By Ranga R Kanapathy, Chief Transformation Officer – APAC | Chief Delivery Officer
Going Digital is an imperative! It is no longer an option! Companies continue to invest tens of billions of dollars aiming to achieve their transformation goals. Most of them have done the easy work of acquiring basic digital capabilities, typically, by making a shopping list, buying the chosen technologies, and plugging them in with the help of technology experts. And yet, digital transformation projects often either get massively delayed or derailed in delivering tangible outcomes. A big-bang approach is not necessarily the solution. To be competitive, enterprises need a holistic transformation.
“Taking small and achievable steps that yield measurable and noticeable results, faster and repeatably, proves to be the solution.”
At Altimetrik, we pride ourselves as that pureplay digital business solutions company. We advocate an approach that is incremental and bite-sized that helps clients achieve rapid business outcomes in an agile manner.
“We re-think not just technologies, but products, processes, customer interfaces, and culture, all synergized towards a clear future-state digital business model.”
The Bottlenecks We Address
Many organizations still make piecemeal investments in digital business enablement by overly emphasizing ‘hot’ technologies and expecting enormous improvements. This kind of evangelization is often espoused by technology and product leaders without aligning with the holistic business strategy.
Having executed numerous transformation projects in the Banking and Financial Services space, we have identified 5 common challenges:
- Absence of a business-led and outcome-driven approach
- Taking a big bang view rather than an incremental one
- Lack of a Single Source of Truth (SSOT)
- Not adopting an agile digital culture
- Absence of a comprehensive digital business methodology
Business-led and Outcome-Driven Approach
We have devised a Practitioner-led approach that focuses on business outcomes. It begins by identifying the key customer pain-points, assessing the current architecture, building business and technology roadmaps and leveraging data and technology solutions. By avoiding a big bang approach, we reduce the risk of complexity and delay that are typically associated with digital transformation initiatives.
“A proven Practitioner-led approach, that focuses on delivering incremental business outcomes across the enterprise with speed.”
Building a Single Source of Truth
Digital Practitioners play a key role in realising this approach by establishing measurable outcomes quickly and incrementally. Working with key client stakeholders (both business & technology) from the ideation phase through deployment, these Practitioners simplify end-to- end workflows and leverage a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) to drive adoption and scale.
“Adoption of SSOT to drive incremental outcomes ensures customer buy-in and success.”
Adopting an Agile Digital Culture
At Altimetrik, we emphasize a strategic focus on data engineering, product engineering and cloud enablement. Depending on the client’s requirements, we leverage various digital technologies and platforms including cloud, devops, security, platform & product engineering, advanced analytics and data science. All this expertly put together is what we call as Digital Business Methodology (DBM). With DBM, enterprises adopt new ways of working, infusing an organization-wide Agile Digital Culture.
“An agile culture that acknowledges change, encourages experimentation and builds collaboration among teams is a foundational recipe to success.”
Applying the Digital Business Methodology
Typically, we start an engagement with a holistic assessment that defines the Point of Departure for the client and a roadmap to reach the Point of Arrival.
We have added a unique discovery phase to understand the customer pain points and needs. We explore customer personas to build a deeper understanding of their goals, motivations and pain points, some of which are not explicitly stated. During the discovery process, we engage with actual users to understand their challenges.
Our DBM methodology has dramatically shrunk release cycles for large global banks from 6 months to 2 weeks. We have also helped enterprises create SSOT and deliver modern analytics products within 8 weeks, whereas the norm for such projects is several months.
Applying DBM at a global financial services firm
At a global financial services firm, the key challenge was how to deliver agile products with more predictability and higher frequency in the face of a complex organizational structure. We helped them adopt a scaled agile framework, restructured their agile teams, and transitioned the business portfolio from projects to products.
Further, we embedded practitioners into their agile teams to optimize their engineering environments to support bite-sized delivery approach. This accelerated time to market from semi-annual to on-demand releases. Agile teams aligned on prioritized business goals every quarter and delivered outcomes every two weeks, creating a massive competitive advantage and boosting Customer Experience (CX).
In conclusion, what we have learnt working with several clients is that success comes not to those who add the hottest digital capabilities, but rather to those that adopt an objective-driven Digital Business Methodology to create a new digital culture. Technology is not the differentiator, leadership and culture are.
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