Digital Kinetics: Is This New Digital Transformation Breakthrough The Answer You’ve Been Looking For?
By: Mark Waller
Tags: Business Resilience, Digital Transformation, Change Management, Business Results, Program Management

Interested to learn new moves to outpace and out maneuver your digital competitors with a sustainable high growth business model? In today's blog, I will introduce you to a new understanding that, when applied, could give you, your team, your organization the digital | edge.

Breakthrough innovations in the “how-to” of digital transformation happen rarely. When they do — they impact. Agile, on the CEO agenda of every traditional enterprise, is today ubiquitous. DevOps is tables-stakes for all digital natives. Each business has a digital strategy. Meh. Yet despite all of this, breakout leaders are pacing ahead, leaving many in their dust. Responding with monumental effort, many people, teams, and organizations are falling even farther behind. Whether, tired weary, uncertain, or leading the pack, here’s how to get and stay ahead.

First, let's get some basics out of the way.

Wikipedia defines Digital Transformation is the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses through replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes or replacing older digital technology with newer digital technology. Digital solutions may enable — in addition to efficiency via automation — new types of innovation and creativity, rather than simply enhancing and supporting traditional methods.

Also, it's important not to confuse Digitization, Digitalization, and Digital Transformation.

Briefly, Digitization is making analog-digital — like converting paper-based and manual processes to digital processes. Digitalization is what is enabled by digitization and concerns the process organization and governance aspects. Digital Transformation is enabled by entirely new capabilities and ways of working underpinned by the increasing scope, rate, and magnitude of digitization, digitalization, and connection.

There are countless variations on this theme, but they all distill down to one thing — how do we take advantage of modern technologies that impact the way we live and work?

As a transformation leader, you will undoubtedly have asked yourself and your team this and many more questions as you formulate your strategy, decide on your options, invest in your technology, and embark on your implementation journey.

Here’s the rub. It’s well documented and supported by our own research; over 90% of digital transformations end in some form of disappointment. Disappointment is defined here as failing to transform digitally. That means unable to play in the new ever-connected world where the playing field and existential rules are different.

A simple truth: a good pass grade for an initiative that doesn’t transform your relationship with employees, business, customers, partners sustainably through technology is not good enough to succeed in our future paced world.

Bold moves are required at the outset to qualify for future success in the digital arena. The biggest hurdle? — perception. The perception is with big ambitions comes even bigger risk. In turn, leaders confronted with business challenges and bold opportunities tone down their plans with caution. In the process, they are shortchanging themselves at the outset of the very prize they desire.

But wait: if we cannot take bold moves to win in Digital because we fear disruption and failure, but traditionally safe moves are assured of securing our demise, what are we to do?

I am glad you asked.

Accelerated by COVID-19 disruption, the same question is asked by our clients and no doubt many others. I am going to outline for you here an answer that will give you some pointers.

Irrespective of where you find yourself today, I am confident this will give you an actionable fresh perspective on your transformation “opportunity.”

These are three key dimensions and contrasts I ask clients to consider that separate progressive leaders’ who execute bold moves and those digital explorers who can’t.

Breakthrough Thinking Tip 1: You Choose — Are You Building or Chasing Your Future?

Progressive digital leaders have mastered business and technology moves and know how to make technology work for them. They push the boundaries with confidence, find new limits, and maximize the opportunity technology offers at the frontier. They connect this to their present reality and know how to make technology scale and pay.

They do not avoid technology, are not in love with technology, and are not afraid of it. They master technology, not let it enslave them.

Ask yourself — firstly, in the heart of your enterprise culture and your leadership — do you understand the difference between how technology can either help you build your future or exhaust you chasing your future?

Secondly, do you want to, and are you taking steps to build your future and stake-out your connected economy rights?

Digital Explorers are bound to chase their futures along with the 90%, as they never take the right steps to build their future. Their belief systems honed in a past life prevent them from seeing things differently, and this consigns them to repeating the costly traps that keep them wanting.

On the other hand, Progressive leaders understand this is a new world. There is a competitive new game with entirely new rules. They know they can help define and set the market's agenda. In contrast to Digital Explorers, Progressive leaders believe past technology practices are holding them back. With technology accelerating and converging in business on every dimension and changing fast, so must their approach and relationship to people, technology adoption, and business leadership.

Breakthrough Thinking Tip 2: Is your Transformation culture Tech or people-centered

Progressive digital leaders understand a contrarian secret Digital Explorers do not grasp before it’s too late. They know all things being equal, technology innovation shifts towards a zero-sum game. When there is no advantage left in applying technology, then the only point of differentiation is people.

Consider for a moment Formulae 1. Throughout its history, F1 has danced with technology and human talent. In ever-increasing speed and tightening innovation cycles, the driver, the machine, and the support crew converge to form a force multiplier. Technology virtually welds these together into a high-performance unit underpinned by the perfect blend of data, man-machine collaboration, and innovation that rewards consistency and endurance over a season.

Without human ingenuity and collaboration at the fore augmented with data and technology, this would not be possible. Business is heading down the same path. Progressive leaders know this well.

