Co-authored by Craig Mikus, Senior Director of Cloud Engineering
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? This picture clearly says that change is hard. Because our brains are wired to catalog new experiences by referencing old experiences, change literally fights biology. However, standing still means being left behind. Companies that don’t change end up in one of two places: The hope zone or the graveyard zone.
Hope zone business wants a shiny new toy but can’t get it because IT capacity is consumed keeping the lights on. Businesses in the hope zone never reach their full potential. New things get done the old way.
Graveyard zone business wants the status quo and has a low tolerance for disruption in business as usual. Because funding for investment in new technology or business process change is unavailable, IT can’t change, and they continue doing old things old ways. Sooner or later, they become obsolete.
Another option exists. In the transformation zone, IT and business can collaborate to do new things in new ways positively impacting growth. The global COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to reevaluate their digital transformation strategies and rethink how to deliver exceptional value to customers virtually.
How do companies move into the transformation zone and drive the changes required to build a resilient, profitable future?
Start with strategy
Cambridge Dictionary describes strategy as “a detailed plan for achieving success in situations such as war, politics, business, industry, or sport, or the skill of planning for such situations.” It’s about how an organization moves forward. In 2020, many companies went into survival mode. However, now is a good time to reevaluate your business strategy to see if it still fulfills your short- and long-term objectives. Set aside the status quo and ask the tough questions about your market share, competitors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and other stakeholders. Ensure that your strategy team includes a stakeholder group with diverse viewpoints and the insights required to “think big” and create a transformational plan.
Start simple, revising as complexities are uncovered. Consider the following key questions:
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What products and services do you plan to deliver in one, three, and five years?
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Where’s your market sweet spot now, and how can this evolve over time?
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How have your customers’ expectations changed since the pandemic?
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Where did you see cracks when your operations were stress-tested?
Define your innovation goals
Cloud has enabled companies to get from a cool idea to implementation faster and cheaper than ever before. Cloud shifts the burden of “keeping the lights on” to partners, so IT can focus on mission-focused business initiatives.
A good starting point for your goal setting is to begin with the end in mind. Keeping customers satisfied require ongoing collaboration between business and IT, while partners can help to understand the challenges, aspirations, focus areas, and guiding principles that address the big questions about data, re-engineering, and integration. Defining innovation goals positions you for growth by using automation and emerging technologies to problem solve at the speed of business.
Data is at the heart of business, but information is elusive. Ask yourself the following questions:
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What governance can protect data integrity?
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How can you architect to liberate data from silos and build a common language?
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What impact can predictive selling capability have on your digital strategy?
Re-engineer, think lean, and turn process improvement into operational efficiency with the following questions:
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Where are your process bottlenecks?
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How can you eliminate manual intervention?
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What are the streamlining opportunities that improve customer satisfaction?
Integrate as you build a new future. Think agile so your foundation grows with you. Ask the following questions:
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Where can manual processes be replaced by APIs?
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What ecosystem applications can be re-engineered to take advantage of new capabilities?
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How do you avoid leaving data islands behind?
Build a cloud evolution roadmap
Your business is unique, and your transformation zone can be too. It’s important to build a roadmap that helps you articulate and sell the value of a transformative vision to your board, your stakeholders, and your team. Through intentional collaboration across organizational boundaries, we can identify common goals and find the sweet spot between IT and line of business.
Oracle offers a zero-cost virtual workshops called Hello, which are two-to-four-hour virtual sessions where our strategy and industry experts accelerate your path to cloud no matter where you are in your journey today. After the workshop, you will receive a customized assessment with actionable next steps to enable your future-state cloud strategy.
As part of the workshop, we consider the following ideas:
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What does digital mean in your industry?
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What are other success stories in your industry?
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How can you align your multicloud strategy to business outcomes?
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Which hypothesis do you want to test to build confidence?
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What are your near-term priorities?
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How will you focus investment to enable your future-state cloud strategy?
Motivate and empower your team
People are at the heart of successful business transformations. Delivering the engagement required to power a successful transformation requires helping stakeholders imagine what the world looks like when the transformation succeeds.
Empower your team with knowledge. When you understand the behavior and process changes required to realize return on investment, assess the organization’s change capacity and build a plan for obtaining new skills to address gaps.
Engage C-level sponsorship. A committed C-level sponsor team invests in success by prioritizing the initiative and bringing the right talent, tools, and mind set to a pioneering transformation effort. Building something new without an instruction manual is hard, and failure is part of the process. Embrace the failures and learn from them.
Finally, recognize and incent success. It’s never too soon to say thank you. Celebrate lessons learned to limit losses associated with failure. Small wins along the way build confidence and competence.
Consider the following key questions:
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Who are the storytellers that can convey empathy?
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How can you bring diverse input to problem solving?
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What types of communication are most engaging for impacted teams?
Invest in your future
Preserving your competitive advantage with transformative change is worth the investment! The traditional return on investment framework doesn’t always work with transformative investments. Because you’re doing new things in new ways, there’s no direct comparison with today. Transformations are a multiyear effort, which means that business cases must look deeper than the current budget cycle to identify value and capture both hard and soft benefits, such as better resource utilization, reduction in excess capacity, improved time to market, and greater customer satisfaction.
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What skills do you need to buy or build to run the transformation and operate in a new way?
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Where can you deploy resources more strategically?
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How can you balance production efficiency and resiliency?
The future is now
Now that you’re armed with a roadmap, an empowered team, and the investment to make a difference, it’s time to move into the transformation zone and dare to do new things in new ways! Soar to new heights and become an industry leader by reinventing your business.
Are you ready to drive a transformative effort? Schedule your interactive Hello workshop today and put Oracle’s transformation experts to work for you. Have a question? Contact us!
Dawn Austin is a senior practice director in the Strategic Service and Partners team, serving Oracle Applications customers by reimagining their business with the power of Oracle Cloud.
Craig Mikus is senior director in Oracle’s Cloud Engineering team. He uses his finance and enterprise architecture experience to help customers build the right cloud foundation for their destination.