Articles 2 min read

How to start your Digital Transformation on the right foot! by Daniel Wright

Put simply, Digital Transformation is applying technology to change and improve your organisation. This means improving processes and systems (don’t forget culture) to better deliver against strategy or react to market factors.

Many organisations spend £millions on Digital Transformation programmes that unfortunately do not achieve any tangible business outcomes. Do not fall into that trap, mobilise your Digital Transformation on the right foot!

We walk you through the 6 key steps to mobilise your Digital Transformation with the best chance for success. We keep this at a high level to provide you an overview. You can get in touch to discuss any area in more detail.

1 – Define the Goal

Be clear on what you want to achieve and how to measure it.

Digital Transformation is about driving forward the business, tech is just the enabler.

2 – Identify Opportunities

Identify which opportunities exist to drive positive change. Whether speeding up time to market, improving your customer experience or automating processes, list all those you may choose to tackle.

Capture the potential benefit of these using a simple Low/Medium/High rating.

3 – Feasibility / Complexity Analysis

Consider those opportunities, are they complex processes running on obsolete systems, in which case they would be high risk or are they low risk opportunities to integrate two modern systems and streamline a process.

Apply a simple Low/Medium/High complexity rating.

4 – Prioritise and Validate

Do an initial prioritisation pass of your opportunities.

Aim to gain stakeholder buy in and build credibility for the Transformation by prioritising Low Complexity / High Benefit items where you could engage stakeholders, sharing the success.

Do a business case assessment against the High complexity opportunities… is it worth transforming these processes? Should you replace them? Is there an ROI? Even drop some of them?

5 – Build a Transformation Plan

Once you have answered these questions, define a Transformation Programme against the priorities and start to plan for delivery.

You broadly understand the areas to transform so can plan clear projects aligned to your goal, making consistent, aligned decisions such as wholistic technology selections.

You also MUST plan for business and culture change, you cannot Transform your organisation without your people adopting the new ways of working and solutions.

6 – Use a proven approach

You should not layer change onto change without good reason. If you already have an effective programme delivery approach, use that to govern your Digital Transformation.

Put your best people onto this as successful transformation requires strong leadership.

Remember the golden rule

Always start with the goal, never the technology! Only at the end of definition do we consider the technology. Digital Transformation is about using technology to improve your organisation, not about implementing the latest shiny tech.

If you would like to discuss any of these steps or get access to the approach and templates that we use to mobilise successful Digital Transformation for our customers, get in touch we would love to hear from you.

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Daniel Wright founded Monochrome Consultancy, specialising in Digital Transformation, IT Transformation and Project & Programme Delivery.

With his background in IT and InfoSec Dan is a techie at heart.

For more on Dan and/or Monochrome visit: www.monochromeconsultancy.co.uk

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