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!

It may not be obvious, by the concept of a value stream is one of the most important concepts in a digital transformation. Why? Because once you understand a value stream, you start to truly understand your business and you’re on a clear path to improving customer experience. Exceptional customer experience is your key business differentiator in the world of digital disruption and needs to be the core focus of any digital transformation.

Let’s define a value stream. I’ll use what I consider, to be the best sources of knowledge reference.

First from Scaled Agile.

If you click on the image it will take you to the Leading SAFe 2 Day course I run at ALC Training.

Second from the TOGAF certification, written by the Open Group:

Value Stream Mapping: the breakdown of activities that an organization performs to create the value being exchanged with stakeholders. It illustrates how an organization delivers value and are in the context of a specific set of stakeholders, and leverage business capabilities in order to create stakeholder value and align to other aspects of the Target Business Architecture.

And here is a picture of a sample value stream map for an online purchase:

And here is another, outlining an emergency hospital admission:

As you can see it’s a simple overview, usually shown in 5-9 stages, of how a product or service starts life and is delivered to the consumer.

As you can see, the business processes beneath can vary in complexity. With an online purchase, the process is relatively simple. With say intensive care, the process can be extremely complex and there are probably 1000’s or paths, depending on the type of care required.

It can also be known as:

Value Chain Diagram
Functional Reference Model

Clearly, there are many values streams and they are quite different between industries.

Once we understand our value stream, we can then consider decomposing each component into systems and people. An example of this is from Scaled Agile, where they define two types of value streams:

You’ll notice that the operational value stream is the one that is focused on the customer. Whereas the development value stream is aligned to delivering systems in an agile manner. In fact, these are development value streams are also known as a CI/CD pipeline:

CI = Continuous Integration – committing code at least once a day.
CD = Continuous Delivery – making sure code is always in a releasable state.

So what we’ve now done, is to understand our business in the context of delivering value through software. We cover this in our DevOps Foundation course:

Any questions on Scaled Agile or DevOps concepts, as always please reach out via twitter – @MusicComposer1 or find me on LinkedIn:

There are a number of examples in history, of how governments have fallen. Either through the ballot box, through a coup d’etat or via a civil or military war. But have you ever stopped to think that a lack of progress in a digital transformation, could be a fourth reason?

Let me back up a bit…and outline what I believe are the reasons we have a government. Why does it exist and why we need one. There are five:

Keep citizens safe.
Maintain law and order.
Grow the economy.
Provide services that require high capital expenditure to deliver.
Collect tax revenue.

Here is a great video that provides some more information on what government is?

Failure by governments to maintain those outcomes and deliver great customer experiences will result in disruption. We’ve already seen this movie before right:

Uber disrupting the transportation industry.
Netflix disrupting the entertainment industry.
Google disrupting traditional advertising revenues.

But hey, they’re all commercial examples. Have you got anything that is relevant to government? Sure:

Russian interference in the US democratic system.
UK leaving the EU. Affectionately known as Brexit.
Chinese attacks on Australian government services.

Here is a great video explaining Brexit:

You can also extend that to local government, such as Queensland in Australia:

Parents opting to homeschool their children and not use the Government funded system.
Students choosing to study at universities that offer the best blended, digital vs classroom-based experience.
Tesla disrupting cars, trucks and eventually planes and trains, which forces say the Dept of Transport and Main Roads to rethink transportation strategies and plans.

I talk about digital disruption and governments in the latest #AskTheCEO discussion here:

The same forces that have helped Uber, Netflix, Google and especially Apple become commercial disrupting forces, are the same for the government:

High customer expectations, driven by an app store always-on mindset.
Generational shifts, as we move into an ageing population, whilst we have adults that have been brought up with social media.
Customers expecting costs to drop and value to increase, driven by innovations started by Google, Amazon, e-Bay, Microsoft, Apple and others.
The increased use of technology to scale crime and scale warfare, driven by the low-cost barrier to entry, the relative ease to learn and use new tools due to the proliferation of the internet, and the prevalence of unprotected and unpatched systems.

So what is the solution. Well it’s important to understand what needs to transform in government and then do so, quickly. Using the latest Lean-Agile and DevOps principles, along with great talent, is how Spotify undermined their competition, so government needs to do the same. Here are three examples:

Attract and maintain talent by allowing them to be autonomous, attain mastery in their craft and provide them with clear purpose that inspired them. Think Elon Musk, heading to Mars and SpaceX.
Create fast and effective feedback loops, to allow everyone to learn quickly. A great example is the Uber App, which asks you to rate the driver at the end of the journey. Taxi companies don’t do this, so they can never learn as fast.
Decentralise decision-making, not all decisions, but ones that empower your workforce. Short-term, localised decisions, where people doing the work are the best informed to make the right decision. So let the sales-man close the $1m deal. Move the people to the work.

