Is it really Digital Transformation?

Is there an IT project today that isn’t labelled as digital or digital transformation? Why do we feel the need to label everything as digital these days? I’ve judged awards where entrants have put forward application and even OS upgrades as digital transformation projects, when they clearly aren’t. 

We all know that digital is the current buzzword in the industry but we really need to take a step back and label our projects properly, and yes I’ve been guilty of it in the past too. 

 As a company when working with clients I like to break their strategy down into both digital and technology projects and then each of those into three categories; those being Manage, Improve and Re-Imagine. This will then help you set out your programme plan for the next 1-3 years. 

So what do we mean by Manage, Improve and Re-imagine? 

Manage

Whether digital or technology, the likelihood is that you’re going to have applications that you can’t remove from your estate easily or quickly and as such you’re going to have to keep them working. Maybe you’ve already purchased a forms package that's now a bit dated but you have a hundred forms being used in it. You’ll need to keep these working until they can be replaced. That would fall into Digital Manage. Or from the Technology side, you’ve probably got applications that have a contractual term or a one off piece of software that can’t be replaced, or an application that’s used by a large number of staff and can’t be replaced easily. That would then be Technology Manage. You can start to look at your estate and drop software, hardware and infrastructure etc into these categories. This should then be BAU work for your department. 

Improve

Here we are starting to change things. However, with improve there will always be an element of legacy involved somewhere. From the digital perspective you may be introducing an online account. So you’ve improved the front end with digital applications, but ultimately the information from the account still feeds back to a legacy back end system. That would then be Digital Improve. From the technology perspective we might be taking those legacy applications and moving them to a IaaS service and reducing your own data centre usage. Again we’re transforming the way we run the service but there remains some legacy there. That would be Technology Improve. Here there will be some project work to introduce new ways of working.

Re-imagine

For both Digital and Technology, this is where there is no legacy involved. You’ve got a blank sheet of paper to deliver a service. This might be building an app from scratch that covers front and back end services. It might be going SaaS and completely replacing a legacy system and the processes that go alongside it. It’s likely that when we get to re-imagine, you’ll have more in the Digital box than the Technology box. And this is reflective of the types of work that IT will be working on in the future where IT becomes a more business centric service delivering tools that support the business achieve its aims. However, even once we’ve re-imagined a service, this may well fall into the Manage box in the following year. 

 As IT we can then plan our project work annually. We’ll have written a strategy that breaks down the businesses requirements and thought about how we can accelerate the business to reach its goals. Against each goal we can look at the IT involved in that service and improvements we can make in each of the categories or even go back to the business and explain how technology can get them to their destination quicker and ask for funding and investment. It’s easier to write a business case when you can show exactly how the investment will be used to accelerate digital and the efficiencies that go with it. You also may need investment to keep some of those legacy systems alive, but again you can show why and how you will eventually replace them.

 So let's not be lazy and label everything as digital transformation when it’s not. All you need to start is a piece of paper on which you draw six boxes. Three for digital and three for technology, and allocate systems, and infrastructure to Manage, Transform and Re-imagine and you’ll be surprised how easy the following years projects will fall out of this when you compare it to the businesses outcomes. 

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