I've spent the last couple of months reviewing case studies of digital transformation and speaking to colleagues in the industry about their experiences, good and bad, in a effort to distil the essence and fundamental principles behind "Going Digital."
I'm going to avoid defining what it means to go digital or what a digital strategy is. Instead I want to focus on the outcomes that businesses want to achieve, the technologies they employ to achieve those outcomes, and to draw out the fundamental principles that inform the decisions required to successfully fully embrace digital.
The ultimate reasons for going digital, for a profit-seeking organization, is to increase profits, increase revenue, and grow. But what do we want to achieve from digital transformation?
Human ability v. human capacity
Answering the question above informs our decisions in the most fundamental fashion. I am in agreement with Mark McDonald of Accenture who says: "Human performance is the essence of digital transformation in the 12 truths that will become self evident in the digital decade."
Mark's No. 1 truth is: "Raising human ability is the expectation for everything digital. There are no users, customers, or associates - only people. People looking to improve their lives, meet their needs, achieve their ambitions, complete tasks, etc. Human ability should be the source of value for digital technology. Digital technologies that do not support raising human ability either directly or indirectly are worth less than those that do."
This truth resonates with me as I hope it does for those that have read my writing on KnowIT, especially the principle of NoIT. But I'd like to offer a slightly revised version of Mark's truth, one that is based on a more fundamental semantic. I would suggest that:
"Raising the human capacity for action is the expectation for everything digital."
The substitution of "capacity for action" instead of "ability" is more concise. "Ability" is not the source of value but rather it is the actions of humans that generate value. I consider ability as a component part of the capacity to act, along with opportunity, and the will to act.
By "going digital" we hope to deploy technology to increase human performance, that is, to raise the human capacity for action in order to create greater value.
Reducing unproductive aspects of technology
KnowIT principles (read the three principles - NoDEV, NoOps, NoIT - that I use to guide my IT decision making - I refer to them as "KnowIT principles") are expressed in a couple of the technology paradigms utilized in digital transformation. Look at a key assertion made by the "NoIT principle" namely: eliminate IT systems that demand the attention of humans.
The mobile paradigm along with the technologies that best deliver it embody non-intrusive and non-interruptive IT. This is absolutely in keeping with the principle of NoIT. While we may not be able to completely eliminate IT systems that demand the attention of humans, the mobile paradigm clearly demonstrates that the negative, unproductive aspects of technology can be reduced. NoIT is the general, ideal case that applies to all IT systems, its application in the mobile paradigm results in the selection of non-intrusive, non-interruptive technologies.
As a final example let's look at an assertion of the NoOps principle:
"Eliminate all dependencies between application teams (broadly, developers) and infrastructure teams (networks, storage, database and middleware)."
For me the clearest expression of this principle within the realm of digital technologies is the cloud. It is an expression of the broader societal impact of digitalisation (i.e. disintermediation) and clearly demonstrates the impact of increasing the capacity of human action. Anyone can easily utilize compute infrastructure and services at a fraction of the cost (both financial and temporal) when compared to recent history and when compared to many on-premise, internal infrastructure providers within IT departments.
Companies embarking on digital transformation need to remember to keep the list of reasons why they started in the first place at the forefront. I hope this summery of my recent deep dive into digital helps provide some focus to those embarking on digital transformation.
"Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public." - Ludwig Von Mises
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Hussein Badakhchani is a distinguished technologist with over twenty years professional experience of applying IT to business goals in Finance, Banking, Biotech and Telecoms sectors. Hussein's current focus centres on innovation and transformation. Liaising with startups in the FinTech sector, Hussein acts an enterprise entrepreneur involved in all stages of the service delivery life cycle. Combining deep technical expertise with commercial experience, leadership and a passion to deliver value, Husseinhas spearheaded both regional and global, innovation and transformation programs.
