First of all, I must state that this article contains my personal opinion entirely!
In the past two years, I watched the digitalization trends in the surrounding companies and made conclusions, which reflect my opinion.
Majority of the companies started Digital Transformation as no other way of surviving, but most of them failed.
There are several factors which made the final results, and I will walk through all of them step by step, I hope this can help for those who learn from other failures! As my colleague say every time: Western people only can learn from own expensive failures, not from others!
Let's start with the beginning. Most of the companies start with IT Digital Transformation. Company culture against these changes! This behavior is a normal behavior of human being. First, we need to be open to changes, before we change these transformations. For this behavior an excellent example: Carol Dweck's: Mindset work, which shows the difference between growth and fixed mindsets. When I first read this book, I realized why I have to fight with my colleagues in the past ten years. If we can transform our own employee's mindset to be open to changes and learn, we can prepare the land for growing plants for our new business.
Next one is the silo operation. This silo operation interweaves the whole company. We can identify this between departments and between Business and IT. Let's start to open this topic further.
In a lot of the cases, I hear: Let's Business do business, and keep IT spend their time with the IT relevant topics. I had terrible news: IT is part of the Business! In the Digitalization era, it is more than before! Moreover, if I think about Industry 4.0, it will replace the majority of the business also! We can think about business as a transparent business without IT, but lets me show an example when a financial industry does not need IT:
I think this was a good business in the past, but now in the digital cash, and digital services age, this is history. Try to justify the video business model in the following
well-performing organization, the business and IT works together. This is the basis of an Agile organization where barriers destroyed between these units.
How can you diagnose your distance from this ideal state? Just check your ITSM system usage pattern in the processes!
In a traditional organization, departments, divisions hide between tickets. I dropped the task to the other department/division, it is no more my duty! In an ideal Agile organization, there is only one point in the ticketing, at the entry of the process, which outside of the organization. The rest processed in the organization without no communication overhead. Just imagine what is the highest level of responsibility where we cannot point with the finger to another one? There would be the point where we create a ticket. In the inner organization, we need to work as one unit! Until we have ticketing overhead and hiding behind ticket in the internal organization, we cannot expect performance!
The process itself cannot solve problems. To solve problems you need qualified staff. For this, you need also a lot of things! Let's go thru on these:
To hire qualified staff, you need engaged managers, who can attract staff. Money always one factor. It can solve issues but only for limited time. To have a good staff you need:
good atmosphere
Possibility for continuous learning
Managers who can inspire the workforce
In a good work environment, you can trust your staff, they are at the company to work. You don't need to make more and more strict control system. If they cannot work, they will leave the company before you need to implement control systems, like timesheet and big brother systems.
If you can do these, your colleagues will take their trusted friends, to work at your company. This will help to have the best talents!
With these colleagues, you will have a good mindset in your team, and you can make the transformation what you aim, but you need to communicate clearly both internally, and externally. External communication help to find those who not on your radar, and you can make the best team with results which unique on the world level.
Employer branding, and CSR both important.
On CSR level I believe the most important is the diversity of the team. If you want to make digital services, which can serve the widest level of customers, you need the most diverse team. This is not only important on an ethnic level, but more on generations. You need team members from Generation Baby-boomers to Gen-Z which start working this year! This is also not an easy task. You need to know the differences between generations both on communication, and behaviors. Every generation has different needs to have the most relevant communication channel which makes the information most effectively.
The last one is a topic appeared in the beginning, but need to be opened with more details: Learning. As Industry 4.0 rising, learning will be more and more important. As robotics will replace most of the traditional jobs, the replaced jobs workforce must learn new things, to be able to be part of the working ecosystem. For this reason, the companies have a greater responsibility than before.
I hope this article can help to make more successful Agile Organization, and Digital Business Transformation in the future.