3 Key Capabilities for Digital Transformation
I believe in a type of strategy focused on developing an organizational architecture conductive to be successful, instead of only defining the next initiatives, features or steps.
This is why I use to define processes and objectives in a way no one needs to deviate from their natural path to find what’s necessary.
For example, if you need to be reminded about an appointment, and you use your smartphone the whole day, the best way is to setup an event or alert that will notify you on your phone.
When it comes to Digital Transformation, my approach comes from this same mindset, being the first step to architect an organization conductive to being digital.
Independently on if you know exactly what you want, or not, if you have the correct Digital Capabilities, you’ll find your way, or your way will find you.
Remember that Digital Transformation it’s not about implementing some specific software or solution, but building a set of new capabilities for BEING digital in a sustainable and long-term way.
Being that said, let’s summarize below the three main capabilities one should invest on to be capable of that.
1 — Digital Development
The first Digital Capability its the Digital Development, which means basically being capable of developing digital solutions. To get there, companies will need specific Skills, Practices, and Technologies.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
SRE is a set of technical and organizational practices developed and maintained by Google and given for free to the community which covers the practices for developing software faster, more reliably and less risky.
SRE practices includes:
- Blameless culture — developing digital solutions its complex and uncertain, mainly if you want to be ahead of your competition. Punishing and blaming errors will make people afraid of being creative.
- CI/CD — continuously integrating your code, and continuously deploying it in production, countraty to what it looks at a first sight, reduces considerably the risks, since you deliver smaller pieces of softwares, where errors are eaiser to detect and the impact is smaller, or easier to mitigate with a quick and simple rollback.
- Dedicate time to automate repeatable work — one of the core focuses of SRE practices is to reduce what they call “toil” (the manual work). The time you use to automate that is, with no doubt, an investiment.
You can check for further details directly from the official webiste.
DevOps
Being the combination of Development and Operations, it supports the idea that both teams must act in line with each other, and not separate as practiced before.
Alongside with SRE, this reduces dramatically the costs of maintenance, production failures and time to recover from an incident.
Agile Development
The agile wave came to preach a few simple ideas:
- Be simple and lean
- Do not overplan or resolve problems that doens’t exist yet
- Evolve throughout small iterations based on customer’s feedback
- Give people freedom to be creative
As we came from an era where we tried hard to predict every single step of a project, the experience has shown that its better to create a responsive and adaptative organization, instead of trying to predict and control everything. Which corroborates with the initial statment of this article.
Beyonde my interpretation, you can read the full agile manifesto directly from the source.
Service Management
Bear in mind that you are never developing only a piece of technology. Instead, you are developing a service, which will need to be operated, supported, maintained and found by your users.
Knowing that, its necessary to start thinking on the non-functional elements of this new solution since from the beginning.
The reference practice for Service Management is ITIL framework, which you can check in details here.
Project and Programme Management
The traditional planning model didn’t die.
There will be moments where you need to be more pricise, such as when you have planned the launching of a new store. All marketing, operations, financial and other teams must coordinate with each other to make sure everything is ready for the "big day".
For these and other cases, techniques and tools from the traditional way of working are still useful.
2 — Digital Operations
Once the solutions are developed, they’ll have to be operated, which includes proactive and reactive work.
Proactive work includes updates, monitoring, security checks and others. While reactive work covers responding to customer’s requests or resolving an incident not detected proactively.
To develop this capability, take the following practices into considerantion.
Service Management
Once more, Service Management practices are relevant. However, at this phase, the focus is to operate the previously created services.
The common practices includes:
- Incident Management (put the fire out)
- Problem Management (avoid the next fire by fixing the root cause)
- Preventive Monitoring
- Learning with Failure
SRE
Again? Yes. But, now, from an operational perspective.
While in the development phase the focus is on creating reliable solution, at this phase the objective is to quickly and objectively recover from inevitable failures.
Continuous Automation
Nowadays, there are abundant alternatives for automatizing operational work without the necessity of having programmers or technical specialists.
Explore tools like Google Scripts, PowerAutomate, PowerApps, Google AppSheets and RPA solutions to automatize day-by-day work whenever possible.
3 — Digital Governance
As the company grows, the demand for control increases.
Because of this, its natural to lose part of your agility. However, if the company concentrates in architecting the governance in digital world, its possible to mitigate the impact of controls.
For example, if you decide to use a cloud provider, such as Azure, AWS or GCP, they take care of most of the necessary controls for you, producing an annual document called “SOC Report”, which usually you can use as an input for external auditors.
Abusing on the technology and architecting adequatedly the other 2 digital capabilities, its possible to achieve the level of controls you need without reducing considerably the agility.
Conclusion
Its called digital TRANSFORMATION because its necessary to transform the way one work. It means you need to be capable of doing different things, in a different way.
This transformation involves rethinking all your processes, considering that, now, you have a set of technologies to support you.
Its not just to automatize how the physical letter comes from the physical mailbox to your door, but proposing a completely different way to communicate and pay your bills.
Would you like help with you Digital Transformation journey?
Check also “Service Oriented Organizations”.
