How do you execute Digital Transformation at scale?

New years bring with them, depending on your outlook on life, the opportunity, or the pressure to set out new resolutions, create better habits and wipe the slate clean to be refreshed, re-energised and ready to go again for another year. However, for me personally and perhaps for many others, this year feels different. Whether this is the impact of emerging from lockdowns, battling with our own personal pandemic fuelled mental and physical health challenges, increased awareness of net zero and sustainability or the relentlessness of trying to thrive in new remote ‘ways of working’ aka sitting in front of a screen on your own non-stop all day I’m not 100% sure. However, what is clear is many of us are fundamentally changing the way we think about our personal purpose and what is important to us, individually in life, both personally and professionally.

These seismic mindset shifts are impacting our behaviours of how we buy products from organisations, how we expect to be treated and more fundamentally leading us to re-evaluate how both a company and its leader’s values, principles, and the way they do business align with what is personally important to us. We are experiencing an unprecedented wave of profound change that is impacting organisation’s right from their core ‘soul’ through to how they turn to new technology, digital and data to fundamentally reinvent how to meet new consumer expectations. This change isn't only limited to how organisations optimise for agility, growth and changing customer needs but is causing organisations to rethink their core DNA and how to embed sustainability, innovation, agility and purpose within the heart of their business and company culture. Organisations and leaders are now faced with not only how they scale and transform fast enough while retaining and creating new sources of competitive advantage but also how they can authentically articulate how they are making for the customers they serve, the communities they operate in and the planet itself a better, healthier and happier place to live and work.

In this series I discuss with a number of our Digital Transformation leaders to unpack the big questions of the ‘How’, rather than the ‘Why’. Exploring ‘how’ organisations can double down on technology, digital and data, culture and ways of working to accelerate growth and create better experiences for customers and colleagues while making a real change to the communities they operate in.?

For this first discussion I sat down, virtually of course, with Accenture Interactive’s Craig Mullins. Craig is a trailblazer of Digital Transformation with the war wounds and hands on experience to take transformation strategy into execution. Craig and his teams translate the strategic C-suite ‘Air-game’ into operational reality, delivering fast paced change at scale with real impact - the ‘Ground-game’. Craig and his team have industrialised this approach into what he calls a ‘Digital Factory’ - a system for discovering what to produce in the first place, fast.???

Dan: For any readers Craig, please could you introduce yourself…

Craig: Hello I’m Craig Mullins, I’m a Senior Manager in Accenture Interactive and Digital Factory Delivery Lead. Digital Factory is all about partnering with our clients to accelerate the delivery of brand-new experiences at scale.?

It’s designed as a system for discovering more of what to produce in the first place and helping develop a culture-first organisation to meet the pace of change in today’s uncertain world.

Dan: Many of us read or hear about the changing trends and customer expectations impacting customer experience, for example in a recent report by Accenture Interactive found 50% of consumers say that the pandemic caused them to rethink what's important to them in life. Of these consumers, 66% now not only want brands and organisations to take more responsibility in motivating them to live by their values and feel more relevant in the world but actually expect it. Reimagined Customer Expectations Craig, I’m curious to hear what are the key trends you are seeing ‘on the ground’ impacting customer experience for your clients?

Craig: Much of what we observe as experience trends is not entirely new, but the pandemic has helped to accelerate and make them more pervasive.?

?On the one hand, we are seeing consumers moving increasingly towards online channels. A recent report shows we’ve leaped five years ahead in consumer digital adoption in as little as eight weeks, and that is driving more of a shift to online for many businesses. Experiences are becoming dramatically more digital overall as a result.

?And we see that - supermarkets have shifted to online ordering and delivery as their primary business and manufacturers are developing plans for “lights-out” factories and supply chains. Covid-19 has is advancing the trend that is encouraging organisations to make greater investment in technology a top priority, whilst forcing brands to pay even more attention to the ease with which customer can engage with them digitally.

?B2B transactions are starting to catch on too. Very few companies have so far managed to create the same quality of digital service that allows other businesses to buy from them without having to pick up the phone or email the sales team. But that is starting to change with increasing investment in B2B commerce. DHL, the logistic firm, have said that in the next 3 years, 80% of all business-to-business sales will take place online. We’re going to see less and less bifurcation of your consumer experience being super-technology advanced compared to your business life.

?But it is not enough to be present online. Businesses are fighting on several fronts to reimagine customer experiences and reduce friction. Some airlines are reinventing the passenger experience with contactless journeys focused on health and safety. The travel industry is looking at digital hotels for a fully contactless experience. Some of these trends are not new, but they are evolving, fast and organisations are going to have to continue to navigate through these disruptive times to thrive in the months ahead.

