An overview of some simple ways to get started on your company’s digital transformation journey and becoming a Digital Dragon.
Establish Top-Down Support From Executive Operating Team
Collaborative support from the top is rocket fuel for a company on the journey to becoming digital. Create a council or digital community of practice made up of senior leadership from your company. This is the customer advisory board and steering committee for the journey. A great way to get buy in and support from the Executive Operating Team is through inclusion of digital initiatives and benefit commitments to the balanced scorecard. Buy in from this level is critical. If they are engaged and bought in, they will knock down walls, unlock funding and provide the critical feedback that you’ll need along the journey. They can also help company meet its scorecard commitments. The council should be cross functional and should span all of the key capability areas of your organization – production, marketing, finance, legal, HR, business development, etc.
Empower Your Chief Data & Analytics Officer to Capture the Dragon
If your company doesn’t have one, get one. Digital means being able to leverage the data your company manages, experiences and captures in order to make proactive decisions. Capturing data and managing data are two different activities, and require different key skills and have complex strategies. What are your company’s data assets and what are they worth to your organization? How can enriching those data assets make them more valuable? How does your company benefit from these assets? Focus and accountability to deliver answers to these 3 simple questions will create digital transformation momentum, establish basic show-back benefits to the organization, and if done thoughtfully can create a self-funding mechanism for future initiatives.
Create A Tiger Team
Invest by creating a team of cross-functional, high-performing technologists. This doesn’t need to be a big team. A small team (15) that has funding and executive operating team support can create a tremendous amount of momentum and value. Invest in this team like you would in your marketing budget, and allow them to manage their own P&L. Challenge them to get *stuff* done. Early on, you should shield them from operational overhead, bureaucracy and friction. Ask the team to read the Lean Startup, live into rapid prototyping, build MVPs quickly and embrace the fail-fast mindset. And most importantly, keep track of the wins.
Build A Score Board
Make the scoreboard visible to the entire company. Everyone wants to be part of a winner. Show the wins publicly and proudly. Being on the winning team is incredibly inspiring. Winning is addictive. Empower the CDO and the tiger team to show-back the wins that the entire company is achieving through their collective journey to digital. This is not the tiger team’s or the CDO’s score board. The tiger team is the cheerleading squad and the CDO is the head coach of the digital transformation. The company fields the players. This is the entire company’s digital score board. Show it proudly, support it through the executive operating team and celebrate the wins with great pride.