Digital explorers naturally focus on technology first. After all, technology is at one time, the center of most pain, the source of their biggest complaints, and the hope of their most ambitious expectations. It’s also their biggest investment and in anticipation of the cause of their biggest disruptions.

Digital explorers form in two camps. They approach transformation from either end of the technology continuum — love-hate. They are either in love bold and experiment with technology but fail to grasp its significance, struggle to embed and scale, or at the other end are ambivalent, perhaps timid, and refuse to get involved beyond the minimum they consider necessary to get the job done — as its not their thing. They fail to grasp and hold the center ground essential for balance — that key to success is people.

Progressive digital leaders, on the other hand, understand the secrets to technology mastery start with people and nurturing talent to be more precise. People are in everything you do, and it starts and ends with people. People help formulate and keep technology plans in alignment and balance and enable you to regulate govern from the core to the edges, driving innovation scale and efficiency as both business and technology evolve.

Ask yourself, do you or your team hold a strong technology motivation bias from the past or future that is shaping and unfavorably distorting your outlook and approach towards business transformation?

Consider the inverse scenarios to get a more rounded perspective on your situation and look for people and talent blindspots.

Breakthrough Tip 3: Is your transformation the focus of the business or your business the focus of the transformation

Again this is a subtle yet crucial difference between Digital explorers and Progressive leaders. Progressive digital leaders understand the focus is a big picture, planning the journey, getting business results at the next way-point, and not planning the entire journey against a set vision for the final destination.

Digital explorers focusing on getting the big transformation done carve out a solution ambition designed to move away from today’s headaches towards projected future needs. They define a future proof specification to meet these requirements and assemble a big program to execute the change, mostly external resources to do the heavy lifting. They struggle to allocate resources from today's priorities to define tomorrow's opportunities, and the eventually delivered solution despite much external investment struggles to meet both present and future needs.

In other words, Digital explorers see the transformation as the focus of their business, are always chasing their future, and are forever left behind.

On the other hand, Progressive leaders realize they are on a journey, and the only transformation they need to do is transform how they transform.

This capability enables them to address today's high priority needs while keeping the door open for an uncertain tomorrow, ready to address it. They evolve into the future in control of technology through people.

Recognizing there will always be new technologies, innovations, seeing the problem differently, they behave accordingly. Progressive leaders think in terms of products, not programs, platforms, not solutions, short-term gains as a priority. They make the business the focus of their transformation of today's needs continually.

How are you seeing and addressing your transformation? Are you making some “agile” approach that doesn’t actually fit within any context that makes sense – i.e., fast impactful, sustainable business results?

Are you in danger of “abdicating” everything to an SI because you or your team cannot think through the magnitude and complexity of the task at hand?

Would you say your focus is on getting the program done at any price instead of continuously extracting business results?

Are you “carving out” and “ring-fencing” your “solution” and giving this a 3–5 year runway with a huge secondary organization?

Is your focus suspended in what you want the solution to be based on painful observations of the present, and are you struggling to fix what that future looks like well enough for a workable system design? Are you ignoring the details of your current technology situation when factoring in planning?

You may wish to consider how you can rethink your approach for achieving continuity, transformation, and fast continuous results as people, business, and technology continue to converge into an interdependent performance unit.

Breakthrough Bonus Tip 4: A new force that is impacting everything you do

You may be asking, what is giving a sudden rise to this extreme binary phenomenon, and why should you care about it now? The answer is simple.

You will have gathered by now three stark choices embodied into the belief systems of Digital explorers or Progressive leaders materially affect the course of their business transformation outcomes.

As the rate of change and magnitude of change driven by demands data and digital technologies impacts us on the one hand, and the amount of digital penetration we actually deploy in response increases, the necessary interaction to remain aligned between these dimensions is going exponential.

The more technology we have, the more we rely upon it. The more we use data-driven foresight to get ahead of change, the more and faster our current and future technology must be adapted to remain relevant to meeting both our present and future needs.

When the world was much slower and the digital footprint much less focused on point solutions and back-office systems, this was perhaps manageable but barely for many.

This growing force is responsible for the pain you feel today and why you need to replace existing systems. If you fail to recognize and address it, it's also the force that will destroy any business technology ambitions and transformations you undertake.

Introducing Digital Kinetics

We call this force Digital Kinetics. Digital Kinetics is growing exponentially and is the product of so-called Digital Natives. They are leading the business technology innovations and forcing the rest of the market to respond. Recognizing Digital Kinetics exists and learning how to use it as digital natives do, rather than being consumed by it as Digital explorers are, is the ambition of every Progressive leader.

When you look around – are you seeing this force impact your business and operations?

Is your current system unworkable and getting worse all the time? Do you have many off system processes and manual workarounds that cost a lot of time and effort and impact transparency? Are these incidents getting more complex and frequent? Do you have data issues and process issues, and governance issues? Is your current system nothing more than an expensive database? Do you have an exploding list of urgent point solutions requested as a short term fix? Is the business complaining of “flying-blind” with no tech support?