Organizations have experienced unprecedented change and opportunity as a result of the digital age. As technology advances, businesses must adapt and evolve in order to remain competitive and relevant. What, however, does it take to become a world-class digital organization?
LOOK IN THE MIRROR
First and foremost, it's important to look in the mirror and assess where your organization stands in terms of digital readiness. Do you have the necessary infrastructure and technologies in place to support digital transformation? Are your processes and systems optimized for the digital age? These are important questions to consider as you embark on the journey toward digital excellence.
CRITICAL QUALITIES
There are seven critical qualities that all world-class digital organizations share. These include:
Let's delve a little deeper into each of the preceding points.
1. Ability
People are at the heart of any successful organization. It is critical to invest in your employees and foster a culture of continuous learning and development if you want to become a world-class digital organization. This includes ensuring that they have the necessary training and support to thrive in the digital age.
People are essential components of any high-performing team.
Executive-level representation is required for a business-critical function such as digital transformation.
Find a leader who fits in terms of experience and alignment on these critical qualities, create metrics to measure performance against them, and then delegate execution to him or her.
2. SECURITY & Privacy
Ensuring the security and privacy of customer and company data is of the utmost importance in the digital age. This requires robust cybersecurity measures and a culture of security throughout the organization.
Each week (approaching every day) there is a news headline regarding a high-profile compromise of IT systems that reveals sensitive information about intellectual property or customer/partner data, injects fault (sabotage), or results in outright theft or extortion. While developing this blog post, British Airways and T-Mobile were two high-profile organizations suffering customer data breaches. In the same time frame, a division of Boeing battled a ransomware attack.
Connected software is a requirement to compete in today’s economy. Such systems, by their very nature, expose vectors of attack that can be exploited to the above ends. Planning and managing security in a digital world require a similar level of diligence as in the analog world. Implement processes and systems, monitor, respond to threats, and continually harden.
3. INNOVATION
The digital age is all about innovation and the ability to quickly adapt and respond to change. World-class digital organizations encourage a culture of innovation and embrace new technologies and ideas.
As is true in any discipline, the agility to bring ideas to market quickly and/or adapt to market changes and trends is just as critical. Once delivered, refinements to the product or service are a continuous process. Shrinking innovation cycles are required to stay ahead of the competition.
Does it take months to go from idea to realizing value from new or updated software? Can it be done in weeks? Days? Hours? Tools, technologies, and processes are available in the market to implement, test, evaluate, and deploy software to capture value at lightning speed.
Netflix is a leader in this space; according to one of their blog posts, they can move from updated software code to deploying at scale in 16 minutes!
4. PARTNERS & Suppliers
In the digital age, it's important to build strategic partnerships and collaborations that can help drive growth and innovation. World-class digital organizations know how to identify and cultivate mutually beneficial partnerships.
The same is true of software. Whether it’s hardware, data center, cloud services, COTS (commercial off-the-shelf), SaaS (software as a service), or open-source applications and libraries, your platform will rely on third parties. Choices made can have a dramatic impact on the effectiveness of your platform. Of course, the best decision today may not be the same months or years from now. Ensuring you can survive the failure of a partner or make a move to gain/sustain an advantage is paramount.
Whether it’s problems implementing ERP COTS packages at Target, Nike, Pacific Gas & Electric, or applications going down because your cloud or service provider suffered outages, the right (or wrong) partners can critically impact your success.
5. QUALITY
Delivering high-quality products and services is essential for any organization, but it's especially important in the digital age where customer expectations are high. World-class digital organizations prioritize quality at every stage of the development process.
What does it mean to measure quality in your software platform? The concept that typically comes to mind is defects (“When I click the button, does the expected thing happen?”). While the number of errors per feature tested is an interesting metric, it is only one dimension of the discipline. What are the performance characteristics of the platform? Does it process requests/data sets in an acceptable time frame? Can it scale to 10x the load? What are the failure modes? Some of these dimensions can be evaluated in test environments, while some can only be fully understood when taking production traffic (or it is impractical to maintain a production-like environment).
As with analog products, automate and test every component as thoroughly as you can, do the same with the integrated, fully assembled results, evaluate in real-world limited deployment, and continue to evaluate performance in the wild. Once parameters are defined for the operation of a predictable software platform in a given scenario, processes and tools can be aligned to ensure the results.
LinkedIn has worked on its methodologies for some time to find the balance between high quality and high velocity of its software platform, implementing creative solutions as needed for various components.
6. USABILITY
In the digital age, it's not enough to simply have a website or app; it must be user-friendly and easy to navigate. World-class digital organizations prioritize usability in all of their digital offerings.
Simply put, if users/consumers struggle to (or simply cannot) realize the value of a given product, then the product will likely fail. Barriers include difficult-to-understand functionality or data sets, response time/performance, and cumbersome workflows. Expensive projects have been scrapped (such as this implementation at Avon), or required costly modifications (e.g.: Healthcare-dot-gov) due to a poor user experience.
Human-Centered Design (HCD) is an instrumental discipline in defining usable interactions. Just as critical, however, is having a process in place to quickly gather feedback on functionality once it is deployed and make adjustments. This can be accomplished by explicitly surveying select users or by evaluating how a product is used via telemetry from deployed software (e.g.: A/B testing, which is analogous to trying two or more approaches to assembling a product and measuring which is more efficient).
7. OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
To remain competitive in the digital age, organizations must be efficient in all aspects of their operations. This includes streamlining processes, using data and analytics to inform decision-making, and leveraging automation to increase productivity.
Top-tier organizations are constantly monitoring and improving their performance. In terms of software development, some key metrics include cost and throughput (in terms of delivering functionality). Can hardware/software/staff costs get optimized on a particular dimension? For example, if hardware and software or staff scale linearly based on transaction volume or number of customers, can tooling or other change in software make this sub-linear? Uber reworked its software services to accommodate massive scaling.
If releases are taking on the order of a month, what is the “long pole”? If testing/QA, for example, can tooling improve throughput, or is there a process optimization opportunity, such as BBC experimenting with lean/Kanban?
FINAL THOUGHTS
Establishing a new business function or product line often requires a material investment. Digital transformation is no different. While the specifics and terminology of the discipline may be unique compared to other aspects of the organization, the same is likely true of other ventures executed. Define what success looks like, put the right people in place, and start working towards that vision with these guideposts in place.
In conclusion, becoming a world-class digital organization requires a holistic approach that encompasses all of these critical qualities. By focusing on security, people, innovation, partnerships, quality, usability, and operational efficiency, your organization can position itself for success in the digital age.
