1. Digital
transformation
Studies
August 2020
Adapted by Claudete Mello - Jeanne Ross ( MIT) webinar, “The Digital Challenge: How to transform your
business in the midst of a crisis.” available on YouTube, May ‘1st 2020
2. Jeanne Ross
• The Digital Challenge: How to transform your business in the
midst of a crisis
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrX0UemtWVQ
4. SMACIT – Jeanne Ross
And here is what you need to understand about SMACIT. It is
changing what’s possible. And why we care about this is
because it's not just SMACIT, but this constant introduction of
new technologies. Add artificial intelligence, blockchain,
biometrics, robotics, quantum computing, they just keep
coming.
5. SMACIT – Jeanne Ross
Social
Mobile
Analytics
Cloud
Internet of Things
6. WHAT IS DIGITAL TO YOUR COMPANY?
• We'd like to know what digital transformation means to your
company.
• Is it digitizing, becoming more operationally excellent at what
you've always done?
• Or is it about digital, delivering rapid business innovation?
• Or is it neither or both?
7. SILOED SYSTEMS
• For the last 30 or 40 years, we have been using information
technology to support our organizational process.
• The problem is we did it little bit by little bit. As a result, we
ended up with a lot of siloed systems that address one very
specific business need.
8. OPERATIONAL BACKBONE
This is what we're trying to fix right now as we digitize. Because
we are exposing all this messy spaghetti to our customers. So
we're trying to create something that looks more like a platform.
We call it an operational backbone.
9. Case NORDSTROM
• What we found with Nordstrom is it continued to focus on the
digitizing. The digital is still part of its challenge.
• Nordstrom's digitizing efforts have positioned them to be
stronger in this pandemic than any other department store.
• The New York Times just ran an article in which it says,
Nordstrom's is the one retailer that should be able to survive,
say, a year long global pandemic, this kind of economy. So
the digitizing is really paying off.
10. THE BAD NEWS
• Only 14% of established companies has a robust operational backbone.
There’s a 30% that have made enough progress that it's not necessarily
impeding them as they become digital.
• A real liability for many companies in this digital world is the lack of
an operational backbone, the inability to do things end to end and
reliably for their customers.
11. Who should lead the digitization efforts, line
functions or a specialized department?
• It’s typically led by the CIO. The problem is while the CIO can
help shape the vision, provide the underlying technology, the
CIO cannot impose the discipline and the organization that
creates this digital-- this operational backbone.
• So it can be headed by the CIO, but it can't be accomplished
by the CIO.
• This is an enterprise effort
12. What's the difference between the operational
backbone and Porter's value chain?
If you understand your value chain, you can start to identify
what must be the essence of this operational backbone.
If you understand your value chain and what matters most,
it can help you get past that, got to fix everything, to there are
most important things. The trick to getting an operational
backbone in is to not try to do everything, but to recognize
some critical things and go after them.
13. OPERATIONAL BACKBONE
• Operational backbones are challenges that have been created
through years of processes and systems that need to slowly be
fixed.
• Focus on the most important. Do something substantive, and
then start to use it.
• And then the job will never be done. You'll continue that
journey for a long time. But that is only half the story.
14. DIGITAL OFFERING
• In addition to digitizing, you must become digital because
your customers are demanding so much more. You need to
start solving their problems.
• Now to do that, you must think of your new value
proposition.
15. DIGITAL OFFERING
• There are two things going on here.
One is you're trying to be inspired by what digital
technologies make possible.
16. WHAT DOES YOUR CUSTOMER WANT?
So the other half of this picture is what your customer
desires.
You can influence that. You can market. You can test with them.
Amazon does this all the time.
But every company can identify what's possible and test it with
real customers, and it is the only way to market.
We must understand we do not know what our customers
want.
17. SCHNEIDER
• So Schneider now is on a roll. It started seven years ago.
• The customers come to them. They ask for things that
Schneider says, whoa. That may be a bit beyond what we do.
We'll go find a partner that they can provide some of these
services.
• They're growing not only with what they can do but with what
their partners can do.
• And that is the path. Recognizing that that's a challenge, I
think, is step number one.
