Digital Transformation is the ability of an organisation to remain competitive. By using new technologies more effectively than their competitors, this leads to greater market share, lower price points, improved product and/or service quality and constant innovation for clients. But where do you start?

This article is designed for medium to large organisations that want to know how to do this. I’ll draw on my 20 years of experience as an enterprise and solution architect with DXC technology. I was fortunate enough to help a range of clients which I can now couple with my knowledge as a trainer, across the 12+ courses that I now run.

Click to open the infographic below to see a snapshot of the steps to take to perform a digital transformation successfully.

Here is my list of key steps in order:

Use an Agile framework to help structure the entire transformation. My recommendation is to use the Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe, coupled with The Open Group Architecture framework or TOGAF. This will involve sending all the senior leaders on a Leading SAFe 2-day course, your architects, engineering and development functions on TOGAF Part 1 and Part 2 4 day course.
Understand what business objectives you’d like to achieve in the next 3-5 years.
Work with all the key stakeholders to develop a common mission and vision.
Send your security experts to become certified on the Certified Cloud Security Professional certification.
Identify key execution leaders, usually the program manager, a senior project manager and the lead architect, to go onto the 4-day Implementing SAFe course to become SAFe program consultants. I wouldn’t recommend relying on outside consultants unless you want to hire someone.
Run a value stream workshop with the key stakeholders to determine the best value stream to take forward that will deliver your first epic and the associated top 5-10 features.
Start running internal Leading SAFe workshops to ensure everyone know how SAFe works and outline the value stream that we’re going to take forward. Use the workshop to seek feedback and help improve the decision-making process.
Think about training for your technical resources. So unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably looking at Office 365 Security & Compliance (2 Days) and either AWS Quickstart (1 Day) or Azure Fundamentals (1 Day). My personal pick is to stay with Azure. It’s the most popular with my students in Australia. You could also consider Google and Oracle. I’ve had a handful of people use Google and only 2 use Oracle. I think they were from Oracle.
Identify the first Agile Release Train, be clear on what success looks like and ask your people to self-organise across the train, using the SAFe principles. Blend in the principles from the enterprise / solution architecture function and seek feedback from the teams.
Perform a training needs analysis workshop, by involving all those people that are required to build and deliver the solution. This is where you’ll need to identify the technical and soft skills that will be missing. This will include specific vendor product training, probably through eLearning methods and vendor training.
For soft skills, start thinking about cultural change programs for everyone on the trains. I’d recommend DevOps Foundation for everyone, DevSecOps Engineering for security and lead developers and DevOps Leader for the key leaders managing the train.
Don’t forget to bring the business on the journey too, so I can recommend the Cloud Computing Foundation (2 Days), designed for non-technical professionals and leads to an accredited APMG certification.
Almost certainly your transformation will contain a significant data component, so I can recommend training for all your technical resources on the newly released Enterprise Big Data Professional certification.
At this stage, you’ll be very close to deploying your first Agile Release Train, so you’ll need to ensure the relevant people have attended the SAFe Product Manager, Scrum Master and SAFe for Teams courses.
Finally, launch your train through a face-to-face Program Increment (PI) Planning workshop and allow your SAFe Program Consultants and Scrum Masters to coach the teams to success. Don’t forget to measure at every step to show progress. This is all explained in the SAFe implementation roadmap. If followed correctly, you’ll be delivering multiple features in the first 50 days.
Over time you’ll launch more trains, that are aligned to value streams to deliver more epics and features. As you grow, the trains will become much faster and with a team of 125 people or more, you’ll delivering features much faster than ever before.
Importantly, constantly track where you are in your business objectives, your mission and vision, to ensure you keep the trains on the tracks. There is where the Lean Portfolio Management components in SAFe that helps with the governance piece of this.

Do you have questions with these steps? Contact our awesome ALC Training team!

Digital transformation is the process of cultural, technological and thought leadership innovation, that is required to ensure businesses remain competitive, relevant and able to survive. Let’s break that down and explain what I mean.

