Education

Do we need to shift our view of Digital Transformation?

November 8, 2019 by

Digital Transformation is top of the agenda for many, with figures from IDC forecasting worldwide spend will hit £1.6 trillion by 2022 as businesses aim to keep pace with emerging technologies and increasing disruption challenging existing business models in almost all industry verticals.

While a shift towards capital funding of initiatives points towards recognition of digital transformation as a long-term investment, 72% of leaders surveyed by Couchbase reported their transformation projects are falling short of being truly revolutionary. With 87% also reporting disruption in their respective industries accelerating over the last 12 months, time is running out for digital transformation initiatives to start delivering the expected returns.

Why do so many transformation programmes fail?

A recent report from Harvard Business Review estimated that out of $1.3 trillion spend on digital transformation last year, $900 billion went to waste. What’s leading to so much failure?

Digital leading transformation programmes

Where we’ve worked alongside businesses in the middle or large, ambitious digital transformation projects, we consistently see continuous improvement initiatives, often technical in nature, focused on embedding new, more integrated systems, improving processes and changing the focus of peoples work mispresented as transformational. Whilst holding a lot of merit and value themselves, this ultimately misses the opportunity of transformation to ask deeper, searching questions, rethink the core fundamentals of markets, or even which markets the business operates in.

When the ‘digital transformation’ is taken literally, tools, technology and process lead the way, resulting in some operational improvement, but missing the vital , strategic step-changes needed to meet the challenges of the next decade.

Failing to deploy innovation at scale

Chief Digital Officers, innovation teams and dedicated funding are now more commonplace. Even a lack of formal innovation governance structures hasn’t held back new idea generation through design sprints, agile planning, hackathons, channelling enthusiasm from all parts of the business.

Typically built on a smaller scale, utilising technologies that favour speed and ease of deployment, while many legacy IT systems are built around more rigid infrastructure, with changes requiring much more rigour end up pitting two entirely incompatible approaches against each other.

Without achieving that essential compromise of developing new solutions with wider scale deployment in mind from the outset, many valuable developments never leave that beta state, unable to scale and deliver the wide-ranging benefits the business demands, only serving to frustrate and dishearten team members.

Going ‘big bang’

Successful transformation takes time. While customers and market disruption are key drivers, IT, finance, marketing, operations and customer service ultimately need to deliver the vision. The change required to move from well-defined, long established ways of working to more adaptive, agile approaches can be seismic.

Attempting to land such huge changes and benefits from the outset may feel bold and even inspiring from the outset; however, the operational reality of steering a complex organisation in a different direction in such a short space of time results in challenges demonstrating value, with that early momentum and enthusiasm rapidly running out of steam.

Attempting to duplicate disruptors and their business models

As smaller, nimbler competitors leverage innovative business models, some heavily investor-backed with profitability not a short-term gloal; digital, innovation and transformation can all become conflated, as incumbent leadership teams react by attempting to replicate their delivery models.

This approach neglects to understand the customer journey, and where value can be added throughout, missing key opportunities to leverage differentiating elements and offer a distinctive proposition that is more challenging for competitors to replicate.

The explosion in the use of mobile apps has also stimulated a ‘build it and they will come’ methodology, believing that modern delivery methods will connect with audiences and stave off competition. Such an approach often neglects robust due-diligence prior to development. To deliver value, clear usage cases need to be developed and clear benefits to customers identified alongside a robust plan to drive and maintain adoption. Clear communications and engagement, both internally and externally are critical and quite often missed straight out of the gate.

Not recognising the power, and the challenge of culture change

There is nothing more transformational than employees inspired by change that has been well planned, thought through and deliver clear benefit personally and professionally.

The impact and challenge of the human aspect of change is often underestimated. Thinking people-first not only informs the direction and design but will also recognise that individuals will respond differently to change, required a more segmented approach.

Getting this right will deliver robust and effective support mechanisms for people to develop at the same pace as technology change within the organisation, avoiding frustrated colleagues resisting change in an attempt to keep their heads above water.

