How To Deliver On The Promise Of A Digital Business Transformation
Whether you think of digital business transformation as enabling worker productivity, managing business performance through data, or exceeding evolving customer expectations, it can be tempting to embrace it by building digital things. Yet, this approach misses a big piece of the puzzle. While digital services might be the mechanism by which you address business and market needs, ultimately, they are not enough in and of themselves. To truly address customer and business needs, a digital business platform — a technology foundation from which to work — is required.
For better or worse, digital business platforms are not available as an off-the-shelf purchase; enterprises must build them for themselves. Building your own digital business platform is the foundation of your digital enterprise — and ultimately your ability to serve the business and your customers. As such, it is too imperative to leave to a third party.
A digital business platform is the key to supporting agility, allowing your business to respond to the market adroitly. It actively supports the innovation that drives business services and products into the marketplace, addressing evolving customer needs at the speed of the market. I’ve seen it help grow productivity, product quality and team cohesion, as well as reduce business risk. Ultimately, a digital business platform is critical, as it is a core underpinning of the vision-to-outcome chain in which the following steps are taken:
In working with dozens of organizations to guide them through technology transformations that lead toward digital business, I’ve found that small, iterative change that’s focused on business value achieves the best outcomes.
While most existing IT systems are not enough to support digital business at scale, it is not the best course of action to just dig in and begin building. When starting this journey, it’s advisable to begin with a “bright spot. Taken from Dan and Chip Heath’s novel, a bright spot in this context is a project that can result in a quick win that delivers business value and illustrates engagement.
While many companies feel the need to boil the ocean, I would instead encourage you to lean toward “good enough.” If it’s good enough to simply execute the bright spot, stop there. Prove the applicability and success of the bright spot — and only then move on. It is through these incremental, iterative steps — where new technologies are introduced and the team learns how to build, manage and extend them for future projects — that your digital business platform will be built.
You won’t get everything exactly right the first time, and that’s OK. The digital business platform is meant to encourage and support innovation, and that includes even the first steps in the platform itself. What’s important here is to build a culture where learning and improvement are embraced by the team. For, the faster the team is able to incorporate feedback, the faster the platform will evolve and be able to support more and more business initiatives.
It’s important to note that a digital business platform is central to delivering on a company’s vision and goals and should, therefore, be considered core IP and remain in-house. While it’s advisable to work with experts who are familiar with the tools, technologies and skills needed to build digital business platforms, seek out guides who will help teach your team along the way, encouraging a culture of learning while addressing internal digital business skills gaps.
Automation can fuel a self-feeding cycle. For example, I had the opportunity to work with a large hotelier on a digital transformation project where most of the team, during the first bright spot phase, remained focused on “keep the lights on” activities. As automation was added, it freed team members from manual tasks, allowing them to begin contributing more directly to the digital business platform.
