Digital transformation is one of the key opportunities in today's business for CIOs to increase leverage with their internal and external customers. Digitization does not require the use of the latest technologies to provide an impact, and its techniques to move companies forward don't have to be complicated.
One of the tenets I see in digital transformation is this connection between us and our tools. It makes enterprise architecture more complex with an enormous number of integrations, APIs, and data volume. As our systems connect, we sometimes lose sight of the real intention: to provided end-to-end connections for our customers.
There is little value to releasing a new application or technology if the customer value is hampered by manual processes that break the connection flow. For example, when replacing our outdated sales quotation system, we made sure that the process was a true end-to-end service. In our previous systems, the quotation process was focused in one system. A sales user had to update their sales opportunities manually and when the purchase order came from the customer it was sent through email to the order management "black hole."
A critical success factor for the new project and technologies was to provide an end-to-end experience for the sales users. It certainly included many technical complexities to integrate the systems together, but we were rewarded in the first few minutes of our pilot deployment when a sales user exclaimed he "got an email from the system that my order was submitted!"
The acknowledgment he received was a message to us as well. It shows that it doesn't take a new technology advancement to provide value. Technology leadership is not about leading technology projects. Technology leadership is using technology to create advances in the lives of our customers.
Every day we are presented with projects for our portfolios: new applications, decommissioning, maintenance, alignment, etc. We can't expect every project to achieve digital transformation for our company or even to be visible to our internal and external customers. We should, however, be asking the question each time, "What transformations can I provide in this project which make progress toward end-to-end digitization?"
Customer impact is not just about the "wow" factor. It includes efficiency, branding, interconnectivity, negative impacts, and speed. See these two examples for a back-end technology project.
A) Project Name: Replace middleware ABC with middleware XYZ: Project Summary: Middleware ABC does not meet our expectations, so we are changing to the new middleware solution XYZ.
B) Project Name: Connected Transformation: Project Summary: To meet our customers' requirements of high availability and quickly configurable data transformations, we identified a technology to replace our underperforming and difficult to use middleware platform.
In the business case and charter for project B, you can elaborate on the positive and negative (if any) impacts to the end-to-end process. If you lose some functionality for a period, then mention it! I too often see project requests that promote a thousand benefits and neglect to include a negative, which then stops a project from going live. The project should be clear about all aspects and vulnerabilities.
For CIOs, the road to digital transformation will continue, but along the way, there will be traffic, distractions, and accidents. This road trip also includes progress, learning, and directional changes. I encourage CIOs to carefully drive your project portfolio and, instead of focusing on the technology, you should concentrate on end-to-end processes that you can transform or connect to create business value in your company. In turn, these actions will increase CIO leadership within the company itself.
