Don’t panic! Technology is the easy part.
There is not much in business transformation that comes with a guarantee. So, let’s kick off with one; your new technology will be delivered, and it will work. I’ve never worked on a program where this was not true.
Whether or not it results in a positive change to how your business operates is much less certain.
Because the second guarantee is; there are no silver bullets.
New tech, and especially AI, is seductive. The marketing around the certainty of its capabilities is so slick, you feel confident pulling levers and making decisions almost immediately. There’s a reason the (real) sales pitches include “a CRM that knows your business” and “the last software your teams will ever need to learn”. They’re contained and comforting. They feel like progress.
They’re also strange things to promise, given the vendors have never seen the way you work, have never met your people and don’t know your business.
Nonetheless, this is why business transformation is usually framed by Technology, and why Purpose, People, Planning, Change and Governance end up ignored or reverse-engineered to fit a platform decision that’s already been made.
Here there be monsters!
Monster number one – no matter how much they want us to believe otherwise; technology is not a magic black box. Yes, it can take the friction out of things you already understand but it amplifies the things you don't. If you automate a messy process, you get a messy process at scale. If you put a chat interface on unreliable data, you get unreliable data that sounds confident.
Monster number two - there is almost always an asymmetry that we gloss over. On day one, your delivery partner will be ready to move at speed with a team who do this every day. Understanding processes, writing meaningful stories, running a backlog and knowing what good testing looks like, is all second nature to them. If it’s all brand new to you, then that’s a red flag. A big one. With flashing lights. And a siren.
That gap is where you cede control of your business transformation to your delivery partner.
Closing that gap is what we do.
It’s a big ask though, because tech implementation is the easier option…bear with me, my angry implementation colleagues. It's hard work and it’s complicated, but complicated is fine, humans are excellent at complicated. We build and use complicated solutions in every part of our life, every single day. Complicated is what the delivery partner is for.
What causes problems is dumping a complicated solution into a complex business environment and expecting it to fix things. That's where the chaos comes from.
Working together to understand the complexity before designing complicated technology solutions is what gives you agency and makes implementation easier.
I know this because I’ve seen it many times. Time and money being wasted as the business tries to figure out what it needs…as they're actively building the solution to those same, undefined needs. It’s wasteful, unnecessary and soul destroying.
And because there’s a deadline (and, frankly, because everyone ends up exhausted and disengaged) the business takes possession of a new platform with little understanding of how it was configured, no ownership and no process for changing it. So, the tech sits there, capable and under-utilised, consistently pushing quarterly updates and new features. Changing nothing.
Outsourcing the build is usually the right choice, but you can't outsource understanding the build. If nobody inside the business can explain what the platform actually does, why it was configured that way, or what it would take to change it, you don't have a new capability. You have a new dependency with a renewal date.
That’s what this series and MypeOwl are really all about.
Do the work on Purpose, People, Planning, Change and Governance to close the gap, and you'll set yourself up to change how you work and transform your business.
Skip it and business transformation is…and I'm choosing this word carefully…impossible. Not hard. Impossible. Twenty years on both sides of the table have made me comfortable saying that.
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