Leading IT Transformation – Workshop 3 (Future-State Design)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Leading IT Transformation is provided by Ms. Drabenstadt MBA BBA Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 24 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
If you would like to view the Client Information Hub (CIH) for this program, please Click Here
Learning Provider Profile
Ms. Drabenstadt is a Certified Learning Provider (CLP) at Appleton Greene and she has experience in Information Technology, Information Governance, Compliance and Audit. She has achieved an MBA, and BBA. She has industry experience within the following sectors: Technology; Insurance and Financial Services. She has had commercial experience within the following countries: United States of America, Canada, Australia, India, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Her program will initially be available in the following cities: Madison WI; Minneapolis MN; Chicago IL; Atlanta GA and Denver CO. Her personal achievements include: Developed Trusted IT-Business Relationship; Delivered Increased Business Value/Time; Decreased IT Costs; Re-tooled IT Staff; Increased IT Employee Morale. Her service skills incorporate: IT transformation leadership; process improvement; change management; program management and information governance.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
Future-state design is another crucial part of the process of carrying out a successful IT transformation. While the current-state assessment tells us where we are at the moment, the future-state design is important because it tells us where we plan to go. There are two basic questions that form the foundation of the future-state design. The first question is, “What do we aim to achieve?” and the second is “How do we plan to get there?”. In working towards the IT transformation of an organization, there must be a goal. The people involved have to know what they are hoping to achieve with this initiative. That is what the answer to the first question gives us. What we aim to achieve is the goal that we set for the transformation program. After filling up the gaps in the current state and adopting new technology, where the organization hopes to stand at the end of the transformation process is the future-state. The answer to the second question – how do we plan to get there? – is what helps build the strategy for change. It sets the path that the organization needs to follow in order to achieve the goal. It builds a framework for the transformation process based on a clear vision, a purpose, the key transformations, operating principles, and so on. Using these two basic questions, the organization can create a vision for IT transformation and a roadmap to fulfill that vision. The future-state design uses research, design techniques, and business thinking to paint a vivid picture of what the business should be like in the future.
Objectives
01. Customer Focus: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Organizational Structure; departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation; departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Transformational Leadership; departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite; departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. Integration of All Data Systems; departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
07. Internal Customer Experience: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. 1 Month
08. Modernization Strategy: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
11. Digitization of The Business: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
12. Personalization Guides The Customer: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
Strategies
01. Customer Focus: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Organizational Structure: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Transformational Leadership: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. Integration of All Data Systems: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
07. Internal Customer Experience: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
08. Modernization Strategy: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
11. Digitization of The Business: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
12. Personalization Guides The Customer: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
Tasks
01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Customer Focus.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Organizational Structure.
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Change Management and Cultural Transformation.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Transformational Leadership.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Integration of All Data Systems.
07. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Internal Customer Experience.
08. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Modernization Strategy.
09. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics.
10. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Evolution of Products, Services and Processes.
11. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Digitization of The Business.
12. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Personalization Guides The Customer.
Introduction
What does “Future State” mean, and why is it important?
The broader vision for the organization ultimately translates to the company’s future state. It’s where you want to be in terms of the constantly changing nature of technology and how it relates to your current business. Without a clear future state, a business will frequently lack direction, making it difficult to make critical decisions, generating management misalignment, and ultimately impeding the advancement and growth of the organization’s mission.
To identify and achieve their future state, a company will go through a series of process mapping activities that look at both their current state and what it will look like in the future. Let’s get into the specifics of defining and achieving your company’s future state.
Combine Forces
It takes team effort to define your future state and develop a strategy for getting there. Get a leg up on the competition by bringing together members of your team from other departments. Hold a meeting or workshop with an expert facilitator to assist them lay out the steps needed to get to your future state.
This facilitator can assist you in documenting your current situation and identifying the pain areas and challenges that are preventing you from moving forward. They know how to ask the appropriate questions to get to the heart of the matter and lead your cross-functional team in the right direction.
Consult with your colleagues
If a co-worker opposes a particular course of action, it’s most usually due to a lack of participation on the back end. Although you won’t be able to completely eradicate resistance as you progress to your future state, bringing in and engaging the individuals who are executing the processes cross-functionally can help reduce resistance.
Building a business case for your strategy, especially one that is data-driven, will aid in reaching general agreement within your larger team. Quantify particular benefits and growth potential and tie them to the company’s aims to build a solid case. Always keep in mind that appropriate organizational change management is where it all begins and finishes. More than just communication and training, it’s about determining the effects of upcoming changes and determining ways to easily handle those consequences for each person.
Choose the Right Approach
You could perform a blanket duplicate of another organization’s best practises, but that’s risky. Knowing your organization and knowing what to look for are essential for determining the best approach for your company. If you start with a blanket copy of someone else’s best practises, you may miss out on the elements that make your company different and unique, causing you to lose out on your company’s competitive advantage. If you choose that path, make sure it’s well-planned. Instead, consider duplicating only a few processes, deciding which ones are most important to your company, and tweaking them to match your specific requirements.
Highlight Your Specialties
Work on knowing who you are as a company and what makes you unique, then expand on that. Work with the members of your team who are knowledgeable about the processes that set you apart from your competition. Sure, everyone’s business is different in some ways, but there are a lot of untapped similarities.
Identifying the areas of your business where you are unique begins with a strategic discussion with your leaders and executives about where you are in the market, what your competitors are doing, and what your customers are thinking. Understanding why your consumers seek you out and why they stay with you is a very important piece of customer feedback.
Create a Process Map
Depending on the organization, the process map may differ. It is beneficial to have a map of some level of depth for reference, one that people can track and refer to in their daily operations, regardless of the business. Some companies may need to go farther into determining their phases, while others may find that just having a framework is enough to have everyone on the same page.
In either case, a process map will assist you in identifying areas for improvement and strategies to change the way you do business, which could range from changing the way you communicate to reorganizing teams to pursuing technological opportunities. A process map might bring you to a halt in the middle of your digital transformation project and force you to reconsider your strategy. It may cause you to reconsider how you prioritize processes and assist you in defining the best-fit software during your software selection process.
Why is it important?
Technology advances at a tremendous speed. Your future state is approaching faster than you think. Businesses are being forced to adjust their procedures, and it’s now or never for them to adapt. You get the chance to examine the shifting landscapes in your industry and forecast what the future may hold. Now is the time to get a handle on your procedures and make sure they’re flexible enough to adjust as changes undoubtedly occur.
Change surrounds us, and you can either let it dominate you or be able to respond to it effectively and therefore control it. By staying on top of your processes and re-evaluating them on a regular basis, you’ll be able to respond to changes more swiftly and in a way that isn’t purely reactive. It’s all about constant progress, and you’ll need to develop a discipline that you can stick to over time. It is critical to define your future state in order to be timely, competitive, and keep your business alive.
For transformational success, define future state capabilities
The problems of adopting technology transformation include short-termism and a compartmentalized approach. If these issues aren’t addressed, it’s possible that a tactical improvement focus will be placed on business owners with larger portfolios but lower future business value. What can businesses do to guarantee that essential capabilities are prioritized and aligned with intended business outcomes?
Following the definition of the current state, it’s critical to begin with a clear picture of the desired future state’s organizational capabilities and the commercial benefits they can give.
It is possible to innovate with core capabilities while standardizing enabling capabilities by focusing on concerns that the organization cares about and capabilities that are important to the business. Many organizations take a compartmentalized approach to capability development, focusing on tactical enhancements for a short-term gain. With a wider portfolio, business owners can attract more attention while offering less commercial value. To mitigate this risk, align business benefits with value driver uplift for each of the required organizational core competencies. The value chain or the customer journey can be used to align value drivers with desired core capabilities.
Best Practice Tips
Get a clear picture of your organization’s desired future state capabilities
Map the targeted future state core competencies of the organization across the four components of people, process, technology, and assets. To map out the gap between the current state and the future state maturity level requirements across the four components, first understand each capability and its future state maturity level requirements. Concentrate on quantifiable value drivers such as increased revenue, lower operational costs, and greater asset efficiency. Establish early information goals to aid in the delivery of fundamental capabilities.
Align a business benefit to each capability uplift
Understand the advantages of each key competency enhancement and how they relate to the company’s strategic goals. Determine the size and reachability of the tangible and intangible advantages that can be gained by strengthening each competency. Assign a single company owner who is responsible for delivering the identified benefits and has decision-making authority over each capacity. Establish a continuous improvement and long-term strategy for the intended future organizational capabilities, with the executive monitoring the delivery and benefits on a regular basis.
Align architecture & centralised process management to the business value chain
For flexibility and agility, align process design and technology architecture with desired core business capabilities. To maximize reuse, centralize business process management capabilities. To simplify processes and data complexity, eliminate siloed views. Define data and information architecture to master fundamental entities in a single location and centralize business processes to promote frontline agility.
What is future state design?
Any strategy or transformation program should start with two important questions: ‘What are we aiming for?’ and ‘How are we going to get there?’
The strategy is the ‘How are we going to get there?’ part: a purpose-built structure for the organization, with a defined goal, a set of operational principles, significant transformations, roadmaps, and so on.
In theory, the question “What are we aiming for?” is part of that plan. It’s a means of describing what the company aspires to be so that everyone understands where they’re going and why.
All pretty easy, except that, in the past, that second question has been addressed with a succession of extremely intangible models, accompanied by comments like “a data-driven business,” “decentralized operations,” and “connected to our customers.”
They can be useful business principles, but they don’t truly answer the question of what that future business would be able to provide its consumers, or what it might be like to be a part of it. The ambiguity also makes it difficult to make significant strategic decisions, such as deciding where the gaps between today’s business and its future self should be filled or where key investments should be made.
Future-state design tries to fill that hole by combining a variety of research, business thinking, and design methodologies to create a tangible image of what the business of the future should be. Consider it like building a prototype of a new product that everyone can touch and feel so they can understand what they’re working on.
The magic components in future state design are customers and services.
Building a tangible vision of the future state is critical to the entire process, and in order to do so, you must abandon current practises and conceive what a future generation of services could do.
Beyond broad-brush assertions about culture and behavior, it’s quite difficult for members of any established firm to consider what the future company should be. When you ask them how the company could connect with its customers (or any other commercial partners), a whole new set of possibilities emerges.
With facilitation, and some stimulus material to help them think without current constraints, most people can put themselves in the place of a customer and imagine what a new approach or radical alternative might be. By feeding in broad market perspectives, real customer insights and experiences from other sectors — and dismantling ‘why we can’t do that’ mindsets — teams frequently shape genuinely innovative approaches and describe customer experiences that would transform their company.
The spine of any future state experience for any corporation hoping to construct a future in the digital economy is, of course, digital.
Everyone involved can tangibly see what they’re striving for once that future state experience is in good form (answering the question “what are we aiming for?”). From today, we may start analyzing the gaps and identifying new capabilities and efforts that will be necessary to close them. New technologies, as well as a new organizational architecture or operating model, could be examples.
By putting customers first and picturing what their service experience should be like in the future, an organizational strategy can be created with a clear aim in mind.
It doesn’t matter what your future state is if you can’t attain it.
While the ultimate goal of future state design is to avoid creating an organization that is built for the past, it’s also critical not to imagine something that is impossible.
Future state design is not a futures discipline for the vast majority of companies. It’s not about picturing distant theoretical or extremely speculative situations, nor is it about prospective utopian and apocalyptic visions. It’s a delicate balancing act between the practical and the aspirational.
People quickly lose interest in a far-future, hypothetical vision because they can’t make meaningful progress toward it. It’s critical to envision a future that’s within reach — one that the entire company can realistically imagine achieving — because while a far-future, hypothetical vision might appear compelling and exciting at first, people quickly become bored. Its inaccessibility renders it meaningless, and everyone returns their attention to the present.
For future state design exercises, we normally choose a three-to-five-year horizon, and the results never include anything that requires a breakthrough idea to make it conceivable. This may appear unambitious, but it works because, unless you’re building a new railway or sending people to Mars, most organizations can undergo a significant transition in that timeframe, and most individuals can commit to this as a goal.
Anyone who has lived through the last 20 years knows that a lot can happen in three to five years, therefore the future state vision that is created should never be viewed as a how-to manual. It’s a method of constructing a solid vision of future goal, not a detailed description of what it will be like when you get there.
When should you use future state design techniques?
Future-state design is a process employed frequently during organizational transformation and digital strategy programs to assist an organization break free from its existing operational perspective. Let’s go over the three main advantages again:
It presents a compelling future picture that anybody can grasp and rally for.
It gives a ‘to’ in a ‘from-to’ and allows for the definition of critical transformations.
It allows for more creative thinking about where a company or service should go by removing current-state limits.
As a result, it’s especially useful when your company is stuck in a rut or has to rethink how to succeed in the digital economy. It can also be used to rethink a single service rather than an entire business, which is especially useful when that service is a substantial source of revenue for the company and is vulnerable to disruption.
It’s crucial to note that it’s just as useful for organizations that are succeeding as it is for those who are struggling. In reality, many of the organizations that are in desperate need of a major overhaul appear to be doing well on paper because they’ve stuck to their guns and squeezed every ounce of efficiency out of the machine. Their continuous profitability conceals long-term underinvestment in the future and a high vulnerability to disruption by more forward-thinking competitors.
Developing a strategy to realise your future state vision
You articulate a design target by imagining the type of company you can become; a tangible vision that you can use to enlighten and engage your business, as well as energize teams toward a common goal.
It is important not to overlook the importance of conveying this idea. Every time we perform a future state design exercise, we end up with a vision of the future that is far more compelling than anyone expected. It puts an end to incrementalism and brings everyone together in support of the type of step-change corporate innovation required in the digital economy.
A vision of the future state is only beneficial if you can really get there.
Of course, there’s a long way to go in order to accomplish a version of that future state vision, which is where strategy comes in. We discussed current-state analysis and why it’s important in the previous workshop: essentially, it defines the ‘from’ in a ‘from-to,’ where the ‘to’ is the future state vision.
The purpose of strategy in this situation is to bridge the gap between the two states and achieve the business’ step-change. This is referred to as a “transformation strategy.”
A well-developed transformation strategy explains how to transition from today’s business to tomorrow’s business without making the future state vision a fixed point at the end of the plan (you should have improved on components of that future vision by the time you get there!). It lays out a set of concepts, guidelines, and activities that the organization can use to implement a master plan.
Modern strategy, as we’ve previously discussed, is more of a language than a plan, uniting everyone under a similar goal and vision, as well as principles and organizational behaviors. However, in order to make rapid progress toward your future state — to transform — you’ll need a variety of instruments to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction.
An effective transformation strategy brings all of the company’s activities together.
Here are some of the basic components that are designed in almost every transformation plan, while they differ from client to client.
Purpose
Restating the organization’s purpose in a fresh way, when necessary, can be quite beneficial, especially if the business couldn’t communicate it properly in the first place or hadn’t done so before. Your purpose is the infinite arc that connects everything you stand for and do as a company.
In theory, you can never ‘accomplish’ your goal. For example, at Wilson Fletcher, they write theirs as “we exist to help established organizations realize their full potential in the digital economy,” and while they’ve changed the wording a few times over the years, it’s essentially what was above the door on day one, and will be for as long as they’re in business.
It is worth noting that while purpose doesn’t have to be ‘worthy’ (few businesses can exist simply for direct social or planetary good), it does have to be ‘worthwhile’ if you want to utilize it to lead and unite your team.
Vision statements
If your purpose is why you exist, then your vision is what you’re aiming for. It’s a goal that can be achieved. Of course, vision statements are commonly stated at an organizational level, but many individuals find that when they are articulated for key groups or markets, they are very impactful.
Consider the case of revamping a sports team. You may write a vision statement for fans (e.g., ‘our fans everywhere will always feel like they are a part of our club, closely connected to us through digital services that enrich every aspect of their matchday — and everyday — experience with NGFC’). You may also create one for commercial partners, players, and training staff (‘with state-of-the-art performance intelligence, analysis tools, and networked facilities, our training teams will be able to give world-class player coaching and development.’).
These phrases aid in focusing on a variety of levels, from where to invest to how to prioritize. They also play a critical role in energizing those groups by communicating the organization’s goals for their experience, especially when (as they should be) some of those people were involved in the future state design process.
Target customer models
Target customers are best described in a transformation strategy in their future state form, which is always nuanced.
In a transformation strategy, we normally avoid going into too much depth about customers because customers should be ‘pulled in’ to play a continual role in the organization’s evolution, fast rendering specific personas or detailed archetypes obsolete. Customers are living design topics and should be included in the design process.
However, it is important to capture the characteristics of the organization’s future customers in a high-level model that outlines how they may differ from current customers, what characteristics may open up future opportunities, and what emerging behaviors and influences have influenced the future state vision.
Future-state experience visualisations
We always visualize the future state experience in some form, even though it is never the same. Nothing surpasses being able to ‘see’ what the plan could mean in practice for the company.
These can range from a set of idea images on one end to extensive future state journey maps, rich animatics, and vision videos on the other. They are storytelling devices, not prototypes, whose purpose is to present an example, or a series of examples, of what life will be like when the company achieves its vision for the future state. Favored media include posters and movies, but they can also take on a variety of other interactive forms.
They must never be a ‘business diagram’ or a chart: they must be presented in a way that every person in the company can comprehend and engage with, providing them a glimpse into the future on which they will all be working. They must be compelling and self-explanatory in order to bring the vision to life.
Key transformations
These represent a sequence of significant organizational adjustments that will be necessary to attain the future state vision. A large number of themes can be identified, ranging from broad organizational attitudes to specific operational activities.
Devised below is a structure for them that is proven to be consistently effective:
From > To: What needs to be altered.
Imperative: Why it needs to be altered.
Implications: Likely impacts on the company or key considerations involved in making it happen.
Key benefits: What will be the advantages of doing so?
Key initiatives: What ‘projects’ must be carried out to make it happen?
The set of significant transformations you come up with will define the number of ‘projects’ or initiatives that must be carried out. These will be crucial in creating a roadmap. They are one of the most significant components of a transformation strategy since they may be built out to assign duties, finances, and more.
Key capabilities
These are the functional areas in which the organization must develop or gain expertise in order to accomplish the future state vision.
They vary greatly depending on the nature of the organization and the type of change required, but they frequently contain new core business models, critical technical capabilities, and services required to realize the vision.
Principles
As part of a transformation strategy, we usually intend to establish experience and service principles. These are the yin and yang of a modern organization built on digital services that unify consumer and commercial decision-making in a unified framework.
The concept of experience principles are totally centered on ‘clients,’ in whatever form they present themselves to that organization. They’re completely outside-in. They’re defined and explained so that all future customer-facing experiences are designed and delivered to the same high standards, and crucial choices are always made with the consumer in mind.
From the standpoint of the organization, service principles are their complementary twin. These are made entirely from the inside out. They define how the business should make service design and delivery decisions in order to achieve future state goals and commercial success. They are at the heart of every choice made on how the company creates ‘systems’ (both technological and human) that can adapt to new client opportunities.
KPIs
Most companies undergoing transformations must change their thinking, behavior, and procedures to become “more digital.” As a result, future performance measures are expected to become more comprehensive and customer-centric than in the past.
By requiring diverse but complementary lenses to be applied to the business’s performance, the odds of making the right decisions along the path to achieving them are increased.
Roadmap
A roadmap is an important product of a transformation strategy: it is the overall plan for realizing the future state vision, combining vision, capability development, and initiatives into a single, cohesive plan that the company can plan, fund, and execute against.
A good roadmap should, in general, outline activity periods. While good product roadmaps generally employ a basic ‘now/next/later’ approach, it’s more acceptable to layout phases with major targets against them at an organizational level. This is acceptable because these phases will commonly overlap.
Developing more specific, actionable plans that layout the range of initiatives required on a prioritized timeline is favored. While we would never advocate executing against a Gantt-like plan, providing a roadmap view like this alongside the phased method helps in two ways: it allows everyone to see how intensive the transformation will be, and it makes it simpler for priority streams of work to get started right away.
Without the clear strategy, you will not be able to reach your desired future state.
If you don’t proactively step out of today to envision what your future can look like, any strategy you develop will inevitably have far less potential to deliver the outcomes you hope for.
You may take steps forward without a picture of your future state, but you will never jump ahead. Create a compelling future state and a solid transformation strategy to get there, and you’ll be able to unlock and realize far more of your potential, as well as emerge with a new generation of organizations capable of capitalizing on possibilities for years to come.
Executive Summary
Course Manual 1: Customer Focus
You can’t change something you don’t fully understand. You don’t want to meddle with things that are working well for you and your consumers. So, before developing the future state, understand the current state and what has to be fixed or maintained. Know where you are today so you can make short-term changes and enhancements as you re-imagine and develop the future state, which can take some time.
Future-state journey mapping involves imagining and mapping out the ideal future experience with clients, which then serves as the blueprint for implementation. The future state map depicts what the client will be doing, thinking, and experiencing during their interactions with the brand in the future ideal experience.
The mapping of future state journeys serves a variety of functions, including:
• Collaborating with real customers to identify and examine potential experiences or journeys
• Collaborating with customers to co-create and design the best experience
• Working with customers to co-create and design a unique experience
• Imagining what the experience might be like in the future with less risk because it’s first tried on paper
Innovating your Customer Experience and Increasing Productivity
We’re entering a new era. With the recent economic developments, leaders in practically every sector are having to rethink how they do business. In order to survive, they must change their client experience and increase corporate productivity. Our future success is determined by how we choose to deal with uncertainty.
The trick is knowing where to direct your attention. Now is the time to improve your organization. To effectively implement incremental or transformative change, you must first have a thorough grasp of your current situation. This understanding of people, processes, and systems is what unlocks the crucial knowledge that guides successful strategy, planning, and implementation of change with measurable outcomes.
8 Examples of Inefficiency That Impact Your Operations & Customer Experience
There are eight well-known types of waste in processes that have an influence on the delivery of value to customers and have a negative impact on corporate performance.
1. Non-Utilized Talent – People’s talents, skills, and expertise are underutilised. When individuals and teams are not given the opportunity to contribute their expertise to the improvement of processes and systems, it can become a problem. This is a perfect example of an outdated command-and-control management paradigm in which constant feedback and improvement are not part of the corporate culture.
2. Bottlenecks – People or systems waste time waiting for the next step in the process. When continuous discovery, planning, design, and implementation are not aligned across the product development lifecycle, this is a common result.
3. Defects – Efforts that necessitate rework or the abandonment of a portion or all of the project. This can also be seen in efforts that result in unusable outcomes, such as inaccurate data.
4. Extra Processing – Excessive activity or extra steps that do not add value to the end customer’s service or product. Are you certain about each process or flow, the inputs, and the results you want to achieve?
5. Over Production – This is when output exceeds demand or work is completed ahead of schedule. This could happen when designing and implementing untested features and functionality.
6. Inventory – Raw resources or products that aren’t being processed in sufficient quantities. Files waiting to be worked on, clients waiting for service, idle records in a database, or obsolete files are all examples of inventory waste. Broken equipment, excess finished products, surplus materials taking up work space, and finished goods that can’t be sold are all examples of manufacturing inventory waste.
7. Motion – People moving around unnecessarily (for example, walking) to achieve an internal or external task. This includes any needless movement of people, equipment, or machinery that could improve performance, health, or security if addressed.
8. Delivery – Unnecessary product, service, and material movement. This can be done in a physical or electronic manner. Both consume resources and incur expenditures, yet neither is required to please the client or achieve the desired result.
3 Ways to Gather Ideas For Improving Operations and Customer Experience
A brilliant idea can come from a variety of places. It can originate from a variety of sources, including cumulative, linking, and technology-enabled insights.
• Over time, cumulative insights from numerous inputs and perspectives are added up. Ideas are formed by combining all of the available information.
• When connected insights are combined, the result is a much more effective solution than the sum of its parts. Focusing on the interdependencies upstream and downstream in an organization’s and/or customer lifecycle generates ideas.
• Technology, such as data collecting, automation, or cross-system integration, enables capacity insights. Exploring how new technology can improve the way people, processes, and systems interact generates ideas.
Each strategy can aid in the discovery of a big idea that has the potential to revolutionize your customer experience and/or business.
Your ideas must target the solution space, which entails researching the various options for meeting your needs and limits in order to change your business.
However, if you haven’t mapped your current state, you won’t know if a solution fits those requirements. You can’t identify and explore all of the alternatives or assess their impact unless you know where you are today.
Ideas must be based on an understanding of the current state, or how your company generates value. Customer experience journey maps, service design blueprints, value stream maps, product flow maps, user scenarios and flows, systems architecture, or material and information flow diagrams are some of the tools that can be used to map your current state. This is defined in Toyota’s lean methodology. Each strategy can be really useful, but like any tool, you must know when and how to utilize it.
The benefit of these various tools is that they all assist you in identifying opportunities and diagnosing issues that affect business drivers such as:
• Engagement
• Consistent recurring outcomes
• Productivity
• Communication
• Cross-functional collaboration
Each tool aids in the visualization of your business, the understanding of how a process adds value, the identification of leading and lagging key performance indicators, the consideration of the process from the perspective of the customer, the crosslinking of disparate data, the creation of a common language about the process, and the provision of focus.
It’s not about how that process should have worked in the first place. We must consider the current state of affairs.
Leading with Courage as you Define Your Ideal Customer Experience Journey
It is more important than ever to consider how we might innovate in the face of a global upheaval that affects every country, state, city, and small town. Work from home (WFH) was a luxury in the new economy. It has now become a standard requirement. Now is the time to pivot or adapt. You can find untapped opportunities and viable solutions to help you thrive by mapping your current situation. You may define the future you want by understanding your current situation, what to look for, and the essential mindset.
Course Manual 2: Organizational Structure
Business structure is more than simply an organizational chart; it is the basis upon which your current and future business will be built. It is a representation of your business model and goal that allows you to plan for your future state and the steps necessary to get there. How you construct your teams and guarantee you acquire the right individuals at the right time is dictated by your structural design. Your structure is the framework that gives your entire business clarity and accountability, empowering employees and getting everyone moving in the same direction. Your organizational structure allows you to be successful, increase sales, and grow into a great company.
However, an organizational chart is still required, but not just a schematic that no one refers to or uses. Instead, it should be a dynamic, live tool that elaborates on the nuances of your business, such as how you do what you do and who does what, how you define and measure success, and how you plan and achieve development. When done correctly, your organizational chart will be based on how you want to operate in the long run, both strategically and day-to-day – not necessarily how you’ve always done it. An adequate chart will inform a plan to transition from current to future reality, it is the guideposts on your journey to the summit.
