Base for large scale technology transformation

A clear playbook is emerging for how to integrate and capitalize on advanced technologies—across an entire company, and in any industry.

How does your company use advanced technologies to create value? This has become the defining business challenge of our time. If you ignore it or get it wrong, then anything from your job to your entire organization could become vulnerable to rivals who get it right. The new technologies come with many labels—digital, analytics, automation, the Internet of Things, industrial internet, Industry 4.0, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and so on.

What’s more, even companies that devise sound strategies are likely to encounter two formidable obstacles to using advanced technologies at a transformative scale. The first challenge is the sheer number and breadth of technology solutions required to truly transform an enterprise, often in the hundreds. The second one might be called the “last-mile” challenge: redesigning a company’s processes to capture the value of new technologies, in line with their strategic goals. Both sound technical, but they play out far from the traditional IT organization and create headaches for the business leaders who will need to guide their people toward new patterns of thinking and operating.

A playbook for overcoming these challenges is starting to emerge across industries. In this article, we’ll explore five cornerstone practices underpinning the progress of successful companies:

• Develop technology road maps that strategically focus investments needed to reinvent their legacy businesses and create new digital ones.
• Train managers to recognize new opportunities and build in-house capabilities to deliver technologies.
• Establish a modern technology environment to support rapid development of new solutions.
• Overhaul data strategy and governance to ensure data are reliable, accessible, and continuously enriched to make them more valuable.
• Focus relentlessly on capturing the strategic value from technology by driving rapid changes in the operating model.

Creating business-led technology road maps

Large-scale technology transformations can begin once CEOs and top leaders have agreed on a bold, comprehensive digital strategy and an overarching vision for how technology can enhance their companies’ performance. The critical next step, one that too few executive teams take with sufficient diligence, is to develop a road map of technology solutions that will achieve the transformation vision. The road map is a powerful tool because it aligns business and technology leaders on the sequence of solutions to be developed (and, likewise, on the solutions that should be deprioritized).

Building in-house capabilities

An essential component of achieving scale in a technology-enabled transformation is having sufficient in-house technology expertise and talent. One proven model for building a technology bench is the “technology factory.” Such a factory is wholly at the service of the business and governed by the business.

Modernizing the technology environment

Two features define the core of a modern technology environment: a data platform and a development environment for producing software and analytics code. Without these, a company’s tech-enabled transformation quickly stalls and becomes mired in complexity. The good news is that technological tools have evolved rapidly over the past two to three years, and it is now possible to deploy these cloud-based solutions quickly and at relatively low cost.

Overhauling data strategy and governance

Every executive understands that data are a source of competitive advantage, but surprisingly few have put in place the business practices to capitalize on the value of data. As companies move beyond piloting solutions, they find that their data are messy, hard to access, and undifferentiated from their competitors’.