Six Keys To Successful Digital Transformation
Rick Kelley is Vice President of SMX Center of Excellence where he leads client organizations to successful digital transformations.
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Many businesses believe that moving workloads to the cloud or deploying SaaS technologies to replace legacy business processes are transformative. Yet, there are other modernization efforts that may support a more significant transformation. Digital transformation is more profound; it integrates technology into a business or mission, fundamentally changing how value is delivered.
Today, decades into the digital age, transformation efforts still fail more often than they succeed. Your success will depend on anticipating and avoiding looming pitfalls. Here are six tips to help ensure a successful digital transformation.
1. Start with a strategy and outcome-focused approach.
First, strategic planning focused on the outcomes is integral to a successful transformation. These can be massive undertakings, so building an outcome-based strategy that maps out the near-term along with the long-term objectives helps focus attention on the transformation path.
At the onset, anchoring digital transformation to mission outcomes that align with how people work is essential to the strategy. The result can be more efficient operations, improved employee experience and maintained connections, which in turn serves customers better. Equally, an approach that ensures security and compliance is at the forefront will help ensure successful long-term outcomes like scalability and resilience.
2. Choose the right talent for the outcome in mind.
Too often, we see team members chosen for a particular skill like leadership, communication or organization, with the expectation being that those skills will ensure the initiative is well-led, communicated and organized. But in actual practice, when those highly skilled individuals lack domain experience, they find it challenging to contribute their skills to the initiative. With a steep learning curve, they’ll tax the time of those on the team with the domain experience they lack, and they’ll typically be slower to reach significant decisions.
You want team members who already know the industry, business and/or government function involved. If you’re transforming a system used by the military, military experience is crucial. If the initiative is intended for revenue generation, business domain experience is invaluable. If it’s an AI deployment, you want your leaders and communication team members to be well-versed in data science.
Building a team with overlapping domain experience along with their talents will help make the team cohesive from the start, facilitate communication and accelerate decision making—all necessities in today’s digital transformation environment.
Often, organizations need to bring in consultants or entire teams to help with the transformation. Here, the engagement strategy should be financially tied to outcomes and not simply cost basis. Having their compensation or a portion thereof connected to outcomes helps reduce unnecessary changes in scope. Without this consideration, nice-to-have capabilities may increase scope, timeline and thereby, payment for individuals and organizations that operate from a simple cost basis.
3. Create an adoption plan.
Transformation can only be counted as a success once it’s adopted by users and integrated into their day-to-day workflow. Only then can it deliver the advantages promised at the outset. Yet, too often, new technology is provided to users as a fait accompli.
Users’ enthusiasm for transformational change correlates sharply with their empowerment to participate in it. This is particularly true when choosing and learning how to use the new tools and technology with which they’ll implement modernization. Consult throughout the transformation to avoid user resistance—passive or otherwise—when it comes time to launch.
4. Address obsolete processes and policies.
Embedded processes and policies govern much of what takes place in any large entity. Yet, many digital transformations produce workflow changes that mimic those existing processes or ignore existing regulatory policy, failing to meet the desired benefits while remaining compliant with regulations.
Make sure your team includes members responsible for anticipating such impacts and getting policies and workflows changed or waived in advance so that users are comfortable adopting the transformed systems. And bear in mind that this will probably occur in phases, with incremental releases on the way to end-state transformation.
5. Ensure complete alignment across the organization.
Before embarking on a transformation journey, alignment across the enterprise is essential and will provide a significantly higher chance of success. From the top down, there should be buy-in and an understanding that transformation often requires a phased approach and a long-term commitment. This alignment across the organization will influence stakeholders at the C-suite level down to the individual contributors who may be more hands-on. In turn, it will be more likely that organizational changes, shifting priorities and new emergencies won’t impact the commitment to modernization.
6. Operate with an agile and resilient mindset.
Employing an agile methodology throughout transformation carries with it a high degree of success. Regular, iterative, consumable releases, quickly road-tested in the field, give you feedback that tells you if your project plan is still on target. This “fail fast” approach lets you know if there are market changes you didn’t anticipate or illuminate technological advances that might provide more significant benefits.
It’s no secret that technology is moving at a pace that makes it challenging to meet the needs of the day, such as doctors using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze data quickly and accurately to diagnose patients.
The Department of Defense is democratizing massive stores of data so AI can unlock means of better securing our world. But the journey between vision and outcome can be long and arduous. Only when new technologies are in the hands of capable practitioners can you be assured that true transformation can occur.
The future of work is most certainly here, and we’ve learned a lot about digital transformation best practices. The opportunity to modernize and create fundamental transformation is limited only by our ability to rationalize effective and beneficial change in the markets we practice.
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