The clarity acquired around team development is one of the most helpful benefits of effective configuration and congruent planning. With its clearly defined functions and areas of responsibility, your new ideal organization will illuminate a clear route to scaling your team. You can identify the milestones required to develop your team once you’ve specified where you’re heading and how you’ll get there. This includes knowing when and where to deploy resources that will yield the best results. This enables you to maximize profits as your business expands and maintain or improve margins as you scale.
The ability to remove the ambiguity and complexity that hinders focus – which is required to operationalize strategy, optimize operations, and establish a sustainable organization – is perhaps the most valuable benefit of an effective organizational structure. Focus is attained when everyone is on the same page, when employees from many departments are working together to achieve the same goal(s). The empowerment required to achieve is sanctioned by clearly defining success, both individual and organizational. People are more effective – individually and collectively – when they understand what they are responsible for and how it fits into the bigger picture.
To summarise, if you want your organization to thrive, you must identify and develop the structure necessary to fulfill your vision. You can’t optimize your operations for efficiency or profitability unless you have an organizational framework in which to function, which includes delivering product promises with sustainable margins. You can never assess progress or performance to know if everyone is focused on attaining the same objective without precisely identifying the roles that make up the structure and what each is responsible for. Any attempts to create and attain goals will be fruitless unless structure and strategy are aligned.
Analog-native businesses with high levels of digital maturity all have one thing in common: an enabling organization. Companies that lack this quality risk developing entrenched silo mindsets and a lack of collaboration, resulting in wasted investments and, eventually, failure of their digitalization efforts.
How may organizational structures be adapted to accelerate transformation and digital maturity?
Analog-native organizations must break down historical functional silos and upgrade their overall structure to meet the agility and customer-centricity of digital players. They must build organizations that encourage cross-functional collaboration and allow activities (such as product development) to flow effortlessly between departments, allowing for the end-to-end digitization of goods, processes, and touchpoints. Collaboration should extend beyond the business to ecosystem partners and customers, as well as within the company itself.
Multiple considerations, such as current digital maturity, planned target picture, urgency of change, and risk aversion, influence which organizational model to adopt to promote digitalization.
(Source: Arthur D. Little.)
Starting with central models may be a good idea for digitally conscious businesses embarking on IT transformation. This increases responsibility and transparency at the risk of a potential “us-versus-them” relationship with the rest of the company. This problem is solved by using an integrated model, which creates more impetus for change. However, due to ambiguous accountability and the difficulties of following a common vision, it runs the danger of causing problems with alignment. The hybrid model incorporates the best features of both the central and integrated models, but it is more complicated and difficult to implement. Finally, a centrally facilitated and fully integrated model is the most digitally mature structure and the end state for many digital-native businesses. Digital is fully integrated into the company’s business strategy, products/services, processes, and attitude in this context.
Only a few analog-native businesses have yet to establish appropriate organisational structures to aid digitalization. Top management is still collectively responsible for creating the digital strategy and driving its implementation in many companies.
Course Manual 3: Change Management and Cultural Transformation
In today’s complex—and cutthroat—global economy, achieving effective IT transformation has become a must-have aim for almost every company. Many businesses gain a much-needed boost in efficiency and profitability by implementing new technology and automating business operations, but keeping that momentum to produce sustainable improvement and higher value isn’t always easy.
Companies require a comprehensive grasp of, and plan for, IT transformation change management in order to preserve and expand on the early improvements that accompany IT transformations. Organizations of all sizes and types may successfully scale their IT transformation projects to meet changing needs and goals while continuing to add value by investing the time and resources required (and following a few best practices).
Change Management Is Critical In IT Transformation
Companies that recognized the writing on the virtual wall were making major investments to IT transformation even before the COVID-19 disruption drastically impacted practically every area of modern life. However, as businesses struggle to find their footing in the new normal, IT transformation has become a top priority for many.
Companies around the world are making a successful IT transformation journey a major part of their strategies for not just recovery, but growth, innovation, and competitive advantage, from launching new apps to expanding their social media presence to fundamentally altering their entire business model to meet changing consumer needs.
Industry giants like McDonald’s, Hasbro, and Capital One have set the bar for successful IT transformations by embracing digitalization, artificial intelligence, and leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT). Others are quickly following suit; according to Meticulous Research, the worldwide digital transformation market will be valued $3.2 trillion by 2025.
Despite this enthusiasm and significance, IT transformation initiatives continue to fail at alarming rates. According to research firm McKinsey & Co., around 70% of digital transformation projects fail.
These failures can be attributed to a variety of factors, including inadequate planning, a lack of investment, and a lack of people with digital technology skills. However, a change management plan is evident in terms of major, long-term results—including scaling the successes of initial digital transformation efforts to meet an organization’s evolving demands and business strategies.
What is Organizational Culture?
The collective thinking of an organization is known as its culture. People’s ways of being, relating, and working, as well as the organization’s engagement with and effectiveness in its environment, are based on patterns of widely accepted (sometimes unconscious) assumptions, beliefs, and values.
In other words, the culture of an organization influences everything that happens in that context. An organization’s culture is reflected in how people interact, how things are done on a daily basis, and how culture change, organizational change, and transformation are managed.
How Does Culture Change Impact the Success of Transformation?
The success of your transformational change projects is heavily influenced by your company’s culture. When a big organizational transformation is happening, the culture of the organization is in play. It will either support or oppose the new state reality you’re constructing.
As your business transitions from old to new ways of doing things, many of your organization’s patterns will most likely emerge as helpful or inhibiting. The new tactics, structures, systems, processes, and/or technology will very certainly need people adopting new ways of being and functioning. Employees will almost certainly have to adjust how they engage with one another, what they prioritize and focus on, and how their performance is judged.
Change projects in your organization are likely to fail unless there are demonstrable modifications in cultural norms and expectations. Your company’s culture has been built to be successful as it is, not as you would like it to be. Employees will quickly revert to their old ways of working unless there is a fundamental culture shift. You must make overt and precise changes to culture so that people understand what they need to do differently. Employees should be able to see how the new corporate culture will fit into the bigger change picture if leaders construct the new culture to deliver on the new transformational and organizational change efforts.
Course Manual 4: Transformational Leadership
Transformational leadership is a common leadership approach, especially in businesses where employee satisfaction, productivity, and success are all dependent on culture.
It’s comparable to servant leadership, which is also an ethical leadership style, but there are several major differences. We’ll discuss transformational leadership, including its roots, key characteristics, and more.
Defining transformation leadership:
The needs of others, rather than the leader’s, are the focus of transformational leadership. Although similar to servant leadership, each style differs in that the leader’s goal is distinct.
The transformational leader’s concentration is “directed towards the organization,” and his or her behavior encourages followers to support the organization’s goals. The focus of a servant leader, on the other hand, is on the followers, with organizational goals coming second.”
As it focuses on culture, transformational leadership differs from one of its antecedents, transactional leadership. Transactional leaders do not aim to change the culture; instead, they work within it. Transformational leaders, on the other hand, strive for culture change as a means of driving improvement and performance.
Where did it come from?
Its origins can be traced back to the concept of charisma. Of course, charisma is a concept that has been around for a long time. In the last 40 years, however, there has been a growing interest in charisma. Employees have been “overmanaged but underled,” according to a theory.
This makes sense because transactional leadership places a premium on management skills. Compliance, structure, hierarchy, work tasks, incentive, and punishment are the main topics. Unlike more current leadership methods such as empowerment and inspiration.
The focus of transformational leadership is on leading rather than managing. It was developed by political scientist James MacGregor Burns, who popularized it in his 1978 book Leadership, after sociologist James Downton Jr conceptualized it.
Bernard M Bass built on Burns’ work by studying the underlying psychological characteristics that define a transformational leader.
Features and traits of transformational leaders
1. Charisma/idealized influence: To what extent does the leader’s behavior model remain consistent with the broader vision they’ve established, and does this role modeling motivate employees to follow the leader and the goal?
2. Inspirational motivation: Creating a compelling future vision, having clear goals that stretch people and recognize potential, and being enthusiastic about employee development are all important.
3. Intellectual stimulation: Enabling and motivating workers to go beyond their own self-interest to the needs of the team and organization, challenging their attitudes, ideas, and beliefs in order to drive growth and performance, and fostering innovation, collaboration, and the pursuit of excellence.
4. Individualised consideration: The transformational leader focuses on the individual’s needs, goals, and anxieties, knowing that understanding how to build an environment that encourages individuals to perform is critical.
Tips to develop a strong base for a transformational leadership journey
1. Develop a challenging and attractive vision, together with the employees
2. Tie the vision to a strategy for its achievement
3. Develop the vision, specify and translate it to actions
4. Express confidence, decisiveness and optimism about the vision and its implementation
5. Realise the vision through small, planned steps and small successes in the path for its full implementation
Which Organizations Benefit Most from Transformational Leadership?
Les Stein, PhD, feels that every business, regardless of size or success, can benefit from transformative leadership. After all, he emphasizes, “Transformation doesn’t have to always be from bad to good. It can be from good to great, or simply good to better. The point is, [a transformational leader will] change their institution in a way that’s always positive.”
However, Stein acknowledges that firms with a bad culture will benefit the most from positive interference.
“Organizations will benefit most from a transformational leader when their culture is such that people aren’t sure if they buy into the vision of the organization, [or they don’t] seem to have that collective enthusiasm for their product.”
What are the positive effects?
The function of transformative leadership in generating achievements is generally seen favorably in research. Transformative leadership, for example, has aided both organizational commitment and workforce productivity.
Employees led by a transformational leader had greater health than those led by a laissez-faire (apathetic, hands-off) boss, according to Zwingmann et al (2014). They went on to say that having a clear, shared goal that gives meaning to work is a “health-promoting phenomena”
In terms of specific workplaces, a study on transformational leadership in schools discovered that it has substantial and significant favorable effects on organizational circumstances, as well as moderate effects on student involvement.
Choudhary et al (2013) discovered that transformational leadership had a stronger impact on organizational learning than servant leadership, which they attribute to transformational leadership’s greater emphasis on goal-oriented behavior. Many critics agree that the dynamic and diversified character of today’s workplaces necessitates different leadership styles at different times, thus it’s difficult to argue that one leadership style is more valuable than another.
Course Manual 5: Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-suite
The pervasiveness of technology in the corporate landscape is unrivaled: It is a big consumer of resources, both human and financial; it is the operational platform that drives day-to-day operations; and it contains future potential. As a result, technology is intrinsically related to most companies’ current and future performance. As a result, technological leadership is blending with strategic and financial leadership, requiring the CEO, COO, CIO, and CFO (among others) to work together in the future. A CXO collaboration is what it’s called, and it necessitates new abilities among today’s leaders.
What is a CXO partnership, and how does it work? To begin, realize that this isn’t about organizational structure. The CXO partnership is an informal one, consisting of a coalition and a group of people who share common interests. It’s based on trust, knowledge, and the need to integrate that knowledge to improve decision-making in your organization.
Which of the “Os” should join the CXO coalition? That depends. Today, there are a plethora of options: We now have CTOs (technology), CMOs (marketing), CCOs (customer advocacy), CKOs (knowledge), CIOs (investment), and CIOs (information), to mention a few, in addition to the well-worn CEO, CFO, and COO. It’s easy to become so focused on the inclusion and exclusion judgments that you lose sight of your true goal. This is a model that is adaptable. The partnership’s membership will be determined by the nature of your company. It may even change depending on the choice. The term “CXO partnership” is actually just a catch-all word for a collaborative leadership style.
Build It Right
What can you do if you aren’t already in a situation like this? You’ll have to forge your own CXO partnership since it won’t come knocking on your door. Often, it might be built around a major event that requires the CEO’s personal engagement, or a continuous process like investment prioritization. Before you begin, make certain that you:
Invite those who are willing to participate. It’s less crucial to have the perfect mix of individuals than it is to get the cooperation started, so reach out to those you can. The number of people who participate will rise as a result of the success.
Facilitate and integrate the process. Your job is to bring individuals together to start a conversation and to gather information in order to make a decision.
Consider the big picture. Even if you bring technological expertise to the table, the executive thought process must take precedence. “Wearing your corporate hat” was a phrase used at Xerox. They even gave out hats with a large red X on them at one point.
Stay together. Whether it’s joint problem solving or dispute resolution, collaboration is the preferred option. This necessitates open and direct communication as well as explicit knowledge sharing. For example, whether formally or informally, make sure your CFO is aware of your figures and the story behind them. This is nearly a requirement in an open-minded environment.
Act as if you’re doing a balancing act. Advocacy for your own cause should be balanced with a knowledge of others’ views and interests. It would have been easier for Xerox to reach an agreement based solely on financial concerns, but they also had to consider the interests of their employees as well as their customers.
Set shared goals. Develop objective metrics or milestones together. This will aid in the development of shared ownership of the final product.
Avoid Potential Pitfalls
A CXO partnership can be a great tool for accomplishing goals. However, like with any cooperative activity, it’s critical to foresee and avoid potential issues by ensuring that you:
Everyone should be involved. Power is shared in a collaborative atmosphere. For some, this feels like a loss of control, complete with all the worries that comes with it. Pay attention to individuals who aren’t participating in the process and try to entice them in. Something will be lost if they are not present.
Stay focused. Even though they claim to be collaborative, some participants may adopt parochial or defensive postures. This is particularly true when you get closer to making a choice. Don’t let this get in the way of your progress. Attempt to elicit the primary concern and find a solution that addresses it.
Think beyond IT. The best IT solution isn’t always the best solution for the firm. There will be instances when you believe the best technological path has not been taken. In these situations, letting go is a strength, not a weakness, as long as you’ve presented all of the pertinent facts and everyone is aware of the repercussions. The truly best answer can only be found by bringing all of the perspectives together. Not the best for technology, not the best for money, not the greatest for a single function or industry, but the ideal combination of those elements.
Reap the Rewards
A shared ownership of the outcomes is the result of a successful partnership. At Xerox, senior executives were heavily involved in the outsourcing decision, ensuring shared ownership. As a result, there was no pointing of fingers even when they struck some bumps in the road. “If it works, it’s mine; if it fails, it’s yours,” they avoided the usual shared-risk formula.
Meanwhile, your personal development will accelerate. This collaborative experience will sharpen your understanding of the business, your thinking breadth, and your ability to balance hard and soft abilities.
Course Manual 6: Integration of all data systems
Those of us who have worked in the field of information technology (IT) are well aware that it is rife with buzzwords. The latest phrase, “IT transformation,” has become a popular component of the digital transformation process, but what it implies varies depending on who you ask. If you ask ten CIOs or IT executives to define transformation, you’re going to hear ten different replies.
On the one hand, data integration is responsible for IT transformation, which is defined as “a complete overhaul of an organization’s information technology systems. IT transformation can involve changes to network architecture, hardware, software and how data is stored and accessed. Informally, IT transformation may be referred to as rip and replace”, according to with Margaret Rouse, Whattls.com Manager.
Digital transformation, on the other hand, according to Galen Gruman, isn’t just about converting physical assets to digital copies; it’s also about doing something with those digitized assets.
As a result, data integration is a critical enabler in this space. IT transformation and data integration processes are combined on the same journey to maximize digital transformation processes and find “processes that create, enable, manage, and deliver them” to the appropriate company units. The most important aspects to understand about data integration, according to David Linthicum, in this new era of IT transformation are:
1. Workload data is likely to be shared across traditional systems and both private and public clouds.
2. Data is growing faster and faster, with big data lakes common within most companies.
3. Data has to be delivered in real-time, on demand.
4. Security is now systemic, it cannot be an afterthought anymore.
5. DevOps is the new standard for building and deploying applications and data store
During his recent webinar, “Digital and IT Transformation: A Formula for Empowerment in the Digital Age,” Dennis Drogseth, VP of Research at EMA, shared some thoughts. We want to emphasize that while analytics and metrics are excellent tools for making strategic decisions, the foundations of these judgments still require high-quality data. Why? Because the costs, risks, and potential negative impact on the business are too great to risk making judgments based on faulty or incomplete data.
Data Quality Management was cited as a crucial technology by 35% of the leaders polled, while Data Integration was cited by 32% as a critical technology for their present or future transformation endeavor.
How to begin your data integration journey
Most businesses make use of a variety of cloud, social, and mobile-based systems and applications. However, those systems are incompatible, causing the vital data flow to be disrupted.
It is critical to implement a data integration strategy in order to overcome this. It is not, however, a “one-and-done” exercise. To bring together your diverse data sources, it’s a process that grows over time and may incorporate a variety of ways. It is not only a cultural transformation, but it must also be incorporated into your IT management system.
To start with it is important to:
• Identify the importance of data to people and processes
• Understand how you’re processing and integrating data
• Identify silos among internal and external systems
When attempting to blend data from legacy systems into a new system, data integration becomes a hurdle. Because of anomalies such as formatting, spelling problems, duplicates, or naming standards, a complete cleaning is required to ensure that only valid data is transferred to your new system. This will ensure that the data integration project is completed on time and on budget.
Course Manual 7: Internal Customer Experience
Start with your employees if you want to provide superior service to your consumers.
Customer-centric initiatives are increasingly being recognized for their benefits, which include increased revenues, decreased expenses, and stronger employee and customer loyalty. Many firms underestimate the need to engage the entire organization, including support functions, in a customer-centric transformation in their efforts to improve customer journeys and refine direct interactions with clients.
That is unfortunate. Developing exceptional customer-service operations in support functions (such as information technology, finance, and human resources) is a significant lever for sustaining and expanding a full customer-centric transformation.
It aids in the development of a new service culture that strengthens customer-centric initiatives across the board. By applying customer excellence ideas to employees’ experiences, it creates a longer-term impact and full engagement of the personnel. Creating outstanding customer experiences starts with a common vision for premier customer-centric firms like Disney, and it requires an engaged and energetic staff that can translate individual interactions into fulfilling end-to-end customer journeys. The rationale of extending that commitment to support personnel within the company is compelling.
To acquire a sustainable competitive advantage, successful major firms are increasingly thinking about end-to-end reforms that focus on internal customers—their employees—as well as external ones. This isn’t a simple task. It can take two or three years to completely implement such initiatives for all internal customer journeys. An endeavor to transform support employees into a true customer service culture involves defined and ambitious objectives, dedicated resources, and involved sponsorship from C-suite leaders, rather than being a kind of employee satisfaction exercise, which is normally handled by the HR department.
The good news is that these activities can operate alongside externally facing customer-experience programs, complementing and reinforcing one another.
This Course Manual examines the advantages of involving support functions in customer-centric transformations and describes the approach and principles for successfully managing such initiatives.
The intersection of customer and employee experience
For years, we’ve heard of EX in relation to HR platforms, but it’s now spread throughout the corporate landscape as a result of the influence of remote work. Brands like Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others are talking about how their platforms solve EX as if it were a brand-new category that emerged in the previous year, but it isn’t. Enabling your staff has always been critical to successful IT transformation and customer experience.
Regardless of how good your customer-facing app is or how efficient your supply chain is, your employees make or break your company. Keeping employees happy is equally as important as keeping consumers pleased for your business to run smoothly. Indeed, because your staff are your product, this is an extremely important notion for service-based businesses.
You already know what employees want, whether you realize it or not, because it’s the same thing that customers want: a terrific experience. However, if you don’t give your employees the experience they require, they’ll disconnect and go, just like dissatisfied customers.
Consider how much time and money your company invests in the client experience. Businesses want to know who their consumers are and what they want, so they invest money and effort in market research, surveys, and analytics, then use the information to make changes and updates. This type of marketing technique is brought to your internal organizations using EX platforms.
HR departments are conducting market research on their internal consumers when they send out employee surveys. Non-HR EX platforms are now taking it a step further by using passively acquired data on how employees are using their products to gain quantitative insights about their behavior.
Course Manual 8: Modernization Strategy
Moving away from outdated systems and toward newer technologies gives businesses a competitive advantage in today’s digital world.
What is IT modernization?
IT modernization is a broad term that refers to any attempt by a company to embrace, adapt, or improve its technology.
The steps required in an IT modernization project will differ depending on the company’s industry, size, budget, workforce requirements, and customer expectations, as well as where they are in the digital transformation process. However, these projects generally entail a shift away from older technology and toward new technologies that streamline, simplify, and/or automate the processes and procedures that keep the business running.
While modernization is practically necessary in order to flourish in our increasingly digital economy, these efforts are more likely to succeed when they are carefully planned in relation to current demands and long-term objectives. IT modernization that isn’t well-planned can end up posing more issues than benefits for colleagues and consumers. For example, if a company upgrades functional systems while leaving others that need to be overhauled, untouched. Or if it introduces new tools without providing proper training to the employees who will be using them.
You’ll learn foundational information in this Course Manual that can help you identify and evaluate key considerations for your own IT modernization journey, such as which aspects of your IT to upgrade, why change management is an important part of effective digital transformation, the challenges you might face, and the business outcomes you can aim for.
What is modern IT management?
In the long run, IT modernization decreases complexity, but in the transitional stage, it may necessitate a patchwork of management solutions for your evolving infrastructure, apps, devices, and users. Simultaneously, as with cybersecurity, digital transformation provides opportunity to move toward more centralized and streamlined management tools and procedures.
Data management is a highly fruitful field for modernization. Expanding visibility into and control over the data you collect is critical for optimizing processes, managing compliance, and adjusting to consumer expectations as your organization changes to meet the shifting demands of a digital economy. This is especially crucial if your company adopts advancements like the Internet of Things, which extend the pool of information you can access. In brief, current management tools and techniques allow you to more effectively and efficiently access, store, govern, and analyze data from a rising number of sources.
How does training fit into IT modernization?
Implementing new technology is only one aspect of IT modernization; it’s also critical to ensure that your end users understand how to make the most of those capabilities. Without sufficient preparation and training, even your most innovative teammates may be hesitant to adopt new solutions.
Working with professionals in Organizational Change Management (OCM) and Learning and Development (L&D) can assist your company navigate the digital transformation process by training your employees to jump right into the new technology you’ve encouraged them to use.
Not only can effective training help to foster technical innovation, but it also helps to facilitate innovative training methodologies. Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, traditional in-person learning was limited in 2020. While this quick transformation was frequently difficult, it also led to the refinement of many new training methods, such as virtual learning, immersive technology, video content, and mobile platforms. As a result, training programs are more adaptable, engaging, and audience-centric than ever before, increasing the chances that learners will assimilate the knowledge delivered throughout the training session.
IT modernization challenges
Modernizing IT is a top business priority, but companies frequently hit hurdles along the way. Internal IT departments must balance several conflicting goals, and long-term transformational projects may be pushed aside in favor of more pressing needs. For organizations with limited finances, people, and experience, the desire to allocate time and energy where it is most needed is very acute. Collaboration with an external partner can often assist firms in filling knowledge gaps, developing successful strategies, and achieving modernization more quickly – all while reducing the pressure on internal teams.
Even companies with a lot of internal and external resources can struggle to modernize if they don’t have a clear, comprehensive strategy in place. And, fear of new technology’s potential downsides — particularly in terms of staff adoption, industry compliance requirements, and cybersecurity threats — can deter firms from ever attempting to reap their benefits. Again, a trusted relationship can make it easier to develop a strategy that includes business objectives and required process changes into technology upgrade plans.
IT modernization outcomes
While IT modernization is a large task, it is also a key driver of corporate success in today’s digital age. When your company implements new technologies across its IT infrastructure, you can speed up workloads and establish the groundwork for greater data insights, streamlined procedures, and routine task automation. Upgrading devices, applications, and networks improves customer and employee experiences, resulting in increased brand loyalty and easier talent retention. And, with modern workforce technologies that enhance productivity and enable effective collaboration wherever and whenever they work, that talent can maximize their potential.
Patience, resources, experience, and an effective approach are required to achieve these business results through IT modernization, but the rewards are well worth the effort.
Course Manual 9: Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
Data Security and The future of IT Transformation
Companies are under pressure to adapt and transform as a result of continual technology breakthroughs, changes in work cultures, and rising market and customer demands. IT transformation is one of the most common changes.
Cyber digital transformation is not something that can be accomplished suddenly, as it requires a well-defined strategy from these corporate executives. Digital strategies are also a personalized process because no two businesses have the same needs, goals, assets, or technologies; yet, in order for a plan to be effective, it must have reinforced Cybersecurity in order to safely alter its digital environment. This is due to the necessity to stay relevant in a hyper-competitive corporate environment, which has arisen as a result of the new era of data analytics and artificial intelligence.
However, as more businesses accept these improvements, they become more vulnerable to Data Security Threats and weak Cybersecurity. More and more cybercrime stories are emerging about businesses losing millions of dollars as a result of Ransomware attacks or security breaches, prompting company executives to reconsider how to safeguard their digitization operations.
Almost all businesses are now looking for security solutions to prevent cyber-attacks and safeguard them from financial damages. This introduces a new problem for corporate leaders: developing a Cybersecurity Strategy to secure their data – cyber resilience.
Top Security Challenges of IT Transformation
The expanded attack surfaces and greater value of data are two of the most significant security challenges impeding the IT transformation process.
Because IT transformation and information processes are growing the quantity of data loads and applications, digitalization creates new network access points like mobile and cloud, which gives cybercriminals more opportunity to attack. Companies should consider if they are prepared to confront new risks before implementing new strategies or programs.
Data has essentially replaced oil in today’s world, which explains why security incidents such as data breaches are on the rise. Companies are becoming more conscious of data analytics as they learn how to use data for customer services by evaluating their behavior, markets, patterns, and so on. As a result, cyber-attackers are growing more interested in using or selling the data they have discovered. The fundamental drivers of digitalization, such as the expanding volume of structured and unstructured data, as well as the demand to access information at any time and from any location, are also driving data security concerns.
IT Transformation and Cybersecurity
Although speed is the primary goal of digitalization, it is also the primary risk that exposes businesses to security vulnerabilities because it compromises security controls and overlooks underlying risks when undergoing security transformation, as the rush to complete this transformation increases the risk of data breaches by 72 percent. Those dangers, on the other hand, can only be determined and foreseen when all of a company’s units – such as security, IT, procurement, administration, finance, and so on – work together.
Cybersecurity and Cybercrimes
Cybersecurity refers to the practice of safeguarding systems, software, devices, networks, and other digital assets from cyberattacks, illegal access, and other forms of cybercrime. Cybercrime is typically used to gain access to, alter, or delete sensitive data in order to disrupt corporate processes or even extort money from users.
