7 Signs

Your Digital Transformation Strategy Is Shortsighted And Will Be Short-Lived

Ravee Gokulgaandi

There are memes going around various social networking sites on who led digital transformation in your company. But what is the essence of this meme?

Digital Transformation is not the sudden digitisation of your business, but rather as a holistic strategy to reform your company’s traditional processes and to streamline existing experiences for both your employees and your customers, with a focus on reinventing, rather than refining your existing services. It is a long term strategy that can be likened to a marathon, and not a sprint. The goal of digital transformation is to increase revenue, provide better customer experience, and to minimise wastage through any procedural inefficiencies that may exist within the organisation while ensuring security and governance.

However, due to Covid-19 situation, many organisations have rushed into business continuity management to keep their business running. Companies that never offered work from home or remote working, are now taking pride in offering work from home for all their employees. Companies that thought cloud was a security nightmare are now rushing to adopt cloud platforms. And companies who thought that client interaction can only happen in person are now finding innovative ways to connect with their customers remotely to comply with social distancing. 

But have these organisations done thorough planning before adopting these digital workplace platforms? And do they align with their long term IT Strategy in helping their business go digital during and post Covid19? 

A short-sighted digital transformation strategy is like a pain killer that can address your immediate problem but will not resolve the core underlying problem. This reminds me of a situation where I used to pop a painkiller every-time I had a migraine which in turn made caused more acidity which actually was a trigger to my migraine. The moment I started working towards fixing my acidity problem which actually took time as well as changing some of my habits, my migraine problem fixed eventually. 

In the case of many organisations, shortsighted digital transformation strategy can cause major issues that can have a significant impact on your organisation culture, decreased adoption programs, the increased total cost of ownership. 

The following are the 7 signs that you need to pay attention to ensure that your Digital Transformation strategy is not shortsighted 

1. You are using time-bound platforms without post Covid19 conversion strategy – Email and Collaboration Tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Hangout Meet have offered six-month free usage of their remote working and collaboration platform. While these platforms are robust and enterprise-grade, what is their roadmap after the trial period completes? Has your organisation budgeted the total cost of ownership once the trial period expires? Or what is the impact of downgrading the functionality to their most basic version? Are you prepared for functionality loss? Data Loss? 
2. You have offered BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) without having a Device Management Tool in place – Many organisations have offered employees, contractors, and partners to use their own device to access enterprise data. This is a great decision given the challenges in providing corporate devices to your users. But is there a device management mechanism in place to ensure that the devices are compliant and follow guidelines to ensure that your data is safe during transit or at rest? Do you have a mechanism in place which prevents any malicious attempt for data loss by the user knowingly or unknowingly by copying data in a flash drive or personal cloud storage devices? 
3. Shadow IT is prevalent in your organisation – Shadow IT refers to the usage of applications and infrastructure without the knowledge of your enterprise IT department. IT can include hardware, software, cloud applications, or web services / API that employees turn to without IT authorisation to accomplish their tasks or projects. Your employees may choose to use a variety of cloud platforms like Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Google Drive for data storage, or your sales team my try or buy CRM applications without the knowledge of corporate IT, or build an application on various Low-Code/No-Code application building platforms like Power Apps or App Sheet that may be part of your Office 365 or G Suite tenant. Or buy one of the many Low-Code/No-Code applications in the market using their personal or corporate credit card against a reimbursement. 
4. You have a tech and talent mismatch and end up engaging OEM vendor for help all the time – Many tech vendors provide you with a complimentary trial during Covid19 that lasts for months, but does your organisation have skills to support it? Is there an SOP made available for your IT Help-desk to resolve basic queries about the platform? Do you have a specialist available in case of critical issues? In the absence of skilled resources or a managed services provider with predefined SLA, tech support from OEMs can do as much around their product but cannot help you fix your processes or adoption. It is imperative that your organisation understands the skill gap across all levels and establishes a clear strategy to migrate this risk by employing the right resources or engaging with a cost-effective managed services provider to provide both proactive and reactive support. 
5. You have many initiatives going on in your IT Portfolio and most of them are at evaluation or experimentation stage by the same team – Your organisation may be in the middle of migrating critical workloads on cloud or making available collaboration tools to your users, while at the same time the same team or leadership is busy with other initiatives like Bot, Blockchain, Machine Learning, IoT without a clear strategy or charter. Covid19 has triggered many initiatives to align enterprise strategy with remote working and IT departments are overwhelmed with several initiatives around cost savings, security, compliance, and collaboration. While running these initiatives in parallel may not be an issue, having the same team running these in parallel may be alarming. 
6. You don’t have a PMO (Program Management Office) – There is a misconception that a PMO is required for large enterprises. A PMO is beneficial to any business that would like to measure the effectiveness of their projects and gain insight on critical metrics that impact their organisation directly. A PMO is a lens to an executive body to summarise performance on the projects, establish policies, processes & guidelines and bring down silos that may result in duplicate initiatives or lack of communication. Depending upon your organisation size, a PMO with a small team can bring order to chaos and improve visibility to all stakeholders involved. PMOs can ensure seamless connection and communication between operational teams like Finance, Procurement, Human Resources with Delivery & Leadership teams. 
7. You don’t have an Enterprise Architecture Office – As the organisations grow and business processes evolve, their IT landscape tends to become more complex. There are always buy vs build decisions and cost may not be the only metric in picking the right approach. A suboptimal application or platform can result in an architectural debt, a situation where a system or group of systems don’t perform the way they were intended due to a root cause that can be expensive to resolve and thus causes many inexpensive short terms fixes that may involve adopting processes and workarounds for the systems to work as intended. An Enterprise Architecture team can range from a governance body to an active team in defining IT strategy, building to-be landscapes, ensuring business alignment and taking part in demand management, this all depends on the organisation needs, what issues it is facing and what the Enterprise Architecture Office role is defined to be.

Organisations often term some digital transformation initiatives as failures, while others are put on indefinite hold. But in any case, they end up being ghosts from the digital past that may haunt many new initiatives going forward. If your organisation sees any of the 7 signs above, it is imperative to analyse the risk and impact of your current situation and design a risk management plan. As a Digital Transformation Consultant, I can help you with your Digital Maturity Assessment, calculate Total Cost of Ownership, and provide a roadmap and a plan. 

Stay Safe !!!