Digital Transformation Starts and Ends with a Digital Architecture

The implementation of business transformations within organisations, and especially digital business transformations, is growing to a peak level right now. Chief Information Officers and Heads of Transformation are stepping in to: “digitally enable businesses”, “implement customer self-service channels”, “put the customer at the centre/focus” or just to simply “be more digital” (whatever that means).

However, when you ask these organisations what they are doing to change their internal systems and technical architecture design to facilitate this change, many either go quiet or simply utter something such as “it’s not about technology, it’s mainly about people”… Which I have worked out to actually mean “that technology stuff isn’t as interesting as building something nice & glossy I can show to the board”.

But let’s flip this around for a minute…

Digitally enabling your business usually means taking control of the data in your organisation and enabling it via online technologies. Yes, it does therefore mean the creation of some sort of new database or cloud-based big data lake that can then have modern web services integrated to it, so that some or all of this can be presented within a browser interface.

Implementing customer self-service channels, typically boils down to pretty much the same thing.  Web services and functionality are (securely - obviously) exposed to external customers via web and mobile App channels, so that contact centres or telesales operations can be scaled back or redeployed to different tasks. This also usually comes with a more onerous set of performance & availability criteria, so that a (near) 24/7 service can be offered to customers. However, presenting these services to real users also means that the systems behind-the-scenes need to be able to scale and adapt to changing user demands. Just plugging a rich user interface into a legacy system and hoping for the best is not digital architecture, it is digital anarchy.

Putting the customer at the centre of a business is an easy thing to say and a much harder objective to implement. Most organisations have been created to make money and therefore have lines-of-business designed to perpetuate this purpose. Consequently, technology systems are developed to support these structures and maintain the status-quo, rather than re-orientate things to make sense to the customer or help facilitate their engagement. It might be the ideal, but very few companies actually have end-to-end integrated systems that enable a single customer to be consistently tracked throughout their entire lifecycle. In short, creating technology to enable a customer to be in the middle of a business isn't always as easy as the sales PDF brochure states, especially if you don’t have a decent vision of how these systems need to work together.

So what can a decent technical architecture do for your company’s digital transformation?

It can provide a stable backbone that can support your technical & process change objectives. It can facilitate agile incremental delivery based upon re-usable components. It can help your business grow by supporting integration of other online services, API’s and data sources.

If you’re planning any of this, can you afford to NOT have the right digital architecture?

The Wider CIO Role In A Digital Age

The role of the CIO has evolved over the last decade or so. In my opinion this is primarily as the technology services, digital products and online marketing industries have changed considerably over that period.

Cloud, Apps, SaaS, micro services, and a bunch of other technologies & paradigms now means that:

• Hosting a online service with 99.9% availability is just a £10/month subscription rather than a £100,000 per year investment
• Developers no longer go to offices and work where work is, but instead sit in their bedrooms and offer themselves to the most innovative opportunities
• Your customer (or customer's customer) is now online at any time... and more than ever before likely to be viewing your services via a smartphone
• The new Chief Digital Officer role came & went, with a lot of their work being picked-up by the CIO (and some by the CMO)
• Vendor lock-in is less of a concern than a vendor that doesn't have an API

All this also means the CIO role in the digital age has become more strategic than ever to the CEO. 

This is because, as software replaces more and more things, every business is becoming a technology business.

Is there space in the boardroom for the CDO?

There's loads of discussion online and in companies generally about the role of the CDO - the Chief Digital Officer.

The traditional 'C Suite' must be getting pretty anxious these days, with a new CxO role being suggested as one of their members everywhere they turn.

The list of new senior roles appearing more recently includes:

• CMO : Chief Marketing Officer
• CIO: Chief Information Officer
• CXO: Chief Experience Officer
• CSO: Chief Strategy Officer

One does wonder if there will be enough seats around the boardroom table to accommodate all these new executives (or more cynically, if there will be anyone left to do the work).

