Digital Transformation: What Digital Leaders need to know

The message is everywhere; digital transformation is imperative for all businesses, from small to the enterprise, in order to survive. While this message comes through loud and clear, what it actually means and looks like in practice is often left blurry.

The WNDYR team believes this blurriness comes from a lack of a defined process; just like when training for a race, it makes sense to compartmentalize one’s preparation into identifiable milestones or layers in order to achieve success. At WNDYR, call these milestones in the journey the 5 Layers of Excellence.

Starting the journey through the 5 Layers of Excellence

Generally speaking, digital transformation focuses on two things – firstly, the introduction of digital platforms into multiple areas of a business and secondly, the fundamental transformative changes of that teams need to make as they work to deliver value to their customers. 

All organisations embarking on this journey start at Layer 1; this initial layer is largely disruptive to the nature of a business. This happens due to the reshaping done to the company as a result of a productivity solution being launched into a company, most often through a basic deployment with a WNDYR consultant. This introduction encourages customers inside Layer 1 to scrutinise and challenge many of the assumptions around how work is managed and completed within organisations. 

Once a company refines its internal processes and realises that they can achieve greater results through further customised deployment, they reach Layer 2. Layer 2 is the last stage where organisations experience digital disruption.

Frequently, organisations cross into Layer 2 when their ongoing experiments with systems and processes deliver new ideas and possible opportunities. Their relationship with their deployment consultant becomes critical; their consultants are able to assess any further changes required to ensure their customer’s organisational success, whether that means further training or implementing change management strategies within the team. 

From disruption to transformation

Layer 3 is when things really get interesting – at this stage, successful organisations have realised the value of the platforms they use and find them influencing their success rather than hindering them. As such, Layer 3 is the part of the journey where the hard work from the previous layers bear fruit;  the systems and processes are configured, users are trained and the team’s targets are set. The digital tools have gone from being disruptive to enabling transformation within an organisation.

This realisation can only happen once teams are comfortable with the new systems, processes and ways of working. Teams actively feel the impacts of work inside Layer 3 when their organisations begin to introduce standard API led integrations, like DAM platforms, to their productivity stack to ensure further growth and increased efficiency.

Finally, the organisational need for further customised API integrations for departmental stacks and integrations brings us to Layer 4. Similarly to Layer 2, Layer 4 relies on the company’s ambition in further fine-tuning their internal processes, not for the sake of efficiency, but rather to enable individual inside the organisations – this is Layer 5; Human Transformation.

Human Transformation is the goal

In many cases, the benefits and successes organisations enjoy by the time they reach the end of Layer 4 are easy to identify; there is clarity in the way systems and processes work; individuals inside teams are aligned with the various directions needed to collaborate successfully and there is cross-organisational transparency in the way work is progressed.

At this stage of the journey, much has been achieved. However, for truly motivated teams there is no substitute for data. The need for quantifiable feedback is a critical factor of easing into Layer 5 and helping teams experience Human Transformation. At WNDYR, we refer to this as “human acceleration” – the notion that an organisation’s productivity ecosystem is geared to empower humans to be their best selves at work.

Next time, we’ll look at how incorporating a solution like our new product, Pattyrn can help team’s gather accurate and actionable feedback across an organisation’s ecosystem in their pursuit of human acceleration.