Can you believe it? The 2010’s are over! Whenever we cross the threshold into a new decade, it’s a great time to reflect, consider where we are, where we and our business need to go, and how technology can help us get there. Over the past decade, we saw a drastic shift in technology direction and a mindset shift in terms of aligning IT to the business – and fast forward 10 years and IT is the business. After a decade of IT transformation stops and starts today many enterprises are running digital businesses where their very product and services are digital.
If you have not started your IT Transformation, or you need to put after burners behind a transformation you started too long ago, or just need a refresher on best practices here are the three most important things you should be focusing on to ensure success:
1. Establish a Culture of Transformation
All transformation initiatives require a change in culture, but culture is often overlooked and when a transformation stalls or hits a speed bump, it is usually because culture was not addressed. Culture change begins by having conversations with your team early and often to clearly explain how this change will benefit the teams, and the longevity of the business. Culture change conversations are also not a one and done activity – every time you pass through a transformation milestone that is your opportunity to continue to bring the culture change and buy-in along by demonstrating the benefits already resulting from the change you are putting in place.
When is the last time you were asked to change? Change anything? How did the change make you feel? Ultimately, did you buy-in to the change and commit to it?
In one of my past roles, I was asked to develop and deploy an IT Change Management solution. I began by interviewing all stakeholders to understand their vision for what a great solution would look like, and I combined their ideas with industry best practices to create what I believed was a fit-for-purpose solution. After training everyone in IT and conducting a pilot, we went live and began seeing only a limited number of changes being entered. After speaking with a few of the team members who were not submitting changes, I realized what the problem was. Since the organization had always operated without a formal Change Management solution, people were struggling to understand the value and looked at it as extra work. The initial rollout of the solution was lacking the critical element of leadership support, which is why people had not bought into the change. After raising this to the attention of the CIO and him putting his support behind it, it was only then that we began seeing buy-in and greater adoption.
Why do I tell this story? For most people, change is incredibly hard. As Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” In order for people to accept change, the change must yield a positive outcome in their mind and the best way to do this is by using the following steps:
- Establish a leadership team that can overcome resistance (ex. Exec Sponsor, Platform Leader, Experience Architect)
- Set a clear vision which aligns short and long-term IT and business strategies
- Identify key stakeholders from across the business (cross-functional)
- Craft value-oriented and people-focused messaging around why you are embarking on the transformation
When you establish a culture of transformation, you will gain willing cooperation and enable IT and the Business to innovate and evolve together.
2. Use a Strategic Platform
Long gone are the days of tech companies investing money to develop complex siloed systems that are deployed on premises and take decades to fully implement. This legacy approach did not provide customers the ability to keep current on their technology investments since upgrading to new versions required lots of money, extensive resources, and lengthy deployment timeframes… not to mention it built walls that prevented organizations to adapt in an agile way to change.
Today’s approach has tech companies shifting to a cloud-first strategy where they can innovate rapidly, and drive value for customers quickly and easily. A key component of driving value is ensuring the multitude of technologies that organizations have invested in are able to work together seamlessly. Now more than ever tech companies are exposing application programming interfaces (API’s) so that customers can integrate systems together to eliminate silos and work cross-functionally and create new apps on the fly by integrating system-of-record on premise workloads with cloud native platforms.
While it’s great that systems can be more easily integrated together, this in and of itself does not enable great experiences for customers and employees. People should not have to first figure out which system to use before making a request. There needs to be one platform that ties everything together – the one place where people go to get work done that is just as easy to use as the experiences they use at home.
What I’ve just described is a strategic platform and the value it provides is a unified request experience, governance of the execution of the workflow (incorporating approvals, creating Changes, etc.) and visibility into performance metrics. After choosing a strategic platform, it is crucial that transformation leaders and stakeholders fully understand the capabilities of the platform and ensure that every effort is taken to leverage this platform before looking at alternative solutions.
In a recent interview on CNBC, ServiceNow’s new CEO Bill McDermott talked about his recent conversations with customers and fellow enterprise tech company CEOs about the single platform concept, saying “We are the platform of the platforms. We create workflows across silos that make companies [people] work, and they [people] work together as teams. [With ServiceNow] process simplification in the cloud is as easy as point, click and done.”
When you utilize a strategic platform integrated with your systems of record, you will enable great experiences for customers and employees, while increasing efficiencies and driving tremendous value across the organization.
3. Focus on Experiences
Organizations who are most successful with IT transformations focus on designing great experiences instead of focusing on how IT systems are architected. By focusing on improving experiences, you start with the end in mind and work backwards - incorporating desired outcomes, what a great experience looks like leveraging the strategic platform, and what cultural changes are needed to ensure adoption.
1) Start by having the cross-functional stakeholders select three to five key experiences that need improvement (ones that can save money, reduce risk, increase productivity, etc.). Consider this common problem in the healthcare industry:
Picture a scenario where a doctor is sitting with a patient and when the doctor attempts to login to see the patient’s medical history, he receives an error that his Citrix session is locked out. When this occurs, the doctor picks up the phone and calls the Service Desk to have the session reset, with the process taking around 15 minutes to complete.
2) Next, for each experience, define specific outcomes aligned with improving the experience. For example:
After improving this doctor / patient experience, we will have increased the number of patients seen on an annual basis by 10% and increased patient satisfaction by 2 points.
3) Next, have the stakeholders define what great looks like for each experience. Earlier we agreed to use a strategic platform that ties everything together – from request to measuring performance and everything in between. One of the main reasons you chose the strategic platform was because it makes it easier for people to get work done. This strategic platform is the engine that enables execution of the experience, and when designing what great looks like it is imperative that you design the experience with platform capabilities in mind before considering alternative solutions. For example:
What if the doctor could use their mobile device to chat with a virtual agent and have the session automatically reset in a matter of 30 seconds?
4) Once you’ve designed what a great experience looks like, think about how it will affect the people impacted by the transformation. Remember, when you make it easy for people to do something, they are more likely to buy-in to what you are asking them to do. What will people need to do differently? In their eyes, is this a positive or negative change? The answers to these questions will enable you to craft an organizational change management (OCM) plan you can use when discussing the changes with those impacted. For example:
Doctors will no longer need to call the Service Desk to have their Citrix sessions reset. Instead, they will need to buy in to using their mobile device as a means of requesting the reset. A potential challenge here is overcoming the objection of not being technically savvy or feeling more comfortable speaking to someone on the phone to solve a problem. You will need to craft a plan to overcome these objections, which will ultimately gain their support for the change.
When you focus on transforming experiences, your IT transformation initiative will be aligned to business priorities
As John C. Maxwell said, “If you don’t change the direction you are going, then you’re likely to end up where you’re heading…” When you establish a culture of transformation, use a strategic platform and focus on experiences, you will set the direction for your IT Transformation.
After setting your direction, you are ready to begin driving towards your transformation outcomes.
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