Shared practices for technology transformation
Grow your foundation of talent and capability
Your people and partners are central to the successful adoption of new technologies and retaining those ongoing capabilities.
Attract, retain, and re-skill talent
Changes to technology, alongside the changes to the organisation’s culture and operations, require new skills and different ways of working. Involving teams directly in planning for the changes and encouraging people to challenge the current ways of working are both major contributors to successful transformations, especially in embedding the many transitions that take place.
Among the challenges you’ll face are the difficulty in attracting and retaining talent, and the existing time pressures already on your current staff. It’s hard to realise the benefits of DevOps, Change Management, Customer Experience, and similar practices when you don’t have the talent or available workforce capacity.
Seek guidance and establish partnerships
The team from Diversus bring their experience and expertise from helping many other organisations implement new technologies and undergoing digital transformations. As well as helping to implement the new solutions in both the technical delivery and organisational adoption, they can work alongside your own people to provide formal and informal knowledge transfer. This further enhances the development and competency of your own workforce, alongside bringing in extra resources, giving a two-factor improvement to your organisation’s progress.
Align participation through strategy and communication
The adoption of new technology is more successful when a clear vision is established upfront and communicated throughout the organisation on an ongoing basis.
Use current state analysis to inform your strategy
Understanding the organisation’s existing performance, problems and gaps is an important part in making sure that changing and introducing solutions delivers the greatest set of benefits possible. Also having a clear understanding of the current technologies in use and the existing design of operations will provide valuable input into how and where changes should occur.
The practices of business analysis, solution architecture, and enterprise architecture all have approaches that can aid in this discovery. Conducting interviews, running workshops, observing staff activities, analysing data, reviewing support tickets, and assessing technology are some of the approaches that can be applied depending on the organisation’s situation
Working through your early analysis with assistance from a trusted external partner like Diversus can help you better understand your current inventory of solutions and processes, along with the issues and challenges that need to be addressed to achieve a better outcome from your investments. We’ve helped other organisations in similar situations gain a greater understanding of their current position, assess technology from multiple vendors, and evaluate alternative pathways for transformation.
Develop your strategy and evaluate your technology options
Developing the strategy for new technology and transformation requires decision making around where efforts and investments need to be directed at each stage. Different organisations will have their own priorities in pursuing specific outcomes and benefits based on their individual circumstances. The best digital transformations consider how all the technologies will work together, rather than just focusing on specific isolated solutions. The order in which individual technologies are added or changed will establish the foundations for the further options which can follow on in later stages.
There are many ways to get input into the selection and sequencing of technology. Your existing IT workforce and partners will have priorities and pain-points that they want to pursue. The practices of business analysis, solution architecture, and enterprise architecture also have approaches that build on the current state analysis and broader thinking of ideal solution development and deployment. It’s also important that the technical decisions aren’t made only by the technical roles, the teams which use the tools everyday will have an excellent understanding of whether changes will be a help or a hinderance in the future.
Working with a trusted external partner like Diversus can help your organisation to identify opportunities and evaluate different technology options. Our knowledge of the relevant technologies and practices, combined with our experience in both the strategy and execution of digital transformation, provides you with greater insight to inform your own choices and determine the best roadmap for your organisation.
Create and communicate your roadmap
To transform old behaviours and overcome organisational inertia, people need to understand the why, what, and how to take full advantage of the new technology and the related organisational changes. The strategy and roadmap help to articulate the vision by developing specific and quantifiable outcomes for the organisation and a roadmap to show how they will be progressed.
Establish change management and champion teams
To support the adoption and continuation of changes across technology, processes, and the organisation’s culture, change management becomes the competency that binds together all the individual efforts. The principles that inform effective technology transformation align strongly with effective change management: communicate a shared vision, involve teams early as active contributors, and build cultural and workforce support for change as a positive enabler. Changing attitudes and helping people to understand how solutions and processes are being made better is not always easy, but they are the primary mechanism for removing roadblocks and preventing people from falling back into their older, more comfortable ways of working.
Developing one or more champion teams is an approach that can make the burden of change more manageable for the broader workforce. These teams can be compromised of different disciplines and expertise to bring together the different views and priorities from across the organisation. They can evaluate and trail alternative solutions and processes, identify issues and enhancements before they impact the broader workforce, and help communicate the overall vision and progress of the transformation back to their co-workers.
