The challenges of Digital Transformation

I view change management in the Digital area through the lens of the following 5 activities

1. Process (engineering / re-engineering),

2. Org Design,

3. Training & Learning Management

4. Communications Management

5. Incentives and Adoption Management (which may or may not be part of #2 above.)

 Process:  Many consulting firms can do process very well since they are familiar with it (very similar to doing any IT project and can typically be done by your existing BA's and Business Consultants).  However we need to adapt our mindsets in the digital world.  In order to truly deliver the best value for our customers we should take a comprehensive omnichannel view of the solution and also ensure that old processes and bad behaviors are not just ported over to the new world, given a coating of paint, and passed off as an improvement. At Target.com I had to ensure that the new content planning and production processes were actually BETTER i.e. simpler, faster and more flexible than what was being replaced.  I also wanted to ensure that offline content planning processes (say for in store marketing and merchandising, print catalog photo shoots etc.) were being leveraged into the digital area to ensure the customer was actually going to save cost in the long run i.e. by getting rid of redundant procedures.  For example: This could mean coming up with a standard style guide for digital channel, store channel and sprint photo shoots; understanding the timing and frequency of photo shoots to piggy back on one event thereby saving cost. As you can imagine in a $70 billion USD retailer doing something like this is a major task (crosses probably 3 major departments) and is risky but if you truly want to look at avenues for reducing waste this is the kind of mindset you need to bring to the table.  Its way MORE than doing process maps!!!

Org Design tends to be done usually by specialized firms (in my experience at GM and Target.com we used McKinsey and Bain and Co. respectively – I served as an advisor to them from the Program) who are typically brought in through the Chief Human Resource Officer (usually someone the SI lacks clout with).  But the SI will have a very good understanding of what the new job positions will need. Often times someone on the existing project is actually doing the work for the project (e.g.: setting up analytics and tags in the cloud, setting up search etc.). Therefore this is once again a huge opportunity to demonstrate value for your client. Even if the OD work goes to someone else you are still an integral part of the Consult and Support aspects of the activity (from a RACI perspective).

I won’t spend much time on Training and Learning because this is an area that is mature and established.  One observation in my recent experience is that SI's tend to skimp here and never allocate enough time to this it seems.  Some percentage of the best Sr BA's time must be set aside to work with the training teams.  This is usually never adequately planned for. Also if UX deliverables are coming piecemeal from the agency, sometimes the most complex pieces (and thereby the most relevant for training) get delivered late in the project timeline and also frequently can be error prone and subject to more than normal cycles of review thereby throwing the learning development plan askew

Communications Management is usually not given as much serious attention as it deserved and depending on the size of the company can be a very small effort (i.e. someone’s 2nd or 3rd job on the project sometimes even run through the project sponsors Exec Admin staff (not recommended!!!!) or (less frequently) a more sustained effort with a sophisticated just in time communications strategy involving multimedia (monthly newsletter, kiosks, internal website, FAQs, launch sweepstakes, etc.) can be used to inform the stakeholders and build excitement.  Once again depending on scale #4 can be sent out to a specialized company or can be done through contractor resources by the main SI (in fact this assumption of using contractor resources to augment a lack of specialized skills can hold for any of the above five points with the noted caveat that #2 and #5 brings in a new stakeholder into the mix i.e. the CHRO of the company).  The lesson learned here is if the client is expecting the SI to own the communications – get good clarity on scope and make sure appropriate staffing is given here or it will be done badly and can badly jeopardize perception of the project by the non-direct stakeholder community (i.e. people in the second and third tier away from the project)

Incentives and Adoption (this is part of OD usually).  This can be tricky to do and political because it maps into customer employee performance measures.  We really struggled with this at Target.  Who gets credit for what?  What is worth measuring?  Does the VP of marketing get credit for driving eyeballs only? or do they have some responsibility for conversion also.  In the digital product centric world what are the metrics to measure great performance of HomePage, Internal Search, Personalization, SEM/SEO etc...what is the biggest contribution to conversion? How do you make the correlation?  How do you manage things you don’t directly control but yet have a guge impact on performance such as product pricing and product assortment? These are complex topics which must be addressed ideally during the project itself if you want to realize your business case.  However it is the exception and not the rule.