Want scalable digital transformation? Focus on your mission

Generative AI’s astonishing introduction and assimilation in 2023 hurled thousands of companies – including marketing firms – into rapid-fire technology adoption. Even as you read this, programmers across the globe code up hundreds of new applications that rend, sort, categorize and visualize data and data insights and short-cut complex processes. How do you tap into this?

Transformation is not without high risk, but the high-impact payoff can be huge. A key outcome: achieving a successful digital transformation holds the potential of dramatically magnifying the impact and scope of your organization’s products and services. Thus the question: how do companies truly embrace digital transformation in the midst of driving change?

How important is generative AI to transformation?

Why is such transformation important, especially in marketing and public relations? One recent comment rings true: “AI will not replace marketing professionals, but marketing professionals who effectively embrace and deploy generative AI will replace those who don’t use AI.” The phrase likely applies to all disciplines to one degree or another.

Global transformation expert Lindsay Herbert writes of one common approach, which can unfortunately lead to completely missing the innovation mark – companies look inward, and “audit their operational efficiencies, analyse past performance, brainstorm new customer ideas, identify IT upgrades, and gather budget from each department until they’ve amassed a giant report.”

What can happen? By the time the “giant report” is completed, here’s the rub: it is out of date. Instead of initiating transformation, the company snapshotted the status quo of a moment in organization history now past. In the interim, opportunities sail by.

While dark clouds may ominously gather on the company’s market horizon, the now-historic comprehensive snapshot plan “is about as useful as a lifejacket made of spreadsheets,” Herbert notes in her book Digital Transformation – Build Your Organization’s Future for the Innovation Age. As global Director of Innovation for the IBM Garage, she represents an authoritative voice in this space.

In a recent webinar on MarCom transformation, Herbert explained how many executives “look for the elephant in the room” when they initiate what they intend to be a full-on digital transformation.  Canadian-born, Herbert suggested that this is perhaps better related to a problem of frisky black bear issues common to the Maple Leaf domain.

Metaphorical elephants often take time to define, which slows down transformational innovation to a frigid crawl. Conversely, black bears wreak havoc, but they’re outside, they move around, and they’re often out of sight and hard to find. Such are the problems facing companies seeking digital transformation.

The point? Problems and challenges in identifying, planning and implementing digital transformation exist “in the gaps” of organizations. Herbert uses a simple framework to illustrate the process she has deployed successfully for hundreds of companies around the globe.

Deploying a “build” model

Making up the acronym “build,” she outlines five steps: bridge, uncover, iterate, leverage, and disseminate.

To succeed, companies have to first build a bridge to span the gaps that are blocking progress. Second, effective digital transformation often requires the identification of old, cumbersome technology and processes that erect unpassable organizational barriers. Those barriers must be uncovered and removed.

Third, executives and change planners must recognize that existing company culture and structure “disincentivize” exploratory efforts to test new ways and learn from them. Companies must “iterate” the transformational process and adapt or modify it as new processes and new technologies get implemented, including generative AI.

Change, as Herbert plainly notes, is “scary.” Openly celebrating successes and encouraging change risks at a high level can “leverage” success to turn “scary change” into “existing opportunity.”

Finally, no digital transformation succeeds unless it scales. As Herbert emphasizes: “nothing scales without policy, process, and tooling,” so companies have to effectively “disseminate” the transformational plan and collaboratively execute.

A critical consideration

Digital transformation cannot be built or executed on a vapor. Companies generally enjoy past success for a reason. How do you build on that reason?

Herbert makes a critical point: noting that she is actually not a fan of the phrase “digital transformation” for its buzzword connotation, she emphasizes that it is more important for a company to continuing to adapt and embrace what they don’t know, positively seeking new tools and opportunities. to innovate

The real anchor for successful change and digital transformation, according to Herbert? Executives must keep laser-focused on their mission.

Here we insert a proven thought from Jim Collins’ Hedgehog concept and how it can relate to digital transformation. As Collins famously asks: “Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In his famous essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox,’ Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’”

The key point? “A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely crucial.”

Since any digital transformation will magnify what a company does, it’s time to revisit your mission statement and see whether it truly focuses you and your organization.

The drill is simple, but potentially profound. Ask yourself and your team:

• What can we potentially do better than any other company?
• What can we not do better than any other company?
• If we can’t be the best at it, then why are we doing it at all?

Draw three circles highlighting three questions:

• What are you deeply passionate about?
• What drives your economic engine?
• What can you be the best in the world at?

The intersection of the three answers is your corporate (and likely personal) Hedgehog Concept.

The key takeaway? Any successful digital transformation – including the speeding up and sharpening of processes through applications of lightning-fast generative AI – will magnify the answers to those three questions.

What have you discovered in the past – and the present – about your corporate mission, your Hedgehog Concept and real digital transformation?

By Michael Snyder, Managing Principal, MEK For several years, Snyder wrote a weekly technology and business column titled “The Hoosier Coefficient” out of Chicago.