TOO BIG, TOO SMALL,
JUST RIGHT
By Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Strategies for digital transformation in businesses of any size
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igital transformation has been a popular term for quite a few years now. It sounds great, but most digital transformation projects suffer from “Goldilocks Syndrome.” They are too big or too small; getting it right is remarkably hard. Approximately 70% of these projects fail or fall short of expectations, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s first start with a couple of things not to do. What follows is arguably common sense, but as I say all too often, common sense isn’t that common. Firstly, never start with the technology; always start with the business problem you want to solve. I say this as it’s common to see enterprises and government departments alike pulling together shortlists of technology providers before they have built a thorough business case or undertaken any business analysis. That’s a recipe for disaster. Good business analysis often shows that the problem you are trying to solve is not the problem you should be solving. Similarly, a thorough business case may well show you that though transformation would be good, it’s simply not worth the time, money and risk. In short, you should never try to transform
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anything without a business case and thorough business analysis. Significant and ambitious transformations almost always fail because life is complex. What can seem like a straightforward, albeit ambitious transformation, will reveal itself over time to be more and more complicated than you first thought. Even a relatively common, though critical, activity like Accounts Payable, can be challenging to automate and transform. Over the past five years, there has been an explosion of interest in RPA (Robotic Process Automation) automation tools that can undertake tiny transformations, such as eliminating the need to manually type the same information into two different screens. A large part of the popularity of RPA bots and tools is that they are easy to deploy and fix a known problem. However, just as large-scale business process automation can get out of hand quickly, so too can a slew of quick RPA fixes. Think of these bots as band-aids; a couple can make a lot of sense, but if you need 100-plus band-aids, you may need to go to A&E. A minor fix here can trigger another problem somewhere else. So at one end of the spectrum, we have entire business processes; at the other, we have individual tasks. And as
of today, most digital transformations focus on one or the other. We should be looking at the middle ground between these two extremes in an ideal world. That’s more possible today than ever before, and there is technology freely and cost-effectively available to help. There are many Process & Task Mining products on the market that can provide you with a quick and detailed insight into exactly what is happening, when, how and by whom. Starting with a broad yet thorough understanding of your business activity is essential. Though you will still need a business analyst to interpret and augment the work of these technologies, business analysis that would have taken months can now be done in a fraction of the time. From this broad picture, you can identify specific bottlenecks and/or areas for improvement and break the transformation work down into an ordered set of digestible, affordable and sub-projects. Let’s put this into a real-world context. A couple of years back we advised a supply chain transformation initiative. It was driven by a recognition that technology, in this case, blockchain and IoT devices, could speed up endto-end shipments and dramatically reduce the number of disputes over