Mike Fitzmaurice, VP of North America and Chief Evangelist at WEBCON.
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“No plan survives contact with the enemy” is a quote often attributed to Dwight David Eisenhower, though it’s actually a longer phrase coined by Helmuth von Moltke. But I care far less about its precise origins than I do about how it informs digital transformation.
Digital transformation is not something that can be planned out and imposed from the top—not if you want it to succeed. For one thing, you can’t think about everything in advance. You can—and absolutely should—set goals in advance. But tactics? Most organizations (especially after factoring in customers, partners, vendors, etc.) have too many moving parts.
At best, you’ll have 100% of the requirements for maybe 15% of a process—at least the way it looked at the time the analysis started. That means some assumptions will be wrong. Some conditions will be obsolete by the time a solution is delivered. Hoping for everything to hold still for a few months while you build something to address it isn’t a realistic expectation, so you have to approach innovation in incremental steps.
Secondly, you’re going to need to trust (even require) that your people do more than simply follow instructions, and reward it when it happens. There’s a term that generals have used known as “ground truth,” which refers to the often substantial difference between what commanders expect and what troops actually encounter. Real transformation takes place when employees have a hand in helping create the applications and resources they’ll be using. There are things that only they know, and we ignore their ground truth-derived knowledge at our peril.
Thirdly, put approaches, techniques and tools in place to accommodate making regular adjustments to plans and deliverables. Not all tools and platforms lend themselves to continuous improvement. If you see or hear wishes for frozen requirements or extensive advance specifications, that’s a good indicator that changes are hard to implement, and looking around for something more change-friendly might have merit.
This can affect budgeting, too. Classically, digitalization efforts are regarded as something that disrupts the “normal” budget, and to mitigate the disruption, the goal has been to assign a fixed schedule and a firm price tag to each project. That kind of thinking, though, is at direct odds with continuous improvement.
What if we viewed digitalization as an ongoing, evolving effort? What if we determined how much we can afford to spend on continuous improvement and made it a recurring line item? What if we committed to how to use that budget monthly and adjusted it as circumstances demanded?
Digital transformation isn’t really a technical change. It means pivoting from thinking about one project at a time to taking an approach focused on the ongoing delivery of outcomes. It’s organizational change assisted by technology.
We know this works because we’ve seen this work in other places. Think about how a lot of videos are produced. Going back a few decades, they were carefully scripted in advance. Video was shot relatively late in the production cycle in strict adherence to a script, and editing was done to remove errors and fit what was shot to time constraints. Today, it starts with an idea and a storyboard. Plenty of video is shot early in the process, and the story is created during the editing phase. The narration is done near the end, and even that will be rearranged by further editing.
Digital technology made the cost of rearrangement low enough to make this approach possible. The transformation was that more content gets delivered to more places with greater regularity. Today, not only is the editor just as important as the author, but in many ways, the editor is an author. Creative decisions can be—and are—made and incorporated right up until the last minute.
It can be the same way for business applications. Early efforts can be spartan-yet-functional, and ongoing efforts can enhance and/or add to their utility. Users get something early, and even though it’s not perfect, they get a say in how it evolves. It’s a happier set of circumstances than having to build a complete application in advance only to—upon its delivery—get something completely divorced from ground truth.
Whether we’re talking about video production, application development or something else entirely, you’ll know you’re in a state of ongoing digital transformation when you realize that, by compromising, you’re actually optimizing.
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