What are the key Technologies that I need to embrace as I take my organization through a Digital Transformation?

Digital Transformation, from the face of it, sounds like a technology-only exercise, but in reality it is not. This is not just my opinion. Many experts also have the same opinion – Digital transformation is as much about culture shift (if not more) as it is about technology shift. And the reason is mostly due to complexity – technology generally maintains a binary state (very digital), either it works or it does not. Culture, however, is all about people – and there could be way more than fifty shades of grey that you may end up finding.

But you’re not on this post to check ideas on culture shift. So, let’s just recognize the big elephant in the room and work around it for now. We’ll discuss about culture shift in another post. Just note that in some contexts the lines between technology and culture could get a bit blurry.

Organizing Business Priorities for Execution/Implementation

Business Priorities are perhaps the most important attributes of an organization’s growth and operations. These are the essential marching orders, more at a tactical level, that defines the pace and the direction for the troops on the ground. Hence, being able to get these right might prove to be a matter of life and death.

Business Strategies are devised at the executive level. The strategies take an overarching and (in general) a long-term approach to providing direction to the organization. Each strategy however, needs to be broken down for implementation through one or many business initiatives. And then there are also initiatives that are created based on the changing market conditions (both on the customer as well as the competition side) and increased understanding of the customer needs. The initiatives generally take the form of projects, which generally comprise of multiple project requirements at different priority and urgency levels. Both the projects and the requirements within the projects could take the form of a business priority.

Let’s look at what is a priority, how to prioritize (in brief) and how to organize priorities.

How much of your Organization stands behind the FOG?

Fog that is beautiful but conceals everything | Photo By: Robshenk/Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 | Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AntietamFog.JPG

Have you heard of “Fog of War”? Do you know what it is? Do you relate to it as an organizational leader?

We, the people of the business world are not in war. We’re in peace. We don’t fight amongst each other. We’re all happy doing business with each other. Or, are we??

We have a limited amount of resources to produce things from and a limited number of customers to sell to. We compete for these on a daily basis. When one company is growing market share, there’s another that is surely losing. We’re all in for survival here. And that means war (although of a different form). However, it is not a bloody war, it’s a war of business. What’s at stake is not lives, but livelihoods. The winners and losers are not countries, but companies. But, it surely is a damn war. And as with any war, there always is the FOG OF WAR. You can only reduce it, but you can never eliminate it.

The question is not whether it is there or not, but if you can notice it or not, and how bad is it. And how can you reduce it.