The rewards for getting it right

Organisations that have taken a long-term, holistic view of transformation have seen significant benefit delivered. Here, we look at two, well-known transformation journeys and the impact on business value

Honeywell – 83% increase in share value over 3 years

honeywell share value Source: Google News

Honeywell International Inc. produces commercial and consumer products, engineering services and aerospace systems. In 2016, having formed their own internal digital transformation group, they were able to leverage new technologies, including more data-centric devices and offerings. As they reinvented industrial process control and offers modern technology-focused solutions for their customers, they developed a strong ability to bring customer data and insight back in-house and deploy effective internal solutions.

Microsoft – A 258% increase in share value over 5 years

Source: Google News

While Microsoft is well-known for their Windows products and Office productivity suites, increased competition and disruption from Amazon, Google and Apple created a need to re-think their approach and create a forward-thinking cloud business.

With a change in leadership in 2014, the business made some radical changes, shifting away from traditional, single license software, to a more dynamic, subscription-based cloud model across consumer and business markets. Where they had once attempted to control and dominate markets by brute force, their culture began to change, being far more open and embracing partnerships with other software and technology companies.

Their transformation also changed public perception, going from an outdated, stagnant business to that of a forward-thinking, modern provider of cloud solutions.

It’s time for transformation through a different lens

Digital technology has the capability to enable truly transformative approaches, yet shouldn’t be in the driving seat. A single-minded focus on human experience – encompassing customer and colleagues alike will enable innovation and disruptive thinking to thrive, targeting areas that benefit your customers most.

Collaboration: friend or foe?

November 1, 2019 by

Well established collaboration tools like email are being augmented with a vast array of technology-driven solutions; the global market is currently valued at $3.5 billion, and is forecast to grow by 70% in the next three years. But we’re not always capturing the promised productivity gains from these interactions.

So what’s stopping us from collaborating, in a world where we’re more connected than ever before?

As barriers to adoption of digital-first working practices have eroded, online collaboration platforms have grown significantly in recent years, with tools such as Microsoft Teams recently hitting 13 million active users and Slack reporting that its software is used by 65 of Fortune 100 companies.

Whilst these tools have been primarily built to support collaboration, there has been very little focus on how people use these tools to arrange their work. Rather than setting in place new guidelines on appropriate usage and outcomes, we end up transferring or duplicating existing inefficiencies onto newer platforms.

As a result, colleagues are increasingly oversaturated with notifications, instant messages, emails, calls and meetings without enough clarity on where, and how to focus their time to deliver value.

How does increased connectivity affect productivity?

The benefits of closer collaboration feel quite self-explanatory. Over the last two decades, additional technologies promised to remove the friction and inconvenience of not being in the same physical space, empowering distributed (and local) teams to deliver at greater pace.

While global provision of such technologies gathers pace, are they having the opposite effect on our people?

Research from Time Is Ltd, a productivity-analytics company, discovered that employees were sending more than 1,000 messages per day across email, instant messaging tools, and collaboration suites. Keeping up with conversations has become a full-time job, often leaving only 1 hour and 12 minutes of uninterrupted productivity time in an average day. Another piece of research by RescueTime discovered that productivity actually increased when there was an outage of collaboration tool Slack.

Productivity pulse Source: RescueTime

The issue is amplified when paired with poor management routines. Existing behaviours and practices prevalent across conference calls, emails and meetings have transferred over to digital-first platforms. Meetings are often held without proper focus on outcomes; they become reduced to broadcast channels and echo chambers, rather than utilised to make effective decisions. Whilst working with one client recently we identified that up to £400m of salaried time was spent in ineffective meetings.

Finally, constant context switching between platforms and tasks fragments our day and reduces focus. In one study, Dr. David Meyer found that “even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.” Reaching a state of flow requires around 20 minutes of uninterrupted focus time. Whenever this is broken, whether by a colleague walking up to you or by an incoming online message, you have to start over again.

If adding new tools means the addition of further administrative layers, moving teams further away from the objective of leveraging diversity and delivering value, the results can be damaging. Are we duplicating effort, “just moving email to another place”, whilst creating increasing pressure on teams to be responsive to all manner of minor queries?

When ‘more collaboration’ has an adverse effect on your team’s productivity, it is time to re-evaluate the approach used to design and deploy new tools and ways of working.

