Digital transformation integrates digital technology into all business areas, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organisations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.
The race to implement an enterprise digital transformation is relentless and moving faster than ever. Reading MIT Sloan – “Your Business is Too Complex to Be Digital”, organisations struggle with weak branding, poor vision or resource debt from previous business decisions.
As leaders, do we have the courage to stop and reflect on our enterprise’s digital transformation? We declutter – our bookshelves, wardrobes, sheds, digital subscriptions, and our lives. Are we starting to observe the great declutter of business? Who will emerge as the Marie Kondo of business in the 2020s? Are we to see a Konmari method of ruthless prioritisation? Start-ups already do it – they must to survive, but what about large organisations?
Apple is a decluttering expert.
One story that repeatedly comes up is Steve Jobs’s impact at Apple. With the introduction of the Mac in the 1980s, Apple mastered innovation by bringing a new product to market that created a fantastic customer experience. Jobs departed from Apple to seek out other ventures. As the story goes, by 1997, Apple had over-extended and needed to be in better shape. The company was two quarters away from going bankrupt when Jobs came back. He famously said a relative asked him which Apple computer to buy for their family home. Jobs looked at the product range and eventually came back and said, “I don’t know; it’s too confusing”.
The first thing he did was ruthlessly prioritise. He stopped everything that was not at the core business of making a computer to change the world — he simplified the software, supply chain and distribution, as well as the peripherals, models and products on offer.
He also fixed the naming of products. From “the Apple Quadra 660av” to “the new Mac” – Apple still use this convention today. They will use model numbers internally (the 2016 MacBook), but to the customer, it’s two computers – the new Mac and the new MacBook. There are customisations in screen sizes, memory and speed – but Apple downplays these.
As you can see, Apple’s share price has responded well to this vision of FIRE – Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained and Elegant (Dan Ward).
The importance of technology in the C-suite
The immediate response to the Steve Jobs story is usually, “But not everyone is Steve Jobs”. I think that’s missing the point. What he did was Enterprise Digital Transformation 101 – it had nothing to do with technology. He started with ruthless simplification. It is a pattern that repeats. We can look for similar examples at Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Tesla and Airbnb. There is an unrelenting focus – technology comes later.
Another fascinating article in MIT Sloan is “Does your C-Suite have enough digital smarts?” The article reveals that ‘digital smarts’ in the team that set the enterprise’s digital transformation are in low supply. Part of having ‘digital smarts’ (I don’t like the term, but let’s not start) is knowing what to ask for, how to ask for it and when to say no. In other words, craft your enterprise’s digital transformation.
Let’s break that down — the C-Suite must clearly define the organisation’s goal and mission. Enterprise Digital Transformation must enable that goal, and you must question anything that doesn’t. Don’t ask for technology; ask for capability. “Can we reduce our operational IT costs and increase our time to market using Public Cloud” is better than “Can we go to the Cloud?”
If someone is making a tech pitch that sounds like: “AI will change the world, we need to explore it”, you need to push back and be clear on the ‘why’ and the ‘what’. Resume-driven development is a natural phenomenon, and I am no longer surprised when I hear about millions spent to boost someone’s resume at the company’s expense.
Educate to deliver your enterprise’s digital transformation.
With a mission of ruthless simplification and an educated C-suite, companies can start to achieve. A Serverless-First approach can achieve great things. We have agreed to declutter; we have a clear business goal – we can now stop focusing on things that are not core to our business and focus on real business differentiators.
Amazon has a term for this called “Single Threaded Leadership”. I have seen this in action, and it is liberating. Technology and business goals are the same – let’s delight our customers. The friction starts when overbearing management structures get in the way and slow things down. All that is needed is ownership and accountability – just point me at a problem and let me go. If I need support, I’ll tell you.
Take the time to ensure a North Star is in place, then ruthlessly declutter everything else. If an organisation has a vague or complex North Star, this is a signal for the executive team to take action.
Inertia eats enterprise digital transformation.
Organisations can perceive many obstacles:
- Technical Debt – “We have decades of old systems”.
- Operational complexity – “We are fire-fighting all the time”.
- Poor leadership – “We don’t have the drive we need”.
- Customer Demands – “The market is very demanding”.
- Staff issues – “We don’t have the people”.
- Burn rate – “We are running too hot.”
If organisations want to “go digital”, then courage is required to pick a path, take action and execute. Steve Jobs’s legacy of those values has led to Apple’s continuing achievements:
“At $2 trillion, Apple’s market value is now higher than the GDP of numerous developed countries, including Italy, Brazil, Canada, Russia and South Korea, to name a few.” – Forbes
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