Digital Transformation

Build versus buy

Building new technology that's customised to the business need often gives a higher impact, but it takes time and carries an IP risk if key people leave. It also needs required documentation at a level that many businesses struggle to produce.

On the flip side, buying a platform means conforming to the platform's processes, and vendors are generally not interested in single-use-case changes, which makes it hard to get vendor support.

Ultimately, the approach taken to the creation or adoption of technology can be critical in digital transformation projects.

Three ways to roll it out

There are fundamentally three ways of rolling out a digital transformation project.

The first is to build separately. This approach involves creating a ring-fenced team with new technology and creating the environment for it to work, and then moving people across into the new structure and abandoning the old way of doing things.

The second way to roll out a project is to try to build alongside, where the new project or digital transformation is being done alongside business as usual. The challenge of doing it this way is that it creates a potential threat scenario where the people who are involved in business as usual see the new project as a threat coming to replace them.

The third way of doing it would be as a viral change model. This involves starting with the change in an existing team and working to implement the new technology or way of work, and then, once it's been done in a beachhead kind of way with one or more teams, that approach is then slowly moved out to the rest of the organisation where the old technology, practices, and processes are assumed into the new context.

All three of these processes are fraught with uncertainty. The reality is a few-to-many scenario. If the many opt out of the process, then leadership is always going to struggle to recover a failed implementation. Careful planning and genuine staff buy-in are fronts that raise the chances of success.