Digital Transformation, Part 1 - Role of Culture

Digital Transformation is to the organization as Democracy is to the Nations.

Its Transformation of the people (Culture), by the people (Internal Customers) for the people (External Customer).

Culture plays a vital role, vision must be disseminated to the lowest level, to get everyone onboard to play his/her part.

Culture is a very comprehensive term about the organization, we won’t be covering it from the HR (Human Resource) perspective, instead our focus is to look at the culture from the perspective of *Disruption*. Culture is nothing but a bunch of values which have exhibited time and again.

Aristotle said, we are, what we repeatedly do, excellence is not an art, but a habit.

So, a good or bad culture is nothing but persistence of Good or Bad values.

In reference to our subject, Digital Transformation objectives must be incorporated in every individuals' day to day life, in such a way it should resonate in their actions, no matter what posit in or role they are.

If we achieve this, this will address the *Transformation of the People*. All the departments IT, Sales, Marketing, Finance and HR will go hand in hand to make the strategy with an execution plan which everyone will know what exactly they must do.

I attended a training with Dale Carnegie, they asked a team of 7 people to perform a task, in the first go we did that in 11 minutes. The trainer asked, you know what is the record? 27 seconds. We laughed. But literally when we developed a strategy and assigned each individual their specific goal, we did that in less than minute.

Transformation is the effect of disruption. We must look around and identify what are the values which are/will be impacted because of the disruption we are facing.

 • Do we want to engage/target a new customer base?

 • Do we need to tap into some untapped market?

 • Is this a new service we are planning to launch?

 • Is this a new product line we want to introduce?

 • Is there an improvement in existing products/services we want to address

 • Is there a new Regulation which we need to address.

We can have any of above or similar question which will cause, sometimes directly or at times indirectly to face a disruption, causing a desire to change the Culture.

If we address these questions at the right time, we will end up being successfully transformed.

I attend a Gartner CIO Conference, they presented a research, where they asked the Ice Skaters, that while everyone is moving at such a high speed, what is that moment where they can leave the other behind. The answer was, at the curves. If we manage to control the curves, we get that slight moment to take a lead. The ones who cannot manage, a moment, to manage the curve, a slight stumble, it will cost them the race.

In Part 2, we will discuss Business Users are Primary Internal Customers, Technology driven changes seldom succeed. Employees in Business and Technology are Secondary Internal Customer, their motivation and alignment are the fuel.

In Part 3, we will be discussing Redesigning, Re-branding, innovation in Products and Services for *Customer* is the customer perspective of *transformation*, Our customer must buy this.

Digital Transformation is not change only changing the tools, it is changing the Character of every individual in the line of business from Strategy, Execution, Delivery and Maintenance.