Digital Transformation the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I was recently asked to share some insights into the patterns of successful transformation and the anti-patterns of failure. Having spent 15 years transforming great brands like The Economist, Reed Elsevier, Standard & Poor’s and now advising some amazing boards. I thought I would share some of my experience with my network.

Anti-patterns

• Blindly copying. Most of us are not Google, Amazon, Tesla etc. It is worth learning insights from these organisations but do not build a blueprint that copies theirs, you will fail.

  • Your organisation’s value proposition and ways of working will be different. You will also have a mountain of legacy and a much smaller budget to deal with this and grow your org.

• Stand-alone digital strategy. A digital strategy that does not align to a business strategy will provide some value but not a transformation. If your organisation is happy with add-ons like new apps, then that is fine. However, if your organisation is in fierce competition with new-entrants or existing competitors who have transformed, and customers are leaving you for them, then you will need both a short-term plan and long-term whole business strategy, with all business units fully aligned on a Digital and Omni future.

• Silver bullet promises. Expect your digital transformation to take 4-7 years, it’s a long game. But you need to add significant value and show real progress every 6 months. With most CIOs, CDOs, CTOS either fired or deciding to leave in 2-3 years I would add another 2-4 years onto your transformation.

  • If you have a 3rd party product seller or a consultancy, including mine, that tells you that they can transform your people, process and delivery challenges within 1 year, fire them on the spot!

• Siloed teams or individuals. An engineer who does not understand the business is like a doctor who does not understand their patient – smart but ultimately adds no value. Ensure that every member of your organisation is aligned with the necessary business outcomes.

• Features over Outcomes. Product folks need to be responsible for new features but also for growth. Without the outcomes responsibility, they are business analysts; good at scoping but not connected to the value a business needs to generate.

• Coaching over execution. Great, execution focussed project managers are rare; hang-on to them. Most PMs seem to have turned themselves into agile coaches. Coaching is good but coaching with execution is much better.

• Over-promising, under-delivering. Digital, tech and data leaders are trying to do 20-30% more than their team’s capacity to execute. With 50% of their digital strategy adding real value. Get the red marker pen out.

Patterns

• Utilise real world experience. Books, magazine articles, events, roundtables are all great ways to learn insights. But none of these come close to experience. To gain experience you must try something and learn hands-on. By-the-way, as a serial failure - nobody at the events I attended spoke about failure, I wish they had I would have learnt a lot more. It is no coincidence that the most successful people are also those who have failed the most.

• Aligned business and digital strategies. Many business leaders are not sure what digital and technology folks actually do and hence do not strategically collaborate with them. They are unsure of the value the Digital teams could add.

  • Digital leaders and managers should therefore act as internal consultants, understanding the business strategy and aligning the digital strategy, not having a separate one. Although this is not easy, you need a good framework to ask good questions. If you do not have this reach out at https://www.insightsdriven.io/contact-us we will provide it to you for free.

  • Digital leaders should also challenge the business strategy as in most cases there are multiple disconnected business strategies.

• Outside-in, not the inside-out. It is an old saying but it is still not landing with many organisations who find themselves falling behind. Value is created by your customers or users of services not by internal teams. Talk to and listen to your customers!

• Empowered teams. Technology teams are hard to manage. Leaders can either be too demanding, leading their teams to not being open, or too trusting leading their teams not being open. In my experience an objectives led department succeeds.

I could go on but that would fill a book. So, if you are interested in more just drop me a note https://www.insightsdriven.io/contact-us and I will share as much as I can.