Click on the image below to see ALC’s range of courses that can help with your digital transformation journey:

Cultural Innovation

This means allowing people within a business to develop and grow, by learning in a safe environment. We often call this Failing Fast. This helps to foster a culture within an organisation, that moves away from:

Blame
Mistrust
Finger-pointing

And move towards:

High-Trust
Collaborative
Engaged

You can only innovate when you allow people to take risks. But in concert, you need to provide tools and an environment for continual fast feedback. This includes:

Allowing people to select the tools they want, in order to automate or streamline a job. This requires management buy-in and funding.
Realising, that the customer is the person that consumes your work.
Fostering a culture of open feedback, without retribution, with customers. How am I doing? What could I do better? What keeps you awake at night?

All these concepts and learnings appear again and again in many of the cultural change courses I run:

Click on the picture below to watch an awesome video from our DevOps Foundation course, covering Spotify Engineering Culture:

Technological Innovation

This means adopting the latest technological innovations, to help business leaders learn and act quickly. There are many examples:

Using “Big Data” to provide new insights and gain a competitive advantage.
Using “Cloud Computing” to provide a business model that is more agile, whilst removing the reliance on investing $1000’s in IT infrastructure, licencing and bespoke software development.
Using “Artificial Intelligence” to detect and protect the business from hacking, data loss and service loss.

It’s no surprise that at ALC, we’re focusing on these key technological innovations:

Click on the diagram, below to see an awesome video from the Enterprise Big Data Professional course on why we use Hadoop over SQL when dealing with Big Data:

Thought Leadership

This is the most critical. Leaders are the people in a company that pave the way for new things. Just like in music, they are the avant-garde, breaking new ground, failing fast and leading by example. They are skillful coaches that bring all their people with them on the journey. They lead through:

Trust
Respect
Rewarding everyone.
Being fair, honest and open.

You’ll find these leadership traits are exemplified in the following courses for leaders:

The diagram below shows you the Scaled Agile Framework, of SAFe for short. Click on it and you’ll be taken to the FREE clickable version on their website:

Government

If you have ever worked in a government department or a local council, there are very few examples of these digital successes. Why? I believe many leaders of governments, whether they be the lord mayor of a council or the elected minister, fundamentally do not understand digital disruption. They believe it is a phenomenon that only affects commercial entities and is not relevant to them. And the ones that do try and embrace digital disruption, don’t focus on cultural change, with leaders not leading by example.

Unfortunately, it is extremely relevant. I believe governments will be disrupted, just like every organisation in the world will be disrupted. Charities, councils, regulatory bodies, none of them are immune. In fact, they are the entities that are most at risk of being irrelevant. Why?

Because for every government service, there is are much better ways of delivering, by adopting the key tenants above and embracing digital transformation. This means, if enough people do not see the value in government services, they will protest, they will resist taxes and want to live in a place where the services are incredible.

We’ve seen trailers of this movie before:

Tiamen Square Uprising in China.
The Election of Donald Trump.
Brexit – Where the UK government is effectively the customer and the EU is the supplier.

Click on the diagram to show you how you digitally transform your government organisation using SAFe:

Check out my latest conversation on “Navingating Digital Disruption” on the New York hit show, #AskTheCEO with Avrohom Gottheil:

I was very fortunate in 2011 to be awarded a Leading Edge Forum Grant to perform distinguished research on In-Memory Data Grid technologies (IMDG). At the time, the term Big Data had not been coined, or at least I had never heard of it. The 3 months of intensive study and research for the CSC Leading Edge Forum, now known as DXC Technology, lead to a path of self-discovery and a realisation of what was really happening in the data space. Here is a link to the brochure showcasing my work:

www.slideshare.net/CSC/csc-grants-via-leading-edge-forum

Big Data is now defined as the problem space, relating to the cleaning and analysis of huge data sets, resulting in a series of recommendations, a roadmap and/or defined business outcomes. It’s further described by using the 4 V’s:

Volume – When I say huge data sets, I mean millions of records or entries. Think of Facebook logins.
Velocity – Data hits us thousands of times per second across multiple channels. Think of Social Media feeds across multiple platforms and real-time data in hospitals.
Variety – Data is mostly unstructured or semi-structured. Think of payments, pictures, videos, blogs, tweets, MRI scans and sensor data.
Veracity – Refers to the quality and relevance of data for the task in hand. Data scientists often refer to high veracity as finding the signal in the noise.

Based on my research, and because of my classical / jazz composition background, I see Big Data slightly differently. You see when I studied musical composition at the University of Wales and the London College of Music, I learnt that the most talented composers and performers had been using the same system for around 500+ years.

