Digital Transformation as a Service (DTaaS)

The moment you decide to start your Digital Transformation journey, you set on a long path of technical and cultural changes in your organization. Digital transformation is not simply installing new hardware and apps on top of old ones and calling it a day. Digital transformation is cultural changes, transformation of core functionality as well as defining company-wide data schema, metrics and SLAs. Often we see an issue where enterprises decide to change some application with exactly the same functionality, just from different vendors and then having trouble understanding why transformation failed and the company is stuck with tens or hundreds of developers and managers that have failed the project, there is no operational need for them and costs for reduction are extremely high.

A solution to get the best service and financial terms for any Digital Transformation, especially in enterprise where key IT speciality is kept to minimum is to consider Digital Transformation as a Service. A solution where your IT team gets increased on a project basis by experts that have spent hundreds of hours transforming the companies. Before entering such an agreement, it is important to understand what Digital Transformation as a Service is. To understand what a Digital Transformation partner is and how to choose one and most important – how to leverage the partner to achieve your goals.

What is Digital Transformation as a Service?

Imagine last time you wanted to improve something, but couldn’t, because “this has always been done this way”? Or that time when Gary from accounting didn’t want to deal with Sergey from the front-end team, because during last Christmas party they both wanted to dance with Anna at the same time? And now imagine a team that is hired to help Gary and Sergey to transform the way you do business, but they remain impartial. They were not here since the beginning of time, they evaluated requested changes based on statistics, business impact and hardware requirements. And they didn’t go to your Christmas party. Digital Transformation is a service which allows any enterprise to strengthen it’s core capacity and successfully reach the goals set for Digital Transformation.

1. Project manager and architect(s) do the initial evaluation, gather scope and prepare business case
2. Same team supports you during pitch meetings. 
3. Once the project is started the team organizes frequent planning sessions
4. Project (Delivery) manager is responsible for overall project flow and handling the requirements with various teams as well as process implementation questions. Architects concentrate on technical implementation questions with technical teams
5. Once the plans, design, information scheme, etc. are done, delivery phase starts and the temporary (during project implementation) team is set up to either implement required functionality and support it afterwards (requirements + production monitoring/fix) or gradually switch to the internal team

While some managers argue that only internal teams can deliver quality, reality is that short-term, project-based employees are almost impossible to find, third-party digital transformation teams have already set processes, templates and out-of-the-box solutions and most importantly – one of the main rules for any Digital Transformation partner is not to be involved in internal office politics, skipping never-ending power plays and discussions. Partner is interested in sticking to an agreed schedule and the enterprise is interested not to extend the transformation (and contract) forever.  

Also worth mentioning is the skill gap. Third-party teams are purpose-built teams with selected skills to support defined scope and transition. While improving your in-house team’s overall skills and knowledge is something every manager should prioritize as much as possible, sometimes it takes too long to gain expertise in the team to fulfill the task on hand (i.e. app is built, but there is no UI/UX expert in the team or app requires scaling, but there is no cloud expert). 

Long-term ROI

Estimating the budget for Digital Transformation is a difficult task as each transformation consists of many sub-projects from enterprise evaluation target architecture,  data scheme, software/hardware selection and implementation, metrics definition and work with the teams as part of transition. What makes this even more expensive is bad target architecture, inexperienced teams that can’t fully enable full potential of deployed applications and integrations or simply low quality implementation. Also all returns can be reduced to even losses if the team itself is scaled incorrectly (i.e. hiring too early, bad team-implementation mapping, no possibility to manage reduction of the teams after the implementation, inexperienced support teams, etc.). Proper strategy needs to be applied to deploy correct teams at the correct time in the correct place.

Innovation at its best

Of course it is not always the case, but one of the unspoken reasons why companies need to undergo Digital Transformation is simply because of layers of procedures, limitations, set ways and restrictions, employees have very limited area for innovation (i.e. team would like to implement new functionality that will decrease headcount in support teams by 50% over next 3 years, but small to medium investments are made for only 2 year period, while this new functionality doesn’t fit the criteria for major investment that would last 5 years). While during transformation these rules may still apply to daily business, there is a very high probability to implement such changes when teams have extensive cooperation with the outsourced teams and can innovate while under the Digital Transformation umbrella.

How to select your partner?

1. Evaluate your current team:
   1. Which expertise you have in your teams
   2. Which is missing
   3. Which areas will be transformed and will require:
      1. Employees to learn new things
      2. Will not have place in your organization
   4. How many teams you will be able to maintain after the end of transformation
   5. How to move the existing expertise inside the team to end-result
2. Evaluate time and budget restraints – map them with your project goals and understand your expertise needs (there are many strategies from short-term injections of experts to long-term full teams)
3. Capabilities and Expertise
4. Culture and willingness to go the extra mile 

One way or another most of the enterprises will have to do some digital transformation within the lifecycle of their existence. It’s every CTO’s task to evaluate the best strategy for it. In the case of Digital Transformation as a Service you get lots of expertise in a short period of time and a concentrated implementation while there have to be special strategies in place for knowledge retention in your teams. At the same time building large in-house teams may lead to very hard and costly transformations at the end of the project.