These 5 key steps we recommend will help you to transform your IT ecosystem by not limiting to build, operate and grow but also to enable you to deliver fast, differentiate and lead in your industry. Let us look at them one by one.
1.Move from Hype to Action
Leaders should be persistent to respond to organization’s new threats and opportunities as they emerge. Many leaders believe their job is largely done when they share their aspirations for IT-growth with their employees. Unfortunately, nothing happens after that.
The spirit of any transformation exercise is in making your strategic choices work-string of cascaded clear, tough choices. Only through making and acting on choices you can win.
An Integrated Cascade of Choices — A.G Lefley & Roger L. Martin
To enable your business transformation for success and profitability, have a winning aspiration that defines the purpose of your enterprise, its guiding mission and aspiration, in strategic terms.
What does winning look in your transformation journey? What, specifically is its strategic aspiration? These answers are the foundation of your discussion of transformation strategy; they set the context for all the strategic choices that follow.
As a rule of thumb, though, start with people (consumers or customers) rather than money. Peter Drucker argued that the purpose of an organization is to create customer, and it is still true today.
Consider the mission statements of Nike and McDonalds, each massively successful in its own way, frame their ambition around customers.
Mission Statement of Nike
“To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world” and “if you have a body you are an athlete”
Nike wants to serve every athlete (not just some of them).
Mission Statement of McDonalds
“Our mission is to be our customers’ favourite place and way to eat & drink”
McDonalds wants to become its customers favourite place to eat (not just a convenient choice of families on the go).
Each company doesn’t just want to serve customers; it wants to win with them. And that is the single most crucial dimension of a company’s aspiration: a company must play to win. To play merely to participate is self-defeating. It is a recipe for mediocrity.
Unless winning is the ultimate aspiration, a firm is unlikely to invest the right resources in sufficient amounts to create sustainable advantage. But aspirations alone is not enough, with most corporations, it is very difficult to see how the mission statement translates into real strategy and ultimately strategic action. Without explicit where-to-play and how-to-win choices connected to aspiration, a vision will be frustrating and ultimately unfulfilling for employees.
The leaders must get their team together to ponder where and how choices are, in order to act. Without them, it can’t win. Dealing change with inaction or just with modest aspirations doesn’t help your organization to gain any competitive advantage or add up to a significant value creation.
What matters is winning! no matter you are big, small or a non-profit, great leaders choose to win rather than simply play. The desire to win spurs a helpfully competitive mind-set.
2.Hire A-level Players
In the progressive world that rewards innovation, speed and agility, many successful companies that served & succeeded to win customers in the past are struggling today to compete in their marketplace, to sustain relevance, to succeed again and respond to change.
For incumbents, the threat posed by competitors born in the digital age may turn their struggle to find relevance into a fight for survival.
The incumbents are not able to differentiate and lead in the marketplace anymore in a traditional way. The challenges are manifold, but single most influencing factor that allow the digital-born organization to compete fiercely with legacy firms is the digital divide.
Smart Skills
This digital supremacy of the digital-born companies is paralyzing the growth and dominance of the legacy firms.
The new technology medium — cloud, data science, mobility, AI, social and IoT have clearly swiped the competitive advantage from the incumbents.
While technology is a driver, it’s the people, not just technology, that will transform the organization for the future.
The digital-born companies are attracting the workforce of the future, with promise of more interesting and meaningful work, cutting edge work environments, appealing benefit packages and perks.
To respond to changing customer needs and behaviour, winners in the digital age do much more than tick off a checklist of technology capabilities. They know their success hinges on people.
To support future growth & future value of your organization, a paradigm shift will be required to not only take advantage of emerging technologies, but also, critically, embrace new business strategies, evolve its corporate culture, talent strategies to empower people to learn, adopt and drive change.
To successfully endure the digital divide, legacy firms need to reclaim their position as worthy employers of highly skilled digital talent.
Companies no longer just serve customers; they collaborate with them. They no longer compete with rivals; they partner with them.
They no longer are limited by the boundaries; they ignore and go beyond them. The connecting medium for all this change may be the digital drive, but the essential factor to enable change are the people.
Adopt the “people first” strategy in enabling your digital transformation journey a success.
