Setting focus in a stagnating digital transformation

Introduction

In my previous post (here ) I wrote about the difficulties of navigating a digital transformation that is stagnating. The post centered mainly on the core pillars-Trust, focus and Clarity-? whilst also visiting thought leadership.? Today we will dive deeper into one of the core pillars, focus.

How do we define focus?

Focus is the first pillar of digital transformation and is critical to its success. A focus on clarity for people and in the organizational processes is essential to ensure that digital transformation efforts align with the overarching transformation goals. Enterprise architects play a crucial role in maintaining this focus by establishing guidelines for and processes around technology usage to ensure consistency across business units and IT infrastructure.

To set focus a strong architect should keep in touch with these components:

1. Emphasize the human element: Digital transformation should be about changing the way workers in an organization produce or deliver services, rather than just focusing on the technology.
2. Digitize processes: Start by digitizing a single, annoying process to demonstrate the benefits of digital transformation and create value for the company.
3. Invest time in conversations: Engage in conversations with workers to ensure everyone is in agreement on the objectives of digitizing a process and how it will enhance their working life.
4. Ensure the right people use the right technologies: Show your workforce how digitalized operations can enhance their working life and deliver improvements to processes.
5. Reduce complexity: Focus on reducing complexity in systems and processes to enable the company to capitalize on digital technologies, support agile and DevOps product-development methodologies, and respond to customers' needs more quickly.
6. Write things down: Last but probably the most crucial one, write things down. It will make the stagnation clear. Ensure that you are involving your team and business in the documentation phase, it will give a lot more granular visibility and tighten the bonds with the (possible sceptic) business. Writing things down will generate a better understanding and ability to steer the teams and business in the right direction.

By following these standards, you can ensure that the digital transformation efforts are focused on achieving business value and retain talent you need to succeed in transforming the company.

Invite your stakeholders to participate

Reduce complexity, focus on simplifying systems and processes to make it easier for the company to use digital technologies and respond to customer needs quickly. In the end leadership decides on budgets and has to account to their stakeholders on the progress of the stagnant transformation.

In most cases when you embark on this journey, you are either new to the company or you step in by request to re-activate the transformation. Having leadership available in this phase is a must and gives you the benefit of a strong helicopter view. Allowing you to map dependencies for them. Things you cannot oversee, leadership can spot, things you are strong at you empower leadership with for their conversations. The additional value is that this allows you to generate buy-in and adds to create and set focus immediately setting yourself up for success.

Make time for thorough planning: Allocate time during your transformation process for careful planning and reflection. This approach allows for better measurement, visualization, and alignment between business and IT architecture, ensuring a comprehensive understanding and successful implementation, below some consideration points:

1. The business you work with: Have a good understanding of what the business actually does that generates them money, makes them successful and even more important what is the most painstaking issue that you should resolve.
2. Understand the channel strategy: Marketing is a key factor to the success of any business, these departments are responsible for creating the image, tone of voice, look and feel and the identity of the organization. Their channel strategy is a good place to start.
3. Look at the business goals: The business goals should map back onto the Channel strategy (or they are in the process of revising so stay on board), as the products that the company sells rely heavily on the success of the channel strategy. Make sure you take the time to write out what you see and measure these goals efficiently.
4. Capability view: Understanding where the capabilities of the business and IT rest will give you a good skillset matrix, where your migration team can ask questions and generate their own stakeholder matrix as they understand what skill are in what team.
5. Write down what needs to be done: Can't emphasize this enough, when you take over a stagnant migration a tedious but required task is to write down what still has to be done in the eyes of your technology team, based on what they know. This can be brought back to the business, broken down into smaller pieces and create an end-to-end overview.
6. Make time to take time: Making time during your complex transformation allows you to take time. The idea behind it is you take time to work things out, measure, draw and create a closing understanding for business and IT where both business and IT Architecture are truly represented by your Enterprise Architecture practice.
7. Measure is knowing: Be open for feedback on anything you write, the helicopter view of leadership, the in-depth detail knowledge of staff on the work floor. Measure every step what has been written down and reiterate continuously. Architecture is a living thing that should always be moving with the needs of the business.

Ensure close connection with leadership: Establish a strong rapport with leadership to understand the business setup. Then, align these insights with staffing and IT processes to ensure smooth operation and rapid progress.

Use simple strategies to get clarity like the "Plan-do-check" mechanism. Engage with the principles you establish with your teams, incorporate the style of delivery that the business wants to get accustomed to.