Digital Transformation Game Plan

Part II. Building a Responsive Organization

The main obstacles to improved business responsiveness are slow decision making, conflicting departmental goals and priorities, risk-averse cultures and silo-based information.

—Economist Intelligence Unit, “Organisational Agility: How Business Can Survive and Thrive in Turbulent Times”

Part II looks at the organization’s ability to evolve to the model outlined in Part I. The Digital Age demands responsiveness; the ability to listen, learn, and change. Responsiveness comes from working smaller, changing often, and using knowledge and data to make better decisions on what to do, when to change, and when to stop.

Working this way is difficult because of the organizational and functional constraints that are inherent in an organization’s current nature. Your ability to align and manage these constraints and to capture and use data to build knowledge will play a major role in sustaining your digital transformation.

The thin-slice approach will expose the functional constraints that will need to be addressed during digital transformation (see Chapter 3). Common functional areas include the following:

• Organizational structure misaligned to value delivery

• Funding models for allocation of resources more aligned to line-of-business budgeting than spending more on things that generate the most value

• Prioritization approaches that value certainty and completion over value and accuracy

• HR policies and processes that limit team stability and cross-functional ...