Improving collaboration

Successful collaboration must facilitate and build strong relationships within and between teams, provide clarity and purpose to people’s roles, and ensure visibility of progress towards shared goals. While intelligent technologies can be powerful enablers, they must earn their place alongside structured management routines.

Collaboration must have clear purpose

Whether online or offline, clear outcomes need to be defined. Teams coming together to share information without a clear objective will only further exasperate the productivity problem. Structured cultures around meetings and Human-Centred guidelines for use of collaboration technologies will help drive value from each channel. Don’t expect that these channels can be self-managed.

Technology is a powerful enabler, but must have a clear role alongside other routes

Setting clear roles for technology-based solutions, understanding where they can aid productivity and where they add friction, will help build effective, blended solutions. Face to face, voice and email still have powerful roles to play, but without identifying and setting expectations, communication and outputs will simply be duplicated across multiple channels, creating fragmentation and knowledge management challenges.

We recently held virtual customer journey workshops with a client who needed input from teams located across the globe. This relied on significant planning and structuring to deliver specified outcomes from each session, pre-work from delegates, and silent brainstorming. Without the software, we could have never brought multiple people from all over the globe together in one virtual session, but success was delivered by the team working together to achieve clear goals.

By focusing on where and how collaboration can drive purposeful outcomes, by maintaining a view of the overall human experience, we can bring out the best in cutting edge technology and drive further productivity benefits from increasingly diverse and multi-skilled teams.

Watch now – Shared Services: delivering strategic value through a customer lens

October 31, 2019 by

Developing multi-functional Shared Services

September 6, 2019 by

There is no let-up in the pressure on Shared Service operations to increase the strategic value they add to their customers, whilst also reducing costs.

As part of a well-designed operating model, our view is that combining disparate, siloed Shared Service functions into an aggregated, multi-functional model is a key lever in delivering on these strategic objectives.

When we speak with our clients who lead Shared Services functions, we hear consistent themes when they describe their strategic objectives, including a push to:

Improve both the integrity of their data, and enhance the insights it provides through better, more focused analytics
Enhance the skillset and agility of their workforce
Become the ‘go to’ partner for digital innovation within their organisations
Reduce the breadth and complexity of their technology landscape, whilst leveraging best in class capabilities
Provide an integrated, end-to-end service to their customers

Aside from the obvious efficiency potential gained through economies of scale (shared recruitment & training, IT, telecoms, risk management and compliance, management overheads), we see the opportunity to:

Reduce the execution risk of managing and standardising end-to-end processes
Consolidate data
Introduce disruptive technologies
Develop the skills and capabilities of your workforce.

When developed in line with your Target Operating Model, multi-functional Shared Services can break down functional silos that inhibit best practice, ensure congruent workforce location strategies, drive a consistent technology roadmap and enable the development of Centres of Excellence.

What is digital transformation?

August 16, 2019 by

This was first published as a guest article in partnership with The GC Index®, read the original piece here

Digital Transformation has become a phrase at the core of board rooms world-wide. As the urgency for deep, sustainable transformation exponentially increases , we explore what transformation in a post-digital era really is and the impact it has on organisations, people and culture.

What is Digital Transformation?

Transformation is a noble idea. While continuous improvement is about building on existing tools, processes and strategies, transformation is about rethinking core fundamentals, asking deep, searching questions. Often, it’s about changing the game, or indeed at times changing which game you’re playing.

In the challenging world of change it can sometimes be easy to mistake something as transformational. Often, technical improvement initiatives, while an important component of change, are mistaken as ‘Digital Transformation’ and ultimately fail to deliver on the broader strategic imperatives.

We see consistent conflation of digital and innovation with the ‘Uber’ phenomenon, pushing leadership teams to react to new, disruptive market entrants by attempting to replicate their delivery models, neglecting what their customers really want and how it embeds into the wider customer journey. If you read their story, Uber didn’t actually start with an app(as is true with many disruptive organisations), it was a great idea they bootstrapped and the tech came later. But there is confusion between successful innovation and digital – they have almost become synonymous.

If you look at these so-called disruptors a lot of them leverage digital – but digital is not the underlying proposition. This leaves a fairly large question – are legacy businesses looking to move what they currently do from analogue to digital or are they looking to genuinely innovate?

