digital disruption – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

March 14, 2019 By David Terrar

Reframing the Digital Transformation conversation in 5 steps

I’ve spent the last 2 days at Cloud Expo Europe, the premier London based event covering cloud platforms, hybrid and multicloud approaches, cybersecurity, AI, blockchain and more, as well as well as all of the ingredients of the data centres that support those technologies. A wide set of tech topics, but within them everyone’s talking digital transformation and it’s dangerous. Dangerous because, like talking cloud 10 years ago, it means different things to different people, becoming a catch all with too much emphasis on the technology itself, rather than the business outcomes it supports. It’s the classic mistake we technology marketers have been making with our “widgets” for decades. We need to reframe the digital transformation conversation!

First, how do we define it? On the first day I was chairing the Techerati Keynote theatre. During the stand out session of the morning an audience member asked the speaker that very question. The speaker was Ian Johns, Chief Architect at Kings College London, who was talking about how you should ride the wave of digital disruption, rather than being swamped by it. A message close to the heart of us Agile Elephants! His session properly explained the disruption we are all experiencing, and he did a great job of defining digital transformation too. I’m delighted that various blogs have referenced, and the latest Cloud Industry Forum research has adopted, our own definition which is:

“Digital transformation is the process of shifting your organisation from a legacy approach to new ways of working and thinking using digital, social, mobile and emerging technologies. It involves a change in leadership, different thinking, the encouragement of innovation and new business models, incorporating digitisation of assets and an increased use of technology to improve the experience of your organisation’s employees, customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders.”

The crucial point is that emerging technologies and innovation are driving it, but the true transformation is all about business, mindset and leadership change.

Allan and Will interviewing me on the
Disruptive.Live studio/stand

I spent a lot of my time at the Expo with my good friends at Disruptive.Live co-hosting some of their live #Techerati interview shows, but then switching sides and coming on as a guest to be interviewed by Will Spalding and Allan Behrens (see later). “Where are we at with digital transformation?” was the first question they asked me. So if we put the technology aside for a moment, how do you go about integrating these new approaches while running your existing business? How do you reduce risk and increase your chances of success? I believe we need to reframe the conversation. Here are my five suggestions on how to do that:

1. Encourage good behavior

Digitally savvy companies have leaders who encourage teamwork, explain their purpose with clarity, and promote an environment of openness and sharing. The particular organizational structure you have in place is less important than getting employees and leaders to embrace these behaviors. In her book The Management Shift, Vlatka Hlupic shows that many successful companies share a management style characterized by an open mindset, an unbounded culture, strong team cohesion, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and passion for the work the company does. Check out the absolutely excellent Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, Chris Fussell et al translating their experiences in Iraq War 2 to today’s complex supply chains where teamwork across organisational boundaries is crucial. These are the characteristics that 21st century leaders and managers need to be able to handle today’s rapidly changing business landscapes.

2. Think holistically

Adding mobile apps and new digital business components on top of existing systems can provide some help, and even give short-term benefits in key areas. To really transform your business, however, you need a holistic approach. According to recent Forrester research, most digitally mature businesses recognize that they must break down business silos in order to realize their digital visions. One helpful tool is the McKinsey 7-S framework, which has been tried and tested over decades. The 7-S framework emphasizes the role of coordination, rather than structure, in organizational effectiveness. First you assess the business in terms of strategy, structure, and systems. Then you examine your staff, skills, and style, as well as the shared values of the company. This approach helps to integrate all the factors needed to add value, find efficiencies, and make a real difference in your organization. You don’t have to use this particular framework, of course—there are many other useful tools out there. The point is that digital transformation becomes much easier when you think about it holistically.

3. Be agile

You need a plan to integrate your digital transformation project so that it works with your legacy systems. Your plan should draw on agile thinking while still satisfying the financial demands of the C-suite. Think in terms of short time scales and multiple iterations. Don’t fear experimentation or failure. The Forrester research already mentioned highlights agility as one of the top five metrics to measure the success of digital programmes. True agility requires you to think like a startup. First, identify the problem that needs to be solved with a new digital approach. Next, develop a minimum viable product that you can implement. Use the resulting feedback to improve and iterate your product. Pursue multiple, parallel streams of change with a six-to-eight-week cycle or shorter. Focus on achievable outcomes rather than individual tasks and steps, and be sure to foster regular communication at all levels across the process (back to Team of Teams).