Interesting in learning more about digital transformation. Check out a range of courses that I run at ALC Training:

DevOps Foundation

Cloud Security

Cloud Computing

Scaled Agile

Enterprise Big Data

Microsoft is one of the world leaders when it comes to cloud computing services. In the last comparison of revenue streams from the cloud giants, back in Feb 2018, it seems that Microsoft was just ahead in front of AWS.

Want to learn more about Azure? Well, there are options. There is a great free resource from Microsoft that covers Azure fundamentals here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/azure-fundamentals/

Or, if you’re looking for more a hands-on 1 Day Azure Technical Quickstart to understand how to provision resources, you can check out our 1 Day course here:

https://alctraining.com.au/course/microsoft-azure-technical-quickstart/

You can also reach out to us, for customised Azure and Office 365 courses.

Azure is classed as an Infrastructure-As-A-Service (Iaas) and Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) in the cloud computing world. IaaS services are designed for system engineers, where you can set up and build servers, networks, and storage, and then install your apps on top. If you’re in the software development business, then the PaaS services are designed for writing, testing and managing code, and target developers.

Some important PaaS services that developers will need include:

Source Code Repositories – Such as GitHub or Azure Repos – these allow you to store and version control your source code.
Serverless – Azure Functions – automatically builds and manages the compute, storage and networking components, so a developer can focus on writing code.
Containerisation – Azure Kubernetes Services – allows developers to build, manage and monitor containers, which are used to store separate app stacks, relating to separate apps.
Datastores – Azure SQL or Azure Cosmos DB – allows developers to store and read structured (SQL) and unstructured data.

Below is a brief snapshot of just the Compute services:

By combining together these services, you can create a rich tapestry of solutions. It’s very similar to the age of analog electronics, where you could select oscillators, diodes and specific electronics components, to create solutions like creating a home radio.

In Azure you can create very complex business solutions. Below is an example of how you might integrate a complex corporate environment with Azure services, in a model known as hybrid cloud:

There are some very important services that are available in Azure, that align nicely to medium to large clients that have to comply with complex regulation. Clients involving in banking, government, healthcare, and defence, need to maintain a level of corporate and regulatory governance, as well as a high level of cyber security protection in their cloud services. Tools such as:

Azure Security Centre – understand, see and manage your security across all your Azure resources. Very useful when dealing with a critical security incident in your organisation.
Azure Advanced Threat Protection – Protect your assets from all kinds of threats, both inside and outside your organisation, using AI and smart analytics.
Azure Policy – Enforce rules across how and where your Azure resources are deployed. Need to only deploy in Australia, no problem, set up a policy that only allows services to be run from Australia.
Azure Blueprints – Setup standard collections of resources, pre-approved by your security and governance functions that allow fast deployment of business solutions.
Azure Monitor – Monitor the health of all the resources you have created and have control over.
Azure Service Health – Monitor the health of all the resources that Microsoft controls.
Azure Advisor – Makes intelligent recommendations covering Availability, Security, Performance, and Cost.

The diagram below shows an example of the types of recommendations that the Azure Advisor can provide:

Feel free to reach out anytime with your Azure of Office 365 questions or queries?

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:

Cloud Computing is the latest skill, that is moving into employment market today. It supersedes a time where businesses relied on IT professionals, typically between 1985-2008. This is referred to as the client-server model era.

These IT professionals were employed to ensure that services were designed, deployed and run in a highly efficient and highly reliable manner. Apps and data were run on servers, in a data centre at best…at worst it was hosted inside a cupboard. Services could include:

Installing and running manually built apps on manually built infrastructure. This includes back-end servers in the data centre, and front-end personal computers in the office.
Backup and Restore of data. Data restoration woul typically take days if not weeks and would often be unsuccessful.
Storing of files on servers. Often without resiliency and outages were not uncommon.

Today, Cloud Computing has changed this landscape forever. It started to really mature and become used by businesses around 2008, Microsoft Hotmail and AWS being pionerring spirits, through to the present day.

Below is a solution architecture, showing the services that are available instantly through AWS:

Already we’re 10 years in, and only within the last 3 years has cloud become common:

Apps are delivered via web browser to consume on any device – Microsoft Hotmail
Apps are delivered via App Stores onto mobile devices – Apple App Store
Infrastructure builds are highly automated and highly resilient. – Amazon Web Services EC2 / S3 / VPC
Data backups can be automatically tested and recalled in hours – Amazon Web Services Glacier
Agile, Lean & DevOps have emerged, as a set of people behaviours that improve business responsiveness and reduce the cost required to build and run apps.

No longer is a $100,000 loan necessary, to buy infrastructure when starting a business. You just need a credit card to buy the cloud services as you need them. This means anyone can start a business and scale services with just 1 employee. This accounts for the explosion in entrepreneurs, particularly females, who often have to balance income with kids.