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How Every Company Can Become a Tech Company
Fifteen years ago, the Harvard Business Review wrote “IT doesn’t matter”, calling it a commodity input and an overhead to be cost-managed. That’s hard to believe considering how IT (and software, specifically) has moved from a back-office function to a primary customer interface. Digitally native companies continue to spring up and no industry is off limits. Today, IT or digital technology is not only a major enabler of disruption across whole industries, but fundamental to a company’s survival and success.
Transforming legacy organizations
Companies are often expected to behave like tech companies, but transforming into a digital leader is easier said than done. Rapid change is difficult in enterprises that are hundreds of years old, with established processes and deep-rooted cultures.
Established firms in industries like financial services, government, resources or manufacturing often face challenges like extensive legacy systems, the need to consolidate systems as a result of mergers and increasing customer expectations. Add to that digital adoption, market-driven technological innovation, financial innovation and the emergence of new digital business models—and it is not surprising many businesses don’t know where to start.
Many organizations report digital transformation initiatives taking 18 months from problem to solution. In today’s fast-moving environment, the solution is likely to be out of date by launch. In order to get time back on their side, enterprises need to change how they engineer technology by injecting an engineering mindset.
Specifically, established companies need to:
Test and learn to transform business and culture
Most importantly, enterprises need to do what successful organizations like Amazon do: instill agile principles whereby you test and learn—constantly.
Again – easier said than done. Everyone understands the need to implement effective change, but few enterprises know how to actually achieve it. Here are a few common pitfalls:
A framework for engineering transformation
The framework Publicis Sapient helped to develop for one of the UK’s biggest banks is based on lean methods, agile principles and value stream analysis, which maps and visualizes the current state of the workflow to find waste in the system and highlight improvements that can be made. From here, an ‘intervention catalogue’ can flag 52 opportunities for change focusing on four key measures: productivity, people, quality and value. This mapping helps companies better understand their systems and where digital technology can lead to greater value.
Proven results include:
Using this approach, many organizations can accurately estimate the expected value at the start of the project and prove the impact of digital transformation on the core business. Successful engineering transformation goes beyond IT; it’s fundamental to a company’s future and its resilience in the changing marketplace.
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