Why digital transformation happens to you
Iterate every day or face the consequences
Most digital transformations don’t start with turning analogue processes into digital ones.
The challenge now is taking 30 years of hybrid manual and digital processes and products and somehow trying to make them better.
Most organisations already have digital, data and technology embedded in their organisations. They might not think they do, but they’ll have an existing Microsoft tenancy, alongside multiple, independent software products. They’ll have some payroll software. Maybe their data exists in databases, but often it’ll be in spreadsheets or a combination of the two. It’s messy, its disconnected, it’s understood by only one person in the organisation, until they finally leave for something better and suddenly everyone left behind realise something has to change.
But if you create a culture of iteration, you can improve things every day, rather than have a transformation happen to you.
Years of dusty, digital detritus
Complexity always lives under the surface of organisations, with people with generic job titles that everyone relies on, managing a ridiculous amount of disconnected tasks and processes. For those super-humans, all these things take five minutes and require no thought because they were gently layered upon them like different layers of sedimentary rock. But if you try and introduce new people to this geologic strata of unloved tasks, who don’t have all the historical knowledge and understanding of out-of-date-to-what-the-process-is-now-software, it all seems like an incomprehensible amount of stuff to do.
The problem with accumulation of ‘just making things work’ for such a long time, is that it becomes increasingly incoherent. It’s hacking the existing systems to get something done, whether or not it’s 100% correct. It’s right-ish. It’s got a truthiness about it. It’s what has always been done. But if you take a step back and analyse it, you realise that years of work often relied on many incorrect assumptions.
This is often the case with hacked together reports and data. Some people may have been unhappy with it, or knew there was something fishy about it, but no one could articulate exactly what the issue was. Mainly because it often takes far too long to get basic data together, let alone when you try to do something complex.
And this is why transformations take so much time - it’s a long road of picking apart hundreds of decisions, miscalculations and bad assumptions. And, of course, everyone who contributed to those long-held but incorrect assumptions are now long gone.
But the individuals somehow holding an entire organisation’s processes together are merely a symptom of a deeper affliction of modern office life.
Working all day to get nothing done
Very rarely will someone just do one thing anymore. Everyone has to manage their inbox (perhaps also dip into a shared one), manage their diaries, create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. And this is just the baseline expectation of working in an office. When in reality, all these tasks steal attention and energy throughout the day. It’s why in agile teams, you try to bat all these interruptions away - but in non-agile or non-purely digital organisations, this is an unimaginable luxury.
I currently have a second inbox, where I dump things that take more than five minutes to answer. This is because for each of those emails, I’ll have to look something up, cross reference something, consult someone, or basically perform a mini-investigation to reply with a one-line explanation email. It’s just a little bit complex but the person asking me the question doesn’t know it’s complex - to them it’s just an answer they need.
Then you have to layer ‘real projects’ or ‘business priorities’ onto this endless source of distractions. Also the governance around the projects. And the stakeholder management. The business cases. Then statutory requirements, like GDPR.
And then we have general ‘office’ stuff. Working groups. Mandatory training. Line management. All staff meetings. Staff surveys.
This is what I think about when it comes to digital transformation.
When you have something that 95% works, the 5% left over is the seed of a future digital transformation. It’s the spark of another tiny investigation for someone in the future, as that 5% non-transformed process will eventually be accumulated with other similar tasks and dumped into secondary inboxes. All those little manual tasks or random things that have to be remembered - it all adds up over time - like organisational grey goo.
This is why companies then hire new people to do ‘the transformation’ or ‘the change process’, because they’ve maxed out staff time with just trying to get all their tiny, non-fully-transformed-tasks done, day to day. The friction of business-as-usual rubbing against the desire to do new things becomes too insurmountable and stressful to do both at once.
I think this is why a key characteristic that you should always hire for, no matter what role, is the ability to understand and diagnose complexity. The ability to articulate the problem or to come up with a solution, rather than just accepting poorly implemented software or out of date processes. Without that ability to recognise those tiny inefficiencies or overall complexity, you end up with never ending disjointedness across an organisation. With no one taking ownership of all these annoying things that need to be transformed out of existence.
This means as a digital leader, you need to support fixing the problems. Often it’s not the individuals on the team resisting change, it’s someone above them that doesn’t want to do the engagement with other teams or with other senior leaders. And I get it, it’s hard to want to cause even a little disruption when you have a hundred other things to worry about. But not tackling these problems is also guaranteeing that at some point, it’s going to be taken out of your hands and a ‘transformation’ or ‘change programme’ will happen to you instead.
Iteration is the only way to get out of here alive
As someone in a technology or digital leadership role, you need to support those small, minor but still disruptive, everyday changes. It’s great for the team, fixing things and getting that small hit of delivery dopamine. Your team then gets the pride of making things better, being more efficient as a team, being able to take on more interesting and complex things when more of annoying things are fixed. Rather than take the most interesting stuff that a team could work on and have it shunted off to a newly parachuted in delivery team that will dump the 5% non-transformed tasks back on your team to manage afterwards.
People make everything work. Technology is just a tool and often an inefficient one at that. By creating a culture of iterating and filling those gaps left by a poor transformation processes or badly implemented software, you can ensure that your team can develop new skills and are given useful challenges.
My goal as a manager is to see my team gain new skills and eventually leave for greater things. It is also to leave everything more functional, more efficient and more documented than when I found it. So when members of my team leave or when I choose to go, the world won’t come crashing down around the organisation. I want to think that while we were around, we took the time to improve on all those 5% unfinished or untransformed tasks that someone had left behind before us.
Transformation is hard on everyone - the organisations embarking on it and the staff trying to survive it. The best transformation is the one that happens every day, a little at a time, eliminating the need for that annoying second inbox.