For the past decade, CIOs have been on a slow and steady drive toward digital transformation, incrementally moving their organizations to implement technology in business strategy. Yet getting organizations to establish true digital capability remains a challenge.
Rapid adoption of new processes and technology often lacks continuity. However, recent history has proven that organizations can and will embrace continuous change at an extraordinarily fast pace to remain relevant. This gives CIOs a prime opportunity and obligation to advance digital capability at every level of the organization.
Opportunities to increase digital maturity center on creating better customer experiences. Every member of the team needs to embody a customer-focused mindset and behaviors to achieve the highest level of innovation.
Too often, the executors on the ground don’t think beyond the automation of existing process. They lack the knowledge, imagination, and/or desire to leverage the human-centered technology available, leaving transformational capabilities untapped. Further, they are missing opportunities to leverage data to create customer journeys and optimized processes that deliver more value sooner.
[ Learn how CIOs are speeding toward goals while preventing employee burnout in this report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services: Maintaining Momentum on Digital Transformation ]
For example, I once worked with a human resources team to transform performance management. It was natural for the HR team to take their paper-based process and create a web-based performance management form as a solution to storage and compliance problems. However, this strategy did not enable them to reuse the data, nor did it address the bigger issue of employee productivity drain caused by hours of work to complete the workflow.
Both of these issues hampered the organization’s ability to deliver more high-value services to clients. As IT leaders, we’ve embraced our obligation to deliver technologies that enable the business, but CIOs also have a role in shaping overall business strategy. We know that to maximize the value of technology, business and support functions need to have core competencies in data management, digitalization, and agility. CIOs should drive strategies to achieve these competencies.
The 4 Cs: A path to digital maturity
To move the maturity needle, CIOs may need to take on execution of the strategies. Consider adopting the following “four Cs,” which I often use to light the path to an organic and sustainable culture that promotes rapid customer-focused innovation.
1. Communities of Practice (CoP)
Sponsor communities of practice focused on data and digitalization. Invite members from the IT organization as well as the business. CoPs encourage collaborative environments across the enterprise that drive opportunities to share and learn about resources and systems that increase efficiency and better experiences. Further, they promote adoption of proven methodologies and datafication of process.
Develop and publish a central repository for tools and collaboration, focusing on using data as a business asset as well as policies and guidance. We had great success driving adoption of data tools by sponsoring the Data Practitioners CoP (DPCoP) at the International Trade Administration: We onboarded about 7 percent of the organization’s population as community members in 12 months.
With help from the DPCoP, we rolled out the Data Practitioners toolkit, providing self-service guidance on the use of tools for new and existing data sets. The collaboration tool created an organic system of community assistance that reduced data management coaching requests by 50%. We also increased our ability to share data assets across the organization, leading to valuable new insights in product and delivery performance.
2. Collaboration
Provide opportunities such as rotations for team members across the organization to collaborate in innovation projects. Track innovation roadmaps and encourage diversification of teams to amplify exposure to new technologies and practices. Promote the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework to ensure that teams are focused on specific achievable outcomes.
Collaboration is critical to innovation and digital maturity as the best new ideas materialize when teams of diverse backgrounds work together. Further, it promotes a great work culture, helping to retain employees in today’s challenging digital talent market.
3. Coaching
Provide dedicated coaches and trainers to assist team members utilize visualization and digital experience tools. This will promote adoption of tools to understand the voice of the customer and identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. Extend coaching to include agile practices that ensure value is delivered as quickly as possible when customer needs or environmental conditions change.
Whenever possible, include snippets of digital education in communication such as newsletters, announcements, team meetings, all-hands, etc. Coaching accelerates the adoption of change and is critical to pushing through the “early majority” on the adoption curve.
4. Celebration
Celebrations increase hands raised. Everyone wants to be part of a winning team, so recognize your innovators formally and informally. Publicize successes across the enterprise, sharing the impacts with clients or customers through deliberate engagement such as IT annual reports or awards. Incorporate discussion of innovations in team meetings. Implement a channel for spontaneous “shout-outs” by team members.
Speeding up digital maturity across the organization will help you, as an IT leader, achieve your most ambitious goals – and more importantly, increase value to your customers.
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