5 Recommendations for Successful Digital Transformation
If you are feeling stuck in your digital transformation journey, you are not alone. Here are my top five recommendations to keep you on the right track.
I had the opportunity to join the last Microsoft Build annual conference virtually. Opening remarks were given by the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella. At the beginning of the talk, he said (because of COVID-19); “We have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months”.
“We have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months”. — Satya Nadella, at Microsoft Build 2020
Digital transformation is the process of integrating and using digital technologies to improve operations, organisational culture, and customer experiences. In this way, it helps you to solve complex problems, reduce cost, increase efficiency, and meet changing business requirements. It is obvious the pandemic has altered the speed and scope of digital transformation. The traditional way of working is rapidly changing. Those who adapt to change will survive and benefit, and the rest eventually will lose out.
Having worked in industry for over a decade, I would say digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. If you are feeling stuck in your digital transformation journey, you are not alone. Organisations always face tough obstacles on their road to success including (but not limited to) lack of vision, strategy, budget, talent, and culture change. There is no silver bullet, but here are my top 5 recommendations to keep you on the right track.
1) Unlock Data
Data is the foundation of digital transformation. More data is produced and captured than ever before, but most businesses do not know what to do with it. Unlocking the opportunities of data starts with collecting reliable and accurate data for the right purpose through the right way and authorising the right users to access. Let’s take a bit of a deeper dive into the subject.
As your organisation looks for new data sources and evaluates the existing ones, ask yourself; “Are we collecting the right data?” In order to answer this question properly, first, you must understand the underlying purpose of collecting the data; “What problem are you trying to solve?” or similarly “What area of your business are you hoping to improve?” If you blindly dump data into a repository, you will not only reduce the chance of meeting the organisational goals, but also increase the cost drastically. When it comes to data, never forget; “garbage in, garbage out”.
Your solution architecture must be based on individual requirements of the problem that you are trying to solve. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing in the industry. Look at the characteristics of your data; is it relational, non-relational, more specifically timeseries, object (e.g. image, video) etc. What about the classifications of data: structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. Also, consider the data collection requirements of your use-case including pattern (request-response, pub-sub), form (static, streaming), size, speed, and volume. For example, operational metrics and events coming from industrial equipment or data from sensors can be modelled structured or semi-structured and usually require latency sensitive and frequent writes into an optimised database. On the other hand, surveillance imagery, audio files and social media feeds are traditionally unstructured and can be processed as stream or batch depending on the trade-off between benefits and costs.
Undoubtedly, security concerns are the number one roadblock in the way of your digital transformation journey. It is unlikely to have all the required resources readily available internally, but security becomes even a bigger challenge when talking about cloud adoption. These concerns must be addressed at all layers from the very beginning by applying industry standards and best practices.
Today, there is plenty of resources available for us to take advantage of cloud technologies to protect data, systems, and assets in a way that can improve your current security and privacy posture. For instance, identity and access management services to implement a rock-solid and fine-grained foundation. Advanced traceability features to monitor, alert, and audit actions and changes in your environment in real-time. Out-of-the-box data classification and protection both in transit and at rest.
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for”. — John Augustus Shedd
Organisations should have a coherent, holistic, risk based and proportionate security strategy to support digital transformation initiative, not block it. If the only tool you have is for keeping data on-premises with extremely restricted access, forget about being a data-driven organisation.
2) Embrace Change
A successful digital transformation is not about introducing fancy tools and implementing sophisticated systems, rather it is more about company-wide cultural and behavioural changes. As a result, it is a challenge for the entire business not only limited to technology departments. Therefore, you are likely to encounter resistance from all levels of the organisation.
To overcome resistance to digital transformation efforts, I am going to suggest a few quick tips. First, determine stakeholders properly ensuring staff from across the organisation have a voice. Listen to their concerns without getting defensive, be transparent, keep channels of communication open and use effectively, acknowledge difficulties, provide technical assistance, encourage co-creation, so make them a part of the solution where possible, and do not hesitate to ask help from key stakeholders when required. Fundamentally, it is a two-way street. You cannot expect people to be digital transformation champions while taking no action on your end.
“There’s just no place for laggards in business today”. Brendan Witcher, principal analyst at Forrester.
Even though you do everything just right, two groups of people tend to slow down the momentum of transformation: digital dinosaurs and lone wolves. The most common attribute of these is legacy thinking, which is a much bigger barrier than legacy systems to the success of a digital transformation project. In one of my previous projects, I remember a high-ranking IT executive who was supposed to be one of the early adopters turned out to be one of the biggest blockers due to his lack of knowledge in the industry and understanding of the problem. Engage these two groups. Make sure they understand that you are focused on their problem.
3) Start from Somewhere
A digital transformation initiative can be scary and overwhelming. In the beginning of your journey, it is likely to have so many unknowns. Furthermore, it will always have risks. However, they are not greater than deciding not to start at all. To get started faster, I suggest my clients:
- Break up big problems into a series of smaller and manageable ones.
- Prioritise them based on importance and feasibility.
- Do not have too much on your plate, instead expand incrementally.
- Be clear about the milestones. Monitor closely and keep track of the progress achieved.
- Once you reach a milestone, evaluate the impact on your business.
In this regard, following agile methodologies such as Scrum could be instrumental to reduce risks and improve productivity while providing greater ability to incorporate changes as they occur.
4) Build Capabilities
Ideally, companies carry out digital transformation projects with the guidance of consultants who are competent and proficient in their work. This gives confidence and reassurance to those who do not have such capabilities in place. The bitter truth is that you cannot sustain a project solely relying on external support. I have seen plenty of instances where such successful initiatives were abandoned due to lack of talent and low adoption. Have you implemented an API management solution? Then, make certain you have a well-planned migration strategy across the organisation. Have you deployed a machine learning inference recently? If so, ask yourself; Who will maintain it?
Without having a reliable workforce who are capable of using existing technologies and adapt to evolving methods and new approaches, companies eventually will struggle. Thus, you need to ensure that digital culture is created by training the right people internally and acquiring new talent that is key to business success.
5) Top Management Support
Leadership is the most critical factor for a successful digital transformation. It is simply “a top management project”. It is too important to leave technology or innovation departments alone. Your work should be guided by the broader business strategy defined by the company’s leadership. Executives ought to provide the required resources, help remove obstacles, and encourage everyone to contribute. They must collectively share the accountability of failure as much as success. The most successful transformation programs I ever worked on were those that had effective executive involvement. In short, if there is no strong commitment and support from the executive-level, failure is inevitable.
Conclusion
Digital transformation allows companies to improve their operations, organisational culture, and customer experiences. It helps solve complex problems faster, reduce cost, increase efficiency, and meet changing business requirements. However, it is a challenging journey that organisations face tough obstacles on their road to success. In this blog post, I shared 5 recommendations based on my experience to keep you on the right track. Try to adapt them and feel free to share your comments below!
Note: As always, if you have any further questions, do not hesitate to reach out! You can also follow my latest thoughts and updates on @KahveciSinan.