Why is Digital Transformation important?

Two-thirds of global CEOs will start focusing on digital strategies to improve customer experience by the end of 2019. *Seagate

34% of companies have already undergone a digital transformation. *Smart Insights
44% of companies have already moved to a digital-first approach for customer experience. *IDG
56% of CEOs said digital improvements have led to revenue growth. *Gartner

We now live in a post-digital age, so transformation programmes naturally bring considerations around technology to the forefront. As we all know consumer expectations have changed, and continue to do so but one aspect that’s often overlooked is the employee experience. There are ever-increasing expectations that the way everyone works will become more digitally focused, similar to the manner in which technology is embedded in their day-to-day lives.

As cloud computing, application development and systems integration become easier and more cost effective with lead times for acquiring infrastructure and for developing solutions continuing to fall, the conditions are ripe for businesses that wish to do something truly different (rather than just better) to deliver exciting new propositions in an agile manner.

Digital technologies that drive enhanced experiences are no more than the various platforms and devices we interact with on a daily basis. Mobile tech, basic AI, social media… they are ubiquitous to the extent that anyone attempting transformation without embedding these elements would be met with extreme scepticism. As such are central areas of focus when selling to senior leadership teams. However, it’s this focus that often leads to underwhelming outcomes, frustrated stakeholders and spiralling costs.

Why is Digital Transformation so difficult?

One aspect not wholly forgotten, but the impact and challenge of which is often underappreciated is the human aspect of change. Thinking people-first from both a colleagues and customer perspective helps inform the design and delivery so that the intent and objectives are aligned and understood by people with an ability to deliver business value from the get-go.

Sufficient thought about those people who work for the organisation needs to be given when it comes to the implications of new technologies. We need to consider the following points:

How is the new technology effectively integrated into ways of working?
Do teams need to organise themselves differently?
What new work is created?
Are the processes and skills in place to execute effectively?

Many digital transformation programmes lack any obvious maturity or impact, failing to reach a tipping point due to the fundamental challenge of developing robust support mechanisms for people at the same pace as technology advancement. Change often lands slowly, poorly or not at all as frustrated colleagues slipping back to legacy ways of working in an attempt to deliver BAU activity and keep their heads above water.

Evolving legislations such as GDPR have also had a huge impact on transformation, especially where customer data is concerned, with perceived high-risk and rigid interpretation of guidelines used as excuses for lethargy. As long as a people centric-lens is also applied alongside technical implementations, there is no reason why innovation and regulation cannot co-exist and be a force for good.

Unsurprisingly, many businesses begin with a technology focus. They buy a tool or set of tools and then look for instances to deploy them. This isn’t holistic enough and generally won’t deliver the results that individuals and organisations want. This results in the overall perception that Digital Transformation is problematic.

When we think about the employee element of a digital transformation there is nothing more transformational for your employees than knowing that change has been well planned, well thought through and will be implemented with low effort and clear benefit. They spend their free time in the elegant ecosystem of the iPhone and Netflix, when they leave that space and return to a work place that’s a decade behind, their ability to think innovatively becomes suppressed.

Digital Transformation is all about people and process as much as the technology that underpins it. It’s about challenging the status quo and being intolerant of the mediocre, re-framing the problem and craving new paradigms that eclipse that which came before.

Technology will always be a key enabler, but it’s the things the robots can’t do that remain the most important.

What has worked?

Where technology changes are business led, rather than IT led, automation technology is able to enhance the value of human employees. For example low code workflow and automation platforms are able improve the flow of information along the journey from start to finish. User interfaces with role-centred design can simplify tasks that require human intervention, and delivering through a single interface, even if in actuality passing information from and to multiple systems in the background.

By placing Human Experience at the centre, supported by clear, scalable processes and operating models as well as the back-end technology being redesigned to focus on delivering the customer promise, clients have seen a distinct success in delivering Digital Transformation programmes that long-outlive the initial reveal and novelty.

About The GC Index

The GC Index® is a technology based organimetric that is increasing global knowledge, wealth and harmony by creating impactful collaboration. As a GC Partner, Gobeyond Partners are able to deliver solutions powered by their toolsets and methodologies.

