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:
- Certified Cloud Security Professional
- Cloud Computing Foundation
- Enterprise Big Data Professional
- Office 365 Security & Compliance
- Azure Technical Quckstart
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:
