7. Roadmapping Your Digital Transformation
Your digital transformation is a journey. Journeys require maps. As aligning digital with the rest of the organization’s strategies and activities is crucial to your success, nothing is going to be more important to the successful execution of your transformation than a well-documented digital roadmap.
Objectives of a Digital Roadmap
There are several critical objectives for digital roadmaps.
A Digital Roadmap Is Easily Accessible
Often companies will put together their roadmap and create their digital strategy but won’t integrate it enterprisewide. It will be rolled out and receive a lot of attention the first week, then sit in people’s email, forgotten, the rest of the year. A roadmap is not just a list of things to do, or a collection of data reports and a status update every 6 months. A great digital roadmap is a living and breathing entity. It is extremely important that you do not allow a digital roadmap to sit static, in the form of a file that only gets reviewed on occasion. Just like your strategy, a digital roadmap needs to come “off the page.”
A Digital Roadmap Is Dynamic
Once this roadmap is created, it should reflect the fact that it is indeed a living, breathing, entity that interacts with your organization and vice versa. Over the course of it, you should see it shift, change, and morph as you continue to monitor, track, and adjust your progress along the way. The roadmap should tie your progress back into your updated strategies as you go, and employees should be able to monitor that all along the way. The roadmap should literally be published and available for everyone to see, comment on, and share.
It should not sit in a drawer or be forgotten a week after it’s rolled out. One way to accomplish getting your roadmap off the page and bringing it to life is to apply social media concepts to the traditional business planning process. Give people the ability to like, vote, comment, and plug into your map. It should reflect your vision in an ongoing basis, as though it was alive and new every week. This roadmap should be a link, a viral and vital part of your company’s day-to-day processes. No one in your organization, employee, contractor, or consultant, should be able to say “I don’t know where we are or where we are going” on the company’s digital journey.
A Digital Roadmap Is Social
Third, successful digital marketing roadmaps align your goals, strategies, and tactics in a clear and visible way. These goals, strategies, and tactics shouldn’t be a secret to your employees. Everyone in the company needs to have access to the map and be able to comment, suggest, critique, and interact with it. That way, you’re crowdsourcing great ideas, giving people across the organization the opportunity for buy-in, and keeping people plugged-in, so it’s always in their face and demanding attention in a way that makes it better. It’s not enough to know where you want to go. The most critical aspect of any transformation is that everyone in the company is onboard and following the organizational vision and roadmap. For instance, if you spend millions to develop a customer-centric business model that focuses on sterling levels of customer service, then fail to train the sales staff and customer service agents in customer service, your model will fail.
A Digital Roadmap Is Visual
Last, your roadmap should have multiple, powerful, and visual tools. This visual aspect is important because it helps people quickly align with where the roadmap is really starting from. These tools also give your employees several different perspectives about what’s happening so they can actually engage with the transformation and socialize it internally, across the enterprise. Your roadmap shouldn’t be just one document with one perspective. It should be multilayered and include multiple slices of a variety of kinds of data about the steps you’ll be taking along the way. We can’t say that enough, visual tools are critical for conveying your vision and creating a roadmap that works. Visual data trumps numbers, text, and two-dimensional data. Destinations on your map may include capabilities, product releases, phases of work getting completed, maturity levels being achieved, and implementing processes, and they should do so in a visual way, whether it’s with graphs, photographs, video, or infographics. People should be able to tell at a glance where the company is on the map at any time. Visual tools, and why you should use them, all come back to aligning your digital transformation with everything else in your organization so that you realize the best success.
A Digital Roadmap Is Aligned to Business and Technology Roadmaps
You’ve looked at the strategy and visualized your journey. You see that the transformation is going to require a new website, and a new mobile app. Your site needs be fully responsive to be able to integrate with IoT (Internet of Things) sensors.
You see you will also need a whole new set of marketing capabilities. Additionally, other functions in your business will need improvements. All of a sudden you’re talking about lots of features, lots of tools, lots of platforms, and you wonder which of your people are going to implement these changes? How are you going to create an organization to do this? It can become overwhelming if you haven’t spent time drawing up the right map. Focus now on aligning your digital roadmap with business and IT changes.
Focus on one thing at a time rather than multitask your map. That one focus can be many things along or on the roadmap, but the point is to understand you’ve got one kind of map, not seven. Many companies have several maps that might overlap, but they’re not aligned. They may have a consumer strategy and a digital strategy that overlap but are not aligned. Your business strategy and roadmap should contain digital at the center. You also need someone at the top leading the transformation. Then you develop a collaborative network of digitally adept participants inside and outside of your organization.
A Digital Roadmap Is Easy to Understand
Strategy needn’t be that complex. Some of the business strategies we’ve heard leverage analogies like “The mint.com for health”, referring to what Mint.com has done for financial services by putting the big picture of a customer’s finances at their fingertips—so they know what they’re earning, spending and investing in order to take advantage and control of their money. Imagine doing that with your healthcare provider. Ultimately digital transformation will challenge to you change how you do business, meaning how your culture works, what your business model is, and how you connect and engage with your customers. It won’t be easy, so there is no need to make the process more complicated than necessary.
