Has your Digital Transformation got off on the right track?
If you’re not sure why it’s so hard to get digital transformation projectd off the ground in your organisation, this might be what’s going on…
We’ve been helping clients for years get started with their digital transformations, and we know the importance of a strong strategy. One key area of our method when engaging with clients is identifying the challenges they are currently facing. Not just to help determine where change needs to happen most urgently, but also to guide the client's understanding of how these struggles manifest themselves within an organisation and ultimately how to sidestep them to ensure success!
Taking an objective view of where, when, how, and why these blockers appear is a key factor in enabling clients to be successful with their transformation. Here are some key areas we’ve seen customers struggle with over the years, and if you’re struggling with these too, the steps to think about getting through them:
- Capacity headroom to change - The number one issue for a lot of change programmes we find is the capacity to think about or perform change whilst in the day-to-day delivery mode. Fighting day-to-day challenges and keeping up with numerous incidents or requests for small changes often siphons focus away from more transformational projects and inhibits teams from thinking about and executing strategic change that aligns with business needs.
2. Technical debt or legacy - End-of-life infrastructure, legacy applications and out-of-date end-user technologies are causing numerous incidents for ICT to deal with, leading to a poor experience for end users. Difficulty in planning for change and not building change into the longer-term ICT strategy and aligning to the needs of what the organisation wants, can lead to putting off the refresh to the point where only a huge project fixes the issue, causing lots of disruption to end users and masses of cost that the organisation must invest just to get the service experience back to acceptable levels.
3. Lack of budget - Throughout the clients we engage with, we find a lack of budget for resources as one of the top reasons for the inability to start to digitally transform. We find a shortfall in information about existing service costs and how changes to service approaches, applications, or technology components can impact the overall cost of operations for the wider organisation. This information gap then limits the ability to "pitch" to senior executives for more funds and to demonstrate the return on investment that a large-scale change may provide.
These 3 examples can be difficult to fix, and it's unlikely there's a single solution that will address all the issues we've outlined here. However, we strongly recommend looking at forming a 3-year fully costed digital strategy that enables you to:
- Realign ICT services to the needs of the organisation, forming a roadmap that aligns to what technology services are delivered and how best consumers of services wish to engage with the technology, applications and services they need to perform their roles.
- Make the financial case for strategic change to bring in backfill resources, 3rd-party expertise, or new hires to relieve pressure and ring-fence people specifically for change.
- Look at the wider impact of change and understand what additional resources are needed to reduce blockers, reducing the likelihood of needing additional funds or time to deliver the change that your organisation needs.
- Fully cost the current service and align costs to services, not just provided from IT budgets, but also to services provided by the wider organisation through cost allocation and enterprise architecture techniques.
- Align service, business analysis, project management office and technical governance processes and procedures. Put the right tools in place to surface the right data at the right time to senior management, so the right decisions can be made at the right time throughout strategy delivery
At CoStratify, we realise it’s not always easy to see the issues outlined above or understand their causes. It can then be even more difficult to put a plan in place to address the core issues being faced and to align its strategy with what the wider organisation wants.
At CoStratify, we help clients understand and fix the core issues. Our Roadmap service provides an excellent framework for this, as we know how to navigate each new issue that comes up on the path of change. If you're struggling to align what different stakeholders want from technology & digital strategies within your organisation with how these impact change, then CoStratify can definitely help!
