The Mavericks Guide to Becoming a Digital Business

You now have to be a Digital Business or at least be considering it otherwise you are doomed for failure. That’s the message coming out of all the large management consultancies and research houses. Act now, act quick, put a huge amount of budget aside for your impending and unavoidable ‘Digital Transformation’.

It’s true. Businesses do need to be thinking about how they are going to address the digital challenge, the increased pace of technology and rising customer expectations have made it so. In fact, if a business hasn’t already put ‘digital’ on the boardroom agenda, they are already way behind the curve.

But businesses don’t need ‘Digital Transformation’. Businesses need to become adaptive. Change is not new, never has been, it’s just that now, change has become so fast, it’s scary, meaning there is huge reluctance to change anything within the organisation that holds risk for the bottom line. And the term ‘Digital Transformation’ has not helped. Wow, do I have to transform everything, all at once and it’s going to cost how much? And it could fundamentally and negatively affect the way the business operates and through a multitude of high profile, failed projects, and the list goes on. Only a couple of weeks ago did Mike Bracken talk about the disillusionment of so-called ‘digital transformation’ due to the failure of long term ‘BIG IT’ contracts within the Civil Service.

It is inevitable that the business world has to embrace digital…every business does, large or small, if they are to survive into the future. And this is not a technology/IT discussion, this is embracing digital across the entire organisation; it’s a change to the business model, the development of people, a shift in culture and the way a business communicates. Digital is affecting every pillar of the business and thus needs to be addressed across every pillar, holistically, to make the most of the digital opportunity. The rewards are proven. There is more research out there than you can shake a stick at demonstrating the benefits, cost savings, revenue growth and increased innovation possible when businesses are more digitally mature. So rather than focus on the obstacles to change, perhaps it’s time to focus on the advantages. 

We have to think differently. We have to take the fear out of digital and provide a means for action rather than just talking all the time. So if Digital Transformation is not the answer, what is?

Here’s our Maverick’s guide to becoming a Digital Business. It is based on the Adapt2Digital: Digitally Adaptive Framework & Methodology™ that helps businesses become adaptive over time. Think of digitally adaptive as taking the best of what a business has today and then looking into the future and pulling both together, in small incremental stages to create meaningful change. Not so scary now is it?

Take the time to understand the difference between technology and digital. Technology has an important and valid place within the organisation but there is a need to change the perception of technology from an internal service provider to a place that can share insight into the art of the possible to create business solutions. Digital on the other hand is about the whole business from the organisation, to the people, to the culture to the wider business ecosystem, it’s about the point of connection between technology, people and culture…and it’s always continuously changing.

It doesn’t matter who in the organisation starts the transition to becoming a Digital Business. The standard interpretation of changing your business to be more digital is starting at the very top. So this is getting someone, generally the CEO to mandate the digital directive. This is not the start, this is actually the tipping point. It actually starts with an advocate, someone who has recognised the digital imperative and can see the business benefit and communicate this upward and outward.

Find your champion. Maybe the advocate is the digital champion but maybe not. If not, find the champion. This needs to be someone who:

• Can talk up to the business

• Who believes and participates in digital

• Has credibility as an individual

• Has courage to challenge the status quo

Build a Business Case for digital. You aren’t going to get anywhere without a strong business case that is bought into but the senior leadership team. Make sure you include a broad assessment of current digital capability and competency across the business and what the effects of the transition could be in real terms.

Find some good news stories. There will be pockets of digital happening in your organisation. Find the good stuff and demonstrate the value of this. Use these as best practice examples, think about how learnings from these initiatives can be repeated, enhanced, and made more of. 

Bring people together. Vitally important. Bring the senior leadership team together and do something with them that shares the business case, that creates digital definition for the organisation, that builds agreement and consensus. Everyone needs to be aligned and committed to the digital cause because it is everyone’s responsibility.

It’s all about lots of little. The business isn’t going to transform overnight. Thinking this would be very unrealistic. Neither do you need big digital transformation projects to adapt to digital. What is needed are as many believers and advocates as possible that can start to seed positive change in many areas and just start small.