Cybercrime has the potential to devastate companies of all sizes. Not only may these assaults cost businesses money, but they can also have a negative impact on brand loyalty if users believe their privacy is being violated or exposed. Users who believe their information is not being secured are more likely to take their business elsewhere – where they feel safe – which can result in a loss of sales and earnings for businesses. Not to mention that a cyberattack might result in legal ramifications, particularly in light of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulatory punishments.
All businesses, in all fields, have an obligation to ensure that their company is up to date on security threats (such as impersonations, data leaks, fraudulent e-mails and viruses, and even loss of intellectual property) and ransomware (malware that encrypts data and is only unlockable after the exchange of a specific fee), and that they have acquired the best methods to protect data – from training personnel to acquiring the best methods to protect data.
Customers entrust their data to businesses, and businesses must be well-equipped to secure that data, which can only be accomplished with the support of a smart cybersecurity strategy.
While organizations’ intentions are good when it comes to conquering security concerns while undergoing a cyber digital transformation, they will face a number of hurdles along the way — challenges that are specific to their industry.
Tackling data trust and transparency
For CIOs and other IT leaders, bringing their companies to this future state will necessitate an urgent focus on the data’s trustworthiness and transparency. According to Burke of Gartner, IT directors will be required to investigate such difficult areas as confidential computing, a catch-all term for technology that maximise security, limit the use of personal data, and allow individuals control over their data, in 2021.
Explainable AI (Artificial Intelligence), or AI that is trained to describe itself in words that the typical human can comprehend, will become more popular. Companies will also have to assure trustworthy AI, which is the notion of AI systems that are resilient in the face of change, safeguard people’s privacy, and are secure, as AI becomes increasingly important for comprehending and capitalizing on data.
Trust will have to be approached in ways that go beyond validating a particular component of data management, such as data provenance, governance, or compliance. They’ll have to persuade customers by explaining how their data is actually used. Employees, management, and regulators will all need to be convinced that the information gathered and used to make critical company decisions is reliable. Successful organizations will collaborate with consumers and employees to establish new data-driven business models and work patterns in the future.
The chain of trust for organizational data efforts, like IT security, is only as strong as its weakest link. Aside from the human element, establishing a data chain of trust will require the usage of encryption to securely share insights in AI models, as well as a slew of new technologies – and buzzwords – such as homomorphic encryption, trust fabrics, and federated deep learning.
This article examines a paradigm shift in how businesses, and ultimately all of us, manipulate, manage, and extract value from data. It starts with the necessity for businesses to improve their AI capabilities and ends with a vision of a future in which our digital identities have agency and certain unalienable rights.
Course Manual 10: Evolution of products, services and processes
The corporate agenda prioritizes IT transformation. Some businesses are nearing mass digitization of their processes and technologies, while others are just getting started.
Previously, transformation may have been evaluated by digitizing a paper-based process such as contract signature. In the past year, this has expanded to include everything related to remote working and virtualizing the workplace, with a focus on securely accessing cloud-based apps.
As a result of the quick turnaround, firms have done the best they can with the tools and resources they have. Even those business owners who were previously concerned have embraced IT transformation and succeeded thanks to technology and vendor advancements.
In practice, end-to-end customer experience optimization, operational flexibility, and innovation, as well as the development of new revenue sources and information-powered ecosystems of value, are key drivers and goals of IT transformation, leading to business model transformations and new forms of digital processes. However, before getting there, it’s critical to address internal obstacles, such as legacy systems and process disconnects, as internal goals are unavoidable for the next phases.
Business process optimization is critical in IT transformation initiatives, and it is a combination of customer-facing and internal goals in most industries and cases today.
Internet retailers may make critical modifications to their e-commerce websites in hours, but brick-and-mortar retailers can take three months or longer. Suppliers of cloud-based enterprise software can upgrade their solutions in a matter of days or weeks. Traditional business software organizations, on the other hand, require months.
Why can’t established businesses keep up with their Internet-based competitors? Because of their constrained enterprise architecture, which is the underlying design and administration of the technological platforms and capabilities that support a company’s business strategy.
The enterprise architecture in traditional companies typically reflects a bygone era, when it was not necessary for companies to shift their business strategies, release new products and services, and incorporate new business processes at hyper speed.
Consider that until this decade, mobile devices, the Internet of Things, and big data and analytics platforms weren’t crucial for competing in the marketplace. Companies did not have an acute need to continually infuse new IT-enabled business capabilities into their operations.
They do now.
Traditional companies must adopt a much different approach to designing and managing enterprise architecture to compete against digital-born companies—a model some call “perpetual evolution,” because it emphasizes continuous changes to and modular design of business capabilities as well as the technologies that support them. This method incorporates a number of well-known enterprise architectural frameworks but connects them in a novel way. It forces CEOs to take a broad view of their digital capabilities and technology while also managing them in a way that minimizes or eliminates interdependencies while emphasizing speed.
Course Manual 11: Digitization of The Business
You’ve undoubtedly figured out that IT transformation is the driving force behind business growth of all types and sizes. It is crucial to note, however, that it is not limited to large corporations.
In the corporate sector, digitization has become a buzzword, with more and more organizations realizing the value of transforming information to a digital version. The usage of PDFs, graphics, sound, and signaling are some of the most common instances. But why are businesses suddenly embracing digitization?
Success factors
Companies in almost every industry can benefit from the practices of organizations that have done so successfully.
Start at the end state and work back
A process can often be substantially redesigned thanks to digitization; for example, merging automated decision making with self-service can eliminate manual operations. Successful digitization efforts begin by imagining the future state of each process without regard for existing constraints—for example, reducing the turnaround time of a process from days to minutes. Constraints (for example, legally needed checks) can be reintroduced once a convincing future state has been specified. Companies should not be afraid to put each constraint to the test. Many of these are business fallacies that can be easily debunked by talking to customers or regulators.
Tackle the end-to-end customer experience
Digitizing specific stages of the customer experience may improve productivity and address some pressing customer issues, but it will never create a genuinely seamless experience, and as a result, it may leave tremendous potential on the table. To tackle an end-to-end process like customer onboarding, process-digitization teams will need help from all departments engaged in the customer experience. Not least to challenge traditional opinion, the final customer should be heavily involved. To do so, some companies are forming start-up-style cross-functional groups that bring together all employees involved in the end-to-end client experience, including IT developers. The mission of the cross-functional unit is to question the status quo. Members are frequently grouped together to promote communication and ensure a true team effort.
Build capabilities
Since digitization skills are in short supply, successful initiatives place a premium on developing internal capabilities. The idea is to establish a center of excellence with highly experienced personnel who can be relied upon to quickly digitize processes. Even so, firms frequently have to look outside the company for new skill sets and jobs, such as data scientists or user-experience designers. Given the importance of the transformation, the initial managers chosen to lead it should be carefully chosen, well-respected within the business, and willing to commit for an extended length of time. It’s also critical that the team has the expertise to build the appropriate technological components in a modular manner so that they may be reused across processes and economies of scale are maximized.
Move quickly
Traditional IT-intensive initiatives pay off only at the end of the project, which can be years after it begins. However, digitizing end-to-end processes one at a time can enhance performance in as little as three to five months. Complex IT difficulties, such as legacy-systems integration, can take longer to complete, but there are solutions to avoid delays. One industrial company, for example, employed low-cost offshore personnel to rekey data between systems, allowing a new digital customer procedure to be brought up for usage with pilot clients while a robust IT interface was being constructed in parallel. The risk associated with the integration effort was decreased, and the return was accelerated as a result of this method.
It’s not always easy to move swiftly. More often than not, the bottleneck is caused by business decision-making rather than IT development. That is why, in order to align all stakeholders, digitization efforts require significant board-level backing, whereas all other choices should be assigned to the project team.
Roll in, not out
In a traditional deployment, a new product is gradually rolled out to existing user teams across several sites. However, due of the drastic changes in processes and supporting organizations, a different approach may be required when firms embark on digitalization. Telecommunications salespeople, for example, may prefer that clients apply for services through the existing retail system rather than using self-serve kiosks. Bank credit underwriters may choose to analyze automatically approved applications if they do not trust automated algorithms. In these circumstances, it might be easier to create a new organizational unit to manage the new digital process, then hire people to work in it while simultaneously increasing the volume of work it handles. This makes the shift to the digital process much easier by avoiding the need to waste a lot of energy on changing old routines and practices. The new organizational unit will have “swallowed” all of the required staff from the older units by the time all process volume has moved to the new digital process.
Companies that digitize procedures can boost their profits while delighting their customers. The value at stake varies depending on the business model and starting point, but it can be evaluated by allocating expenses to end-to-end procedures and comparing to peers. Organizations can do one or two pilots to kick-start the strategy and establish capabilities and momentum, and then scale up quickly.
Course Manual 12: Personalization guides the customer
Consumer expectations and priorities will continue to fluctuate as they struggle with their “new normal” and the rapid rate at which it unfolds. Companies and brands must produce contextualized and distinctive offers and experiences that directly correspond to consumers’ requirements in the present to remain relevant and helpful in these tough times.
Companies must now, more than ever, reach customers where they are
“Personalization” is a term that has been around for a long time. Companies and brands have long sought to better engage their most valued customers by sending personalized messages and providing personalized experiences. Despite these efforts, there is still a disconnect between corporations’ efforts to build highly tailored experiences for customers and what they really get. According to a recent Forrester report titled “Personalization Demystified,” while 90 percent of companies regard personalization as critical or very important to their business strategies, only 39 percent of consumers report receiving relevant brand communications and only 41% report receiving valuable offers.
Companies see customization as a succession of content-focused projects (e.g., a marketing-led effort to deliver relevant ads to customers through an app), rather than an ongoing enterprise-wide journey fuelled by continuous learning and improvement, which explains the gap between purpose and reality. Companies risk creating a fragmented consumer experience that may come across as unnecessary, redundant, or even annoying without a comprehensive approach to personalization – supported by underlying organizational structure, culture, and tech & data strategy best suited to enable it.
Imagine if, in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, merchants could communicate real-time data regarding the availability of goods at your local store location via their app, as well as funnel pertinent information and offers tailored to your location. Your pharmacy, for example, could share hyperlocal guidance based on your past purchase history with a unified view of customer data across the enterprise (e.g., you’re due for a refill of allergy medication but your local store is out of stock; we can deliver it directly to your home from an alternate location).
It will take time to enable a best-in-class enterprise-wide journey, whether your business is just beginning to establish a personalized strategy, is reasonably advanced, or is in the process of transforming in light of the current epidemic. Companies should consider short-term measures to speed enhancements to their current state personalization initiatives, in line with a longer-term goal, given the urgency and volume of customer need right now.
Align your brand’s “North Star” to personalization opportunities for “quick wins”
Companies must transition from a campaign-centric attitude to an enterprise-wide approach, unified by a single vision for the future state of customer experience (CX), as a vital first step. If your company hasn’t already created a purpose-driven CX “North Star” for the enterprise, try bringing together representatives from several departments (such as sales, marketing, customer support, IT, and so on) to collaborate on it.
For example, a big food and beverage shop with a hyper-local brand vision developed a CX North Star strategy that focuses on creating unique experiences for every customer who enters through their door or goes onto their app. The retailer moved backwards from that future state CX vision to build a roadmap to close holes in their company, such as holistic offerings, marketing, and services. They can now swiftly change the sequence in which they address these gaps in response to changes in customer and company needs.
Consider where you might be able to fast track “quick wins” that will dramatically improve the experience for your client within the next 1-2 months if you’ve established an enterprise-wide North Star and an initial roadmap to get there. Given that the majority of clients in 2021 were adhering to quarantine instructions and staying at home, many motor insurance companies were rewarding accounts based on usage data in order to develop connections during those tough times. Rapidly discover these “quick win” opportunities by conducting a prioritization grid exercise with a cross-functional group of decision-makers, prioritizing the activities that have the largest impact on customers and that are feasible to bring to market within 60 days.
Resist the want to stray from your long-term North Star approach. Rather, speed up important workstreams to deliver a prototype to market rapidly that provides demonstrable value to customers, then refine as needed based on their input.
Avoid one-size-fits-all mass-market services and promotions
Empathy – which means different things to different individuals – should be the starting point for companies when dealing with their customers. Ensure that any communication you send maintains your company’s reputation as a reliable source of information, products, and services. Promotions for an at-home spa experience will elicit significantly different reactions from a middle-income parent of two living in a small New York City apartment and a high-income single adult spending more time at home than travelling.
Examine your promotion and engagement efforts from the previous six months and think about how you might improve them swiftly based on new consumer behaviour trends. Consider how you may fine-tune your target population segmentation, test improved engagement tactics, and use the information to guide your longer-term enterprise-wide personalization strategy.
Curriculum
Leading IT Transformation – Workshop 1 – Future-State Design
- Customer Focus
- Organizational Structure
- Change Management and Cultural Transformation
- Transformational Leadership
- Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
- Integration of All Data Systems
- Internal Customer Experience
- Modernization Strategy
- Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
- Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
- Digitization of The Business
- Personalization Guides The Customer
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling on the Leading IT Transformation corporate training program. You will be learning through our unique facilitation via distance-learning method, which will enable you to practically implement everything that you learn academically. The methods and materials used in your program have been designed and developed to ensure that you derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible. We hope that you find the program challenging and fun to do. However, if you have never been a distance-learner before, you may be experiencing some trepidation at the task before you. So we will get you started by giving you some basic information and guidance on how you can make the best use of the modules, how you should manage the materials and what you should be doing as you work through them. This guide is designed to point you in the right direction and help you to become an effective distance-learner. Take a few hours or so to study this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students, while making notes, before you start to study in earnest.
Study environment
You will need to locate a quiet and private place to study, preferably a room where you can easily be isolated from external disturbances or distractions. Make sure the room is well-lit and incorporates a relaxed, pleasant feel. If you can spoil yourself within your study environment, you will have much more of a chance to ensure that you are always in the right frame of mind when you do devote time to study. For example, a nice fire, the ability to play soft soothing background music, soft but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if possible and a good size desk with a comfortable chair. Make sure that your family know when you are studying and understand your study rules. Your study environment is very important. The ideal situation, if at all possible, is to have a separate study, which can be devoted to you. If this is not possible then you will need to pay a lot more attention to developing and managing your study schedule, because it will affect other people as well as yourself. The better your study environment, the more productive you will be.
Study tools & rules
Try and make sure that your study tools are sufficient and in good working order. You will need to have access to a computer, scanner and printer, with access to the internet. You will need a very comfortable chair, which supports your lower back, and you will need a good filing system. It can be very frustrating if you are spending valuable study time trying to fix study tools that are unreliable, or unsuitable for the task. Make sure that your study tools are up to date. You will also need to consider some study rules. Some of these rules will apply to you and will be intended to help you to be more disciplined about when and how you study. This distance-learning guide will help you and after you have read it you can put some thought into what your study rules should be. You will also need to negotiate some study rules for your family, friends or anyone who lives with you. They too will need to be disciplined in order to ensure that they can support you while you study. It is important to ensure that your family and friends are an integral part of your study team. Having their support and encouragement can prove to be a crucial contribution to your successful completion of the program. Involve them in as much as you can.
Successful distance-learning
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes or workshops, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. But unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s responsibility, with a distance-learning program, to ensure that they manage their own study contribution. This requires strong self-discipline and self-motivation skills and there must be a clear will to succeed. Those students who are used to managing themselves, are good at managing others and who enjoy working in isolation, are more likely to be good distance-learners. It is also important to be aware of the main reasons why you are studying and of the main objectives that you are hoping to achieve as a result. You will need to remind yourself of these objectives at times when you need to motivate yourself. Never lose sight of your long-term goals and your short-term objectives. There is nobody available here to pamper you, or to look after you, or to spoon-feed you with information, so you will need to find ways to encourage and appreciate yourself while you are studying. Make sure that you chart your study progress, so that you can be sure of your achievements and re-evaluate your goals and objectives regularly.
Self-assessment
Appleton Greene training programs are in all cases post-graduate programs. Consequently, you should already have obtained a business-related degree and be an experienced learner. You should therefore already be aware of your study strengths and weaknesses. For example, which time of the day are you at your most productive? Are you a lark or an owl? What study methods do you respond to the most? Are you a consistent learner? How do you discipline yourself? How do you ensure that you enjoy yourself while studying? It is important to understand yourself as a learner and so some self-assessment early on will be necessary if you are to apply yourself correctly. Perform a SWOT analysis on yourself as a student. List your internal strengths and weaknesses as a student and your external opportunities and threats. This will help you later on when you are creating a study plan. You can then incorporate features within your study plan that can ensure that you are playing to your strengths, while compensating for your weaknesses. You can also ensure that you make the most of your opportunities, while avoiding the potential threats to your success.
Accepting responsibility as a student
Training programs invariably require a significant investment, both in terms of what they cost and in the time that you need to contribute to study and the responsibility for successful completion of training programs rests entirely with the student. This is never more apparent than when a student is learning via distance-learning. Accepting responsibility as a student is an important step towards ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program. It is easy to instantly blame other people or factors when things go wrong. But the fact of the matter is that if a failure is your failure, then you have the power to do something about it, it is entirely in your own hands. If it is always someone else’s failure, then you are powerless to do anything about it. All students study in entirely different ways, this is because we are all individuals and what is right for one student, is not necessarily right for another. In order to succeed, you will have to accept personal responsibility for finding a way to plan, implement and manage a personal study plan that works for you. If you do not succeed, you only have yourself to blame.
Planning
By far the most critical contribution to stress, is the feeling of not being in control. In the absence of planning we tend to be reactive and can stumble from pillar to post in the hope that things will turn out fine in the end. Invariably they don’t! In order to be in control, we need to have firm ideas about how and when we want to do things. We also need to consider as many possible eventualities as we can, so that we are prepared for them when they happen. Prescriptive Change, is far easier to manage and control, than Emergent Change. The same is true with distance-learning. It is much easier and much more enjoyable, if you feel that you are in control and that things are going to plan. Even when things do go wrong, you are prepared for them and can act accordingly without any unnecessary stress. It is important therefore that you do take time to plan your studies properly.
Management
Once you have developed a clear study plan, it is of equal importance to ensure that you manage the implementation of it. Most of us usually enjoy planning, but it is usually during implementation when things go wrong. Targets are not met and we do not understand why. Sometimes we do not even know if targets are being met. It is not enough for us to conclude that the study plan just failed. If it is failing, you will need to understand what you can do about it. Similarly if your study plan is succeeding, it is still important to understand why, so that you can improve upon your success. You therefore need to have guidelines for self-assessment so that you can be consistent with performance improvement throughout the program. If you manage things correctly, then your performance should constantly improve throughout the program.
Study objectives & tasks
The first place to start is developing your program objectives. These should feature your reasons for undertaking the training program in order of priority. Keep them succinct and to the point in order to avoid confusion. Do not just write the first things that come into your head because they are likely to be too similar to each other. Make a list of possible departmental headings, such as: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing and Production. Then brainstorm for ideas by listing as many things that you want to achieve under each heading and later re-arrange these things in order of priority. Finally, select the top item from each department heading and choose these as your program objectives. Try and restrict yourself to five because it will enable you to focus clearly. It is likely that the other things that you listed will be achieved if each of the top objectives are achieved. If this does not prove to be the case, then simply work through the process again.
Study forecast
As a guide, the Appleton Greene Leading IT Transformation corporate training program should take 12-18 months to complete, depending upon your availability and current commitments. The reason why there is such a variance in time estimates is because every student is an individual, with differing productivity levels and different commitments. These differentiations are then exaggerated by the fact that this is a distance-learning program, which incorporates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program. Consequently all of the project studies are real, which means that important decisions and compromises need to be made. You will want to get things right and will need to be patient with your expectations in order to ensure that they are. We would always recommend that you are prudent with your own task and time forecasts, but you still need to develop them and have a clear indication of what are realistic expectations in your case. With reference to your time planning: consider the time that you can realistically dedicate towards study with the program every week; calculate how long it should take you to complete the program, using the guidelines featured here; then break the program down into logical modules and allocate a suitable proportion of time to each of them, these will be your milestones; you can create a time plan by using a spreadsheet on your computer, or a personal organizer such as MS Outlook, you could also use a financial forecasting software; break your time forecasts down into manageable chunks of time, the more specific you can be, the more productive and accurate your time management will be; finally, use formulas where possible to do your time calculations for you, because this will help later on when your forecasts need to change in line with actual performance. With reference to your task planning: refer to your list of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to achieve your program objectives; with reference to your time plan, calculate when each task should be implemented; remember that you are not estimating when your objectives will be achieved, but when you will need to focus upon implementing the corresponding tasks; you also need to ensure that each task is implemented in conjunction with the associated training modules which are relevant; then break each single task down into a list of specific to do’s, say approximately ten to do’s for each task and enter these into your study plan; once again you could use MS Outlook to incorporate both your time and task planning and this could constitute your study plan; you could also use a project management software like MS Project. You should now have a clear and realistic forecast detailing when you can expect to be able to do something about undertaking the tasks to achieve your program objectives.
Performance management
It is one thing to develop your study forecast, it is quite another to monitor your progress. Ultimately it is less important whether you achieve your original study forecast and more important that you update it so that it constantly remains realistic in line with your performance. As you begin to work through the program, you will begin to have more of an idea about your own personal performance and productivity levels as a distance-learner. Once you have completed your first study module, you should re-evaluate your study forecast for both time and tasks, so that they reflect your actual performance level achieved. In order to achieve this you must first time yourself while training by using an alarm clock. Set the alarm for hourly intervals and make a note of how far you have come within that time. You can then make a note of your actual performance on your study plan and then compare your performance against your forecast. Then consider the reasons that have contributed towards your performance level, whether they are positive or negative and make a considered adjustment to your future forecasts as a result. Given time, you should start achieving your forecasts regularly.
With reference to time management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual time taken in your study plan; consider your successes with time-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; consider your failures with time-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to time planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your time expectations. You need to be consistent with your time management, otherwise you will never complete your studies. This will either be because you are not contributing enough time to your studies, or you will become less efficient with the time that you do allocate to your studies. Remember, if you are not in control of your studies, they can just become yet another cause of stress for you.
With reference to your task management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan; consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to task planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your task expectations. You need to be consistent with your task management, otherwise you will never know whether you are achieving your program objectives or not.
Keeping in touch
You will have access to qualified and experienced professors and tutors who are responsible for providing tutorial support for your particular training program. So don’t be shy about letting them know how you are getting on. We keep electronic records of all tutorial support emails so that professors and tutors can review previous correspondence before considering an individual response. It also means that there is a record of all communications between you and your professors and tutors and this helps to avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. If you have a problem relating to the program, share it with them via email. It is likely that they have come across the same problem before and are usually able to make helpful suggestions and steer you in the right direction. To learn more about when and how to use tutorial support, please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide. This will help you to ensure that you are making the most of tutorial support that is available to you and will ultimately contribute towards your success and enjoyment with your training program.
Work colleagues and family
You should certainly discuss your program study progress with your colleagues, friends and your family. Appleton Greene training programs are very practical. They require you to seek information from other people, to plan, develop and implement processes with other people and to achieve feedback from other people in relation to viability and productivity. You will therefore have plenty of opportunities to test your ideas and enlist the views of others. People tend to be sympathetic towards distance-learners, so don’t bottle it all up in yourself. Get out there and share it! It is also likely that your family and colleagues are going to benefit from your labors with the program, so they are likely to be much more interested in being involved than you might think. Be bold about delegating work to those who might benefit themselves. This is a great way to achieve understanding and commitment from people who you may later rely upon for process implementation. Share your experiences with your friends and family.
Making it relevant
The key to successful learning is to make it relevant to your own individual circumstances. At all times you should be trying to make bridges between the content of the program and your own situation. Whether you achieve this through quiet reflection or through interactive discussion with your colleagues, client partners or your family, remember that it is the most important and rewarding aspect of translating your studies into real self-improvement. You should be clear about how you want the program to benefit you. This involves setting clear study objectives in relation to the content of the course in terms of understanding, concepts, completing research or reviewing activities and relating the content of the modules to your own situation. Your objectives may understandably change as you work through the program, in which case you should enter the revised objectives on your study plan so that you have a permanent reminder of what you are trying to achieve, when and why.
Distance-learning check-list
Prepare your study environment, your study tools and rules.
Undertake detailed self-assessment in terms of your ability as a learner.
Create a format for your study plan.
Consider your study objectives and tasks.
Create a study forecast.
Assess your study performance.
Re-evaluate your study forecast.
Be consistent when managing your study plan.
Use your Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) for tutorial support.
Make sure you keep in touch with those around you.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Leading IT Transformation corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Leading IT Transformation program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Leading IT Transformation corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Leading IT Transformation corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Leading IT Transformation Specialist (ALITTS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Leading IT Transformation – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Capgemini Consulting
“Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for Billion-Dollar Organizations: Findings from Phase 1 of the Digital Transformation study conducted by the Mit Center for Digital Business and Capgemini Consulting.
How Can You Make Your Digital Journey Successful?
Successful digital transformations in our study used a common set of elements (see Figure 12). Each is a lever executives can use to initiate and drive digital transformation in their organizations. Leaders diagnose the potential value of existing corporate assets and build a transformative vision for the future. Then, they invest in skills and initiatives to make the vision a reality. Fundamental to the transformation is effective communication and governance to ensure that the firm is moving in the right direction. These elements work together in an iterative approach – constantly communicating and listening to re-envision and further implement new types of digital transformation. Senior executives drive digital transformation through an iterative three-step process: 1. Envision the digital future for your firm. 2. Invest in digital initiatives and skills. 3. Lead the change from the top.
6.1.
Envision the digital future for your firm Many digital transformation initiatives fail to capture all of the value available to them because their vision is not transformative. Only the top of the company can create a compelling vision of the future and communicate it throughout the organization. Successful digital transformation does not occur bottom up. The true value of transformation often comes from seeing value across silos and then helping everyone else see that value.
Identify and diagnose strategic assets
Large companies survive major transitions not by radically replacing the old with the new, but rather by transforming some of their existing resources and competencies for the new environment. While this sometimes involves changing leadership or replacing assets, it usually involves reassigning or adapting assets and realigning or re-motivating employees. However, it also requires understanding when traditional assets and sources of advantage no longer provide value.
Digital transformation is the same. Your company will thrive in digital transformation not by doing something completely new, but by taking advantage of your powerful capabilities to gain advantage through digitization. But that requires thoughtful diagnosis: what assets will be useful in a digitally transformed world?
Interviewees, without being asked, often identified important assets that could help or hinder their transformations. These strategic assets include:
• Sales force: A strong source of customer loyalty is the set of relationships cultivated by a strong sales force. Digital initiatives can threaten to disintermediate salespeople, leading to channel conflict. However, digital transformation can also be used to enhance those relationships, such as a logistics firm that can use demand data in one part of the world to provide customers in another part of the world with forecasts of trends that will hit them soon. In addition to sales people, front line employees often are an important face to the customer, as well as having important knowledge about how business is done.
