Crafting a Future-Proof Landscape
The ultimate goal extends beyond achieving a successful go-live or operational excellence.
Foundations of Digital Transformation
In this in-depth exploration, the focus transcends the mere initiation, implementation, and deployment of projects. The ultimate goal extends beyond achieving a successful go-live or operational excellence, emphasising establishing a foundation for organisations to continually evolve their business application landscape and expand their digital transformation impact over the long term.
Tailoring Transformation for Business Impact
This discussion is finely tuned for business-centric digital transformation programs and their subsequent expansion. Before delving into the intricacies of expanding a solution for enhanced value delivery, the narrative unfolds the fundamental approach to transformation, concentrating on depicting the current business model, identifying transformation triggers, and defining clear goals and scopes for the ensuing transformation roadmap.
Representing the Business Model
A pivotal step before crafting a digital transformation roadmap is representing the business model. This strategic exercise involves holistically understanding value delivery, target customer base, and critical activities and resources, whether at the organisational, departmental, business unit, or team level. The Business Model Canvas, a framework developed by Alexander Osterwalder, is introduced as a valuable tool for mapping existing business models and highlighting changing areas.
Navigating Transformation Triggers
Exploring transformation triggers as disruptions or inflections in the business model creates significant opportunities for transformation. Examples range from shifts in customer segments and emerging channels to alterations in value propositions, customer relationships, revenue streams, and sustainability considerations. The discussion emphasises the critical need for organisations to adapt and reinvent themselves in a rapidly changing world.
Defining Clear Transformation Goals
Defining digital transformation goals in clear business terms and emphasizing measurable metrics and milestones is of the utmost importance. The narrative illustrates how creating a 360-degree view of the customer serves as a tangible goal with potential business outcomes, fostering enhanced customer engagement, personalized experiences, and increased retention rates. Communicating these goals is crucial to ensure alignment with IT and technical teams throughout long-running transformation programs, fostering a collaborative environment where technological advancements align seamlessly with overarching business objectives. This shared vision not only accelerates the achievement of transformation goals but also ensures that technological implementations resonate with the broader organizational strategy, enhancing overall business agility and responsiveness.
Business Agility in Transformation Endeavors
The subsequent stage involves business process discovery, a collaborative exercise with key stakeholders. With a holistic view of the evolving business model and well-defined transformation goals, organisations can identify pertinent business processes and applications that necessitate change. The scope of change ranges from automation for improved productivity to capturing accurate data to enhance strategic effectiveness and drive user efficiency. Prioritising these changes for continuous impact becomes paramount, emphasising business agility as a focal point for comprehensive transformation endeavours. This approach ensures sustained relevance, prevents missed opportunities, and guards against the loss of market share.
Navigating Change Streams
In this segment, we address the digital transformation methodology and the formulation of a corresponding plan for your application and its associated processes. Traditionally, this entails a top-down strategy, commencing with the overarching business model and progressively funnelling down to the business processes and applications deemed to wield the most substantial impact.
Business Stream
Embarking on the transformative journey and constructing the business application based on predetermined business goals necessitates appreciating potential adjustments and refinements during the design and implementation phases. The support for agility and change must be inherently woven into the program’s fabric. Iterative methodologies can prove beneficial, allowing for responsive adjustments without causing disruption.
Leaders orchestrating transformative change often grapple with the reality that not all change aspects are well-defined in the early stages. Swift and early iteration to adopt changes become crucial, and flexibility becomes paramount as clarity about the resulting business model unfolds. Rapid adaptation during an industry-wide transformation, where the post-transformation landscape remains uncertain, is imperative for successful project completion.
User Stream
A crucial stakeholder in your transformation plan is the business user, who interacts frequently with the application. Ensuring that the implemented process aligns with user needs and considers working patterns and end-user usage is pivotal to preventing poor adoption and lack of engagement. Continuous incorporation of user feedback throughout the process, facilitated by well-defined and frequent touchpoints, is critical to achieving transformation goals.
The approach to designing and developing the application must be inherently user-centric, clearly articulating how the implemented change translates into value for the user. As user experience expectations constantly evolve with exposure to diverse software products in the enterprise and consumer spaces, staying attuned to these changes is vital.
Product and Technology Stream
In cloud-based SaaS applications, a continuous flow of new capabilities, improvements to existing features, and transitions to the latest technology paradigms can impact your current application. Traditionally, business applications were IT-driven, with features the business and end users requested. SaaS cloud providers now actively contribute to understanding the latest business trends and delivering innovative capabilities, enabling businesses to stay competitive.
For example, businesses aiming to transform their sales applications can leverage best-in-class sales capabilities offered by SaaS providers, avoiding the lengthy process of research, design, and development from scratch. Continuous investment in microservices, exemplified by Dynamics 365 with features like planning as a service, can significantly transform core business models.
