Three Tips for Digital Transformation

Three tips to success: Engage and enable everyone around innovation. Don't turn digital business into a silo. Make the right investments.

02:06

Jul 11, 2015
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Dion Hinchcliffe discusses his top three recommendations for becoming a digital business:

  • Broadly enable everyone around "spots of innovation"
  • Modify the company's organization to be a digital business and tie digital business into the rest of the company
  • Properly invest in assets and resources necessary to have a credible digital business

Transcript

To be most successful in digital transformation, you have to kind of invert and the first thing that I would do is invert the process of change. Instead of trying to change the organisation from some small spot, broadly enable everyone, and this is what we’ve done with things that are very popular right now in IT, things like hackathons. And other contests as it basically says there is a lot of great ideas, our customers internally and externally, the people on the business they have been wanting it to change for a long time but haven’t had the support or resources to do that. So we think about new types of change programs really broadly enlist the spots of innovation and the people who are chomping at the bit to get something done and turning them loose, and that’s how we can unleash the scale. So that’s invert that change process, and don’t try and do it all yourself. You can’t, you’ll never get the resources and you will never have the horsepower what’s needed. But by inverting it and switching that process you will have a lot of success.

I do think you have to reorganize your company around digital change, and that’s not one organisation but like we are seeing, adding a new digital business with a new Chief Digital Officer on top of that. That can help, although it really needs to be well connected to the rest of the organisation.

We are seeing IT being broadly taken up by different lines of business for example, so there is a number of organizational changes you have to make to be more digital, we don’t have all the answers for what those are, but we know that you have to do it. And I think one of the biggest issues is investing sufficiently. Investing as if you are becoming a digital business doesn’t mean a 1% like we are seeing increase in IT budgets. It requires proper resources, intelligent resources for the long term, and I think if you do those three things and do them well, you’ll end up much better down the road for digital transformation.         

Published Date: Jul 11, 2015

Author: Michael Krigsman

Episode ID: 206