The goal of digital dexterity is to build a flexible, agile workplace and workforce invested in the success of the organization. This dexterity allows the enterprise to treat employees like consumers—researching their challenges, goals and desired technologies—and then allowing the employees to exploit existing and emerging technologies for better business outcomes. This post advises line-of-business and product owners, already acting as agents of transformation inside their enterprises, on extending the metamorphosis into dexterity.
The Road vs. The Mountaintop
The journey begins with digital transformation, a road leading to multiple destinations. It is not a singular goal, but rather a way of life. Even digital-first enterprises continue to transform as they experiment with different business models or expand into new markets.
Enterprises executing digital transformations share three common goals:
- Making analog tasks digital
- Seeking new ways to solve old problems
- Making the business better
While all three goals are important, the technical challenges of digital transformation often end up overshadowing the goal of improving the business. Transformation must leave the business not just different, but better. The transformed enterprise needs to be more agile in both application development and business. Digital transformation needs to result in a new company with digital ’savvy’, an understanding of the power of the data being collected, and the flexible and informed mindset required for digital dexterity.
Dexterity vs. Transformation
The real goal of digital transformation is to shorten the time required to transform business processes. How quickly can you spot a new or altered opportunity? Is the business digitally savvy enough to comprehend the possibilities of new technologies like blockchain, internet of things, and edge computing? Is your business now digitally dextrous?
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Digitization without exploiting resultant data is a negative technical investment. |
The next step in this journey—data extraction and data-driven decision making—mines the real value of going digital. The significant power of digital over analog is the ease of accumulating and assessing data, including data on each customer click, each cloud system executed upon, each line of code, and even each stage in a business process.
Often the first projects in digital transformation take long, lapsed periods of time. IT will need to rebuild itself first, and take many steps to respond faster to evolving needs. IT will also need to upgrade traditional waterfall models into agile development lifecycles with continuous integration and continuous delivery. Departments can restructure to create DevOps teams to reduce time from coding to deployment.
In the middle of long transformation projects, it is worth stepping back and asking anew: Why are we doing this? Digital transformation has been around so long, it may feel like it’s past the use-by date. Though some enterprises birth as digital-first, many are still struggling with basic analog-digital transformation. In the rush to deal with technology of multi-channel digitization, the goal often is missed.
(For more on digital transformation in specific industry verticals, read our AppDynamics blog posts on insurance, retail banking and construction.)
Digital Dexterity
Once your digital processes are generating data, the next step is to ensure you can exploit the wisdom of that data.
Achieving digital dexterity requires a new culture on both the business and technical sides. The technology team not only needs the technical skills to transform, but also the diplomatic skills to boost the organization’s digital dexterity. Amongst the “best coders on the planet” that you hire, you will want to seed the best communicators and evangelists as well. The business team will initially need your support in understanding what can be exploited with technology; the technical team will need to communicate using business terms. Similarly, these teams need to be presented with clear correlations from their application deliverables to business outcomes. Developing a multichannel awareness may be a new thing for your salesforce.
The real measure of dexterity is the enterprise’s ability to empower technical staff to make business decisions, and business staff to drive technical choices.
Challenges You Will Meet
Culture
Gartner’s 2018 CIO Survey reveals that CIOs believe corporate culture is one of the biggest barriers to digital transformation, followed by resources and talent. Those three elements make up 82% of digital business impediments, the survey says.
Consider expanding DevOps into BizDevOps. For this, you will need a nervous system connected to all parts of your enterprise to define common goals for both the business and technical teams, both of which need a common, shared view of data to allow differently trained participants to discuss and identify solutions.
Build a common vision and strategy across your business and technology leaders. Collaborative learning across team and knowledge structures is an effective way to help employees become dextrous.
Embracing diversity is a key action that adds a variety of viewpoints for spotting new opportunities. Make sure your strategy considers the employee experience (also a good time to preclude bias for gender, disabilities, etc.). Consider if the approach makes the employee more business-literate and more empowered to exploit new business processes.
Application owners need to continuously search out ways to improve employee effectiveness. The applications we develop should always listen to, interpret, and learn from their users. In the same way smart speakers were extremely stupid initially but self-improved over time, the enterprise application should consider user activity and create more efficient workflows for the user.
Technical Delay
As part of digital transformation, enterprises build out business intelligence frameworks, creating data lakes and gaining a rearview-mirror view of their business. Executives may even bring on data scientists to create models to predict the coming quarter. Each of these actions has value but excludes one key timeframe: today. Right now.
Why Aim for Dexterity?
Every company today is experiencing disruption. In fact, more companies experience disruption than act as disruptors. Right now, there’s a startup somewhere that will eventually flip to a business model that challenges yours. It might be a small change, or a permanent change in the marketplace. Your job is to prepare your enterprise by making sure your employees are empowered with self-serve, consumer-like technologies, and that they’re aware of the possibilities of change.
A dextrous enterprise can easily respond to market movements and disruptions. New businesses can be created with less struggle once it’s easier to connect departments and businesses. Employees with common awareness of the business—and the technology supporting the business—can readily identify, define and exploit new revenue opportunities. The holy grail alignment of IT and business will come through having all parties look at the same data to enable data-driven decisions.
Remember, the dextrous enterprise provides a consumer-like experience for its employees.
Transformation must leave the business not just improved, but better at surviving disruptions. The transformed enterprise is more agile in both development and business. It is able to rapidly integrate and partner with external businesses when the opportunity or need arises, and connect disparate business processes into a new buyer’s journey when a disruptor changes the marketplace. Digital transformation needs to deliver a new company that understands the power of collected data and the flexibility to harness the latest technology.
Digital dexterity is people using digital technologies to think, act and organize themselves in new and productive ways.
For more uses cases supporting digital dexterity, read how our customers are using Business iQ for AppDynamics.
