Organising & Architecting for Sustained Digital Transformation
Unlocking capacity to fuel a whole-of-organisation approach to digital transformation
Across different industries, public or private sector alike, many organisations are now embarking on their own digital transformation efforts.
Often, you would hear these organisations lament about the slow progress and how they wish Engineering can deliver more quickly.
At the same time, one common constraint facing Engineering is the inability to expand capacity fast enough, limited by headcount budgets or hamstrung by the limited pool of technical talents.
I had the opportunity to be part of the CSIT team going through our own digital transformation journey.
In this article, I would like to share our experiences in organising and architecting for digital transformation.
It is about creating engineering capacity to bring about the necessary changes. But it goes further than just hiring more engineers. If we can empower every employee to create digital solutions, we can unlock the full capacity of the organisation for digital transformation.
Architecting Our Technical Foundations for Expanded Reach
If development platforms and infrastructure can only be accessed by Engineering, it is not surprising that the organisation’s capacity for developing digital solutions is limited to just Engineering.
There could be the occasional automation tool, data analysis software or excel macro. But by and large, much more can be done to democratise the development of digital solutions.
We want to build an ecosystem where highly-available and production-grade services created by Engineering can be delivered through APIs, and made accessible throughout the organisation.
Engineering went on a orchestrated effort to decompose application monoliths into microservices and publish them centrally on internal cloud platforms. Definitely not an easy feat, as these same applications are used day-to-day. Intense discussions and complex considerations took place, to ensure that the migration is seamless to Business. Nevertheless, these are critical foundational pieces that need to be in place.
When the underlying services are externalised in this way, every one in the organisation, Business or Engineering alike, could potentially ride on these externalised services to develop digital solutions.
Engineering is no longer confined to just delivering web application, which is typically targeted for business users who is steeped in business knowledge, but may not be adept in technology. Instead, Engineering can deliver a wider spectrum of solutions that cater to employees possessing varying levels of technical skills.
Engineering can deliver data exploration environments, where users with scripting knowledge can independently harness insights from data through the use of the scripting platform, data and analytics services provided by the environment.
Engineering can deliver data pipelines and visualisation tools (e.g. Tableau) which enables users to build their own dashboards. Engineering can provision a backend that pulls in relevant data, while allowing users to create bespoke dashboards customised to their own use case.
Engineering can deliver code bases or software libraries, developed and made available to the entire organisation for use as-is, or improved upon by technically adept users.
Engineering can even deliver one-off analysis reports or time-bound studies, by forward deploying data scientists or business intelligence analysts to Business, to analyse or provide insights for a specific problem using services that had been externalised.
We have been building towards an architecture that could support such a concept of operation, where technology delivery will not be confined within Engineering. Instead we build an entire ecosystem where the whole organisation can be empowered to build digital solutions.
Raising the Level of Digital Literacy in Our People
Upskilling our people is as integral as building the technology development platform. There is no point in having technology development platforms available to every employee in the organisation if only a select few is sufficiently skilled to use them. We want to upskill every employee.
The influx of digital natives into the workforce opened up new possibilities. It is now pretty common to find employees who do not have a formal education in computer science or engineering, picking up basic scripting or programming. The boundary between Business and Engineering is no longer a clean black line, but less well defined, in blurred shades of gray.
While we want to upskill every employee, we do not expect every employee to be full-fledged software engineers or programming experts. But we do need to be deliberate in investing in our people, giving them sufficient training to develop the skills needed to make full use of their access to the technology development platforms.
We organise every employee in a virtual ‘hub-and-spoke’ structure. Engineering acts as the hub, building and supporting a few flagship products that supports core enterprise workflows, and publishing high quality data and analytic services through production grade APIs. The hub is typically made up of full product teams comprising product managers, UX designers, software engineers, data scientists, data engineers and AI engineers. The hub is also seen as the center of excellence where best practices can propagate from.
Beyond Engineering, we hire and deploy technically trained employees, typically data analysts and data scientists, to Business. Sitting alongside business users, they can respond faster to critical and urgent needs. Through their day-to-day exposure to the business floor, they would already be in touch with the issues at hand, and do not require a detailed and elaborate brief on the situations every time their expertise is required. Their main focus is to use the services developed by Engineering to solve new business problems, and where needed, ride on some of the services to develop simple applications or create last mile tools.
On top of deploying technical folks in Business, we designed programs to upskill every employee in the organisation to attain a certain level of digital literacy. Imagine a scenario when every employee has some basic programming or technical skills. They are pretty much a 5% or 10% techie. Instead of calling for help every time they need technical support, they can self-service for some of the less technically challenging problems.
