The Digital Transformation Series – Part 5 – How do you build capability in people?

A transcript of a video, part 5 of 6, from the Digital Transformation series, produced in partnership with the Business Transformation Network. Video here: https://www.thebtn.tv/exclusive-content/video/technology-led-disruption-chris-micklethwaite

[TRANSCRIPT]

Introduction

Hello I’m Chris Micklethwaite, I’m founder and principal consultant at 3pointsDIGITAL. I’ve spent my career in technology, working with web and customer-facing technologies, and using technology to help find efficiencies in business, and that help people collaborate and work better together.

What I’ve learnt from the businesses I’ve worked with is that technology alone can’t make a change in an organisation; to use technology effectively to help people to become more productive, and for an organisation to better connect with the customer requires fundamental changes in people, skills, structure, approach and culture. I founded 3pointsDIGITAL to help businesses of all types tackle these challenges, and the challenges and opportunities from balancing three points of a triangle: Customer, Business and Technology.

In this series of videos we will to explore this type of technology and the permanent changes required in an organisation to adopt, use and generate benefit from it, which in short is called digital transformation.

We’re going to talk about digital disruption, what characterises digital native businesses and what we can learn from them, and how to create a digital strategy and embed change in your business.

Do you focus on Technology or People?

Well I think the answer is both. And actually it’s more than that, it’s technology and people and how people work with technology. So, learning from the digital natives, look at the way they use flexible technologies in their choice of languages, frameworks and platforms – they have to support a fast pace of change because the development of digital products and services needs to happen quickly. So they talk about cycle time – this concept of having an idea to putting something live – as fast as possible, and having the ability to test and learn from customers and users.

So that cycle time, and the ability to test and learn, means you need technologies and platforms, and the systems and processes in place to support that kind of approach (“continuous delivery”). This often means taking advantage of infrastructure-as-a-service, cloud hosting, test automation, etc, with small, self-contained agile teams that have the skills required to design, develop, test, deliver and operate something on those platforms.

So choice of technology is incredibly important, and the way in which you then build and deliver those technology experiences is is incredibly important, but also so is the way you form your teams around that. The reason that technology and people are equally important, plus how they work together, well it’s really about knowledge. We talk alot about agile – and there’s good and bad in how companies have adopted agile practices – but ultimately to me an [agile approach] means cross functional, multidisciplinary teams – small, stable teams – that have **knowledge** of the customer, the technology and the business, to deliver great digital technology products. Teams that work well together, with the skills, process and systems to take knowledge, customer feedback, data and analytics, and feed it back into the development process.

How do you resource for transformation?

So let me expand on that question a little bit because it’s not just about resourcing it’s also about sourcing. What we tend to find at 3PD with businesses we work with, is they have patchy skills in certain areas – usually skills are very embedded along with existing technology ‘legacy’ platforms. But what you need for the digital age – for modern digital products and services – is a range of skills – and you’re also going to need people that understand the right approach and a product-led technology delivery approach. So first you need to look at people that you already have, how they’re working, and you probably need to restructure those teams. That’s one.

Second is working out the skills gaps, but you can only answer that question once you’ve established some of your technology and architecture principals – these are strategic decisions – I mean deciding what type of technologies you need, to develop products and services that support your business strategy. From that strategy, and assessing the technologies that will fit the bill – yes you will need to make some decisions – ultimately you’ll end up with some choices around tech platforms and frameworks, and probably languages, that will then help you understand the skills you need to fill the gaps.

The reason I talk about sourcing as well, is because it’s unlikely in this scenario that you’ll go to a third party consultancy, integrator or software engineering company, and ask for a fixed specification of a piece of software. Instead you’ll be looking for their skills and their specialisms, so how you approach procurement, buying and sourcing is very different – it’s about buying skills and experience. The way you engage with partners is much more conversational – it’s less formal and RFP based – it’s about finding the right chemistry for their teams to work with your teams, and for partners that can help you setup those structures for delivery success.

So I would say, resourcing skills internally, and sourcing partners are equally important in this mix.