• Point of sale and distribution channels: Stores are often a strong source of location-based advantage, even in a digital world. In other cases, firms with a strong warehouse and supply chain capabilities are able to use their distribution assets to disrupt the advantage of local competitors.
• Products and content: Media firms find their content is a strong asset that can be reused in digital environments. Product companies often find they can build new digital business around strong products. An electronics manufacturer is building energy management solutions around its highly successful devices for the commercial buildings market, and a manufacturer of expensive long-lived transportation products is building services that digitally diagnose and help to maintain those devices.
• Product innovation: A high-tech materials firm has engineering capabilities that few other firms can match in its niche markets. It has the opportunity to use digital transformation to connect its engineers more closely with global manufacturers. An apparel firm has world-class fashion design talent. It uses digital technology to connect designers closer to manufacturers, speeding the design-to-market cycle time while enabling designers to change designs at will.
• Partnership network: Strong partnerships can be a key lever for transformation. Networks of exclusive or trusted relationships can enable firms to combine different expertise and deliver powerful new operating models. A mortgage company, in switching from a single value chain link to a value chain orchestrator, benefited greatly from its partnership assets. Partners could have refused the idea out of fear of direct competition, but they cooperated in the project because of years of working together on many financial products and transactions.
• Brand: Companies with a strong brand are able to leverage it in related offerings. Through mobile web, social media, new digital businesses and other digital initiatives these companies can extend and strengthen their brands, building additional points of contact with customers.
• Customer knowledge: Across the years, companies had gathered more and more knowledge about customers. Today, some are reaching a point where they can start envisioning the next step, monetizing this relationship to launch new products, enhance customer relationships or augment sales via customer-segmentation.
• Culture: Some firms are able to use culture as a powerful asset. Executives in a manufacturing firm found that the company’s historically entrepreneurial culture made digital transformation easier. Employees were willing to embrace operational changes and strategic partnerships as part of the new vision. An airport authority noted that the nation’s collegial culture made it easier to engage in transformation. Meanwhile, another airport authority found that its unionized culture restricted change.
Create a transformative vision Successful digital transformation comes from envisioning new ways that digital technology improves performance and customer satisfaction, not just trying to find a use for the new technologies. As we described earlier, many companies that are doing experiments in mobile marketing, social media, or analytics find that they can be quickly stymied by organizational boundaries or by culture issues. Often the problems arise through vision focused on technology rather than different ways of operating. More often they are limited by a vision that is incremental instead of transformative.
Start with an overarching vision of the what, not the how: “customer experience transformation” not “mobile marketing” or “social media.” Then support the message through consistent communication. Each specific element of the transformation can then be placed in a context of the broader vision.
This will also highlight when issues such as a single customer profile or a coordinated messaging approach may be important in reaching the vision. Our interviews showed visions that were internally focused, externally focused, or bridging the two. Some visions were focused on specific business units, while others extended across the enterprise. Another element of the vision is the relationship between new and existing businesses. Companies in the study had visions that included launching new businesses, digitally improving existing businesses, or creating an overarching vision for a transformed company.”
To continue reading this study, please visit:
University of Cambridge
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Digital Transformation Process: How Do Businesses Formulate and Implement Their Digital Business Transformation Strategies? Faced with multiple digital transformation challenges, companies have recognized the need to govern this complex endeavor by formulating and executing a clear strategy to keep pace with the new digital reality (Matt et al. 2014). This is supported by various stakeholders within organizations: executives see the potential of emerging digital technologies, and yet they are unclear about how to achieve their transformation goals. Experts in the business world are all in agreement that the ability to digitally reinvent the business is not just about the technologies being adopted, but rather about a radical strategic and cultural change within the organization (Von Leipzig et al. 2017), and corporate employees equally believe in the central role that strategy plays for successfully adopting new technologies (Fitzgerald et al. 2013). Both levels, individual and organizational, are therefore advised to comprehend this strategic imperative behind any digital integration and transformation attempts (Kaufman & Horton 2015). Despite the paramount importance of formulating a dedicated strategy that integrates all the prioritization, coordination mechanisms and implementation steps of digital transformation, academia still fails to provide a coherent guideline that addresses a company-wide transformation strategy (Matt et al. 2014; Hess et al. 2016). “We need strategic frameworks that are aimed at deliberately harnessing the unique capabilities of digital technology that are embedded into products to gain competitive advantage” (Yoo et al. 2010). This “growing sense of urgency about the need to craft successful strategies for the digital marketplace” (Kulatilaka & Venkatraman 2001) makes it apparent that the concept of a company-level digital transformation seems to hinge on a strategy perspective, which is needed in the literature, as well as in practice. Therefore, this review continues to focus on the strategic perspective of a DT and the following sections explore this in more detail.
Before introducing the digital transformation strategy and positioning it within the hierarchy of companies’ strategies, we briefly touch upon the relevant strategy levels recognized in the literature, as shown in Figure 6. These levels are the most commonly met in the world of business. It is useful to identify the strategy hierarchy for each situation, since strategic choices can be tempered or restricted depending on the members involved at each level (Mills et al. 1995).
Figure 6: Three Major Strategy Levels
Digital Transformation Strategy Definition A digital transformation strategy is considered to be an overarching and company-wide strategy guiding an organization in its entire digital transformation journey. It therefore surpasses functional thinking and holistically tackles the opportunities and risks associated with the enabling digital technologies (Singh & Hess 2017). Its distinctive nature of being inclusive of all business segments and company-spanning characteristics necessitates several alignment mechanisms: first, alignment with the business strategy; and, second, alignment with other operational or functional strategies to act as a unifying link between different strategy levels within companies (Matt et al. 2014; Kaufman & Horton 2015; Hess et al. 2016). Digital transformation dimensions also include digital activities and changes to products, services and business models, thus going beyond the firms’ operational boundaries. Consequently, the scope of a digital transformation strategy should be more broadly designed, and because of the unchartered waters of many transformation initiatives, the strategy should be subject to a continuous reassessment regarding its underlying assumptions, as well as its progress (Matt et al. 2014).
The literature accentuates the difference between a digital transformation strategy, IT strategy and digital business strategy. Venkatraman et al. (1993) articulate three dimensions as inherent in an IT strategy, namely the IT scope, systemic competencies and IT governance, meaning that it typically concentrates on the efficient management of IT infrastructure and application systems, with limited impact on driving innovations. The resulting system-centric focus regarding the future use of technologies is considered to be hindering the product-centric and customer-centric transformational opportunities crossing firms’ boundaries in a digital economy (Matt et al. 2014). A digital transformation strategy, on the other hand, impacts companies more broadly and allows for transformational opportunities within business models, products, processes and customers. It is further argued that the previous IT strategy knowledge cannot simply be transferred to a digital transformation context (Hess et al. 2016).
With the rise of digital products, processes and services, Bharadwaj et al. (2013) define digital business strategy as an “organizational strategy formulated and executed by leveraging digital resources to create differential value”, which revamps the role of IT strategy from a functional strategy to one that is fused with the business strategy. Although this strategy determines the desired future business opportunities based on the integration and use of new digital technologies, it does not provide guidelines regarding the transformational steps needed to reach the desired future state (Matt et al. 2014; Hess et al. 2016).
As a result of the lack of a coherent and rigorous definition of a digital transformation strategy found in the literature, we propose the following working definition and criteria for a digital transformation strategy. A digital transformation strategy is a company spanning strategy that is formulated to enable a company to incorporate the opportunities of the digital economy by leveraging digital resources and capabilities, and digitally transforming along multiple business dimensions: operational, customer focused and business models. It further:
a) Recognizes the fusion between the business strategy and IT strategy;
b) Translates the digital layer of a business strategy to the various functional strategies and acts as a missing link;
c) Provides specific transformational guidelines to reach the future state; and
d) Considers broader organizational restructuring requirements and acquisitions.
Thus, the discussed characteristics, as well as the necessary alignment mechanisms of a digital transformation strategy, position it at the level of a business strategy in a company’s strategy hierarchy. This allows it to incorporate the vast opportunities that the digital environment and the readily accessible digital technologies present (Sebastian et al. 2017), as depicted in Figure 7. It also illustrates the necessary functional alignments that the digital transformation strategy fulfills.
Figure 7: Positioning Digital Transformation Strategy
3.1 Digital Transformation Strategy Content: What Decision Areas are Relevant?
The design of a digital transformation strategy requires companies to make appropriate strategic decisions in several key areas and this section synthesizes the relevant ones encountered in the literature, as summarized in Figure 8. We categorize the content according to the strategy level being addressed. We further propose that these strategic decision areas have to be incorporated into the strategy formulation process by making a set of deliberate choices to meet the long-term goals of the transformation endeavor.
Figure 8: Digital Transformation Strategy Content
From a business point of view, an initial business case has to be made, in which the long-term objectives need to be clear and also overweighing the mere pursuit of quick gains. Closely related to this are decisions about the potential need for an overall change readiness assessment in order to comprehend the current state of a company’s performance, and to identify potential problems, vulnerabilities, opportunities and the associated risks (Lawton 2015; Kaufman & Horton 2015). Furthermore, digital transformation implies changes in value creation, derived from the way in which adopted digital technologies alter the current business model. Companies are required to rethink the scope of their business and also identify potential new revenue streams from digitally enhanced products, services and customer interactions (Hess et al. 2016; Matt et al. 2014). They should also consider the integration of digital technologies with their core values and business goals to ensure a sustainable outcome (Kaufman & Horton 2015). Most importantly, academics emphasize the importance of establishing a common and clear vision across the entire organization to inform all the stakeholders where they are heading and to ensure the transformation’s future success (Chahal 2016; Fitzgerald et al. 2013; Westerman, Tannou et al. 2012; Webb 2013). Decisions will also involve how the vision will be set and who is going to communicate it to the rest of the organization.
Technological decisions are crucial when introducing new emerging technologies into companies. Among areas being explored here is the role that technologies play in the firm to achieve strategic goals. This can be divided into an enabling role for new business opportunities or a merely supportive one to fulfill current business requirements. Closely related to that is a company’s attitude towards new technologies and its ability to exploit them for future business goals. Firms usually fall into two broad categories: they either adopt established and widely used technology solutions and act as market followers or become the market leaders by innovating and introducing new technology solutions to the markets (Hess et al. 2016; Matt et al. 2014). This stems from investments in their capabilities to conceptualize how digital technologies can impact their business (Kane et al. 2015) and also requires dedicated change programs to ensure that the organization is concurrently evolving with the technologies (Webb 2013).
Numerous strategic decisions have to be taken in relation to changes in the interaction with customers. Companies are encouraged to investigate potentially new benefits created in their customer experience through digitally enhanced changes to the customer journey (Valdez-de-leon et al. 2016). This can be achieved by exploring all the customer touch-points and integrating the companies’ interactions across various digital, as well as physical, platforms (Berman 2012). Transforming the customer experience can also be accomplished through the introduction of digitally enhanced products and services (Hess et al. 2016; Matt et al. 2014; Valdez-de-leon et al. 2016). Additionally, investments in R&D can further help organizations develop digitized solutions to anticipate customer needs rather than merely responding to existing ones (Sebastian et al. 2017).
Managerial decision areas have a financial element, which evolves around choosing how to finance the digital transformation endeavor, after assessing the financial pressure on the current business (Hess et al. 2016; Matt et al. 2014). The focus on fostering innovation is also a critical element to be discussed (Kane et al. 2015; Lawton 2015), in which managers are encouraged to view digital innovation as an integral part of their strategy (Kaufman & Horton 2015). Agile and new flexible working, along with a consideration of a bottom-up innovation processes, should drive an ongoing digital transformation (Westerman, Tannou et al. 2012; Valdez-de-leon et al. 2016). Managers need to further be aware of the paramount importance that various capabilities play, namely, organizational, technology-based, product-related and digital capabilities (Kane et al. 2015; Matt et al. 2014; Westerman, Bonnet et al. 2012). Examining their firms’ strategic assets and capabilities through a digital lens may help managers pinpoint which existing assets can be leveraged, which capabilities can be used in new ways and whether or not new competencies are needed to be brought into the company (Westerman & Bonnet 2015; Hess et al. 2016; Ross et al. 2017). In their empirical work with large, old companies, Sebastian et al. (2017) reveal the importance of two technology-enabled assets that are necessary for a successful digital transformation: an operational backbone to ensure efficiency and reliability of core operations; and a digital service platform to support business agility and rapid innovations.
Various organizational decisions are also identified in the literature, in which companies are advised to take a closer look at the employees, culture, talent and skillset, and leadership. Companies should review the need for developing a collaborative work environment and ensure that the transformation project is staffed correctly (Kane et al. 2015; Matt et al. 2014). Employees are often assessed from a maturity point of view, in which their roles, expertise and capabilities are scrutinized (Von Leipzig et al. 2017). This enables companies to classify themselves into a category of digital maturity and also helps them to navigate their transformation in a structured manner. Further considerations are required regarding the necessary changes in the company’s culture, which are aimed at adapting it to work with new technologies rather than imposing these technologies on employees (Chahal 2016). Additional decisions are made around techniques for encouraging risk, creating the right digital mindset and helping employees to adapt quickly to change (Kane et al. 2015; Kaufman & Horton 2015). This cultural shift is considered to be the biggest challenge encountered in transformation related change programs (Webb 2013) and is also viewed as a critical success factor in technology-induced business transformations (Lawton 2015).
A digital transformation strategy formulation needs to further include decisions regarding securing people with the necessary skills and talent to be able to capitalize on the digital trends (Kane et al. 2015; Westerman, Tannou et al. 2012; Berman 2012). Action plans are taken upon assessing which organizational skills are affected (Matt et al. 2014), what skills changes are required (Hess et al. 2016) and whether internal training or new talent acquisition is necessary (Kaufman & Horton 2015). Kane et al. (2017) further recommend recognizing on-demand talent markets as strategic resources, balancing fulltime and part-time talent and creating an environment where the best people want to work.
Within the organizational decision areas is the criticality of the buy-in from senior leaders and the board (Chahal 2016), who are expected to articulate their vision to the staff and prepare the roadmap for future commitments (Fitzgerald et al. 2013). This top-down approach is preferable (Westerman, Tannou et al. 2012; Kane et al. 2015), and yet there is no clear answer as to which c-suite position should be in charge of the digital transformation strategy (Matt et al. 2014). Together with CIOs or even CEOs, new positions such as CDOs are also emerging as potential candidates for driving the transformation.
A pattern of other structural decisions is also articulated in the literature and involves the right internal governance, as well as external collaborations through partnerships or acquisitions. Internally, companies face multiple structural choices to support the execution of their digital transformation strategy and to make decisions regarding whether new operations will be incorporated into their existing structures or through new separate units (Valdez-de-leon et al. 2016; Hess et al. 2016). Establishing a strong company-wide coordination mechanism through communication and collaboration rules, along with the desired KPIs, are also of paramount importance to ensuring the firm is on the right path to transformation (Westerman et al. 2011; Von Leipzig et al. 2017).
The operational dimension of strategic decisions cannot be overlooked in digital transformation projects and mainly incorporates choices regarding necessary operational changes and adaptations to the current business processes (Hess et al. 2016; Webb 2013). Here companies have to make decisions based on mapping exercises to determine the processes that will be affected by the new technology integration (Matt et al. 2014). Organizations must also be primed to tightly infuse the use of new data into their processes and decision-making (Kane et al. 2015). They should be further equipped with the predictive capability to obtain certain insights from analytics and to leverage the data to optimize its digitally enabled supply chain and interaction with customers (Berman 2012). Ways to drive operational agility and efficiency can be achieved by determining points of vulnerabilities and addressing them (Kaufman & Horton 2015). Maturity models also exist to help companies assess the state and agility of their current processes, and to increase their digitalized operation (Valdez-de-leon et al. 2016; Von Leipzig et al. 2017).
A comprehensive digital transformation strategy needs to address the above-mentioned decision areas, and, depending on the company context, the right choices from various alternatives should be selected.”
To continue reading this paper, please visit:
https://cambridgeservicealliance.eng.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/2017NovPaper_Mariam.pdf
Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Customer Focus
Customer journey mapping for an operational future state
Only by adapting to changing consumer needs and continual technological innovation will a thorough IT transformation be successful. While transformation leaders often have a clear vision of the intended future state, different streams often have a deep understanding of their own particular components. Furthermore, BAU employees may have just a limited comprehension of the transformation vision. We’ll show you how to utilize customer journey mapping as a diagnostic and communication tool to solve these problems.
While the concept of customer journey mapping isn’t new, many organizations lack the rigour and clarity necessary to make this technique effective for diagnostics or communications. There are two ways to map out a customer’s journey: current state and clean sheet. In the diagnostic phase of a transformation, current state is evaluated to discover consumer and employee pain points and bottlenecks. Working backwards from the customer experience and identifying people, process, and technology changes to evolve the organizational design of the company, a clean sheet is used to imagine what the future state should look like.
Current state customer journey mapping
Companies can assess current touchpoints along the customer journey for the most important client segments using this method. Touchpoints that offer a positive or negative customer and employee experience should also be identified. Because the customer journey traverses across numerous organizational functions and silos by its very nature, areas of strength and weakness should always be documented to guarantee consistency in building the future state.
Align the current state employee experience to the same customer phases once the customer journey has been mapped, and identify supporting processes and technology. Internal handoffs should be scrutinized in detail to identify any bottlenecks, friction points, and inefficiencies that could result in a poor experience or value leakage.
Mapping processes and technology to the journey also highlights areas of the business where changes are needed to alleviate identified pain points and get the company closer to the intended customer and employee experience. A set of lead and lag metrics can be used to assess the scope of any issues and track any progress.
Clean sheet customer journey mapping
Organizations can gain a shared knowledge of anticipated changes at the operational level by starting with a clean sheet and drawing a thorough set of customer journeys matched to the target future state. Customer journey mapping on a clean sheet allows senior leaders to think outside the box, imagining how they want customers to perceive the company in an ideal world free of constraints like internal silos or technological constraints.
Map process technology and human interventions into the future state journey steps once the ideal customer and staff experience has been designed. The transitions in organizational assets and capabilities required to get from the current to the future state are guided – and informed – by this activity.
Finally, it’s critical to recall any known present condition pain points and double-check that they’ve been taken into account. The diagram below depicts the full range of processes that businesses can consider as part of the customer journey mapping process, which can be adapted to a particular industry or client.
Standardized Customer Journey
From present to future
Use insights from both current state and clean sheet customer journey mapping to create a fully customer-centric IT transformation. While clean sheet mapping paints a picture of the company’s future operating model, current state mapping serves as a reality check on where the company is right now. The company can then monitor progress throughout the transformation.
By using insights generated through customer journey mapping to steer the change from current to future states, businesses may stay focused on areas of maximum value from a customer, employee, and organizational standpoint.
Achieving executional excellence
There are three best practises for ensuring that insights from current state and clean sheet customer journey mapping are long-term established in the organization.
1. Be holistic
Ascertain that all initiatives are coordinated and centered on the desired client experience. IT transformation projects should remain customer-centric and end-to-end. Make sure the entire project is anchored by the anticipated future state client journey and avoid siloing the project into separate pieces of work.
2. Get into operational detail
Focus the journey mapping exercise on the front-end customer and employee experience, and obtain real value by translating this into people, process, and technology transformation implications. It’s critical to investigate current state pain points as well as future state modifications that will remedy them. Prioritizing and sequencing changes can be made easier by quantifying the value and impact on customer metrics like cost per transaction and response time.
3. Prioritise employee pain points
While identifying customer pain points through customer journey mapping is critical, addressing employee pain points using the same technique is just as crucial for driving understanding and alignment, get frontline staff to buy into the transformation, and allowing employees to improve customer experience.
Mapping the path to change
The alignment of ideal future state processes to the desired customer experience leads to shared understanding and alignment on the transformation’s direction. Focusing on the most pressing customer and employee issues will swiftly generate value and engage frontline employees in the change process.
Current-State vs. Future-State Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map has been seen by almost everyone in the UX industry at some point. A customer journey map is a valuable tool for tracing a customer’s journey from beginning to end. It covers the customer’s first interaction with the product, their engagement phase, and even long-term usage. When interacting with a product, customer journey maps can provide useful information into a user’s feelings, motivations, and questions. Customer journey maps are typically created in a similar manner and then displayed as an infographic. There is, however, a new and original take on the customer journey map that can provide clever insights into the customers’ trip and assist in the creation of a whole new experience.
The current-state journey mapping model is the one we’re all familiar with when it comes to customer journey mapping. Current-state journey mapping is primarily concerned with identifying and resolving the many pain points that occur during the consumer journey, from first contact to repeat usage. Customers as we know them are heavily influenced by this process, which relies on their previous behaviours, beliefs, and emotions. The idea is to sketch out the customer’s experience and then adjust it to better suit the customer’s needs and desires.
People have recently shifted their focus from current-state journey mapping to future-state journey mapping. Unlike current-state journey mapping, which focuses on fixing existing experiences, future-state journey mapping focuses on generating new ones for the user. Rather of addressing pain points or areas of difficulty, it focuses on unlocking new areas of client connection and value. This isn’t to say that current-state journey maps are no longer useful; they are still used as valuable information when building future-state journey maps. Future-state journey mapping is all about moving forward and generating new journeys for clients, as implied by the word “future.”
This may all seem complex, so here’s an explanation of how current-state journey mapping and future-state journey mapping differ:
Current-State Journey Map:
• Documented and shared organizational understanding of the customer experience from beginning to end.
• Focused on current customer interactions
• The foundation for building a current-state journey map is collected data
• They are founded on facts.
• Assists in the mapping of customer perceptions
• Enables incremental enhancements to the customer experience.
Future-State Journey Map:
• The goal is to instill new values and experiences in customers
• Assists in the investigation of customer expectations
• Rather than data, imagination and innovation are the driving forces
• Can be utilized to find innovative ways to improve the consumer experience
• Allows for subjective judgments rather than relying on empirical data
• Rather than focusing on their past experiences, customers’ wants and hopes are taken into account.
Future-state journey mapping is a novel, creative, and inventive approach to current-state journey mapping. Current-state journey mapping is still a valuable tool, and as previously indicated, it can substantially aid in the development of a future-state journey map. Future-state journey mapping focuses on building a completely new customer experience rather than improving an existing one. Future-state journey mapping is all about going forward and providing our consumers with unique and exciting new experiences.
Below are 4 easy steps that can be used to create your own future-state journey map:
1. Define
This is a standard phase in the building of any journey map. Before you begin, you must first describe the map’s business aim and identify the intended user. This will aid in visualizing the complete path for the user in question. Because the major purpose of future-state journey maps is to build a new customer journey, specify what that journey will entail and the steps required to complete it.
2. Pre-Work
This is where you get all of your ducks in a row so that you may create a journey map as efficiently as possible. Current-state journey maps can also be used as helpful reference points at this point. Reviewing existing journey maps for ideas and insight into how to develop a new sort of journey, as well as distinct pain points that may arise, can be beneficial during this ‘pre-work.’ This is also the stage in the process where you will recruit any participants who will be needed for later testing.
3. Create
This is where vision, creativity, and innovation take center stage. This is where ideas are discussed, customer empathy is developed, and participant testing takes place. Remember that future-state journey maps are guided by imagination rather than facts, so let your imagination run wild. While client experiences are vital, customers’ aspirations and hopes must also be considered. If this stage of the process feels overwhelming, consider using card sorting or affinity diagrams to arrange your creative thoughts.
4. Map
Now it is time to map the journey. Instead of identifying pain points and solutions as you would with current-state mapping, focus on transforming ideas, emotion, and vision into points on the map when creating your journey map. Make a multi-stage roadmap that includes all of the different ways the customer can begin their new adventure.
The most important aspect of executing a future-state journey mapping is ensuring that you have the right mentality before you start. Begin by asking yourself and your team, “How can we captivate our users with a completely new journey instead of adjusting an old one?” The importance of putting creativity and innovation at the center of a future-state journey map cannot be overstated.
Customer-centric IT transformation
Yes, technical advancements are causing major market upheavals and a new wave of digital disruption. Customers, who are increasingly looking for always-on, performance-based, and integrated solutions, could be an even bigger driver.
Customer expectations and demands are posing significant problems – as well as possibilities — for staff in sales, services, support, and product development. Companies must continuously evaluate how digital disruption is changing customer behavior, rethink their customer engagement model to leverage disruptive technologies, and redesign employee roles to form customer success (CS) capability that maximizes value for customers and enables an enhanced experience for them to successfully ride this wave of change.
Ideating the Future State Customer Experience
You don’t want to tamper with things that are working well for you and your consumers. So, before developing the future state, understand the current state and what has to be fixed or maintained. Know where you are today so you can make short-term changes and enhancements as you re-imagine and develop the future state, which can take some time.
Future-state journey mapping entails imagining and mapping out the ideal future experience with clients, which then serves as the blueprint for implementation. The future state map depicts what the client will be doing, thinking, and experiencing during their interactions with the brand in the future ideal experience.
This table outlines differences between current state and future state maps.
Future state journey mapping serves many purposes, including:
• Collaborating with real customers to identify and examine potential experiences or journeys
• Collaborating with customers to co-create and design the best experience
• Working with customers to co-create and design a unique experience
• Imagining what the experience might be like in the future with less risk because it’s first tried on paper
So, where to begin?
Start with Ideation
An ideation session is a good place to start when planning your future state. Ask customers to brainstorm ideas for a better future experience, focusing on customer experience pain points. What would that entail? What should it contain? What are your competitors or other industries doing differently to provide a far superior experience? What would be your perfect experience? Request that they think outside of the box. Consider a completely different scenario. It’s all right. Don’t be alarmed, and don’t limit what they can advise. Don’t provide any parameters. Ask customers not to pass judgement on what others are saying or writing down while they’re working; instead, build on others’ ideas and improve or evolve them. Prioritize quantity over quality while making a purchase.
Then Group the Ideas
The next stage is to arrange ideas into like themes after customers have written down and/or discussed all of their thoughts. Are there any concepts that logically go together? Some concepts may be appropriate for numerous groups or topics. They can group those who are expressing the same thing; they can remove ideas that don’t make sense or don’t appear to match the group’s criteria; or they can extend and clarify ideas to determine where they belong.
Next, Review the Ideas
Customers should next examine, vote on, and prioritize the ideas based on their preferences as a following step. The idea is to find the nuggets that connect different groups or stand out as the optimal next moves. They can then focus on a topic or grouping to add into the future state journey mapping process once they’ve prioritized everything.
