The nuts and bolts of designing a successful digital transformation program

Originally published on Forbes

Digital transformation, as we know, represents an ecosystem of technologies that provides an enabling foundation to run any business. The confluence of technology and interaction happens in a crucible of an organizational culture powered by solid talent. While everyone understands what it takes to bring about digital transformation, many need help to derive real business value for their technology investments. Only some companies are ripe for embracing change, and there is no “one-fits-all” approach to digital transformation.

It is imperative to internalize that the raison d’etre for large and complex digital transformation programs is not about technology. Instead, it is about business. With that in mind, successful digital transformation requires the following.

• A clear vision of why it’s needed; an understanding of how the digital transformation efforts support business goals.

• A strong commitment from the top leadership and a large part of the middle management (that oversees and drives execution) throughout the organization to clearly define goals.

• A set of distributed and lean agile processes; clear definitions and metrics for measuring success along the way.

• Continuous communication across all lines of business about the need for change and its potential positive impact on the overall business and all the employees.

Many organizations don’t approach digital transformation initiatives for the right reasons. They may view it purely as a technology-driven initiative or solely to adopt new technologies without a clear business rationale.

While those factors may be part of the overall initiative, digital transformation should always be driven by how technology aligns with business goals, processes, procedures and strategies. Technology is always the enabler, not the driver of the effort.

How well an organization aligns a digital transformation project to the business will ultimately be reflected in the measurement of success. For example:

• Has the effort boosted revenues and reduced costs?

• Has it improved productivity and efficiency?

• Is the organization in a stronger competitive position by creating barriers to entry for the competition?

There must be a solid commitment to change and the willingness to accept the disruption caused by these initiatives. The leadership needs to provide good propulsive power to effect change. It is a laborious and often cost-intensive makeover of an organization’s operations. The process can be complicated and often scary, but with exemplary leadership and vision, it can successfully be done over time.

Before starting a digital transformation initiative, people leading the effort must understand the organization’s “ripeness for change.” Is the organization ready to embrace the changes at every level the transformation will target?

The ripeness for change can be viewed at two levels: institutional and individual. A journey must be traversed for the “institutional and individual metanoia” to take form. The main drivers for change may come from the industry trends; the macroeconomic conditions (of deep recession or high inflationary cycles); major technology shifts (AI, cloud, blockchain, quantum computing, Metaverse, etc.); and, lastly, the motivations of the workforce.

A cross-functional team of business experts carries this out with adequate and requisite domain knowledge; enterprise architects who can map the business processes and needs to the engineering and technology building blocks and associated risks and mitigation strategies; and solution and application architects who can provide the granular details to make the blueprint more measurable in terms of real-world implementations and governance processes.

With the advent of AI-first, mobile-first and digital native companies, the end user or the customer experience has come into sharp focus. Customers now expect a pleasing and intuitive experience in their buying journey across all industries. This has resulted in the emergence of user experience (UX) design and product design teams that work seamlessly with the customer and the engineering teams to build the most intuitive and pleasing business platforms. These platforms are designed from the ground up with design thinking principles and the customer journey and personas in mind that help drive customer engagement, loyalty and, hence, the revenues for the organization.

To this end, technologies such as AI, cloud and advanced analytics and data engineering all come together to push the envelope of customer satisfaction and intimacy and, ultimately, the business value of such outcomes. Cloud makes the platforms highly scalable and available, besides taking care of business continuity and disaster recovery needs. When business is always “on” for the customers to engage, this is a massive plus in terms of customer experience and how they engage with the brand.

Culture is often coercive and softly propels behavior when no one is watching. It’s the social pressure that is exerted without anyone explicitly applying it. In the end, it will never be the technology that will hinder change; rather, the soft yet compelling element of culture will be the root cause of the failures of all new endeavors.

Leadership should look at this aspect from an outside-in, top-down, bottoms-up and sideways perspective and be ready to take steps that create a culture of respect, acceptance of failures, candid feedback and coach/leader relationships to push the organization forward. Leaders should step in early when they see defensive routines and rigid adherence to dogmatic beliefs or “we do it this way here” syndrome and be the change agents supported by robust processes.

Training, upskilling workers, open access to leaders and fairness in rewards and punishments are all strong levers driving culture in all organizations. The freedom to experiment and learn from successful failures is exceptionally crucial to all technology-driven initiatives and must be fully supported top-down unambiguously.

Stories of digital transformation are laced with crests and troughs of triumphs and failures. The ones that succeed are due to clarity, culture, leadership, talent and a motivated workforce. There is no silver bullet, but the organization has exponential benefits if done with proper planning and a clear business rationale.