Digital Transformation: is it just about technology?

Nowadays, we are listening these two words wherever we go: ‘Digital Transformation’. Every company is doing its own Digital Transformation, hiring many people, making many projects, replacing its “old technology architecture” and all this “new stuff”.

If you looking carefully at many of this companies, people working there keep working more or less the same way. Sorry, it’s true that there are “new roles” like “Scrum Master”, “Product Owner”, “Functional Architect”, “Digital Channels Manager”, “Devops Engineer”, “Big Data Engineer”, “Data Analyst”…,etc and maybe they are working in an “agile way”, having meetings at the beginning of the day, using post-it everywhere and coding in the latest language or framework known.

But the reality is that most of them don’t know why they have to use Scrum or why decomposing business in domains and using a microservices oriented architecture is better than the old way.

They just keep working and now, the old Project Manager is a Scrum Master, the old Functional Analyst is a Product Owner and there are several people working as a develop team that every two or three weeks have to make a demo. The old working place changes to an open space, the ties are removed and there are two screens for every worker.

Behind of this new image, everybody knows that there is a deadline from the beginning of the project, the Scrum Master is checking everyday in the Gantt Diagram if the deadline is possible or the team will have to overwork and Business people are attending to the demos but they are waiting for the final release, several months later…

In many companies, this is the real Digital Transformation. New face but old body.

Nowadays, customers are looking for companies that offers their services in every device, companies that can offer a service while the customer is in the bus on his way to work, companies that offer an enrollment service without going to an office and in several minutes time instead of several days or companies that improve their service everyday because they know their customers perfectly: their habits, their positions, their hobbies,…,etc and can offer the best suitable product to each customer in every situation.

The “new customer” doesn’t hesitate to hire a service to another company if the current one is not providing the service he needs. Loyalty is something that the companies has to fight for by improving their services everyday.