Your first four steps to digital transformation
From “behind” to future-ready: here’s where to start
Ten years ago, at a conference in Toronto, Tim Walker explained the difference between success and failure in the digital age with a couple succinct sentences. “There are two types of organizations,” he explained. “Those are say ‘the web is hot, let’s put someone in charge of it,’ and those that say, ‘The web is game-changing, let’s make it central to everything we do.’”
A decade later, Tim’s words are still true. And becoming digitally-centric is still hard. By now, many organizations are desperately behind.
If you aren’t a sector-disrupting upstart with the relative luxury of building from scratch, knowing where to begin can be anxiety-provoking.
Changing over legacy systems, old habits and bad departments is no walk in the park. The terrain is murky, and many organizations have been traumatized by expensive, failed attempts.
Yes, it’s risky. There’s no flashing sign saying “this way to an effective digital transformation.” But not changing is more risky.
The good news is, you can crack this. This is where transformation starts: in the proverbial dark before dawn. If you have the insight and guts to acknowledge that your systems haven’t kept up — that you haven’t been agile — you have what it takes to embark on the journey.
It will probably be a tough journey at points. Digital transformation is not simply an isolated update: it doesn’t look like a new IT tech project, marketing automation, or HR payroll system. You need to be prepared to engage many areas of your organization and culture.
Digital transformation is a systems-wide renewal.
Transformation is not just the technology development — it’s the interfaces. A new digital system is only as effective as its presentation is intuitive.
It’s not just the interfaces — it’s the customer experiences. Understanding your customer journey is critically necessary to getting the digital touchpoints right.
It’s not just the customer journey — it’s your organizational culture. Are you service-oriented? User-centric design is an empty effort if your company doesn’t live and breathe a culture of service.
Many companies attempt a so-called “digital transformation” hastily and desperately, only addressing the systems and visuals components. This can create temporary improvement. Hitting three of the four components by tackling systems, visuals and customer journeys will likely delight customers for a season. But customer trends are fickle. Expensive overhauls may be waiting in the wings for you down the road.
You only get sustainable success when you embrace a holistic approach: evaluating systems, visuals, customer journeys, AND your culture.
True transformation is more than screen-deep. It brings your entire organization into a new era, with the customer at the center, capable systems in place to serve them, and the iterative and people-centric culture to keep up with changing needs.
It can sound like a grand — and unrealistic — vision. But this new paradigm is undeniably the future, and like any journey, getting there can be broken down into individual steps. The first one?
1. Assess how customer-oriented your culture is. This is a defining characteristic that digitally successful organizations at the forefront of their fields share. Being customer-centric is no longer a warm and fuzzy brand buzzword: it’s essential to competing in today’s landscape. Are you prepared to listen to your customers, to adapt, and to adjust your fundamental ways of doing business to become a service success story?
2. You’ve asked yourself if your company is ready to reshape itself around your customers’ needs and are confident that you’re committed to the customer experience. What’s next? It’s time to engage in a structured process of deep listening. Applying service design tools to get into the mindsets and experiences of your customers will equip you with the thoroughly empathetic understanding you need to create a satisfying, relevant experience for them.
3. Once you understand your customers’ experience, you begin to see key places where you could change that experience for the better. This is step three: zeroing in on the touchpoints that will make a significant difference, and looking at the underlying systems that power those parts of the experience. You will use these insights to create your new systems architecture plan: a clear roadmap for a brighter digital future.
4. Now things are getting tangible. Bring your new understanding of your customers’ needs and organizational opportunities to the question of focus: which part of the plan do you build first? Create a project to bite off specific components, and adopt a learning approach of testing and tweaking as you go.
Too many options? Take our quick assessment to discover which project you should kick off first…
Digital transformation is a journey that can feel vulnerable and risky, requiring openness and learning. But it’s also an incredibly rewarding journey to embark on successfully. Going from “behind,” beyond “keeping up,” to a future-ready and sustainable place can spark renewed confidence, creativity and innovation in an organization.
One more thing…free advice from 20 years of digital
Over the last two decades we’ve worked with a wide array of organizations and seen some dramatic changes in the digital landscape. Here’s a few key things we’ve learned about digital transformation along the way:
- Get off the monolith. Embrace microservices architecture, and stop futilely trying to use one giant vendor to run your whole company. Pick small, smart, best-of-breed tools that can talk to other small, smart, best-of-breed tools.
- Embrace early and often iterations. Large, black-box projects with a grand reveal in the distant future are far too risky, with a costly tendency to veer off-track. Stay in touch with your customers’ needs with an iterative approach. Involve them in early testing, and adjust your design approach as insights arise.
- Rally and involve your team. Top-down change efforts are painful. Grow the momentum for transformation within your organization by involving your workforce in energizing and empathetic co-design sprints.
- Ditch the “one-off project” mindset. Customer-centric digital transformation is a permanent posture, not a one-time effort. To become a digitally mature organization, this focus must be fully and sustainably embodied. It’s a long-term commitment to working differently, and more effectively.
Ready to create a project? Take our quick assessment to prioritize your organization’s specific technology needs.
