How to adopt Digital Transformation? part 2 - Vision

Hi all,

this is the 2nd part of some articles around the Digital Transformation with the viewpoint from Germany (EMEA). In the last part I explained what the current situation looks like and that many companies are speaking of DX though most companies even didn′t start to implement anything. Due to its complexity, I have split up the article in smaller parts.

• This article contains: Vision part 2
• You can find part 1 here: Intro and current situation

Let us now take a look, what is necessary to accomplish the goals.

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Vision:

The most important step by far is to define a vision. A vision is necessary to show the employees in which direction the company is heading to and what the plans are. It is important for the stakeholders to recognize the continuous improvement of the company, but also the necessity to challenge against the competition. It can be used in marketing to end-users and even new talents to demonstrate the modern approach of the whole company and finally - it can be even used as a brand.

In my past career, I have been assisting many migrations to Windows 10 with Windows as a Service. I have never seen a company with a clear vision to demonstrate what should be achieved within the next 2-3 years or how the working style should be changed. IT pushes the migrations because they have to. They validate on their own, how to handle different tasks and define their migration plans. (more or less good or bad) That′s it. But this is not a vision, guys!

But how should a good vision look like?

The vision should include:

• Where the company wants to be in 2-3 years
• How your products should look like in 2-3 years
• How the working style should be changed
• How the IT empowers the employees
• How IT infrastructure is being prepared for this
• What this means for processes and probably even the whole organizational structure
• What requirements need to be established to fulfil these tasks
• How far the modern technologies should be adapted
• How much you want to invest in emerging technologies
• What to retrieve from emerging technologies like AI or Data Science
• How to implement security compliance and technologies in the next 2-3 years
• Can you implement Business Process Management with your Digital Transformation and how
• and probably even more

This vision needs to be placed top-down. The top management should live this vision and assist in enforcing it, but also helping to remove constraints and boundaries.

And - this vision needs to be vivid, being tuned time over time and always being replanned for the next upcoming years. You know that Digital Transformation will never be finished - it is a continuous process! In addition due the current pace in IT, it′s important to not to define too long timelines, as the world in IT might easily change within months.

You should also take a dedicated look on Business Process Management in parallel, which comes along with the five pillars of a successful digital transformation:

• Integration of digital technology
• Agile processes
• Leadership and culture
• Workforce readiness
• Customer experience

Many of those areas can be empowered with tools and technologies coming with the digital transformation and vice versa. It is an enabler for the Digital Transformation and you will need to define for each point the plans for the next 2-3 years as well, which we will dive into with more detail in the following articles.

Most known errors from the field

Someone could say that this kind of vision should not be a hard task. At least, if you invest some time into it and get it discussed with all the executives. Unfortunately, the reality shows the complete opposite.

What vision?

Interesting to say that even many enterprise companies with more than 20k devices don′t have any vision at all. The most popuplar excuses are:

• It is currently under development
• It needs to be defined by the IT teams
• We are currrently lacking money and concentrate on the most important steps

Sometimes I have the feeling that companies want to postpone the transformation, because it is somehow unpleasant and disturbing. Keep the following in mind:

The easiest way to fail in a Transformation is to handle it as an incremental change. And - the transformation will come. Either you will bring the transformation, or the transformation will come for you.

So, either you start doing your job correctly, or you will be facing a transformation which is not controlled by you. And normally you recognize these kind of situations when you find yourself in a world of pain due to technical problems or constraints, which you cannot overcome anymore, or even worse - when your complete competition has just outpaced you in the meantime.

Selling

I have very rarely seen companies with a good vision. The next big error after lacking a well defined vision is not selling it correctly. As mentioned before, it is extremely important that this vision is sold top-down from the top-management. The management has to support the vision and to sell it by their own. They need to live it and share it publicly. To give you just a good example for this, take a look at next video on how Google′s CEO Sundar Pichai sells Google′s 'AI first' strategy.

If a vision is not sold correctly, it will lack influence and probably even credability. If the vision is not even lived from the top managers, why should the employees follow?

It′s called leader, because someone is leading!

Long-term

Then, many companies define long-term visions. You may be even aware of some typical names like: 'Next generation client', 'Modern place to work' and so on. These visions mostly define a long-term goal. A goal, which is set for 3-5 years in the future and is completely static. In the complete meantime, no one even wants to touch this vision, even if some technical definitions become outaged.

Your vision is agile!

Take a look on it continuously and recalibrate it, if it becomes necessary. Also, don′t stop to continue to plan for the future! It is nice that you have defined a vision for 2020, but you should also continue to plan for what follows after 2020. This is a continuous process!

The vision is crucial!

Keep in mind that you need a vision by any means. Otherwise the people don′t have any motivation to face the upcoming changes and just recognize it is an enforcement from top management, without knowing what the long-term goal is.

- and as I said - I haven′t seen much companies with a dedicated vision.

I hope that you understood how important the vision is. Many of the described topics in the following chapters are all derived from this vision. Lacking a good vision will create a lack of adoption of these topics.

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Thanks for reading - I hope you liked it and I am very happy to retrieve some feedback or discuss some topics in detail.

All the best,

David das Neves