Managing digital change and developing the right skills

Part of any digitalization strategy is being able to implement tools to work with data in a much smarter way.

This is important because understanding data fully can lead to creating greater efficiencies in an organization. But this requires spending more time using data to make commercial decisions and this isn’t always the case.

Often, most teams’ effort is consumed by gathering data, cleaning, transforming, and interrogating it for what is useful and what isn’t. Essentially, this creates a lot of manual work that has little added value.

Changing the way an organization works to adopt a more commercial approach to data needs behaviour change and a more concerted focus on the outcome of the data and realizing benefits rather than output. This is when data is used in a more intelligent manner and becomes transformative.

In our organization, one example of realizing benefits is in the process of getting paid for the electricity we produce. Historically, this has been a long process which can take more than a month to raise a payment claim with a company. Now, through better understanding of data, we know exactly the amount of power produced in real time and can automate the claim process, eliminating hundreds of people hours and creating efficiency.

So, what the skills needed to enact these types of changes within organizations?

Along with having the skills of data and machine learning engineers, the other essential skills organizations need are about change.

Part of this is training ourselves to ask the right questions: for example, in digital transformation, rather than asking people what they want (which is inevitably focused on today rather than a transformed tomorrow), we’ve learned to understand the job they do, what they need and then propose solutions.

To achieve this outcome demands skills focused on continuous improvement and these can be obtained from a variety of best practice sources:

1. PRINCE2 for the overall roadmap
   
   PRINCE2’s classic project management approach and relationship with programme management remains one of the best ways to explain to senior management what we’re doing.
2. PRINCE2 Agile – understanding the agile world
   
   If your organization – like ours – is moving into full agile ways of working for software or product delivery, for example with Scrum, then PRINCE2 Agile helps to manage ideas in a more waterfall way before engaging with agile teams for development, using two-week sprints and daily stand-ups plus one meeting every two weeks reviewing the roadmap with different people in the team.
3. ITIL 4 and digital strategy
   
   ITIL 4 has been very useful to me for devising digital strategy. In my role as Head of AI Implementation, it’s important to understand what by digital strategy means in practice.
   
   And how does it work to have people collaborating across a mixture of skills? Most people in our organization don’t really need to understand the agile element. Instead, they can think about these activities in the context of a project without being closely involved with the framework.
   
   For pure developers, they need to understand the overall business drivers but can focus on agile development without being involved in the roadmap planning.

Today, it is an unavoidable reality that organizations going through digital transformation need the right tools for the job – and this means bringing various sets of best practice skills into their companies, creating new breeds of people with new approaches, and occupying new roles.

A major part of this is also communication. From the start of a transformation, it’s about getting close to people and exciting them about proposed change.

Ultimately, exploiting data to enable transformation – which may include machines and artificial intelligence – can’t just be about writing rows of computer code, but a journey of improvement that people need to join and be excited about.