In my last article, I covered the basics of understanding the digital landscape and aligning transformation efforts with your organisation's goals. I explored the importance of tailoring your approach to fit your company's unique needs and ambitions, setting the stage for a successful digital transformation journey.
That's about setting off in the right direction, knowing where you want to go and why it's a good idea to go there, as opposed to anywhere else.
But, as any navigator will tell you, you can't set off towards your destination without knowing where you are starting from.
Assessing the Current State of Play
What’s key is being honest about the challenges and failings that exist in your company today. You can’t fix problems you pretend aren’t there. And trust me if you try to just build over the top of them they will likely cause decay and the collapse of whatever you put in place. Do not build on a crumbling foundation. This is also why true change or transformation is not about launching an exciting new tech platform but about solving the process and personnel problems that contribute to the current tool not working. All aspects must change for the change to be of value.
In practical terms, this requires a full investigation and documentation of at least the following:
All business processes and their intended outcomes
All systems & their integration points
How work moves through these systems and why (what are the processes & outcomes they support)
Find where manual processes are accounting for a failing or absence of integration/system capabilities
Identifying technical debt & legacy systems that cause friction in processes or workflows
Where the dead ends or leaks are in the system i.e. data captured and stored but not used
Where processes or policies are currently being circumvented or ignored and why
This is going to require an investment in decent business analysis & data analysis. One particularly impactful approach is stakeholder interviews during a full assessment or discovery phase. Do not include only senior staff and management but also the people that any eventual change would impact. Ask yourself who will be enacting the new processes and using the new tools.
This way you can not only learn how systems and policies are intended to be implemented, but how they are actually being used. This will help you identify the technologies that may be the biggest sticking points (or easiest to improve) and help you identify early on who your enthusiastic partners are at every level of the business. You’ll see clearly who wants change, and who is likely to obstruct it but also why. This way you can work on strategies to make best use of the early adopters and coach any groups who are resistant, encouraging them towards shared goals. This can help reduce change failure rates.
General Electric (GE) executed this organisation-wide baselining well during a previous digital transformation. They tackled assessing the existing infrastructure, including industrial machines and equipment. They identified performance issues and developed predictive maintenance models leading to substantial cost savings.
A couple of key takeaways here are:
If you plan on making wide-scale change, then do an equally wide-scale evaluation of the people, processes, and technology you are starting with
Uncover your allies and challengers, and bake that knowledge into your change approach
Do not focus exclusively on the technical tools in play but also how they are being used (or not)
Now that you know what needs tackling, you may have also found the list to feel overwhelmingly large. So it’s time to decide in what order to tackle it. In Part 3, we'll explore the art of prioritisation as it's rarely possible or efficient to tackle everything at the same time.
I'd love to hear about any areas or methods of discovery you have found effective, or challenges you had while trying to get to the truth.
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