Anand Sambamoorthy
Solutions Architect, Engineer
Digital Transformation - Darwinian View of an Enterprise-IT Organization
Published Sep 06, 2019
I started this post with curiosity on - what would a typical IT Organization in an Enterprise play for the digital transformation. Normally traditional IT Organizations in an Enterprise plays a back-office, cost-center role supporting business - developing applications (products as we now call it fancifully!) against business requirements, supporting ERP systems, COTS packages that are aligned to business. As we all know this can no more be the case as we witness the disruptions and transformations in the world today all enabled by digital. Who on earth would have thought bricks-and-mortar Toys “R” Us would lose sales to online Amazon and eventually close down. Moral - Adapt/Digitize or Perish!
The post is to provide an outline with an evolutionary view (Darwinism) of how a typical IT Organization in an Enterprise can change to enable the digital transformation. Enterprise - here in context is probably a company or a corporation that act as a single entity for that business; Organization - here in context is a group (of people) within the Enterprise with a particular purpose (IT Organization would provide IT/Technology support/services for the Enterprise). The post provides the point of view from the IT development model rather than technology enablers for digital-transformation like Analytics, Cloud, AI/ML, IoT etc.
What is digital?
The word “digital” is a loaded word and could mean many things - contextualizing to the current subject on a customer-centric enterprise would mean - technology to improve performance and the reach the enterprise has.
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation is the integration of technology in all areas of business fundamentally changing how the enterprise would operate and deliver value to the customers.
More than technology, digital transformation is about culture - challenge the existing state of affairs, change existing ways of working, be nimble, be transparent, experiment, comfortable with failures. All of these centered around delivering value and unlock potential areas of customer requirements and satisfaction.
A good comprehensive view of digital transformation in an Enterprise and the key areas is articulated in an Opinion and Analysis Paper - The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation published by MIT Sloan. The article describes 3 key-areas/pillars subsequently 3 elements within to describe transformation.
Not to repeat - in a gist the 3 pillars in simple description would be:-
- Customer Experience: e.g. Enhanced and targeted customer engagements; retailer “Walmart” enhances shopping experience with a shopping assistant in the mobile-app by providing the store-map based on the list the customer has!
- Operational Processes: e.g. Process digitization; apparel companies digitizing the design process was able to move away from physically shipping prototypes across design centers shortening product development life-cycle.
- Business Model: New Markets e.g. Airline industry offering E2E travel experience right from reservation, traffic, pick-up at door step, lodging - a complete journey!
Adding to this is my view that the foundation of these pillars ought to be the existing - “IT Organization” - illustrated as below.
There is no one way for digital transformation and needless to say it would be attributed to what the enterprise wants to achieve based on the vision - the goals (desired outcomes) and objectives(targets to achieve the goals). A strategy of one is not going to be applicable for another.
While the post talks about digital transformation - the primary focus of this post is how an “IT Organization” can change to support these pillars. IT Organization in my view is the foundation for the pillars to be strong, supportive and effect change.
Foundation - IT Organization
IT Organizations need to transform - and transformation as we know is about changing things and that could be something like below or anything that is pertinent to the organization
- New Architecture
- New Technology
- New processes & ways of working
One of the fundamental things to note is to align this with - what the enterprise wants to achieve (the vision, goals and objectives).
So what would be the change from IT Org perspective? “It depends”.
- “As a goal - business says I will provide new business logic that were not part of the product but would like to get them to users in minutes time” and IT Org could achieve this with “Ability to commit code and move-to-production in minutes and during any time of the day”. As an example Netflix can deploy code from commit->prod in 16 mins.
Orchestrating change - Darwinism
Adapt or Perish : Rather than react to change or be disrupted - IT Organization should invest in transformation to adapt & support the digital transformation of the Enterprise (see the 3 pillars above) – else the Enterprise on a whole will be out-performed and eventually perish!.
This is the reason for the topic to call it with “Darwinism” - “the
theory of evolution of species by natural selection” where
adaptation is of utmost importance rather than the fittest.
Enterprises that adapt to new environment would be the ones that
would be naturally selected for future.
How would we effect change? While it is easy for start-ups as they can align technology and process to business strategy the problem is with ‘legacy organizations’ where existing structures impede the transformation like
- Existing technology & application landscape that are not so nimble
- Current org-team structure that have defined responsibilities
- Current application-life-cycle process & associated tools, technologies and structures: dev-build-test-release
- Varied visions of departments in the organization
- Existing technology debts
The change is best done in an evolving fashion “Darwinism” – with continuum as the key fundamental principle.
Illustrated view of change in context to a development of a product/application life-cycle:-
In summary - digital transformation for an IT Organization is about what the Enterprise wants to achieve - vision, the goals and objectives and the best possible way is to evolve supported by cultural change and aligning with principles like - experimentation is good, be transparent, be bold, failure happens and it s okay (but we try to fail fast) and from a team-culture perspective it might also be good to look at leadership principles of Amazon tailor it, make it fit-for-purpose and effect change. We know it works for them and it might for any other as well and after-all who does not want to be like ‘Amazon’!