The digital transformation of a company (or digitization) requires, as its name suggests, planning. The change we seek in our organizations is so relevant and impacts all areas of the business that we cannot afford to improvise or underestimate details or aspects that, a priori, may seem irrelevant.
Any strategic planning for digitization must consist of an initial diagnosis of the digital capabilities of our company, an identification of future ones, a training path for the organization and a digital strategy that ensures that everything that is achieved is sustainable over time and endures.
A standard digitalization strategic planning consists of the following three stages:
- Identification of the current state: analyze the current degree of digitalization of the operating model and establish the digital gap compared to the current state of the applicable technology.
- Design the future state to which we want to take our company: establish the appropriate degree of digitization and design the future operations model of the company.
- Implementation path: define initiatives to overcome the gap between the current state and the objective we want to achieve.
Identification of the current state of digitization
This phase of strategic planning for digitization basically consists of understanding how the company operates its business model. In this process we must consider processes, people and technology. The result we obtain from this analysis will help us to assess the degree of digital maturity of the company.
We would do this work in three steps:
- Collect and review all information describing the processes, organizational structure and existing digital and data infrastructure. Many companies do not have this information, we will have to find alternative sources.
- Conduct interviews with key business stakeholders, managers, internal and external process users and customers. This is to contrast the information from the previous point.
- Summarize in a document that divides between problems and needs, which will be incorporated in the list of requirements and will allow us to define the future state to which we want to transform our company.
Any information related to current digital or non-digital processes, organization and roles of people, digital applications and infrastructure used can be used as input for our analysis.
Designing the future state of digitization
Once the degree of digitization has been determined, it is a matter of designing the ideal state for our company to be competitive in a digitized environment. The model should be detailed in a general way, but with enough detail to calculate the costs and benefits of its implementation. It should allow us to build the business case.
We would do this work in four steps:
- Determine the main operational processes that are aligned with operational excellence or customer experience. With this in mind, we do not intend to over-automate and forget about people, for example.
- Establish the operational performance that allows us to define the objectives that the future model must achieve.
- Design the processes in two steps: first assume that there are tools that can automate the process or at least can help the people who currently execute it. If you see that it is not possible or has limitations, focus on the people and improve from them.
- Integrate all processes. Align and restructure processes, people and technology in a way that avoids duplication of functions, bottlenecks or excessive automation.
Implementation pathway
Basically, it is a sequence of initiatives and decisions with their respective responsible parties. It is important that the sequence takes into account the dependency between initiatives. For example, the definition of a Big Data architecture should be preceded, among other tasks, by the social listening strategy, for example.
The implementation path should include solutions that can be implemented quickly and effortlessly. Apart from requiring little time and investment, they build a sense of advancement in the work teams.
We have not made reference, but we take it for granted that this type of transformation is not the exclusive responsibility of IT departments, indeed, we believe that they should not lead it. It is a strategy that comes from the company’s management or business managers and is transversal to any department or functional area.
