With businesses increasingly looking digital, ‘IT transformation’ has become a buzzword of sorts signalling an increasing shift of dependency to more agile and tech-savvy models. However the journey is a difficult one and despite holding high expectations, is not always met as promised.
Having worked within a few ‘IT Transformations’ before, it’s worth discussing some of the crucial factors considered when planning and executing such a large project and trying to identify why they may stumble.
- What is it? - It’s generally an overhaul of an organizations’ IT systems, processes, and culture. It is viewed as vital to the companies future success and generally involves re-inventing how business objectives can be achieved with technology in a more scalable and cost-efficient way.
- Justification - Some of the reason behind undertaking such a large endeavour is an increased need for agility, improved competitiveness, compliance reasons, resource or cost-cutting, scalability, improved customer experiences and much more. In recent cases I’ve noticed ‘transformation projects’ occurring purely due to a new team of senior management who wish to scrap existing models and generate a new vision for the company.
- Current-state Evaluation - To transform something new, the old model needs to be evaluated including its infrastructure, applications, and processes. This assessment generally highlights what is working well and what needs to change to meet the future vision of the organisation. This may involve re-selecting the right technology stack and generally consider factors such as scalability, security, and interoperability.
- Success Measures - Like any change, goals and KPIs are identified from the outset to help provide a benchmark to measure the success against post implementation. These could include both tangible and non-tangible measures such as improvements in efficiency, cost savings, enhanced customer satisfaction, and agility.
- Project Team - In my opinion the project team is the most crucial factor in successfully navigating the transformation. Building a competent, cross-functional team with a strong leader to navigate the many unknowns and pitfalls is vital to keeping the project and stakeholders on track. Lack of collaboration or resources can quickly and severely turn the project into a disaster, adding years (plus millions in costs) to the originally defined scope and timelines. The team should also possess knowledge and experience from both business and system perspectives, which is generally a hard fit to find.
- Change Management - IT transformation inevitably bring about a lot of change in business processes. Therefore a robust communication strategy is essential to keep stakeholders informed throughout the journey will go a long way in minimizing change resistance
- Adaptability - Transformations can and will evolve, and to ensure scope-creep is minimized, buffers are usually created to help alleviate the blow of unknowns. It’s also vital to continuously reviewing goals and collaboration between the teams by gathering feedback from the project teams.
Overall IT Transformation are not just about adopting new technologies, but strategically aligning technology with business objectives to set up a foundation for success going forward. And by understanding some of these core concepts above, you can see that there a number of factors to take into consideration before embarking on the journey.
