Ready, set, transform: A guide to developing your digital transformation gameplan

Now more than ever, digital transformation plays a bigger role in modernising your organisation and helping it move forward. Digital transformation helps improve customer experience and drives increase in productivity, agility, and profitability.

Digital transformation, however, isn’t simple. Challenges include the lack of resources, budget constraints, lack of proper IT skills, and establishing a clear technology and management strategy, among others.

Creating a clear digital transformation strategy can help.

A digital transformation strategy is a detailed plan for using digital solutions to improve the physical aspects of your business across engineering, manufacturing, and service. On its own, digital transformation is a broad business strategy, so narrowing down your priorities through a strategy can help you move forward.

So how do you come up with a well-designed digital transformation strategy?

The Digital Fluency Model

Gary O’ Brien, co-author of Digital Transformation Game Plan, says that becoming a modern business calls for identifying the “degree of fluency” inside the organisation. To help them with this, he created the “Digital Fluency Model.”

“We started to think about how the more important part was not where you are, but where you want to be, and using that as the indicator of what to be investing in. When we thought about that, it really reminded us of the Agile Fluency Model. And so we spoke to James [Shore], we spoke to Diana [Larsen], and thought about how we could create a model that was at an altitude different to Agile Fluency Model and really looked at organisational transformation,” he recalls.

In this context, O’Brien explains that “fluency” is the degree or the amount that organisations need to invest in order to achieve their desired state.

“I guess the counter argument is [that] you can do a maturity assessment or you can do a benchmarking experiment. That’s great if you just want to be what everyone else is, but what we’re trying to say is what do you want to be? And based on that, what should you invest in?,” he explains in an episode of Coding Over Cocktails.

The building blocks

In order to achieve digital fluency, O’Brien introduces the five building blocks which they found were consistent among the modern businesses they have worked with at ThoughtWorks.

The first building block is about taking friction out of operating models, which includes all the factors of how strategy turns into execution.

“‘From executive to developer’ is a great way to put it. So, how do you take friction out of the operation? How do you streamline the way work flows through the organisation so that you are better prepared to respond to change? So you can chase value?” O’Brien explains.

The second building block is around platforms.

“That classic, building platform models, whether it’s an internal platform model and an external platform business or whatever it might be. So, just that ability to kind of productise the technology so that you can plug-and-play a lot better,” he says.

The third building block refers to product and experience design.

“It’s the product mentality, the product thinking. I guess ‘taking technology to the boardroom’ is a coined phrase that we use a lot around that.”

The fourth is about using data in a proactive way in order to either capture the weakest signals to make decisions on, or predict the future to make decisions on. O’Brien adds that the pandemic may have amplified this.

The last building block is about the traditional engineering culture.

“That route-delivery mindset, that execution, the bias for action that organisations — that modern digital businesses typically take.”

With those five building blocks at play, O’Brien notes that these could vary as to how much of each an organisation needs.

When it comes to achieving that fluency, O’Brien explains that aligning everyone’s idea of digital transformation should be a priority, starting with getting the leadership teams on the same page.

“It’s from focusing through executing, optimising, and strengthening, and understanding what level you’re going to be for each of the building blocks, which creates a pattern. And then that pattern leads to a group of default investments that you should focus on more than others, in order to achieve that, the greatest aspiration,” he explains.

Learn more about developing your own digital transformation game plan in this episode, and listen to more of the world’s leading experts on architecture, design, and the technologies that facilitate digital transformation on the Coding over Cocktails podcast available on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, and Stitcher.