Digital transformation strategy: the bridges to

build
Companies across the globe are digitally transforming as they are
challenged to improve business processes and develop new capabilities
and business models.

In this economic reality where entire industries are disrupted, actionable

intelligence is the new currency. Data and information have become core
business assets, sources of revenue and critical enablers in the information age.

In order to reap the benefits of new technologies, the next stage in that
information age and the digital transformation economy, organizations need to
be ready for accelerating evolutions, higher business agility and the increasing
role of all forms of data and information.

Most importantly, they need to be able to develop a digital

transformation strategy and build bridges in several areas, which are
related with information, data, processes, technologies, human aspects
and much more.

A digital transformation strategy starts with answering essential

questions such as the what, why, how and who. A digital
transformation strategy builds bridges between current state and
desired long-term plan.
And as digital transformation by definition is holistic and requires integration
and collaboration, a digital transformation strategy looks at building blocks and
the bridges to connect them, as well as barriers and new bridges to overcome
them.

Building bridges between IT and the business

In a business reality where ‘the business’, with a leading (yet, non-
exclusive) role for marketing and the CMO, increasingly takes decisions
on technology budgets, we see that it’s often hard for IT and
information management professionals, who are essential in digital
transformation, to speak the language of the CMO or other business
executives, which traditionally didn’t belong to their ‘target audience’.

It’s one of the reasons why IT firms are building or acquiring ‘digital
transformation consultancies’ with roots in marketing/business or even
agencies, which can help them in properly understanding and addressing the
needs of these a-typical audiences.
It’s also the reason why some consultancy-oriented firms, who have been very
vocal in the digital transformation scope, encounter challenges of growth. They
can’t respond to the increasingly end-to-end digital transformation strategy
needs of companies as they miss the profound IT and information management
skills.

In other words: for many of them it’s hard to build the bridges that are required
in the holistic phenomenon that covers many realities and skillsets and is called
digital transformation.

Building bridges between the business and

information/processes
It’s not just the IT and information management people that struggle to
speak the language of, let’s say, the CMO.
The other way around, many marketing executives, don’t speak the language of
IT and/or are not used to think and work in terms of business process
management, essential technological evolutions and concepts or methods of
business process reengineering and/or business process optimization.

Effective change management is impreative to making the

transformation from doing digital things to becoming digital (Deloitte,
infographic below)
There are more bridges to build than just those between the ‘IT and information
management side’ and ‘the business side’. We’ve covered this necessity
previously from the perspective of information as a bridge builder in the next
stage of the information age, whereby information bridges need to exist
between back end and front office, content and processes (integration), human
and machine and machine to machine (the Internet of Things), raw data and
actionable intelligence, etc. It’s equally critical to integrate information/content
and processes, with the business and knowledge worker in mind as previously
mentioned.

To successfully navigate digital transformation and protect against

digital disruption, all organizations need to developed three core
capabilities says Professor Michael Wade: hyperawareness, informed decision
making and fast execution. More in the presentation here, which we also
embedded below.

It’s probably not that hard to imagine how much bridging of processes, people,
information sources and existing silos and gaps that requires.
Building bridges for actionable intelligence
Information is ubiquitous and at the center of digital transformation.
Data volumes, formats and sources keep growing exponentially. The
question for leading companies has become: how do we turn all this
data into actionable intelligence in a meaningful, prioritized and
profitable way, leading to new opportunities.

At the same time, information management requires a holistic and integrated

approach. From digitizing and capturing paper-based information to enhancing
processes, empowering knowledge workers, better serving customers and
getting the right information and intelligence when, where and how they are
needed requires several steps and integrations.

Achieving end-to-end information management excellence, tailored to the

individual goals and challenges of organizations, their customers, their
ecosystems and their goals of optimization, innovation and, increasingly, digital
transformation, is critical, if not the main pillar to succeed any digital
transformation strategy. In practice, it requires building many bridges to
remove gaps and chasms that are still prevalent.

Last but not least, it requires data/content analytics and (thus) artificial
intelligence to move from information to knowledge and intelligence that is
actionable.

Building human bridges in a digital transformation

strategy
There are ample bridges to be built from a human perspective.
Customer-centricity, customer-facing processes and the end-to-end
customer experience are key in digital transformation strategies. We
need more and stronger bridges with customers in ways which require
more depth and breadth (and personalization) than ever.