Time to Map
You’ve prepared customers for the problem they’re solving and the experience they’re redesigning with the ideation session. It’s time to get up and start planning for the future. They’ve come up with some fantastic suggestions, which have all been recorded, ranked, and voted on. Let’s see how they combined everything to create the new experience.
How Will You Prioritize?
During the ideation session, you heard a lot of amazing suggestions from your consumers. They’ve chosen their favorites only on the basis of their personal preferences; they haven’t considered how you would prioritize the concepts based on a range of considerations, such as the following:
• cost to implement
• time to implement
• effort to implement
• resources required to implement
• impact on the business
• impact on the customer, as well as
– type of customers impacted
– volume of customers impacted
But here’s a tip: customer impact should always be factored into your prioritization process.
Consider this for a moment: don’t hastily dismiss an idea because you believe it will cost a lot of money or because it appears to be too far-fetched. Make sure you finish your homework. Get a hold of some data. These must be data-driven choices. Do the numbers first to see if the ROI is there. Simultaneously, don’t stifle creativity and innovation by employing the same logic, reasoning, methods, and ideas that got you into this problem in the first place!
As Einstein said: We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. In this case, that couldn’t be more true! It’s possible that you’ll have to invest a little to get a lot. If you actually want to be innovative, differentiating, and improving the customer experience, you may need to feel a little uncomfortable now in order to reap long-term benefits.
Course Manual 2: Organizational Structure
It takes more than redrawing your boxes and lines to find your future-state model.
An in-depth investigation and knowledge of the current ‘as-is’ organization is the starting point for organizational structure. You must assess your organization’s present strategy and long-term mission, identifying and documenting important concerns, gaps, and areas of investment (i.e., innovation, CX, etc.) that your new design must support. You must assess your internal and external resources as well as workflows. When it comes to optimizing your design, form will always take precedence over function.
So, how do you get started? Is there a common framework that serves as a road map for discovery, comprehension, and, eventually, the creation of your next design? Yes. Here’s how to do it in five easy steps:
1. Before making any proposed adjustments, thoroughly analyze the ‘as-is’ organizational structure. You must be well-versed in what is working well (don’t tamper with what is working), what isn’t working well, gaps, and alternative resolution alternatives. In many circumstances, you may reduce risk by modifying workflows to suit your goals without reorganizing your team. Form a cross-functional committee (including management and employees at all levels) to offer you with a 360-degree view of the team to acquire a detailed understanding. To minimize team disruption, you must have a change management strategy in place.
2. Determine the future ‘to-be’ design using a structured technique. You should examine your design using a variety of methodologies, such as by business unit or resource location, corporate or functional alignment, focus area (such as CX), or sales/channel alignment. Using one or more techniques will provide you the most realistic collection of “what if” scenarios, allowing you to test each choice against your strategy requirements, corporate restrictions (business structure, reporting authoring, and budgeting), and workflows.
3. Implement new team functions that are required for current marketing agility and effectiveness. Marketing operations, content marketing, and sales enablement are all included. These three roles are not often explicitly recognized in many marketing organizations, but they are crucial.
• Marketing Operations should be a primary marketing role that provides cross-functional coordination, communication, and reporting. Your marketing operations staff will be critical to your company’s success in turning marketing into a revenue and growth engine.
• Content Marketing, when paired with an effective operating procedure and a set of criteria that require regular audits, content repurposing and contextualization, and the use of templates, marketers can achieve great business results at a cheap cost. Rethink how new and existing content may be tied to strategic initiatives, improving customer experience, bringing marketing narratives to life, or offering ‘evergreen’ thought leadership pieces to increase the value of your content investments. Fundamentally, you must be more strategic about how, where, and when you employ content across the client experience.
• Sales Enablement is the process of delivering information (message, targeting, and qualification criteria), content (sales guides, one-pagers etc), and tools to salespeople to help them sell more successfully and efficiently. Basically, giving sales what they need when they need it so that they can successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process and, as a result, generate more value from marketing.
4. Compare your organizational design to that of others. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for organizing your staff. Consider the most important drivers for your organization’s strategy (both short- and long-term), objectives, and corporate restrictions. Consider combining several models to create a framework that meets your goals and objectives.
5. Create a rollout strategy that includes a timeframe, a communication plan, and training, among other things. It is vital to devote time to create your future-state model in order to achieve organizational transformation success.
Organizational Change: A Crucial Component of IT Transformation
A combination of digital innovation and human contact lies at the heart of the 4th Industrial Revolution. This has resulted in major shifts in traditional business paradigms as well as significant organizational disruption. As breakthroughs in fields like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Decentralized Knowledge Networks, Big Data, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) gain traction, the non-linear speed and amplitude of these changes will continue to accelerate.
Digital disruption was most prevalent at the start of this latest industrial revolution in enterprises where the product or service could be easily digitized. Media and entertainment companies, telecommunications companies, high-tech companies, and financial services companies all required to rebuild their legacy businesses in order to thrive.
We are now in the midst of a second, far more widespread wave of disruption. Today’s focus is on business models and procedures in general, across all company ecosystems. However, in many circumstances, IT business transformation will fall short of expectations. This is due to the fact that the bulk of transformations are centred on digital rather than business transformation.
In reality, it is vital to consider IT transformation in terms of the organization’s total impact. The ideal result is not only alignment with the company goal, but also a deep integration of the digital endeavor with the ecosystem’s purpose, day-to-day labor, and underlying culture. As a result, rather than the other way around, the corporate purpose becomes the driver of IT change.
The Necessity of Organizational Change
Technology, culture, leadership, and business practices are all part of the digital workplace. However, each IT transformation effort’s Achilles heel is usually found in the world of organizational change. It is a recipe for failure to just provide workers with access to a digital cornucopia without also assisting them in planning for and responding to inevitable changes in the business model and work habits.
Even as companies invest heavily in IT transformation, Michael Wade, the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation, points out in his book ‘Orchestrating Transformation’ that “the vast majority of organizational change efforts fail,” and that “failure rates vary from sixty to eighty percent and don’t seem to improve over time.” Wade goes on to say that IT transformation success is so unusual that many CEOs have banned the word “transformation” from their business endeavors because it conjures up images of “hype, frustration, and fiasco.”
According to the 2018 State of the Digital Workplace Survey, ‘Culture and Change’ and ‘Employee Experience’ were two of the top three digital workplace priorities, while a Celonis study conducted last year found that nearly three quarters of all C-suite executives interviewed believed that AI, machine learning, and other automation tools were areas where spending should be increased. The same leaders also admitted that digital transformation projects were being separated from the workforce, and that not enough time was being spent evaluating, assessing, and designing organizational support based on employee needs.
Working with high-profile clients has revealed that the essential organizational change required as a result of digital transformation is far more difficult and complex than previously assumed. As company ecosystems expand with new digital capabilities, new organizational growth maps are required, and old occupations must shift to the nature of new work practices. After all, enhanced agility, inventiveness, and levels of collaboration that become firmly established in the organization’s culture are characteristics of a successful digital transition. Individuals’ and teams’ interactions are the most visible examples of these traits.
Organizational change management must be a key component of any business transformation if it is to be successful. After all, being digital is really a means to an end, not an end in itself. Any digital transformation initiative’s ultimate success hinges on worker adoption and expertise. As a result, employees must be included in the transformation discussion. We need more clarity on how workers are expected to adopt the new behaviors that digital requires, as well as how they are given the opportunity to do so.
The bottom line is that focusing on the capabilities required in the future state entails analyzing if the organization’s current operations, staff, and technology enable it to achieve the set digitally enabled goals.
Of course, the perfect model for allaying seismic business disruption is rare. Organizational silos, a propensity to purchase digital capabilities without a clear business context, a disregard for agile and digital-first redesign work processes, and weak strategic governance are all typical.
The Critical Role of Leadership in IT Transformation
Both digitally-savvy leadership and a digitally-ready workforce are required to fully exploit digitally-driven opportunities. But how do we go about acquiring these new abilities?
We need leaders to show people what ‘good’ looks like in the digital era by modeling the future state. Our digital ecosystems must work harder to facilitate organizational change and be designed with employees in mind. To put it another way, these digital ecosystems must be contextual and responsive to new work, and they must also support the decision-making methods we want people to employ in the future (i.e., unbiased, team-based, best-ideas-win-based, data-informed, etc.).
Digital transformation must be a CEO-led business strategy and operating model that focuses on organizational, operational, and behavioral transformation. As a result, value is created through technology-enabled productivity and creativity, while also supporting the new digital business environment.
Senior leaders or managers may believe that their employees are unwilling to adapt, and that they are unable to “learn to learn” as a new important skill. As a result, a concentrated effort is required to not just design for cultural change, but also to recognize that traditional operational models do not always fit into digital solutions, as well as a rethinking of how workers produce and share knowledge.
Leaders must not believe that half-baked organizational strategies, such as those that are more concerned with resolving current pain points than anticipating a new world and new tasks in the future, are sufficient. They aren’t. Because the fundamental organizational challenges – business silos, weak people leaders, failure to build organizations – are too difficult to solve without destabilizing the top of the organization, this is an “illusion” of digital transformation.
There will be new behaviors and ways of working from the worker’s perspective, which may be at odds with traditional performance goals. Indeed, management must lead the way by assuming the role of ‘Talent Champions,’ focusing on the competencies that will be required in the future state while also encouraging and rewarding associated behaviors.
If leadership is facing a transition crisis and isn’t doing what it has to do to show its people the way forward, or if it knows where it’s headed but hasn’t prioritized getting its people ready and onto the bus, it is jeopardizing the company and its people.
A successful digital transition requires strong leadership through organizational design. It’s critical to figure out whether the company is prepared to accept and effectively manage the disruption that executing its digital goals would bring.
People in IT Crisis – The Necessity of Acquiring New Skills
Once an organization’s potential to produce value in an IT world is established, it’s vital to focus on developing a workforce that can adapt fast, is comfortable with change, isn’t afraid to take risks, is highly collaborative, and is made up of critical, systems-based thinkers. These aren’t your typical employee profiles; instead, they’re a new species of worker that can work in tandem with machines to achieve any transaction’s intended end state.
A recent digital readiness survey by the Center for Creative Leadership found that the largest obstacle firms confront in their IT transformation efforts is a lack of internal skills. Similarly, Skift’s 2018 IT Transformation Survey indicated that more than half of executives surveyed were having trouble finding the technical expertise they needed to meet their digital goals, while a third were neutral or unsure. In a recent MIT/Deloitte study, less than ten percent of executives strongly believed that their workers possessed the skills and experience required to carry out the organization’s IT plan.
Only 23% of firms were specifically researching strategies to update the Employee Experience and engagement, according to Brian Solis’ 2018/2019 State of Digital Transformation report. The final conclusion is that most firms lack clear guidance on what employees should do in order to remain viable in the future. And, strangely, prescriptive instruction from the organization is incompatible with the type of transformation that is required.
A holistic, strategic workforce plan that is consistent with the future business model – one that is built on revolutionary, not incremental, change – is required. We must also urge people to adopt new work-related behaviors and mindsets. Only then can we expect our workers to place one foot in front of the other and begin walking in the direction of change.
The New Alliance of Workers and Machines
In this era of IT transformation, there is a pressing need for collaboration between humans and machines, one that empowers individuals and teams rather than relying on centralized control.
Companies are picking and selecting their way through what some regard as a digital minefield as the 4th Industrial Age gains traction. When it comes to imagining the future workforce, we must first determine which tasks will be consumed by humans and which will be handled by machines, and then guarantee that workers are aware of the scope and limits of their obligations.
Designing for people and their new relationships with technologies is an important part of solving this puzzle. After all, neuroscientists have shown us that substantial shifts in organizational ambition are accompanied by uncertainty, volatility, complexity, and ambiguity. The 4th Industrial Revolution is creating a new type of difficulty for employees that needs to be carefully studied, much as the beginning of the Industrial Age witnessed the resistance of technology-averse Luddites. Any IT transformation leader’s goal should be to blend the strengths of humans and machines.
This changing human-machine relationship – particularly if people are still involved in work that isn’t totally automated – is a critical component of any digital transformation project. The user experience (UX) and new digital relationships will take center stage as artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms become more prevalent in the commercial world.
With a ‘people-first’ approach, the primary goal of every UX endeavor should be to make human labor safer and more fulfilling. Workers will need to be encouraged to engage in “continuous learning” to improve their most marketable and sustainable human abilities in order to attain this goal.
Even if the most innovative solutions are followed, the obvious question of how to persuade workers to cope in their new relationships with machines when those machines may possibly be poised to replace them in part or entirely in the future remains unanswered.
The Importance of Future Work Practices
Knowledge is more important than labor or capital in the new IT organization. When an external IT strategy isn’t backed up by people-ready processes and digital capabilities, problems develop. To be effective in our developing now-future, we need new work methods as well as clarity around the informal work or culture that holds the model together. To put it another way, how would people be encouraged (and expected) to adopt these new behaviors? Answers to simple inquiries are required by workers. What am I supposed to be learning? What’s the best way for me to learn how to do that? How can I make an attempt?
Companies can’t expect workers to “transform” until executives make these organizational reforms from the ground up. Why should you make a change (first)? What do you want to change (second)? How do you change (on a regular basis)? This causes the change crisis many companies are grappling with as a result of making change confusing, threatening, or vague. As a result, change becomes a personal issue without the new work contexts that people require to determine whether these are changes they are able or willing to make. People don’t have a fair chance to change or adequate time to adjust when leadership and leading practices are lacking.
To thrive in this brave new corporate environment, workers will have to alter a great deal. What was necessary to be successful in the past is no longer sufficient to be successful now. Some employees may be resistant to change, while others may be unmotivated for a variety of reasons, but the leadership command is frequently unclear, or they aren’t given enough context to apply it themselves. Regardless, it’s strange that, in the face of the digital tsunami, executives aren’t actively revamping their companies to match this quickly expanding business model.
The following components should accompany any leader’s call for change and should be considered features of any successful IT transformation.
• Inspiring and visionary leadership that explains what is required of employees in terms of cultural, organizational, and work practices alignment.
• Organizational clarity, as opposed to structural changes that do little more than rearrange chairs on the deck
• Instead of one-off “new day at work” sessions, implement smart, iterative change management programs.
• People-centric digital work tools
• Possibilities to operate in multi-functional groups
• Aligned, new recognition and reward systems
Designing the New Digital Organization
IT companies are becoming more result-oriented, iterating and developing at a quick pace. We must restructure the organization to deliver digitally by moving toward a flexible, collaborative, self-organizing, and fast-changing environment in order to become an agile corporation.
Naturally, these new organizational viewpoints must be designed — and this is a difficult task. New competencies must be carefully integrated with the new business model, and any gaps must be identified. People who can develop innovative human-machine interactions are needed, but there are few competent people who can do so, and most approaches aren’t sophisticated enough to deal with the problem. This circumstance harkens back to the days before off-the-shelf solutions, when human factors and ergonomics experts were hired to build user interfaces.
Traditional organizational silos that separate administration from the front lines must be rethought and integrated, resulting in multiple knowledge paths that lead to bidirectional work practices and innovation. This is just the beginning of empowering the entire workforce to move away from hierarchical, traditional structures and toward decentralized, multi-dimensional knowledge networks.
We must also prepare for the new social contract between employees and their employers. We put people in a crisis situation when we don’t convey a wider picture, when we minimize digital transformation to digital. No matter how lucrative a digitally-driven notion may appear to be, technologists will never be able to overcome the challenge of organizational upheaval.
Conclusion
So, what are the best strategies for dealing with organizational disruption as the company shifts its focus to IT transformation and employees require new tools and processes?
Organizations must assess how existing jobs may change in the digital age and consider if their staff has the required skills to deal with these changes. It’s possible that new jobs with new skill sets could emerge, while others will go.
Similarly, rather than being bound by traditional roadmaps, IT transformation necessitates a more aspirational approach, in which a company can pivot as its overall vision evolves in a series of steps capable of handling new waves of innovation and the resulting rethinking of the employee experience. The larger concern is then whether or not people can handle organizational change.
The requirement to enhance worker competencies to meet the needs of IT transformation is critical. Larger organizations may be able to do this in part through mergers and acquisitions if necessary. Under any business-digital paradigm, however, executives must begin to evolve their current workforce and be willing to address leadership shortages and top-down adjustments.
Course Manual 3: Change Management and Cultural Transformation
One of the most critical techniques for guaranteeing effective transformation is change management, which is perhaps one of the reasons the CIO position is currently one of the most coveted and compensated in business today.
Companies operating in today’s business environment are progressively managing more than just people, customers, and products. They’re also dealing with the introduction of new technology, the emergence of new business opportunities, and changes in the way customers select, engage with, and apply standards to their brands.
In a nutshell, modern companies must be able to deal with change. They’ll have to adjust their management strategies to accomplish so. Forming a systematic change management plan, as with any major organizational change, can be tough.
Employees may be apprehensive about “doing new things.” It might be difficult to acquire funding because decision-makers may not perceive the need to change systems that appear to be working. Even if they do, finding the right people to participate to the amount that is required can be difficult.
In the current IT transformation landscape, the ability to address and adapt to change within an organization is becoming a vital part of survival for many modern enterprises.
Is your firm planning for change or straining to keep up with it? Continue reading to discover about the evolution of change management and what you can do to assist establish a viable, successful approach.
The Goals of Change Management
Unlike project management, where timelines, concrete targets, and specified outcomes are simple to point to, change management takes a more reactive and indefinite approach.
Although the specifics of change management will differ from one firm to the next, all strategies will have three fundamental objectives:
• To improve the ROI of the workforce. All improvements, particularly those related to IT transformation, should be implemented to boost your workforce’s efficiency and productivity. Every improvement should assist your staff execute their task better and faster, whether it’s the technology to improve communication across departments or the equipment to effectively carry out expert design work.
• To create a competitive advantage. Companies improve over time to become better at what they do. Change management gives the process of change a structure, which aids organizations in identifying possibilities to achieve a competitive edge through lower costs, specialization, innovation, or improved service quality.
• Energize and empower employees. According to research, 70 percent of change attempts fail owing to a lack of employee support. Change may be scary, especially when users have been doing things a certain way for a long time or are concerned that changes will result in a loss of income. Employees who feel valued and supported are more likely to embrace change initiatives, according to change management.
Current Problems of Change Management In IT Transformation
As previously said, implementing significant changes to current business processes is often a long and difficult process, especially when dealing with business components that have been in place for many years. IT transformation project failure is almost always due to a lack of planning and strategy.
To see an initiative through from inception to completion, clear communication, objectives, and consistent reporting of progress are all essential.
Businesses who are dissatisfied with the results of their digital projects frequently lack direction in three crucial areas.
One of the reasons organizations are increasingly turning to MSPs is for this reason: outsourcing strategy and execution to a third party with proven expertise in similar projects over a number of years is enticing to companies trying to transform.
When it comes to adopting and implementing new technologies, having a solid change management strategy should be a top priority. So, without further ado, let’s get started on the most crucial components of a successful overall change management approach.
Change Management Strategies for Businesses
Whether it’s a small, targeted transition inside a department or a massive IT transformation across the company, change management tactics are important to the success of any change endeavor in a corporation. Here are five recommended practices for small and medium-sized enterprises when it comes to change management:
1. Start from the top
Changes that influence the business’s core operations will have an impact on the company’s culture. As a result, such adjustments must begin at the top.
In management studies, the importance of leadership during times of change has been thoroughly documented. For example, studies on leadership during mergers indicated that when executives took a more active part in change management, the merger process itself resulted in a more positive work environment.
The presence, advice, and support of the leader conveyed to their staff that they were aware of and supportive of what was going on. It calmed employees’ fears, lowered tension, and made them feel more optimistic about the future.
Change that begins at the top indicates a dedicated, invested, and united leadership that is on the same page about the company’s future. It’s the only way you’ll be able to elicit and promote the culture you’ll need to get the rest of the company on board with change.
2. Make sure the change is necessary and desirable
If a company doesn’t have a sound strategy in place, introducing too much too fast might be a significant problem down the road. It’s no secret that many IT transformation projects fail or fall short of objectives, often in alarming ways.
One of the main reasons for this is because decision-makers are confused how to properly approach an IT transformation and the impact it would have on their company.
A lack of a thorough audit can lead to the installation of solutions that are unsuitable for an organization’s objectives, resulting in additional expenses, training, and unreasonable expectations.
It’s even more important for SMBs pursuing digital transformation to be aware of the consequences of implementing new technologies.
Will the proposed solutions improve the organization’s operational capabilities in the long run, taking into account factors like personnel onboarding and familiarity? That brings us to the following point.
3. Minimize disruption
Employee perceptions of what constitutes a necessary or desirable change differ by department, level, and performance history. What is the most important indicator? How much of their everyday routine is disrupted by a change.
Changing current processes inside an organization may be a pain, as many executives will attest. It’s critical to minimize the impact of changes on personnel.
Employee apprehension about change is frequently caused by the introduction of new tactics or technologies intended to improve management and business operations.
For example, although executives may regard the introduction of automation into essential company processes as a method to save time and money, employees who previously performed similar tasks may feel replaced, threatened with obsolescence, or unsure of their positions.
Furthermore, organizational restructuring may make employees who are transferred to a different role angry, bewildered, or unsure of what went wrong with the prior system.
In both circumstances, the consequence is decreased morale, reduced performance, and a brain drain as your best performers leave. As a result, disruption in the workplace can be reduced by:
• Anticipating some interruption and spreading the message early.
• Providing training and tools to staff so they can adjust to changes.
• Creating a culture that encourages change and transformation.
• Providing clarity and context for changes by empowering champions such as project managers or team leaders.
• Ensuring that your IT department is up to date and prepared to accommodate technological or infrastructure shifts.
4. Promote communication
We’ve mentioned the importance of effective communication throughout organizational change, as it appears to be one of the fundamental variables that determines whether a transition or transformation succeeds or fails.
Excellent communication puts everyone on the same page and convinces those who will be affected by the changes that they are safe.
One of the most effective ways to help your company embrace change is to talk about it freely and honestly.
Likewise, encourage communication not just from leadership to employee, but also from employee to leadership.
Make it easy for employees to contact you with inquiries or concerns. As new processes take hold, encourage cross-departmental contact to help ideas and innovation flourish. Communication, like your vision, promotes efficiency and has the capacity to change culture.
5. Recognize that change is the norm, not the exception
Are you approaching change as if it were a project with a start and end date? Because change is a process rather than a project, you may encounter obstacles.
Technology, markets, consumer preferences, and even environmental circumstances are all rising and falling at the blink of an eye in today’s world.
Businesses must not only adapt their operations to keep up with their customers, but they must also transform themselves. They must plan for change and be prepared for it when it occurs.
Harvard Business Review defines change readiness as “the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance.”
Sound familiar? That is identical to the objectives of change management mentioned before. You can only be change ready if you understand that change is the rule rather than the exception.
Bottom Line
• Organizations are unique – Change has a variety of effects on people. Across a diverse set of organizations, change management methods will take on different forms.
• Successful change – whether big or small—requires active, committed leadership that supports good communication, a learning culture, and a clear vision of what that transformation means.
• Change is an inevitable – In today’s society, social media is a critical component of running a business. Businesses, on the other hand, can transform change into an opportunity rather than a barrier by embracing change readiness.
• While all change causes some disturbance in the workplace, you may minimize the negative effects while allowing it to breathe new life into your operations.
Advanced technology solutions assist businesses in gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage in their respective industries. You may boost employee productivity and lower costs by utilizing the technologies offered, allowing your company to operate at a higher capacity and provide a better client experience.
How Does Culture Change Impact the Success of Transformation?
The success of your transformational change projects is heavily influenced by your company’s culture. When a big organizational transformation is happening, the culture of the organization is in play. It will either support or oppose the new state reality you’re constructing.
As your business transitions from old to new ways of doing things, many of your organization’s patterns will most likely emerge as helpful or inhibiting. The new tactics, structures, systems, processes, and/or technology will very certainly need people adopting new ways of being and functioning.
Employees will almost certainly have to adjust how they engage with one another, what they prioritize and focus on, and how their performance is judged.
Change projects in your organization are likely to fail unless there are demonstrable modifications in cultural norms and expectations. Your company’s culture has been built to be successful as it is, not as you would like it to be. Employees will quickly revert to their old ways of working unless there is a fundamental culture shift. You must make overt and precise changes to culture so that people understand what they need to do differently. Employees should be able to see how the new corporate culture will fit into the bigger change picture if leaders construct the new culture to deliver on the new transformational and organizational change efforts.
Cultural Transformation Starts with Leaders
Leaders are at the forefront of any major cultural transition. To set a good example for employees and indicate that these changes are not transient, leaders must model the new habits. Employees are unlikely to take this initiative on their own if their supervisor does not show signals of change. A leader must totally commit to the new culture and believe in it. Any hesitancy or ambivalence about these ideas will be picked up on by employees. Demonstrating that this change is a priority will encourage them to embrace it.
How Can Leaders Successfully Shift Organizational Culture?
From the start of the change process, leadership and project teams must pay close attention to culture. After installation, it is never effective as a “bolt-on” method. “We need to change our culture,” for example, is ineffective as a broad statement. That says nothing about what has to happen for the new state to succeed and maintain its value over time.
For the change to take root and last, everyone involved (leaders, managers, and employees) must be encouraged to act in pre-determined new ways. Many executives find it difficult to foresee this shift since culture is difficult to define and modify. This focus, on the other hand, is always required for transformative change to succeed.
How Do You Reveal What Must Be Changed in an Organization’s Culture?
The best place to find out what needs to be changed is to look at the impact of the new state solution on culture. Leaders will need to examine what elements of the current culture currently support their planned changes, as well as what obstacles stand in the way of their new directions. They’ll have to figure out which cultural indicators need to be updated or implemented. The sharing and use of information, the use of rewards and penalties, how managers monitor their teams’ performance, how mistakes are handled, and so on are all examples of cultural indicators. Examine what can thwart or obstruct the successful implementation of your new state.
Take some time to discover the following:
• What aspect of the new state solution necessitates a cultural shift? What do you mean by that?
• What cultural markers are effective, ineffective, or necessary for this transformation initiative to succeed?
• What new behaviors are needed to put these new norms and practices into action?
• How can I model these behaviors as a leader?
• How can I communicate with and involve my stakeholders so that they understand the importance of changing their fundamental working practices?
• How can the new cultural norms and behaviors be reinforced in the most effective way?
