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Service 07 · Digital Transformation

Transformation is a sequence of specific changes.

A transformation programme cannot be bought as a product and does not arrive all at once. What can be delivered is a process that stops being manual, a system that stops being the only one that knows something, a report that starts arriving before the decision instead of after it.

What the change is made of

Transformation is usually pictured as replacing systems. More often it is this: the same applications, arranged around a governed data and integration layer. The problem in most estates is not wrong connections but missing ones, and the gaps between these applications are where people currently carry the work by hand.

ISOLATED SYSTEMSCONNECTED AND GOVERNED

Drag, or use the arrow keys, to move between the two arrangements.

How the work is scoped

A programme begins by naming the system it will change first, and the date that change lands. Assessment exists to produce that answer rather than to produce a document, and every subsequent phase is scoped the same way — against a named system, a named owner and a date.

Those changes are then sequenced against real constraints — budget, an operating calendar, and a team that still has to run the business while the work happens. Each one is handed over as it lands rather than banked for a single release at the end.

The service, by capability family

Seven families, running in parallel rather than in sequence. Most programmes draw on three or four; the scope is set by what the organisation is setting out to change.

Technology strategy and advisory

  • Current-state review of systems, processes and interfaces
  • Where cost and delay accumulate today
  • A sequenced plan with a first deliverable inside the quarter
  • Business case built on the client’s own figures
  • Technology selection support, vendor-neutral

Enterprise architecture

  • Application landscape mapped as it stands today
  • Target architecture and the transition states between
  • Standards and reference patterns delivery teams can work to
  • Application portfolio rationalisation and retirement

Enterprise applications and ERP

  • ERP advisory, selection support and readiness
  • Requirements and solution architecture
  • Implementation, modernisation and migration
  • Configuration, extension and workflow build
  • Data migration, cutover and deployment
  • Testing, training and post-go-live support
  • Application support and managed operations afterwards

Application and platform modernisation

  • Modernisation of applications that still carry the business
  • Re-platforming, and retiring what a new system genuinely replaces
  • Migration off systems nobody can support any more
  • Cloud transformation sequenced with the application change

Process transformation and automation

  • Process mapping against how work is actually done
  • Workflow and approval digitisation
  • Removing paper, re-keying and duplicate entry
  • Automation where the rules are stable enough to hold

Integration and the connected enterprise

  • Interfaces between systems that were never meant to meet
  • An integration layer, so the next connection is not another point-to-point
  • Data transformation across the estate, with the reporting that follows
  • Master data agreed once, across the applications that use it

Workplace, adoption and governance

  • Digital workplace — collaboration and document practices that people keep using
  • Training built around the job, not around the software
  • Measuring whether the change was adopted or endured
  • Scope, dependency and risk held in one place
  • Decisions recorded with the reason, not only the outcome
  • Handover to the people who will operate it

How a programme moves

  1. 01

    Establish

    What is true today, in enough detail that the plan can be argued with.

  2. 02

    Prove

    One change, delivered end to end, early. It establishes the pattern and it tests the assumptions cheaply.

  3. 03

    Scale

    The remaining changes in waves, each wave widening the pattern the first one proved.

  4. 04

    Embed

    The point at which the organisation would keep doing it without us. Anything short of that is a pilot.

What it draws on