?Dan: Thanks Craig. Really interesting to hear how you see COVID-19 has impacted the rate of technology adoption. Accenture research has also indicated that there is a new cohort emerging post pandemic who are compressing digital transformation and growing 4 x faster than competitors. These organisations, so called Leapfroggers, are excelling at building core system strength in the cloud and flipping their IT budgets to favour innovation. Investing in emerging tech, AI, automation, IOT, cloud and data at the core of their transformation strategies. Make the leap take the lead?

?I am however interested to hear what you see from your experiences as the number one challenge you expect organisations to face as they look to shift from incremental improvements to potential ‘leapfrogging’ status

?Craig: I think one the biggest challenges to growth is the rate of change and your ability to keep pace with it – the rate at which you are able to move at the speed and scale suddenly required by the Pandemic to leapfrog competition is a dramatically more daunting reality than pre-crisis.

?What that means for many organisations is the pace of learning – being able to test and prove what is working and what is not - is falling far short of the level required to match the rate of change around them.

?Technology and the right mix of digital skills undoubtedly plays a big part, but on their own are not sufficient to get or keep ahead of the pack. Leapfrogging requires a system and culture to act on ideas and innovate super-fast in a sustainable, repeatable, and prolonged way that’s often completely missing.

?Dan: Interesting to hear, what do you think is holding organisations back?

?Craig: I think there is a general tendency – which is understandable - amongst organisations to dial down innovation and protect and trade the core business in uncertain times.?Innovation is often seen as the preserve of “normal times”. But starving innovation funding is not necessarily a safe bet. Companies have lost leadership positions that once seemed completely unassailable because of the pandemic. This is the time when discussions about your own velocity of change and forward-looking actions and investments should be massively amplified.?

?Relying on technology alone is not enough. Moving to the Cloud! Automate everything! Adopt AI! From my experience innovation has less to do with digital or technology alone and more to do with your people and culture. Ask yourself the question - is your company filled with more “checkers” than “doers,”??

?If you haven’t already begun the process of identifying entrepreneurs and giving them the platform to take risks and experiment, you’re never going to develop the muscle memory a company culture needs to meet the current pace of change.

?

Dan: I love that - “ask yourself the question, is your company filled with more checkers than doers?” We all know it can be challenging in some organisations that are not digitally native or are the latest ‘purpose first’ app based start-up for example to drive change at the required level. From what you see, hypothetically of course, if you had a magic wand and could fix the number one key challenge you see these organisations facing now what would it be and why?

???

Craig: One of the key challenges organisations are facing is knowing how to accelerate time-to-market with more of the right ideas sitting on top of “not-so-new” systems and processes. This comes back to my point about culture - many organisations have no shortage of ideas but are challenged in how to take and turn them into something real. And, let’s face it, most ideas turn out to be bad! Organisations need to provide their people with the platform and authority for experimentation to discover this on their own. This can only begin once you recognise that your people, their roles and job descriptions, the way they work and how they’re renumerated, need to change first so that technology can equip them with the firepower to make deep change happen.

?How to change the company culture to be more agile, risk-tolerant, data driven, more customer-centric is one of the biggest challenges. Because where do you start? Companies that unlock a winning culture will transform at a pace that leaves their competitors behind.

?Dan: Helping organisations change their culture from ‘monolithic oil tankers’ to ‘nimble flotillas of yachts’ who can simply get stuff done quickly with the agility to rapidly react to changing customer needs is however not a new challenge.

?You are right in saying though, that the gap between those that have pivoted to a winning culture has been amplified significantly by mastering the effective use and adoption of new technology as well as the right systems and processes to scale it.

?Ok let’s make this real then, what are 3 examples of tactical changes organisations facing these challenges could get started on now?

?Craig: What can realistically be done quickly to increase the organisational drumbeat? Standing up a Digital Factory is a great approach because it can be set-up and scaled in a matter of weeks. It offers leaders a digital-led recovery system to reset their digital agendas to meet new customer needs, shore up their idea prioritisation processes, and tune their organisational models and tech stacks to operate at the highest effective speed. In other words, it’s something that allows C-level execs to point their digital firepower at the right targets and execute against them fast.

?Once you have created the vision and purpose for your Digital Factory define the capabilities required to run it both near-term and at scale. Look to balance the buy vs. build equation by bringing in partners who can provide more of what you don't have but need to accelerate Factory development and mobilisation. Partners can also help to fill critical digital skills shortages by brining great talent with the right cultural fit.

