7 Valuable Insights in Digital Transformation Management

The ever-evolving landscape of the digital realm never fails to captivate me.

For over four exciting years, I’ve been steering the ship as the Head of Digital Transformation Management at my company.

In this article, I want to share some of my key learnings.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

1. Focus on Change Management First

Digital technologies have a huge potential, but they only bring value if they are used. I’ve seen many innovative and technologically advanced solutions that were developed but not used by the end-users, because they didn’t feel it added benefit to their daily work.

To get your company to use these digital solutions you need to entice them, you need to show them how the solutions can benefit the end user.

You need to bring digitalization to the people.

To achieve this, you need to focus on change management first. A good strategy is to involve your end users as early as possible and address their needs as well as possible.

Develop a minimum viable product (MVP) and work on it from there.

This is especially important if you are just starting on your journey of digital transformation in your company. If the first solutions you develop are successful the sentiment about the whole topic will be much better. Hence, the barrier to the introduction of future solutions will be much smaller.

2. Stability & Robustness > Complexity

When I am thinking of digital transformation, I imagine established companies. Companies that have been doing great at their core competence for a long time. They have established processes and now want to use digitalization to become more efficient overall.

In such cases, the most important thing is not how innovative and complex a new digital solution is. It is much more important to keep the existing processes stable and robust.

When we develop something new, we often add a lot of complexity to it. At least for me, this was the case. When I look back on the first digital solutions I developed, they were always packed with extra rules to handle rare situations that might only happen a few times a year.

But now, I’ve learned that it’s better to focus on the main problems and give users the freedom to deal with special cases on their own.

This results in three benefits:

• A more robust solution (because of reduced complexity).
• More time to develop the solution’s core.
• A better acceptance by the users.

3. Digitalization is More General than You Think

In my last article, with the help of McKinsey, I’ve defined what digitalization and digital transformation are and it is more general than you think.

When I first started my job as Digital Transformation Manager, I thought, that my main task would be to develop new solutions on the brink of technology. And yes, this is a part of the job, but other things are at least as important:

• Change Management: This is so important that it has become the first learning I shared within this article.
• Project Management: The heartbeat of digital transformation is carrying out projects that result in the implementation of new digital solutions. Good project management is mandatory.
• Marketing: It has also a lot to do with how you “market” the solutions within the company. If you can show the end-users the true value of your solutions they are much more likely to truly test them and implement them in their daily workflows.
• Operations: A solution that isn’t robust and breaks all the time won’t bring any good to your organization. To avoid this and bring it back online quickly when it fails is crucial. Therefore, you need a good operations concept.

4. Think about the Operations

For me, it is always the case when I develop new solutions that my ideas are overflowing.

• What features can be integrated?
• Which special cases need to be considered?
• …

Operations isn’t one of my first thoughts.

But during the past years, I’ve learned that operations is a very important aspect of the solutions. If you don’t consider the whole life-cycle of a digital solution, chances are that it will be quickly neglected after the prototype phase.

Just like when you welcome new users, the sooner you plan how to operate the solution, the simpler it becomes to design it without draining all your resources later.

This frees up your time to create exciting new things instead of just maintaining the old ones.

5. A Holistic Picture

In my first years as Head of Digital Transformation Management, I focused on developing solutions with my team that solve a particular problem. That worked well, but since then I’ve learned how important it is to have a holistic picture.

• How do different solutions work together?
• Can they be integrated?
• Does an overarching solution exist that brings together multiple tools?

These are all questions that show the necessity of a digital architecture that is closely related to the IT architecture of a company. Hence, digitalization and IT need to work together to create long-lasting and sustainable benefits.

6. User-centered Design

As important as change management is during the project phase of introducing a new digital solution (software, cyber-physical-system, …) is a user-centered design for the long term.

It aids the operation of the solution (less effort for support if the solution is self-explanatory) and brings the user to the center (not the developer).

7. Scalable Solutions vs. Island-solutions

The decision of a digital solution should be scale-able or solving a problem in a smaller area is a hard one. It boils down to the question: How robust and/or connected does the solution need to be?

In my experience, you cannot have both at their maximum: there is always a tradeoff between how robust a solution can be and how connected it can be within the overall digitalization and IT architecture.

If you are in industrial production and you are developing a solution for a machine with enormous operating costs running 24/7, robustness is key. If such a machine has a downtime it will be very costly. Therefore, it makes sense to develop a solution that is as robust as possible and sacrifices connectivity.

On the other hand, if you develop a solution that should collect data from your whole shop floor and connect it to calculate KPIs on a factory level, you need to focus on connectivity. Hence, you sacrifice robustness.

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Thank you for reading!

These are some of my learnings from my experience as Head of Digital Transformation Management. If you are interested in my journey into this job, this article might be interesting to you.