Digital Transformation? It’s Not About the Tech.
Since the beginning of civilisation as we know it, technology has been the great differentiator between success or failure. Whether it be, having the bravery and ingenuity to make the first tools, create language, or mastering the use of fire. We as a species have survived not due to our strength but due to our wit. In the last century that growth has sped up to an exponential rate, the invention of the computer, the PC, then the internet, we have information in our pockets today, that 50 years ago no-one would have dreamed of.
This has changed everything, it’s changed how we interact with each other, it’s changed how we value things, and it’s changed how we do business. 20 years ago, if someone told you that a bank would only exist as an app, most of us wouldn’t believe it. But that’s one, out of a multitude of examples, self-driving cars, films straight to your home, being able to print physical objects from data. Nowadays, more often than not, the company that moves fastest is the company that wins. We are valuing innovation over stability time and again, the next decade is going to be, make or break for a lot of incumbents.
So what’s the solution? A lot of enterprises seem to think they know. They plan to wait out the tide, to buy challengers and disruptors and in doing so, somehow steal their abilities. But unfortunately the real world doesn’t work like Highlander, you can’t just buy a company and suddenly have its power. In fact, the opposite is closer to reality, one of the many tricks Julius Caesar employed as he expanded the Roman Empire was to take enemy tribesmen who’d been defeated and add them into his own army but splitting them up to dilute their sense of self. This worked well for Caesar, but he already had a winning team, he just wanted more numbers to add to his army, not more individuals. But what happens if what you really want is to change a companies culture?
Culture Starts From the Top.
No matter what you do, no matter what your industry is, every aspect of your business will rely on technology. Whether it’s Finance, HR or Sales, you lose the tech, then they won’t be able to do their jobs. Fundamentally every company is a technology company, and the first step to realising real change is to recognise this one simple fact. The IT department as a cost centre is long dead, IT is the lifeblood of your company, and just because you or your boardroom may not understand it, it doesn’t make this any less accurate. So that’s why for any real change to occur, it has to come from the very top. Not from the CTO, but from the CEO and the board. Why is that? Because change is hard.
Humans naturally resist change they deem not to be in their best interests, so part of the trick is to make sure the companies best interests align your employees. We as a species like to feel like we’re right, so surrounding ourselves with likeminded people feels good, but it can give you an incredibly warped view of reality (Just look up the CIA pre-1990's). So then if some kid in a hoody comes into your office and tells you you’ve been doing it all wrong, you just aren’t going to sit up and say “God Dammit! You’re right!”. There has to be a motivation for people to change, and that has to come from the top.
So how do you know you’re doing the right thing? And how do you choose who to listen to? There is one metric that every single member of the board (and the company as a whole) should care about and that’s cycle time. The time it takes for an idea to go from concept to being released into the world for feedback. If you wait 3 years for a digital transformation project to be released into the world, then the likelihood is all the concepts that were relevant at the beginning will be history and your project will fail. Get that 3-year cycle down to a month or less, and you have the hope of competing in a market filled with smaller, more agile companies.
Driving with Data
Politics plays a key role within large companies, so a person who plays the political game the best may get the outcome they want. Biases and fear of change means this isn’t necessarily the best solution for the company. So rather than letting personalities and opinions drive your decision making, create some key metrics and judge your teams based on them. This doesn’t mean a succeeding group can lord it over all the others, toxic behaviour will negatively impact your company regardless of results. But it does mean you can see through all the BS and understand which teams are succeeding, which are failing and take steps to reproduce one team’s success in another.
Constructing that data can be a minefield though, I heard recently of one company which had all teams fill out risk reports to gauge their security. The problem turned out that the most mature (and also least risky) teams filled out their risk report fully and honestly. Whereas the less experienced teams didn’t know what their risks were and failed to gauge the impact of the risk adequately. This meant the most vulnerable teams were being falsely rated as the most secure. Data should be impartial, carried out by 3rd parties (or automated) and should honestly reflect how that team is doing. After all, how can organisations know how to improve if they don’t know what they don’t know.