Break down the barriers and collaborate. Find some areas where you can collaborate, invite different people to meetings, learn something new from someone. Get away from hierarchy. Businesses in the modern world are not hierarchical; they foster collaboration to enable innovation. Empower people to make data driven decisions.

Make sure you have a framework to track progress. So many times ‘digital’ is happening without a structure to monitor results and progress. A robust framework is needed to ensure you are moving in the right direction. Anchor digital back to the business and find a way of proving real, tangible ROI. This is the only way to ensure digital is seen as impacting positively on the business from a financial perspective.

Take care of mindset. No business can change without the right mindset. A collective digitally adaptive mindset shifts culture. Seek the solution, not the reasons to fail, be an enable, not a blocker and remember that mindset is learned, it is not a given. 

Nobody believed in Steve Jobs when he first took the concept of the personal computer to market, in fact he had to describe it as ‘putting a TV screen and a typewriter together’, which to most was a crazy idea. But as Apple has proven, belief by a few can change the world.

It is time to believe in a new business model, one that is adaptive, one that is not stuck in traditional ways of working and operating. Here’s to the crazy ones…

Collaboration & Integration: A Match Made in Heaven

Collaboration has become quite the buzzword within business recently as leaders start to realise one of the future success factors of surviving in the digital age is dependent on enabling a collaborative environment. And this is for many reasons, improvements in communication, an empowered workforce and importantly, the ability to continuously innovate at a time where innovation can mean the difference between business success and failure.

There are many examples of collaboration within business. Google for instance introduced the concept of Google Garage. A space where “Googlers can come together from across the company and learn, create, and make.” Apple has always been known as a collaborative company, as referenced in this interview with the late Steve Jobs where he talks about how the company is organised like a start-up. AMP Bank in Sydney spend time with their employees side-by-side to understand how they work and how new technologies and strategies can enhance their personal and professional lives. Cisco leverages a collaborative environment to crowd source issues and requests, enabling them to find the best and fastest solutions for improved customer experiences.

So we can all agree that collaboration is a necessity. As businesses move to become digital businesses, adapting internally so that functional areas do not operate in silo is a real imperative.

So where does integration come into it? There are many definitions of integration. Here we are referring to integration as systems, as technology that enables collaboration. Interestingly, there are very few examples of businesses that are successfully combining collaboration with integration, which is somewhat odd given the amount of tools and systems that are now available for businesses to utilise. There is very little point investing in a collaboration tool that is never used and in this day and age, there is very little point having a meeting to collaborate on something without the tools to enable further collaboration and effective progress. Time and time again, systems and tools are introduced into the organisation to promote and encourage collaboration yet they fall by the whey side because there isn’t an explanation of why it has been introduced, the reasons for using it and how to use it – therefore you end up with just another platform or tool that becomes a burden for the employee rather than an aid. 

Collaboration & Integration are key parts of a continuous journey, and also key elements of successful digital business. What they require however, is combined focus and a committed driving force to keep both moving forward to generate value for the customer. What is important is understanding the parameters of both as part of a wider digital business strategy, how far it should be pushed across audiences (and by audience, I mean not just employees but customers, supply chain/partners and wider stakeholders). In addition, they require ownership. Who owns collaboration and integration in the organisation? Motley Fool has a Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO) who is charged with making collaboration part of the daily doings of the company. Of course, this responsibility could also fall to another member of the C-suite. So who owns Integration? You could argue this is the future role of the CIO, who historically has been kept at arms length from the senior leadership team. This would make sense given the growing importance of the CIOs role and responsibility in driving the organisation from being a traditional business to a digital business and all that entails. And then of course there is the challenge of bringing these two roles together so that they are not working in isolation. Moving forward, both of these roles will be integral to building a digital culture internally across the wider workforce.

As our working environments change due to the combined forces of technology advancement and customer demand, the need for collaboration and integration to work together will be key. Workers will be spread across many time zones, employee demands will be greater, and technology will continue to advance. In the end, the future workplace will be a digital and analytical environment and businesses should be starting the journey now to put a workplace infrastructure in place that accommodates this – one that smartly enables innovation to increase competitiveness and the bottom line.