Why most digital transformations get lost in translation

A blog post by Rich Nanda, Ragu Gurumurthy, Sam Roddick, Deborah Golden, Brenna Sniderman; and Diana Kearns-Manolatos

While many organizations have developed digital strategies, they struggle to truly transform in a way that is aligned with their organization’s strategic ambitions and demonstrates clear impact. Digital transformation is about more than user experience (which can be thought of as cosmetic surgery) and requires core transformation (which can be more like open-heart surgery) to create the systems transformation needed to enable the adaptive organization.

Perhaps the issue is that, despite organizations knowing digital transformation requires leading with business strategy, technologies like cloud are too enticing and take over the conversation. Clearly, cloud technology will need to be a cornerstone of digital transformation. However, starting with cloud strategy without understanding the business ambition is a recipe for disaster.

Start with a strategy that enables the organization’s capacity to change and ability to win

The fast pace of change in business and technology strategies means organizations need to build a foundation that is more modular and adaptive to change. Organizations need to embrace an engineering mindset—build and improve as contexts shift—to keep up. That culture change requires chief technology, information, and cloud officers to think beyond the technology they’re implementing and to elevate the conversation to a business strategy discussion.

Leaders need a common language that bridges the divide across business, technology, and organizational transformation functions that can evolve as today’s technologies become tomorrow’s legacy solutions and directly connects IT spend to business value.

Use five digital imperatives to align strategy and transform 

In Deloitte’s new research, “A new language for digital transformation,” we define five digital imperatives organizations can consider to align their strategy and accelerate their ability to change and win. These concepts create a common vocabulary across organizational functions, creating a level playing field for nontechnical and technical leaders alike.  

Organizations can align digital strategy and transformation solutions around these five imperatives:

• Experiences: Focuses on optimizing interactions with users, whether they be customers, the workforce, or other stakeholders within the ecosystem
• Insights: Assesses what data, analysis, operating model, and workforce is required to enable organizational strategies
• Platforms: Focuses on the location and management of information across an organization or its network
• Connectivity: Involves the flow of information between platforms, experiences, and insights, encompassing the future of the internet, and networking with other organizations and ecosystems
• Integrity: Focuses on improving resilience, security, ethical tech, and trust across all internal and external facing business systems and processes with a cyber-minded culture

Organizations can benefit from this approach whether they are looking to optimize their insights strategy as a competitive differentiator; build a holistic business strategy that considers all five of the imperatives; or collaborate across business, technology, and operational functions in a way that considers multiple imperatives across the digital capability stack.

Make sure you’re asking the right questions

“What should our cloud strategy be?” is a critical question for a technology team building tools and accelerators for business use cases, but it’s not the question that can drive forward transformative change. True organizational transformation, in which workloads move to the cloud and business processes change, needs business requirements, technology strategies and operating models, and the workforce to line up.

After all, an organization can’t build an e-commerce solution to sell its products without having the right business strategy in place to manage its operations, supply chain, and regulatory restrictions; the right technology platforms to manage those operations; and talent with the right skills to build and adopt it. An organization can’t transform and automate underwriting processes without getting the underwriters who are fundamental to the process to embrace that change.

Instead, the key questions should be:

• What is our strategic ambition related to our capacity to change and ability to win?
• How does our digital business strategy or organizational mission reinforce that ambition?
• What technology requirements exist for digital solutions that line up with that business strategy?
• How will organizational operations need to change, and what needs and opportunities exist within the workforce ecosystem to inform technology and business strategies?