Such a hub and spoke model opens up opportunities to expand the capacity for digital transformation. Progress need not be bottlenecked at Engineering. It places employees with the right skills where the action is, enabling more rapid response to business needs.
Generating Momentum through Innovation Initiatives
We have developed the platforms and upskilled our people. The last critical factor that we need to put in place is time. How do we deliberately set aside pockets of time and put employees in spaces where they can come up with creative solutions ?
There could be pockets of people in the organisation who take to this naturally. Through their own proactiveness, they are already putting their new found skills and access to technology platforms to good use, finding pockets of time within their daily routines to make a difference.
But we need to go further than just pockets of people. We started innovation initiatives to generate momentum, to catalyse more of the organisation into action.
The best ideas does not necessarily come from the senior leadership. Middle managers, team leaders, business users and engineers on the ground see opportunities and challenges in their own space that are not visible to senior leaders, and sometimes bring the most value.
Most of us know this as a fact. But putting this knowledge into well-oiled organisational mechanism is not as straightforward. We want to empower employees to act on their own ideas, instead of letting their creative ideas die off simply because they could not leverage on organisational resources to see the ideas through to fruition.
We hold yearly hackathons where staff are encouraged to form teams across Business, Engineering and increasingly also Corporate to work on problem statements that they came up with themselves.
The teams are given an uninterrupted stretch of working days to develop their ideas. Employees are also encouraged to explore and develop new technologies during extended work-from-home periods (common in today’s pandemic situations). Some of the outcomes from these projects had turned into mainstream products. Case-in-point, there was a two-man experiment on an internal development platform that proved so useful the platform was productionalised, with full-time headcounts and budget allocated to run the platform as a mainstream product.
We send engineers to Business for micro-attachments where they could understand the day-to-day routines of the users of their products. The engineers are not there just to shadow or observe, but they get hands-on experiences on the business processes. They perform tasks like what their colleagues in Business are doing, and at times using the very application that they had developed.
When they return to Engineering, they return with a stronger empathy for the problems that the users face. They return, having built relationships with Business, which they could call upon in future. They return with a better appreciation of the impact that their applications made, understanding what worked, what did not and what could have been better. Some engineers even started to develop new applications during their micro-attachments, which they brought back to Engineering to continue development, long after the micro-attachment is over.
In essence, it is about creating time and space, so that every employee can be empowered to take action on the ground. Advocation and strong senior leadership support is a critical success factor for any digital transformation. This is a necessary ingredient, without which little can move forward. But putting in mechanisms that empower actions at every level could amplify the impact of senior leadership advocation substantially.
Conclusion
Finally, where does all these bring us ?
I believe these would put us in a position of sustained digital transformation.
Whichever industry you belong to, at some point of your career, you might have come across big strategic masterplans with lofty ambitions to totally transform the way businesses are run. We had too, and I was personally involved in a few myself.
But I would like to propose a view that digital transformation need not be thought of as one massive push, but can take on a form where it is continuous and self-sustaining. If change is indeed the only constant, then we should be configured to be ready for change by design. We need to organise and architect for sustained digital transformation.
An effort that can be sustained for the long haul needs to be a whole-of-organisation movement.
It is insufficient to depend on the sheer force of character of a single charismatic leader or even the collective wisdom of the entire senior leadership team. Without a doubt, senior leadership drive is critical at the onset to give it the initial push and set things into motion. But we must progress towards a point of inflexion where digital transformations will carry on and take a life of its own. I believe the foundations mentioned in this article can come together to set the stage for such an eventuality.
It is also not solely Business driven. Nor is it Engineering-led.
It is about setting up an ecosystem of accessible technology platforms, skilled and digital literate staff, and vibrant innovation mechanisms that would release the employees with the best ideas to lead transformative changes in their own spheres of influence, wherever they are, whichever levels they are at, whenever the opportunity presents itself.
It comes about when the wall between Business and Engineering is tore down, when every employee is empowered to bring change in his own area. This empowerment goes way beyond just conferred authority assigned during steering committees or forums, but is backed by concerted investments in the tangibles for technology platforms, organisational structure and innovative processes.
In my humble opinion, this is the true spirit of being digital-to-the-core. It is a place where the power to bring change through technology infuses through every fabric of the organisation. Employees at all levels who have the relevant skills are able to take meaningful action, instead of just waiting or clamoring for change to happen.
It unlocks whole-of-organisation capacity, releasing every single employee to respond to opportunities and challenges at their own space, and to do so with agility, with precision, and at the speed of the business.
It engenders whole-of-organisation ownership in digital transformation where all employees can collectively own the journey of progress and change.
This in turn brings about true organisational agility, transcending departmental boundaries and hierarchical constructs, underpinned by a strong foundation for sustained digital transformation.
