The Digital Journey
Digital journey’s start with a recognition of a need or a problem. The need and problem are both simple; The business needs to remain relevant and progress needs to happen at a velocity rate that isn’t already part of the company’s DNA. You realise that you cannot make this shift without changing the way the organisation fundamentally operates. This is the start of becoming digital.
Acceptance of the digital journey starts with rationalisation of what’s required. i.e to get an organisation to move fast and reach its outcomes. In my experience most organisations are bound by years of legacy, a fear of cultural changes and a deeply ingrained mindset on the statement “this is how things run around here..”.
One of the most important implications for individuals who are part of any digital transformation is to recognise the boundaries between the tradtional frameworks vs the creation and adoption of “new” industry practices . For many organisations the digital journey paves a completely new set of ideals which aren’t seen before;
Way of Working — focus on outcome and value.
Closer collaboration — single out come enabling people work closer.
Faster decision making — Alignment on how to and when to escalate
Teams — Self organising, cross-functional teams to drive the outcome
An agile environment — fluid by nature, low level of up-front deliberation.
Mindset over skillsets
The readiness of the mindset dwarfs even the most skilled person in an organisation which is planning to make the shift from the traditional operating model to an agile operating model.
The open mindset alone; a person which expects and promotes constant change and challenge as the norm. A person who questions practices (existing and new). A person who looks for “Value” in the work produced. This is the mindset which will help push the agenda and goals of the digital journey.
Essentially, skills can be taught and nurtured. The digital mindset cannot; it is inquisitive by nature and values interactions to improve the overall ability to hit the goal or outcome. The mindset is cultivated through experiences and ways of learning — we can’t just buy this off the shelf or procure this in.
Focus on the Change agenda.
Before you begin on your new found Digital change agenda, organisations need to be set and be clear on the goals and outcomes expected. This will create a focus from strategy to execution while taking the organisation on the journey together. And it is a journey and not a 100 meter sprint.
The goals;
- Customer — Enhance the customer experience and engagement to increase transactional value or customer lifetime.
- Efficiency — Transform business units through automation, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
- Competitive advantage — Derive insights from implementing rich data collection and analytics tools. These will help prioritise where the company’s penny/dime (effort) should be spent to increase competitive advantage by creating products or enhancing existing ones.
Vision the future platform
Every digital journey will start with recognition of the standing state of affairs and the need to move / adopt a new nirvana. Visioning of the future and articulating the need for this is the bedrock and has in the past helped to obtain the buy-in needed.
Personal lessons from technology platforms; look at platform and technology players across the eco system, don’t go too deep into an eco system where you cannot reverse the decision. Be distributed from the outset; setup a strategy for loosely coupled teams and software; agree the boundaries of interaction and working practises; software changes over-time and this is ok, agree the principles of change and how often you veto this.
As part of the new platform, you will need a plan in place for upskilling and bringin in new capabilities. This means new tech, experiences of people who’ve successfully worked and delivered real world examples on how to progress tech in a fast moving digital company. In my experience, its crucial that the early joiners have hands-on experience — else the adoption will be slow and the journey a costly one.
Digital cycle
The lifecycle is the most imporant part of the journey towards becoming digital. The adoption of frameworks and practises which are common to start-ups and modern tech companies.
language such as “DevOps”, “Agile”, “As a Service”, “Microservices”, “Product Engineering teams” need to become the norm. With it though comes the cultural change which strips out the rules of the old and looks to adopt the value driven culture.
This is a huge cultural shift and larger organisations tend to struggle with the new ways of working, the tooling, the language used, and more importantly the ethos by which the team is motivated on. It’s often true that digital teams start small, hidden in a corner of the office and run as an experiment.
It is the motivations of this new culture that will separate the existing landscape, here is a team who’s sole aim is to move the existing organisation and pump steroids into the existing blood stream to move the organisations goal by leap years— this can be highly powerful stuff .
Cultivate small, grow big.
The journey needs to start small, in my experience these skills aren’t leveraged through digital agencies or outsourcers promising huge “Value-adds” or dev bodyshops at low costs. This is a group of individuals who have a vested interest in understanding the existing business (The people and what makes them tick!), the customers (who we serve and want to do better for), the legacy (which is often holding the business back) and wanting to improve the future outcomes (by working together)
A good measure of success in the digital journey is when you have lead indicators which suggest you need to “double down” on your initial investment. Lead indicators which prove you’re making a small dent in A) Customer engagement and satisfaction number as a result of new product or B) Customers or staff have an ehanced experience as a result of a process made more efficient and more likely to return C) removal of costs in the business which allow you to position capital (dime / penny) elsewhere.
This is where the “Grow big” comes in. You’ve proven the outcome and results show the need serious planning with scaled investment.
Outcome
Digital journey’s are exciting times for any organisation, especially those companies who are looking to change their fortunes by changing the pace of decision making / materially improve customer engagement / launch new products.
The digital journey is also a time when an organisation needs to evaluate the purpose of what’s needing to be changed and by when. Setting clear outcome markers with deadlines is critial, having an executive sponsor or someone on the board who completely supports the reasons for change and investment (especially when it comes to doubling down) is more important than the outcome.
