By Dave Henderson
I’ve spent much of my career getting up close and personal with the technology challenges of clients. Early on, with my computer science view of the world, I focused on ensuring the IT solutions we developed operated effectively, efficiently, and as promised. As I moved into the business consulting side of client conversations, We began to focus less on the underlying technology and more on understanding the particular strategic vision of the customer: Where they want in order to go plus how they want to evolve from a business perspective.
What I’ve learned over my career is that client success is more about understanding an organization’s eyesight and approach in order to apply the appropriate technologies solution, and less regarding simply turning the technical wrench tighter, so to speak.
Having looked at digital transformation initiatives through both technical plus business lenses, I can see why so many efforts fail to realize the desired outcomes. The first hurdle many organizations face is defining digital change. While countless factors influence transformation success or failure, I believe you can judge how well a program will go by how closely it aligns internal resources (organization) along with market opportunities (business model) and available tools and systems (technology). Once these key pillars are aligned, it becomes easier to answer the question: Are we doing the correct things best?
Doing the right things
While the concept that electronic technology plus data are rapidly disrupting existing business models is easily understood, it gets harder to sort out the details. Which technologies are usually driving this disruption? How can one adapt to survive (or thrive) in this new landscape? It’s challenging enough to keep up with constant advances in analytics, artificial intelligence, the Internet associated with Things (IoT), blockchain, and more; but implementing solutions based upon these technologies can be even more daunting.
Organizations trying to develop a digital strategy can fall into the particular trap of trying a good emerging technology without linking the initiative to their overall company strategy.
For many organizations, while emerging technologies influence their own business priorities, they don’t drive them. Their top business focal points aren’t strictly technology-based, but rather are technology enabled.
Succeeding along with digital modification first requires a focus on bottom-line business drivers such as improving relationships with customers plus suppliers, optimizing operations, and being able to respond to external opportunities plus threats. Doing these “right things” from the start can guide the overall digital technique.
For instance, if developing a digital ecosystem or supply chain is your priority, can you accomplish this simply by sharing your IoT data with suppliers and customers to jointly develop new products and services? Or, can you use that information to help simplify interactions with ecosystem partners through robotic process automation or even distributed ledger technology?
Doing points right for digital alteration
Sorting through the best technology mix to accomplish your own strategy isn’t always (ever) straightforward. That’s why it is crucial to not just envision the right items for your organization, yet also do those things right . However , this doesn’t mean following a rigid methodology. While this particular approach was effective in the past, our present digital revolution is moving too quickly with regard to this. What’s needed is a focus on three key areas:
1 . Taking an agile approach. Because of the particular rapid rate of change in systems and customer expectations, it’s crucial to bring ideas to market and make business modify faster. Clients we’ve worked with have been able in order to accomplish this by adopting the comprehensive souple approach that will breaks down cultural and organizational silos, while maintaining security plus quality assurance. When these types of techniques are combined with modern “cloud-native” frameworks and platforms that automate formerly tedious and time-consuming tasks, the business can both “go fast” and “stay safe. ”
2. Emphasizing experiences. With customer expectations shifting as quickly as technology evolves, another way to do things right is to focus upon the experiences of your end users. Here, you can use human-centered design or design thinking to understand both internal and external audiences more deeply. By adopting business insight capabilities and harnessing the influx of data, you have an unprecedented opportunity to develop and deliver highly customized offerings using an agile approach. You can then seize the opportunity to engage your customers through growing technologies plus intuitive relationships.
3. Partnering using the right experts . It is certainly simpler to identify the things to do right than it is to perform them. That is why it is critical to find technologies partners (such as consultants, solution providers, and system integrators) who have global know-how, but can easily deliver and lead through local, accountable teams who understand not just the technology and methodologies, but also your business domain and environment. Of course , I actually have a bit of a bias here in knowing our geographic proximity model plus investment in local talent are key success factors for our own clients.
Next steps in your own transformation journey
What is the next step for your transformation trip? Ensuring you’re “doing the right things right” for change for better starts with an internal conversation that answers the following five questions:
- Do we have the particular right people in the room (representing business, THIS and exterior stakeholders) in order to articulate the business priorities?
- How are usually these focal points being impacted/transformed by digital technology and end-user anticipation?
- Do all of us have a clear grasp from the levers (organization, business model and technology) that will allow us to transform?
- Where are we now? Are usually our culture plus our infrastructure ready to take advantage associated with transformative possibilities?
- Are we all aligned along with the right partners to ensure that this transformation is successful?
These questions are usually designed to be discussion starters, and I hope they will help your organization identify the next steps inside the shift journey.
About the author
Sawzag Henderson has a 35-year career in helping clients in their particular transformation to secure, customer-centric digital enterprises. He serves as President of CGI’s Global IP Solutions, leveraging his proven history of guiding multi-industry IP development and growth to help further strengthen the particular connection between CGI’s IP strategy and operations globally.
