Digital Transformation in the Enterprise is Like Watching Your Kids Eat Broccoli

Janine Sneed
5 min readApr 10, 2018

It’s always a negotiation at dinner on fruit and vegetables. “Jaxon, if you eat three pieces of broccoli, three carrots, and five apple slices, you can have that brownie for dessert.” Jaxon protests, “No deal. Two pieces of broccoli, two carrots, two apple slices — with peanut butter.” Me relenting because it’s 7:00 PM, some vegetables are better than none, and I want to get on with dinner and get these kids in bed. “Fine, but I want all of this eaten in five minutes — and don’t give any of it to Roxie.” (Roxie is the dog.)

I watched his face wince, wallow, and finally slosh it all down. In that moment, I realized that watching and negotiating with my son to eat his broccoli is no different than my workday in convincing teams why they need to quickly adopt digital transformation. This is something that should be no brainer — just like vegetables — i­­t’s good for you! IDC forecasts that by 2022, 80% of enterprise revenue growth will directly depend on digital offerings and operations*. However, I’ve come to realize in a large enterprise, with a very large existing install base there are many trade-offs that have to be made to ensure we are delivering on product features while implementing digital criteria and growth experiments. It’s not — either or — it’s AND — and I’ve realized there are a set of tactics that can be used to get the broader offering and development teams aligned with you.

1) Strong senior leadership buy-in

Within large enterprises, there are many competing priorities. I’ve seen many determined, smart engineers with very good ideas die on the vine. They didn’t take the time to get senior leadership buy-in. Buy-in that takes some time. There are only so many resources — investment dollars, people, tools. Often time, there are planning cycles when those resources are discussed and allocated way in advance. Digital transformation and portfolio transformation can’t be treated as a side show. It’s a serious, dedicated commitment that requires senior leadership support to carve off and protect resources to fund your project (staffing, software, experiments, data, etc). I’m not saying that digital transformation and adoption can’t be done without it, I’ve just seen that it’s harder and takes longer.

2) Show ’em don’t tell ‘em

If you are digitizing, you are leading from the front so you have to lead by example. Show them what you’re digitizing vs telling them in PowerPoint. That’s the power of digital — it’s the mobile and web experience you’re moving to. It doesn’t have to be perfect (and it won’t be). Show your stakeholders and sponsored users, your experiments and stats in live dashboards. Show them how your chatbot works by running a live demo of it in a stakeholder stand up. Have two team members run the A/B test in front of them (or via a Zoom if you are remote). Pull up the live dashboard of your funnel and drill in. As they start to see the fruits of your labor, they will likely start believing you are truly transforming your portfolio and will advocate what you do. Trust me, leaders want less PowerPoint and more playbacks.

3) Trade within apples and oranges but not apples and oranges

This one is hard — particularly with die hard product managers that don’t understand growth. You will face this regardless of how your team is structured in a large enterprise. I hit this one 30 days into my role when the product team told me that they moved every single one of the March deliverables out to 2Q so they can work on “features”. There are always backlogs, PMRs, and new features that product managers promised in roadmaps. However, your role as a digital offering manager is to ensure you are releasing capabilities needed as you digitize your portfolio. As I shared my March disappointment with a trusted colleague, she said to me… “Oh no. No, no, no. You have apples and oranges. You can trade within the apples and trade within the oranges, but you can’t trade apples and oranges.” When she said this, it made perfect sense. Apples are product capabilities. Oranges are digital capabilities. Product can trade within the apples. Digital can trade within the oranges, but never let anyone take all of your oranges. It’s a way to protect your digital investment + the product capabilities that need to be delivered.

4) Clarity — Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle

Sometimes things seem obvious because you live, eat, breath, and sleep them every day. I reflect back on why I do things. I tend to gravitate to and be motivated to projects and activities that I believe in if I understand their purpose. Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle says it best. Here’s the Ted Talk if you haven’t seen it yet — https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

What: Every organization knows WHAT they do. These are the products or services they sell.

How: Some organizations know HOW they do it. These are the things that make them special or set them apart from their competition.

Why: Very few organizations know WHY they do what they do. WHY is a not about making money. That’s a result. WHY is a purpose, cause, or belief. It’s the very reason your organization exists.

Credit: Simon Sinek

In digital, the world is flatter and cross functional teaming is paramount. But do the people you are working with understand WHY you exist? Do they truly understand your motivation, intent, and why you are doing what you do? Driving simple clarity in the What, How, and Why will get more of your cross functional team lined up to move faster because they understand the purpose.

5) Culture and Change agents

I saved the best for last. Forrester released a report “Fix your culture Gaps to Speed up Digital Transformation” (Feb 26, 2018) citing that one of the biggest and most common obstacles to digital transformation is Culture. When you are missioned with driving digital transformation you have to line up leaders and smart creatives that are customer obsessed, data driven, empowered, accountable, and collaborative. There are days that will be exhausting for your team because they are change agents working with (and sometime against) people trying to transform.

Digital transformation isn’t easy — it really is like eating broccoli. But leading and watching enterprise teams transform is really rewarding with huge payoffs: your customer experiences, operations, ecosystems, and culture will all be more healthy for it.

*Developing the New IT Capabilities for Digital Transformation, Joseph C Pucciarelli, February 2018

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