The process and knack of digital transformation in a big organization

Digital transformation has been turned into a key objective for many companies and organizations after COVID. The purpose of digitalization is to improve working efficiency and increase resilience to the rapidly changing business environment. I would like to share my experience of preparing and planning digital transformation for a large organization, the topic includes the investigation, the planning, and the execution.

The investigation

The investigation covers the following parts, understand organization culture, identify the politics, understand the duty the teamwork among teams, collect the on-going projects from teams. If you are an external consultant or new hire for a company, you need to understand the culture of the company, which includes working pace, decision model, high-level focus, and some other traditions among employees. It helps you get involved in this organization and make sure you are speaking the same language.

Politics is also important within an organization, which affects cooperation, resource allocation, project priority, and conflicts avoided. If you can identify the office politics, you are much easier to leverage the right resources and get strong backup supports, however, if you do not follow the currency, you have to pay double efforts and suffer a high risk of failing due to people issue.

The job duty for a team is different across companies. Hence, you need to understand the duty of each team in an org and to understand the working process including cooperating, conflicts, tiers, and back & force process. By doing this, you can set schedules and arrange tasks accordingly, to reduce double works and have the right support at the right stages.

Leverage the on-going projects is also important while dedicating to digitalization. The change is not a one-time effort, there must be some projects that are ongoing within the org. And we definitely would not stop them or dump it, wasting all the bandwidth and efforts paid in the org. What you need to do is that to understand all the purposes and progress of these projects, draw a full picture of all ongoing projects and think about starting with the digitalization projects with partial leveraging the existed projects, either as pilots or POCs.

To Sum up

We have covered the essential points of the investigation stage for digitalization, highlighting some tasks that you need to do before planning the digital transformation within an org. In this stage, we put our focuses on understanding culture and job duty, to support our plan and set the priority. We will be covering the planning stage in the next article, stay tuned.