8 Key Programmatic Investments for a Technology Transformation
By Carla Bendeich and Chad Corneil
As we work with our clients on technology roadmaps and global platform deployments, these transformations require critical investments to successfully implement any large-scale technology change. This includes plans for eight programmatic investments that play a crucial role in a successful technology transformation.
1. A Transformation Management Office
A transformation management office establishes a central program office to govern the rollout of the enterprise platform. This includes the enterprise platform strategy, program planning and project prioritization, project status, change and communications, centralized training offerings, and delivery support.
Our client — the business solution unit within a global telecommunications company — wanted to return to growth, but needed a more streamlined and efficient global operations and services function. They had set up a multi-year transformation program to reduce costs, grow and accelerate revenue, and improve the customer experience with more than $1 billion in expected value.
As part of building a transformation management office, we were asked to look at their transformation initiative portfolio across sales, delivery, and services, as well as create a vision, strategy, and recommendations to help achieve their transformation goals. We created a maturity model for each element of the growth formula that included a highly aligned leadership that is purpose-driven, value-centric, and vision-led to assess the client across their four business areas (sales operations, order fulfillment, customer service, and integration services). The growth formula provided a powerful tool to assess readiness and realize transformation benefits in addition to communicating these findings across the organization.
Our recommendations included use cases estimated to drive more than $100 million in revenue growth and $50 million in cost savings for the organization. Our client loved the growth formula and the output helped inform key focus areas for capital planning. The formula provided an opportunity for them to strategically evaluate how they could adopt a more insurgent mindset and enable highly aligned leadership to achieve their transformation goals.
2. Product Management
Product management requires critical investments in innovation, product strategy, product definition and scope, finance and funding, product planning and governance, and product design. Understanding the customer experience and mapping key customer journeys is an essential investment in this process.
Slalom operates from a customer-first agile perspective. Through the development of journeys and personas we’re able to deliver effective product management that significantly enhances the customer experience, drives higher revenue, and reduces costs. One of our clients — a global Fortune 500 company — desired an integrated sales, services, and marketing omnichannel experience for customers in 90 countries across four global regions. We worked with several software partners with the objective of establishing an integrated platform and global data model.
By partnering with the executive team to establish and communicate the strategy to global stakeholders, we helped lead the global transformation roadmap execution, development, testing, and training end-user onboarding. This resulted in a country-by-country adoption across more than 10,000 users in 83 countries. This example demonstrates how product management can be a vital investment that ultimately delivers high value for an organization.
3. Business Process Optimization
Business process optimization supports the alignment and implementation of the business processes and digital product lifecycle. We help clients document their processes before determining their process to manage change requests or customizations from the various parts of the organization. This drives an understanding of how the customer experience is impacted as well as how the organization itself needs to change.
With one of our global clients, we assessed the service behind those requests to create a white glove experience as part of the process transformation project. This was an example of how business process optimization lives at the intersection of technology and people and is essential for delivering a successful transformation.
4. Infrastructure, Security, and Compliance
Addressing infrastructure, security, and compliance requires selecting the architecture to deliver product value with flexibility and momentum at scale, especially when migrating to the cloud. Key investments usually include DevSecOps automation, automated compliance, and monitoring and auditing built into the software release pipeline. This eliminates single points of failure and establishes geographical redundancy.
We helped a global IT organization add agile development capacity for strategic development projects to enable high-level velocity deployments. The organization moved from on-premise to the cloud and established continuous integration that reduced deployment time from eight hours to 15 minutes and reduced downtime from 24 hours to five minutes. Converting large manual test plans to an automated test suite also allowed for a reduction from 25 to 30 manual testers to a three to five-person team of software developers.
Nearly every transformation requires a significant investment in technology infrastructure. The key is understanding the customer experience, process optimization, and compliance requirements before making these large investments.
5. Information Management
Investing in the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of data can drive enormous returns strategically for an organization. We have seen data transform our client’s culture to include experimentation and innovation, where people have the power to accelerate business outcomes with rapid insights.
A formal data governance program, key decision rights, set of standards and policies, and ongoing management are needed to organize and leverage the data. Key components include: data quality management, data development, database operations management, data warehousing and business intelligence, reference and data management, metadata management, data architecture management, and data security management.
We have helped many clients with their data integration platforms and application integration strategies in addition to tying and operating all these platforms together. Our goal is always to set our clients up for success so that they can effectively enhance an operating platform and scale independently. We upskill our clients on data governance and utilization throughout the project to help work ourselves out of a job.
6. Application Development, Product Lifecycle, and Implementation
These components impact the prioritization process for development and enhancements of digital product solutions being driven by the business to end customers. We bring patterns and practices to support planning efforts to implement a high-velocity delivery lifecycle as part of the overall investment.
We helped a leading software company develop a faster, more reliable, and scalable process to support marketing teams as part of the organization’s growth strategy. This included developing a 90-day roadmap and change strategy along with recommendations on how to optimize the new process. The roadmap outlined how to reduce process cycle time and variance by more than 50%, increasing their speed to market.
Successful product and application development, whether it’s enhancing the customer experience or optimizing internal capabilities, will only be as good as the process around the product lifecycle.
7. IT Operations Management
IT operations management encompasses the core IT functions and operations to support the deployment of the technology platform for business functions. If considered too late, IT operations can have a negative impact on the transformation.
One client asked us to provide a clear operational performance baseline to identify how it’s doing today in its IT software delivery group and develop a future state roadmap. Its global regions had been operating autonomously and independently, and new leadership was looking to deliver world-class software better, faster, and cheaper as an integrated global organization.
The client’s IT software delivery team supported application development and support to all business partners across three divisions companywide, with an employee and vendor base of approximately 5,200 and more than $800 million in spend.
Slalom completed the IT Strategy execution gap analysis, a current state assessment, and provided recommendations on the operating model, organization design, culture, and customer experience with a two-year roadmap. The program encompassed 16 prioritized programs and 81 projects that helped to drive the evolution to a world-class software delivery and support organization. The work spanned US, Singapore, Brazil, Ireland, and Belgium.
8. Reporting and Dashboards
Developing a usable strategy and plan for integrating reports that can be supported at scale across core business applications is another key component of technology transformation. This strategy should include report security and access, report development, data visualizations, dashboard development, and governance.
We were asked by a global beverage organization to help create sales finance reporting deployed to the various functional groups being impacted by a CRM implementation. All sales reporting — which included more than 450 standard and ad-hoc reports — were built against a legacy system that would be retired at year-end when the new CRM solution was implemented.
We created the strategy to inventory existing reports, coordinate reviews by the business community, and create the change management efforts around the process. We were thoughtful to embed the end-user groups to teach them to be proactive versus reactive in making business decisions and changing views to suit their needs.
Reporting requirements are not only a vital investment, but should also be seen as part of the user experience. Identifying the type of information needed from the project and how the reports will be leveraged should be considered early in the transformation to increase transparency and hold people accountable.
Conclusion
Each one of these investments could be a project within the overall program. This is very intentional because these are a distillation of two to three-year technology platform roadmaps. When these investments aren’t made, it’s often difficult for the project to scale and realize the benefits of the transformations. We work with our clients to share the effort needed across platform capabilities, technology foundations, and enhancing and scaling the platform to achieve the desired value.
Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.