You can start implementing successful culture transformation once you’ve addressed these questions. As you articulate your Case for Change and Change Strategy, keep the cultural story alive.
Course Manual 4: Transformational Leadership
What is transformational leadership? A model for motivating innovation
In the IT industry, growth and change are unavoidable, but transformational leadership can help employees accept change by cultivating a business culture of accountability, ownership, and workplace autonomy.
Transformational leadership is a management style that encourages, inspires, and motivates people to innovate and generate change in order to help the organization grow and influence its future success. This is accomplished through executives leading by example with a strong sense of corporate culture, employee ownership, and workplace independence.
Transformational leaders inspire and motivate their teams without micromanaging; instead, they trust their staff to make decisions in their areas of responsibility. It’s a management style that encourages staff to be more creative, think ahead, and come up with fresh answers to old problems. Through mentorship and training, employees on the leadership track will be prepared to become transformational leaders themselves.
Transformational leadership model
James V. Downton coined the term “transformational leadership” in 1973, and James Burns built on it in 1978. Bernard M. Bass, a researcher, developed the notion in 1985 to include techniques to measure the success of transformational leadership. This style encourages leaders to show genuine, powerful leadership in the hopes of inspiring staff to do the same.
While Bass’ model is from the 1970s, it is still a successful leadership style today – the environments in which it is utilized change, but the style of true leadership does not. It applies to any industry, but it’s especially important in the fast-paced IT sector, where innovation and agility can make or break a business.
Qualities of Transformational Leaders
Transformational leaders, according to Les Stein, PhD, an assistant teaching professor in Northeastern’s Master of Science in Leadership program, can bring an organization together “to understand a common purpose and motivate in a way that creates an organizational culture focused on success.” He’s discovered that these types of leaders share a same set of features and characteristics.
A transformational leader is:
• Visionary
• Team-centric
• Engaging
• Inspiring
• Inclusive
• Emotionally Intelligent
• Collaborative
According to Stein, charismatic, empathic, and motivational leaders are prevalent traits. They have strong ethical ideals on a personal level. They seek to prioritize their teams before themselves, never considering their own power or how their actions will benefit them in the long run.
Transformational leaders have a natural ability to comprehend people, define each team member’s goals and aspirations, and bring everyone together to make a difference when working as part of a team. They’re also likely to be visionaries in their own minds, with communication skills that allow them to not only express themselves clearly, but do so in a way that inspires others.
“You hear a lot of people called ‘transformational leaders,’ and I would question that,” Stein says. “[Transformational leaders are] unique individuals with real, honest personal skills [that allow them] to get the job done far better than anyone else.”
Transformational leaders must also be able to instill a favorable work environment among their teams. This necessitates assembling the ideal team and fostering a collaborative environment in which individuals are free to collaborate, voice their views and opinions, and feel comfortable sharing any creative or new ideas that could benefit the firm.
Stein describes an effective transformational leader as one who is, “always focused on making the organization the best that it can be.” This entails soliciting feedback, collecting ideas, and ensuring that everyone on the team feels included, heard, and valued.
Most transformational leaders are found at the executive levels of organizations because, “they have to be in a position of responsibility to impact the success of their organizations,” Stein adds.
Transformational leadership in IT
Although transformational leadership may be applied to any field, including healthcare, education, and government agencies, it is becoming increasingly crucial in the IT industry as businesses embrace digital transformation. To stay ahead of the curve and remain competitive, companies must adapt to fast changing technologies through innovation and good leadership.
CIOs, as IT executives, have a responsibility to lead by example as transformative leaders, especially as they are mostly responsible for the business’s digital transformation. According to Gartner, 40% of CIOs are in charge of digital transformation in their organizations, while 34% are in charge of innovation. When it comes to digital transformation, inspiring and motivating employees is a critical piece of the puzzle, because success depends on everyone buying into and embracing development and change.
While there is an increasing need to keep an eye on the future — whether it’s security, new technology, or evolving platforms – transformational leadership will not benefit every aspect of IT. Transactional leadership refers to the need for more structure, consistency, and reliability in certain processes, procedures, and development programs.
Transactional vs. transformational leadership
Transactional leadership is the polar opposite of transformational leadership in that it focuses on rewards and penalties to motivate personnel. It requires supervision, organization, and performance tracking. This leadership style does not attempt to be innovative. Rather, it’s based on maintaining consistency and predictability across time. Errors and flaws are thoroughly investigated, with the ultimate goal of establishing efficient, routine procedures.
This management style is best suited to departments or organizations that demand routine and structure, as well as areas where firms wish to decrease confusion or inefficiency. However, it does not permit innovation or long-term planning in the same manner that transformational leadership does.
Transformational leadership, on the other hand, promotes agile environments, particularly those with a lower chance of failure. You want the creation and maintenance of a present product to be consistent and error-free, but you also don’t want future upgrades and improvements to be hampered.
Transformative leadership frees employees to come up with new ideas and consider the future of products, services, and ideas, whereas transactional leadership ensures a consistent development process.
Examples of transformational leaders
Harvard Business Review analyzed companies on the S&P and Fortune Global 500 list to uncover the best examples of transformational leadership. These businesses were judged on “new products, services and business models; repositioning its core business; and financial performance.”
• Jeff Bezos, Amazon: Bezos’ “insider, outsider” status, according to Harvard Business Review, is part of what makes him a brilliant transformational leader. Through years of experience in a different field, he provided a unique viewpoint to e-commerce as someone who leapt from the banking world.
• Reed Hastings, Netflix: Hastings and Bezos tied for first place for similar reasons. He came from the software sector, therefore he wasn’t used to the television industry’s pre-established process and procedure.
• Jeff Boyd and Glenn Fogel, Priceline: Boyd and Fogel redefined travel reservations by charging lower commission fees on reservations while focusing on smaller specialty markets (inns, B&Bs, and apartments), eventually resulting in the birth of Booking.com.
• Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Apple: Apple is an example of “dual transformation,” according to HBR: Jobs innovated on original Microsoft goods while simultaneously creating a software ecosystem. Cook has carried on Jobs’ goal, focusing on innovation, software, and customer loyalty.
• Mark Bertolini, Aetna: Bertolini is well-known in the healthcare profession for his pragmatic managerial style. His purpose, he says, is to develop tactics based on a realistic view of the future.
• Kent Thiry, DaVita: According to Harvard Business Review, Thiry was able to turn a failing company into a successful one by emphasizing “service excellence, teamwork, accountability and fun,” as firm core values.
• Satya Nadella, Microsoft: Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and rose through the ranks, eventually leading the company’s cloud computing activities and earning the CEO post.
• Emmanuel Faber, Danone: Faber began his career at Danone as an architect before being promoted to CEO after assisting in the development of the firm’s mission to transform it into a sustainable health and nutrition company.
• Heinrich Hiesinger, ThyssenKrupp: Hiesinger took over as CEO of ThyssenKrupp in 2011 and used modern types of manufacturing, such as 3D printing, to help alleviate pressure from Asian competitors in the steel industry. These “new development sectors” now account for 47 percent of the company’s revenues.
All Good Technology Managers Are Transformational Leaders
Transformational leaders are better suited to deploy information technology tools, products, and services than other leadership styles. In this post, we’ll look at why transformational leadership prepares you for success in the tech sector – both in terms of managing teams and understanding IT principles.
How Transformational Leadership Surpasses Other Leadership Theories
Today’s global business settings are fraught with uncertainty, and businesses are in desperate need of more and better leaders to steer them through it. Although transformational leaders are more imaginative and creative, they nevertheless require additional leadership skills to lead a global firm. Because there are so many different leadership approaches and ideas, my focus is on becoming a better leader through practicing transformational leadership.
Although some scholars criticize leadership literature for lacking relevance to today’s changing business environment, transformational leadership has a track record of delivering results within organizations, such as influencing individual employee interests to align with organizational interests and inspiring followers to create new ideas and innovations for successful business outcomes.
Dissatisfactions with earlier leadership theories, which were a dichotomy of people-oriented versus task-oriented approaches, dominated the early 1980s. With this new paradigm centered on transformational leadership, a new shift in leadership studies happened. Transformational leadership is simple to grasp, put into practice, and encourages followers to speak with one voice and be outspoken across the organization. Transformational leadership appears to be more realistic than some other leadership philosophies.
Recently, five scholars—Jessica Dinh, Robert Lord, William Gardner, Jeremy Meuser and Robert Liden—from the Academy of Management, one of the largest leadership and management organizations in the world, reviewed articles published in 10 top-tier academic journals, including The Leadership Quarterly, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Psychologist, Journal of Management, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organizational Science, and Personnel Psychology. These researchers found that, when compared to other leadership theories including attribute theory, behavioral theories, and situational theories, transformational leadership is still one of the most popular paradigms. The results of this investigation are summarised in the table below.
‘A Review of Articles Published in 10 Top-Tier Academic Journals’
Now that we’ve shown that transformational leadership is a phenomenon worth studying, learning, and applying in businesses all around the world, let’s look at how transformational leadership may be used to lead technology.
Leading Technology Using Transformational Leadership
Transformational leaders cultivate internal relationships and interactions, establish desired expectations, and motivate followers to seek out new opportunities in their workplace. The idealized influence aspect of transformational leadership can be considered a major facilitator of technology communication, which improves the extent to which knowledge is shared and available to all employees and improves relationships across organizational members and departments. As a result, it is proposed that transformational leaders improve their efficacy by combining technological communication with their leadership function.
Executives also devote a significant amount of effort on formulating strategic initiatives. According to Selby Noseworthy, an author and management expert at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, transformational leaders’ strategic role is improved when information technology is implemented at the correct time and place. Transformational leaders create awareness of the value of technology and empower employees to better IT implementation.
This managerial implementation improves both competitive advantage and enhances the time and efficiency of task significance, resulting in happy teams who take better care of their stakeholders. As a result, transformational leadership creates a solid foundation for leading information technology within enterprises.
In Conclusion
The development of transformational leadership inside businesses is aided by the use of good information technology. Leaders have been encouraged to achieve meaningful change at the organizational level in light of the rising pressures of the global workplace. In order to properly adopt IT to promote competitiveness, transformational leadership is critical.
Course Manual 5: Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-suite
Filling Your C-Suite With The Right Technology People
Your company is changing. Employees use their own devices to work on the go. You operate a number of cloud-based applications, and as-a-service platforms play an important role in your everyday operations. Do you have the necessary technology people in place to help you succeed in a digitally disruptive business environment?
Evaluate the Potential in Technology Leaders
Deloitte recently produced a poll emphasizing the importance of technology leaders as agents of change. Nearly half of IT leaders, according to respondents, are in charge of technology adoption in their organizations. Previously, IT leaders were responsible for managing a restricted technology infrastructure and ensuring its continued performance. IT executives are now expected to play a more strategic role.
From customer data management to production lines, digitalization has changed practically every element of business. Even more automation and data-driven corporate activities are expected in the future. IT executives are critical to a company’s capacity to compete in today’s technologically driven market. IT professionals and technology experts play a proactive and strategic role in business, from developing employee usage regulations to reducing security risks.
Are All Tech Execs Created Equal?
Two C-suite structures in today’s environment could appear radically different. Apart from the traditional leaders, such as chief executive officers and chief financial officers, executive arrangements differ from company to company. A company might hire a chief data officer (CDO), a chief digital officer (CDO – confusing, isn’t it? ), a chief information officer (CIO), a chief technology officer (CTO), or a combination of all of these in the technology field. Not to mention new roles such as data privacy officer (DPO) or chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) (CAIO).
Some are in charge of all IT choices, from security to device policies, while others specialize in customer experience management or customer acquisition and deployment management. A chief data officer may report to the chief information officer under some arrangements.
Finally, every organization must examine its strategic goals as well as the leadership abilities that will ensure long-term success. The title is simply that: a title. The role, on the other hand, has the potential to make or break the company’s digital maturity race.
Structure the C-Suite to Fit Your Needs
Companies may need to take a step back from the usual management structure in order to identify the proper individuals for the job. Continuing down the path of routine recruiting decisions will only provide decreasing results in the brave new world. You must invest in people who can both culturally and technologically drive change. To determine business needs and make employment decisions, follow these steps.
Evaluate the Status Quo
Consider the current state of technology. Who is in charge of making decisions? Department heads and team leaders who do not report to technology officers may be included in your answer. Consider every component of the organization’s present technology. Determine who is in charge of each activity, from managing vendor relationships to training end users. Are they the most qualified candidates for the job? Will they be able to handle the activity, as well as their other responsibilities, as technology evolves? If the answers are no, or if no one is in charge of a critical function, it may be time to fill the void.
Explore Your Long-term Goals
Do not hire a new executive solely to meet immediate needs. Any IT leader must present a future vision that is consistent with the company’s culture and goals. Consider what you want to happen to your organization in the next five years. Do you want to stick to the status quo or break the mould with cloud migrations, improved consumer data handling, and a stronger focus on user experience? If that’s the case, you’ll need executives who can keep up.
Pinpoint the Right Skill Sets
A background in engineering, prior experience in a functional tech capacity, and access to a demonstrable network of tech-savvy employees may be associated skills for your next c-suite executives. After all, one of the qualities that distinguishes a strong leader is the capacity to attract additional, high-quality personnel. Determine the talents you’ll need to meet your company’s short- and long-term IT objectives.
Be Flexible in the Roles You Create
You may need to hire more than one executive to match the skill sets you require, depending on company demands. A group of tech experts who collaborate in large companies, in particular, may offer better and more organized results than a standard management structure. A chief analytics officer, for example, may focus on all data collecting, management, and handling tasks if your company processes vast amounts of data. A chief digital officer, on the other hand, can spend his or her days laying the groundwork for digital maturity. Each job necessitates executive leadership, but it limits the amount of power held by a single CEO.
Recruit the Best Technology People
It’s only half the struggle to find the correct leadership structure. When you’ve come up with a clear vision for the job, vet candidates for the hard talents you’re looking for, but hire primarily on their soft skills. Any organization will benefit from IT executives who know how to encourage staff and implement enterprise-wide transformation. Market the role and the perks of working with your organization via social media and traditional outreach channels in addition to hiring executive recruiting agencies.
Support Your Leaders
Executive technology personnel of the highest calibre will hit the ground running and never look back. You’ll achieve more each year if you provide exceptional leaders with resources, a competitive benefits package, and an inspiring workplace. After all, human capital is still regarded as the most valuable technology asset in which a firm can invest.
Techie C-Suite Executives: An Enterprise’s Secret Weapon
When you look at the C-suite of most major corporations, you’ll notice one thing: it’s not your grandfather’s C-suite. Executive leadership used to be a two or three-man show, with a CEO, COO, and sometimes a CFO. New C-suite executives, such as the CMO and the CIO, joined the team as company operations became more complex and stratified.
Digital revolution, of course, has shaken up the C-suite like nothing before. New positions have evolved in recent years, such as chief data officer, chief information security officer, chief customer experience officer, and possibly even a chief everything officer! Not only are there more executives, but their responsibilities and functions are evolving as well. They all have one thing in common, though: they’re all considering and investing in technology. They’ll also learn everything they can about digital innovation if they’re clever.
Introducing the Techie CEO
The majority of CEOs in Silicon Valley are techies, and have been for years. In executive suites across the business landscape, there’s a new powerful phenomenon: tech-savvy, digitally-inspired company executives spearheading cutting-edge projects that keep their companies on top.
The CIO and CTO are no longer the sole techies in the boardroom. Crash courses in IT have been given to forward-thinking CEOs across industries. They’re following the newest trends, learning everything they can about emerging technologies, and pondering how to drive digital innovation throughout enterprises. Whether you like it or not, it’s now part of the job description.
According to Gartner, nearly half of CEOs (47%) are under pressure from their board of directors to make a digital push, and 56% claim that digital investments have already increased their net profit. Simply said, digital transformation is so important to success that it necessitates immediate attention and strategic thought from the CEO.
The good news is that the message has reached the majority of CEOs. 42 percent of respondents said their executive teams have adopted a “digital first” mindset. When asked what their main business priorities were for the next two years, 31 percent said IT-related projects. It’s a strong indication of the digital change and the necessity for forward-thinking leaders to guide their teams into the next frontier.
Organizations can do more than talk about having a digital-first mindset when C-suite leaders are on the same page. They can work together to create a genuinely digital-first organization.
C-Suite Executives and Digital Innovation: A Team Effort
As CEOs broaden their technical knowledge, they’re sending a clear message to the rest of the C-suite: digital is the future, it’s at the heart of our operations and strategy, and it’s something we all need to grasp.
That’s fantastic news for CIOs, CMOs, and other executive leaders whose roles have been thrown off by digital technology. Digital executives may spend less time justifying investments and more time implementing them with the support of a tech-savvy C-suite. Executives have a good understanding of what implementation teams do, why they’re important, and the problems they confront, so they can offer the resources and support these initiatives need to succeed.
There are more opportunities for high-level dialogues regarding digital strategy and innovation now that everyone in the C-suite is focused on technology. Leaders can readily collaborate to integrate technology across corporate processes, rather of keeping technology and data compartmentalized by department, because everyone speaks the same language — or at least knows the spirit of things. They might look for cloud-based enterprise solutions that connect data and workflows through developer-friendly APIs.
Organizations can do more than talk about having a digital-first mindset when C-suite leaders are on the same page. They can work together to create a genuinely digital-first organization.
The CIO of the Future
For CIOs, the digital era has been a roller coaster ride that has taken them from undervalued techies to respected consultants to strategic decision-makers.
The CIO used to be the go-to expert for technical knowledge, responsible for “keeping the lights on.” Most executives didn’t care how the technology worked as long as it worked. Then came business mobility, cloud computing, and digital communication. The CIO became a C-suite rockstar when the rest of the executive team couldn’t figure out how to use these new technology.
According to CIO, CEOs are now more likely to learn about new technologies rather than asking their CIOs for information, which is a significant change from just a few years ago. Does this imply that CIOs are becoming less important? No. They just have a new job to complete, one that is becoming increasingly strategic.
According to a separate research conducted by Gartner, at least 84 percent of top CIOs now have responsibilities outside of traditional IT delivery. They’re now in charge of revenue growth and other company objectives. They’re assuming greater senior leadership roles, especially in the areas of innovation and change management. They’re making plans for new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. They’re even taking on more responsibilities in terms of talent development and recruitment.
But how do they manage to achieve all of this while keeping the lights on? It certainly helps that they can rely on cloud-based solutions. UCaaS and CPaaS are cloud communication systems that combine an organization’s communications elements into a unified platform that is simple to set up, remotely hosted, and vendor maintained. Because cloud solutions require little to no IT monitoring, a company’s IT team and CIO can devote more time to revenue-generating projects and preparing the organization for the digital future.
The CIO position, like the rest of the C-suite, will never be the same. However, in the digital era, when disruption is the way to invention, this is most likely a positive thing.
Course Manual 6: Integration of all data systems
The Importance of Data Integration to IT Transformation
The term “IT transformation” is frequently used as a buzzword, but what exactly does it imply? It essentially entails reorganizing an operation’s technology and procedure in order to prioritize data. Businesses had to rely on guesswork and gut feeling to function prior to the modern information age, resulting in enormous losses and inefficiencies. Today, however, it is feasible to build a connected business environment in which data is freely shared across departments and ecosystem strata, ensuring that decision-makers have access to as many hard facts as possible.
As a result, data integration is one of the most critical parts of an IT transformation. You’ll have a much simpler time enjoying the benefits of Industry 4.0 processes if data flows easily between actors within your ecosystem.
For IT Transformation To Succeed, the Data Must Flow
Simply said, the more information available to your decision-makers, the easier it will be for them to make practical, fact-based decisions. Data integration is the process of gathering data from numerous sources and putting it all in one place for simple viewing.
For example, while developing new products or campaigns in the past, R&D and marketing departments had to rely solely on the contents of the Customer Relationship Management database. The CRM’s data is nearly completely made up of information gathered at the point of sale: what the consumer bought, when, and how often, as well as basic demographic data.
However, there is so much more information out there about your customers. For example:
• Contacts with customer service and/or technical assistance in the recent past. Have they recently had a good or bad encounter with your business?
• How people interact with your website. In the last week or month, what websites have they visited? Are there any items in their online shopping cart or on their wish list?
• Online testimonials. Have they made any recent comments about you on review aggregators?
• Use of social media. What do people have to say about it on the internet? It’s not just about you; it’s about everyone. One of the most effective ways to learn about client lives, hobbies, and pain points is to use social media.
It’s not difficult to imagine how much more productive your sales or R&D teams could be if they had access to part or all of this data. This is when data integration enters the picture. It’s becoming increasingly easy to develop highly solid holistic profiles of your clients using modern data-sharing technologies and information scrapers, offering you better insight on how to service their demands.
The Basics of Data Integration
In most circumstances, hiring a consultant or other third party to identify the correct tools and methodologies to aggregate the data you require is the best option. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all procedure; it should be customized to your specific requirements. These are, nonetheless, some of the most important features.
• Link all your databases. There are numerous tools available, including free plug-and-play solutions, that can connect your multiple databases. These can merge data from your ERP, CRM, SCM, and other sources to create a single database.
• Leveraging APIs. An Application Programming Interface (API) is a pre-written library of code designed to make interacting with different software programs easier. For example, you can use Google APIs to pull data from Google Analytics, allowing you to access online site search data for relevant demographics. You can get data from most public or semi-public information sources by using APIs.
• Strong reporting options. You must be able to take this information and make it accessible – and understandable – to the general public. You’ll need software that can collate and report on the information you’ve acquired, or provide it in a dashboard format for convenient viewing.
The Ultimate Goal: 360 Degree Customer Views
A 360-degree perspective of the customer is a complete image of a customer’s journey and experience with a firm from beginning to end. It is what enables businesses to provide a flawless client experience. A 360-degree client perspective is no longer a pipe dream for many businesses; it has become a strategic goal. Finally, a successful 360-degree customer perspective is one that is developed over time, based on data, and shared across departments to create a comprehensive image of your consumers. As a result, it necessitates the use of linked systems across departments and divisions.
There are many types of customer data to be collected:
• Declarative data: This is information about the consumer that they provide us with, such as by filling out forms.
• Behavioral data: What they did on a company’s website, where they clicked, and how they traveled from page to page, how frequently they place orders, do they pay on time, what kind of goods they generally buy, and so on. This data can be saved in a variety of areas, including CRM systems, ERP systems, accounting systems, and basic spreadsheets.
• Inferential data: Thanks to lead scoring, intelligence prediction, and Artificial Intelligence, this is what we may expect them to do or expect next. It’s all about anticipating the next step.
It is only when you can access and mix all forms of data that you will be able to gain truly insightful information.
No Complete IT Transformation Without Integrated Systems
To have a complete 360-degree customer view and make excellent use of it, you must make all three forms of information available to anybody who interacts with your client at any time. Digital and data transformation are required. It is critical to be able to interconnect your various systems at this point.
Companies without a 360-degree picture of their clients suffer severely when their systems are disconnected. Service representatives have had to hunt and retrieve information in four different systems, on two or three distinct screens, in some instances. They become ineffective, dissatisfied, and unmotivated. They must be trained in a variety of systems, making them difficult to replace, and they must frequently switch from one system to the next, copying and pasting data while risking making mistakes.
But it’s likely that they’re most lacking in the ability to execute exact segmentation. Because customers anticipate personalised communication and offerings, segmentation will play an increasingly important role in organizations’ marketing efforts in the future. The more information you have about your clients in one place, the more you’ll be able to differentiate and personalise offers and communicate with them in a way that meets their needs. This is only available through system integration. Extreme segmentation and giving exceptional unique experiences are the future of marketing; and segmentation is all about personalization, which cannot be done without end-to-end data integration.
Salesforce has officially released Customer 360, a product that is supposed to sit in the centre of Salesforce’s ecosystem and connect all of its customers’ data.
You can still use data integration solutions and platforms to fix this problem if you don’t have all of your data in various Salesforce systems. Many executives are now frightened by the word “data integration.” The good news is that data integration does not have to be difficult or painful today.
There are numerous reasons for a company’s IT infrastructure to be modernized. Modernizing your environment allows you to be more agile, flexible, and scalable while also saving money in the short and long run.
Finally, in order to become a digital firm, a company must grasp the importance of utilizing the capabilities of more current IT systems. Those businesses who continue to rely on disjointed, archaic, and out-of-date systems may miss out on the benefits of modernization. IT system integration is one of the first measures an organization must take to upgrade its infrastructure.
What is System Integration?
System integration (SI) is a method of connecting an organization’s multiple IT systems and applications so that they function together in a coordinated and uniform manner.In a nutshell, system integration is similar to piecing together a puzzle.
An organization’s information subsystems are dispersed and must be brought together into a well-coordinated, coherent architecture or integrated application mesh. It’s a complicated construction process that integrates an organization’s functions from many systems, simplifying diverse systems such as current hardware, software (customized or out-of-box), and communications. The final result of system integration is that an organization’s working relationships with customers and partners improve, workflow efficiency improves, and operational expenses decrease. Business process management, computer networking, enterprise application integration, and/or manual programming are all options for a system integrator.
Data Integration
Data integration is the process of consolidating data from different sources. Data integration is often a prerequisite to other processes including analysis, reporting, and forecasting.
Data integration vs. application integration vs. ETL
Application integration and ETL/ELT are frequently mistaken with data integration. While the three names are closely connected, there are significant differences between them.
Data integration is the process of bringing data from multiple sources into a single consolidated location, usually a data warehouse. The final destination must be adaptable enough to handle a wide range of data types in potentially massive volumes. Data integration is a big deal when it comes to enabling analytical use cases.
Application integration entails transferring data back and forth between different apps in order to keep them in sync. Typically, each application emits and takes data in its own unique fashion, and this data moves in smaller amounts. The usage of application integration to power operational use cases is ideal. As an example, ensuring that a customer assistance system and an accounting system have the same customer records.
Extract, transform, and load (ETL) is an acronym for extract, transform, and load. The process of taking data from source systems, changing it into a different structure or format, and putting it into a destination is known as data transformation. ETL can be divided into two types: data integration and application integration.
Data integration example
Let’s take the example of a company called See Food, Inc. (SFI). SFI’s product is a mobile app where users can take pictures of different items and use the app to identify which specific item is being shown in each photo e.g. type of food or item of clothing.
• Facebook Ads and Google Ads in order to acquire new users
• Google Analytics to track events on its website and in its mobile app
• MySQL database to store user information and image metadata
• Marketo to send marketing email and nurture leads
• Zendesk to perform customer support
• Netsuite for accounting and financial tracking
Each of those applications has a silo of information about SFI’s operations. For SFI to get a 360-degree view of the business, all of that data needs to be combined in one place. That process is data integration.