4. Build a social network

True digital transformation touches all of a company’s teams and processes. You need sound cross-functional governance to get everyone on board with the disruption that’s to come. Our research shows that organizations that have implemented some form of enterprise social network or social collaboration platform, such as Workplace by Facebook, Jive, Microsoft Teams, Kahootz, GitHub or Slack, are more successful with their transformation than those that don’t. This kind of communication harnesses the collective intelligence of teams in ways that aren’t possible with old communications technologies such as e-mail.

5. Create your transformation story

Unless you are a digital native startup, your digital transformation will most likely be a complex series of incremental and strategic initiatives that fundamentally change the company over time. To get employees, customers, and investors on board, leadership needs to communicate the big idea—the “why” of what you are trying to achieve by reinventing your business. Start thinking about the principles of story telling. Start thinking in terms of the visual tools and communication processes you are going to use get the whole company as well as your partner and supplier ecosystem on board.

Here is the interview, with the answer that triggered this post. Allan and Will also ask me about Blockchain technology, and what I think of the show too:

Please check out the hashtags #techerati and #disruptivelive for more CEE19 content from this year’s show.

In summing up how to go about integrating digital transformation:

Digital transformation requires an open mindset, an unbounded culture, strong team cohesion, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and passion for the work the company does.
You need agile thinking, a mix of incremental and strategic initiatives, and short development cycles.
Leaders must communicate why they are reinventing the company so that everyone is on board with the overall goal.
If you need help defining, adapting or communicating your particular digital transformation story, please contact us – we’d love to help.

Note – this post is an evolution of an article I wrote for enterprise.nxt the HPE Insights blog.

November 21, 2016 By David Terrar

What is the Digital Enterprise Wave?

We collaborate with and guest lecture at Henley Business School. As part of their input to the future FutureLearn project I was filmed as part of the promotional video for their course “Digital Leadership: Creating Value Through Technology”. FutureLearn is a free resource with hundreds of free online courses from top universities and specialist organisations. The latest edition of the Henley course started on 7 Nov, but check out what else is available from this excellent resource.

The guys at Motion Blur Studios filmed me explaining what we call the Digital Enterprise Wave. We’ve been talking digital for more than 20 years with the shifts to cloud computing, social technologies and mobile at the heart of the changes. The resulting disruption has many explanations, but we use the metaphor of the wave to explain the onslaught of transformational technology that is changing both our personal lives and the world of work. Watch the short video on Vimeo or above, or go here for more.

If you want help making sense of digital and how to distribute it across your enterprise, then join us at the Enterprise Digital Summit London. Follow the link here or below to find out more.

March 19, 2015 By David Terrar

CeBIT SBA keynote – Strategic Building Blocks for your Digital Transformation Strategy

As my last post explained, I was privileged to do the opening keynote, substituting for Dion Hinchcliffe, at this week’s Social Business Arena at CeBIT 2015. The theme of the show was social as the enabler for digital transformation. I expanded on a session I did at the Enterprise 2.0 Paris Summit with some additional material on our 20 year journey in to a “world gone digital” since the publication of Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital in 1995. I added some Dion slides (but avoided doing a Dion impression) to explain the challenge that the typical CIO has dealing with legacy IT, edge IT and the shadow IT that is happening because their department isn’t being responsive enough.

We are living through a time of immense disruption. We explain it in the presentation as the Digital Enterprise Wave. IDC calls it the Third Platform. Gartner calls it the Nexus of Forces. It doesn’t matter what we call it, but it does mean that everyone’s business model is under threat. You need to transform, but how do you do it? First you have to get educated, and I suggest 3 books you might read covering the global forces at work, the management shift required, and the kind of leadership that organisations need to adopt to start real, digital thinking. Then I’ve added in our definition of Digital Transformation. There are several you can find (that I link to in my definition blog post) but we believe there are key ingredients missing from some of the explanations you can find. After that I work through 8 strategic building blocks you need to address to form the basis of the change that your organisations needs to go through. One important factor I bring in that is usually missed by so many is creativity. When we live in a world where content can appear to be free, or we can use low cost resource, or Amazon’s mechanical turk, competing with commodity ideas on price just won’t cut it. More than ever we need to be teaching our kids, our employees, our managers and leaders thinking skills, and we need to make our organisations live and breathe creativity. When your business is under threat and needs a reset, new ideas are the weapons that you need to make progress.

