Digital Transformation not only changes the way to do business but also the organization and people who form the organization. The role of change management becomes vital here in facilitating people in their transition to a different way of thinking, behaving, and acting at work with technology and doing it as smoothly and quickly as possible. It also helps in instituting and embedding the change actions so that they become the ‘new operating model’. Adoption of a digital strategy begins with a cohesive perspective about the changes.
Organization
Digital transformation often discusses only the technical perspective – conducting business at the speed of the internet with device and platform solutions, providing anytime and anywhere interactivity and collaboration. But that’s not all, there’s much more to it! In fact, at the outset, organizations should focus on conversation, thinking, and planning about the value propositions for being digital, such as,
- Business agility,
- New business models,
- Streamlining and modernizing operations,
- Better uses of resources,
- Less capital expense,
- Improving human performance,
- Keeping pace with the market,
- Improving customer experience, and
- Staying competitive or seizing competitive advantage.
When you look at digital transformation and the supporting technologies, the technical details are not as relevant to the discussion as the requirements for change in the organization to accomplish the transformation. It is about how people work and how the workplace functions to support them with digitally enabled job experiences. That translates into what services the organization must provide to engage and enable these digital job experiences.
For an organization to reap the full benefit from digital, it is necessary to produce an organizational change roadmap that is often overlooked or minimized, but essential to understand and take action on the change impact affecting the people.
Technology
Technology change also influences people's processes, which require adaptation to prevent them from becoming a bottleneck. Suppose your technology solution demands web services capable of immediacy of response. Being able to use a service the instant it is requested seems brilliant! However, when the processes from request to delivery lag, the net effect will have severe consequences.
Organizational change roadmap must also consider the people requirements associated with the technology, not only the technology. Everyone must get equal consideration when developing the strategy for change. IT often shifts from back-end application processing services to front-line business delivery services. This happens when acting digital transitions to being digital and the transformation shifts the technology to cloud computing. IT must understand and interpret requirements from the business and then in real-time promote the requirements to the cloud services teams in forms which are immediately actionable.
Business
Business management is always a major component in addressing the issues of handling the discomfort and frustrations experienced by people as new processes accompany the technology. Successful implementation and realization of the benefits of the change require people across the enterprise to be comfortable with abandoning familiar ways of doing business and embracing new ways of working with technology such as AI.
When people and the organization become fully enabled by technology, the benefits of a transformed business are realized. The forecast for future state achievements becomes real as the link between disruption and opportunity becomes recognizable and manageable.
People
It is easy to think of change management solely in terms of processes and technology, but it is the attitude and behavior of the people engaged in the processes and using the technology solutions that ultimately will make or break a successful transformation. For example, business information (content) often resides in hard copy or digital formats like PDF or text files. Document use is then the intrinsic way people go about doing business. The habit is a human endeavor of consuming, exchanging, and storing paper and files as the given practices for conducting business transactions, and the behavior seldom is given a second thought. Enter AI, which shifts the human factor from pushing paper to electronic media transaction processing.
Now comes a realization of the value of content strategy for transforming business-critical document processes. It becomes a system approach in which the people component of document management gives way to machine processing in this transformation, and subsequently creates machine management for ongoing improvement. A behavioral change shifts the work to minimize disruption of business routines and, just as importantly, to facilitate higher user adoption rates, greater user proficiency, and efficiency that ultimately produce an organizational culture of continuous improvement.
Roles
Digital transformation leads to a change in people’s roles. Cloud services deliver managed functionality; therefore, fewer technical roles are necessary. And new roles emerge, like technical engineers for PaaS services and functional managers for SaaS services. This gradually decreases the gap between business and IT with service architects in the middle. IT isn’t responsible for managing bits and bytes anymore but for seeing that new ways of working add greater business value.
Skills
The change affects the skills required of both IT and business. The IT organization gradually requires less technical skilled employees, shifting technology know-how skills to Cloud Service Providers and the IT focus to technical knowledge and service orchestration. The business units also need to develop an understanding on using the cloud services while maintaining governance and integration with the rest of the IT landscape.
Embrace change with Quantiphi
Quantiphi has proven expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions to drive enterprise digital transformation. We follow a people-centric approach to streamline business processes and accelerate your organization’s digital transformation. We are aware that human factors of change are significant and we focus on enhancing capabilities to engage and include people in creating change. Our success is a product of user adoption. Benefit realization requires cultural and behavioral change.
Get in touch with our experts to begin your organization’s transformation and improve business outcomes.