A digital transformation strategy also requires bridges between leaders and

‘their people’, among others those who are closest to the customers and often
feel forgotten and unheard, bridges between various functions and, increasingly,
between business execs and leaders from several companies who are building
the ecosystems of value which are needed in an economy where new business
models and revenue streams de facto increasingly dictate both the business and
technology agenda. The customer in the broadest sense (external and internal
such as employees, don’t forget change management) is the driver behind
many bidges to build and instrumental in effectively building them.
Bridges to build new ecosystems
The strength of ecosystems and communities of innovation,
collaboration and also outsourcing partnerships, defines the strength of
the businesses which are part of them in a culture of co-opetition and
co-creation.

Finding new revenue streams together by connecting systems of value and

building bridges is key here as well, and is enabled by a technological reality
that increasingly revolves around data, actionable intelligence, software and
connectivity. This dimension will increase even more with the interconnection of
everything and more actionable intelligence opportunities, what the Internet of
Things or IoT is really about.

It’s clear that collaboration and co-creation, on top of the different meanings
they already have (think internal collaboration, for instance), in a digital
transformation economy and digital transformation strategy context go beyond
the enterprise and existing ecosystems and move towards building new
networks and ecosystems where data and actionable intelligence are leveraged
for future growth and entirely new business models.

Co-opetition might be less known but in fact it’s an idea and practice
that exists since several decades.

We invite you to read the classic ‘Coopetition‘, essentially meaning ‘cooperation

and competition’, which Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff already
wrote in 1996. It has always been in our top 10 of business books and in the
holistic reality which business is and which digital transformation also is and
requires to succeed, it could inspire you as it inspired us.

The reason we mention it is because co-opetition is also de facto what we see

happening in several markets where so-called incumbents and so-called
disruptive companies understand that it’s better to collaborate in competing for
specific markets than to go in from purely competitive approaches. A typical
example of that is happening in Fintech.

Speaking about disruptive companies, also note that, on top of describing a

game theory strategy that redefines what competition and co-operation are, co-
opetition builds upon a specific aspect of the, by definition holistic, industry
attractiveness assessment model, widely known as the ‘six forces model, where
‘new entrants’ are one of the key forces.

Building bridges between technologies

Another area is the building of bridges between the capabilities of
existing and ’emerging’ technologies and the potential they offer for the
most innovative, who will win in the end.

While many companies already struggle with several of the previously

mentioned bridges, this is where the real value can be created in an enterprise-
wide and longer term digital transformation strategy (digital transformation
needs a longer term view and strategy). We live in an age where over the past
decades new technologies have emerged (some more recently) and gradually
became core components of the ways we do business and the ways we live.

Their increasing maturity, as well as their increasing adoption, has led

to what Gartner called the Nexus of Forces. On this site we often refer
to the core technologies as the third platform (a term coined by IDC) or
SMAC and sometimes SMACIT.
Third platform technologies and accelerators are meaningless as such.
It’s in bridging them with each other and with people, processes and
purpose that they can transform.
Just to remind you: they are the cloud, social,
mobile (mobility) and (big) data (analytics). With SMACIT we also include the
Internet of Things. None of these ‘technologies’ are really new and often have
their roots in other technologies we mention less or have forgotten about. On
top of these so-called pillars new technologies are added, from 3D-printing to
what IBM calls cognitive (and in the end is really about analysis and artificial
intelligence).

The thing is that we often tend to approach all these technologies from
a somewhat siloed perspective. It suffices to look at the traditional
third platform depiction.

We do know that they are interconnected and strengthen each other, not for the
sake of the technologies themselves but because in that Nexus of Forces they
are inherently dependent of each other and simply overlap if you go deeper.

Bridging technologies and innovation

When you look at these various technologies, whether it’s from their
individual traits and evolutions (books are written about each one as
they cover many underlying realities and are all de facto umbrella
terms) and when you look at how they are often covered, it’s easy to
forget how they are really part of one single, more holistic, perspective,
which is defined by the end goals why we ‘invented’ them and why we
use them.

However, in order to reap the benefits and potential, it’s not enough to
understand what you can with these technologies. It’s at least as important to
understand how, in the end, they all matter in a context of your digital
transformation strategy, actionable intelligence and opportunities. Most people
realize that this end-to-end view matters to come up with innovative business
approaches or novel ways to solve challenges of whatever nature.

At the same time we’re also forced to understand them individually. You really
need to know what the Internet of Things is and can do, beyond what you
believe it is and how important it will be. So, that is what we try to achieve.
However, you should never forget that it’s important to build bridges between
your understanding and the goals you want to achieve on one hand and the
bridges to build between all the technologies that fit in your individual business
context.