The swift adoption of enhancements delivered through continuous updates in SaaS applications, with shorter adoption timeframes compared to traditional major version upgrades, underscores the dynamic nature of this change stream. SaaS providers, vying to deliver business capabilities, transform applications into dynamic tools that automatically capture and learn from data, provide insights, and guide users to optimal actions. Establishing a robust relationship with SaaS providers as strategic partners and influencing roadmaps through strategic feedback ensures businesses derive maximum value from these partnerships.
External Stream
External economic, social, and political drivers can disrupt transformation plans. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, elevated the priority of supporting remote work and creating online collaboration channels in 2020. While predicting and planning for external events is challenging, an iterative approach to delivering continuous value in smaller increments allows for pausing and pivoting as needed. Organisations adopting a DevOps culture, delivering value with regular bi-monthly or monthly updates, are better positioned to realise value sooner and pivot when change demands it compared to those on a long-term transformation program with major releases once a year.
Navigating Change Streams and Beyond
In our exploration thus far, we’ve delved into a strategic digital transformation approach and the diverse change streams that demand consideration. However, the ever-expanding backlog of feature requests, change demands, and product capabilities can challenge the transformation journey. It is crucial to establish a connection between product features, transitions, and transformation goals to ensure a shared vision among business, IT, and users. A transformation map is an effective tool for visualising and communicating these goals, clarifying the current and future state of business process implementation aligned with transformation objectives.
The Power of Quadrants
The current state of business process implementation can be assessed by plotting feature asks, changes, and SaaS product capabilities on a transformation map. This strategic visualisation allows businesses to identify essential features, differentiators, and potential competitive advantages. For instance, a sales system with basic contact and opportunity management may be deemed necessary, while AI-driven insights may provide a unique edge. Creating a dashboard based on this quadrant approach ensures clarity during initial implementation and for future increments, considering the dynamic nature of business needs.
A Blueprint for Success
Careful planning and scoping of distinct phases in the digital transformation program significantly impact value realisation. Aligning with business goals and selecting capabilities based on a transformation map guide the phased implementation. Balancing the delivery of essentials in Phase 1 and progressively introducing innovative features in later phases is critical. However, strategic planning must ensure the timely delivery of the most valuable transformations, ensuring sustained stakeholder engagement and user adoption.
Mastering the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) Strategy
The MVP strategy, rooted in the lean startup mindset, proves invaluable in quickly building, measuring, learning, and pivoting when necessary. In digital transformation, an MVP should include more than just basic features; it must drive transformation goals efficiently. The characteristics of a good MVP include:
- Delivering on transformation goals.
- Being production-ready.
- Extending beyond essentials.
- Focusing on maximum business value in minimal time.
- Supporting quick changes based on feedback.
This iterative approach ensures continuous improvement and prevents being stuck in an MVP limbo.
Strategic Expansion
As businesses evolve, so should their digital transformation roadmap. Expanding the usage and scope of business applications involves various strategic approaches
Users Expansion
Adding more users, especially in new regions or countries, requires meticulous planning to address data migrations, security, and compliance challenges
Mobile Optimisation
Supporting multiple devices, including offline capabilities, becomes crucial for broader adoption, often requiring immediate attention or a quick follow-up
Incremental Changes
Driven by user feedback and change requests, incremental changes ensure ongoing enhancement and relevance, always aligned with transformation goals
Feature Adoption
Constantly leveraging the latest SaaS features through continuous updates ensures that the application stays innovative and aligned with business needs
New Workloads
Identifying opportunities to onboard related workloads facilitates collaboration and data sharing, strengthening the impact of the application
Satellite Applications
Tailored applications for specific teams, regions, or roles allow for targeted capabilities and user-developed apps, promoting innovation
Integrations
Core integrations, when part of the initial phases, enhance data quality and reduce the need for users to navigate multiple applications, promoting seamless collaboration
Aggregation
Consolidating overlapping applications into a cohesive application prevents data fragmentation and ensures streamlined processes
Application Standardisation
Creating a generic application for similar processes can achieve hyper-scale but requires thoughtful execution to ensure success
Pivot
While not expansion in the traditional sense, pivotal changes can broaden an application’s scope, responding to unexpected shifts in user adoption or organisational needs
Mastering these expansion strategies ensures that digital transformation remains a dynamic and responsive journey, adapting to evolving business landscapes and maximising the impact on people, processes, and technology.
Get Started
We’re here to answer your questions, provide valuable insights, and guide you through the process. Schedule a consultation to discuss your specific requirements, and together, we’ll craft a tailored roadmap for success. Following a proposal and agreement, our onboarding process ensures a smooth transition, setting the stage for your business to experience the transformative power of digital innovation. Start your journey with SMEx Digital today and unlock the full potential of your digital landscape.
By submitting this form you understand and agree to receive relevant future communications, based on personal information collected through email tracking, forms, cookies. Please review our Privacy Policy to find out more.