Include sustainability and continuity in your early objectives
The outcomes and benefits of adopting new technology are ideally realised on an ongoing basis. This requires the accompanying transformation to deliver the frameworks that support the ongoing operations and technology as they continue to evolve.
Create a culture of ongoing change and continuous improvement
The shift in mindset and strategy that are fundamental to adopting technology and sustaining the transformation also need to be ongoing. If your workforce reverts back to the familiarity of how things were before, or the strategy fails to provide continuing clear direction away from organisational inertia, then your new technologies won’t achieve more than any other isolated system upgrades or process changes.
It’s essential that teams can continue to improve and pursue change beyond their initial delivery efforts. Management needs to continuing addressing roadblocks and not lose sight of the broader ongoing plan. While the organisation’s culture needs to continually reinforce the idea of change as positive enabler, not a threat or something to be avoided.
Establish DevOps and the capability to frequently deliver change
DevOps brings together the activities of the developers who create and customise the solutions with the operations staff who deploy and support solutions. Integrating these teams is then complemented by adopting the tools and approaches that enable increased automation and streamlined deployments.
The resulting capability to deploy solution changes faster and more frequently is an essential part of achieving organisational agility, adaptability, and ongoing productivity. The capabilities also improve the robustness of systems and support the organisation in making ongoing operational improvements. The also contribute to collect, combine, and monitor data from different solutions, which improves the organisation’s ability to monitor and measure on an ongoing basis, a crucial aspect for directing the organisation’s future strategy and focus.
Build in cybersecurity and reliability from the beginning
Broad technology transformation is also the ideal opportunity to further build the organisation’s complete Cybersecurity capability. New technology can be selected and adopted with the additional objective of strengthening security and risk management, while the broader review of operations and processes is the opportunity to include clear cybersecurity outcomes into workforce training and role responsibilities.
As technologies are added or improved, understanding their individual trade-offs and how they combine to operate securely and reliably together is a crucial consideration. To be greater than the sum of their parts, the data management, functionality, and process support of each piece needs to work together well while avoiding unnecessary duplication.
Always look to improve customer and workforce experience
When organisations start to consider a digital-first view of transforming their technology and organisation, many are also considering a customer-driven approach to how their business and operating models are re-designed. Our page on Customer Experience solutions describes many of the different approaches and tools that are used not just in digital transformation but in other approaches to solution and organisational improvement. For digital transformation, starting with an understanding of the ideal experience that they want customers to have provides further direction to inform the organisation’s choices around selection, prioritisation, and redesign.
Also understanding the ideal experience for the organisation’s workforce provides a similar level of insight and direction. The Diversus page on Modern workplace solutions describes some of the options and considerations into how staff productivity, engagement and collaboration can be enhanced further with the right choices and changes. Developing the capability for collaborative knowledge capture and sharing across the organisation is also an important contributor to supporting the workforce through continued change and the adoption of new technologies. When the workforce is provided with the tools and processes that best fit their needs, achieving the outcomes of digital transformation becomes more certain.
Establish management and coordinate parallel initiatives
As the range and availability of available technology options increases, the number of simultaneous technology initiatives underway at the same time is also increasing. Combined with broader transformation approaches, such as digital transformation and customer experience, the need to coordinate and synchronise multiple technology initiatives becomes even more important.
Effective program and project management can align the efforts of contributors in a time and cost-effective manner, while coordinating the many interdependencies and managing any shared potential risks. The advantage of getting Diversus to provide some of these roles is they work alongside your own people to meet the growing workload that will emerges as the current scope of transformation efforts start to grow.
Let’s contribute to the capability, strategy, and continuity of your organisation’s initiatives
Your people and partners are central to delivering technology and transformation outcomes and retaining those ongoing capabilities. The team from Diversus bring their experience and expertise from helping many other organisations work through similar initiatives. They can work alongside your own people to provide formal and informal knowledge transfer, further enhancing the development and competency of your own workforce.
Successful transformation and technology adoption need a clear vision to be established and communicated, while the outcomes and benefits need to be realised on an ongoing basis. Your people and partners are an essential part of the decision making, strategy, communication, and ongoing capability required.