Sounds remarkable, that a single system would pervade for so long, but it’s true. We call it tonality, or in laymans terms we use keys and scales in music. When we learn to play a musical instrument we learn all the different scales and all the different keys. Examples include C Major, D minor, B flat major or C# minor. This is why there is much emphasis on practicing scales and chords. This system is called the tonal system and is still strongly used in pop music culture, especially in the pop music charts.

Now…at the turn of the century, between 1900 and 1925 a group of composers emerged, that are now called the Second Viennese School. And what they did was remarkable. They pretty much started to reject the use of the tonal system, that had served mankind well for 500+ years and created a new form of music called serialism. Simply put, that is music that does not have a tonal centre, a key or is not strictly part of a scale. We describe this as atonalism. To the untrained ear, it would appear that the notes seems to be random and dissonant. This is what atonal music, using serialism composition can look like.

You’ll see that every note on the top stave is never repeated and every note on the bottom stave is also never repeated. This ensures that no note takes precedence and stops us perceiving any form of tonal centre, or tonality. Below is a short video explaining serialism, if you’re interested in learning more.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6fw_JEKT6Q

This new school of serialism, led by Schonberg, Webern and Berg, was mirrored in the art and fashion worlds, through the abstract art movement, with Jackson Pollock being the most famous. Below is an example of Pollock’s work:

So what the hell does this have to do with Big Data, I hear you cry?

Well Big Data is a great analog of this short history lesson in modern musical composition theory. We’ve been using relational datastores for 30 years, and apart from the emergence of a few exceptions, the most popular datastores have been SQL based, conforming to relational database theory. These datastores are commonly known as relational database management systems or RDBMS. Think of relational database theory as musical tonal theory. It’s worked for a long time, so why change it? Examples of RDBMS include Microsoft SQL, Oracle and SAP. With a relational datastore, we store data in tables and these tables all relate to each other in a schema. Below is a simple example:

There are other rules that need to be implemented in order for a relational datastore and these include following the ACID principles, and rationalising the structure using normal forms. Here is a good article outlining relational database theory:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database

Then companies decided to rethink the storage of data, to help solve new, complex problems. The challenge with relational datastores is that they are great at storing customer information and financial information, but are not very good at processing and storing millions of records, that are unstructured, with 1000s of additional unstructured data items being thrown into the mix per second, with varying levels of data quality. Basically relational datastores are not built to cope with Big Data. They tend to be much slower, reliant on ACID principles, and are not optimised for handling unstructued or semi-structured data. The diagram below outlines ACID principles in an RDBMS architecture:

The first well known company to use non-relational datastores en-mass was Napster. They created a peer-to-peer music sharing network in the early 2000’s and used distributed hash tables to link up the data via central servers. A distributed hash table is essentialy a key value store, which links a key (name of the song and artist), with a value (a link to the mp3 file). This means it’s super fast and able to reference unstructured data very efficiently. This provided a very successful, timely and ground-breaking music streaming service, similar to Spotify today. In those days Napster was later shown to be an illegal service, which has since reached agreements with record companies and artists. Click on the diagram below to view a short video outlining how Peer to Peer networks operate:

In parallel we see Google invent Apache Hadoop technologies to deal with vast quantities of indexing material for search engines and the Big Data ecosystem grows expotentially from there. We now have NOSQL datastores, In-Memory Data Grids and the list goes on. Here is an article that best describes the key differences between the most common types of technology: NOSQL, RDBMS and Hadoop:

www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/hadoop-vs-nosql-vs-sql-vs-newsql-by-example

Be aware that there is huge complexity and variation between different types of Big Data products. The diagram illustrates this point, by outlining the current Hadoop suite of software tools, that can be utilised in a Big Data initiative.

Unfortunately we haven’t had enough time to cover Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning, which I’ll save for another blog post. But these techniques, methods, approaches are all part of the Big Data movement.

If you’re interested in learning more about Big Data technologies, check out our new Enterprise Big Data Professional course:

Where to Start with Digital Transformation?

Why Governments will be Disrupted?

Cultural Innovation

Technological Innovation

Thought Leadership

Government

How Does Modern Musical Composition Echo The Trend of Big Data