Pitfalls To Avoid – Enterprise Digital Transformation
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Every company in every industry cannot ignore the focus on digitally engaging with their customers. Digital technology dramatically improves the economics and capabilities of every business. According to a recent study conducted by Forrester, using hardware, software, algorithms, and the Internet, it’s 10 times cheaper and faster to engage customers, create offerings, harness partners, and operate your business. As a result, digital transformation is the buzzword today along with data analytics. Everyone technical and many non-technical people want to get involved, know they are affected by it and know they need to know more. Unfortunately, the onslaught of interest results in many enterprises walking into typical pitfalls of digital transformation. From my perspective as a digital transformation specialist, let me share what I see as the five most common pitfalls that digital leaders and their organizations will face in 2019:
Too Many Ideas – Blurred Vision: This is by far the biggest challenge we face during Digital Transformation. With Digital Transformation being the focus for many enterprises out there, it is natural to expect every leader in the company wanting to do something about it. Which results in a whole bunch of ideas being implemented many of which have not been fully vetted or researched to make sure they will make the necessary impact. It will help if all the ideas are backed with solid analytics and data points and in case we don’t have enough data points, we have a few decision makers who have been empowered to prioritize what gets implemented. I am sure you have heard of examples like adding Virtual Assistant to a website not knowing that you need rich historical data behind it to have meaningful impact.
Not Listening To Your Engineers On The Front Lines: This is another major pitfall that many enterprises have to deal with. Mainly an issue in a large enterprise vs. a startup, we see a tendency to have the actual engineers just implement the ideas that have been already picked by the leaders or product owners. There are some great stories from many mature digitally focused companies where some of the best product ideas came out of team hackathon than closed-door product strategy meetings. For example, some of the best features, ideas and functionalities in Facebook like Video, the Like button, Chat, Hip Hop for PHP, Tagging in comments and even Timeline were originally introduced at a Facebook hackathon.
Forgetting This – Deadlines Do Matter: The idea of letting the team fail fast is definitely a neat concept. But it does not make any sense when we waste cycles and time on failing and not be able to deliver key capabilities to the market on time to meet customer expectations. All companies cannot be like Apple where it dictates when a new capability is introduced to its customer. For example Apple does not commit what it will introduce for a customer in advance and then look to meet that deadline. In an enterprise, sales cycle starts very early in the year and the sales team needs to make commitment in advance and will loose credibility if they are not delivered on time. Which obviously means the team is working back from a delivery date and needs to deliver them on time.
Too Much Agile Gets You Lost In Ceremonies: Implementing Agile using various scaling frameworks like SAFe, DAD, LeSS etc. is good. However many times enterprises get lost in those framework jargons and forget the fact that Agile is a mindset more than anything else. As a team gets more mature in Agile, it has less and less of ceremonies and structure. For example, we have high performing Agile teams, that don’t have a dedicated Scrum Masters or even set Sprint schedule as team had figured out how to not get stuck and be self sufficient.
Chasing The Unrealistic ‘Startup Model’; While we all aspire for a nimble, efficient, highly skilled operating model that exist in a startup, the reality is that in an enterprise, we cannot get away from an operating model where we have to rely on cheaper offshore resources to scale for big projects, deal with aging workforce that might not be highly skilled like in a startup or multiple layers of management that are not close to the day to day engineering work. Instead of pushing to pretend like a startup, enterprise should embrace what they have and just focus on basic delivery principles of pushing defect-free business capabilities on time the best way they can and in the process strive to keep the customers happy and get them what they aspire for.
In conclusion, no need to start second-guessing all the new ideas and concepts coming out of the digital transformation happening across industry as they are needed to jump start change in any enterprise. But don’t forget the basics of building and sustaining a successful enterprise. Those have not changed over the years and still remain solid and trustworthy.
