Digital transformation

Digital transformation is the place where people, process and technology really come together.

People often think that digital transformation is about using technology to transform a business so that it becomes more efficient or more competitive in the market.

In reality, the technology is often the least important part of digital transformation, because technology can either be developed or existing platforms can be deployed to support the goals of the transformation. There are, after all, very few new problems that first movers have not already encountered, which means there is usually technology already available for most digital transformation needs.

Implementing that technology is another challenge entirely. This raises questions such as:

1. How well does the technology fit the use case?
2. Should the company change its processes to fit the technology?
3. What are the vendor agendas and how do they affect the political landscape?
4. How do people respond to the change in technology?

And so the list goes on. Let’s break down some things to think about.

Build vs Buy

Whether the tech gets built or bought has pros on both sides of the fence. There’s very little an experienced build team can’t do, but it takes time and comes with inherent risk if key team members move on and IP is lost.

However, once built, a customised solution can often have a higher impact than a bought platform that may not fully meet the specific needs of the company.

If a business decides to build from scratch, the requirements need to be documented at a sufficient level of detail to meet the build needs – something most businesses struggle to generate.

If the business decides to use a platform, then it faces the challenge of conforming to the platform’s processes. As anyone who has tried to log a change request with a platform team knows, vendors are generally not interested in single use case changes.

Driving internal adoption of the platform can be really challenging, which leads us to the people side of the story.

Changing the way people work

We assist our clients with the strategy for working through these stages and building technology adoption within the business.

Large-scale technology adoptions

When undertaking a large-scale adoption of technology, such as deploying a tech stack with multiple vendors, there are essentially several approaches:

1. Build separately
   In this scenario, the new environment is built by ring-fenced teams and, when it is ready, the data is migrated and the old environment is decommissioned.
2. Build alongside
   A separate team works alongside the BAU team in order to deploy the new tech stack.
3. Build in the teams
   Existing teams have to maintain the BAU environment and implement the new technology at the same time.

The unfortunate reality is that all three approaches are fraught with difficulty because each of them contains high levels of uncertainty.

Finding a way forward involves breaking down the three options, assessing which would work best for the business and then working on a plan that gains buy-in from staff and takes them along on the journey.

The practical reality is that, with deployments often being a few-to-many scenario, if the many (staff) opt out and refuse to use the technology, it becomes very difficult for the leadership of an organisation to recover the situation if the implementation fails.

Careful consideration and planning are therefore required prior to kicking off the digital transformation journey in order to have a higher chance of a successful transformation.