Course Manual 7: Internal Customer Experience
Why transforming internal services matters
A successful customer-experience strategy entails much more than just providing the best possible products and services. It constructs a seamless network of “customer first” activity that stretches from boardroom executives’ visions to frontline workers’ individual acts in day-to-day interactions with customers. The more a company’s commitment to customer-centricity is aligned with the interests of its employees, the more likely it is to meet its customer-strategy objectives.
Despite this, many businesses fail to align themselves internally around these objectives. Some organizations, such as banks, suffer security and legal constraints that make it difficult to provide internal services in a timely and efficient manner—for example, strict data storage and sharing criteria limit employees’ access to different sources of information across locations. Concerned about noncompliance, some businesses set high standards for themselves, jeopardizing their attempts to function efficiently, easily, and promptly. One bank, for example, kept all of its data in the strictest confidence, denying access to non-confidential information to its workers.
Other organizations have compartmentalized organizational functions that address individual touchpoints in a customer’s journey but no one in charge of the whole experience. Furthermore, in the pursuit of efficiency and scale effects, businesses create enormous teams dedicated to specialized themes, resulting in silos that isolate support operations from their users. Other organizations, who place a greater emphasis on their external image and customer experience at the expense of internal services, view support operations as cost-cutting targets rather than key drivers of company health.
Such blunders can be quite costly. When businesses fail to maximize the quality of their internal services, they create a gap between the customer experience their workers have at work and the one they want to provide for their frontline staff dealing with consumers. “If you want your front-end employees to be very good at the relationship with their clients, then the core of the company, including the support functions in particular, has to be very good with the front,” says Françoise Mercadal-Delasalles, group head of corporate resources and innovation at the French bank Société Générale.
In short, as a top-management priority, the internal-customer experience frequently lags behind the external one. That’s a pity, because there are numerous implications for good customer service.
• First, the quality of internal services has a direct impact on external consumers’ experiences. For example, which customer does not rely on internal services (such as IT) to define the customer relationship? The IT staff of one international airline failed to integrate its front-office products with a new IT architecture. Employees were unable to serve their customers due to a lack of accurate flight and ticket information, resulting in major delays and flight cancellations.
• Second, in a competitive market for top talent, providing employees with a smooth work experience can be part of a company’s value proposition for attracting and retaining talent. Furthermore, just as it does in the transformation of externally facing customer teams, supporting a customer-first culture in support operations tends to inspire back-office personnel with a heightened feeling of responsibility, which enhances their retention rates.
• Finally, improving the internal-customer experience will almost certainly boost employee happiness while simultaneously lowering expenses by enhancing productivity, removing inefficiencies in processes, and reducing absences. Digitizing manual procedures, for example, significantly improves efficiency and decreases employee lost time. Such successful reforms, in our experience, can reduce the total cost of travel by 25 percent in two or three years. These savings might be used to fund expansion and other projects.
Measuring and understanding internal-customer satisfaction
First and foremost, businesses must comprehend their employees’ level of satisfaction with their working environment and services, as well as the factors that influence their contentment. Many people believe that the best technique is one that is structured and discloses the sources of satisfaction as well as how to improve them. Too many firms fail to effectively monitor employee happiness or the performance of support activities, resulting in a lack of understanding of the needs of the employees who use these internal services. As a result, the chances of taking corrective action are reduced.
Why are businesses ill-equipped to effectively assess internal-customer issues? Some HR departments are in charge of gauging employee satisfaction. Frequently, HR sends out employee satisfaction surveys with ad hoc, generic questions that don’t address the dynamics that drive pleasure or dissatisfaction and are unrelated to the daily work experience. This survey-heavy strategy does not assist organizations in understanding the fundamental reasons of employee dissatisfaction, and it is not usually followed by the necessary corrective action. Employees are dissatisfied.
For example, a European bank realized that its staff were unhappy with their technology and tools. It provided them tablets to help them bridge the gap. Because they were difficult to use and full of technological flaws, the majority of these devices were relegated to drawers. As a result, the bank increased costs without increasing employee satisfaction. In the end, it only added to the frustration.
This wasted opportunity emphasizes the importance of thoroughly analyzing the factors that influence internal customer satisfaction before determining the best ways to increase it. After conducting a customer satisfaction survey focused on employee journeys, the bank discovered that employees were most displeased with the tools’ complexity rather than their obsolescence. For example, synchronizing passwords to log onto programs would have greatly improved employee satisfaction with the hardware.
In many circumstances, businesses select the wrong approach to dealing with employee satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Employee-customer-experience efforts, like many diagnosis of external-customer experiences, tend to focus on touchpoints—individual contacts between support staffers and their coworkers—rather than end-to-end customer journeys. Because it can’t identify blind spots and miss critical cross-functional concerns, a company runs the risk of failing to understand and improve its users’ satisfaction.
Defining and measuring internal satisfaction
A user-centric methodology should be used to assess employee satisfaction with internal services. In most situations, these efforts are concentrated on a small number of 10 to 20 journeys that are significant in terms of frequency, importance, or cost (Exhibit 1). While this concept is highlighted for business-to-consumer (B2C) services (such as IT for all employees), it is also viable to do a comparable analysis for business-to-business (B2B) services (for instance, IT services for IT operators).
Exhibit 1
A two-step process should be followed while defining employee journeys and preparing to survey them. To begin, create a list of journeys to investigate, filtered by the criteria listed above. Only ten journeys account for roughly 80 percent of customer satisfaction results in most circumstances. By their very nature, these travels are multi-functional. As a result, it’s critical that key personnel from all departments who provide services to employees get together to define journeys and adopt the consumer perspective.
Avoid attempting to define journeys within organizational silos; for example, a journey like “I am a new employee in the firm” involves HR (contracts and validations), purchasing (badges), real estate (securing an office), IT (delivering hardware and software), finance (sharing bank-account documentation), and so on.
Next, test the list with employees who utilize these internal services to confirm that it is complete and representative. It’s critical to bring up the subtleties when polling employees about the finer points of journeys. In truth, the goal of polling employees on their satisfaction with internal trips isn’t only to gauge it.
Above all, this effort tries to comprehend the factors that influence satisfaction or discontent with travels in order to identify and prioritize areas for improvement. To do so, the detailed process should break down the stages employees take on these journeys, with input from both those who operate and those who use them. The effort should include live observation of the journeys.
Companies will be able to grasp the following by analyzing the survey’s ratings and feedback:
• What factors have the greatest impact on employee satisfaction with internal services?
• The level of happiness with each journey
• What factors contribute to satisfaction or discontent with each journey
The primary areas for an effort to transform the internal-customer experience will be determined by these findings. They will also assist businesses in avoiding time-consuming initiatives that will not be rewarded (Exhibit 2).
Exhibit 2
A comprehensive staff site for a European insurance company, for example, took more than a year to construct, aggregating all links to internal requests and information about support activities. The IT team was in charge of the project, but they failed to examine internal customers’ needs, test features with the user base, or give training on how to utilize them. Employees did not use the portal when it was released since it was complicated and required multiple passwords to access.
The organization refocused its efforts on developing journeys that meant more to employees after a structured internal-customer-centric transformation. As a result, their level of satisfaction with internal services has greatly grown.
What do employees want?
McKinsey & Co. drew some conclusions on the primary areas of dissatisfaction employees had with internal services after conducting multiple internal-customer-experience surveys at large companies. Among them are the following:
• The overall time necessary to execute tasks required by support functions
• The availability and clarity of information
• The time it takes to proceed through processes that involve support functions.
Their study has also aided in the collection of data on employee demands and sources of satisfaction, as well as the development of a hierarchy of what employees expect from customer-centric businesses (Exhibit 3). The more advanced a company’s customer-centric thinking is, the more likely the determinants of employee satisfaction will evolve from basic courtesy on the part of the staff to the availability and timely delivery of information, and finally, to an enjoyable and seamless experience that resolves problems and issues on the first swipe.
Exhibit 3
Key success factors for conducting an internal-customer-centric transformation
Internal-user-centric transformations, like any other customer-centric transformation, necessitate the establishment of design and governance requirements:
The first step is to create the correct overall architecture, which includes creating a clear and ambitious vision, as well as a change story, developing a governance blueprint, drafting an initiative road map, and aligning the company on metrics and objectives. In addition, the corporation must establish and apply purpose-driven change-management principles outlining a new way of working to change mindsets and behavior and guarantee that the entire organization works to give internal customers an amazing experience.
Setting up cross-functional transformation teams that represent all functions and departments involved in internal-customer journeys is another requirement. To be autonomous and test all relevant concepts in a risk-free environment, the teams must run the transformation by defining their own rules and scoping out actions they would not be able to do in a normal day-to-day setting.
Aside from the typical key success criteria seen in customer-centric transformations in general, experience with internal-customer-centric transformations has revealed certain unique variables:
Managing a cultural transition to refocus support functions on the customer. Despite the fact that frontline staff are continually in contact with customers, support services may have gotten progressively alienated from them and established their own goals and incentives that are separate from the company’s. Organizations should employ a variety of outreach efforts to refocus support operations on the consumer. These include developing an understanding of and commitment to increasing internal-customer satisfaction; reinforcing internal-customer-satisfaction mechanisms, such as customer-feedback loops and incentives; developing the skills and capabilities needed to deliver services to internal customers; and having heads of support functions model desired behavior to demonstrate the importance of the internal-customer experience.
For example, a bank attempted to foster a customer-centric makeover of its support functions without encouraging a culture shift. The bank failed to engage its employees by failing to generate a feeling of shared purpose and goal. Only minor steps forward were made as a result.
Building strong links between the support units and the business to ensure alignment of interests and close collaboration. One company pursued a customer-centric transformation of its information technology department by establishing intermediary roles between IT and the business to function as a link between the two. As a result, IT teams grew separated from the business, and intermediaries were unable to effectively communicate messages from the business to IT and vice versa. The organization greatly boosted the satisfaction of both business and IT operators by eliminating these roles, re-establishing direct links between the two entities, providing tools more suited to the needs of employees, and incorporating them at all stages of product creation.
Giving support units direct contact with internal and external customer feedback relevant to their actions. The frontline and support functions of a private bank were both undergoing customer-centric transformations at the same time. Client arenas, where clients discussed their experiences and feelings about their engagement with the bank, were attended by employees from the support services. Clients complained about restrictions on activities (such as executing certain transactions) as a result of several restrictive compliance requirements during these sessions. This was a watershed moment for the compliance division, which had previously shied away from dealing with clients. By putting themselves in the shoes of the customers, the compliance team was able to shift its focus from just protecting the bank to offering a positive customer experience while maintaining its protective role.
Companies that want to take advantage of the competitive advantages of a better customer experience should look both internally and beyond. Employee participation in a customer-centric culture is a powerful strategy to increase corporate loyalty as well as effective outreach to end customers.
Course Manual 8: Modernization Strategy
Transforming IT infrastructure into a highly efficient and strategic business foundation can boost technology-driven performance while lowering expenses dramatically.
Building a firm foundation
Many businesses have been dissatisfied with their IT infrastructure for years, due to obsolete technology, high expenses, and poor service provider performance. Most are afraid that their infrastructure, which is less than ideal in terms of cost and capabilities, would not be able to satisfy the increasing business requirements of the digital age.
The technology foundation that supports a company’s business strategy, ability to innovate with technology, and digital skills is IT infrastructure, which includes data centers, communication networks, IT security, and end-user technology services. The majority of infrastructure environments are outsourced in huge, complex contracts that last five to ten years. An annual budget for a Fortune 500 business might range from $30 million to more than $100 million.
Many businesses, on the other hand, neglect the strategic value of a solid IT infrastructure. Despite the fact that fundamental services are treated as commodities, successful organizations are gaining a competitive edge through sophisticated infrastructure capabilities, such as faster time to market, increased productivity, improved customer experiences and engagement, and cheaper costs.
Because of the complexities and high costs of switching providers, upgrading an IT infrastructure necessitates planning and experience in order to minimize interruptions, reduce costs and effort, and shorten deployment time. Poor performance, excessive expenditures, limited innovation, poor human performance and high turnover, old technology, limited structure and management of the technological environment, and lack of flexibility are among issues that most companies face while working with IT infrastructures. The benefits of getting IT infrastructure right, the perfect conditions for making a change, and the path to a successful transformation are all discussed in this Course Manual.
The benefits of IT infrastructure transformation
A high-performing IT infrastructure has become increasingly crucial as digital activities and technology have become more prominent. From back-end capabilities and customer-facing innovations like in-store Wi-Fi to internal staff advancements like access to social collaboration tools, bring-your-own-device programs, and the expanding use of cloud services, the infrastructure’s strength has a huge impact on corporate performance. The majority of these capabilities are outsourced, and their annual market worth is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The advantages of a successful IT infrastructure transformation are numerous, including a plethora of cost-cutting and process-improvement options, as well as the ability to gain an advantage by having a competitive and adaptable technology environment. Companies that examine their infrastructure on a regular basis reap a slew of advantages (see figure 1).
Transparent and reduced costs. Many vendor relationships experience cost increases for a variety of reasons that are difficult to explain. The transformation process provides visibility into IT infrastructure spending and identifies areas where the organization may spend less for the same or better service. Advanced technology may save a lot of money by supplying more computer power at a reduced cost, and alternative delivery methods like relocating employees or moving to the cloud can save even more money.
Improved service levels. IT infrastructure services are operating well when no one notices them at all. The infrastructure is always available, responsive, and of high-quality thanks to best-in-class service levels. Customers and staff are both affected by service levels. Support tickets are addressed faster with a better IT infrastructure, and network and system availability is guaranteed.
Greater flexibility and faster time to market for new services. A transformation gives you the chance to boost your processing and storage capabilities. Pay-as-you-go models allow servers and other equipment to be deployed more quickly, and storage can be raised or lowered on demand. More modern technology can get into the hands of users sooner by adding a new contract with accelerated tech refresh cycles.
Innovation. Legacy systems necessitate ongoing monitoring and can waste important staff time due to significant issues and unanticipated outages. Companies may spend less on putting out fires and more on developing inventive methods to work with business counterparts to give solutions that will drive revenue growth in a refreshed environment that is running smoothly.
Bolstered network security. Security tools have improved their ability to detect real-time threats, detect potential data leaks, and stop viruses from spreading. Advanced tools can boost network security and cut down on unplanned outages.
The conditions for making a change
Making significant changes to your IT infrastructure is a difficult and time-consuming task. Modifications must be carefully planned because poorly planned changes can create major business system and operational interruptions, resulting in revenue loss.
Many tech executives conclude they can’t take the risk. And for other people, making a change may not be the greatest option. So, how can you tell when it’s time to upgrade your IT infrastructure? When is the best moment to question your current supplier and maybe replace them? Before moving forward with a transformation, some requirements must be met, according to most experience:
There is a sound business case. The case was clear for one client: the financial repercussions of making the adjustment were too great to overlook. However, for some, the business case for change is less evident since the gap between market-level service price and current pricing may not be as large as it appears, implying that now is not the best moment to make a significant change.
Senior leadership is supportive and motivated to drive change. Changing the atmosphere and working methods can be tough, and overcoming the status quo’s inertia necessitates strong leadership. There will be challenges along the way, as well as short-term problems. A successful transformation requires senior leadership from both within and outside of IT.
Technologies are stale or do not take advantage of new, modern capabilities. Old contracts may not motivate vendors to perform responsibly, especially when it comes to keeping the environment updated and technically sound. The rapid rate of technological innovation and evolution need frequent refresh cycles in order to adopt the most current technology. When it comes to constantly upgrading and updating, the old adage “if it’ broke, don’t fix it” no longer applies, and all too frequently, enterprises and their providers both succumb to fatigue. If technology, for example, can strengthen the link between IT and business strategy or has beneficial implications for the company, it’s worth looking into whether contractual adjustments can help.
The incumbent vendor is not a strategic partner. IT infrastructure vendors tend to follow their contractual commitments with surgical precision. Strategic partners, on the other hand, go above and beyond the agreement to assist businesses get more value out of their IT infrastructure. These companies are ahead of the game when it comes to spotting systemic hazards before they become outages. They offer research and development labs where new technologies can be tested, as well as ideas on how to improve the business’s IT infrastructure. They also have a stake in the game since they share the financial risk of price hikes and service interruptions.
There is a culture for change. A culture that embraces change and is eager to explore and learn new technologies and innovations is required for a successful transformation. Furthermore, a culture based on results-driven accountability is more likely to facilitate a smooth and quick transition and realise the benefits of a modernised IT infrastructure. When the firm, the exiting vendor, and the new vendor are all held accountable for success, this strategy works well.
Creating a strategic partnership
Most IT infrastructure setups offer great potential for increasing value, lowering costs, and improving service. However, IT infrastructure is frequently overlooked due to its complexity and operational hazards. Neglecting to analyze this infrastructure increases the risk and expenses over time, since IT infrastructure services and capabilities deteriorate quickly. Trying to save money and time by avoiding the costs and time required for a transition and transformation can be an expensive mistake.
Complexity may be reduced into clear-cut decision criteria for proactive technology leaders who are prepared to test what they find with the correct framework and awareness of where to look. When outsourced infrastructure contracts have a year or two left on their term, it’s the best time to look. High costs and an unmotivated vendor are frequently encountered. If this is the case, the environment is perfect for competition to drive the necessary level of innovation, with the ultimate goal of replacing a tactical, profit-maximizing vendor with a strategic partner.
Course Manual 9: Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
The importance of data privacy in IT transformation
For different people, the phrase “IT transformation” has varied meanings. IT transformation may entail applying artificial intelligence to improve customer experience, while for others, it may entail utilizing cloud technology and analytics tools to optimize logistics procedures. In a nutshell, IT transformation refers to how organizations use technology to innovate their operations.
In recent years, there has been a surge in interest in this topic. Since 2014, Google trends data reveals a continuous increase in UK searches for ‘digital transformation,’ indicating that technological innovation is becoming a more important consideration for business leaders.
This graph shows recent reports of increased investment in digital transformation. According to a recent survey by Deloitte, the average budget for medium-sized enterprises to engage in IT transformation climbed by 25% in the previous year. Similarly, according to a survey titled “The State of Digital Transformation,” the top reasons for organizations engaging in IT transformation include growth opportunities (51%), as well as greater competitive pressure (41%).
Despite this increased enthusiasm, there is still some skepticism, particularly among smaller enterprises. Businesses must now map their data flows, analyze the risks in their data processing activities, and determine where controls must be installed, thanks to the implementation of GDPR legislation last year. As a result, there is now a larger chance of sensitive data being lost or, worse, stolen as a result of innovation. The repercussions of making mistakes are too large to be disregarded, with the maximum fine for non-compliance being €20 million or 4% of annual turnover.
When the GDPR’s specific requirements were first announced, and Privacy by Design was made a legal requirement for IT projects for the first time, it was feared that hundreds of digital transformation projects – many of which had been scoped and designed months, if not years before – would be derailed. Or, even worse, would come to a halt indefinitely. After all, retrospective Privacy by Design is nearly impossible, and abandoning the project and starting over is usually not an option.
How can the two coexist if IT transformation strives to liberate as much data and correct context around the business as possible, while data privacy aims to ensure secrecy and pseudonymization?
Keep the project focused
Keeping your business goals concise and attainable is a necessity for successfully implementing IT transformation. Far too frequently, businesses overextend themselves by making big plans, only to fall short and jeopardize not only their reputation but also their sensitive data.
We once worked with a major European retailer who wanted to use technology to create a better working environment. They intended to uncover areas of the organization that were not working at full efficiency and fix it by measuring their employees’ utilization of physical and digital resources.
They also intended to link this data to employee HR records, analyzing usage reports and access card data alongside employee attendance and performance measures to determine which staff were underperforming and which merited promotions. On paper, the concept succeeded since it eliminated the possibility of unconscious bias in performance appraisals.
The corporation, on the other hand, failed to inform the rest of the team about the proposed structure and did not even consider their individual privacy rights during the design phase. Employees were subjected to an automated decision-making process without their knowledge or consent, which is in blatant violation of GDPR. As a result, the project had to be rethought from the ground up, resulting in both financial and reputational implications.
The technical infrastructure was secure, and the workflows and machine learning in place were impressive, but the organization tried far-reaching changes that were not conveyed to the privacy team.
Make privacy a priority from the beginning
Organizations should prioritize the security of their company data from the start to avoid potentially disastrous data breaches. When attempting to implement large-scale modifications to a company’s operations, proper security safeguards are frequently overlooked, resulting in major problems down the road.
We previously collaborated with an international medical company that creates medical devices. The developer team deployed Internet of Things (IoT) technology to track how each gadget was used, with the goal of leveraging the information for product development and maintenance.
The necessity to keep private information secure was even more crucial as a corporation that collected healthcare data. The GDPR regulation, which went into effect last year, lays a special emphasis on healthcare data and establishes extra rules for its storage and usage. Nonetheless, neither the patients, healthcare providers, nor the rest of the company were made aware that their information was being gathered and utilized in this manner.
Any organization considering a similar venture should establish a set of project oversight practices from the start to guarantee that the project is thoroughly assessed by a privacy or legal expert before moving forward. It’s also necessary to create documentation that records and governs the data’s gathering, storage, and use.
None of these steps were taken in the situation described above, and this activity was only found after the legal team began its GDPR preparations and company-wide audit of data use. The project was promptly suspended, resulting in delays in product development, disgruntled investors, and additional expenditures associated with relaunching a similar initiative without data difficulties.
Ethical data usage in an era of IT technology and regulation
During the global coronavirus pandemic, digital surveillance and technology have been at the center of public debate. Companies and government agencies have access to vast amounts of user data, which is only growing. In this environment, discussions are raging over whether it is appropriate for governments to follow the whereabouts of persons under quarantine or to undertake contact tracing using mobile phone location data, for example. Businesses must have clear, transparent guidelines for how they will use customer data as access to it grows.
Data-protection procedures should be in place for businesses of all sizes, but the larger the organization, the greater the risk of data breaches. Unfortunately, most businesses lack clear policies for how to treat and protect customer data, as well as how to prevent data breaches. This is frequently because businesses believe regulators bear the brunt of data-protection responsibilities. In other circumstances, corporations attempted to form a committee to develop data-protection rules but failed due to a lack of clarity about what the program should look like or who should lead the effort outside of IT.
Having a sound policy—and enforcing it—around the ethical use of data, on the other hand, gives businesses a competitive advantage. Customers who value data privacy will choose providers who are completely transparent about how their data is collected and used. Data ethics is at the top of the CEO’s priority list, as failure can result in serious consequences such as loss of reputation or business closure. Companies require a systematic program to verify that standards are upheld and evaluated on a regular basis in order to build a successful policy.
The case for a corporate data program
Rather than the subtleties of how the data is used, regulators tend to focus on how data collectors and disseminators—such as data brokers, governments, and large corporations—oversee the privacy and protection of personal data. While many legislatures have passed data-privacy protection legislation, it is not as successful as it could be. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, for example, is a good breach notification mechanism, but it hasn’t been consistent in enforcing fines to dissuade companies from violating customer data privacy.
In order to preserve the privacy and usage of customer data, a data program should go beyond regulation. It should concentrate on ensuring transparency about what data is gathered and how it is used, as well as whether such use cases are suitable. Furthermore, businesses should be able to detect any potentially illegal data usage (such as voting analysis to influence voters). There are a few interesting instances of such programs in the banking industry right now, but no obvious leaders have emerged.
Building a successful ethical data-use program
Organizations should follow four stages to create a robust program for ethical data usage.
Align on company vision and beliefs
Organizations want a clear vision and objective for their data program, which is adapted to their specific industry. It’s crucial to understand the company’s vision, the values it upholds, and how a potential data use case connects with those values to make data-related decisions. For instance, a health company deciding whether to sell pseudonymized data can evaluate the decision against its data ethics.
Companies can select which data initiatives are acceptable and which are not by having clear values and criteria.
Determine data ownership and risk mitigation
A good data programme establishes roles for data ethics and data ownership. Then, if an algorithm needs to be overridden, or a system’s data access needs to be changed, it’s apparent who should make the adjustments. The policy for the programme should also specify who is responsible for the data collected and handled.
Data hazards should also be considered, such as the use of personal consumer contact information. In the event that something goes wrong, such as claims fraud in insurance, the company will require a secure escalation method. Prudence and compliance are accelerators of business value generation rather than obstacles.
Evolve culture and talent
Companies can gain a competitive edge by not just embracing data privacy in their data-ethics programme, but also ensuring that it is a value shared throughout the C-suite. Having a culture of transparency and privacy at the top of the business makes it simpler to spread such changes across the rest of the company. A customer-centric approach also entails making data-use decisions based on the potential impact on customer privacy rather than the immediate economic benefit.
It’s also crucial to train new and existing staff to follow the data privacy and risk mitigation culture. Setting expectations about data usage up front is critical for protecting client data from illegal use. As a result, businesses should establish explicit identity and access-management policies, ensuring that only individuals with privileged access may access consumer data and make system changes.
Set up a data-ethics board
A data-ethics board, in its ideal form, would be a cross-functional group made up of people from business, compliance and legal, operations, audit, IT, and the C-suite that acts as a point of reference for complicated and contentious data use cases like customer segmentation. Because of the department’s data responsibility and technical competence, IT representation is essential. Indeed, this division is in charge of numerous aspects of data management and security.
Business departments and data owners, on the other hand, must guarantee that their functions comply with agreed policies and regularly monitor emerging use cases that may necessitate a data-risk assessment. Product owners can explore data-opportunity ideas with peers, mentors, or leadership, and, if necessary, seek board permission. Importantly, the board should not only create data standards and ensure that they are consistent with the company’s values, but it should also monitor whether these standards are followed throughout the organization.
How can companies ensure long-term success?
Debates regarding data ethics can impact industry norms and individual decisions, such as whether or not to pursue a specific data-processing use case. Even the most comprehensive data ethics programme, however, will fail to achieve long-term success if data management is left primarily in the hands of IT. Companies can entrench these changes in their DNA by establishing a written data policy and a data-ethics board to support it. Support from the C-suite is also essential. Data ethics must be viewed as an enterprise-level risk rather than a functional risk if a data programme is to be sustained in the long run.
Key Takeaways
Despite its drawbacks, IT transformation is still a thrilling prospect for organizations of all shapes and sizes. The possibility of using cutting-edge technology to speed up their company processes and hence improve their competitiveness is certainly appealing. Data privacy, on the other hand, should always be a cornerstone of any IT transformation project, because without it, the whole house will crumble.
