Digital Ramblings - Part 2: The How (People)
In the last blog, I rambled on about what Digital means and why CIOs and businesses, in general, are so focused on it. If you missed 'Part 1' of this Digital Rambling series, you can catch up here.
In Part 2, the rambling is mostly focused (I use this word loosely) on the 'How' and by 'How' I mean, what will Enterprises need to do to become truly digital. In the Enterprise, CEO's refer to this undertaking as 'Digital Transformation'... and it is, a whopping undertaking for the big businesses festering in the dizzy heights of the Fortune list.
Having said this becoming a digital business is actually very very simple idea:
Instead of organising people around technology, organise the technology around the people.
By people, I mean employees and customers. Both are pretty important ingredients for business success. (Hopefully, we can ALL agree on this point? I will save the arguments for later)
This is a very very obvious assertion but if you look at the way large Enterprises and Government organisations are currently going about their various businesses, employees are largely organised around technology silos and the customer experience is often a byproduct of how the technology has been deployed and integrated (or not, as the case is so often).
Think about it for a moment....
How many times has your customer or employee experience been interrupted because the person or website you are dealing with doesn't have access to the right data or systems at the time you need them.
Some companies get this assertion, some don't. The ones that do, tend to be leading the way in terms of market success. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc all go out of their way to employ the best people AND keep them. They put the customer experience at the centre of everything they do and they use technology to help them improve the experience of customers and employees alike. It is a very different cultural approach to how traditional Enterprises have gone about their business.
In a large Enterprise, it is not unusual to see an entire team of people organised around a single technology - like Windows or UNIX servers for example. There are storage teams, network teams and database teams. You will even find silos within the technology silos...
The focus of these teams is on their individual technology and the way in which they have been siloed (cough cough) organised removes them almost entirely from the experience or service they are ultimately trying to deliver. As a result, these teams configure their individual technology according to what is best for the individual technology... they read best practise guides and meet with vendors to agree on configurations that will keep their technology happy - very rarely (if at all) is the experience, customer or employee talked about.
(Anyway.. I'm rambling again. If you are still reading by this point, you probably work in or around technology and get the point I am trying to make! Getting back on track...)
Enterprises need to re-organise their talent.
(Can we agree on this? I imagine most of you nodding at this point. Now you are telling me to get on with the blog, aren't you? Again...)
Enterprises need to reorganise their people around the customer experience and business outcomes they aspire to deliver. Then these Enterprises need to empower these incredibly talented and awesome teams of people, that they have spent millions of £$£$£'s recruiting, with the ability to augment their technology base in ways that maximise the customer experience and allow them to constantly improve it. (Obvious statement? clearly not, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place....)
The processes that support these awesome and empowered teams need to be leaned out and simplified so that they help and not hinder. Processes are important -particularly in highly regulated businesses- but not to the point that they stifle creativity and destroy agility. In the digital world, agility and the ability to respond is essential -not optional.
(Note to self -STOP! I'm rambling again). I think the above has pretty much covered off the organisational element of digital transformation. In the next blog, I will discuss the processes in more detail, If I do it now, it will make this post MASSIVE. I will talk about Agile, Lean and DevOps and how these things compare to things like Waterfall, ITIL and ITOM. I might also ramble on about architectures as well because they are pretty fundamental enablers to the above process/mindset changes.
Thanks for Reading,
Go be Digital! Chancey
In Part 2, the rambling is mostly focused (I use this word loosely) on the 'How' and by 'How' I mean, what will Enterprises need to do to become truly digital. In the Enterprise, CEO's refer to this undertaking as 'Digital Transformation'... and it is, a whopping undertaking for the big businesses festering in the dizzy heights of the Fortune list.
Having said this becoming a digital business is actually very very simple idea:
Instead of organising people around technology, organise the technology around the people.
By people, I mean employees and customers. Both are pretty important ingredients for business success. (Hopefully, we can ALL agree on this point? I will save the arguments for later)
This is a very very obvious assertion but if you look at the way large Enterprises and Government organisations are currently going about their various businesses, employees are largely organised around technology silos and the customer experience is often a byproduct of how the technology has been deployed and integrated (or not, as the case is so often).
Think about it for a moment....
How many times has your customer or employee experience been interrupted because the person or website you are dealing with doesn't have access to the right data or systems at the time you need them.
Some companies get this assertion, some don't. The ones that do, tend to be leading the way in terms of market success. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc all go out of their way to employ the best people AND keep them. They put the customer experience at the centre of everything they do and they use technology to help them improve the experience of customers and employees alike. It is a very different cultural approach to how traditional Enterprises have gone about their business.
In a large Enterprise, it is not unusual to see an entire team of people organised around a single technology - like Windows or UNIX servers for example. There are storage teams, network teams and database teams. You will even find silos within the technology silos...
The focus of these teams is on their individual technology and the way in which they have been siloed (cough cough) organised removes them almost entirely from the experience or service they are ultimately trying to deliver. As a result, these teams configure their individual technology according to what is best for the individual technology... they read best practise guides and meet with vendors to agree on configurations that will keep their technology happy - very rarely (if at all) is the experience, customer or employee talked about.
(Anyway.. I'm rambling again. If you are still reading by this point, you probably work in or around technology and get the point I am trying to make! Getting back on track...)
Enterprises need to re-organise their talent.
(Can we agree on this? I imagine most of you nodding at this point. Now you are telling me to get on with the blog, aren't you? Again...)
Enterprises need to reorganise their people around the customer experience and business outcomes they aspire to deliver. Then these Enterprises need to empower these incredibly talented and awesome teams of people, that they have spent millions of £$£$£'s recruiting, with the ability to augment their technology base in ways that maximise the customer experience and allow them to constantly improve it. (Obvious statement? clearly not, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place....)
The processes that support these awesome and empowered teams need to be leaned out and simplified so that they help and not hinder. Processes are important -particularly in highly regulated businesses- but not to the point that they stifle creativity and destroy agility. In the digital world, agility and the ability to respond is essential -not optional.
(Note to self -STOP! I'm rambling again). I think the above has pretty much covered off the organisational element of digital transformation. In the next blog, I will discuss the processes in more detail, If I do it now, it will make this post MASSIVE. I will talk about Agile, Lean and DevOps and how these things compare to things like Waterfall, ITIL and ITOM. I might also ramble on about architectures as well because they are pretty fundamental enablers to the above process/mindset changes.
Thanks for Reading,
Go be Digital! Chancey
Comments
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment, I believe in freedom of thought and freedom of speech. I will, however, only reply to respectful discourse.