Transforming Digitally

What is there left to say about digital transformation? There will be just one thing you possibly can hear again.

And that is, digital is both the cause and the effect of the transformation, and the transformation is likely to fail if either side is missing, incomplete, or in error.

The question at hand is, how will transformation work specifically for you? Let’s break that down into the major issues to recognize.

Current and Future States

We should say first of all that a “transformation” results in a new formation, and its success is marked very overtly by the end of a need for whatever formation it replaces. Emphasizing the obvious: flowers do not bloom and un-bloom; and they cannot stay in bud form and do what is necessary later.

As members of an organization, we additionally understand that “trans” formation means envisioning ourselves migrating from the prior to the new.

A transformation has failed if the effort concludes without adoption of the new as the expected and default “normal”.

Managing transformation for success is about influencing what the new formation is, how to get to it, and how to stay there.

The what: purpose, type and configuration

The approach: direction, priority, commitment, capability

The sustainability: compatibility, impact, resilience

The Requirements of Demand

As of this writing, we know that many organizations are planning or undergoing a transformation as a critical strategy — one for recovering from the functional disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent economic distresses.

By recovery, we mean re-establishing feasible and viable business operations designed for business continuity and gain by the same recognized company.

For those organizations, the key condition is that the operations prior to transformation had become obsolete as a way to address the adequate restoration of opportunity and execution.

In effect, the environment of operations has itself already changed in ways that will not allow prior operations to succeed going forward.

Here, then, is where digital operations are the primary influence on the organization. The importance of the influence derives from how to change as a response to what has already changed. We need to know in some detail the difference between operations being digital or not; being present or not present. Absence has various faces.

Missing as a cause, or missing as an effect

As a cause, digital operations are already in effect by competitors and partners. Not being digital in kind means losing to competitors and being disconnected from effective interaction methods with partners. If the organization is not already aware of this, its operational stance may be seriously out of alignment with the success factors of using and responding to the real-time operations environment.

Incomplete as a cause or as an effect

Digital operations have their effectiveness primarily because digitization removes barriers to the speed, security, and confirmation of processes that create assets, functions and value. Without barriers, those qualities create integrations of interactions that become systems accomplishing greater volumes and quality of output. When some of the interactions are not digital, they become bottlenecks, incompatibilities or even risks — as they hold back or interrupt workflows now expected to execute at greater given scopes and scales. In effect, that makes workflows defective.

In Error as a cause or as an effect

Digital operations generally implement automation in the procedural layout of business processes. They have the effect of introducing unprecedented actions or events, new combinations of them, and new distributions of responsibility and outputs. As with any automation, the essential issue is not whether it can be done but whether it should be done. Uncoordinated automation easily increases the risk of unintended consequences by complicating interactions in ways that are not supported or anticipated.

The risks and outcomes of above deficiencies in digitization correlate to failures in deciding, designing and deploying operational transformation.

In turn, under pressure to adapt through the current environment, the lack of recovery can be traced back quickly to lack of adoption of missing (but needed) changes, poorly conceived changes, and irrelevant changes.

The imperative to “Digitalize”

When data, content, communications and visibility are all available through the life-cycle of creation, storage, distribution, and utilization, the primary organizational decision and design issues become ones that establish who is involved in each stage and how.

The universe of possibilities offers many ways to connect what happens in one stage to what happens in another.

Compared to the pre-transformation operations, the new possibilities can mean dramatic alterations in how staff are re-positioned to take advantage of what is possible. As a critical success factor, the users of the digitized mechanisms and assets experience them as a collection — and usually as a “digitalized” system — of resources.

If users do not know how to effectively use the digital systems, they will either avoid them, misuse them, or undermine them — generally in an attempt to keep their own ability to account for what they do as an example of familiar and appropriate skill.

If that fully understandable risk-aversion orphans real-time requirements and responses, then there is a failure to adopt the adaptation; the migration to the new normal has not occurred.

Back to business

Deciding, designing, and deploying the pathway and conditions of transformation will mean focusing on the motive, the opportunity and the means that enable the users of digital systems to adapt and then adopt their adaptations.

By maximizing the visibility and relevance of the intended future positions to their benefit, management actions assure them that their being stakeholders in the migration from before to after is something that is being taken seriously, while the objectives of the target state are something that they want.

When something is digital, it means that the thing as a form is based on its being composed as digital data.

When something is digitized, it means that the availability of its utility has been created to exploit digital form.

When something has been “digital-ized” it means that its prior known form has been intentionally converted to digital.

The language lesson is no more nor less than that digital transformation is a concern mainly about future intention. For users, the most important intention is the capability that the transformation gives the users.

Naturally, the company places value on the effects of using the capability.

But for the organization, the essential value of the transformation is in the empowerment users get by having the capability.

When we look back (above) at managing transformation for success, digital transformation succeeds when users want, as a default, the advantages of digitization in their resources and functions in order to meet their requirements in awareness and communications; knowledge and decision-making; and, assets and labor volume.

User capabilities are enhanced by a stable combination of speed, predictability, flexibility and security.

The combination provides them with autonomy, reliability and resilience both as providers and as recipients of effort and events in interactions.

That user mindset is the critical success factor of the transformation. As a result, cultivating and supporting that mindset is a fundamental requirement in the design and status tracking of transformation.

© 2020 malcolm ryder / archestra research for ChangeBridge.co