the past couple of decades have made them immobile to growing threat and disruption around them. 

A recent forbes article published that 84% of companies fail at digital transformation and the single biggest attribute is the fundamental shift needed in how people think about how they interact, how they collaborate and work and if firms don't spend time changing people's behaviors, changing culture and how people make decisions, all of this transformation effort falls flat!

We also see firms struggling to make sense of the emerging market place, players, disruption and how it affects them and when. We continue to see incumbent firms across all industry verticals (some more than the others - for now!) plagued by the same themes.

When do they act and how?

The fears around transformation complexity are justified considering the 4 major pillars (Organization, Business, Technology & Operations) of an enterprise which have to be aligned to deliver that incremental progressive value through a cycle of continuous innovation perpetually.

Capturing transformational thoughts across each of these pillars into a Sustainability Thought Model (STM) brings about a reflection on the current sustainability state of the enterprise!

This can seem like a daunting, overwhelming and almost impossible task to take up at an enterprise level (Ofcourse needs senior sponsorship) but it is very much achievable.

How do you break down that complexity and get transformation delivered?

Getting back to the basics of how sustainable value is created with a customer centric view, we discover that there is more to it than just the products and services offered to customers!

There is no longer value in creating products or services but in the experience customers go through when engaging with the firm!. Customers don't buy products or services but they buy experiences.

Customers don't buy products or services, they buy what they do to them!

• Rolls-Royce no longer sells their jet engines and the maintenance service contracts around them, instead they now sell 18,000 hours of uninterrupted uptime experience. They are using IoT & AI to track & predict engine failures before they happen and resolve them during scheduled downtime before they break!
• Under Armour, a $5B athletic apparel firm wanted to move their value proposition from delivering a product to experiences which made them launch “connected fitness”— a platform to track, analyze and share personal health data right to customers’ phones. The platform offers their customers with personalized experience with notifications when their shoes are worn, hiking info, fitness and health trends
• Disney launched MyMagic+, a billion dollar investment aimed at improving the Disney World’s customer experience. MyMagic+ consists of a website, mobile app and wristband that allows Disney to track and analyze customer behavior so they can create a personalized and seamless Disney World experience for their customers like track guests in real time around the park and help them avoid long lines, cheer them up with characters, etc.

Extending that concept inward to drive enterprise transformations can help break down barriers, complexity, reduce risk and streamline approach towards delivering what truly matters - experiences with measured business outcomes.

A defined experience as a target can be the guiding north star at all times for all teams working on that objective across all roles.

The five core experiences which can transform an enterprise towards sustainability are:

The Experience Path/Delivery (EP) has the following phases:

1. Define Experience
2. Gap Assessment
3. Strategy for delivering outcomes
4. Incremental outcome based execution

Investment control experience is a central theme to all the other experiences helping provide a framework to track progress on an experience towards outcomes at regular intervals (preferred monthly) to help aid decision points on further investments.

"We want to experience the ability to manage our investment choices based on real time measured actionable feedback on progress towards outcomes"

Themes which support this experience:

• Business outcome driven program metrics
• Experience Management
• Ability to start/stop/pause on initiatives at any point with minimal/no overhead

Speed to Market Experience

"We want to experience a product release with quality every 2 weeks!"

Themes which support this experience:

• DevOps
• Cloud migration
• Flexible, Secure & Resilient Architecture
• Behavior and Quality Automation

Lean Agility Experience

"We want to experience teams' maturity to be able to own, commit and deliver business outcomes with agility demonstrating clear incremental progress towards those outcomes!"

Themes which support this experience:

• Structured outcome driven cross-functional teams
• Strong Organization, Agility & team culture
• Agile/Leadership/Executive coaching

New Value Chains Experience

"We want to experience the ability to identify customer behaviors and forge partnerships to integrate platforms in delivering a unified experience across eco-systems"

Themes which support this experience:

• Customer journeys
• BI & Data Analytics
• Vendor/Partner collaboration
• Omni-channel strategy
• Architecture re-alignment

Minimize Operational Costs Experience

"We want to experience the ability to minimize operational costs enabling us to reposition our people, resources, time, energy towards better value creation"

Themes which support this experience:

• Value flows across business processes
• Lean process redesign
• Robotic Process Automation
• AI, Machine Learning & Deep Learning

Why is EDT the right approach to delivering transformations?

1. Allows firms to unify their focus on delivering small set of deep impacting experiences
2. Focuses on driving an experience as the guiding star on delivering outcomes
3. Enables people to leave aside their ideological, political, personal considerations to team up in delivering what truly matters - experiences!. This paves the path for a defining cultural shift in the organization
4. Creates a strong passion in the organization for zero tolerance towards waste - time, resources, etc which are not oriented towards delivering an experience!
5. Establishes a framework for personalizing experiences based on organizational needs even combining some experiences or building upon them incrementally.

Would love to hear your thoughts/comments on your own transformation delivery experiences - what has worked for you and your organization? what were some of the learnings?!

Sid Nandi is a technology executive, leader, coach, technology strategy & management consultant experienced in helping organizations, business and technology undergo digital transformation with agility delivering customer centric products and solutions.

?His venture (DigitalTaaS) provides management, strategy & delivery consulting specializing in digital transformations to help organizations transform their business, technology & operations to create sustainable value in a digital world. He is passionate about connecting and collaborating with fervent transformation professionals from all industry verticals committed to building sustainable enterprises in a digital world!.