Components of a Digital Roadmap
A roadmap typically shows phases of work or maturity levels you need to achieve in digital. Those can include the following:
Initiatives Are Organized by Release Dates
Both the passage and the dimension of time can easily be shown graphically. Write down what you anticipate will happen with your digital initiative, when these milestones will occur, what features and capabilities you will roll out at what time, and what a changing maturity or focus will look like and when it will occur. Small companies may make the change in months or years, while larger companies may be looking at a decade or more to achieve digital maturity. As cliche as it can sound, transformation truly is a journey. You need to make sure you’re progressing consistently. This is where visual tools can help bridge gaps as well as alter the perception of time in ways that keep people engaged and focused. Setting a baseline, creating benchmarks that line up with your goals, will help you estimate how long your transformation will take.
Initiatives Are Grouped by Categories
Grouping things by category helps people see the big picture at the same time they’re looking at the details.
Initiative Costs Are Represented
What is the cost of each item? Investing in a digital transformation shouldn’t be done without considering what the investment is going to cost. Begin your journey by taking inventory. Compare your current inventory, including human resources, technology, culture, brand, sales force, marketing, and customer data to what you’ll need to acquire along the way.
Initiative Complexity Is Represented
Beyond costs, some initiatives are more complex to roll out due to regulatory challenges, the number of areas within a company that are impacted by the initiative, and so on.
Initiative Impact Is Represented
What is the number of units impacted, and how, when, where, or why are they impacted? This is a great place to use visuals.
Prioritization of Initiatives and Features Is Represented
Sometimes it’s important to breakdown the features of the roadmap to determine what the various priorities are. For example, maybe you want to address a feature that has a high priority and high impact versus a low priority and low impact. Powerful visuals that convey this distinction can help participants align at a glance with your initiative.
The roadmap begins when you start your digital transformation. Your transformation begins with the creation of a vision communicated to the rest of the company. Support of the vision begins when you get buy-in both laterally and hierarchically in the organization with your roadmap. The value of your transformational initiative must be heard and taken seriously, and this is where a dynamic roadmap comes in. It anchors the vision. If the next steps that participants take are not in alignment with your vision, lack focus or veer off track, your transformation will derail.
Technology Represented as Enabling Business Capabilities
Understand and communicate that digital is much more than “an Information Technology upgrade.” It’s an all-encompassing business model and therefore must have a customer-centric focus from the inside out. Digital transformation is both the roadmap and the destination. It may involve developing a variety of areas, but ultimately it’s about enhancing the customer experience and the ways in which your constituents connect and engage with your company. To enhance and expand the experience, you’ve got to implement transformation from within—your people, processes, and tools will all undergo some varying levels of change. Businesses often worry about whether they’ll have the technologies or the people or the process to make their transformation a success. Your roadmap needs to consider these elements across all of the business units of your enterprise. It should include technology releases, and factor in both current and future capabilities of the organization. For example, what tools you’re putting in place, whether it’s technology platforms, project management platforms, or making sure the people you have are in the right roles. Next, include the processes and individual tactics that comprise the action steps toward achieving the objectives. What is your baseline? What does digital transformation mean to you? Whatever technologies you choose make sure that you have ample support internally and externally to ease the transition you will be making from one system to the next.
Views of a Digital Roadmap
Quantifying Value
Companies continually struggle with figuring out the ROI of digital transformations. The fact that these initiatives have wide ranging impacts is one reason for the difficulty. For example, in the rapidly growing mobile app space, one Gartner study predicts that through 2016, 75 percent of mobile apps will be developed with little or no business cases to back their creation.1
1 Gartner, “Survey Analysis: CFOs’ Top Imperatives from the 2013 Gartner FEI CFO Technology Study”, May 2013
Further, the technologies are evolving so rapidly that many companies have trouble assessing the long-term potential of certain investments. This is often the case in the 3D printing space or wearables, but of course can apply to many other digital spaces that are in a growth phase (Figure 7.1).
Prioritizing
The best strategy for launching a digital transformation becomes not assessing an initiative too early or too late. Give your initiatives enough time to assess their potential. Note again that a digital transformation spreads risk throughout the whole organization if you have involved all your business units in your effort. Realize that by doing this, you are then able to minimize risks, allowing your initiatives to get the legs they need to take your organization to the next level of performance. Consider focusing, first, on initiatives that advance your operations or the customer experience as these will render the best returns.
Another way of prioritizing is to start with a pilot. For example test a number of digital initiatives that focused on things like mobile and ecommerce. Tracking analytics assisted in decision making to refine the initiative (Figure 7.2).
Figure 7.2 Prioritization visualization
Action Steps
• Mandate just one digital roadmap.
• Create a digital roadmap using a live tool that allows social media style interaction and permissions for all applicable participants.
• Create the forum to regularly review the digital roadmap with leaders outside of digital ensuring alignment.
• Align your digital roadmap to technology, business, and marketing roadmaps.
• Get a budget view of all digital spend across the enterprise even if not managed by your digital team.
• Socialize the roadmap with all appropriate business units and divisions of the enterprise.