To do so, you need to grasp what role they play in the bigger picture of digital
transformation, while identifying the glue that connects them and that in the
end enables you to make a solid difference with your strategy. And that’s one of
the areas where actionable intelligence (what data should become),
speed/agility (what the cloud offers), hyper-connectivity and along with it more
data (what the Internet of Things, mobility and so on offer), and the
intersection of people, purpose, innovation, optimization, information,
processes, value and business models come into play.

At the core of any digital transformation strategy:

building bridges with the future
All the mentioned bridges need to be built. Because here is a reality:
some forward-thinking companies have done amazing things using
the Industrial Internet of Things and data analysis. They hook up with
others with whom they can create new ecosystems of value. Others are
doing or will do equally amazing things in other areas.

Time frames greater than 10 years may be needed in a digital

environment (Deloitte)
However, those that in the end will make the difference, will not be the
technology innovators. It will be individuals and organizations that come up with
entirely new ways of innovation and value creation by truly understanding how
they can leverage the intelligence that is created in often seemingly unrelated
areas by those first movers and, possibly by adding additional capabilities, and
who can build bridges between sources and resources in ways we only start
understanding today. And to do so, a holistic mindset, common sense, some
distance and a profound understanding of how everything can be connected in
the scope of a unique purpose are needed.

The question that arises is where do you start? The answer: by understanding
all the components, technologies and others, we mentioned in this articles and
building bridges on the essential levels where they aren’t constructed yet but
where they should be in order to get that agile and holistic innovation and
optimization capacity that stretches far beyond the hype of the day and is
designed with a longer term strategy in mind.
How do you get to that strategy? By building bridges. By bringing people
together that don’t get lost in the noise of the day but are able to see and…to
build bridges. Between what you need to do now and what you will need to do
next with the meaning, context, hyper-connectedness and purpose of it all in
mind – certainly also on the longer term. Yet, that starts in the here and now
and the basic operations, processes and models to improve and overhaul with
an immediate business case, a medium term one and a bigger roadmap in
mind.

Bridging intent and achievement: where do you

want your digital transformation strategy to take
you?
Digital transformation is not a thing, it’s partially a journey and
partially a goal, but most of all it requires a clear roadmap and strategy
with ample room for adjustment in an adaptive way.

The challenge for many executives is to know where they want to head, what
they need to get there and how to be sure they successfully did get there with
the necessary (intermediate) controls in place.
Digital transformation strategy – planning mapping and prioritizing for the
future

You can look at it from two angles.

On one hand we see that often digital transformation is seen as a set of
projects, actions and exercises to do or a more enterprise-wide goal to
achieve. If you look at it this way, inevitably you need to ask why do I want to
transform anything whatsoever, what is that whatsoever and how am I going to
get there as mentioned. Essential project management questions and
forecasting methods are just a must, even if we tend to forget them and lose
ourselves in the technological or organizational questions without the end in
mind.
On the other hand we see that digital transformation is often
approached as an ongoing journey that is more about a continuous business
transformation strategy in the scope of technological and societal change. This
is obviously a journey that never ends. It’s the development of a capacity to
act, react and ideally pro-act as societal changes and technological evolutions
continue to take place, accelerate and evolve.

It’s not because you have digitally transformed in the now, that there won’t be
new occasions, challenges and chances, brought upon us by new technologies.
The Internet of Things is just one example here as, in all honesty, we are still at
the start. And there will be more changes and evolutions, far more.

The latter view explains why it’s so important to have a reactive (or agile),
informed and highly ‘change-aware’ capacity. Digital transformation also means
achieving this omni-informed capacity to act when action is needed or desirable.

Regardless of how you look at it, there is always one crucial challenge that
comes back as just mentioned. However, it’s bigger in less project-based
exercises. We hear this time and time again, whether we speak with experts in
a specific domain such as the Internet of Things, CIOs, CMOs, information
managers, you name it: all too often there is a lack of attention for the essential
questions that also apply in digital transformation or any technological or other
project or process.

What do you want to achieve, why do you want that, how do you get there, who
do you need, is there a clear and calculated case that supports your intent and
how are you going to gauge whether you achieved or not?

Bridging risk and certainty

While these questions seem obvious, there are numerous reasons why
they are often overlooked and we don’t bridge the what, why and how
or the intent and achievement.

One of many reasons is that often we are partially and in a sense by definition
operating in relatively uncharted territory and aren’t sure if we have all the
building blocks. That’s why it’s important to conduct VoC exercises and strategic
sessions with various people. It’s also why it’s important to continue to learn,
have a culture of evolution awareness and prioritize. Last but not least, it’s why
we need a roadmap, as informed as possible, and as mentioned, with the
necessary space for failure and balanced risk.
Compare the latter with marketing ROI. A good marketer will always strike a
balance between activities with more certain outcomes and proven results and
activities with less certain or uncertain outcomes which could be unexpectedly
high gains or, if it doesn’t work that well, losses that don’t affect the overall ROI
too much.

