The fourth industrial revolution elevated the power of information management as the new currency of business success. Information Technology, Telecommunications and Medical-related organizations were among the first to identify means that data could be harnessed, processed and could be made available to provide the required business value through customer insights, business trends and metadata that could in turn, be offered as a resource to allow further processing. Nowadays, even traditional industries, such as Shipping, have quickly shifted perspective towards harnessing the value of data. On the technical layer, data warehouses, data lakes and cloud-native configurations are currently given priority over the traditional infrastructure. Software layers can be built to utilize the infrastructure to provide APIs so that the data can be globally retrieved (and reused) via a secure and abstract fashion.
To facilitate the emerging technologies on all layers, the digital transformation process that has become the 'talk of the town' over the past few years, becoming the most prominent vessel for optimizing businesses through forth industrial revolution. Digital Transformation basic pillars - they have been discussed on a previous article - are Cloud, Service, Infrastructure and Mindset.
An organization adopting a digital transformation journey is encouraged to develop and cultivate a set of qualities that will increase the likelihood of success on such a venture. With a hint of enterprise agility and traditional enterprise management values, on an attempt to approach the subject concisely, let's sail through the 7C's of Digital Transformation Success:
- Commitment: A transformation process is destined to bring about a series of changes to people and the processes involved. As the way of working is subject to change, a revised working agreement must be made, focused on committing to the decisions made and their subsequent initiatives and the work and effort required to make change happen. This should not incur any changes to the work/life balance and should enhance it, instead. As a added benefit, committed teams increase productivity and delivery as they can coordinate work and communicate any issues effectively which, in turn, instills trust between team members.
- Courage: Commitment takes courage, in order to accept and embrace change and to receive feedback and improve upon it (akin to kaizen loops: plan-do-study-act). This also means that the executive level of the organization should approach managing the transformation with a sense of understanding of the current situation (as-is) while bridging the gap to the desired transformation result (to-be). Also, having the courage to accept change and realize the gap between the status and goals sets the required 'north star' for se subsequent steps and initiatives and maintains having realistic targets while achieving them.
- Collaboration: Any joint effort requires collaboration and albeit this stands out as a no-brainer, it requires the previous set of qualities on order to substantiate and drive change forward. An effective set of teams, with the courage to commit to the work and share the vision, collaborates without antagonizing neither the teams, nor the management. Collaboration implies opening communication channels between management levels to allow for coordination and direction, especially when tasks are falling behind schedule or goals are not met.
- Ceremonies: It is a common misconception that work (or process) ceremonies may be time consuming or even establish bureaucracy. Ceremonies promote communication and transparency and establish a sense of commitment to the team. An example can be given form the IT world: large-scale IT projects, bearing high technical complexity, need to be controlled by a number of management levels. Instead of segregating the various decisions required, the eligible projects can be presented to a specific audience, at a specific frequency (i.e. bi-weekly), and the event can be themed as Project Architecture Council where the decisions can be made - along with the respective commitments.
- Capacity: The above qualities can be made more potent when the appropriate capacity meets the demand required by new projects. A common misconception is that, digital transformation is in place for less doing more via automation. In fact, automation is a subset of transformation benefits and it does not necessarily imply reducing the human capital required to carry on with the initiative; instead, automation can be used to reduce drudgery and promote productivity. In practice, organizations rarely reach the ideal capacity to meet the demand, due to running, operations and demand cost, among others. However, every cost-benefit analysis should take into consideration that there are limits to the productivity levels the organization resources can achieve, and it may lead to significant risks and losses if retention levels spiral downwards.
- Context: A transformation effort bears complexity, depending on the size and the business scope of the organization. Every initiative and goal leads to specific benefits realized that contribute to the shared vision set upon adopting the transformation goal. Amongst all the initiatives, processes, targets and actions, context is king. Every business unit, management team and delivery pipeline are essentially interlinked, bringing context to every effort, clarifying the 'what' and 'why' will enable each team to derive the 'how', 'who' and 'when'. In more instances than we care to admit, we have lost our 'north star' via focus shifts that have been caused by lack of context.
- Coherence: Adding to context and sharing the common vision, ideas and words need to convey to action, ergo coherence is a significant factor when action items are taken. Management teams should commence frequently sanity checks when overseeing a transformation effort, since it is a many-body problem, led by different levels of management and implemented by different teams with varying obligations and priorities. Coherence brings continuity and promotes work cadence.
Commitment and Courage are explicitly identified from Scrum Values (which in full are: Focus, Openness, Respect, Commitment and Courage) and stem from empiricism (pillars are: Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation). Communication and Ceremonies are implicitly derived from Agile best practices, as well. Capacity, Context and Coherence are traditional management values that are frequently referenced as essential when managing organizational complexity and compliment lean approaches, as well.
Each to its own and all as an integrated value system, the qualities of the 7C's can pave the way towards a more successful, targeted and rationalized digital business future.
Keep an open mind, iterate and execute.-
