Put your own house in order first (diary of a digital transformation)

I’m sharing my story for four reasons:

i) to help me reflect and learn

ii) to share my lessons to help you

iii) to connect and learn alongside people who want to develop

iv) to be honest and open about my experiences, good and bad (to set an example)
(I’ve tweaked this last one since my last article)

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been involved in helping an area of the business look at how they operate and how that directly helps the customer.

There is one big lesson from this which I wanted to explore:

The number one priority in digital transformation is to meet the customer’s needs in the best way we can. In the world of Google, Amazon, Instagram etc this usually involves tweaking a fairly optimal experience or identifying unmet needs (e.g. super quick delivery with Amazon Prime).
BUT, the biggest opportunities to meet the customer’s needs in older organisations are often found by identifying and removing policies, processes or ways of working that get in the way of meeting the customer’s need.

By the way, legacy issues that arise from policy and processes impacting the customer are not new — it is very common and is well known to many involved in organisational change.

However, in digital transformation, there is a tendency to assume the digital solution is best even though there are bigger opportunities from stopping the company ‘getting in its own way’.

So what do I mean by this?

Big corporates are messy beasts with complexity built up over years driven by mindsets and behaviours such as:

• belief in the need to create ever more specialised teams to increase efficiency
• subdividing the organisation into logical ‘chunks’ (by customer segment/customer size/function/back & front office/customer turnover/change vs BAU etc etc) in the name of efficiency and managing complexity
• empire building
• half-completed organisational change initiatives
• building hierarchy to offer career pay progression

The customer isn’t aware of this BUT they are aware of the pain they experience when trying to use products and services provided by the organisation. They don’t know why the pain arises (and nor should they need to know or care).

Interestingly, because the organisations only pay lip service to putting themselves in the customer’s shoes, this pain is not always well known and, more worryingly, the ‘messiness’ that causes the pain is not visible.

Why is this?

The messiness is not visible or, at least, there isn’t a complete picture because it takes time and effort to understand what the organisation does to meet (or not) the customer’s needs.

(and made even worse, if we don’t know, or have assumed we know, the customer’s needs)

Because of the siloed nature of the organisations with specialised teams, every individual knows their piece in the puzzle and what their role is:

• what they need to do
• how long it should take
• how success is measured
• where their work comes from and where it goes
• why (sometimes)

At no point is the customer or meeting their needs mentioned!

For the employee, sometimes this can be frustrating

Or it can be uninspiring and demotivating

Not understanding how your contribution ties into the big picture and helps the customer can do that for you… (especially when you are being told what to do and given limited power to make changes)

Even the managers of these areas don’t necessarily quite how messy their processes are or are able to answer the question — how are you meeting your customer’s needs?

So what should you do?

When you are in the throes of a digital transformation, keep yourself and your colleagues honest by asking yourself a few simple questions.

• Who is my customer?
• What matters most to my customer?
• How well are our processes and policies meeting those needs today?
• Why are there processes and policies that stop us meeting their needs?
• What are the best opportunities that will help us remove or ‘fix’ these problematic processes and policies?