Digital Transformation is about process and people, not technology

I have been involved in the drive for Digital Transformation for many businesses over the last few years, and time and again I see the spectre of misunderstandings appearing. The truth is, Digital Transformation is about process and people, not technology.

Here are some of the biggest errors;

Digital Transformation is an IT driven ‘project’

The problem with many IT departments is that they are often a facility provider for the business. This may seem like a strange “problem”, but it has wide effects. When the IT department provides the IT facility, they ensure that email is flowing, fileservers are up, network and Internet access is working, and backups are taken. However, that is often the limit. When a line of business application is in need of maintenance or upgrade, IT often do not really know what the LOB system works, or how it is used by the business. When the IT department provides a new service or capability, it is often a ‘shiny’ new service that IT thinks is needed by the business. I have seen this a lot with new Intranet services, document management systems, softphone and desk conferencing tools. Some IT departments have a tendency to roll out what they think the business want, based on it being the latest or greatest (‘shiny’) tool.

Digital Transformation is more about the transformation than the digital. Letting go of old processes, reviewing if the legacy LOB system actually delivers benefits to the business, or if the business is operating in a way that suits the tool. Stopping blindly upgrading systems to the latest version and instead reviewing the processes and activities of the business, and finding the right tool to meet their needs.

Digital Transformation is not a ‘project’ – it is a whole of business change. This cannot be driven by just the IT department rolling out new tools, instead it needs whole of business engagement and contribution.

We just need this specific collaboration tool

Many times I have seen a Digital Transformation initiative kicked off and driven by a suite of collaboration tools. In my experience and exposure, it has been Office 365, but there are many other suites that can trigger the Digital Transformation journey.

It is foolhardy to assume that a suite of products or tools can be the silver bullet that solves all your business problems. A collaboration suite is a tool that can be used to support and facilitate Digital Transformation – and to make that work, you will need a whole range of organisational change and business process improvement to be investigated, tuned and implemented.

Digital Transformation = digitise all our paper forms!

I could rant about how often I have had this assumption levelled – that the existing paper forms that people have to sign, or fax, or print out for internal mail – should be converted into a digital form. This is so wrong. Taking an old approach and shoe-horning it into a new paradigm will lose all the benefits of the new medium, whilst cementing the problems of the old process.

Its not just the paper forms though, this is just a good example and analogy. The concept that an old approach can just be lifted and dropped into a new system is the point of this example.

For a paper form, just like any other process or system, it needs to be reviewed for how it works, how it will be used. What do you expect to get out, and so what do you need to put in? Do you really need a digital form to ask people their name and employee ID – if they have accessed the page by logging in? Do you really need to have a form printed, signed and faxed – if the process can be automated with a Business Process Management tool?

Another mistake taken with both paper form digitisation and with converting legacy systems and processes, is that there needs to be more engagement with the end users – the people who fill out the forms or use the LOB system to interact with customers. The back-end department that gets the information from the form may be unchanged by receiving the information in a new digital way – but the originating users may find the process slow, confusing, difficult or just simply wrong. The engagement with them is key to finding the best way to get the information from them.

Digital Transformation should be about breaking away from the legacy, reviewing the way that processes work and instead embracing the new – which could be microservices, consumer applications and streamlines processes.

Digital Transformation means all we need to do is upgrade and integrate our legacy systems…

Form many years, silos of expensive monolithic line of business systems may have been growing in your business. Infrequently upgraded, but patched, customised and adjusted to resolve times where the vendor has changed their product in a way that does not match your cemented business processes. They become fragile, but also sources of truth for key processes in your business.

The error often made is to integrate the legacy systems, often into a new presentation layer. This may meet the needs of providing web-based access to a system that previously required a thick client through a managed desktop, or it may unlock business intelligence systems being finally able to access years of data. So, on the surface it is a great idea. However, it locks in the dependency on the legacy systems. These fragile systems that have had bespoke customisation and may have required complex manual integration, are now even more fragile – now a small change in one system can have massive knock-on effects for multiple systems.

Instead, this is the opportunity to move away from an expensive legacy system that is actually holding back your business. Are your processes and activities tied to the way the system works? Is your legacy system driving your business, or is it helping you do business more effectively and efficiently?