Russell Reynolds, an Executive Search firm describes the Chief Digital Officer role as having the following capabilities:

• Able to plan and execute long-term strategy around driving customer awareness, engagement, experience and monetization. 
• Familiarisation with web, mobile and social media and possibly local as well. 
• Experience in developing new channels and business models, as well as innovative products and services. 
• Tech savvy, with the ability to manage developers and ask the right questions

However, what I would add to this list is the ability to operate and communicate as the Exec level. There's no point an appointed CDO having all the technical skills and knowledge if they do not have gravitas or the ability to put forward their points eloquently to their senior level peers.

The boardroom seating plan may be getting squeezed, but as businesses evolve and develop... can any major organisation afford not to have digital representation at the top level?

Is the future of the Chief Digital Officer at risk?

In a recent report by Gartner called "Top Industries Predicts 2014: The Pressure for Fundamental Transformation Continues to Accelerate" [link] it's predicted that nearly two-thirds of government organisations with both a CIO and chief digital officer role will get rid of one or the other. This will eventually happen because of the overlap between the two and further changes across the business.

This announcement may seem a little premature, since the role of Chief Digital Officer is only just taking shape in the minds of some organisations and their boardrooms. To therefore announce it's redundancy before it is fully embraced could be seen as just headline grabbing (or link bait).

However, I agree with this viewpoint. Furthermore I not only believe that the future of the Chief Digital Officer post is at risk, but that it should be seen as an interim position along the path to full digital adoption. In other words... if you're aiming to be a CDO in several years time, you are probably planning for the wrong future.

But let's take a small step back to the present. Where the role of Chief Digital Office is definitely needed by some public and private sector bodies, with others having already hired & found their CDO. This person should neatly sit between the roles of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO), to help both on their journey forward to the creation of a vision, where digital benefits are fully utilised & integrated across both teams and further afield.

In some circles the title of CIO amusingly used to stand for "Career Is Over". However it is really the CDO who should not only assume they are out of a job eventually, but should plan for this as part of their wider responsibilities.






 

CMO vs CIO : the battle for data

"In the future, wars will be fought over water" is a phrase you hear quite a lot these days. And it might well be true... As important global resources become more scarce and as rulers realise exactly what matters (in this case, the health of their population).

However, in the boardrooms across the world, there may well be a number of battles. But this time fought over something very important to both technologists and marketers. Data. More precisely, customer & user data, along with any associated information that helps the organisation function / sell / behave better. Consequently, there is a scenario that is looking increasingly likely, the showdown between the Chief Marketing Officer (AKA the marketing director) and the Chief Information Officer.

Its my belief that as data relating to the customer grows and becomes more and more useful (along with the ability to model and then predict future likely behaviour) these two company board members are the two most likely to both stand up and stake their claim to its ongoing ownership. Customer transactions in branches / stores / premises, their online browsing history, their engagement across social media channels and their contact preferences will be like water to these roles.

However, this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. And not just because I'm advocating peace and love in the exec suite, but for a different reason... It has been a prediction of mine for a while now, that the roles of the CMO and the CIO will evolve and in some cases merge, quite possibly around the need to have a single point of data ownership.

This could therefore give rise to a new role seated around the walnut table of major organisations, the CDO. But not the 'Chief Digital Officer' that I have already mentioned a couple of times on this blog, but that of the Chief Data Officer.

Chief Digital Officer - why your company needs one

There's a nasty jibe in some senior technology circles that the title CIO stands for "career is over". However I disagree and have my own thoughts on this.

The title and role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) is now getting quite long in the tooth, but more importantly the reliance on the word 'Information' here is the issue. These days, the competitive edge within a lot of companies doesn't come from their use of information (processed data), it comes from the migration of systems, processes and roles to an online way of working. The web has not only taken over our personal lives, it has also taken over (or taking over) our business ones too. Software as a service (Saas), Platform as a service (Paas) and Infrastructure as a service (Iaas) ... plus others, are all cloud-based approaches to online computing and each has its benefits and challenges. Now these are all typical subjects that typically would come under the remit of the CIO.

But when you then factor in the need to provide connected digital marketing services (e.g. an email or CRM system), eCommerce transacting functionality (along with the associated online merchandising and sales optimisation expertise) and the complex communication and customer services requirements that the online world needs, the experience and skills of pure technologist start to look less than comprehensive.

But who is actually hiring Chief Digital Officers right now? Nobody that I'm aware of, but maybe in the future we will see this role come to some prominence.