Over the course of decades, we’ve come to expect digital transformation to be a big event. These transformations are typically incredibly slow and expensive and the failure rate is astronomical. The impact on employees is serious, with each new wave of major changes adding to change fatigue, and sometimes mistrust if the transformation doesn’t deliver the proposed benefits.
It’s time to change our approach. We can move from large-scale transformation to smaller adaptations as the world, and technology, changes around us – instead of transformation, an evolution over time.
Evolving to fit a changing world
The process of digital transformation is unwieldy and exhausting – for those executing it and for those being constantly change managed. Big budgets and project management overheads see these large scale transformations embroiled in organisational politics and red tape. They also make them turn about as gracefully as a cruise ship in response to change. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that digital transformation is usually seen to have an ending. The teams roll off the program, the budget line ends, we are transformed.
This approach is inherently flawed. The business needs continue to change, customer expectations move, and the team changes the ways they work and use technology – nevermind the changes in the technology itself! In the old model, we let the needs continue to drift from our technological reality until it’s time for another transformation.
There’s a different way to think about technology change. Rather than these monumental transformations, we can build organisations that are in a constant state of technological evolution.
In organisations that embrace technological evolution, staff are adaptable, lifelong learners who embrace the opportunity to improve systems and processes as opportunities arise. Technology leaders and teams are engaged in problem solving as part of normal business, in partnership with teams across the organisation. Leaders can adapt quickly to new opportunities, like AI, because they are accustomed to evaluating new opportunities quickly and rigorously. They have guardrails for risk and a clear picture of ROI.
In a digital evolution model, we do not wait until a system is completely broken, a process is deeply inefficient, or a risk has become urgent. We notice the early signs of drift and empower teams to adjust.
Living governance is the key to making digital evolution possible. An organisation’s ability to continually understand whether its technology needs are changing and if its environment and tools are keeping pace, alongside clear guardrails so that teams can make change without huge overheads.
Living governance
The problem I run into most often is that leaders cannot govern what they cannot see and understand.
During a transformation project, there is usually a lot of visibility. Either the internal team or a consultancy comes in and creates all the elaborate documents: current-state assessments, future-state designs, system inventories, roadmaps, risk registers, process maps, business cases.
That point-in-time work usually ends up out of date and on a shelf very quickly.
If we want to move from transformation to evolution, we need a living view of the technology environment. A way to see how technology connects to the things leaders actually govern: risks, vendors, costs, obligations, performance and strategic priorities.
I’m not talking about documentation for its own sake (see the previous article on security theatre), or a technical catalogue that only IT can understand. Digital evolution relies on access to actionable information in real time, and a shared set of rules that democratise change at the lowest practical level of an organisation. It should help leaders see:
- What has changed?
- Is our environment fit for purpose today?
- What about next year? Is our spend aligned with our priorities?
- Are we within our risk tolerance?
- What does good look like?
If leaders cannot see the small issues, they cannot make small adjustments. Similarly, if teams need to wait for organisational leadership intervention to make adaptations, then small adjustments just aren’t practical. The small issues continue to accumulate.
Then, eventually, the gap between the business and the technology becomes too big to ignore, and the organisation needs another major transformation. We’re back on the merry-go-round again! There’s a way to break out of that cycle.
Digital transformation changes an organisation. Digital evolution keeps the organisation operating effectively in a changing world.
Can you see your environment clearly enough to ask those questions and make adjustments?
