The 3 faces of digital transformation
When I talk with teams about barriers to progress, they quickly highlight the lack of cohesion, often expressed as absence of “a joined up conversation”. Much of the time, discussions about digital transformation devolve into several different conversations taking place at the same time. It is perhaps the one complaint I hear more now than ever before.
I was in this position myself recently and for a long time was scratching my head trying to figure it out. In a room full of intelligent, passionate people wanting to advance adoption of digital approaches to better meet the clients’ needs, the discussions bounced around from one topic to the next. The more I focused, the less I seemed to be able to follow what was going on. People were talking at each other rather than interacting to share ideas.
With a great deal of difficulty, I tried to pick out the key threads unifying what seemed to be randomly colliding interactions and tried to put them into some order. Leaving the room my overriding thought was not about the progress made in the last few hours. Rather it was a puzzled brow and the question “what the heck was that all about?”. No surprise that people just treated the meeting as an aberration and went back to whatever they were doing before.
One of the first steps was to recognize the variety of people involved in the conversations. Each of them comes to the table with different experiences, roles, and motivations. This is well described in writings such as Tom Kelley’s “10 Faces of Innovation”. There, Kelley outlines 10 distinct roles in the innovation process and characterizes their actions and behaviours based on them.
Considering this approach makes me wonder about the key roles of those involved in digital transformation strategy and delivery. Reflecting on my recent experiences, I believe there are 3 distinct personas that I can readily identify in many of the discussion. These I refer to as Engineers, Evangelists, and Entrepreneurs. As characterized below, it is important to consider the implications for any organization involved in digital transformation to recognize where these different views exist and to spend time considering how they can be coordinated to form a single voice of change. Without that, discussions on digital strategy will likely remain confused and ineffective.
The engineers and technologists in the room want to fix the plumbing of digital infrastructure, upgrade out of date (and out of fashion) tools, experiment with the latest digital technologies, and build their expertise in more advanced areas such as data science, AI, and cloud architectures. They look at the impact they can make in digital transformation in terms of technology improvement and the providing new capabilities that demonstrate mastery of digital techniques.
The strategic priorities from their perspective often include expanding the rollout of newer versions of hardware and software with improved performance, capability, and integration across different functions. Of critical importance for many is cloud deployment. This includes the core infrastructure necessary for delivering the cloud capabilities required and migration of services to the cloud.
Those with an engineering focus measure their success by looking at traditional technology factors such as availability and uptime, storage capacity, speed of moving bits and bytes, increasing adoption of technology, the use of digital channels, etc.