The GC Index® provides a common language of impact and collaboration enabling organisations to:

Gain unique insight on people impact
Improve business outcomes
Create a common language across the business
Increase individual performance
Increase team performance
Make more informed and accurate people decisions
The GC Index® has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the September 2018 Cool Vendors in Communications Service Provider Business Operations report by Gartner, Inc.

Shared Services – from cost centre to strategic asset

August 9, 2019 by

Much has been written about the requirement to transform traditional service-providing functions such as Finance, Human resources and Procurement from being overhead and cost centres to value-adding business partners. With business profitability under pressure from all angles, many shared service providers are fast approaching a critical point.

Most have already started on the road to transformation, albeit at varying levels of maturity and success. This is typically focused on either considering or initiating activities such as consolidating processes and resources into single centres (often in the lowest labour cost locations), replacing legacy IT and using disruptive technology such as Robotic Process Automation or Artificial Intelligence.

Is the pace of change quick enough?

There is a high risk, however, that such initiatives may only deliver short term benefits and may even lead to increased cost or poorer service in the long run. With the clock ticking, many businesses are frustrated with solutions that take too long to deploy, fizzle out after initial excitement or fail to add additional value to those they directly impact

Single point, technology-driven solutions, delivered outside of consideration to the broader operating model have so far failed to shift the dial; to provide the wide-ranging impact needed, we need to reimagine the entire scope of operations and the roles of technology, people and process within.

When technology, people and process need to work seamlessly, how can you make sure that these strategies deliver the lasting benefits that you are looking for?

The key to sustained transformation

Sustained and effective Shared Service transformation will only genuinely take place when an operating model has been designed with high levels of stakeholder and customer engagement and in the context of the overall supply chain.

There are two main reasons this approach is so effective

Single point solutions tend to destabilise rather than transform a system
A consciously designed target operating model will help you to implement the optimal mix of initiatives in line with business objectives

Where we have worked alongside clients, developing and implementing our human-centred model, we ensure that people input, and are engaged with the new operating model, ensuring sustained impact and further improvements are driven

An approach that introduces solutions in isolation as reactive, tactical measures to simply reduce cost and ‘follow’ industry trends is a high-risk strategy.

Whilst reducing costs can be a short-term outcome, there is a very material risk that the level of services will deteriorate; in addition, any short-term savings are likely to be offset in the long run against increased failure demand through excessive hand-offs and re-work.

Symptoms of organisations who aim to ‘transform’ their Shared Service capability through single-point solutions without a holistic operating model design include:

Not truly understanding their ‘customer’, their journey or in some cases who they are and their requirements
Location strategy being defined by the lowest labour cost
Failure to harmonise processes across internal customers – continuing to provide multiple variants of the same process
Inconsistent IT strategy such as cloud migration, consolidating suppliers etc.
Using technology to automate steps within processes that are neither standardised (therefore not leveraging benefits of scale) nor stable (increasing risk of service/quality failure)
Performance measured primarily by volume, as opposed to values

The effect of rigorous design and implementation

Our approach of transforming Shared Services through rigorous operating model design and implementation ensures:

Location strategy fuses low-cost delivery operations, where appropriate, with local advisory and specialist services
Partnerships are developed to leverage external expertise where required
Processes are re-engineered to maximise the synergy of the aggregated services
Technology is introduced to stable and standardised processes in order to improve workflow, decision making and free up capacity
Common enablers, such as data science, operate cross-functionally to capitalise on expertise at optimal cost

People strategy is focussed on developing specialist domain skills and creativity
KPIs are customer and outcome focussed

From cost centre to business partner

How do you transform your Shared Services into a strategic business partner and asset, whilst reducing cost?

At Gobeyond Partners, we have found that a focus on human-centred operating model design provides the essential platform for rapid Shared Services transformation. Engaging all relevant stakeholders in the design phase ensures an optimal balance of building the true requirements of the customer into every process and intervention alongside the commercial imperative of reducing cost.

We’ve successfully designed and delivered target operating models using this approach across multiple sectors and functions, building strategic and scalable marketing functions in insurance, setting up effective operations for leading banking brands and reshaping the role of IT in property and real estate, all through that critical, human-centred lens.