Digital Transformation: Where Do You Start?

Digital transformation is a loaded term that means different things to different people, but in my experience, this is the most important principle:

Technology should be used to improve how we work and how we deliver value. When done correctly, it improves the experience for us, our coworkers, and our customers. That improvement is the real transformation.

In order to achieve the “transformation,” something has to change. One of the problems we run into early on is that we trick ourselves into thinking that many things have to change, and that they all have to change all at once.

That kind of thinking—while bold—is not a good fit for many businesses.

Incremental Digital Transformation

I could write (or rather, copy and paste) dozens of clichés about “walking before you run,” “building a foundation from the bottom up,” or “starting with small and simple things.” I’d rather talk about the reality of adopting incremental change. You need to know how to figure out the smallest impactful change that you can implement, and to do that, you need to start at the end—with the ideal outcomes that you want to see.

Reasons Matter

When I ask people what they hope to achieve by adopting a new technology or by automating and changing their processes, they almost always tell me that they want to save time. And almost always, my follow-up question is “Why?”

It’s not that saving time for the sake of saving time is a bad thing. Time is one of the easier metrics we can use to gauge the effectiveness of our experiments and solutions. But looking at time alone might mask some other smaller, but still impactful, opportunities for changes.

Ideally, you can phrase your reasons like a value proposition:

I want to [make a specific improvement], so that I can [achieve some end goal or state].

Here are some generic examples that we can use as a very rough start (and we’ll improve them as we go along):

I want to save time in my document processing so that I can send and respond to more messages with my clients.

In this example, time savings isn’t really the desired outcome. The desired outcome is a different time distribution. If we wanted to improve that value proposition, we could keep diving deeper, ask “why” over and over again until we hit some kind of core issue.

A Starter List of Reasons

Time/Speed
Accuracy
Scalability
Compliance/Auditability
Customer Experience
Workforce Experience
Quality
Efficiency (often tied to time, money, and experience)
Ease/Difficulty/Accessibility/Usability
Reliability
Portability
Reusability

Your Most Valuable Resources Are Your Experts

When I talk about “experts,” I generally refer to three different groups: business leaders (executives, management, stakeholders), the workforce (the people who “do the work”), and clients (customers and external actors). If you take a reason off the list above, you can do some quick brainstorming to get an idea about why that reason is or isn’t important.

Here are some light examples, still sticking with time:

Why does a customer care about time? Is there an unmet expectation of swiftness for product delivery, service response, or notifications? Are they comparing you against your competitors and using speed as a benchmark when making purchasing decisions? Are they generally comfortable with the speed at which you operate? How do you know?
Why does an executive care about time? Is there a public image of speed to uphold? With additional time, could your business increase its throughput, service, or quality? Is there a competitive advantage to speeding up certain processes? Is data moving through the organization fast enough to make well-timed decisions? What are the metrics that are already being tracked that relate to time?
Why does your workforce care about time? Can saving time in a particular process decrease employee burnout? Can faster communication lead to better service or production? Are there other processes that would benefit from having additional time?

Don’t just assume the answers to these kinds of questions. Take the time to actually talk to and understand each group.

From Values to Processes

As you talk with your people (your customers, executives, and workforce), you are going to start to hear about patterns and processes that can be improved. Hold those up to the reasons and make sure they move you in the right direction. Do a quick visualization by combining an idea for change with the value propositions above.

Here’s a template to get you thinking:

I predict that [making a change to a process] will lead to [making a specific improvement], which will enable me to [achieve some end goal or state].

And another generic example (an iteration from our example at the beginning):

I predict that using text extraction software to put client data into a spreadsheet automatically will lead to a time savings of 1-2 hours a week, which will enable me to spend that time improving my relationship with my clients by having a faster response and also by sending more outreach emails to check in with them.

Wrapping Up

Understanding why you want (or need) to make changes should be the first step in any digital transformation. The “why” and the “so what” become our measuring sticks that we can hold up any change (proposed or actual). By having conversations about our goals with actual people in our business and customers, we can start to identify the processes that have potential for improvement in a way that the change will be meaningful and not just mechanical.