Digital Strategy and Architecture

A digital transformation should not be considered a ‘cure‑all’ to any ills, but rather a logical next step following a rigorous diagnosis of an organisation’s needs. What is the best way to define your transformation roadmap?

Digital transformation target outcomes and objectives are rarely concrete or sufficiently robust to drive tangible, lasting value creation. It is difficult to define, strive for and track the journey towards a successful outcome without a clear understanding of what really matters.

Be clear on the business outcomes you want to achieve, and how

We address this upfront through clear value‑driven prioritisation of specific business outcomes to drive expected impact.

To maximise value, opportunities that can be addressed quickly and require minimal change, (often employing tech ‘shortcuts’ such as middleware), need to be front and centre of the transformation roadmap.

In parallel, there must be a deep cultural and operational shift to ‘digital first’. Achieving best‑in‑class outcomes in the medium to longer term, requires efficient digital delivery and continuous data‑driven optimisation hardwired into the product, service, and customer experience across the entire operating model.

Unclear objectives can often lead to unsatisfactory outcomes. How can you ensure that unlocking value is front and centre of your digital transformation?

Ill‑defined objectives make it incredibly hard to value‑engineer digital transformation programs. This results in them often being far‑reaching yet ambiguous in scope, costing multiples of what they should with long implementation timelines and payback periods.

Value‑engineer your project portfolio with a healthy bias for straightforward near‑term solutions

Rapid optimisation, digitisation and automation of existing processes can often quickly deliver value within the constraints of legacy operating models. Dual‑track architecture is a key tactic that can be employed to unlock these opportunities. By separating smaller tactical efforts from longer‑term infrastructure projects, companies can prevent smaller, yet collectively high‑value projects from being deprioritised in favour of the ‘shiny infrastructure of the future’.

Additionally, rigorous value engineering is an indispensable tool to manage down program cost and ensure maximum ROI. Too many digital initiatives get actioned because they are ‘cool’ or ‘the next big thing’. Validating the link between a particular technology initiative and business value forensically is essential.

Overruns, delays and re‑scoping are common aspects of any program failure. How can you create a pipeline for deployment where accountability is key?

Program failure is still extremely common and rarely is as explicit as a program being abandoned.

Instead, it often manifests in dramatic cost overruns, delays and re‑scoping exercises that mask successive redefinitions of what success would look like, how it is going to be achieved and how long that will take. At worst, this means technology is outdated or redundant by the time it is deployed.

Execute at pace, front‑load benefit generation, and hold your business leaders accountable

Modularised program design and delivery accountability are critical to mitigating risks of technology projects and maintaining a high‑velocity deployment pipeline that delivers incremental early value.

Done the right way, modularisation allows companies to reinstate single‑point accountability and ownership of business lines for delivery of individual program components associated with specific value outcomes – accountability that is often lost when implementation is delegated to monolithic technology divisions.

Merely collecting data is of little benefit to organisations unless there is a defined strategy to interpret and harness it to bolster everyday decision‑making. The shift to becoming data‑driven rather than data‑consuming hinges on a single question: ‘What is the value we want to realise from our data strategy?’

Data collection is a cheap commodity for many organisations today, to the point where they are overwhelmed by the volume and lack of quality and consistency. Clear use cases that drive tangible business value and realistic roadmaps of how to get there often do not exist. This results in time and money wasted and escalating (and misplaced) scepticism about the potential benefits of investing in data.

Drive towards using your data, not hoarding it

We help clients define data strategies that start from the value they can generate (now and in the future) and then work backwards to how to get there in stages, recognising that the shift to become a data‑driven organisation far transcends the mere collection and processing of data.

This entails an organisation‑wide cultural shift in how decisions are made on a day‑to‑day basis (and by whom) and requires formalised knowledge of what information is pertinent to a particular decision – decisions may be taken far down the hierarchy based on operators’ experience instead of handed down from above.