Ask The Right Questions and You Will Know Where to Begin
Published on Friday, January 22nd 2021
“OMG! Our IT facilities are outdated! The world is changing so fast in this digital age. We really need to act. NOW!”
How often have you as a top executive, CIO or business owner spent your precious bedtime awake thinking this exact thought? About your wavering Digital Transformation (DT)? How many times have members of your workforce expressed that "your enterprise is in danger, because of the outdated software you continue to run?" How often did you seek guidance from eager consultants wanting to address the elephant in the room?
And how many times have you asked yourself: “what is the starting point to fixing this?” Here are a couple of steps you should consider.
#1 Gain insight on your current Digital Transformation performance status
Identifying your current performance is the key to formulating the right plan and moving forward. This demands organisations to ask the right questions, asking the wrong questions leads to inaccurate answers that could inhibit any form of progress. Unfortunately most executives and consultants fall victims to such mistakes and end up wrongfully depicting their current performance status.
Cycle to Accelerate’s first service (Performance Identification) was developed to tackle this issue of asking the “right” questions. The service is based on our 5 DT capabilities that provide insight into your current DT performance status. This includes:
- A questionnaire tailored to identify your organisation’s current capabilities and performance in the digital world;
- In parallel to the questionnaire, a series of analyses based on documentation provided by your organisation;
- A report that includes a series of improvement steps and the order in which you should prioritise them.
#2 Reinvent cooperation in your actual Digital Transformation
Many C-level executives prioritise activities before taking a deep look at what needs to be done. They often have the opinion that new IT revolves around money, hiring additional IT-staff and implementing the state-of-the art software to become the new Google, Airbnb or Spotify of their business.
However, the first step organisations need to take is altering their attitude towards collaboration and the involvement of the organisation as a whole in the DT process. There is a great need to “reinvent” cooperation in their way of work. This reinvention can be implemented by coming up with a series of collaboration principles. These principles are a set of unspoken rules organisationS should abide by in any project.
Collaboration is a key element that should be acknowledged when undergoing digital change. It should be perceived as an ethical protocol that needs to be agreed upon and lived by in order to generate change. In doing so enterprises are able to make their DT a reality.
The Cycle to Accelerate Collaboration principles
A boardroom where everything is conceived and a workplace that is designed to execute should be a thing of the past. IT is no longer a service that you purchase to play a catering role.
It is of great significance to create somewhat of a bond between the organisation’s business and its IT. The two should learn to work together and harmonise across the board, to do so a set of principles are needed. Cycle to Accelerate suggests 9 principles (further discussed in our white-paper) that should be taken into consideration. These are applicable both on a team as well as boardroom level, where successful performance is influenced by appropriate, agile and swift behavior.
During your DT, there is a great need for new agile behaviour. ‘We need to cycle and not play billiards’, especially when entering a digital era. Forget the old-fashioned way of doing things, your network, board, IT governance, team and enterprise will not survive without this new mindset and behaviour.
