Digital transformation in a nutshell – Communication

If there is one thing you can’t do Digital Transformation without – it’s a team. And not only a team that exists, but a team that communicates, collaborates and has a common goal that gives common understanding to everyone. Managing a team and their expectations can be hard – fighting for budget is getting through some gates in form of accounting, financial controller, board and maybe someone else; fighting for scope is getting through some product managers, branch leaders and technology leaders (most of the time they do the fighting among themselves to deliver the best possible product), but people, that’s a different story. When you are against your team, you are not against a couple of people that are generally aligned, you are against everyone in your company with different needs, wishes and understanding. When working with a team you need to be the light at the end of the tunnel by leading the troops, removing blockers, streamlining the communication and dissolving silos. 

1. IT, Business and the teams

The normal day for any IT team starts with a coffee, reading morning mails, doing daily standup and discussing what needs to be done and how. Everything is flowing, people are working and then comes an email. Innocent looking email saying something like: “we need you to stop everything and gather data that we required yesterday plus add this small function that will give us more flexibility around your database”. Then comes general anger: “how can they request something like that? Don’t they know that we are busy? We don’t have time for this. We are the owners of data and giving them rights will 100% lead to total disaster. We are the only ones keeping the company together” and a short reply “Sorry, can’t do it, because of reasons”. After this answer a mail goes out to business: “We can’t support you on your request, because the other team refuses to work and do what we tell them”. This causes general anger in the marketing department: “Don’t they know that we already ordered the ad time on TV and posters are being distributed as we speak?” The ping-pong starts and in the end CTO is involved to escalate this to the first team. After 15 minutes everything is solved (not counting 5 days of fighting in emails, and meetings, calls and texts). Could someone foresee this situation and avoid it fully by implementing better planning, communication stream between departments and open data policy using API Library solution? Yes. Can you solve it with your Digital Transformation project? Yes.

Each team has different goals and values. For the database team the stability of database and data integrity will be the main focus and the thing they will try to protect the most. For the product management team the same data will be a tool to play around with, trying to find the next bestseller. Their baby is the product (which the database team seems not to care for). To succeed with Digital Transformation it is crucial that every team understands the link between application stability, data value and usage within the company and end-user experience (which all lead to sales).

As the data is usually siloed between different teams, dashboards, divisions and storages, it is important to break down these limitations by implementing a common data model. This needs to be part of the initial Digital Transformation scope. Metrics like:

• Customer experience correlated with system uptime and processing speed
• Application performance with business metrics
• End-2-End (E2E) order flow and business metrics
• Etc.

The goal is to define strict KPIs for each individual system, system groups/domains and overall E2E solution (individual system uptime, system uptime in sales domain and overall system uptime). These KPIs should be tied with Incident Management process, Problem Management Process and Critical Incident Follow-Up process (also known as Post Mortem). And yes, also these should be included in the transformation scope.  

By fully utilizing data, your enterprise can leverage many more opportunities, implement AI solutions (line Netflix telltale a solution that learns what a healthy system looks like and displays only the relevant information on possible issues) and streamline your decision process. 

2. Collaboration

Collaboration between different departments, divisions and teams is crucial. During the transformation, you need to ensure you are working with the right people on streamlining the communication. Simply telling: “Hey, talk more!” will not work. You should consider tools like big room planning for all organizations to highlight business plans and tie them together with requests from individual systems and their dependencies. Things like virtual projects where a cross-functional team is gathered to deliver one, small deliverable that brings value to all enterprises.

Facilitate collaboration with metrics. Once you have implemented your data model, you can publicly display metrics that show transformation results. Is it the decrease of incidents, faster delivery times, less calls to customer centers etc. Any metric that can show how removing the silos lets the teams work faster, easier and achieve more. Instead of fighting for days, better results can be reached within minutes, leaving the rest of the time to do what people want to do – innovate, make things better or simply communicate with their peers.

3. Better tools and talent

Agile manifesto talks about people over tools, but what if the market has changed so much that it’s very hard to find a good specialist? Only option is to return to tools – tools for automation, low-code tools, mapping tools that can be utilized company-wide to reach the same goals while pushing for complete redundancy removal and automation (test automation, automated security testing, automated deployments, AI solutions for monitoring, etc.). 

When planning the scope of your transformation you should consider less specialists, but with bigger seniority to build more advanced solutions as well as data platforms, integration platform and API solutions to allow extensive automation. When doing scoping, you can immediately identify pain areas that concern many departments, communication gaps and data gaps.

4. Enterprise-wide communication

Often Digital Transformation is left on the shoulders of the IT team. Often CTO doesn’t even have a seat at the “Big Table”, yet has all the responsibility to drive full reorganization of the IT landscape that is supposed to save millions, automate everything, empower sales and guarantee best user experience in the world. If this is your case, then I have bad news for you – your job has been made extremely harder by your peers.

Digital Transformation should come out as a common message from all teams leadership. It should be supported by all divisions of the enterprise and marketed fully. Visual materials, workshops, all-hands meetings, town halls, and so on. Everything to motivate the troops.

Digital transformation is a long process with many moving parts. If you manage to remove the silos and leverage E2E data to support your decisions, plans and needs as well as visually show the impact of the change, you might align everyone just enough to reach the goal, maybe even before the schedule and loving the outcome. Instead of the old, slow mountain that was your IT stack, if your employees can use fast, agile applications both on-premises and on cloud, use them from mobile apps at work or home and to be more productive, you will see the results in a very short time.