In exactly the same way and, depending on the scope and breadth/depth of the
digital transformation strategy, chart the unknowns. What we often see in
practice is that the mentioned challenge is not always a matter of uncertainty
regarding outcomes but also a matter of uncertainty regarding the “how”: the
uncertainty regarding what the outcome will look like (as we do speak about
change and this something new) is then strengthened by uncertainties whether
all the (right) building blocks are foreseen and/or in place to get there.

This uncertainty of missing building blocks or having the wrong ones is often
what makes organizations uncertain as they fear failure in regards with the
proper mapping of the needed building blocks (subprojects, people, processes,
information sources, change management initiatives, built-in checks and so
forth). Lean transformation with an adaptive case management approach, a
focus on the 3Ps and room for failure and iteration as in a continuous Bèta
model (more here) offer ways to tackle these challenges.
What you can learn from leading incumbents
Many leading ‘incumbents’ are increasingly setting up environments
where they give room to innovation, experimentation and future-
oriented sessions, in order to shape their digital transformation
strategy.

They invite start-ups, newcomers, the often younger generations of

technologists who master emerging technologies and/or their existing IT
partners (who are also challenged) to showcase, collaboratively think, find
talent and potential future scenarios, etc. They set up hackathons, organize
brainstorming session days and launch trials in order to prepare for the longer
term, as they decreasingly rely upon those first moving ‘digital transformation
experts’ who have been repeating the same stories too long too often.
In more than one sense you can compare this trend and the challenge of
several pure digital transformation consultancies , too often operating as islands
of limited expertise who start feeling that they need to broaden their scope,
with the evolutions before the dot come bubble when huge ‘e-business’
specialists went bankrupt one after the other and only a small portion more or
less survived. Many have forgotten the names of various of these large players
of the early days of the Internet and what used to be called ‘e-business’.

The comparison with that period is not a coincidence. We don’t just see many
digital transformation consultancies facing challenges of scale and capabilities,
we also see that in several areas of emerging technologies, specifically the
Internet of Things, the narrative is mainly about numbers, which in the end are
meaningless for execs, and about the technologies, from connectivity to
hardware and software. This will change as the market matures, just as it did
before the dot com bubble when numbers, predictions and the tech talk
dominated the debates very often as well, leading to inflated expectations and
hype. Will there be a new bubble? There always is one, you just don’t know how
big it will be and which areas will be most affected.

Your digital transformation strategy and asking the

right questions
The main question is: do you build all these bridges and define the
goals, set out the strategy and journey, map the required building
blocks and barriers, and look at your digital transformation strategy
and roadmap in a smart way, regardless of all those frameworks out
there and, rather, creating the right conditions to get you going?

Unfortunately this is still rarely the case and many don’t have a clear goal and
overview of building blocks, barriers and bridges to build yet. Stay tuned as
we’ll look deeper into digital transformation strategy and a framework/roadmap
that guides your strategy by asking the right questions and connecting the right
dots.

Here are two things you can already start doing as of right now:

1. get any ‘digital’ expertise and culture out of its splendid isolation and
let it penetrate the rest of your organization,
2. look at where the leaks in your business are and where it’s clear that
you’ll need to remove or bridge legacy and necessity, among others in
 the technologies that are crucial to scale and move faster and better
once your strategy is in place.

Some digital transformation strategy steps to take into account (and

that can be put in the context of the previously mentioned three core
capabilities, as well as the, also previously depicted vision, plan, action
steps):

 Identify market, evolutions, pain points.

 Assess/benchmark where you are.
 Analyze/prioritize significant evolutions.
 Map current status with major evolutions and opportunities.
 Assess skillset, culture and readiness.
 Focus on core intangible assets: customers, data.
 Base strategy on where you are and go.
Include external and internal help.
 Develop a roadmap to get where you need.
 Design for innovation, optimization, agility and scale.
 Optimize information and data maturity.
 Connect technologies and data (sources) in function of strategy.
 Get clear leadership buy-in.
 Gap bridges with customers and stakeholders.
 Set goals, KPIs and controls.
 Build for ecosystems and platforms.
 Focus on long term with intermediate goals.
 Start where it makes sense (calculated).
 Learn, measure, re-assess, scale, innovate.

Future of IT Podcast: Digital Transformation- Closing the Gap Between

Now and the Future from Connected Futures
Digital transformation strategy – aligning the organization for its digital future
– infographic Deloitte University Press 2016