Building a cohesive digital transformation strategy roadmap to accelerate the journey to value

As part of my everyday work, I engage and interact with top IT, Digital, and Business leaders from diverse industries across the region. From CIO Corner Talks, CDO Summits, CTO Roundtables, Technical Exchange Meetups to private meetings with my client executive leadership teams, I have witnessed keen interest in determining “how to build a robust, cohesive, and future-proof digital transformation strategy roadmap.” Subsequently, I also discerned that clients across the region presume that forming a digital transformation strategy roadmap depends primarily on the reorganization of IT departments and the adoption of innovative technologies, including Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud-native, Microservice, and Blockchain.

Well, when dancing with disruption in a continuously evolving technology landscape, in pursuit of a perpetual reinvention to driving competitive advantage in the marketplace, these myths are fair and natural. Nevertheless, the fact is that forming digital transformation strategy roadmap neither is a one-size-fits-all nor is dependent solely on the adoption of each innovative technology available in the market. In my viewpoint, it is an evolving business process, and I, therefore, define the digital transformation strategy as a subset of your business strategy. Therefore, instead of embracing innovation indiscriminately, your digital transformation strategy must outline such a governed roadmap that should help accelerate the journey to your business strategy. Easier said than done. Indeed, there are challenges, but this is where thought-leaders clearly define business priorities and distinguish themselves from the laggards to eventually build a robust yet flexible digital transformation strategy. Throughout this process, adoption of innovative technologies is assessed on business priorities. Simply-put, if the adoption of an innovative technology helps accelerate the journey to business strategy then embrace it, else disregard.

The enterprise CXO within Digital and IT functions today are being mandated to assure the highest impact from each dollar spent. This elevates the importance of making critical decisions to incorporate the right technology stacks into your digital transformation strategy roadmap. It is where you partner with your trusted-advisors to assist you in making critical decisions and offer guidance to reduce the risk of failures.

Few common steps involved are:

• Qualify your business strategy with a superior focus towards the overall simplification of the ecosystem
• Prioritize business problems to lay the foundations of your journey and to create value for the business
• Invest in the journey in phases and always monitor results to assure that your strategy is not straying
• Establish the culture of transparency horizontally to engineer sustainable value that impacts the bottom-line
• Adopt agile, fail-fast and pivot enterprise-wide benefit to drive innovation that matters to the business

Data Analytics, the factor of this era

In every era since 1960s, computing has helped businesses of transform in many ways, shapes and forms. Likewise, Data Analytics has become the differentiating technological factor of this era. As we continue to expand on the importance of Data Analytics, we must recognize that global companies are now redefining their operating models, to optimizing costs and maximizing profits by leveraging data and analytics. The size of the organization often elevates complexities, but governance of data holds significantly crucial importance towards the success of any business, looking to harness data-driven decision making. It is no mystery that access to the right data at the right time is critical for making optimum business decisions. So, the next natural question would be — where is this data coming from? — In addition to external systems, the “core sources of data” within your enterprise systems landscape would typically include ERP, CRM, and other SOR, such as but not limited to Financial and Operational Systems. But, Is this data accurate, relevant, governed, and trusted? In most cases, if not all cases, the answer is unfortunately “No” which essentially creates the bottleneck and prevents the business leaders from harnessing data-driven decision making.

Lack of Trust in Data

Over the last one decade, since the inception of terms like Big Data, Data Science and AI — many businesses shifted focus towards building a central data repository aka Data Lake. Unfortunately, most project, if not all project, failed miserably. Most businesses created data swamp because of their superior focus towards the deployment of innovative technologies, and completely overlooking the crucial aspects, including data quality, data governance, and alignment with business strategy. Due to this, the term “GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out” revived. Consequently, many businesses launched enterprise systems transformation initiatives to fix the core. Now, streamlining the core is not a bad idea, but it takes years and no business would hold back on accelerating the business strategy for long.

The data which is not trusted by the business leaders is worst then having no data

Turning your existing data swamp into a data goldmine will essentially require a robust methodology, executive focus and proven strategy. I have observed that methodologies are often considered cumbersome to adopt due to the overheads. However, the advantage of following methodologies is that we empower ourselves to monitor, detect and mitigate risks proactively. I have recently defined an interactive, multilayered, system agnostic method which assists in streamlining data swamp and lays the foundations of a robust digital transformation strategy roadmap to compliment business priorities.

The figure above illustrates the output which is generated upon applying the method. The breakdown of segments, functions, teaming, evaluation, conclusion, and execution may vary depending on the organizational demands and inputs to the method. However, it is recommended to adhere with Business Controls and Governance as much as possible.