18. DIGITAL OFFERING
Your offering has to be something the customer wants.
It's important that you work with the customers to
define those offerings and make sure that they fit
well with the customer's own processes, and with
what the customer is trying to accomplish.
19. DIGITAL OFFERING - SCHNEIDER
What Schneider does now is it creates intelligent energy
management solutions.
They help you recognize how to source energy. They tell you if
you're at risk of having a brown out. They tell you if something's
dying. They’re looking for ways for you to save money as you
provide the energy needs of your business.
20. DIGITAL OFFERING – CAR MAX
They added browser and to a large extent, apps as well. And
they created not just the retail experience, but an omni-channel
experience.
You can go shopping for a long time viewing all of CarMax as
cars before you ever walk into a store. And, in fact, if you'd
rather never walk into a store, CarMax is now developing what it
calls home delivery.
21. DIGITAL PLATFORM
• Digital offering requires technology
Understanding what this means for any existing company is that
you're going to need two technology environments. One is this
digital platform where you’re creating these reusable
components that build your solution.
22. DIGITAL PLATFORM + OPERATIONAL
BACKBONE
• You still need this operational backbone. That's how you know
your customers.
• It’s how your back office processes work. That's your supply
chain for your physical products and services.
• These two platforms do tend to rely on one another for data.
23. MIDDLE WARE
• We have identified the most progressive companies as doing
a remarkable job of allowing people to operate in one
environment or the other, and then having a small technology
team in between managing what we call the API linkages.
• You might call it the middle ware. You might call it the data
that needs to be exchanged.
This is how these two environments can coexist.
24. • What we've learned about these
environments is, they change
rapidly.
• You learn something. You
adapt. Your customer needs
change, you adapt. You find a
new opportunity, you adapt.
25. SPOTIFY
• They have multiple tribes that do have some
interdependencies. It’s important that the tribes recognize
their interdependencies and respond to one another's needs.
• That's the challenge you'll take on as you start to use
empowered people and teams to ensure you're learning and
responding to new customer demands. It's hard work, and it
starts on the digital side of your business.
26. ACCOUNTABILITY IN DIGITAL COMPANIES
• There are eight principles that you're trying to get your head
around here.
• One is as you start to do this, you want to recognize you need
people to own your major components and offerings. Past
projects where somebody says, I’ll deliver something and then
hand it off.
27. ACCOUNTABILITY IN DIGITAL COMPANIES
• The second thing is you are trying to get rid of structure as
your organizing logic:
• There will be structure, but it should follow, not lead.
• The thing that leads is mission. What am I trying to get done
here? How do I assign some talents to a mission that
somebody and somebody's team can pursue?
• Those teams are driven by metrics. They understand the
mission. They establish some metrics that will help them
understand if they're succeeding.
28. ACCOUNTABILITY IN DIGITAL COMPANIES
This is a new technology environment, and it's why you are
likely to do this on the digital side before you get around to the
digitized side. This is about what we call DevOps.
29. ACCOUNTABILITY IN DIGITAL COMPANIES
It's an environment in which people are empowered. You
need a well-designed infrastructure. So doing this for your
digital offerings, which will be much smaller initially, makes a lot
of sense. You can eventually go back and make sure this
happens with your digitized side.
30. ACCOUNTABILITY IN DIGITAL COMPANIES
This is not the cheapest organizational design.
You have to resource it. Otherwise, you have people waiting for
stuff, just like you’ve been waiting for approvals in your
hierarchical environment. You're going to end up having this
waiting time while people are waiting for people to get stuff
done…
31. ACCOUNTABILITY IN DIGITAL COMPANIES
You rely on collaboration, not hierarchy to ensure that people
get stuff done. And you make sure that leaders trust the
decision makers. If you empower people but you don't trust
their decisions, you have not really empowered them.
32. THE REAL CHALLENGE
The hard part is not the empowered team part. You'll find
people perfectly capable there.
It's the next layer up, people who are capable of coaching, or
moving talent, of identifying missions that are really clear.
That is the real challenge here, and it is why this is even harder
than the technology environments you're trying to create.