?This does not mean you need to neglect the experience in your existing organisation. One of the biggest advantages of the Digital Factory is how ‘change-the-company teams’ interact with ‘run-the-company functions’ by combining and connecting the best talent and resources throughout the Company and its ecosystem. A Digital Factory with limited scope or participation cannot match this expectation. Look for opportunities to recruit from within and supplement the Digital Factory teams with the domain knowledge from colleagues across the wider organisation – their expertise will help guide and enrich teams’ backlogs. On the other hand, they become internal change agents for the factory and a new way of working helping it to grow organically from within.

?Dan: We often hear the phrase ‘dream big, start small and scale quick’ however ‘Digital Factory’ sounds more like ‘jumping in straight at the deep end’. Which i can appreciate for there are many organisations realising now that they can only learn so much by only ‘dipping their toe in the water’?

?Craig: We need to be thinking bigger - starting small, experimenting, and then scaling is fine when the technology is still relatively new but when everyone is using it, it is time to make some bigger bets. Digital Factory is intended to be the engine of a deep change so avoid thinking small and short-term otherwise you will start small and stay small and miss the opportunity to be impactful.

?There has been an over-promotion of small experiments around the fringe through Innovation Hubs and Innovation Labs that needs tempering. Instead, we should be more focused on the approaches and systems the likes of which Digital Factory bring to solve bigger, more urgent needs.?I’m saying start big and go bigger! For that to happen you have got to be able to scale quickly. If by now your company cannot use innovation or digital transformation to do some big things, to create interesting new products or brand-new business models, or to radically transform a customer experience, you’re going to face increasing competition.

?Dan: Start big and go bigger…. I like the sound of that. So from your experiences which organisations are doing this really well and what sort of results are the achieving?

?Craig: The Digital Factory is a system that serves the purpose of innovation across a business. It’s not the only construct for that. We see some sectors that are more developed, and particularly in some companies that are more developed, they end up innovating?more organically because their corporate centres already operate in a very lean-agile way. They already have a set of rules applied to the normal company to make this happen and they don’t need to create a new construct on the side. We see that at scale, for example, across some telecoms and banking organisations that we have partnered with.?

Other sectors like retail have been at the forefront of this for a long time and have large-scale Digital Factories that are fully embedded in the organisation albeit as a separate entity. We partnered with a home improvement retailer to establish a Digital Factory, helping them to completely re-orientate their business around the customer, experimenting on new ideas and launching a suite of digital products and services to market.

Dan: Thanks Craig. To conclude could you please share your thoughts on the top 5 priorities for building the capabilities to unlock growth through digital transformation

Craig:

1. Keep clear missions

To stand a chance of building great experiences, at the very least you need to talk clearly about well-defined missions that link directly to strategy. Avoid describing corporate goals at such a high level that it is difficult to translate them into concrete initiatives – you will end up with confused teams who through no fault of their own focus on “looking busy”.

2. Open the doors to partners

If you don’t need to own it, and there is a suitable partner, move quickly to bring in external parties who have the required capabilities and skills you need but are missing at first, to speed the rate of progress and get going.?

3. Commit to a new culture

Building new capability for growth requires a new set of rules that allow people to work differently but that needs executive commitment from day one with the authority to cut through red tape and keep things moving.?Strong leadership is fundamental in driving the new ways of working, and in demonstrating engagement through actions, support and participation

?4. Focus on value

Focus on a strong Portfolio Management which can help to identify the most valuable, strategically relevant ideas to progress and re-evaluate value at every step based on new learnings and success measures. This will help ensure that teams are always working on the right things next.

?5. Test early and often

Seek opportunities to test early and frequently with end users to learn what works and reduce risk of building more of the things people do not want. This needs to be underpinned by investing in a strong DevOps platform to support rapid development and frequent releases as well as a fail-fast “productively” mindset – learning from what doesn’t work and making improvements.

Dan: Many thanks Craig for sharing your thoughts. Quotes like “ask yourself if your company is filled with more checkers than doers” and “start big and go bigger” will stay with me forever!

Looking forward to bringing more sustainable, innovative, and purposeful change to the workplace in 2022

If you want to find out more about how to master Digital Transformation at scale or more about Digital Factories then please don't hesitate to reach out to Dan or Craig at [email protected] and [email protected]?

Note the content reflects Dan and Craig’s own views and do not necessarily represent the views of their employer, Accenture?