3.The Elastic Workforce
This brings us to the third shift, where do companies like GE, MasterCard etc go to solve their toughest data science problems? They don’t always turn to the professionals in their own payrolls or regular vendors or contractors or outsourcing arrangements.
They hire relevant people to solve a problem, where they collaborate and solve specific business problems.
Elastic-workforce likely offers not only expertise, that is not immediately available in-house but also real scale. They are available on demand, with right experience & expertise to solve the problem.
Use the Secret Weapon
Your requirements may be too niche or may be too challenging to solve internally or may stale fast-track product development. The elastic workforce is becoming an invaluable filter for reducing product development risks, improving time to market and determine interest to new-product introductions.
Building an agile workforce in response to continuous technology disruption and fast changing business goals are the impediments for enterprise today.
Speed and agility trump every other barrier that businesses face to achieve growth in today’s market.
To compete in today’s market, companies must look beyond just updating their skills. To drive change, they have to become agile at each level of their business. Companies need to choose new partners, run new experiments and make new shifts internally towards building a workforce for today’s digital demands.
4.Minimize Risks
In the competitive market, taking no risk would hamper growth and competitiveness. Taking calculated risk can create value.
Reducing or managing risk is so centrally important for any IT development that they pose big challenges like managing complexity, technical debts and legacy workforce.
As companies innovate, grow businesses, add new business line and products and expand in geographies, the processes proliferate.
The IT organizations, that underlie these proliferations may get entangled between legacy systems & new applications to support the needs of the business.
These anomalies may result in chaos of the architectural blueprint. As application volumes grow in response to business change, the complexity becomes rife.
When these complexities grow, the risks to run the business will multiply.
Growth is very essential for long term success. It yields great returns & create values. A key enabler of growth apart from markets & business model, is rapid adoption. Innovation barriers attribute to the declining growth of mature companies. You need to find a partner who can help you to,
- Anticipate growth
- Align & build your emerging business opportunities into the core IT strategy
- Partner to shape a business idea into disruptive strategy
- Translating your IT expansion strategy to reality
- Innovate, grow, simplify, scale, mature & build
For this, the partner will be able to help you contain risks through experience and acumen and still fulfil all your objectives.
Calculated, prioritized and focused risk management is what you need to deal with, if you want to run a successful transformation program.
When the risk is not completely yours to take, it should make you feel better about taking a risk of choosing a right trusted partner who can turn your weakness and threats into opportunities, who can run the results and enable you to differentiate and create value in your digital transformation.
5.Invest in a Profit-First Partner
Now that you learnt all the shifts, you need to take the last all-essential step. You need to work with a partner who shares the same principles as you do.
A Profit-First Partner not only delivers innovation and on-demand workforce, they become your team, they will share your dream, share your purpose, behold customer centricity in everything they do. They will enable companies to pivot and meet perpetual change and help run your business results for profitability.
A profit partner will help transform your IT eco-system by not limiting to build, operate & grow but also to enable you to deliver fast, differentiate & lead in your industry.
To engage these niche players on-board and to meet the demands of the digital business transformation, leaders should start looking into alternatives to conventional Vendor Management process.
In Gartner’s terms, Digital business demands greater dexterity in creating value from technology. Bimodal IT is a tool vital to addressing that challenge. Using it, IT adopts two distinct ways to meet enterprise demand being agile and flexible, and having a step-by-step approach that ensures efficiency and predictability. Bimodal IT fills the digital divide between what IT provides and what IT really needs.
Harnessing this same methodology for IT VM practices enables business stakeholders to: (1)attain the innovation and agility they need from vendors, and (2) leverage best practices in VM adopted to fast-track” key business initiatives”.
To sum up, what you need to win in the digital transformation voyage are five simple shifts:
1. Focus on ‘Profit-First’
2. Hire A-Level Players
3. Use the secret Weapon: The Elastic Workforce
4. Minimize Risks
5. Invest in a Profit-First Partner
Now, it’s your decision! You can choose to stay where you are and miss the digital transformation bandwagon entirely or you can ride the crest of this exciting wave. The choice is yours.
If you decide that you want to be part of this journey and that you want to be at the forefront of this experience, then we invite you for a Roadmapping session with us.
