Unveiling My Journey in Digital Transformation Management

The digital world is fascinating. Think about how the world looked like just some years ago in 2007. We didn’t have smartphones back then. Could you imagine how the world would look like today if we didn’t have instant access to all the knowledge in the world with a small swipe?

Difficult, right?

In this article, I will tell about how I became Head of Digital Transformation Management and what I learned along the way.

Photo by Ricardo Rocha on Unsplash

But with computing power growing exponentially fast (see Moore’s Law), possibilities have opened up in recent years that we had never dared to think about. And the development goes even further: with technologies such as generative AI at the peak of their popularity, our daily work will change in a handful of years.

Digitalization is fascinating.

To me, it always has been.

In this article, I will tell about how I became Head of Digital Transformation Management and what I learned along the way.

What does Digital Transformation mean?

According to McKinsey, digitalization or “digital transformation is the rewiring of an organization, with the goal of creating value by continuously deploying tech at scale.”

That’s a lot. Let’s deconstruct it:

• Rewiring of an organization: This means that change takes place. A core element of Digital Transformation Management is Change Management.
• The goal of creating value: That’s straightforward. Digitalization just for its own sake, doesn’t create any value. Actually, it is a waste then. However, it has a tremendous potential to innovate and improve processes, products, and whole industries.
• Deploying tech at scale: Scalability is key. Digitalization can also be done on a small scale, creating island solutions and this might already bring value. But, Digital Transformation means scaling these solutions and connecting different solutions to a holistic picture.

My Digital Journey

My view on digitalization stems from the sector of industrial production.

In fintech or other industries, digital transformation might be seen differently, but in manufacturing, it is mostly the combination of a physical thing (a machine) and a digital counterpart (software). In this context, we are talking about cyber-physical-systems, or CPS in short. Some go even further and call them CPPS (for cyber-physical-production-systems).

So digitalization starts in the “real” world.

So did I.

From Mechanical Engineering to Digitalization

I studied mechanical engineering with a specialization in business administration and narrowed my focus to industrial engineering in my master’s.

My main topics were how to construct machines, production lines, and whole factories. I learned a lot about techniques such as lean production to be used to improve processes and increase the efficiency of production systems.

At the core of it all was the production process, and there were various tools to study and improve it.

During my master’s program the German term “Industrie 4.0” was popularized by acatech.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Industrie 4.0 or in English Industry 4.0 describes the 4th industrial revolution with the first being mechanization (steam engines), the second being mass production (Henry Ford) and the third being the use of electronics and programmable logic controllers (PLCs).

But what is the 4th industrial revolution?

It combines the physical world (machines) with automation and the virtual world (software) to optimize production even further.

At the peak of the hype around Industry 4.0, I wrote my master’s thesis in the realm of digitalization. The thesis was about how digitalization measures can lead to an increase in productivity, reduce inventory, and lead to flexibilization in production. The thesis was written as a practical thesis together with a company.

I was able to identify several areas in which digitalization measures could lead to cost savings.

It was well received and I was thrilled about the topic. As described in this article, I really enjoyed writing my thesis. Working at the intersection of theory and practical value has both: scientific curiosity & practical applicability.

Digitalization in Academia

I decided to dive deeper into the realm of digitalization and follow it up with a Ph.D.

During my Ph.D. I worked in a full-time job in applied science within a highly specialized research team in the realm of industrial engineering and digitalization. My colleagues all had at least completed a master’s program and were (junior) experts in their fields. I learned a lot.

I learned new ways of doing things, like coding. I also learned how to communicate well, because we had to present our projects to our partners ourselves. Plus, I learned how to organize and lead projects.

We did a ton of applied research projects - from doing value stream mapping in different factories to optimizing production planning algorithms and predictive maintenance.

Some of the projects were on the brink of technologies’ potential and others were just broadly related to digitalization.

There is one important thing to digitalization: it is easy to come up with different optimization ideas and how to utilize technologies to optimize processes. However, the solutions only bring value once they are integrated with the real world.

The thing with digital solutions is that prototypes can only demonstrate what is possible, but their value is limited. Their true potential unfolds when they are implemented and deployed to production.

Digitalization in the Industrial World

After finishing my Ph.D. I decided to make the transition to the corporate world and apply what I had learned in practice.

I was offered the role of Head of Digital Transformation Management by a main research partner I’ve partnered with during my Ph.D. I gladly accepted the position. It was a great opportunity to put what I had learned into practice.

The interesting thing is, when I first started this job I thought, that my main task would be to develop new solutions on the brink of technology. It turned out that the implementation was much more important.

Because value is only generated if a solution is implemented and used in production. To bring solutions to production, I learned that three things are important:

• Change Management: A former colleague in academia always said, that digitalization can be the eighth form of waste according to Lean. And he is right. If a digital solution isn’t properly brought to production and adopted by the users on the shop floor, it is a waste. This is why change management is so important. It is crucial to onboard the end-users - in an industrial setting, these are the machine operators. They are the true experts in their particular part of the production process and can tell where a digital solution supports them most.
• Stability of the solutions: Prototypes (especially in software) have one thing in common: they still have a lot of bugs and aren’t very stable. In factories, production often goes on non-stop, every day, all day long. The solutions used, need to be really reliable and steady, or else fixing them all the time will quickly become a big hassle.
• Operations: This is an add-on to the former one. Innovative solutions are built to solve a particular problem. Unfortunately, the operation of such solutions is often only a second thought, if at all. However, in the long run, stability is very important for the adoption of the solution and the user’s trust in them. Therefore, a good operations concept needs to be defined.

And Now?

It took me some time to learn that it is not the complexity of a solution or the highest degree of innovation that counts. It is much more important that a solution creates added value and is accepted by the end users.

When I think of the first solutions I developed, they were always as complete as possible - often with a lot of additional rules to cover special cases that occur maybe 2-3 times a year. The more efficient approach, however, is to develop solutions that cover the core and still offer users enough flexibility to react independently to special cases.

This has two benefits:

• More time to focus on the core of a solution.
• A better acceptance by the users, because they still have some degree of independence when using the solution.

To summarize, I have to say that digital transformation management has at least as much to do with change management as it does with the development and implementation of new technologies.

I have realized that my role is to translate the world of digitalization for my colleagues and show them how they can make their work easier, more productive, and more fun when they use digitalization solutions.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Now. And in the years to come.

…

Thank you for reading!

If you are interested in my other articles about my personal story, you can check out the following posts:

• I started sharing my personal story within the productivity realm: what I’ve learned about productivity.
• At Medium I had the opportunity to introduce myself here.
• I had the opportunity to see both worlds: academia and the corporate world.
• I also had the opportunity to take over the responsibility of leading a team with 29.

In my next article, I am going to dive deeper into the learnings of my journey in digital transformation management.