Don’t Forget Security.
GDPR is real, just ask BA and Marriot. Ask yourself, can you afford to lose 5% of your revenue? Improved security does not mean slower, or more complicated. In fact, the slower and more complex your security is, the more likely your staff are to circumvent it. Unwittingly opening you up to a myriad of fines, lawsuits, and bad PR. So security needs to be considered at the very forefront of the change. GDPR means that compliance isn’t the critical factor anymore, your data being genuinely and provably secure is. So it needs to be embedded from the very beginning, and it needs to be easy. One of the great things about being human is that we will always find the easiest route to achieving our goals. You as a company had better make sure that that route is also the most secure.
Dealing with Legacy Services will be the Key to Achieving Your Goals.
There are 2 (or probably more) schools of thought when it comes to legacy services. The first one is to rebrand it to heritage services, concerning the time it has lasted, the fact it has supported your company for this long, yet acknowledging that it’s time it was retired. The second school of thought is to call them toxic services, admitting that these services are the things that slow your company down as a whole and without complete removal, they will be the thing that ultimately kills you. Both these concepts have a grain of truth in them, but fundamentally just like any other machine you are only ever going to go as fast are your slowest piece.
In reality, I like to think of these services like training wheels on a bike. They were integral to the company’s growth. But just as we get to a point where our stabilisers slow us down, so your company reached a point where they aren’t needed anymore.
Bravery and compassion are what’s called for here. Bravery to be able to excise the tumour that’s slowing down your company, but also compassion for the guys that built and owned it for its lifetime. Working with those people to either retrain or create an exit strategy in a way that both parties are happy will not only remove some formidable opponents to change but could also create you some powerful allies.
Don’t Rely on Consultancies.
In much the same way buying a successful startup only serves to dilute that startup’s success, and does nothing for the enterprise as a whole. Hiring a big consultancy does nothing to improve morale or the capability of your incumbent workforce. That and the vast majority of enterprise-scale consultancies have precisely the same problems as you do and it becomes like the blind leading the blind, just with a massive bill at the end. Not to mention the weird conflict of interests involved in time-based billing, and a complete lack of investment in the overall success of the client.
The next decade technology is going to be the battleground where your company succeeds or fails and although you can hire some mercenary’s here and there to shore you up, wouldn’t you rather have an army that knew which end of the rifle to point at the enemy. Your company’s success is going to entirely depend on your ability to train your existing staff and turn them into the elite fighting force you need them to be.
Get Creative.
So you’ve transformed your business, you’ve got your cycle times down to reasonable levels, what next? How do you utilise this massive improvement in efficiency you’ve just given yourself. You take it one step further, you say to yourself; IT is not only the lifeblood of my business, it’s the thing that’s going to differentiate me from the rest of the market. That’s where the buzzwords come in like AI, machine learning and all those cool things people talk about without truly understanding them. But at the root all it really needs is a human being, sitting and imagining what would make your customers’ lives better. Companies like Monzo have become incredibly successful because they completely re-imagined what banking should look like and if you foster and nurture that kind of creativity within your staff (who, after all, know your customers much better than you do), then you are onto a winner.
Creativity is the one thing that computers will never be able to do, us humans are weird, unpredictable beings, and it’ll only take another human to predict what your customers could possibly need. But do you know what, you’ve reduced your cycle times, each idea you have costs nothing compared to the 3-year projects of old, you can try (and fail) with hundreds of ideas in the space of time it used to take you to develop one plan to completion. So if training your workforce and empowering technologists is what’s going to allow you to keep up with the market, nurturing creativity is what’s going to let you overtake your competitors and put you at the very top of the game.
So to sum up driving transformation can be a tricky business, but following these steps will get you on a path to success.
- Drive change from the top down.
- Use objective data to cut through all the politics and emotions.
- Embed security at the forefront of your transformation.
- Own your change and don’t rely on outside sources.
- Get creative and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
for more questions email info@rebelastronaut.co.uk