Here is the audio and slides from Monday’s keynote. They did video me, but I guess I was probably jumping around on stage in too animated or distracting a fashion. It was a blast – hope you enjoy it.

So my core message is that the most important of the 8 blocks is that you need to change your and your organisation’s mindset to a permanent state of re-invention.

February 14, 2014 By David Terrar

Agile Elephant goes Enterprise 2.0 in Paris

The Agile Elephant team attended Kongress Media‘s Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris on Tuesday & Wednesday this week – I was speaking on a panel on strategic engagement and running a workshop session on project management and governance. Alan Patrick and Janet Parkinson will each be blogging their own thoughts, but this will be the first of two posts from me. It will be an introduction to both the topic and the event, followed by my conference report as part 2. We spent the two days at the World’s oldest business school, ESCP Europe in Paris, talking enterprise 2.0, social business and open business… OK, what’s that all about then, and why should you be interested? Let me start by explaining a little of the background.

Where to start? Back in May 2006, Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School started the wider use of the term Enterprise 2.0 as a kind of business oriented evolution of the web 2.0 term that was around at the time. He defined it as:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

At that stage, the emergent tools were blogs, wikis, forums, document sharing, RSS feeds, microblogging and activity streams.

So the term has been around for over 8 years, but during this current decade the concept has evolved, and people have started to use the terms social business and social enterprise instead. This is problematic as the term social enterprise had already been coined by Professor Muhammad Yunus to mean a business with a social rather than financial purpose. That didn’t stop Salesforce, in 2011, branding their major customer and partner events with “Welcome to the Social Enterprise” and even trying (and failing) to trademark the term. Their definition of a Social Enterprise was one where social tools like Salesforce Chatter are used to connect and collaborate in new ways inside as well as outside of the organisation. These social tools, and there are many of them, can provide a very different platform for teamwork compared to sending files by email, which is the default collaboration approach in most organisations, albeit occasionally modified by having some sort of shared drive or intranet as the file repository. By 2012 Salesforce had dropped the term, but their shows declared “Business is Social”.

We’ve also used terms like knowledge management, corporate social networking, social collaboration, or social media in business. Social Business should not be confused with the term Social Media, although it uses social media channels. Social Media incorporates social networking, blogging, microblogging, forums, user generated content, crowd sourcing, RSS feeds and more. All of those communication channels might be used in a Social Business approach, but it will involve other social collaboration tools along with a major change of mindset and culture for the organisation. A culture of openness, sharing and collaboration that goes hand in hand with today’s digital disruption. It’s the antithesis of the old, corporate, command and control hierarchy where knowledge was power, and you were motivated to hang on to information, a valuable currency to keep private for your own use.

Enterprise 2.0, Social Business – part of our current problem is that neither of those terms work well, but the actual concept they are trying to describe can add real value to the bottom line in any organisation.

The Summit had some great speakers – Dion Hinchcliffe from Dachis, Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable, Dan Pontefract of Telus, John Mell of IBM, Emanuele Quintarelli from Ernst & Young, Bertrand Duperrin of NextModernity, Lee Bryant of Postshift, and Luis Saurez just starting his journey having left IBM only days ago. It was a packed agenda covering:

Success factors for social workplace adoption
Key drivers for leveraging social value generation & business transformation
Best practices for enhancing business performance and employee engagement
Visions for future work & process organization

The event was sponsored by IBM (who have the Connections platform), SAP (with their Jam platform), Jive and a number of other players – Sitrion, Bluekiwi, Xwiki, NextModernity, Lecko. There might be over 100 social business platforms on the market, some of them are very good, but the players you’ll come across more often with the larger customers or number of implementations are IBM, SAP, Jive and Yammer from Microsoft.

It was great meeting our friends across from USA and Canada, as well as meeting all of the key European social business practitioners in one place and learning from some great customer case studies. Janet Parkinson, Alan Patrick and I were contributing to the tweet stream at #e20s and flying the Agile Elephant flag. All of the tweets, tweeters, blogs and photos from the show so far have been collected together by Jim Worth (and the crowd) in this wiki. Everyone will add links over the next week or so as we all catch up. Bjoern Negelmann & Thomas Koch, the organisers, and their team did a great job of putting on a very valuable social business event. Right at the end Bjoern grabbed me to ask me my thoughts about the hackathon case study I had just presented on behalf of my team, along with my key takeaways from the conference:

My part 2 conference report is here.