5 factors to successful digital transformation

The AI revolution hasn’t removed the need for strategic planning, it’s actually increased pressure on IT leaders to deliver meaningful digital transformation.

A digital transformation leverages technology and services to not just streamline processes within the business, but change them entirely. A successful digital transformation will lead with innovation and deliver increased value, shorten delivery times, and improve customer satisfaction. Don’t think of transformation as simply reducing costs; consider how to make a measurable and lasting impact through technologies.

Use these five tips to deliver on your next digital transformation:

1. Make a roadmap

You need a strategy, and a roadmap will help you to plan how you'll get from here to there. Most leaders try to visualize the future by examining the present and asking themselves, “What’s next?” That’s a tough proposition, because these leaders are trying to extrapolate. Where you go next depends on your future challenges.

It’s often much easier to interpolate, to imagine an end goal, and then fill in the gaps from your current location to your destination. Try this 3-step exercise instead: It's easier to interpolate than extrapolate

2. Keep open lines

You need to have good information about where to focus your efforts. Lead through listening, and maintain open lines of communication across the team.

Open decision-making is an important consideration in any organization. The open organization model refines the process by helping IT leaders to make quality decisions, speedy decisions, execute on decisions, and make the best effort. Take a closer look at how open organizations can engage team members in making decisions: 4 factors in open decision-making

3. Maintain operational excellence

At a high level, Operational Excellence is a long-term commitment to working smarter and reducing costs by streamlining services.

Operational Excellence is also sometimes used across different industries to mean areas where organizations can strive for increased efficiency. Typically, organizations would focus their business in one of three areas: product leadership, customer intimacy, or operations. 

The key word here is focus. While companies certainly need to be good enough in the other areas, successful organizations focus on one. Use these examples of well-known companies for inspiration: What is Operational Excellence

4. The right things

To execute successfully, IT leaders need to have the right people doing the right things. Your team can't be successful otherwise.

Focus on what IT does best, and strive to do those things in the most efficient way possible. To do that, IT leaders need to simplify, standardize, and automate how they deliver those services. By simplifying a process, you make it easier to support, even as it grows. By standardizing, you can lower costs. And by automating, you can make it repeatable. 

My vision with simplify, standardize, and automate is to allow organizations to streamline services, while continuing to build bigger systems, and support more of them: Simplify, Standardize, and Automate

5. Maintain your priorities

In any kind of leadership or management role, you can find yourself bombarded with lots of requests. And it seems every one of them is someone's top priority.

Remember that an organization can maintain only a few priorities. For example, if you have five priorities, that's good. But if you have ten priorities, then they aren't really priorities but a wishlist that won't get done.

Consider how to respond to different requests by organizing these kinds of requests in a matrix: Balancing the urgent and the important