Hiring Privacy Architects to examine their aims and the privacy legislation that they will have to comply with is something that organizations should consider. Privacy Architects are experts in both privacy and technology, which is a rare but necessary combination of skills. Technology projects that are undertaken without a thorough understanding of privacy laws might expose a company to new hazards. The ramifications of which extend far beyond penalties and fines, to the core of whether or not customers can trust you.
Course Manual 10: Evolution of products, services and processes
Companies have been pushed by saturated and commoditized global competitive environments to significantly transform the nature of their businesses in recent years, moving away from being owners of competencies and resources and toward becoming integrators of skills, resources, and technologies capable of realising complex value creation processes (Cáceres and Guzmán 2015; Marilungo et al. 2017; Lindhult et al. 2018). This progression entails a full shift away from the old product-based business model and toward a new approach that emphasises customer satisfaction and encourages the sale of the performance associated with its use.
The move from hard-wired value chains to adaptable product-service value creation networks is possible because to the digitization of corporate processes and services (Blau et al. 2010). The pace of technological innovation might make it easier to create unique customised service functions that meet the demands and expectations of new clients.
Digital Technology and the Development of New Products and Services
Let’s look at some of the technological aspects of an IT transformation that will have a big impact on how new products and services are designed. This is a sample list, not a comprehensive list. In actuality, the specifics of each of these technologies change on an almost monthly basis, therefore this list is more of a collection of digital technology categories.
• Smart devices are items or appliances with sensors or monitors, a user interface, computing power, and digital communication capabilities. As a result, these devices are effectively computers that are embedded in a product and add functionality. Most smart gadgets can be customised with a personal profile or programmable capability that allows the user to design their own interaction pattern with the device.
• The Internet of Things (IoT) is a digital technology that has exploded in popularity in recent years. Any device or equipment with digital communication capability, as well as sensors or monitors, is considered part of it. The Internet of Things is a digital network that connects gadgets and permits one-way or two-way communication.
• Data aggregation is provided by analytics platforms in the form of a dashboard or user interface. This allows a client to keep track of and control several linked devices in a process. Analytics can also be used to troubleshoot and analyse the performance of the various steps in the monitored process.
• Digital platforms are internet-based software programmes that connect people from various user groups. Individuals or corporate entities can trade information, purchase items or services, and promote a cause or product through the platform connection. With multiple user group classifications and broad sharing capabilities for presenting and exchanging information, digital platforms can be quite complex. Alternatively, the platform could be quite basic and focused on a small number of categories or types of data.
The range and depth of performance of each of these technologies is constantly improving. The specific performance level is not important for our discussion; rather, the impact that these technologies have on the creation of new products or services is.
Every product is now essentially more than a widget; it’s a service with a relationship. Customers want to connect with a product before purchasing it, whether through user reviews or forums. Customers want to be able to communicate with the manufacturer or seller during the purchasing process so that they may easily buy, install, set up, or configure the product to make it their own. Many customers desire to join a community of like-minded people and share their product-use experiences. Many clients want the device to be able to connect to platforms or networks so they may control it remotely (“Alexa, turn on…”). Many customers want the product to keep track of how they use it so that it can remember their habits and adjust to their needs, as well as enable access to other comparable or complimentary products.
All of this is based on the product’s ability to establish a relationship, and has very little to do with the product’s functionality and efficacy. Customers will join user groups or submit comments on the producer’s websites even if the product is not powered or connected. In the digital age, relationship management is a critical component of customer value. As a result, the product must be built to make establishing and maintaining a digital relationship as simple as possible.
While many goods undergo a fundamental change in design, the process of generating a new product or service undergoes a significant transition. Designers and developers in the industrial age acquired customer requirements through focus groups. Then they created the new product and put it through its paces in a lab or testing facility to ensure that it performed as planned. They built and set up a production facility so that the product could be manufactured once they were satisfied with the design. After that, the product was released onto the market. The capabilities of digital technology have changed those steps in the digital age.
Restaurants that offer app-ordered takeaway services, online shops, and other public services that have been made possible by digitization are just a few examples.
A collective drive to execute on a strategy with the required people, processes, technologies, and budget will continue to take IT transformation forward at a rapid pace for most businesses.
The Evolution of IT Transformation
Market competitiveness has always been a motivator for business organizations, both large and small, in virtually every industry, to prioritize IT transformation. The demand for cloud-based IT transformation has sparked a frenzy in recent years, with new products and systems appearing every week — and some companies even creating a new C-suite position, the chief digital transformation officer. According to a recent IDC InfoBrief, 54 percent of business owners say the most difficult part of achieving IT transformation goals is integrating all of these new solutions and projects into their daily operations.
Choosing which system to utilize can be difficult for late adopters. You want to make sure you’re keeping up with the times while also catering to the demands of your staff and customers. Early adopters, on the other hand, may find themselves stuck with old solutions, which can isolate a company in the current day, resulting in decreased productivity and employee dissatisfaction. So, whether you started in 1990 or 2021, there has been a clear progression of IT transformation in the corporate sector, and understanding the many types of solutions available is the first step toward successfully digitizing your company and increasing efficiency.
Here’s an overview of how the corporate world’s digitization has progressed through time and what will be crucial moving forward:
Systems Of Record
The IT transformation journey of any organization does not begin or end in the same manner. Systems of record were often relied on by early adopters who began their change early. Internal data is generally used by systems of record (SOR) to store information that is easily accessible by personnel. Examples of a SOR include a CRM for a customer-facing company or an electronic health record (EHR) system for a health care organization. At the touch of a button, these devices establish a record and specialized data that a corporation may utilize to influence future decisions.
It’s only natural that the IT transformation tsunami began here. Companies began to see the value of data and realized that they needed a strategy to effectively weaponize that data to affect change in their business operations. And it’s still an important part of any organization’s digitization; according to Gartner, any innovative technology will rely on a SOR at some point to be successful. However, simply having a SOR in place will not suddenly modernize a company and result in the complete productivity improvement you need.
Systems Of Collaboration
The emergence of collaboration systems came next. The SOR failed because it kept firms divided; data was available for specific departments, but there was no simple way to disseminate it and keep everyone informed.
Collaboration systems make use of the data obtained by the SOR, but they also allow for a flow of information between employees at a rate that was previously impossible due to technological advancements. Famous collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams have perfected this technique, allowing teams to interact with and extract knowledge that had previously been buried.
Systems Of Engagement
Systems of engagement were the next phase in the evolution. Companies realized they required a method to compile and analyze the massive amounts of data produced by earlier systems. These new technologies were able to collect and source this data faster than ever before, providing relevant business insights at a rapid rate, thanks to advancements in database optimization technology. Users of platforms like Zendesk, Constant Contact, and even Facebook were able to exploit their obtained data in previously unimaginable ways.
These platforms enabled executives and companies to quickly digest information and make business decisions in the blink of an eye, and they were crucial in the development of customer service innovation. In other words, it provided leaders with the data and knowledge they needed to establish digital strategies and shift from focusing on products to providing service-oriented outcomes. As a result, the customer experience improved, which aided other aspects of the business, such as sales and marketing, and, more crucially, engagement systems acted as a catalyst for the next step in the evolution.
Systems Of Productivity And Outcomes
Threading systems of productivity and results together is the final stage of the evolution, or what is currently the best strategy to achieve transformation. You can ensure that these additional systems you use are functioning together to create efficiency for your team, your customers, and your organization by linking digitization to productivity and outcomes – without adding to their existing workload.
Technology has finally advanced to the point where we can combine the benefits of all previous systems to create a more coherent and unified customer experience platform that delivers revenue and productivity outcomes for customers, workers, and ourselves. Companies like my own, Jira, Trello, and Microsoft 365 empower teams to connect workflows and expand productivity across their whole company.
Once a company has achieved real unified digitalization, workflows for the entire organization can be easily mapped out, new tool adoption can be accelerated, and your company can focus on delivering those all-important end-user experiences. It doesn’t matter how useful your system is if it isn’t linked to the quarterly objectives and business outcomes you’ve defined. These output systems are the most effective approach to take advantage of all that technology has to offer the business world, and you don’t want to be left behind.
So, before you embark on your IT transformation path, be sure you know exactly what you want to achieve. Many companies already have the foundation for digitization in place, thanks to legacy technology. The most important thing you can do is to make sure you’re continually moving forward.
Course Manual 11: Digitization of the business
Customers expect a seamless and efficient digital experience, and they expect it now. Customers have been spoilt. They now demand every organization to produce products and services quickly and with a consistent user experience, thanks to companies like Amazon and Apple.
Customers want to be able to access their online electricity account and receive a real-time consumption report. They anticipate purchasing a phone from their telecoms provider and having it activated and set up right away. They demand preapproval or approval of bank loans in minutes. They want all service providers to have automatic access to all of the data they previously provided and to refrain from repeatedly asking the same questions. They are perplexed as to why a bank requires their salary slips as proof of income since their money is placed straight into the bank by their company every month.
Many traditional businesses are unable to meet these demands. As a result, attackers born in the digital age can rush in and disrupt the market by delivering digital products and services quickly, using smart algorithms, and having complete access to data.
Customers may not express it this way, but they are demanding a complete revamp of business processes from organizations across a wide range of industries. Customers have grown accustomed to intuitive interfaces, around-the-clock availability, real-time delivery, individualized service, global consistency, and zero faults. It’s about more than just providing a better customer experience; when businesses do it right, they can provide more competitive rates thanks to lower expenses, improved operational controls, and less risk.
Delighting the customer
Companies must expedite the digitization of their business processes to fulfill these high client expectations. They should, however, go beyond just automating a process that already exists. They must reimagine the entire business process, including decreasing the number of procedures needed, reducing the number of papers required, establishing automated decision-making, and dealing with regulatory and fraud challenges. To fit the new processes, operating models, skills, organizational structures, and responsibilities must be rebuilt.
To enable better decision making, performance tracking, and consumer insights, data models should be changed and rebuilt. When it comes to digitization, old wisdom must often be blended with new talents, such as training a merchandising manager to build a price algorithm. There may be a demand for new positions such as data scientist and user-experience designer.
The advantages are enormous: digitizing information-intensive activities can save costs by up to 90% and increase turnaround times by several orders of magnitude. One bank automated their mortgage-application and decision-making process, reducing the cost per new mortgage by 70% and reducing the time to preliminary approval from several days to only one minute. A telecoms business developed a self-serve prepaid service that allowed clients to order and activate phones without having to deal with the back office. A shoe store created a system to manage its in-store inventory that allowed it to know whether a shoe and size was in stock right away, saving consumers and salespeople time. An insurance firm created a digital mechanism to adjudicate a vast portion of its simple claims automatically.
Furthermore, replacing paper and manual procedures with software allows firms to collect data automatically, which can be analyzed to better understand process performance, cost drivers, and risk factors. Managers can address problems before they become problematic using real-time reporting and dashboards on digital-process performance. Monitoring customer buying behavior and comments through digital channels, for example, can help identify and address supply-chain quality issues more quickly. Leading companies (see sidebar, “Scaling digitalization operations at a European bank”) have realized that typical large-scale programs to move all current activities to the digital world take a long time to achieve results, and in some cases fail completely.
Instead, successful businesses rethink processes, challenging everything about them and recreating them with cutting-edge digital technology. Rather than developing technology to assist back-office employees in typing customer complaints into their systems, for example, leading companies create self-serve options for customers to type in their own complaints.
This technique is typically implemented process by process in a series of short-term releases, integrating classic process reengineering methods such as lean1 with new agile2 software development methodologies.
Below are the most decisive reasons digitalization is important for businesses
1. Improved user experience
Many business owners lament the fact that despite putting in a lot of effort, their efforts are not yielding the intended outcomes. Experts feel that poor customer service is preventing businesses from attaining their full potential. Customers demand a quick and easy user interface. In addition, digitization has the potential to make end-users happy.
A well-known pizza company devised a novel approach of dealing with customer service issues. The pizza firm opted to automate its ordering procedure after consumers complained about having to wait a long time for their orders. Instead of walking through the menu on the board, consumers may personalize their meals right at the table. Customers began to appreciate the ordering procedure, which reduced concerns about long wait times. As a result, it demonstrates how a modest modification to automate the ordering process may significantly improve the customer experience.
2. Accessibility
Digitization not only improves the user experience, but it also allows you to quickly retrieve documents and paperwork. The advantages of digitizing and uploading documents to the cloud are that you may access them anytime you want and that there is no chance of losing them. For example, Manuals Brain is a database that houses user manuals for various equipment.
Let’s say you’re on a trip with your DSLR camera and accidentally lock the shutter. You won’t be able to unlock it in any way. Manuals Brain, which also includes the user manual for your DSLR, may provide step-by-step instructions on how to open the shutter. Similarly, even if he is not in the office, a business owner can access critical documents. Digitization has become a necessary component of business in recent years due to the ease with which documents can be accessed.
3. Flexibility
When you digitize documents, you can reformat, alter, and print them as many times as you like. Over time, old documents are prone to being torn. Instead of paying a lot of money to preserve them, you can scan and upload them to the cloud, then alter and reformat them to create new copies.
4. Cost-effective
Every year, every company prints thousands of copies of documents. You might not be able to keep track of so much paperwork after a while, from buyer information to balance sheets. However, digitizing them allows you to organize them into separate folders. For businesses, this is not only handy, but also cost-effective. You will not be need to spend money on paper in order to print those documents. Additionally, you will be helping the environment by eating less paper, which means fewer trees will be cut down.
Digitization is beneficial not only to businesses but also to the environment. It increases consumer experience, which leads to more high-quality leads for your business — a win-win situation.
5. Improve products and services
Your products and services will improve significantly if you engage in IT transformation. That’s because new technologies enable you to provide higher levels of service to your clients, who will gladly accept such upgrades and view your company in a more favorable light.
All of this additional quality may open up new business prospects for you, such as entering a new market, reaching out to new and old clients, and even improving the features of your present items.
6. Optimize processes
Is your company still carrying out duties the same way it did ten or even twenty years ago? Our procedures should evolve in tandem with technological advancements. You’ll be able to work faster, smarter, and provide more value to your consumers as a result.
By offering solutions that are specifically adapted to your needs, digital transformation aids in process optimization. You’ll be able to get the most out of your duties by delegating the heavy lifting to machines and software.
7. Decrease errors and mistakes
No company, no matter how big or little, is immune to making mistakes. However, it is critical to make the necessary steps to reduce them as much as feasible. You can achieve this goal by focusing on digitalization in your local business.
This is because digital solutions allow us to double-check information and, in most cases, automate corrections. You and your customers will experience far fewer faults in your operations if you rely on the right technology.
8. Learn through data
Larger businesses are no longer the only ones who can put in place a big infrastructure dedicated to gathering data and learning from it. Information about your products, customers, and market becomes available as a result of digital transformation, allowing you to make better business decisions.
That is because the Big Data trend relies heavily on digital solutions. You can measure stats connected to your activity and transactions by focussing your work on such instruments. This is quite useful for establishing norms and trends.
9. Engage customers
Digital tools also enable you to offer your customers new and innovative methods to interact with your company. This method is critical for maintaining interest in your brand and products while also separating yourself from your competition.
This is generally accomplished through the use of interactive technologies such as customer service. For example, instead of making a standard phone call, you can provide your customers a real-time chat option where they can talk to a professional.
10. Remain competitive
All markets move quickly, and businesses who are unable to keep up with the pace of change are likely to be left behind. If your firm has not yet adopted digital transformation, you have a lot of catching up to accomplish. Making such a selection, fortunately, will help you stay competitive.
This is true even among larger competitors. You don’t need a budget or a customer base as vast as theirs to benefit from digital transformation; it will help you boost your performance regardless.
11. Provides much value for less
When you consider the excellent outcomes that may be obtained via digitalization, it offers a very appealing cost-benefit ratio. All you have to do now is choose the best solutions for your needs and properly implement digital transformation in your company.
Technology can aid in the discovery of new business prospects, the detection of significant opportunities within your own results, and even the reduction of errors. This combination will increase the value of your investments and justify the upgrade expenditures.
How to grow a business with digital transformation?
If you want to embrace digitalization in your business, you’ll need a good strategy to get the results you want. You can assure the best strategy and future-proof your organization by following the appropriate steps and taking into account trends and how technology evolves over time.
A list of the most significant tasks to apply digitalization for your local company may be found below.
Invest in technology
A commitment to technology is required for digital transformation. You may need to replace equipment and software as it evolves in order to keep up with the changes and improve your outcomes even more.
This is not only a financial investment, but also a mental one. You must stay current with trends and modify your business as they change. The only constant is your goal: to serve your customers with the greatest services and goods possible.
Encourage collaboration
Working with more advanced machines and software isn’t enough when it comes to implementing digitalization in your small business. It’s all about allowing your employees to work together to achieve your goals.
You can work with better business possibilities and improve your solutions by fostering collaboration and using tools that facilitate it. This will also enable you to come up with new ways to work and achieve your objectives.
Integrate your IT assets
True digitalization for small businesses requires the integration of numerous systems to boost productivity and expand product and service options. As a result, you should always hunt for prospective software and equipment integrations.
Integration, fortunately, is a key component of digital transformation. As you explore this new environment, you will undoubtedly come across utilities that interact with one another to bring additional value to you and your consumers. Keep an eye out for those integrations so you don’t lose out.
Break down silos
Only by tearing down the walls that divide your departments can true digital change take place. If your teams operate in silos, you should encourage them to adopt an integration-driven approach.
That is because the best technological solutions may come from integrating the knowledge and experience of experts from many professions. Break down those barriers and help your employees achieve full integration.
Involve every level of the organization
If you want to digitally alter your company, everyone who works with you needs to be on board. Every department must undergo a digitization process in order to reap the benefits of technology in their respective domains.
This will improve the overall performance of your company and make it easier to continue improving on a worldwide scale. After all, only when all of a company’s functions are evolving is it genuinely innovative.
When you consider the advantages of working with digitalization for small businesses, it’s evident how beneficial this option can be to your objectives. Technology is ingrained in everyone’s lives and may make your job more easier and more efficient, particularly for your clients.
Course Manual 12: Personalization Guides The Customer
Customers are increasingly turning to ecommerce as we move into a digital-first environment, and the shift is happening quickly. According to a McKinsey & Company report, ecommerce grew at a ten-year rate in just three months last year.
Consumer expectations are rising as a result of this breakneck growth, and merchants who want to stay ahead of the curve will need to fulfill the increased demand with an amazing digital customer experience.
Due to a lack of personalization in online retail assistance, 64 percent of respondents stated they felt like a ticket rather than a person when surveyed, but as consumers move more online, they’re seeking for individualized and responsive service.
Nearly all businesses thought broad segmentation, demographic data, and batch outbound marketing to be the keys to providing individualized consumer experiences twenty years ago. Amazon began incorporating product personalization into the online experience ten years ago. Now that marketers and businesses have access to massive amounts of data, they are rushing to compete on customer experience by implementing personalization at a granular level never seen before.
Despite the fact that technology has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, businesses have only scratched the surface of personalization potential. Only 9% of responding organizations in Forrester’s Digital Transformation in the Age of the Customer research said they had implemented IT transformation to the point where they thought it gave them an advantage over their competitors. Companies that want to provide a tailored experience to customers regardless of where, when, or how they engage must use modern technologies to build a lasting relationship between the brand and the customer.
The Evolution Of The Customer Journey
The consumer journey has become increasingly detailed as technology progresses. What began as broad-brush advertising has evolved into more focused, targeted, and strategic advertising. This pattern can be seen in numerous facets of a company’s client relationship. As customers embraced smartphone technology, direct mail got more individualized as the content tailored to whichever segment profile the customer most closely aligned with; connection and engagement transferred to new mediums.
Personalized content can now be given via the customer’s preferred method of contact. Customer experience, on the other hand, is still frequently based on asynchronous or batch-and-blast communications. Without knowing everything there is to know about a client and having that information available in real time across the organization, content is limited to the segment to which a customer “belongs,” with no way of knowing whether the content is relevant at that moment in their customer journey.
We now live in a world where quick gratification is the norm, and customers’ expectations have reflected this. Real-time engagement that spans touch points and multistage journeys is the only way to provide a frictionless customer experience. There are various ways to create a completely personalized customer journey for a segment of one using digital channels, mobile apps, social media, SMS, and IoT. To stay up with the proliferation of touch points and the explosion of data, businesses must embrace new technologies like machine learning and develop a scalable process in which machines detect intent and then seamlessly prescribe the best path to purchase for each client.
A Personalized Experience For The Omnipresent Consumer
The customer now has complete control over their brand relationship. Product and service are a given in a commoditized space. As a result, businesses can no longer compete purely on the basis of their product or service; they must compete on the basis of providing a greater experience.
So, how can businesses use IT transformation to gain a competitive advantage? They require the most recent and comprehensive understanding of a person (i.e., their behaviors, preferences, interests and intents). What is the most effective technique to communicate with them? What is the most effective method of notifying them? What will they want to buy next, logically? This data must be complete, up-to-date, and correct.
Marketers must then make the best decision possible given the circumstances of the connection. It could be a message, an alarm, or an offer. This is then orchestrated across all relevant touch points for the consumer, resulting in a highly relevant and consistent experience across all touch points and stages of the journey.
While the technology exists to support these connections, many CEOs of companies that specialize in customer engagement technology have witnessed firsthand that a large proportion of companies have yet to completely embrace IT transformation for customer experience. The fundamental reason why this hasn’t happened for businesses is that there’s a disconnect between their strategy for creating these experiences and their capacity to put it into action.
Lack of clarity on who should own and drive these strategies is a recurring issue at the forefront of this gap. Forrester respondents also paint a murky image of who should be held accountable for digital vision and strategy, with 48 percent saying the CEO should be held accountable and 27 percent saying the CIO should be held accountable. It’s no surprise that few firms have completed IT transformation to the extent that would offer them an advantage over competitors without a clear picture of who is in charge.
Furthermore, transforming the customer experience is a difficult task for any company, but it can only be accomplished through top-down leadership. Established functional silos must give way to a clear mandate that delivering great customer experience is an enterprise-level prerogative that must be omnipresent across all customer touch points.
In order to effectively develop and sustain a frictionless and profitable relationship between the brand and the customer, companies must embrace an open-ecosystem philosophy with a single point of authority over customer data, choices, and orchestration.
The Future Of Personalization
Inefficient techniques will die out in the future of personalization and customer experience. For example, physical receipts will be replaced with digital options provided directly to the client through their preferred digital channel, intelligently created based on previous purchase history, purchasing patterns, and purpose. Machine learning and better decisioning will enable the consumer experience to become even more tailored as technology advances.
For businesses of all sizes, technology will eventually drive personalization at scale. When a firm establishes a single point of control over data, choices, and interactions, it has established the technological framework necessary to build a beneficial connection with its customers and the ability to expand a seamless customer experience as the company grows. Only then will a corporation be able to provide outstanding customer service.
Why is Keeping the Customer in Mind So Hard?
When it comes to IT transformation, it’s easy to lose sight of the client. A prevalent issue is a scarcity of correct client information. Customer data is frequently locked away in organizational silos, such as sales, client service, marketing, and finance, and cannot be integrated to generate a holistic view of the customer. A lack of useful, harmonized data leads to unending argument over what the customer experience should be, why it should be, and where it should be. As a result, transformation programs lose traction, and unsupported assumptions can lead to ineffective results.
Furthermore, some firms just consider customer experience in terms of client acquisition or customer service. As a result, they don’t consider customer preferences or how to develop an experience that encourages continual involvement. Starbucks, on the other hand, considers significantly more than the cost-effectiveness of serving a cup of coffee. It is committed to providing a good in-store experience, going to considerable pains to create welcoming, pleasant, and helpful spaces (for example, by providing Wi-Fi) in which customers can interact or work. (It’s also worth noting that the corporation has an easy-to-understand reward program).
A badly conceived customer experience transformation might actually worsen a company’s overall customer experience. In a strategy vacuum, individual functions chase digital ideas. This may result in increased efficiencies and productivity for them, but not for the rest of the company. They also overlook the majority, if not all, of the potential to employ digital technology to boost brand awareness, customer acquisition, and retention.
Indeed, failing to prioritize the customer experience risks driving them away to competition. Customers will flee to competitors if the user experience is complicated or clumsy. And, if the customer and user experiences are inconsistent across channels, and customers are unable to do what they need to do when and how they want, they are likely to seek for a better experience elsewhere.
Workshop Exercises
Future-State Design Exercises
01. Customer Focus: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
02. Organizational Structure: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
04. Transformational Leadership: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
06. Integration of All Data Systems: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
07. Internal Customer Experience: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
08. Modernization Strategy: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
11. Digitization of The Business: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
12. Personalization Guides The Customer: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
SWOT & MOST Analysis Exercises
01. Undertake a detailed SWOT Analysis in order to identify your department’s internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats in relation to each of the 12 Future-State Design processes featured above. Undertake this task together with your department’s stakeholders in order to encourage collaborative evaluation.
02. Develop a detailed MOST Analysis in order to establish your department’s: Mission; Objectives; Strategies and Tasks in relation to Future-State Design. Undertake this task together with all of your department’s stakeholders in order to encourage collaborative evaluation.
Project Studies
Project Study (Part 1) – Customer Service
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 2) – E-Business
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 3) – Finance
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 4) – Globalization
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 5) – Human Resources
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 6) – Information Technology
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 7) – Legal
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 8) – Management
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 9) – Marketing
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 10) – Production
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 11) – Logistics
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 12) – Education
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Leading IT Transformation process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Customer Focus
02. Organizational Structure
03. Change Management and Cultural Transformation
04. Transformational Leadership
05. Technology Decisions Involve Entire C-Suite
06. Integration of All Data Systems
07. Internal Customer Experience
08. Modernization Strategy
09. Data Security, Privacy and Data Ethics
10. Evolution of Products, Services and Processes
11. Digitization of The Business
12. Personalization Guides The Customer
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Program Benefits
Information Technology
- Agile IT processes
- Improved value delivery
- Decreased defects
- Continuous improvement
- Modernized infrastructure
- Re-tooled staff
- Increased morale
- IT Business partnership
- Meaningful metrics
- Effective sourcing
Management
- Decreased costs
- Aligned strategies
- Servant leadership
- Clarified priorities
- Improved effectiveness
- Improved transparency
- Reduced risk
- Measurable results
- Satisfied customers
- Vendor partnerships
Human Resources
- Empowered teams
- Servant leaders
- Re-tooled staff
- Improved teamwork
- Enhanced collaboration
- Improved performance
- Reduced turnover
- Improved loyalty
- Leadership development
- Employee development
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.