Business transformation – much more than an IT decision

A recent article in Raconteur places new IT as “central to the whole exercise” of a business transformation, including cloud services, ERP software, CRM platforms, data lakes and HR management tools.

But how does an organization know what type of IT to buy and how does it sustain a successful transformation beyond purchasing new hardware and software?

First, you need to ask what transformation means. Where do you want to take your business? What’s your objective? Do you want to grow and does that mean scaling your organization as a whole, which probably means having a range of technologies (as well as people) to help you scale.

Today, transformation tends to be about modernizing how IT supports a business; moving from traditional IT support in-house to outsourced cloud computing. However, making the move from server-based IT to the cloud could cost a crazy amount of money to get a “Rolls Royce” standard, while a cheaper service might be more affordable but lower quality.

Typically, a business should have a roadmap and understanding of how the IT function and the business will work together to implement new technologies. This will feed into a business plan for the next one to five years and consider how you might scale, either at a modest or more aggressive pace.

Ultimately, you need to have hard conversations within your organization to know what you really need. Otherwise, you might just give in to buying the latest “shiny new thing”, whether you need it or not.

Creating a coherent a plan needs to outline everything you need and to build in risk considerations in case something goes wrong.

The risks of relying on new technology alone to deliver business transformation

Most transformations are not seamless – especially when there are things either difficult to solve or weren’t known in advance.

When adding new elements – essentially, a custom configuration – you must assume that something could break. So, what monitoring systems do you have in place for anything that goes wrong and is the in-house IT team going to solve this, or do you have an outsourced agreement?

You need to think about who’s supporting this technology as part of transformation, along with governance and training for users and who will be the liaison point with an external support provider.

Sustaining a transformation – operations and culture

The Raconteur article mentions, in passing, the importance of “operational and cultural aspects of a planned transformation”, but what does that mean in practice for sustaining a transformation?

Let’s face it, there’s always something that comes up. So, it’s about having the right people and processes in place with a clear support model as well as providing for updates/upgrades. All of this must be processed and documented with any costs/training needs applied to it.

And it makes sense to have people who understand what the problems are and can have the technical conversations with external support services. It’s vital to know what they’re talking about, what they’re proposing and how much it’s going to cost.

ITIL 4 provides a whole section about service operations and there are many elements within the best practice guidance that help you operationalize transformational change within your business.

Part of this picture is the cultural adoption and use of the technology: as you roll something out, you ought to have user groups or communities giving feedback along the way. That way, you can incorporate it into fresh changes and further outreach to users. That, ideally, should answer their principal question of “what’s in it for me?”.

Otherwise, any bad experience means people will get disenchanted and drag their feet on adopting the new technology and ways of working. Bringing people with you on the journey is paramount and practices such as organizational change management in ITIL 4 provide an approach for helping humans deal with change. Not doing this is, I believe, probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in business transformation.

A place to start with transformation

If you’re drafting your agenda for the start of a business transformation program, what should be on it?

1. Have a clear list of what’s needed – including the technology.
2. Create a communications/outreach plan so people know something’s coming, why, when and what’s in it for them.
3. Devise an adoption and change management plan.

And what you must remember is transformation/modernization isn’t a one-time thing: you’re never done and while you’re “keeping the lights on”, you need to forecast what’s coming next in technology and the future of your organization