In my job, I consult several mature companies with historically grown IT organisations.
Of course, they are in the middle of the Digital Transformation hype; when I come in contact with them they already licensed some Cloud-services and now try to get their head around how to implement this new technology in their organisation.
When talking about Digital Transformation, I see two big workstreams coming on the table:
- Technically connecting/integrating the new cloud-services with the existing, mostly broadly on-premise IT-landscape.
For that, I see we have quite some offerings out there how to do that. There are neat tutorials, various blog-entries ( distributed by software vendors themselves or even by users / developers ) and even MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses like openSAP bringing the knowledge to the IT-admins and developers. Not to mention the books and the classroom trainings.I think for the technical things there is a quite mature flow via different channels. Here and there, some features might still be missing, integration processes might show room for improvements, but in general, the knowledge should be accessible rather easily. - The organisational changes coming with the new cloud-services. And this is where I’d like to focus this article:
The organisational changes are usually condensed under the umbrella “Change Management” which is a pretty broad theme. It tries to subsume every change happening to organisations, no matter which is the trigger of the change. In the next time, I’d like to get a understanding of general change management philosophies and tools, but then focus on the organisational changes being triggered, affected by and executed with the current trend of Digital Transformation.
(I’ll try to avoid the usage of the word Digital Transformation nevertheless, because I think it’s the most inflationary used word of the last time 🙂 )
In my job working as Customer Engagement Executive for a Platform-as-a-service offering, our biggest goal and challenge is Adoption.
We know that in a Cloud-world, you can only win as a software vendor if your software is really used by end-users. With a contract being paid on a regular basis, the revenue of a sale will not happen at once when the deal is signed, but the revenue will flow over time if the customer is staying with the contract. In short: The sale of a cloud software vendor is only successful if the customer’s adoption is successful… pretty fair deal for both sides, right?
But in my past years, I’ve seen many IT implementation projects and what I learned is: most of the times, the success or failure of a project is not mainly caused by technical things, but rather by the project setup and the roll-out of the application within the organisation.
The overall questions I’ll work in the near future are:
- what is specific about the change that is coming with Digital Transformation to companies?
- What are good methods / tools to trigger and monitor / track this change to happen? Can change projects be set up, executed and measured like other projects?
- who should trigger this change processes? Should it be done by HR-departments, communicated top-down or better bottom-up? Maybe a mix?
Hope that sums up my motivation for this topic – more on this later…
nicobost 